axiologist

»When you open your eyes in a colonized world, you don’t even know that another world could exist. You go to school and learn rhymes like “Baa baa black sheep” and “Jack and Jill went up the hill” which have zero relevance to your life and slowly begin to speak in an alien tongue, which then gives you filters through which to look at the universe. You begin to think that all useful knowledge, especially science and math is a gift to the world by western scientists. Unless something has been certified by the western universities, it is pseudo-knowledge. Such was my understanding too, until two decades ago, I found a book — Vedic Aryans And the Origins of Civilization by Dr NS Rajaram and Dr David Frawley — that crashed into many of my long-held assumptions. Many more books appeared and epiphany followed epiphany. I had reached the edge of a vast ocean — the ocean of Indian Knowledge Systems.«

Non-paywalled: https://archive.is/bhHQ9

This article manages to come over as a rather believable narrative of the private banking systems as the primary source of monetary slavery. But is it?

Are there any more reputable sources either confirming or disproving these claims?

This really stinks.

Since 1837, former slave owners in the British colonies were "compensated with the amount of approximately £20 million for the freeing of slaves. Based on a government census of 1 August 1834, more than 40,000 awards to slave owners were issued. Since some of the payments were converted into 3.5% government annuities, they lasted until 2015."[1]

Likewise, "The Haitian independence debt (French: Dette d'Indépendance Haïtienne) involves an 1825 agreement between Haiti and France that included France demanding an indemnity of 150 million francs in five annual payments of 30 million to be paid by Haiti in claims over property, including Haitian slaves, that was lost through the Haitian Revolution in return for diplomatic recognition. Haiti was forced to take a loan for the first 30 million,[a] and in 1838 France agreed to reduce the remaining debt to 60 million to be paid over 30 years, with the final payment paid in 1883.[1][2][b] However, according to a 2022 The New York Times analysis, because of other loans taken to pay off this loan, the final payment to debtors was actually made in 1947. They approximated that 112 million francs was actually paid in indemnity, which is equivalent to $560 million in 2022 after adjusting for inflation."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt

»Heather Cox Richardson (born October 8, 1962) is an American historian who is a professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Richardson has authored seven books on history and politics. In 2019, she started publishing Letters from an American, a nightly newsletter that chronicles current events in the larger context of American history. Richardson focuses on the health of American democracy. As of July 2025, the newsletter had over 2.6 million subscribers, making it one of the most popular Substack publications.«

> For the rest of us, if we want democracy to be better than authoritarian Communism, then we actually have to do the "be better" part.

Only problem is that the current reality of authoritarian capitalism in the US isn't helping democracy at all.

The mentioned book "First Contact" at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/firstcontact00conn

The documentary movie related to that book:

https://archive.org/details/firstcontact_201602

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Contact_(1983_film)

Video by Farya Faraji, a Canadian-Iranian musicologist, documentary filmmaker and public educator dedicated to fostering a deeper appreciation for the authentic traditional sounds of the world’s musical cultures.

By putting the music in their larger historic context the author manages to convincingly decostruct the illusionary borders between eastern and western culture.

If you can't beat them, blame them for your own failure.

Soylent Green?

This somewhat reminds me of the cognitive layers as understood by Nisargadatta Maharaj.

»The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way. Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.« —Nisargadatta Maharaj

We are usually submerged and self-identify with what is known experience and therefore rarely ever question it. When the lived context of the cognitive environment we take for granted profoundly changes in unexpected and not yet experienced ways the absence of being submerged into the known emerges. And then the so called witness state of perception is suddenly obvious.

I have felt this many times after extended travels and stays in other cultural spheres where other languages (which I manage fine) are spoken.

ScanTailor Spectre is a document scanning tool based on ScanTailor that transforms raw PDFs or image scans into clean, readable pages through an 8-stage workflow with intelligent batch processing and PDF export. For Apple Silicon.