This guy knows how to have fun and make a good video

Joe Goes To A DONALD TRUMP RALLY

https://youtu.be/4GQtzUYSXEI

Here is an article from Stratfor.com that has a lot to do with feminism and patriarchy and such:

Quote:Since October of last year, Sweden has been pursuing what its foreign minister, Margot Wallstrom, calls "a feminist foreign policy." What that means, she told an audience at the United States Institute of Peace in January, is that "striving toward gender equality is not only a goal in itself, but also a precondition for achieving our wider foreign, development and security-policy objectives."

Sweden's new policy has generated a range of responses. Predictably, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Stockholm, and the Arab League, Gulf Cooperation Council and Organization of Islamic Cooperation condemned Wallstrom's remarks. While many in Europe and the United States cheered Sweden's boldness, foreign policy wonks also engaged in patronizing and chauvinistic piggery, which Wallstrom dubbed "the giggling factor." Several Swedish businesses, for their part, were furious over the policy's role in ending lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
   
This cannot have been an encouraging start for Wallstrom. But a look at the long-term evolutionary perspective on gender equality yields four conclusions that may be somewhat more to her taste. First, contrary to what the skeptics say, feminist foreign policies clearly exist. Second, much like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain (a character who spoke prose for 40 years without knowing it), Western governments have unknowingly pursued feminist foreign policies for the past 200 years. Third, these policies have been among the West's most successful; and fourth, such policies are likely to become even more successful as the 21st century progresses.

The evidence for these conclusions lies in an area that tends to make both feminists and social conservatives uncomfortable: evolutionary biology. Gender relations live at the intersection of sociology and biology and can only be understood through an evolutionary lens, looking back a very long way indeed.

The Origins of Gender Hierarchies

Sexual reproduction is a fairly new idea in the history of life. It evolved about 1.5 billion years ago, before which all life had been reproducing via cloning for more than 2 billion years. Evolutionists get into heated arguments over just why sexual reproduction appeared, but its consequences are clear: Reproduction through the mingling of two organisms' DNA creates much more genetic variation than does cloning. Thus sexual species adapt and evolve much more quickly than asexual ones, as evidenced by our own evolution from chimpanzee-like ancestors to Stratfor employees and subscribers in a mere 7.5 million years.

By definition, sex calls for two genders: females with XX chromosomes, who produce eggs, and males with XY chromosomes, who produce sperm. In all species, males and females have different bodies, incentives and opportunities. Sperm are plentiful and therefore cheap, while eggs are scarce and therefore more expensive. (The typical young male human creates about 1,000 sperm per second, while the female human produces one egg per month and must carry an egg for nine more months once it has been fertilized.)

The economics of reproduction would appear to give females the upper hand, allowing them to control males by rationing access to their wombs. In practice, though, sexual negotiations are only part of a larger deal. The hormones needed to manufacture sperm also make males stronger and more aggressive than females, meaning that males are selling not only their sperm but also protection from violence (both their own and that of other males).

Each animal species has solved the challenges of sexual negotiation by evolving toward its own evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), or set of gender relations. For example, the ESS of gorillas, one of our nearest genetic neighbors, is to cluster into groups consisting of a single male that rules a harem of females while other harem-less males violently challenge the alpha male for dominance. By contrast, chimpanzees, which are even more closely related to humans, form sexually promiscuous bands of related males and females, in which the males use a great deal of violence to dominate and compete for access to the females. Bonobos live in similar bands, but their ESS is much less violent than that of chimpanzees, and males and females are much more equal.

Perhaps because we are so brainy that our childrearing must be a drawn-out, complicated process, we humans have evolved over the last 1.8 million years or so toward an ESS of long-term pair-bonding. Many documented societies have had a few men with multiple wives and others with none, but the vast majority of humans have formed pairs that are more or less monogamous.

From Foraging to Farming: The Rise of Patriarchy

Until the invention of farming some 10,000 years ago, every human was a forager who lived by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Twentieth-century anthropologists studying the last remaining forager bands found that male foragers, with their advantages in strength and aggression, nearly always took responsibility for hunting while women gathered most of the plants. Archaeological discoveries (men buried with weapons and women buried with the baskets and tools needed to prepare plant foods) suggest the same was true for prehistoric men and women, too.

Anthropologists also found that while husbands tended to dominate family decision-making and informal group leaders were almost always men, the gender hierarchies of hunter-gatherers were usually quite shallow. Abused wives could simply leave their husbands, and headmen who failed to persuade the band's female members would soon see their authority wither. There were variations, of course: Yanomami men in the 20th-century Brazil-Venezuela borderlands were famously domineering, while !Kung San foragers in the Kalahari Desert were famously egalitarian. But overall, throughout most of our history, human gender hierarchies have been stronger than those of chimpanzees and gorillas.

That all changed with the advent of farming. The domestication of plants and animals allowed humans to greatly increase the amount of food they produced per acre, an abundance that led to an explosion in the global population. Birthrates rose so high that the typical farmwife gave birth to seven babies and spent most of her adult life pregnant or caring for small children. Permanent villages filled the landscapes, and complicated divisions of labor arose to accommodate the needs of agricultural economies.

In nearly every society documented since the invention of farming, categories of labor have been sharply divided between the two genders, with men toiling in fields and workshops while women stayed home. This was no accident: Women were well positioned for domestic work because it could be combined with childcare, while men were well suited for work outside the home, much of which called for brawn.

Unlike the foragers' division of hunting and gathering activities, the farming societies' allocation of work gave men near-total control of wealth creation, which in turn gave men significant economic leverage over their wives, daughters and sisters. A woman's economic dependence didn't end there; her well-being heavily depended upon marrying a man who not only was able-bodied but also had accumulated the capital needed for farming, either through years of saving or by inheritance. Either way, men tended to be ready for marriage around 30 years of age, while the mates they tended to prefer were teenage girls with long childbearing years ahead of them. As the inheritance of material resources came to play a bigger and bigger role in society, paternity became a life-and-death issue, and the strict policing of girls' premarital virginity and wives' fidelity replaced the rather casual sexual attitudes of foragers.

Once again, of course, there were variations among different cultures. Gender hierarchies were less pronounced in ancient Rome than in ancient Greece, for example, and some societies went to the extreme of mutilating girls' genitals to reduce sexual desire and guarantee chastity. But in every known case, farming produced patriarchy and ensured that men dominated politics. Sultans and emperors, surrounded by huge harems and their eunuch protectors, sat atop gender hierarchies that outdid those of the alpha male gorillas.

The Industrial Age: A Return to Gender Equality

The long-established pattern of patriarchy only began to change significantly within the past few hundred years. Starting in northwestern Europe around 1600, the share of people engaged in farming began to fall steadily as a new economic system based on Atlantic trade arose. Europeans found that if they shifted from agriculture to manufacturing, merchants could export goods to West Africa in exchange for slaves, whom they then sold in America to buy sugar, cotton and other desirable commodities. Merchants then sold these products back in England or Holland to buy more manufactured items, cycling through the entire profit-making process again.

The Triangular Trade generated wealth on an unprecedented scale, with enormous consequences. Rising wages allowed European craft workers to eat better and more regularly than their peasant predecessors, and superior nutrition (combined with small advances in public health, hygiene and medicines) drove down infant mortality rates. By 1650, the average Englishwoman had fewer than four live births, which freed up some of her time from childrearing and created room for women to do more non-household labor. As this happened, the Atlantic trade drove up demand for craft workers, the result being that ancient prejudices against female labor outside the home began crumbling. Very slowly, women's economic power began increasing.

The transformation accelerated after 1800 as Europeans learned how to release the energy stored in fossil fuels and use it to power machines. The further energy developed — from coal to oil and from steam to electricity — the less European economies depended on muscular power and the more interchangeable male and female workers became. Some industries, most notably textiles, already preferred female labor in the 19th century, but the equivalence of genders in the workforce didn't truly take off until the 20th century, when soaring industrial productivity made possible a huge labor shift toward the service sector.

When brains, organization and reliability are what matter, women are in no way inferior to men, and the more a society can free women to sell their labor in the market, the more likely it is to prosper. In response to demand, markets began supplying solutions like washing machines, electric irons and countless other "engines of liberation" that steadily reduced the household drudgery competing for women's time. But even more important, prosperity and better food kept driving down infant mortality rates. In 1850s America, 1 baby in every 4 died before its first birthday; by 1970, that figure had fallen to 1 in 50, and by 2014, it had dropped to 1 in 163. Women responded by demanding better contraception and spending even less time bearing and rearing children. Globally, live births fell from an average of 5.0 per woman in 1950 to 2.4 in 2013. These changes only further increased women's economic power and undermined patriarchy. Between 1940 and 1990, the proportion of American women working outside the home doubled. Just 4 percent of American wives out-earned their husbands in 1960, but by 2014 that number had reached 23 percent.

A New Hierarchy for a New Order

Gender hierarchies haven't completely collapsed. Today, 98 percent of self-made billionaires, 93 percent of heads of government and 91 percent of central bank governors are still men, and American women still only earn, on average, 77 percent as much as men. Still, women are legally barred from fewer and fewer professions, women outnumber men on university enrollment sheets, and Sweden has a feminist foreign policy. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is looking distinctly unhealthy.

The long-term outcomes of the war of the sexes have been driven by the most fundamental economic shifts in history, from foraging to farming and farming to fossil fuels. Each age, we might say, got the gender hierarchy it needed.

Patriarchy spread around the world after 10,000 B.C. not because men became bullies and women became victims, but because steep gender hierarchies worked best for agricultural societies and foragers simply could not compete with farmers' populations, wealth and military power. The gender equality of hunter-gatherers nearly went extinct because the hunter-gatherers themselves were almost wiped out.

Patriarchy has been in retreat since A.D. 1800 not because men have become saints and women have found their voices, but because shallow gender hierarchies work best for industrial societies, and farmers simply cannot compete with fossil fuel users' populations, wealth and military power. Only seven countries currently generate more than half their national wealth through agriculture; the gender inequality of farming is going extinct because the farming societies themselves are dwindling.

Thus, history suggests that Margot Wallstrom should both rejoice and despair. On the one hand, as fossil-fuel industries and free markets spread, societies that cling to farming-era inequalities will be unable to compete. The treatment of women among societies ruled by the Taliban, Islamic State and Boko Haram would not have stood out much during the agricultural era, but in the 21st century these groups are simply backward and brutish. Their savage defenders stand athwart the path of history shouting, "Stop!" but the countries that shelter them will not survive the 21st century.

On the other hand, Wallstrom should despair because the truly difficult part of this struggle was over long before anyone thought of promoting themselves as champions of a self-consciously feminist foreign policy. The real heroes of this story are the forces that are all too often miscast as villains: fossil fuels, which created an economy that allowed women to be independent, and globalization, which continues to spread the new economic order worldwide.

(05-30-2016, 06:07 AM)Galen Wrote:

(05-30-2016, 05:09 AM)taramarie Wrote: Thank you. I will check him out tomorrow after work. Off to bed after a double shift. I agree with him already. I will seek many sources. Not just what science only currently knows.

Just remember that psychology, in particular, has trouble with replicating results.  The field of economics has the same problems which is why the Austrian economists choose the methods of Mises and Rothbard.  They get better results that everyone else but they still are doing research, which is the main reason why the Mises Institute exists.

Our esteemed climatologist (irony intended) and practically-certain Republican nominee for President Donald Trump has made public appearances in California's water-thirsty Central Valley and proclaimed that there is no drought of water so long as Californians are ready to practically drain the Sacramento Delta to give a respite to growers.


[quote-USA Today]

California suffered one of its driest years in 2015. And last year the state hit its driest four-year period on record.

But Donald Trump isn't sold. The presumptive GOP nominee told supporters in Fresno, Calif., on Friday night that no such dry spell exists.

Trump said state officials were simply denying water to Central Valley farmers to prioritize the Delta smelt, a native California fish nearing extinction — or as Trump called it, "a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

“We’re going to solve your water problem. You have a water problem that is so insane. It is so ridiculous where they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea,” Trump told thousands of supporters at the campaign event.

A series of graphics from the Los Angeles Times shows the progression of the drought from 2011 through today, using data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a federal website that tracks the dry conditions. The drought worsened in 2014 and 2015 and has marginally subsided this year.

The most recent Drought Monitor report says that over the past week parts of northeastern California and northern Nevada recorded improvements, and "overall conditions have continued to steadily improve during the past year."

Trump spoke in Fresno and San Diego ahead of California's June 7 primary. California is the country's top agriculture producer, and the drought raised tensions among farmers, government officials and environmentalists.

State officials imposed a water ban on June 1, 2015, after record low rain and snowfall. The scarcity was evident from the Sierra Nevada's shrunken snowpack to the dry wells of the Central Valley.

Trump's comments come weeks after Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order updating water restrictions. The water rules were imposed in hopes of building the state's "resilience" in the long-term water conservation measures through monthly water use reporting and bans on "clearly wasteful practices such as hosing off sidewalks, driveways and other hardscapes," according to a news release from the California Government Operations Agency's website.

Meanwhile, the powerful farm lobby is trying to secure federal and state approval for billions of dollars to create new water tunnels, dams and other projects.

At least we know where Trump stands on the issue: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive."

[/quote]


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/polit..._3JCT5NiOg

Who Are The Real “Victims” Here? On Trigger Warnings, Defensiveness, and Anti-PC Hysteria

Quote:Last night I saw Belladonna of Sadness at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle. The movie is a surreal, psychedelic take on the dynamics of heterosexual eroticism set in medieval France, animated in 1970s Japan. I found a lot to recommend it, as a formally striking film that foregrounds a complex female character and its portrayal of witchcraft as a survival-driven rebellion of a patriarchal order, but due to its frank (albeit highly sympathetic) depiction of coercive sex and outright rape, I can definitely see why some other women might choose to skip it.

(Another case could be made that the intensity of the rape scenes allows male viewers to empathize with the woman whose experience the movie chronicles, feeling a kind of helplessness they might not otherwise have access to, but that’s not the point I’m interested in making here.)

The main thing I want to talk about right now is how judiciously trigger warnings were used before the film. In her brief introduction, Northwest Film Forum director Courtney Sheehan made reference to the erotic complexities of the film. “Are we supposed to be turned on by this? Or horrified? Both are true, at different times.” Her insightful words, along with a brief on-screen introduction from Violet Lucca, digital editor of Film Comment Magazine, gave fair warning of the kind of content we were about to encounter.

As a woman who is lucky enough not to be triggered by much in the way of sexual violence and yet strives to understand the complexities of the experiences of other women and marginalized people, I found these warnings to be highly humane, effective, and welcome. A trigger warning is not the same thing as censorship. On the contrary, the warning made the film accessible to an even broader audience than it might have otherwise been.

In a recent interview with Buzzfeed about her new book ‘Shrill,’ Lindy West said of internet harassment culture, “It’s the same conversation we’re having about political correctness and coddled co-eds.” The world is full of people who, because they are lucky enough not to need them, don’t fully understand the purpose of trigger warnings, but rather than trying to listen to those who do, become outraged and defensive at their mere mention.

The anti-PC hysteria in the US today is coming from a place of intense emotion, not the “reason” it claims to deify. It is coming from a place of wanting to shut down conversations, not the “free speech” it hypocritically touts. We can speculate forever about what motivates people to fall in line with avowed racists and misogynists like Donald Trump and cultural currents like GamerGate, but I would submit that the motivation for this defensiveness, at its core, is sheer, unadulterated terror. Even the slightest glimpse of the terror that many women face every day is intolerable because it is so much more horrifying than anything most of us would prefer to imagine, given the ability to opt out. (This ability to opt out is known in social justice parlance as “privilege,” but for reasons related to the impulse to opt-out in the first place, that word is highly triggering to many who possess it.)

Our culture despises anything we perceive of as “vulnerability,” “weakness” and “victimhood” because we categorize these experiences as “feminine,” but where is the true weakness here? On the part of survivors and feminists developing tools to help everyone navigate the world with more openness, curiosity and understanding? Or on the part of a fragile ego which is triggered into a sputtering, adolescent rage upon being exposed to ideas like “privilege” and “rape culture”?

Upon closer examination, it would certainly seem that when it comes to internet harassment culture and trigger warnings, the true “coddling” in this situation is the coddling of the consciousness that lashes out in denial of the suffering of others.

Here is another one of Eric the Green's articles: http://philosopherswheel.com/cosmicclock...ation.html

It is interesting because it reminds me of one of those anime shows that was popular in Japan and the US in the 1990s. Also, it explains a lot about history and the future. It is also in sync with the birth of modern Judaism, my religion. From what the article says, we are in the 8th house phase.

I wanted to correct an error in my latest posting, but couldn't find
an "Edit" link. Did I miss it? Has that been disabled? Could it be
enabled?

Here's an interesting interview about the i ideology of people in Silicon Valley.  It's from AEI, a conservative think thank but still interesting.

http://www.aei.org/publication/what-does...erenstein/

Quote:A lot has been made of the tech world’s growing involvement in politics — from accusations that social media sites such as Facebook are politically biased, to questions over certain Silicon Valley leaders’ endorsements, to the sector’s support of issues such as more high-skill immigration.

Republicans and other on the right bemoan that Silicon Valley tends to go blue. They’re confused. How could this hotbed of entrepreneurship and wealth creation be largely pro-Democrat? But Silicon Valley boasts a unique culture that emerges from an environment of competition, innovation, government involvement, and collaboration. As journalist Greg Ferenstein has written, these “hippies who dig capitalism and science” – many of them millennials – are hard to label. They go with the public policies that make their ventures possible.

So what is the “political philosophy” of Silicon Valley? And what do these tech leaders want from public policy? I sat down with Greg, editor of the Ferenstein Wire and author of The Age Of Optimists, a free book on Silicon Valley’s political endgame, available on Medium. Here’s some of our conversation, which you can listen at in full over on Ricochet.


http://www.aei.org/publication/what-does...erenstein/

In all this time, I never posted any info about the horoscopes of Neil Howe and William Strauss. Howe was born Oct.21, 1951 and Strauss Dec.5, 1947.

Neil has the aspect that I would immediately correlate with interest in generations: The Moon-Uranus conjunction in the family sign Cancer (ruled by The Moon itself). Uranus, of course, is the planet of the saeculum, since it orbits the Sun at the same rate as a saeculum, 83-84 years, and is said by Dane Rudhyar (greatest 20th century astrologer-philosopher) to have its characteristics just because this is the normal length of a human life (same determining factor as the saeculum). Strauss has Moon in Virgo, but it makes a strong square to Uranus, I believe (birth times are not known; I never asked).

The other saeculum planets are Neptune (2x a saeculum) and Pluto (3x). Strauss has the Sun in close aspect to both planets; sextile to Neptune and trine to Pluto. Howe has a Sun-Neptune conjunction.

William Strauss's horoscope is notable for his Sun in Sagittarius conjunct Jupiter (that sign's ruling planet). This is a sign of a broad outlook and a wide scope of interests, which lends itself to conceiving expansive theories like the generations theory and the turnings. It is the most-prophetic sign interested in long-term visions and plans. It is exhuberant and cheerfully optimistic, and sometimes righteous and preachy. Strauss was always the more outgoing and gregarious of the two authors; also the most argumentative, as shown also by his square of Mercury to Mars and Saturn. His relatively-conservative views (relative to his generation in youth, at least) are shown by this Saturn aspect, and his moral culture-warrior interests and conservatism by Sagittarius as well as Venus in Capricorn.

Both authors were highly educated, and both have Mars in analytical and critical sign Virgo. Neil has become a well-respected expert on generations, economics and demographics. Being a Libra, Howe has a more balanced, elegant, diplomatic and cautious personality than Strauss, and Moon in Cancer (as well as its likely square to Saturn) also indicates more privacy and caution, and an interest in wise conserving of resources, including investments, finances, family/ancestral or generational values, and land or properties. Venus and Mars together in Virgo show a passionate love of analysis and investigation, which is compatible with Strauss' Moon in Virgo. Neil Howe also has a powerful, outstanding Jupiter in Aries (which in this case represents pioneering leadership as a prophet and visionary planner).