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‘Sciencism’ Is Religious Fundamentalism by Another Name

‘Sciencism’ Is Religious Fundamentalism by Another Name

“I know only one thing: that I know nothing.”
-Socrates

I’ve been reading “The Science Delusion” by Rupert Sheldrake, a timely treatise on fallible humans’ hubris.

It ought to be required reading for all public school children, so that they may understand how little the authorities actually know about life on Earth, how it works, and what it means (if anything.)

Knowledge is provisional. It’s multi-pronged. It’s contingent on the observer. And it’s complicated.

Exhibit A is the infamous double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics fame, which defies the laws of physics previously considered absolute fact.

The double-slit dilemma stretches the limits of my understanding of physics. I understand it shows light behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time, and the same particle on dual paths simultaneously. These are substantial things for physicists to have been wrong about for hundreds of years.

What discovery tomorrow will similarly undermine basic tenants of 2023 scientific knowledge?

This is the problem with orthodoxy of any kind. It’s a major flaw in conservative thinking in general. By “conservative,” I don’t mean the right-wing political ideology but the unwillingness to embrace new ideas in favor of old ones for no other reason than they are already established.

Whereas the high priest class once dominated the social hierarchy, sciencism is the trendy new religion of the intellectual elite – equally dogmatic in its epistemological approach to studying the natural world.

God died (metaphorically) unceremoniously about 200 years ago. But because there’s good evidence humans actually require someone or something to revere and to center culture around as a source of meaning, the bearded, robed God of the Bible was replaced with technocratic Science™, and scientists, as the object of worship in industrialized society.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

What Is Anarcho-Tyranny and Are We Living in It?

What Is Anarcho-Tyranny and Are We Living in It?

Question: How does one best explain the brutal crackdown on COVID-19 protesters worldwide for the sake of Public Health™ while, at the same time, Black Lives Matter was permitted to run hog-wild on America’s streets?

How are elected Democrat leaders allowed to literally incite race riots while those same leaders pearl-clutch about January 6 in never-ending televised witch trials?

Answer: Anarcho-tyranny

The term anarcho-tyranny, on its face, is an oxymoron, a glaring contradiction. Indeed, it’s the biggest possible contradiction of political system descriptors, as anarchy and tyranny occupy diametrically opposite ends of the government force continuum.

So it’s obvious nonsense, right? Well, if we lived in a politically coherent environment, governed by rule of law, it would be. But in a Kafkaesque world of arbitrary exercise of government power, it becomes much more descriptive.

Samuel Francis first coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” in a 1994 essay titled Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A., summarized as:

“A concept where the state is more interested in controlling citizens so that they don’t oppose managerial class, rather than tending to real criminals. Laws are argued to be enforced selectively depending on what is beneficial to the ruling elite.”

It essentially describes a situation in which the government has the necessary tools and capabilities to wield oppressive power over its subjects, and does so to further its own interests.

On the other hand, the government actors themselves — and, importantly, their footsoldiers (like Antifa and BLM in the modern American context) — act with impunity, immune from legal consequences.

Exhibit A: the recent hullabaloo over classified documents. When Trump was discovered to have stashed them in his private residence, the full weight of the state fell upon his estate in the dead of night.

“Why [would] anyone be that irresponsible?” an exasperated Biden quipped, his sentiments echoed over and over and over in corporate media.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

 

The Rise of Public Health and ‘Green’ Police: Securitization Theory

The Rise of Public Health and ‘Green’ Police: Securitization Theory

Policing has come a long way since the days of good ole boy Barney Fife.

Once upon a time, cops were tasked primarily with things like catching murderers and rapists and protecting property.

They were always used, of course, whenever necessary, to protect state interests – but, then again, the state’s interests weren’t always so obviously nefarious and illegitimate as they are today.

Law enforcement’s purview expansion is explained in large part by securitization theory.

As a result of the this process, peculiar new breeds of law enforcement – Public Health© officers and green police – have sprung up throughout the West.

Securitization theory: the advent of new security threats

The basic premise of securitization theory in political science is that, given the opportunity, a state will endlessly concoct new security “threats” as a justification to exercise greater power outside of the constraints of the normal political process:

“Securitisation theory shows us that national security policy is not a natural given, but carefully designated by politicians and decision-makers. According to securitisation theory, political issues are constituted as extreme security issues to be dealt with urgently when they have been labelled as ‘dangerous’… by a ‘securitising actor’ who has the social and institutional power to move the issue ‘beyond politics’.”

The process, in a nutshell, works like this:

  • The government identifies a new existential “threat,” either legitimate or overblown, either naturally occurring or cynically engineered by the state itself.
  • The corporate media and corporate state stoke fear about the threat into the hearts and minds of a gullible public
  • In the fog of panic, the state slyly provisions itself with new authority and resources to combat the threat, thereby increasing its power

The threats change, but whether “domestic terrorism,” COVID-19, or climate change, the process largely remains the same.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

WEF Playbook: Collapse Sri Lanka Today, the West Tomorrow?

WEF Playbook: Collapse Sri Lanka Today, the West Tomorrow?

Unless you’re reading this from Belarus or North Korea, safely outside of the WEF clutches (for now), your state is losing its sovereignty right in front of your eyes.

Here’s a perfect case study from Sri Lanka.

You might’ve seen sensationalist coverage of the riots in Western media, but likely none that deeply explores the underlying cancer that’s metastasized on the island.

Social unrest is the symptom; technocratic social engineering is the disease.

Sri Lankan gas prices are through the roof; food is scarce; the government has defaulted on its crushing debts; the ruling fat cats, who drink and gamble while the country crumbles around them, have only gotten richer in the interim (sound familiar?).

In response to the crisis, the overlords have opportunistically treated Sri Lankans to digital fuel passes via QR codes to ration supplies:

 

The economy didn’t magically implode on its own. Rather it’s the culmination of years of self-serving mismanagement by the ruling family and intentional, calculated manipulation from the global technocrats at the WEF and its appendages.

Before the pandemic, tourism accounted for 12% of Sri Lanka’s GDP. Millions of Sri Lankans depended on the influx of visitors for their livelihoods. Brutal COVID-19 lockdowns eliminated essentially that entire economic sector overnight.

To compensate, the proposed solution – at the behest of “Sri Lankan NGO society and civil society” – was to eliminate imports of foreign agricultural fertilizer and pesticides. President Rajapaksa, of the ruling family, forced a sudden switch to all-organic farming.

Organic farming is optimal for human and environmental health – but, in this case, the government made no effort to train farmers or to provide viable alternative natural fertilizers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

British Medical Journal Exposes the Facebook ‘Fact Check’ Scam

British Medical Journal Exposes the Facebook ‘Fact Check’ Scam

In a relatively rare break from COVID orthodoxy by the British Medical Journal, it went nuclear on the Facebook “fact check” scam. But you won’t see it in your Metaverse© NewsFeed©.

A Brief Recap of the Pfizer Fraud Backstory

We previously chronicled the under-reported Pfizer “vaccine” trial fraud, which the multinational corporation used to rush its experimental mRNA gene therapy (deceptively marketed as a “vaccine”) through the regulatory hoops.

In the exposé, a whistleblower (a regional director of Pfizer’s partner contracting firm, Ventavia Research Group, named Brook Jackson) detailed the abuses. She explained how Ventavia and Pfizer systematically skirted regulatory protocols and doctored data to cover up the mRNA shots’ side effects.

You can read the BMJ’s original piece here.

Pfizer, of course, ultimately got approval rammed through despite its criminal malfeasance. As a consequence, pharmacies across the US and the world (which largely follows the American lead) have injected billions of doses of its dangerous genetic material with no long-term safety data. Meanwhile, the corporation generated $131 billion in revenue for itself.

The Facebook ‘Fact Check’ Hitpiece

Instead of going after the Pfizer fraudsters in light of the above revelations, Facebook and the corporate media instead sicced their “fact check” attack dogs on the medical journal that outed the fraud.

(This is the highly ineffective “hammer the whistleblower, bury the crime” model of building public trust in institutions. It harkens back to the Bush-era targeting of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange for blowing the whistle on US government war crimes while prosecuting none of the actors who perpetrated the crimes they exposed.)

Here are a few lowlights from Lead Stories’ flimsy hitpiece:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

1984 vs. Brave New World: Which Dystopian Nightmare Is Likelier to Come True?

1984 vs. Brave New World: Which Dystopian Nightmare Is Likelier to Come True?

That the global human population is hurdling towards dystopia at breakneck speed is a foregone conclusion by this point. The tea leaves read “red” with human pain and suffering.

The deeper question remains: will the coming authoritarian hellscape be more Mad-Maxkill-rape-pillage-scorched-Earth style or more lobotomized-institutionalized-submissive-heavily-medicated style?

.

OR…

?

In dystopian literary terms, will the horrific anti-human engineered society of tomorrow more resemble the vision of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?

I read the first quarter of 1984, for the first time, at 15 years of age in the shed behind my father’s house in Topeka, Kansas on top of the family lawnmower. His wife at the time had banished me from the house, so there I sat at dusk under dim light from a single light bulb in the corner. Things were dark.

The human misery of Winston’s world leapt from the pages in crystal-clear notes.

“1984” in everyday parlance is synonymous with the ethos of that novel’s brutal ruling class. The prevailing ideology of the state depicted by Orwell was summarized in its arguably most haunting quote, delivered by agent of state O’Brien as he tortures the protagonist Winston:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

Police state rule-by-cop is the standard concern when most civil libertarians discuss authoritarian overreach because it is the most visible, most obvious form of government power grab.

The Party of 1984 (the state) pursues power not as a means to an end but as an end entirely of itself: the “pressing forever” on the nerve of power:

“That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Democracy is a Façade: There Are No Effective Constraints on Elites’ Behavior

US Democracy is a Façade: There Are No Effective Constraints on Elites’ Behavior

“Do you remember ’36, we went our separate ways
You fought for Stalin, I fought for freedom

You believe in authority, I believe in myself
I’m a molotov cocktail, you’re Dom Perignon”

-Against Me

How did the cat get so fat?

When I was a public schoolboy, bright-eyed, we sang the anthem every day.

I believed there was some entity, some unseen guardian angel, that made the literal and figurative trains run on time. I really believed there was some incorruptible backstop to prevent the bottom from falling out.

It’s taken years of watching upper-crust decadence and depravity – in the vein of Caligula — to realize the truth: there is no bottom to the barrel. The elites just do what they want and if they decide they want to hurt you, either through malice or indifference or graft, they will.

This is when “defenders of democracy” – increasingly, from the ostensible, self-positioned “left” — will jump in with the well-trodden refrain: “We choose our leaders to represent us – we have a choice!”

You have no meaningful choice. As George Carlin, patron saint of calling out neoliberal bullshit, RIP, put it:

“Americans are led to feel free through the exercise of meaningless choices. There are only two political parties. There is a reduction of the number of media companies. Banking has been reduced to only a handful of banks. Oil companies. These are important, and you’re given very little choice…. You know what your freedom of choice in America is? Paper or plastic.”

High society is “a big club – and you ain’t in it.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ben Bartee, the daily bell, democracy, ruling class, propaganda, lies, con, government, government policy,

The king of Ponzi schemes was an amateur compared to this

The king of Ponzi schemes was an amateur compared to this

Ten years ago, a man was forever separated from his $40,000 slippers.

Posing as an investment firm for decades, Bernie Madoff’s company defrauded thousands of investors out of their money.

In 2009 Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for running the $64 billion Ponzi scheme.

That is considered the largest financial scam in US history, and the largest Ponzi scheme in world history… but that’s not exactly true.

The US government’s method of providing retirement benefits is an obvious Ponzi scheme.

Social Security depends on at least 2.8 workers to pay the benefits of every one retiree.

That would require an ever-growing population to support retirees. In a pyramid scheme, the base layer always has to expand to cover the smaller layer above it.

But ten years ago, the fertility rate in the USA took a huge hit. Five million babies were never born, likely because of the recession. And now the fertility rate is the lowest in decades. By 2035, there will be just 2.2 workers for each retiree.

Back in 2009, the Social Security Administration thought its scheme would go strong until 2039, when the trust fund would run out. Now that doom’s day estimate is down to 2034.

More people than ever depend on Social Security to make up a large portion of their retirement income. 64 million people now collect, up from about 55 million a decade ago.

Among the elderly, one-fifth of married couples and almost half of unmarried persons depend on Social Security for 90% of their income.

Social Security represents about ⅓ of all retirement income among the elderly. 9% of Social Security recipients are already in poverty, and the Census Bureau estimates 40% of current recipients would be in poverty without it.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure.

To Save Lives, We Need More Conflicts. And a Strong Economy Needs More Failure.

How could more conflicts be a good thing?

Well, imagine 50 wars among city-states that each kill 30,000. That is a staggering 1.5 million deaths.

Or one war among nation-states, say World War II, which killed an estimated 60 million people.

Call me crazy, but I’ll take more conflicts if it means fewer deaths overall.

And according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile, smaller governments resembling city-states produce overall more peaceful results for society. Even when there are more conflicts, they claim fewer total lives than years of buildup to explosive large wars.

Or consider that the Soviet Union post-World War II was relatively peaceful towards other nation-states… while Stalin murdered millions and millions of Soviet citizens.

“Stalin could not have existed in a municipality.”

Small is beautiful in so many other ways. Take for now that the small–in the aggregate that is, a collection of small units–is more antifragile than the large.

This means that the overall group is more likely to survive if it is made up of smaller units. And the units which survive will be better for withstanding the tests.

Even in the Soviet Union, this proved true. For instance, under centralized control, Stalin stole the food of the entire nation of Ukraine, orchestrating a famine which starved somewhere around 6 million people.

But most of the Soviet Union did not starve, because food production remained relatively decentralized. Each village produced much of the food it needed, so they were less affected by the horribly inefficient food distribution of the Soviet centralized state. And cities which did not produce their own food fared much worse.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How do we keep getting dragged into this electoral spectator sport?

How do we keep getting dragged into this electoral spectator sport?

Ah, elections…

Little more than a bare-knuckle boxing match. If you were to suddenly catch a glimpse of such a fight, you would see real blood, real punches, swollen lips, black eyes, and a final knockout.

It looks like a real spontaneous fight. But the match was planned, set up, with rules and parameters.

That’s an election. Except that it is shoved in all of our faces, while they lie and tell us it wasn’t a planned fight.

Not interested in seeing the blood and gore? Not interested in watching two people beat each other to a pulp? Well, you can turn off the boxing match, but good luck avoiding election coverage.

There wouldn’t be anything riding on the match if we weren’t all convinced to place bets on it. Now it matters. We’ve put down our wagers, we’ve added skin to the game, and now we care.

Some of what we have riding on the election is psychological. We have staked out a position, and right or wrong, and we want our side to win.

Somehow we think the majority will vindicate out beleifs, and make us feel more right… even if the last election did the opposite.

Ironically, an online poll shows that just 51% of Americans have faith in democracy. The slimmest majority… all that is required to maintain power over the minority.

Not discussed enough is the actual money industries have riding on the elections. Which contractors will be enriched with federal dollars? The military contractors? Those peddling carbon credits?

Will more money go to ICE or the EPA? Will workers be hired for federal prisons, or the IRS?

But these are all manufactured issues.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why Competing Currencies is the Solution to a Collapsing Dollar

Why Competing Currencies is the Solution to a Collapsing Dollar

Cooperate when you think everyone involved will benefit.

Compete when you think something needs improvement.

For too long, certain states have been cooperating with the federal government without any benefit to the state or the citizens who live there. I recently highlighted five states, in particular, that would be better off as countries, without the federal government controlling them, and leaching off them.

Instead, states should be competing against the federal government.

They should be solving problems that the federal government cannot, or will not, solve.

One of America’s biggest problems is a fiat currency which has lost 85% of its value since 1971 when Nixon eliminated the gold standard.

Yesterday I discussed one possible solution. States could create or incentivize banks that safely store deposits of gold and silver, and issue a digital representation of its value. The value would not be denominated in dollars. Instead, the precious metals themselves would be indexed to purchasing power.

The banks would make money in the same way banks currently do, by lending and charging interest.

States could incentivize the use of this real money by giving discounts to anyone who paid their taxes with this new digital metal-backed money.

And the state’s incentive to do this is to cushion an economic crisis triggered by massive debt, inflation, and loss of confidence in value the US dollar.

But one possible pitfall of this system is a shortage of physical gold or silver to deposit, thus creating excess demand, and driving the price of gold and silver up.

So here’s another alternative.

State Cryptocurrency

You know the golden rule–he who has the gold makes the rules.

If states position themselves right, they can avert financial disaster when DC’s luck finally runs out.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How States Can Escape America’s Looming Financial Meltdown


How States Can Escape America’s Looming Financial Meltdown

The USA is $21.4 trillion in debt. That is larger than the entire US economy. And it shows no sign of slowing down.

To put that in perspective, imagine spending $28 million per day, EVERYDAY since Jesus walked the earth. Even then, you’d still have a trillion dollars to go…

But it gets worse. This debt does not even include unfunded liabilities, like the promise to pay out Social Security benefits to retirees. Social Security is underfunded by a whopping $50 TRILLION.

Worse still is that the Federal Reserve has the power to print money, and set interest rates. That means the economy you and I see on a daily basis is not reality.

Markets always have corrections. It is natural for sectors to wax and wane. Some years boom, and some years bust.

But the Federal Reserve has made this problem a hundred times worse. The booms are astronomical because of artificially low interest rates.

That means it is easy to borrow money, even if there isn’t much real capital out there to borrow. And that means money gets wasted, placed in bad investments, or squandered and misallocated on unneeded projects.

We are living in a ticking time bomb.

I have no particular faith in any government.

But I do believe the smaller the government gets, the easier it is to control. Your vote might actually count at the state level.

And living down the street from your State Representative helps to keep him fearful of his constituents. Politicians should fear the people.

State governments can cushion the collapse of the federal government.

This collapse will be triggered by monetary policy.

So states should make sure their economies can keep on chugging along in the event of such a catastrophic financial meltdown.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Real Reason the Government Won’t Hold Big Tech Accountable

The Real Reason the Government Won’t Hold Big Tech Accountable

technology in your hand

The villagers are marching with their torches and pitchforks. Big tech companies are in trouble.

The government is coming to regulate them.

Someone leaked a draft of an executive order from President Trump. It calls on various agencies to use all current laws to look into possible anticompetitive practices by Facebook and Google.

In fact, the EU already fined Google $5 billion in July for “abusing the market dominance of Android.” And now they’ve set their sights on how Amazon uses customer and seller data.

Elizabeth Warren wants to force Amazon to choose between providing a platform for sellers and selling goods. Echoing European Union regulators, she says Amazon has an unfair advantage by competing against the same sellers it collects information from on its platform.

Governments use antitrust laws to break up businesses that resemble monopolies. The government can call just about anything an “anticompetitive” practice. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 gives the US government sweeping powers to regulate almost any business behavior.

And there’s plenty to choose from:

  • Google gets the vast majority of search engine users.
  • Facebook is the go-to social media website.
  • Together, Google ads and Facebook ads capture 90% of new advertising spending. They get 71% of all ad dollars in Europe.
  • The left says Facebook’s lax data policies helped win Trump the election. The right claims Facebook targets conservatives for censorship.
  • Google favors it’s own results, and censors certain news.
  • Amazon collects almost half of all online retail sales in the US.

But much of the criticism misses the mark.

A Bloomberg article called Tech Giants Spend $80 Billion to Make Sure No One Else Can Compete, offers a perfect example of misplaced criticism:

How can a company hope to compete with Google’s driverless cars when it spends $20 billion a year to ensure it has the best laser-guided sensors and computer chips?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Vicious Cycle: How Government “Solutions” Spiral into Bigger Problems

The Hydra serpent with many heads

Vicious Cycle: How Government “Solutions” Spiral into Bigger Problems

Government creates a problem. Government becomes more authoritarian to solve that problem. This creates more problems. Government becomes even more authoritarian…

This is basically the story of the war on drugs, the oppression of teens, the wars in the middle east, every bubble, burst, and bailout, ad infinitum.

Where the government intervenes, you can be sure that bigger problems will spring forth.

Like the Hydra of Greek Mythology, two more serpent heads sprout each time one is severed.

Denmark Considers Draconian Measures to Assimilate Immigrants

European countries have been quite liberal in accepting immigrants from the middle-east. In itself, this is not a problem. But the countries also liberally dole out public benefits, costing taxpayers ballooning sums to support the new population.

But now many countries want to attach strings after the fact.

Denmark has proposed new rules that could land immigrant parents in prison if they take their children on extended vacations to their homeland which interfere with schooling. The legislation leaves “extended” open to interpretation.

Other rules require children from any of 25 identified “ghettos” to attend 30 hours of daycare per week until age six. Parents will lose welfare benefits if their kids miss too much school.

Another rule would make penalties for the same crime in certain areas. So if you shoplift in a predominantly Danish area of a city, you might get a fine, while a shoplifter from a predominantly Muslim area could get jail time.

All of this is an attempt to integrate new immigrants. It is a backlash from vastly different cultures clashing.

But why would the government of Denmark think forced integration would produce the desired results? It seems more likely to produce a counter-backlash from immigrants who resent having different rules than the Danes.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the Media is Desperate to Reclaim its “Gatekeeper” Status for News

truth defintiion

Why the Media is Desperate to Reclaim its “Gatekeeper” Status for News

No one knows what to believe anymore in the age of the internet. Don’t you miss the good old days when you could believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the media reported it?

Everything is fake news, except perhaps the scores of last week’s high school basketball game. And maybe the local stuff is what we should be focusing on because that at least we can confirm to some extent.

Okay, maybe the high school sports scores aren’t an important focus. But what about holding local politicians and police accountable? Seems like paying attention to local news could do more to improve our surroundings than following the latest Trump news.

Yet even in the age of information, local papers are disappearing. As a direct result, the efficiency of local governments is suffering. A study found that a lack of local newspapers correlates with worse local government.

But has an influx of national news made national government more efficient?

No. It has only thrown more power behind collectivist trends. It has added ranks to the mobs of special interests that continue to expand federal expenditures and debt. National news is basically used as advertising to get the masses to line up behind a particular cause. It is activist journalism, directing the mob rule.

Local news differs because it is mixed with first-hand experience, as well as second-hand reports from witnesses–neighbors and friends. Gossip is one way of regulating this local flow of information. It provides details about who can be believed, and who might embellish.

Locally, there is an organic structure of information flow. This alone doesn’t make it accurate, but it gets closer by triangulating from where you get your information.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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