There was a time when centralized authority had collapsed, and all the institutions upon which society depended were shown to be fraudulent and misused. There were three Popes, two of whom had children, and they maintained private armies which lived off the land wandering between various "countries". Livelihoods were destroyed overnight by pirates, pillagers, and thugs parading as Princes.
At the same time, the Arts flourished. And students came from all over the world to study "law" and business management from famous scholars.
We now look back at this time as the Italian Renaissance.
Today, we have a high level of institutional collapse coupled with the same astounding scientific and creative achievement. The Sacred Cows of our society -- our political institutions and parties are fractured, hypocritical and impotent, our religious are not "believed", even our "juries" are suspect, and nothing is stable, regular, and secure. And yet, the "story" is being made in ever richer ways, and our science is bursting on the verge of a Singularity. That event is like the Italian Renaissance -- we are in the midst of a qualititative shift from our own past.
Plenty of evidence that we are living in a Renaissance with the US in the role of the 15th century Italian cross-roads.
ReplyDeleteMusic - Dance - Film - Writing -
People from all over the world find the most receptive "audience" and technological enablers of the arts to be in America. Remember how irritated the Germans were with that insufferable Bach who kept improvising on Hymns they were trying to sing? But he had been to Italy, and was no longer content to just play the songs as they had always been done. So they come to America and get bumped up, re-introduced, re-mixed.
More Sacred Cows biting the dust:
ReplyDeleteFBI/ Quantico Lab. At the apex of the sacred cows in law enforcement was the FBI Crime Lab at Quantico. Now, it too has been shown to be led by incompetents and its "expertise" loaned in support of fiction for money:
FBI asked to downplay forensic bullet analysis
* 13:55 11 February 2004
* NewScientist.com news service
* Andy Coghlan
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* Chemical matching of bullets fatally flawed
* 17 April 2002
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* Bullet analysis report, National Research Council
* FBI
Law enforcement authorities in the US have been asked to downgrade the significance of bullet analysis in court.
The technique, called "compositional analysis of bullet lead" (CABL), profiles the contents of seven metals which contaminate bullets when they are produced from melted battery lead. CABL implies guilt by revealing, for example, that bullets found in boxes belonging to a suspect are "analytically indistinguishable" from bullets found at the crime scene.
But a new report by the National Academies' Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology says that the significance of such matches may have been drastically overplayed in previous murder convictions, which may now need to be reopened.
Since developing the technique in the 1960s, the FBI has presented incriminating CABL evidence in numerous murder cases. This has to be tempered in the future, says the report, published on Tuesday by the US National Research Council.
"Statements made in court need to be limited," says Kenneth MacFadden, the consultant who chaired the panel. "We don't believe examiners can testify at all about boxes of ammunition."
KISSINGER AND NIXON. OK, most of us have known that Nixon was a disaster. He removed Gold and Silver as backing for the US Dollar (with consequences continue seeing today), he destroyed US Cities as political power-bases (checks and balances and agency accountability destroyed through Revenue-sharing and Grants in Aid), put the FBI and IRS to use as political weapons, and in spite of election promises, had no "honorable" exit plan from Viet Nam (he turned over the third largest air force to the Viet Cong, caused the "boat people" and 3 million displaced, and communists proceeded to overrun Cambodia and Laos. Pol Pot finished the job of destroying Viet Nam's neighbors, all on his "watch").
ReplyDeleteWe did not know, however, until the latest releases of Tapes, how much Henry Kissinger was involved in the daily activities of political cover-up and intrigue, and how little Kissinger OR NIXON were involved in international diplomacy. For example, they were each devoted to maneuvering around each other, jealously, and they did not form ANY joint programs. Chile went communist under Allende, and then Augusto Pinochet took over--and in spite of their willingness to interfere with Allende and aid the dictator, neither K nor N was able to act either alone or in concert to influence the outcome.
The same with China. It is true that Kissinger met with Chou Enlai, and that Nixon went to China. However, K and N seemed at cross-purposes and in fact almost nothing was achieved. OK, nothing.
What happened during the Nixon Administration internationally was not due to the brilliance of his administration or its Secretary of State. The Tapes reveal the fact that N and K had a full-time job just trying to compromise each other and their domestic "enemies".
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