After Such Knowledge

Michael Hudson’s great answer to a journalist's question about the nature of financial capitalism: Speculative gains are financial in character. They are deliberately created by using revenue to increase asset prices, not to expand the business. I am reminded of Sun Tzu's The Art of War: "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." Yet most of what the West reports as GDP consists of financial wealth, along with real estate and monopolies. Their gains are not earned by productively employing labor, but in ways that slow investment in the means of production to make short-term hit-and-run gains. Say what you will about how Eurocentric Condorcet's chronology of human progress is, the West indeed took off and ran really really fast. The Abo mother crooning over her infanticide can't compare to a penicillin shot. As for all those babies put in jars and abandoned on the Acropolis hill, Athens' democratically sanctioned imperialism must bear the blame....

 What sort of magic spell might Jean-Paul Sartre cast when he was feeling sick? The world, the universe, would have seemed devoid of meaning. Would he have made himself disappear? To be consistent, nothing would have happened. Silly question. Contemporary physics doesn’t give us anything like a clean, workable mechanism for “faerie portals.” And I'LL TELL YA SUMTHIN' ELSE ... the fun part is that even the closest real-world analogue—wormholes—are so wildly demanding that they almost feel more fantastical than the folklore they resemble. Wormholes are absurdly expensive (in physics terms). In general relativity, a traversable wormhole requires: (א) Negative energy density (exotic matter) to keep the throat open; (ב) Staggering amounts of energy even to stabilize a microscopic one; (ג) Precise spacetime engineering far beyond anything we can imagine doing with technology. The energy requirements aren’t just “a lot.” They’re cosmological. If you wanted a wormhole big enough for a ...

Jiang Xueqin’s public material does not offer a concrete prediction about the “ultimate fate” of Israel in a post–nation‑state world. What he does hint is that Pax Judaica, in his framing, is not a national project but a logistical regime, and that the Ben Gurion Canal would accelerate a shift from territorial sovereignty to infrastructure sovereignty. This is a structural argument, not a prophecy about Israel’s disappearance or expansion.   Below is a careful, citation‑grounded unpacking of what Jiang actually suggests and what he does NOT say. 🧭 1. What Jiang Actually Says About Pax Judaica: - “Pax Judaica is not a state but a global routing system.”   - It is defined by AI‑administered ports, biometric corridors, labor import, and uninterrupted capital flow.   - It is framed as a logistical empire, not a territorial one. This is the key: Jiang is describing a post‑Westphalian form of power—infrastructure replacing sovereignty. He does not claim that Isr...

They've been around since Sir Walter. This naive SF kid thought progress would edge 'em out and make 'em fade away. Moreover, this spiritual outlook dates back millennia and is at odds with the material world which is regarded as evil, even among those who love and understand how to live and work in it, building nations from raw nature. The method? Force. The classic interpretation to fundamentalism is that it was a rural (and small-town) backlash to modern urban-industrial life. The frontier-prowess contingent of colonialist settlers felt culturally displaced as cities became more diverse, secular, and scientifically oriented. Now always remember, we're spirits in a material world. A picture of the world is as much neuro-glandular as it is cognitive-cerebral. This is the molecular question. I suppose it is implicit in the classical SF I read. My precarious experiences were informed by a more adaptive consensus that included jet planes, syringes, rockets, and running wa...

I have trouble believing that Putin wants to erase the United States. What other entity can consume Chinese goods at this scale? Putin might content himself with the acquisition of Ukraine (which is indeed part of Russian Civilization) and abstain from fecking with China's Belt-and-Road Initiative, which is also important to his own Eurasian dream. Does China know what it's getting into? Or has the impersonal logic of capital taken over? Pragmatic Xi must make a scholarly study of Zionism if he wants the Ben Gurion Canal to provide an alternative to the potential chokepoint of Suez. In this scenario, the Gaza Genocide is only a land clearance op. But is prophecy a real obsession with Likud, or just a marotte with which to beguile the Sephardim? Then the Pax Judaica will be less about national glory and more about a secure corridor serving capital's abstract systemic necessities (such as redundancy) under reliable management. Israel becomes a guarantor of capital's passa...

Money and goods are not the same thing. They are opposite things. Confusion in economic is caused by the failure to recognize this fact. Goods are wealth you possess; money is a CLAIM ON WEALTH that you do not possess. Goods are an asset; money is a debt. If money is to be considered as wealth, then think of it as the negative of wealth, or anti-wealth. Capitalism is the pursuit of profit in a price system. Its first incarnation in the West (after feudalism) was commercial capitalism. Merchants conveyed goods from one place to another where they could sell the goods for a price that covered the original cost, all costs of transportation at the merchants' expense, and a PROFIT. Originally this increased the amount of wealth in the world by encouraging specialization in agriculture and crafts, which increased skills and output, and added new commodities to the market. Eventually supply and demand caught up to the merchants in the form of rising prices (costs) at the source and fallin...