recursal/Fanatic-Fandom huggingface dataset:
Education in ancient Sparta

In ancient Greece, there were two kinds of education: Spartan and Athenian (which corresponds to the great division of the Greek society into two kinds of social systems and military alliances). Spartan education was basically a military one, while the Athenian was more balanced, developing both the body and the mind.

Wikipedia writes on the Spartan education:

"the Spartans structured their educational system as an extreme form of military boot camp, which they referred to as agoge.[27] The pursuit of intellectual knowledge was seen as trivial, and thus academic learning, such as reading and writing, was kept to a minimum. A Spartan boy’s life was devoted almost entirely to his school, and that school had but one purpose: to produce an almost indestructible Spartan phalanx. Formal education for a Spartan male began at about the age of seven when the state removed the boy from the custody of his parents and sent him to live in a barracks with many other boys his age.[28] For all intents and purposes, the barracks was his new home, and the other males living in the barracks his family. For the next five years, until about the age of twelve, the boys would eat, sleep and train within their barracks-unit and receive instruction from an adult male citizen who had completed all of his military training and experienced battle.[29] The instructor stressed discipline and exercise and saw to it that his students received little food and minimal clothing in an effort to force the boys to learn how to forage, steal and endure extreme hunger, all of which would be necessary skills in the course of a war.[30] Those boys who survived the first stage of training entered into a secondary stage in which punishments became harsher and physical training and participation in sports almost non-stop in order to build up strength and endurance.[31] During this stage, which lasted until the males were about eighteen years old, fighting within the unit was encouraged, mock battles were performed, acts of courage praised, and signs of cowardice and disobedience severely punished.[32] During the mock battles, the young men were formed into phalanxes to learn to maneuver as if they were one entity and not a group of individuals.[33] To be more efficient and effective during maneuvers, students were also trained in dancing and music, because

   this would enhance their ability to move gracefully as a unit.[34] Toward the end of this phase of the agoge, the trainees were expected to hunt down and kill a Helot, a Greek slave".

To kill a man, as a "final examination" - what a society! But this society was based on slave labor, and in this case these were "Helots", whom the Spartans conquered and made into slaves.

In general, education reflects class structure of a society. It is impossible to reform the educational system, without overthrowing the entire social system and class oppression, upon which it is based.

More details on the Spartan education can be found here .
Fidel Castro on ideal for education

"If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in Che’s spirit! If we want the model of a man, who does not belong to our times but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, is Che!”,

Fidel, October 18, 1967
General information on Hong Kong, from Wikipedia

Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after Qing China's defeat in the First Opium War (1839–42). Originally confined to Hong Kong Island, the colony's boundaries were extended first to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and then, with a 99-year lease beginning in 1898, the New Territories.

Population over 7 million, high density of population per area

Under the principle of "one country, two systems", Hong Kong maintains a separate political system from China. Except in military defence and foreign affairs, Hong Kong maintains its independent executive, legislative and judiciary powers. In addition, Hong Kong continues to directly develop relations with foreign states and international organisations in a broad range of non-diplomatic fields.

In the 1950s, Hong Kong became the first of the Four Asian Tiger economies under rapid industrialisation driven by textile exports, manufacturing industries and re-exports of goods to China... the population grew, with labour costs remaining low...
General info on FARC from Wikipedia

Active: 1964-present

"a Marxist–Leninist peasant force"

In 1964, the FARC–EP were established as the military wing of the Colombian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Colombiano, PCC), after the Colombian military attacked rural communist enclaves in the aftermath of *The Violence* (La Violencia, ca. 1948–58).
"Укроп"

Предыдущая: "Добровольческие батальоны" официального Киева

УКРОП

   В июне 2014 г. Коломойский создает политическую партию "Укроп". Читаем:

"Лещенко связал появление партии с противостоянием Коломойского и Петра Порошенко, начавшееся с вопросов контроля над компанией Укрнафта и приведшее к отставке днепропетровского миллиардера. Причем нефтяная тема еще не закрыта — Укрнафта должна госбюджету порядка 7 млрд грн дивидендов, выплату которых блокирует Коломойский. “Чтобы не возвращать все деньги, сотую или тысячную часть суммы инвестируют в политику”,— написал Лещенко в своем блоге на Украинской правде."

Более того:

"новая партия для Коломойского может оказаться технической, став частью его комплексной атаки на власть.

“Коломойский, как заправский шеф-повар, готовит блюда на любой вкус. У него есть леворадикальная партия Олега Ляшко [21 мандат в Верховной раде], для электората регионалов — партия Возрождения экс-регионала Виталия Хомутынника [22 мандата]. А для правых будет Укроп, которая станет претендовать на голоса БПП и Свободы”,— уверен Березовец.

Если к этому прибавить еще и тайный союз с Юлией Тимошенко, который, по данным источников, заключил бывший губернатор, окажется, что Коломойский буквально обложил БПП и партию Арсения Яценюка со всех сторон."

   В октябре 2015 г. Геннадий Корбан был задержан. "Ему предъявлены обвинения по четырём статьям Уголовного кодекса: 255 (создание организованной преступной организации), 191 (присвоение, растрата имущества: по факту хищение средств из «Фонда обороны страны»), 349 (задержание представителя власти или сотрудника правоохранительных органов в качестве заложника: по факту похищения главы Государственного земельного агентства Сергея Рудыка и секретаря Днепропетровского городского совета Александра Величко), 289 (похищение автомобильного транспорта)", пишет Википедия. Задержание Корбана объясняется подковерной борьбой между Порошенко и Коломойским.

Дальше: "Правый сектор" и Дмитро Ярош
El General music video during "the Arab spring"

Situation

in Tunisia, right before the uprising ("the Arab spring", 2010-11), is best described by the video and rap of a Tunisia rap singer , El General, (real name: Hamada Ben Amor , born 1988, arrested 2010)

Lyrics:

President of the country

Today I`m speaking to you

In my name and on behalf of all

The people who live in suffering

In 2011 he dies of hunger

He wants to work for a living

But his voice is not heard

Go to the streets and look around you

People are treated like animals

Watch the cops with their batons,

“tap tap tap” with impunity

Since there is nobody to say “NO!”

Just like the law and constitution

It doesn`t care!

Every day I hear of a case,

Fabricated.

Even if the powers know

That he is an honest citizen.

I see the cops

Hit veiled women

Would you accept that if they did

The same to your daughter?

What I say is unfortunate,

Since you`re a father,

And you would not want

Any harm to come to your children

Then tell yourself that this message

IS sent by one of your children.

We live in suffering, like dogs,

Half of the people live in humiliation

And have tasted misery.

President of the country

Your people are dead

People eat in the garbage

Look what`s happening in your country

Marigolds are everywhere

People have nowhere to sleep

Today I speak fearlessly on behalf of the people

Crushed by the weight of injustice

President of the country

Your people are dead

People eat from the garbage

Look whats happening in your country

Marigolds are everywhere

People have nowhere to sleep

Today I speak fearlessly

On behalf of the people

Crushed by the weight of injustice

President of the country

You tell us: “Speak without fear”

I spoke.

But know what to expect.

Slaps!

I see a lot of injustice

That’s why I chose to speak.

Yet many warned me

How long must the Tunisian

Live in dreams?

Where’s freedom of speech?

I`ve only seen the name!

You calling “Tunisia the green”!

But president look

Tunisia became a desert

Cut into two blocks

They steal in front of everyone

No need to name them

You know who these people are!

Much money should go

To projects, achievements,

Schools, hospitals, housing…

But the sons of bitches

With the people`s money

They fill their bellies

They steal, they plunder, they use…

Even a chair doesn`t escape them

The people had much to say

But their voice is not heard

If there was not this injustice

I wouldn`t need to talk
Earnest Mandel

1923-1995

**Charles Van Gelderen**

**Ernest Mandel: Revolutionary Socialist
in Theory and Practice**

**(Winter 1995/96)**

Mandel was more than a theoretician. As a Marxist, for him theory and practice were indivisible. That is why the building and strengthening of the Fourth International were central to his life. Like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky before him, he knew that the working class could not carry out its historic task without a party, and that that party had to be international, not only in outlook, making mere genuflections to internationalism, but organisationally. Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach – ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it’ – was the foundation of his political life. That is why, since the age of 15, he devoted himself to what he regarded as the central task for today – the building of the Fourth International.

He regarded the argument of the British Socialist Workers Party, that you first had to build the basement and the floor before you can build the roof (the International), as a crude sophism.

‘several important factors are operating in our favour. On a world scale, the wage-earning class is still growing, and growing in an impressive way, although not in all countries and all sectors at the same pace. Internationally, it has long passed the billion mark. If you add to this the semi-proletariat of landless peasants in important Third World countries, you will probably reach the figure of two billion.’ (Ibid.) – the wage-earners are not “workers”

For Ernest, the building of the Fourth International was the primary purpose of his life
Joseph Stalin

1878-1953

According to Stalin, in the USSR there are two economic laws – the law of value (in the sphere of popular consumption), and the law of planned development (in the sphere of production).

Things in the sphere of popular consumption present themselves as commodities, i.e. things that can be bought and sold. Things in the sphere of production are not commodities. Their production and distribution takes place according to a plan, and money is used only for accounting purposes, to make clear the relationships between the factories and the state.

The law of value has been formulated in the XVIII century England by Adam Smith and it states that the value of things is defined by the amount of labor necessary for their production. The law of planned development Stalin formulates thus: “providing maximum satisfaction for the constantly growing material and cultural needs of the entire society through constant growth and improvement of socialized production on the basis of high technology”.

In spite of the presence of two laws in the USSR, the law of value is subservient to the law of planned production. Hence, we formulate a hypothesis: the manner in which the main products and services in society are manufactured determines the main type of relations which form between people in the society. Thus, if the main things and services in the USSR are manufactured and provided outside the law of value, but according to the “law of planned development”, then the main relations among the people are not dictated by the law of value, but rather by other needs, not always selfless, but not monetary.
Francis Bacon

1561-1626

* Overview from Wikipedia
	+ Father of empiricism
	+ Demands a planned procedure for investigating all things
	+ Tried to create a new instrument of knowledge, "Novum Organon"
* "Novum Organon"
* Audio works of F. Bacon
	+ "The New Atlantis " - a song by Donovan, refering to one of the works of Bacon
* Commentary: "Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes on Learning", by Gennady Kozak
FARC

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - People's Army

These are esssentially peasant forces fighting under the banner of "Marxism-Leninism", for a re-distribution of land.

* General info on FARC from Wikipedia
* Who are the FARC? BBC, 2016
* The current head of FARC, Timochenko , 2016
* FARC-EP , from Stanford-DoD project, 2015
* Tanya Nijmeijer interview to BBC , 2013
"Nine commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party"

(Watch here )

   1840’s – beginning of modern history

2.       1860’s – invasion of China by imperialism, beginning of Westernization in China

3.       1894- Sino-Japanese war, China lost. Reforms.

4.       1904 – Russo-Japanese war, over control of China.

5.       1911 – start of a revolution in China, end of dynasty

6.       May 4th movement, Russian revolution an example

7.       CCP – a Marxist-Leninist party, i.e. a wing of the III International, after the split between Trotsky and Stalin.
Kurt Godel

1906-1978

In 1931, "he proved for any computable axiomatic system that is powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g., the Peano axioms or Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice), that:

1. If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
2. The consistency of the axioms cannot be proved within the system."

This is known as "Godel's Second Incompleteness Theorem". It implies:

1. Infinite nature of any knowledge

Worked together with Einstein at Princeton Institute for the Advanced Studies.

**Other languages:**

Курт Гедель
Brazilians-2013

**"Trotsky’s Law of Uneven and Combined Development in Marini’s Dialectics of Dependency"**, 2013

Notes:

the inability of economies that have peculiarities (like shortcomings and deformations) to develop in the same way as the advanced capitalist economies did is similar to what the Law and Uneven and Combined Development says
Christ the Redeemer

A statue of Jesus Christ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, created by French sculptor Paul Landowski and built by the Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa, in collaboration with the French engineer Albert Caquot. Romanian sculptor Gheorghe Leonida fashioned the face. Constructed between 1922 and 1931, the statue is 30 metres (98 ft) tall, excluding its 8-metre (26 ft) pedestal. The arms stretch 28 metres (92 ft) wide.[1][2]

The statue weighs 635 metric tons (625 long, 700 short tons), and is located at the peak of the 700-metre (2,300 ft) Corcovado mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park overlooking the city of Rio.

Setting the statue atop of the mountain is a very effective move, as it shows literally that such a figure is above the mundane world.
Ante Ciliga

1898-1992

Ante Ciliga was a Yugoslav communist who spent time in Soviet jails during 1930's. His main work is considered to be "The Russian Enigma", published in 1940, at the time he escaped the USSR.

I was not able to get a hold of the entire work, only one of its chapters. Here is what struck me. He writes about his discussion with fellow political prisoners in a Soviet concentration camp:

"Useless to get heated, comrade Ciliga, about Lenin's struggle against the bureaucracy. You rely on one of the last articles he wrote before his death, the one on the reform of the Workers and Peasants Inspection. Did he call on the masses to organize themselves against the bureaucracy? Not at all. He proposed the creation of a special organ with a well-paid staff, a super-bureaucratic organ to combat...the bureaucracy!"

That is what the current bureaucracy continues to do. It attempts to combat corruption with the help of other bureaucratic organs. The bureaucracy is only a sign that people in general, and workers specifically, are not capable of self-management, but instead prefer to rely upon others to organize life for them.

Ciliga:

"At the end of his life Lenin lost confidence in the worker mass. He banked on the bureaucratic apparatus, but, fearing that it would overdo things, he sought to restrict the evil by making one part of the apparatus control the other."

He continues:

"a new revolution, truly freeing, socially freeing, the lower orders, can arise in Russia and elsewhere in the world, only by realizing the programme of the annihilated Workers Opposition”.

Its principal demands: workers’ self-government, freedom of parties, democracy. However, the problem of democracy runs upon the obstacle that this democracy is used by the world capitalism to impose its will upon the Soviet land. This we have seen in the beginning of the Soviet Russia, and in XXI century.

The problem of bureaucracy, or lack of self-management, coincides with the problem of the capitalist encirclement, the capitalist world in general. Can we imagine capitalism growing in the former USSR if the outside world was free of capitalism? This is the reason to believe that the problem of bureaucracy, and capitalist Restoration in the former USSR, will be solved simultaneously with the problem of capitalism in the world at large. Political revolution in the former USSR, and other transitional states, coincides the social revolution in the capitalist camp.

Ciliga approaches the problem of the social nature of the USSR is a manner that is simplistic. He reasons thus:

1. Workers' control = socialism

2. Bureaucracy's control = state capitalism

3. In the USSR, there is the control of bureaucracy.

4. Hence, the USSR is a state capitalism.

This reasoning does not address the problem of "what is capital"? How justified is one in arguing that control by the bureaucracy = state capitalism? Unfortunately, some Marxist workers in the USSR think in the same way.
Escher

17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972
   His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations.

He was one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book *Gödel, Escher, Bach*.
Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists by Zheng Chaolin

(Read here )

   Written by a participant

“theory of national revolution” - China cannot carry out proletarian-socialist revolution without first going through national revolution, i.e., bourgeois-democratic revolution; and the proletariat must strive for the leadership of the national revolution.

before and at the first Congress there was no theory – not even a glimmering of one – about first having to complete bourgeois-democratic revolution before starting proletarian-socialist revolution. After the First Congress the question of cooperating with the Guomindang was raised. It was discussed at the Second Congress and again at the West Lake Conference, and the Third Congress decided to join the Guomindang. But it was raised as a tactic, in terms of how can we even more quickly and effectively develop the revolutionary movement and Party forces

Were there grounds for such a theory? Yes, people cited the theoretical disputes in Russia before the Revolution as a basis for it. But they avoided talking about the actual course of events in 1917, for that showed that the Russians had already carried out the proletarian-socialist revolution even before completing the bourgeois-democratic one, that bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia was completed as a by-product of proletarian-socialist revolution. – an earlier stage of a revolution is a by-product of the higher one.

(boring)
Electronics as emerging technology

Electronic nose - the capability of reproducing human senses using sensor
arrays and pattern recognition systems. This technology,
among other uses, can be used to detect cancer cells.

E-textiles - fabrics that enable digital components (including
smallcomputers), and electronics to be embedded in them.

   Flexible electronics - technology for assembling electronic circuits by mounting electronic

devices on flexible plastic substrates. One example of this are flexible solar panels, on a yacht.

Memristor - a passive component in electronics that changes its resistance depending on the current that flows through it. Can be used for creation of an artificial brain.

Artificial brain - software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.  However Kurzweil prefers the more memorable term Strong AI. In his book The Singularity is Near he focuses on whole brain emulation using conventional computing machines as an approach to implementing artificial brains, and claims (on grounds of computer power continuing an exponential growth trend) that this could be done by 2025. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain project (which is attempting brain emulation), made a similar claim (2020) at the Oxford TED conference in 2009 (watch here).

Spintronics - an emerging technology exploiting both the intrinsic spin of the electron and its associated magnetic moment, in addition to its fundamental electronic charge, in solid-state devices.

More see here
A Struggle Within the Chinese Communist Party, by Bill Fletcher Jr.

Published Sept. 2002

July
1, 2001 – Jiang Zemin calls for admitting capitalists into the CCP.

No
public discussion of the struggle within the party, suppression of discussion,
of the left. Jiang responds to criticism with a house arrest of an 82 year old
“ringleader”.

Self-censorship
of the existing Marxist journals.

Capitalists
are already part of the CPC

Ideology of a “United
Front” still present in the CPC
Incident on 7 November, 2016

I was sitting in bathroom, thinking "why I-a doesn't answer my Viber message" when all of a sudden I heard a typical bell of a Viber message, then another one. I knew without looking these were from I-a.

I thought to myself: "This is mysticism". But then no, it is not mysticism, for first I thought about it, then it happened. This is a fact to me. Hence, telepathy - a transmission of thoughts at a distance without any device - must exist.
Achievements

Achievements are acquired when you accomplished a required task set by an achievement. Some can be acquired from eggs. When you acquire an achievement you get points that can be used in the Achievement store to buy items. Some achievements are upgradable buy reaching the next level of the achievement. You can also wear the achievement and show it off in game play.
Georges Lemaitre

1894-1966

A Belgian priest who, in 1927, proposed the theory of Big Bang .

The theory was first a subject of derision, hence the name "Big Bang" was proposed to make fun of it. But in 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies that are flying apart. Then, in 1960's, a background cosmic radiation was discovered. All these support the theory of Big Bang.
Chinese new left

Maoism, or social-democracy, or simply Chinese nationalism

Cui Zhiyuan, a leading New Leftist intellectual, believes that it is imperative that socialism and capitalism are not viewed as opposing one another

On December 24, 2004, four Chinese protesters were sentenced to three-year prison terms for distributing leaflets entitled "Mao Forever Our Leader" at a gathering in Zhengzhou honoring Mao Zedong on the anniversary of his birth.[8] Attacking the current leadership as "imperialist revisionists," the leaflets called on lower-level cadre to "change (The Party's) current line and to revert to the socialist road." The Zhengzhou incident is one of the first manifestations of public nostalgia for the Mao era to make it to the international press, although it is far from clear whether these feelings are widespread. In any case, it is an example of Marxist Chinese New Leftism in action.

   So, New left in China is:
1) Maoism,

2) Social-democracy
Hacking school, by Logan LaPlante

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY

Goals: to be happy and healthy

Means: 1) exercise, 2) diet, 3) time in nature, 4) relationships, 5) recreation, 6) contributions and service to others.

Education oriented towards “making a living” vs. “making a life”

Ken Robinson: schools kill creativity. Creativity is more important than literacy.

(How they kill creativity? First, they kill play, games. Then, they kill “the whole”, e.g. cartoons).

Logan was pulled out of the school system at 9.

Goals of his education: 1) happy and healthy, 2) creativity, 3) technology and on-line resources, 4) experiential classes and camps. Altogether, that means “hacking school”, i.e. creating, inventing. No curriculum. No one approach.

School looks like “Starbucks”. There, he studies math, science, history and writing. Learned to love to write by obtaining a chance to write about one’s interests and experiences, instead of “butterflies” and “rainbows”.

Main ingredient is “motivation”

Learns physics through making things and experiments (engineering).

1 day/week – outside all day in Nature, skiing. Survival course. Make weapons, tools, sheds. Camp out.

Gets an internship – starts to work as a help boy, and enjoys that the most.

Skiing and education to him mean freedom. To be creative.
Former civil war between the left and the right

Capitalist states where we’ve seen a civil war between left-wing and capitalist forces.

1. Spain, 1936-39
2. Greece, 1944-48
3. Burma, after WWII
4. Uruguay - 1970's, “the world’s poorest president”, since 2010, a former member of a revolutionary group “Tupamaros”
5. El Salvador, 1980's
6. Nicaragua, 1980's
7. Honduras, 1980's
8. Nepal, 1996-2006
Bette Midler (b.1945) on love

(Listen to song "The Rose ")

The song says that we are a “seed”, and love is “the flower”, or “the rose” which develops from this seed.

Love is a very tender feeling that is afraid of any rough handling. It doesn’t know how to protect itself. Hegel dwells on this: “Beauty, powerless and helpless, hates understanding which demands from it what it cannot perform”.

Love is a kind of dreamy state of mind that never takes the chance to awake. Love will not be conquered by any means, such as expensive restaurants and cars; not it will not give itself voluntarily.

It is the soul afraid of death, but the soul which is impractical and hence doesn’t know how to live.

Love is not presented to “the lucky”, “the strong”, “the wealthy”, etc. Love is within every person, within you and me, love is a kind of seed within each of us, which, when conditions turn to “spring”, blooms into a beautiful flower.
"Социал-национальная ассамблея" и Олег Однорожко

Предыдущая: "Братство" и Дмитро Корчинский

   З розпадом СНПУ її наступник ВО «Свобода» відходить від відвертого декларування ідеології соціал-націоналізму, її принципів. Також на ідеології соціал-націоналізму засновують свою діяльність громадські організації:

·         ОУМ «Спадщина» (діє з 1988 р.)

·         ВГО «Патріот України» (Утворена у 2005 р.)

·         ЧПР «Українська Альтернатива» (утворена у 2007 р.)

·         НД «РіД»

·         ГО «СіЧ»

Новітню історію соціал-націоналізму варто розпочинати з 8 листопада 2008 р., коли у м.Києві було проведено нараду керівників соціал-націоналістичних організацій України та прийнято рішення про утворення єдиної соціал-націоналістичної сили — Соціал-Національної Асамблеї (СНА), яка на першому етапі організаційно об'єднала 4 соціал-націоналістичні організації («Патріот України», НД «РіД», ЧПР «Українська Альтернатива» та ГО «СіЧ»

   А. Білецький та О. Однороженко визначають соціал-націоналізм як ідеологію, що базується на максималізмі, національно-расовому егоїзмі, любові до свого, нетерпимості до ворожого та активізмі.

Здесь можно послушать выступление Олег Однороженко об идеологии.

Дальше: Олег Ляшко
A critique of previous forms of organization of the future society

2 questions emerge from my examination of “Law of Uneven and
Combined Development”

1. Examine the states where revolution has taken place, and
compare these to the states where no revolution has taken place. How to explain
the difference, concretely?

2. Examine the new emerging “class” of “creators”, differentiate
between revolutionary and non-revolutionary strands.

This is about critique of previously existing states, their
emergence from revolutions, and decay.

But what about the “new state”, new society to emerge in the
future? For this, we need to know the histories of previously existing
revolutionary organizations. I know of only 4 Internationals. The 5th
one which leader of Venezuela attempted to create did not materialize, and was
not serious from the start. It was to me a front organization for his policies
of defense against imperialism.

The decay and destruction of 3rd International is
synonymous with the decay of the Russian communist party, with emergence of
Stalinism.

But, what about the 4th one? Why did
it not emerge out of the nucleus which Trotsky created?

I have a feeling that the reason for failure was the same one that led Lenin to part with Trotsky, at the founding conference of the Bolshevik party (1905, II Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party). And this was a desire to compromise on important principles, out of the fear of being left alone, or in insignificant minority. A union of Trotsky with the American SWP, and in particular with J.P. Cannonб appears just of such a nature. I have never met a revolutionary from the U.S., and it seems the only way for a revolutionary (social) to survive is to run away from that country.
Bertalanffy

**Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy** (September 19, 1901, Atzgersdorf near Vienna – June 12, 1972, Buffalo, New York) was an Austrian-born biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory (GST). GST is an interdisciplinary practice

that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics, and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that
the classical laws of thermodynamics applied to closed systems, but not
necessarily to "open systems," such as living things. His
mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934,[1] is still in use today.

* Text of "General Systems Theory " by Bertalanffy, 1966
* Notes on "General Systems Theory"
Kurds: the news

**2017**

   March 5 - Russia with Kurds against Turkey and Islamists

March 4 - the Peshmergas (Kurds of Iraq) and YBS (affiliated to PKK) are fighting each other

**2014**

23.12.14 – young Kurds join PKK to fight against ISIL

19 December 2014 – Peshmerga forces fighting ISIL on Sinjar mountain (Iraq)

2 November 2014 - Kobane is one of the three autonomous zones that the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its allies have established since January in northern Syria known among Kurds as Rojava or West Kurdistan, much to Ankara's displeasure. The PYD and its military wing, the YPG, are seen as affiliates of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The PKK has fought Turkish security forces for around three decades in pursuit of Kurdish rights in Turkey. "The government of Turkey would prefer to see Kobane fall," Cengiz Candar, an Istanbul-based political analyst and an adviser on Kurdish affairs to former Turkish President Turgut Ozal told Al Jazeera.
Imperialist satellites

**Definition:**

States that are too small to play an
independent imperialist role, and hence they joined what appeared as the
stronger imperialist power of the times, in oppressing and exploiting other
nations. One example is Sweden during WWII.

Imperialist nations in order of appearance of their imperialism:

1. Portugal
2. Spain (also in category of states with a former civil war between the left and the right).
3. Netherlands
4. Great Britain
5. France
6. Germany
7. Italy
8. Japan
9. Sweden
10. Republic of South Africa
11. Israel
12. New Zealand
13. Australia
Displays as emerging technologies

3D displays - a display device capable of conveying depth perception to the viewer

Holography - a technique which enables three-dimensional images to be made

Screenless display -  systems for transmitting visual information from a video source without the use of a screen.

  EyeTap - a device that is worn in front of the eye that acts as a camera to record the scene available to the eye as well as a display to superimpose a computer-generated imagery on the original scene available to the eye. Picture: EyeTap inventor Steve Mann wearing a metal frame Laser EyeTap.

  Head-up display - a display device, worn on the head or as part of a helmet, that has a small display optic in front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye (binocular HMD). Picture: a man controls Google Glass, a type of Optical head-mounted display, using the touchpad built into the side of the device.

  Google glass - a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD) that is being developed byGoogle in the **Project Glass** research and development project,[8] with a mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer.

   Augmented reality - a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input.  Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world.

More see here
Albert Einstein on love

Read letter to his daughter about that universal force which is love

Albert Einstein says:

“There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us. This universal force is LOVE”.

This force partakes of all other forces and phenomena of nature: light, gravity, power. It is a force that explains everything and gives a meaning to life. One of his most crazy ideas is to make “a love bomb”, “a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet”.

See "Albert Einstein "
Leibniz

1646-1716
Created "calculus", in parallel with Newton. This proves that this direction of research was not accidental, but was dictated by the needs of productive forces of its times, specifically the need to develop mechanics as a science, and hence the Industrial revolution, a century later.

   Leibniz was not only a mathematician, but a multi-dimensional person. He created a philosophy of a monad, and invented various machines, some of which are early ancestors of a computer. Wikipedia: In England, "He met with the Royal Society where he demonstrated a calculating machine that he had designed and had been building since 1670. The machine was able to execute all four basic operations (adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing), and the society quickly made him an external member."
Eduard Tsiolkovsky

1857-1935

He is a grandfather of space flight.

He didn't go to school, due to deafness, and hence taught himself mathematics and physics, and thus developed love for the subjects.

He became a recluse, due to his deafness. Made a living by teaching mathematics in local school.

Loved to ride bicycle. Made experiments with various flying machines, e.g. dirigables, of which there are many models in his home in the town of Kaluga, Russia. I recommend to visit this museum.

Wrote on philosophy of space flight and the Universe .

* Read his philosophical works
* Visit his home in Kaluga
Cliff Slaughter

b.1928

Wikipedia

During the Second World War,
Cliff Slaughter worked in a coal mine as one of the Bevin Boys. While there, he was injured when kicked by a pit pony.

most recent is "*Not without a storm: towards a*
communist manifesto for the age of globalisation"*.*

As a lecturer at the Universities of Leeds and Bradford, Slaughter joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He left in
1956 following the Soviet invasion of Hungary and joined Gerry
Healy's group The Club.[1] Slaughter remained with the tendency for almost three decades,
during which it became known as the Socialist Labour League and then the Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP). During this period, he was regarded as the group's top
intellectual,[2] and
remained on the Central Committee.

In 1985, Healy
faced allegations of sexual harassing WRP members, leading Slaughter and Mike Banda to oppose him.
This broadened into a more general criticism of the party's direction. They
were able to gain a majority of the group and forced Healy to retire. When
Healy again tried to exert authority, Slaughter and Banda led a call for
"revolutionary morality" and expelled Healy and his supporters. This
effectively split the organisation between their supporters and those of Healy
and Sheila Torrance.[3]

Slaughter worked
with David North's International Committee of the Fourth International to publish a study
into the funding of the WRP, which concluded that it had received over
£1,000,000 from Libya and various Middle Eastern governments.[4]

Slaughter and
Banda's group at first continued to call itself the Workers
Revolutionary Party. However, Banda soon split with Slaughter,
repudiatingTrotskyism. The
international supporters of this group decided to call themselves the Workers International to Rebuild the Fourth International, and they published both the *Workers*
Press*and the*International*journal. In the 1990s the members of*
the group which Slaughter led decided that the idea of an elitevanguard party was not the way to build towards socialism.
Slaughter remains a member of a loose grouping with other former members of the
WRP, theMovement for
Socialism, and continues to write. In 2007, his work *Not Without a Storm: towards a*
communist manifesto for the age of globalisation*was published, intended as the opening*
of a discussion on contemporary issues and the responsibility of socialists.

# =

His comments on Iranian socialists in London, 1994, appeared as terribly boring to me

Works
John Stuart Mill

"System of Logic", part I

"System of Logic", part II

   Gennady Kozak's notes:

Introduction

To define, is to select from among all the properties of a thing, those
which shall be understood to be designated and declared by its name; and the
properties must be well known to us before we can be competent to determine
which of them are fittest to be chosen for this purpose.

has defined Logic to be the Science, as well as the Art, of reasoning;
meaning by the former term, the analysis of the mental process which takes
place whenever we reason, and by the latter, the rules, grounded on that
analysis, for conducting the process correctly.

Logic, then, comprises the science of reasoning, as well as an art,
founded on that science. But the word Reasoning, again, like most other
scientific terms in popular use, abounds in ambiguities. In one o£ its
acceptations, it means syllogising; or the mode of inference

the Art of Thinking

The sole object of Logic is the guidance of one's own thoughts – in my view, logic is a codification of the entirety of
knowledge of an epoch

Logic is “science of science”

Logic is the science of advancing from known truths to
unknown, and as the known truths are different for every epoch, logic must
advance with the epoch.

language is an instrument of thought, as well as a means of
communicating our thoughts.

What is needed is to examine modern knowledge, not
Mill’s logic.
Emerging technologies in robotics

Molecular nanotechnology - the ability to build structures to complex,
atomic specifications by means of mechanosynthesis. Mechanosynthesis is any chemical synthesis in which reaction
outcomes are determined by the use of mechanical constraints to direct reactive molecules to specific
molecular sites.

Powered exoskeleton - The main function of a powered exoskeleton is to
assist the wearer by boosting their strength and endurance

   Self-reconfiguring

modular robot - robots that change
shape according to the needs, leading to self-organizing robots. E.g. "Distributed flight array".

Swarm robotics - large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. They may be capable of self-organization, self-replication, self-construction.

Unmanned vehicle -  a vehicle without a person ("man") on board. Types:

·         Unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), such as the autonomous car

·         Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), unmanned aircraft commonly known as a "drone"

·         Unmanned combat air vehicle

·         Unmanned surface vehicle (USV), for the operation on the surface of the water

·         Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) or unmanned undersea vehicle (UUV), for the operation underwater

·         Unmanned spacecraft

More see here and here
Georgy Lukacs

1885-1971

Wikipedia:

*magnum opus* is *"History and Class Consciousness"*, first published in 1923

In 1924, shortly after Lenin's death, Lukács also published the short study *Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought*.

His 'Blum theses' of 1928 called for the overthrow of the counterrevolutionary regime of Admiral Horthy by means of a strategy similar to the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. He advocated a 'democratic dictatorship' of the proletariat and peasantry as a transitional stage leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lukács's strategy was condemned by the Comintern and thereafter he retreated from active politics into theoretical work.

Lukács's books *The Young Hegel* and *The Destruction of Reason* have been used to argue that Lukács was covertly critical of Stalinism as an irrational distortion of Hegelian-Marxism.

Lukács publicly abandoned his positions of 1956 and engaged in self-criticism. Having abandoned his earlier positions, Lukács was to remain loyal to the Communist Party until his death in 1971.

In his later career, Lukács repudiated the ideas of *History and Class Consciousness*, in particular the belief in the proletariat as a subject-object of history" (1960 Postface to French translation), but he wrote a defence of them as late as 1925 or 1926. This unfinished manuscript, which he called *Tailism and the Dialectic*, was only published in Hungarian in 1996 and English in 2000 under the title *A Defence of History and Class Consciousness*. It is perhaps the most important "unknown" Marxist text of the twentieth century

In an interview undertaken just before his death Lukács remarked: "Without a genuine general theory of society and its movement, one does not get away from Stalinism. Stalin was a great tactician...But Stalin, unfortunately, was not a Marxist...The essence of Stalinism lies in placing tactics before strategy, practice above theory...The bureaucracy generated by Stalinism is a tremendous evil. Society is suffocated by it. Everything becomes unreal, nominalistic. People see no design, no strategic aim, and do not move...".

“The Ontology of Social Being” – another major work

“Methodological Remarks on the Problem of Organization”, 1922

György Lukács (1885-1971) has published a book, "History and Class Consciousness" in 1923. This book consists of a number of essays, the last one being "Methodological Remarks on the Problem of Organization", written in 1922.

The key phrase of Lukacs in this text is this:

"organization is a form of mediation between theory and practice".

Organization which we should seek today, I believe, is organization of all our knowledge.

**Other languages:**

Лукаш
Characteristics of creative people

What is creativity?

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.
3. Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy ant one end, and rooted sense of reality at the other.
5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.
6. Creative individuals are also remarkable humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape rigid gender role stereotyping and have a tendency toward androgyny.
8. Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent.
9. Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.
Leonard Cohen

1934-2016

In the song “Anthem  ” he says that every person will come to love, but like a refugee, like a person despairing to find any meaning in this lawless and cruel world.

My favorite songs of L. Cohen:

1. "Avalanche "
2. Partisan
3. "First we take Manhattan "
4. "Famous Blue Raincoat "
5. "Democracy "
6. "Joan of Arc "
7. "Suzanne "
Cervantes

1547-1616
Author of "Don Quixote ", 1605, a novel satirical of the feudal social order which was acting as a break on the development of Spain.

A revolution to overcome feudalism as attempted in Spain only in XX century, and that unsuccessfully! 1936-39 civil war ended with victory of fascist general Franco.

Hence, we can say that revolution is a very long, drawn-out process.
Burt Rutan

b. 1943

Wikipedia:

"an American aerospace engineer noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft. He designed the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and thesub-orbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately funded spacecraft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period."

At "Scaled Composites" practiced job rotation, where each person would work in a different position for a period of time.

He himself starts design of an aircraft as an artist, with a sketchpad and colors. He is attracted to the beauty of flight.

Burt Rutan uses "composite materials" for his aircraft.

A **composite material** (also called a **composition material** or shortened to **composite** which is the common name) is a material made from two or more constituent materials with significantly different physical or chemical properties that, when combined, produce a material with characteristics different from the individual components.

An early example of a composite is "concrete", which is a mixture of cement and rock.

   "Ferro-cement" is a mix of ferrous mesh with cement, e.g. to produce a ferro-cement boat.
Many modern boat are produced using plywood covered with plastic.

A modern human being has to be "composite", i.e. combine qualities of different origin.
Beethoven

1770-1827

Introduction: "The Life of Beethoven " by Romain Rolland, around 1902

Works:

* Sonata 8 ("Pathetique")
* Sonata 14 ("Moonlight" )
* Sonata 17 ("Tempest")
* Sonata 23 ("Appasionata")
* Symphony #3 ("Heroic")
* Symphony #5 ("The Symphony")
* Symphony #9 ("Choral")
* Egmont overture
* Rondo a Capriccio , "Rage Over a Lost Penny"
* Recordings (Russian site)
* Beethoven on modern guitar

Also, see movie "Clockwork Orange " where the music of Beethoven is used extensively. Curiously, the same music is now used as the Hymn of Europe (Beethoven's 9th Symphony, "Ode to Joy").