Making Peace with Death, the Japanese Way

 

The Rectification of Names

 

Urinal cakes are cakes. It's literally the name of the product

Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a Democratic Republic. It's literally in the name of the country

Jellyfish are fish. It's literally in the name

For the last time, read history

The Nazis weren't socialist. https://t.co/5933b5qSqc

— Pandemos (@ThePandemos) September 12, 2026

George Carlin weighs in (20 years ago)

 

I’m talking about the real owners now: the real owners, the big wealthy businesses that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice.…

— Human☮🇺🇸🇺🇦🇺🇸🌊 (@4HumanUnity) September 11, 2026

[continued]

You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations that long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, and the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want: they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs: lower pay, longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and a vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And, by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe, what to think, and what to buy through their media. The table is tilted, folks. The game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good, honest, hard-working people, white-collar, blue-collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on, people of modest means continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on: the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners in this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. Carlin said it 20 years ago. More true now. What a genius: George Carlin - It's A BIG Club & You Ain't In It! https://youtu.be/Nyvxt1svxso?si=3hSjwoWEHb0BS0Ec via

@YouTube

 

China Pursues Peace and Prosperity, Not Profit

 

(c) by Mark Dempsey

 

Isabelle M. Weber's book How China Avoided Shock Therapy describes how China industrialized a poor, largely agricultural society and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a few generations. It also describes the way the Chinese did economics to avoid the meltdown that often accompanied socialist economies' "shock therapy" transition to industrialization and markets in Eastern Europe and the USSR. One of the oddities of the Chinese transition was that pursuing profit in business did not get state support, while free markets and competition ultimately did after a slow (non-shocking) period of adjustment. 

 

Weber notes that Chinese governments intervened in markets as early as 200 BCE, doing such intervention when agricultural goods were plentiful after the harvest was in. That abundance put downward pressure on prices, impoverishing farmers, and encouraging speculators to buy so they could sell when the harvest was not so plentiful. The government intervened to prevent that. China has a millennia-long tradition of government managing markets.

 

Such price supports also exist in the US. Agricultural subsidies reportedly supply 40% of farmers' income. Michael Pollan (in The Omnivore's Dilemma) quotes one farmer calling such subsidies "Laundering money for Cargill and ADM" - large, profitable agribusinesses. Like China, the US government managed the markets' transition to and from wartime footing in WWII. During that war, the US government took over 50% of the economy. The "Green New Deal" would only take 5% of the current US economy, but the political establishment now rejects that as unprecedented.

 

In contrast to China, profit is what neoliberal Western economies pursue, and that pursuit guides how Western economies develop and build. In the energy arena, Brett Christophers' The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet notes bankers tend to deny loans to renewable energy sources because their profits take longer to arrive than conventional energy sources. 

 

Drilling for petroleum profits more quickly, so loans are more readily available. Renewables often have up-front costs like expanding the grid to access the power generated remotely so the electricity produced can actually reach its consumers, in addition to the up-front cost of the renewables' equipment. So while loans for such projects are necessary, bankers are reluctant.

 

Christophers makes the case that government subsidies or loan guarantees are not optional if we want to build the kinds of energy projects that favor sustainability. Meanwhile, China has pursued renewables aggressively enough that their carbon emissions are have been in decline.

 

This Chinese experience also explains the extraordinary efforts made by the petroleum industry to influence public policy in the West. Oil companies are indifferent to whether the planet burns up as long as they make a profit now, and they know government support can create eco-friendly competitors, so they spend millions to dominate government. In 2016, the oil-refinery-building Kochs spent $889 million on politics. Pseudo-lefty George Soros spent less than one thirtieth as much opposing them.

 

 

 

That said, the video above describes how Chinese public policy thwarts savers and investors whenever they try to speculate for profit. Chinese real estate, stock market, or bank accounts do not have the returns investors expect in the West. Ironically, while many Western investors appear eager to cash in on the rise of China's economy, its own population's wealthy try to circumvent China's capital controls so they can export their savings to take advantage of Western economies' pursuit of higher returns in their stock markets and bank accounts. 

Classical economics describes the "law of declining profits." In markets that are perfectly competitive with low barriers to entry, firms often compete for customers by reducing prices, which, in turn, reduces their profitability. 

Western firm managers know this and engage in many strategies to make sure markets are not free--including lobbying for barrier-to-entry regulations, buying out competitors, dumping products at below production costs to bankrupt less-well-capitalized competitors, and engaging in unproductive, but profitable activities. Typical within that last pursuit are military cost plus contracts. In such contracts, the cost to produce a weapon determines its profitability--the "plus" is the profit, and is a percentage of the cost. 

This is one reason American weapons are costly, and finicky. The F-35 fighter jet spends a significant amount of time in maintenance, even though it's a very expensive plane. Profit, not durability or military readiness, is what drives the design. (See William Proxmire's Report from Wasteland for an earlier account of just how costly US weapons are.)

So...does profit-pursuing capitalism require expensive weapons and the warfare that uses them? One editorial describing the dynamics at work in the Ukraine war seems to believe so. That editorial concludes that the war will continue indefinitely because it's so profitable. 

Meanwhile, the Chinese government understands the law of declining profits and does not permit Chinese companies to abandon productive, competitive enterprises to pursue profits at the expense of society's benefit. Chinese public policy places its bets on productive enterprise, which is a significant reason the cars they manufacture are roughly half as expensive as US equivalents. 

Making housing into a speculative investment, as the US currently does, rather than a necessity of life is the epitome of what's unproductive. House price inflation doesn't produce more house. It just enriches speculators and homeowners at the expense of those who want affordable housing.

That dynamic is one reason the US now has the biggest homeless population since the Great Depression. Successive federal administrations have stopped the public sector contributions to house affordability. Nixon stopped the US building affordable housing and Reagan cut subsidies to low-income renters. Clinton signed legislation with the "Faircloth Amendment" limiting federal low-income housing relief, so the attack on the homeless has been bipartisan.

When it was a poor country, Chinese from the countryside would come to cities to beg for food, so China had a homelessness problem too. But, rather than open homeless shelters, the Chinese offered the beggars work in their hometowns. It wasn't necessarily profitable, but that work meant China doesn't have a massive homeless population, despite its poverty compared to the US. 

Profit also is the source of billionaires. As the video discloses, China made many real estate investors unhappy with public policy that keeps house prices low, and they've even imprisoned a billionaire who encouraged real estate speculation (See: China Evergrande founder sentenced to life in prison). The US, on the other hand, leads the world in billionaire production and actively encourages building homes as investments rather than necessities, continuing the US' commitment to a dog-eat-dog economy some call "Disaster Capitalism."

 

The "Interest Trap" is an illusion

 From this Ellen Brown piece: 

As Thomas Edison observed in a New York Times interview in 1921:

"If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way.

"It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people."

Congress has the constitutional power to issue sovereign money directly – interest-free and debt-free* – and viable precedents are available for implementing that policy without driving up consumer prices. The question is whether Congress will reclaim this hereditary power before the interest trap snaps shut completely.

 

 

*OK, technically, dollars are part of national debt, but they don't bear interest. 

Capitalism is Broken Says Venture Capitalist Nick Hanauer

 

Venture capitalist @NickHanauer : "Since 1975, roughly $79 trillion has been redistributed upward from the bottom 90% to the top 10% — not through theft, but through the steady accumulation of rules written to favor capital over labor, shareholders over workers, assets over… pic.twitter.com/ABhbkQkoK6

— Evonomics: The Next Evolution of Economics (@EvonomicsMag) September 4, 2026

Parsing Social Safety Nets

 From Yves Smith, editor of nakedcapitalism.com:

...Since the day of the Powell Memo (August 23, 1971), well funded right wing interest hired Madison Avenue to devise phrasing and framings to make social safety programs look bad and market activities ever and always virtuous.

Web searches are so crapified that date-range queries don’t work well, plus comparatively little material before about 2000 is on the Internet. Nevertheless, see this 1994 article showing this usage of the word entitlements was already well established:

RIGHTS VERSUS ENTITLEMENTS

A Government Which Knows Its Place Will Shun Entitlements

https://fee.org/articles/rights-versus-entitlements/