Insightful newsletter of Drishtikone: Issue #165 - The Escape Artists of Elysium
“[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” ― Werner Heisenberg
There is a difference between a fact and the Truth. That you are a man or a woman is a fact. But in making you, a man and a woman contributed equal ingredients. So, you being a man or a woman may be a fact. However, you being both, a man and a woman is the Truth!
That Ram and Sita were two people may have been a fact. It was not the Truth. Truth is that nothing is different. All is one universal consciousness.
But it is a facetious assertion for most. For some, very very few, that becomes the Truth which has been experienced.
If you have read just simply Ramayana, you cannot understand the full context of Ram. To understand Ram first, you need to read Yoga Vashistht. It shares what and how Ram was crafted into and by whom. His dialog with his Guru and their ruthless honesty shows what Ram really was. Once you know Ram of Yoga Vashisht, you know much better what he is doing in his life as seen by Sage Valmiki.
First things first - the reason there was no newsletter yesterday: we had finished the newsletter when due to a silly error it got deleted in Substack. Poof!! Apparently, there is no way of retrieving it at all! BUMMER!! Yes, there certainly isn’t any way a user can retrieve it. So, we have had to re-write almost the entire content again. Whatever we had painstakingly written directly into the application yesterday was replicated thought by thought. Lesson: We are now using another application to first draft our content and then bring it over to Substack. Cost of education!
Chinese government interventions and the Ponzi scheme
A friend of mine had a factory that produced machines (lathes etc) in the NCR area. He had moved it to Bhiwandi for better tax advantages. Ultimately, he had to close the factory down. When I asked why he said that - the Chinese are selling similar machines below his cost price.
That did not make any sense to me. After all, China certainly did not have a labor cost advantage over India. And, with all the advantages that the friend received in the new place, the tax and other costs couldn’t be that more expensive. Then what was it?
The answer lies in the way the Chinese government has handled their economy and the worked to infiltrate into every country and market to destroy all their competitors.
You see China did not have an economy. It had a Ponzi scheme.
A rather startling op-ed appeared in the South China Morning Post on Sunday suggesting that the entire Chinese economy is just one giant Ponzi scheme that will inevitably collapse. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but–as Humphrey Bogart might once have said–soon (Source)
As long as the money was coming in, it was being used to fund other industries, to a point where the Chinese manufacturer could take over the whole market.
I came across these tweets from a business consultant named Nisheeth Sharan. He shares two anecdotes which are quite symptomatic of how Chinese companies and the Chinese Communist Party operates in the business sphere.
The first one is about this ophthalmic lens company in India. When Nisheeth and the importer’s manager started negotiating with the Chinese company in a rather aggressive manner, they brought the cost down to, well, just 1% above the cost price. That was hardly any margin for the Chinese company.
When Nisheeth inquired, the manufacturer’s daughter told him that the company would get 10% export subsidy from the government. Now, that was a pretty generous subsidy from the Chinese Communist Party to the local business which wanted to enter another market and beat out the competition in a big way! So, in reality, the company was actually working on a margin of 11%, and not 1%.
The reason why China is a Ponzi scheme is precisely this very structure where the government subsidizes businesses to beat their competitors on sheer price and scale. A scale that they can build to and a price that they can offer without any regard to the normal financial considerations like ROI etc.
That is why I sometimes joke at home that 20-40% of our grocery bill is being paid by the Chinese Communist Party!
This anecdote demonstrated how the Chinese government is willing to help its companies beat the competitors. Which is not such a major issue in terms of government policy or social issues.
‘We pay, you fight the duties for us’
The second anecdote, however, is more telling. It shows a different streak altogether.
In this case, Nisheeth went to China to procure flooring material for a large hotel project. There were two options. One (vitrified range), where the Indian government had put the Anti-Dumping duties on Chinese products. The second (Ceramic), where there wasn’t.
In the case of the former, the Chinese had very competitive pricing and a good range. But the Anti-Dumping duty was a bummer. So, as Nisheeth got ready for the other variety, the manufacturer suggested that he could send the vitrified tiles and pay the Anti-Dumping duty. The catch was that Nisheeth and his company would have to file a case in India for the removal of the Anti-Dumping duty against these Chinese products. The manufacturer was willing to even pay for the legal expenses for any lawyer Nisheeth’s company may hire.
Here is a case of just one company talking about a small range of products, where the Chinese manufacturer is willing to intervene in the public policy of the Indian government.
Of course, that company had links with the CCP so basically, it was a government-level infiltration into the Indian public policy debate.
Through a back door albeit!
Now think of it - if they are willing to do such interference for one product, imagine how much money would be given to those who are ready to break India?
‘Elysium effect’ - the super-rich escape artists
In a very interesting article on Medium, Douglas Rushkoff wrote about a talk that he attended in 2017. It was a very expensive speech to get into and the room was full of super-rich hedge-fund managers etc.
The questions he faced were always about the scenario at the time of an extinction-level event(ELE).
Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” (Source)
The ‘event’ was obviously some version of an ELE.
They obviously wanted to live through such an ‘event’, but more importantly, they were targeting almost an immortal status. These are still looking at how to survive such an event on this planet.
There is, however, another breed of individuals - the super-super-rich. Those folks are already working on how to dump this planet and move to a space colony, maybe on Mars.
That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.
These super-rich and the super-super-rich folks are inherently escape artists. They want to close off their gates, create high walls, and have a whole new world to themselves that no one can get into. And, they hope to create an immortal life for themselves. It is now called the Elysium effect, after the Matt Damon movie Elysium.
In the 2013 science fiction film "Elysium" starring Matt Damon, Earth's wealthiest 0.01% move to the ultimate gated community, a luxurious orbiting space colony, leaving a poverty-stricken humanity to fend for themselves on a ravaged planet. Interestingly, it is indeed some of today's 0.1% who are leading the way into space to build communities beyond Earth. However, quite the opposite of the movie, their goals are of the highest order, from democratizing access to space by lowering costs, to creating new products and ideas, to helping save the planet and opening space to future generations. (Source)
It is not as if this is the first time that people are attempting these kinds of antics. Such megalomaniacal nonsense has been tried by many and it has always failed beyond a certain point.
More importantly, it doesn’t take a high IQ to understand that if you cannot make things work on a planet that is designed with all the basics of supporting life, then chances that you can make it work on another planet where you have to ‘create’ life, is the stuff of mental asylum residents. Think about it!
the Ravan syndrome
There are a lot of forces that have worked very hard to abuse Ram and Krishna in order to break the Dharmic structures and convert the Hindus. And many Hindus have been stupid enough to even take believe in the nonsensical arguments that actually are very shallow and based on a very juvenile view of life and history. FOr example, look at this woman and what she is asking for her daughter.
Not only was he not a great bhakt, but he was actually a man-eater, a cannibal. That was one thing. The other thing about him was that he was a rapist, who, when he saw some beautiful woman would kill all her family and rape her.
And this is precisely what he wanted to do with Sita as well.
That Sita survived is not a testimony to the greatness of Ravan but the spiritual strength and siddhis of Sita. Other, not so fortunate women, committed themselves to fire and died.
They suffered, their families suffered and died because Ravan was a rakshasa.
As for this woman, she has absolutely no idea what she is even wishing for her little girl! Little knowing that this universe works in strange ways.
nota bene
Dairy Production in Indus valley civilization: Dairy production in India began as far back as in the 3rd millennium BCE and may have been a factor behind sustaining the Indus Valley Civilisation, according to findings from a team of Canadian and Indian researchers. The study, published in the journal Nature, was led by Kalyan Sekhar Chakraborty, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and dates dairy production to 2500 BCE. “This is the first time it’s been proved scientifically that dairy production was in place in the Indus Valley civilization in 2500 BCE, and the earliest known evidence of dairy production,” Chakraborty said in an interview. (Source)
India’s Recovery rate is 90%: India’s rate of recovery from the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has touched 90% with 62,077 people recovering in the last 24 hours, the Union ministry of health and family welfare said on Sunday. This took the total recoveries to 7,078,123, it added. (Source)
Pakistan to cede islands to China?: Imran Khan's government is trying to unilaterally take over the islands of Buddhoo and Bundal belonging to Sindh on demand of the Chinese government, without taking consent of the people of Sindh or its government. Though the apparent explanation for such an unethical move of the federal government could be Pakistan's hunger for funds, the actual motive lies behind China's interest in strengthening its footholds in the Arabian Sea through a China-Pakistan maritime collaboration. (Source)
Digging through Penguin poop: Now, scientists have scoured 14,000 years of poop from penguins, petrels, and shearwaters, preserved in the peatlands of the Falkland Islands, according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. The idea was to gain insight into the possible correlations between climate changes and seabird ranges, as well as to assess the long-term effect of the birds on the land habitat. The results suggest that seabird populations first exploded on this South Atlantic archipelago as the region was cooling some 5,000 years ago, which may indicate that current global warming will prompt the birds to seek colder refuges in the coming decades, once again. (Source)
Doval speaks
Have you heard of the song “ek, do, teen…” from Tezaab. It was not that great a song because those were the first words that would come to anyone’s mind. On the other hand, you can spend hours and hours listening to and coming up with the many interpretations and meanings of “Humne dekhi hai in aankhon ki mehakti khushboo”. You know why? Because the latter’s words were put on paper after several others were discarded. They were a culmination of a journey, not the first step. When you listen to those words, you too take that journey.
That is why when Doval speaks you listen. Because he says things after a lot of thought. Thousands of things would have happened for even one word in him to be formed for expression. Others remain in him deposited quietly in the homa/havan of national security. So listen to this.
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