Category: Current Affairs

Every inch of me resists the doom-and-gloomers.

I think it’s because I get the sense that this syllogism drives them: doomers are serious. Serious people should rule. Therefore, doomers should rule.

At the very least, doomers think they should tell other people what to do. Doomers, after all, are weighty people, highly thoughtful and considered in things that matter, so they’re in a position to tell the rest of us what to do. Like, “Wear a mask!” while you’re walking outside and the UV light is killing the aerosol COVID (though not the droplets, I suppose).

“The urge to save humanity,” noted H.L. Mencken, “is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

But I walk with the doomers in one area: farming and agriculture.

The doomers say modern farming techniques kill the soil, lead to obesity, give us diabetes and cancer, and render us poor stewards of creation. Though they haven’t yet made the connection that modern farming techniques give us poor food, which leads to poor health, which then makes us more susceptible to COVID (that would hurt the vaccine narrative), I tend to agree with them.

The difference between them and me?

I take my beliefs into my garden and wage my war there. Albert Jay Nock counseled his readers to improve society by improving just one person. Likewise, I’m trying to improve food by improving one plot of … Read the rest

NPR is now pushing for free speech restrictions. Matt Taibbi breaks it down: straw men arguments, name-calling, disingenuous analysis.

“The guests for NPR’s just-released On The Media episode about the dangers of free speech included Andrew Marantz, author of an article called, “Free Speech is Killing Us”; P.E. Moskowitz, author of “The Case Against Free Speech”; Susan Benesch, director of the “Dangerous Speech Project”; and Berkeley professor John Powell, whose contribution was to rip John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty as “wrong.”

“That’s about right for NPR, which for years now has regularly congratulated itself for being a beacon of diversity while expunging every conceivable alternative point of view.

“The essence of arguments made by all of NPR’s guests is that the modern conception of speech rights is based upon John Stuart Mill’s outdated conception of harm, which they summarized as saying, “My freedom to swing my fist ends at the tip of your nose.”

“Because, they say, we now know that people can be harmed by something other than physical violence, Mill (whose thoughts NPR overlaid with harpsichord music, so we could be reminded how antiquated they are) was wrong, and we have to recalibrate our understanding of … Read the rest

I don’t know a lot about Zuby. Oxford-educated rapper that was on Joe Rogan. That’s all I really know. I also remember enjoying his interview, then this morning, I heard about this Tweet by Zuby about the pandemic. All 20 points are worth reading. I’ve just pasted below the ones that resonate with me the most.

1.     Most people would rather be in the majority, than be right.

2.     At least 20% of the population has strong authoritarian tendencies, which will emerge under the right conditions.

4.     Propaganda is just as effective in the modern day as it was 100 years ago. Access to limitless information has not made the average person any wiser.

5.     Anything and everything can and will be politicised by the media, government, and those who trust them.

7.     Most people believe the government acts in the best interests of the people. Even many who are vocal critics of the government.

8.     Once they have made up their mind, most people would rather to commit to being wrong, than admit they were wrong.

10.   When sufficiently frightened, most people will not only accept authoritarianism, but demand it.

11.   People who are dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ are often well researched and simply ahead of the mainstream narrative.

14.   A significant % of people thoroughly enjoy being subjugated.

15.   ‘The Science’ has evolved into a … Read the rest

We might be entering a new Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were a contest between the Catholic Church and barbarism. The Church won. That’s not what’s happening in the new Middle Ages. Here’s how to deal with the new barbarism.

Russian mystic and philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948) spoke about our world entering a new kind of Middle Ages.

Two elements battled for supremacy in the Middle Ages: barbarism and the Catholic Church. The Church won.

In the new Middle Ages, will the Chuch reassert itself . . . or will barbarism come back?

If barbarism, it will be much worse than the old barbarism. The post-modern barbarism will be, in the words of Berdyaev’s younger contemporary Henri de Lubac, “centralized, technically efficient and inhuman.”

De Lubac wrote those words in 1944. Since that time, it has become pretty clear that our world is reverting to barbarism, not the Church.

The Church has lost a lot of ground over the past 75 years, fighting waves of enemies from within and without, losing credibility with anyone who finds it unsettling for erstwhile celibates to sodomize emotionally vulnerable 14-year-olds, plus suffering the lowest of plights — getting kicked while down — as western institutions, from the New York Times to the universities to Hollywood, gleefully kick at the Body.

So, barbarism it is.

And it’s a “centralized, technically efficient and inhuman” one at that, as the … Read the rest

True: Knowledge, by its nature, is decentralized. Knowledge informs, directs, and fuels action. Therefore, action ought to be decentralized.

False: Centralized government action presupposes that knowledge, by its nature, is centered in a few experts. Knowledge informs, directs, and fuels action. Therefore, action ought to be centralized in the government.

The false approach is now known as “Faucism,” named after Anthony Fauci, whose positions and statements during the pandemic are unravelling faster a stripper’s clothes in front of a wad of Benjamins. His lies and incompetence were obvious to many during the pandemic, but now they’re becoming obvious to everyone else. Hopefully, it will forever destroy Faucism.

The above is just a summary of this excellent essay by Barry Brownstein: Liberating Yourself from Faucism. Excerpt:

Most Faucists have never read Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” They do not know why the idea of allowing one man to determine policy is absurd: 

“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

“Our ignorance is sobering and boundless,” observed philosopher Karl Popper. Faucists don’t believe that about their beloved leader. Who else should decide, they proclaim, but our most learned expert? 

Popper continued with what could be a credo for individuals willing to … Read the rest

I haven’t commented on the UFO craze. Joe Rogan believes “they’re out there” and comments frequently on it. More and more people think there’s something out there.

But we know that our planet is extremely unusual (I’d say “extremely unique,” but that’d do violence to the word “unique”), where a lot of weird factors had to coalesce to make it a place where intelligent life can thrive. The chances of all these required factors coming into existence in another spot is infinitestimally small.

We also know the UFO craze is being fueled by footage released by the Pentagon.

Given those two facts, I’m not jumping on the UFO craze.

Recent piece by the punchy Caitlin Johnstone: Everything Keeps Getting Weirder and Weirder.

I’m not interested in being one more person on the internet claiming to know exactly what’s going on with all this, but I do know there’s an exactly zero percent chance that all this is coming out into the mainstream spotlight because the US war machine suddenly decided that the public has a right to know about a potentially dangerous security threat. The Pentagon did not spontaneously evolve an interest in radical transparency, and it is not coincidental that this is happening as we hurtle into a new multi-front cold war and an accompanying race to weaponize space.

As I’ve said before, the simplest and most likely explanation for all this … Read the rest