Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have
plenty of government and nothing of anything else.--P.J. O'Rourke
You go to a seaside beach every year. Have you noticed the sea rising in spite of "irreversible melting ice caps", and "record heat"? And how do you feel when you lose a job, your house, and dignity and are told you must pay plant food taxes on top of the other million and a half ones you hand over to the bankers? Something is rising but it ain't the sea: it's the deceptive influence of governments (working for their banker paymasters) on our minds and the choices we make based on those lies.
With Hideyori's death the Toyotomi family was destroyed save for two small children. The subsequent hunting down of the surviving defenders of Osaka was merciless. Day after day at least fifty or a hundred men were caught and killed, and soon their heads were exposed by the thousand on the road between Fushimi and Kyoto.--George Sansom (A History of Japan 1615-1867)
Present day Osaka would never win any beauty pageant. In any swimsuit competition no city beats Rio de Janeiro. Many visitors to Japan only go to Tokyo and Kyoto. But that's not to say Osaka is not worth visiting. It has a place in financial history, for example, as the first market to have a commodity futures exchange trading rice contracts http://books.google.com/books?id=fvrtIC_FEYsC&pg=RA1-PA1&lpg=RA1-PA1&dq=osaka+rice+markets:+options&source=bl&ots=x36JNeOE_I&sig=-6crIIK0-4T2alZoxCi_XSkDRQE&hl=en&ei=-mTPSbiJAqb26gORtanYAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result back in the 18th century. The current fractional reserve Road to Harare we are all on has some roots here in Kansai. And then there is Osaka Castle Park http://www.osakacastle.net/english/index.html one of city's busiest tourist attractions.
A buddy recommended Kua' Aina in Namba for a charbroiled burger so that's what we did before venturing off to Osaka Castle. Pictured here is the most popular item: Avocado Burger Set at around Y1200. Yes, it was delicious, and thank you, Dwane, for the tip.
Warlord Hashiba Hideyoshi (soon to become Toyotomi Hideyoshi) built the original castle in the late 16th-century. He died in 1598. Before going to the other shore he planned to have his son, Hideyori, succeed him and thereby set up a Council of Five to ensure a smooth transition after his death. Tokugawa Ieyasu, one of the Five, had another idea: he would rule Japan. In 1600 Ieyasu destroyed most of the Toyotomi loyalists at Sekigahara http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara. Japan was now sitting on Ieyasu's platter. There was one slight problem: Hideyori was still alive and commanded sizable forces.
Fast forward to 1615. There were skirmishes between Ieyasu and Hideyori forces a year before and now it was time to settle the account. Tokugawa Ieyasu demolished the son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Hideyori and his mother, the niece of Oda Nobunaga, Lady Yodo, commited suicide. Hideyori's 8-year old son was decapitated and his daughter became a nun. Hideyori's wife, Senhime, a granddaughter of Ieyasu, fled. She soon remarried: to Honda Tadatoki. They moved to Himeji Castle.
Tokugawa Ieyasu died the following year due to battle wounds from the Siege of Osaka Castle http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0312/feature5/zoomify/main.html but his family name endured until the Shogunate he began collapsed in 1867 at Kyoto's Nijo Castle.
Today's Osaka Castle keep is a post-war construction complete with elevators and central heating. Tokugawa Ieyasu destroyed the original in 1615. In 1620 Tokugawa Hidetada started rebuilding it. The job took ten years. Lightning, however, destroyed the keep in 1665. Following the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate 203 years later, civil wars destroyed most of the rest of the castle complex. The building in the third photo from the top is one of the few remaining from the 1620 reconstruction. The crane panels, which are now on display on the observation deck, are also originals. I couldn't find out if they are Hideyoshi's or Hidetada's; I believe the latter.
Not far from Osaka Castle, in Kyobashi, is the Hotel Monterey. Notice the white building behind the big window, below the pyramid, inside the hotel, high above the ground below. The Monterey group of hotels have tons of money and with that they have disassembled churches they bought in Europe and shipped them to Japan to reassemble them in their hotels. They are now not houses of worship but wedding halls. Here http://www.monterey-wedding.jp/lasoeur_osaka/ you'll find some more photos of the church in question.
The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.-- Carrol Quigley
- The goal for the (more or less) unified global alpha class is a totalitarian one world government with one world currency and a universal plant food tax--to save the Earth of course.
- Manufacture a problem. In this case you deregulate the financial markets--as Bill Clinton did--and get the feds to look the other way while Wall Street and its global clones play with financial weapons of mass destruction and create unprecedented debt and risk.
- Oh my gosh, something's gotta be done. Please, Teleprompter Messianic President, save us.
- The solution: a one world currency.
- Roll up your sleeve civilian. It's time for your implantable RFID. The cashless globalized society is here. Don't you just love freedom?
JimShoresArt's photostream
Approx. 4' tall. Made from a 1931 Ford grill, rusty sheet metal, other found-objects and hardware.
Sold through the Archer/Locke Gallery ( Atlanta ) in 1997
(N/R/D) JSA555-000-9119
Until a few evenings ago, Her Majesty Venus appeared brilliant as usual in the evening sky. Now She is in front of the Sun--an inferior conjuntion. Venus will shortly be the Morning Star, her Luciferian aspect.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. -- H. L. Mencken
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as
something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a
small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the
benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. -- Major General Smedley Butler
The argument that the two parties should represent
opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other
of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and
academic thinkers. -- Carrol Quigley
Are some of you Bambi-eyed innocents starting to get it? If not, the tornado of Austin, AJ, will throw you in the deep end with this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaQNACwaLw. Close to 700,000 views since being posted to YouTube on 12 March 2009.
However, what makes Sheldrake’s theory so radical is that formative causation postulated to act in a nonlocal fashion; that is, it operates instantaneously across space and time. Once a particular form has been learned by a system, it will be more easily learned by a similar system anywhere else in the world, without any spatiotemporal contact. And, in fact, Sheldrake points out that there is already a fair amount of circumstantial evidence supporting this. For example, it is well known that it is extremely difficult to crystallize complex organic compounds for the first time, but once it has been done in any laboratory, it is more easily (more rapidly) done in others. It has also been shown that once rats learn to negotiate a particular maze in one part of the world; rats elsewhere learn that maze more rapidly. And this, according to Sheldrake, is because of nonlocal morphic resonance and formative causation.--Ken Wilber
A presentation at the Biology of Transformation Conference in 2007.
