I just made an insightful comment in reply to “Never underestimate the stupidity of liberals” in a ZH thread :
Not stupid, many are very intelligent. I know a few of those.
Guided by ideology. Indistinguishable in effect from stupid in anything but the consistency of their decisions and acts. Stupid people will sometimes do something right by accident.
It would be easy to believe that John Brennan is trying to elect Trump’s supporters. Tone deaf. I suppose this is keeping the Useful Idiots, bureaucrats and clients, and Deep Black Swamp denizens motivated, but the obvious spin and bias is also motivating Trump’s supporters :
All you need to know is that Google and FB both like European laws wrt data protection better than US laws. US laws should be upgraded to ‘you own your data‘ :
Our FDA intentionally slows down the development of new drugs to protect manufacturers of existing drugs. This article doesn’t actually claim that, but it is one of the FDA’s roles, along with protecting drug manufacturers from their mistakes and misclaims and hidden evidence when drugs have significant dangers. The FDA is an entirely captured apparatus, as is the CDC :
It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings.
They promised the open web, we got walled gardens. They promised individual liberty, then broke democracy—and now they’ve appointed themselves the right men to fix it.
But did the digital revolution have to end in an oligopoly? In our fog of resentment, three recent books argue that the current state of rising inequality was not a technological inevitability. Rather the narrative of disruption duped us into thinking this was a new kind of capitalism. The authors argue that tech companies conquered the world not with software, but via the usual route to power: ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors, consolidating power, raising rents, and riding the wave of an economic shift already well underway.
Historical analogies are never exact, but nevertheless, the combination of rapid social evolution, extreme political positions and economic depression produce non-linear behavior in many aspects of the socio-econo-political system :
Additions to the technological palette. I haven’t looked at the nanotech page on phys.org for a while. Progress in understanding and using nanotubes and graphene sheets is exploding, ditto other materials. Many of these studies are combining multiple technologies from the palette :
Men and women are 15x as different in genome as any 2 men or any 2 women. That is the same difference as humans and chimps. Men and women are NOT equal :
Organic food –> lower cancer rates, so the judgment against Monsanto in the glyphosate case was correct. As usual, their own data showed that, and they hid it. As usual, the EPA helped them hide all that evidence. Thus, as usual, people who want to sue have to overcome the laws favoring the companies :
Professor Gelernter did some very interesting computer science, including Linda, a language for parallel computing and one of the early and still-interesting threads :
Gerlernter is a good scientist and clear thinker. WaPo hates him. But anyone who names his language after Linda Lovelace has solid values. Reading the NYTimes article from 1992 is fun, we had no idea of the current reality it all produced, but it was clear what elements were needed and how they could be combined. I think the only completely new element s are the graphics co-processor and the FPGA. The hottest microprocessor was the Intel 80486 which eventually reached the astonishing clock rate of 100MHz, but Gigahertz clocks and low-latency networks like Infiniband and bandwiths of 100Gbps were not even fantasies yet :
Even the most optimistic interpretation of our information systems shows that smart phones are sophisticated surveillance devices. Dumb phones not so much, but still very detailed information about your location :
This is state-sponsored mafias, whatever the lipstick. Israel is bad for all of humanity, not just Jews. The US is bad for all of humanity, not just American citizens :
George Webb continues with the Khashoggi position in the international mafias trading weapons, drugs, …
The many social media alternatives. Another thing to #WalkAway from, Google, FB, Twitter, etc. Trump could end Twitter tomorrow by switching to Gab.ai :
If someone wished to hide their radio signals, mimicking ‘natural’ signals in the environment is the way to go. Turns out, there are lots, and radio astronomers find new ones frequently :
More detail on the Clinton Foundation frauds, now > $100B and continuing. Yes, our government is DEEPLY corrupt, it isn’t just the high level administrators, the SES layers :
Trump is making progress in controlling war, the CIA and the Pentagon :
This is carefully missing the point wrt MBS and Trump’s pov on the Khashoggi murder. Trump knows Khashoggi was trying to get rid of MBS, along with the CIA. They lost a lot of revenue from Trump’s moving the arms trade into legitimate channels :
If our political and military elites would merely stop their insanity, we citizens could handle the remaining problems. If Trump does not win this fight, we are going to have to stop them :
#WalkAway. This is a gay conservative man married to a man in TN :
Commentators appear to believe that something could save the EU and the Euro. Others appear to believe that the US empire and the massive corruption that has accompanied this can be saved. Not a chance, they are both based on debts that can never be repaid. Many great parasitic jobs for our far-too-large ruling class will evaporate :
Dude just cruised past me riding a lawn chair taped to an electric skateboard while vaping and blasting Jack Johnso… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…— Smashley Ghoulish (@AshleyJPL) October 18, 2018
Out-of-Africa replacement vs continuity vs interbreeding data. The greatest result is to allow identifying the DNA changes that are unique to modern humans :
Very good and interesting talk, cultural practices, history and modern science. A very good synthesis and argument for combining old intellectual, academic divisions. Monogamy is just an example of how it is happening :
Richard Nixon was the first President destroyed by the modern media-CIA combination :
“Post-truth age” does not sound like Gandhi and I don’t think he meant ‘living in multicultural societies’ to be an example of a ‘post-truth age’. IThis is so anti-historical, painting the present in black and white on the past :
I think that comparing historical episodes, and implicitly using them to predict the presence, is not as simple as Professor Codevilla seems to. He is clearly an erudite man, and indeed the comparison is as valid as any other. That is to say, zero. Come on, all of these eras differed in 1000s of ways, and the nature of complex systems is you can’t tell what causes what. Really.
And on that reality you can weave an infinitude of convincing narratives. I know this, I often do so, and mostly know when I am doing it, tho I may not mention that fact.
Further, from our own era we learn how many events are caused by conspiracy, plots, faction against faction within ruling classes. History doesn’t generally record successful plots, only failures. There are a lot of failures in history, we see even more in our own times.
So this isn’t useless, new povs are what learning is all about, but you can’t accept any such as more than a hypothesis by an informed mind, at least informed in a few of the 1000s of dimensions in which a person can be informed about any bit of history, including our own.
Deep specialists NEVER see the limits of their judgment, a major reason our civilization has so many ups and downs. We have to stop these people from governing us :
Greer is guilty of the same hubris, over-estimation of his judgment. Extremely erudite, very knowledgeable about a wide range of things (tho not so much math and science, it seems to me), but he claims to grasp the future. Probably not :
In the context above, what are we to make of different human marriage customs? Yes, human social institutions are flexible, so individual humans must be. So does that mean we can just graft a new version of an institution onto the society? Something does that, as a species we have done that all through history. But more evolution than grafting at least up until modern propaganda came on the stage. Whatever the reason, we moderns are evolving our societies at a higher rate than ever before :
That was good anthropology, good scholarship. This is feminist idiocy, carefully interpreting the past in black and white and modern-era concepts. Just another of the infinitude of narratives consistent with carefully selected facts. Not scholarship at all, propaganda, politically correct academic version. Clever, it is all true, it just doesn’t signify what she thinks it does. No kidding, our earlier societies were patriarchial. Guess the many whys?
Can you point to a major civilization which was not patriarchal? Me neither. Not to say there could not be, but it has not, in fact, happened. I bet there are explanations of that fact from every area of scholarship and science, if she went looking for them. I found several dozen on one page with a duckduckgo. :
Just for equity, I reject this as equally lousy scholarship. Again, all true, just not enough context to be useful. A study of marriage and category of civilization from 1930 is not very convincing. This is not based on the modern science of evolution, in which cooperation is as major a force as competition for resources. Missing that point invalidates all of his thinking :
Medicine is based on corruption, this is the case of vaccines. Don’t take vaccines, they have no clue about what the long-term effects are :
When Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, I said he had not done the Israelis any favors, that he had caused them problems by putting the spotlight back on Israel as the reason for the problems in the ME. Seems like I was right. This is just the beginning of the fallout :
The coolest thing about all this is that the Israeli-Neocons are in charge of the foreign policy as these disasters (only from their pov) happen. They add to the long, long list of Israeli-Neocon failures, all of which have been good for Israel, of course :
George Webb has been predicting a violent phase in our coup is the next stage. Yes, the CIA very much controls the government. Yes, DC is incredibly corrupt. Yes, I have thought all this for some months. Thew new information is big picture, they ‘why’ of events in Saudi Arabia. Brennan wants to eliminate MBS, because MBS took away a lot of Brennan’s illegal arms income when Trump moved the trade into legal channels. Smart Trump! I said going after their income is the best strategy.
I watch all of his videos, tho usually just link to the first of the day :
Living with rising interest rates is VERY different :
I think this censorship will lead to major changes in the large social media companies. They can’t both be common carriers, and thus not legally responsible for content, with the responsibility of making their services available to the public at reasonable rates, and discriminate against sets of users based on any criteria whatsoever. Many law suits will follow, I think including anti-trust to break up the integrated monopolies they have :
More non-linear relations at the heart of the financial system. ‘Non-linear’ in analyzing large-scale, natural, complex systems means ‘not predictable’,. That also means that the FED has no clue about what to do to achieve any particular result, they are flying blind.
Also the rest of us, of course. The only prediction that is possible is ‘it will crash, because it was not designed and tested to be fail-safe’. That is a safe and accurate prediction. No other prediction can be, in the nature of nature and chaotic systems :
Cannabis market ‘may face shortages for years’. Unbelievable BS. $4.10 / joint is at least 400X higher than an outdoor grower’s costs, which I calculate at less than $2 / pack, the same as the cost of importing tobacco for ‘no brand’ cigarettes. Tobacco is more difficult to grow than cannabis, even considering how both outdoor tobacco farmers and indoor cannabis growers were driven for maximum yields / area of growing and used extreme measures to produce the highest yield of quality products :
1/6th of the men in the United States in the prime working ages of 25-54 are unemployed. This is depression-era and affects everyone, heart-land to inner city :
The left, feminism, and various ‘academic’ studies based on no reality are seriously exposed. World Socialist Web Site is more reality oriented than the DNC :
If you believe this, you believe that John Brennan, Clapper, et al deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in eliminating war, sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, organ harvesting and drug and weapons trafficking. No kidding, Steve Bannon is assisting the Deep Black Swamp in trying to sell the idea that Hillary Clinton is still a leading candidate to run for President in 2020 :
This from NakedCapitalism’s afternoon set of links. It is so good to have the sides clearly delimited :
Liberal Democrats Have Lost Their Minds
Words fail me:
Many groups on the right have revealed their true moral emptiness under Trump: tax-cutters, evangelicals, conservative law types, etc.. But on the whole the neocons — the people responsible for the Iraq war — have turned out to have genuine principles. Credit where it’s due. https://t.co/xl9cgdM95H
I linked to this before, but the interesting thing about this talk is now little effect any of the expert discussion has had on public perception wrt Global Warming. The recent information about the terrible base data has received no attention. Facts do not change the propaganda. Sadly, he likes China’s One Child policy :
George Webb will get to say “I told you so” many times after this :
George Webb continues the investigation into DC Corruption, here focusing on Khashoggi and Nelle Ohr’s roles in the various projects :
When you look at the long list of failed companies over the last 30 years, at the height of BizSchool prestige and dominance MBA’s in the leadership of those same companies, it sort of makes you wonder about the value of an MBA from one of the elite institutions :
NakedCapitalism is properly skeptical, they see the pattern of a CIA PsyOp :
Why King Salman Must Replace M.B.S. NYT. Again, I don’t want to be Mr. Counter-Suggestible here, but the signature, as it were, of this operation, as it were, is very familiar: (1) Anonymous leaks from intelligence commmunity, (2) evidence nobody can examine, (3) prurient, viral-friendly detail (piss tapes; the saw), (4) inflammatory headlines qualified by text like “increasingly convinced” and “alleged” in the body, (5) moral panic and frantic virtue signaling in the political class, and (6) full spectrum dominance in mainstream press coverage. Of course, this time everything could be true; gaslights really do flicker, after all. And if that’s the case, then all previous gaslighting will seem true, or at least truthy, via the halo effect, a salutary result for all concerned. So we’re talking win-win, here.
The new NAFTA is very nearly as bad as the old NAFTA :
Another link from NakedCapitalism, with their comment :
The Democrats’ Left Turn Is Not an Illusion Thomas Edsall, NYT. “The dominant role of well-educated, relatively upscale white Democrats in moving the party to the left reflects the declining role of the working class in shaping the party’s ideology.” Moving “left” and away from the working class is a neat trick, hitherto unknown to political science.
Why do I need to see this on Al Jazerra? Why did I not see any of it in “The Wire”? Another example how we need to apply the “no broken window” theory of policing to any organization that you want to keep honest. Standard QA theory, fix the problems back at the source, don’t let them cascade :
The world’s cutest cat is going extinct in the wild, and no, you can’t own one! Greens are idiots. If you want to save a species, start eating it, make it an important meat animal. Any Green who wanted to sacrifice his life could save the California Condor by eating one, finding it unbelievably delicious, and announce that at a major conference so that his instant destruction at the hands of outraged fellow Greens would be recorded and reported. The subsequent capitalist focus on getting California Condor onto gourmet plates around the world would guarantee the species’ existence.
Making a species a favored pet is a second-best alternative, but a hell of a lot better than the average Save The Species campaign end result. What species have been saved? Is any variety of the chicken, rabbit, goat, sheep, pig or cow ever going to go extinct? Any variety of horse or dog or cat? These people don’t think :
At least twice in our civilization’s past, civilization got to a peak and collapsed. The first time was in collapse of trade in 1190BC that stopped any writing in the Agean for 400 years. Second was the fall of Rome, 1600 years later which lasted 500+ years, depending on when you think the Dark Ages ended and the Middle Ages began. There are certainly long periods between the various proto-city examples of civilization forming before the Bronze age, so maybe you could consider those collapses also, but the latest ones are quite distinct.
So don’t have any illusions, it could happen to us. We don’t exactly know what happened in even the case of Rome, and are clueless about what might end this civilization’s run, taking us back to the level of city states and big men running counties, much lower populations. Probably a coal-based economy, some strange combination of steam and electronics. A lot of Greens are hoping for that, believing it is the only way to save nature and thus the human race in the long run. We don’t know how many of them are in power helping things along.
Not paranoia, just things to keep in mind. Hedging is important wherever you don’t control the future :
This morning, my wife showed me a FB list of people who support Trump and/or Trump supports in our state. It made me realize that this election will be a massive repudiation of the entire leftish agenda, expressed as votes for Trump. I think I will vote for that list, given some work to see that the claims are true. I don’t like Republicans much more than Democrats, whereas Trump, for all of his flaws and his lousy cabinet, has more values in common with me than anyone running for President ever, only excepting Ron Paul.
Tracy Beanz has a nice discussion at 15:00 in about the strong possibility that this will be a big Red Wave. Yeah, this is a massive repudiation of the insanity the radical feminists and associated mindsets have attempted to inflict on the society. We can’t control what they do to their children, no skin off our nose in any case. In fact, we should thank them for running those experimental societies, it will be real interesting to see how their children turn out.
But they can’t do it to our children and our culture. I don’t care how virtuous they think they are, how wise, or how powerful, the American people are on verge of kicking their asses.
Let us hope they learn from a political defeat. The big problem is the CIA behind these useful idiots and the politicians who orchestrate them. Those are the evil in our society.
Be clear who the enemy is. The useful idiots are not the enemy. You have to feel sorry for your very progressive friends, so many of ours are, the shock that awaits them must be equivalent to devout Staliists about the time he allied with Hitler. Yes, they need defeated, but they don’t need annihilated. Destruction is for the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies. We cannot allow those hidden forces in our society.
The evidence of CIA and FBI running world-wide criminal operations that prey upon the American people is overwhelming, is far past what are needed for indictments. Yet, no indictments. The Kabuki theatre is centered on Rosenstein, Mueller and Trump. No legacy media discussion linking the opioid epidemic to the CIA and military bases, much less the Clinton’s long role in the criminal networks.:
Sad statement, that, because this country has been on a losing streak ever since our Deep Black Swamp and its associated financialization of everything went into high gear. Both parties have largely abandoned the middle class (high taxes and falling job prospects) and entirely abandoned the working class.
$116K is required for a middle class existence, and that only in states with reasonable housing prices :
This is active coverup. I knew enough about Adnan Khashoggi, arms dealer. He was in the news a lot for arms dealing. So once you make the connection, and see that Jamal worked for Saudi Intelligence, how can you be as oblivious as the following article achieves? Someone is deflecting attention, I think :
Have you heard about the Libertarian Party this election? I have literally not read or heard a single word. What a waste of Ron Paul’s legacy. They sold out to the same money that took out the Tea Party and controls the Republicans :
George Webb’s discussion of Jamal Khashoggi. George’s statistic of 631,000 people who came in under the MAVNI program stuck in my head. I have seen a couple of other people saying the same as I have, that we should expect some last throws of the dice from the Deep Black Swamp. If normal, legitimate, peaceful, Rule of Law government is restored, a whole bunch of them will hang.
So, let me think here in public about a few possible alternatives, what can happen.
If George’s story of the CIA controlling so much of this is true, I think there is a serious ex-jihadi faction here in the US. Did you see the link about 300 ex-White Helmets and families being re-established in some northern European country?
Hard to know how paranoid to be, but given the very serious evil we see coming out of our CIA, the 70,000 deaths a year from the opioids those bastards import into this country, maybe we need be ultra-paranoid.
Combine that thought with one about government stock piles in fusion centers, something else George has mentioned. Searching for more data, I found this, which debunks the conspiracy theories about government purchases, but doesn’t reassure a skeptic. That is, they could easily not be expending 20% of the ammunition each year, putting that into a stockpile. Ammunition lasts for many years if it is stored properly.
A paranoid would assume they are stockpiling. But, I can’t see that producing more than chaos, I mean, the idea of occupying the US with outsiders is insane.
The other thing that article convinced me of is that Americans have stockpiled. Assuming the figures I have seen on Breitbart are correct, the US produces at least 10 billion rounds per year. DOD 1.6 rounds, the rest of the government a small fraction of that, and citizens all the rest. An intelligence analyst probably looks at the tons of reclaimed brass per month to evaluate how much is expended at gun ranges. Hunting, and places that don’t recycle the brass are small fractions of those.
So, they have accurate estimates of American citizen’s stockpiles. The Feds backed off at Bundy Ranch. We know that citizens have far more guns than the military and police combined, and far more ammunition also.
Thus, we armed citizens have the preponderance of power in the US of A in 2018, guaranteed. So their strategy MUST BE entirely directed at keeping us apart.
Every line of thought I have reasoned along has brought me to that conclusion.. Yet, the continuous push to a surveillance state and a divided and subservient population.
Trump is a strange man to bring us all together, but that seems to be our fate :
A surveillance state can’t work. It won’t work one way in disarmed China, it won’t work a different way in armed America :
This is from NakedCapitalism’s afternoon set of links for 18 Oct 2018. I remind you that NakedCapitalism considers themselves quite progressive, and thinks the DNC and Democratic mainstream have been coopted by the radical Feminists :
“Bob Bland, Linda Sarsour, and Tamika Mallory Built the Women’s March ‘Mob’ With Nice, Suburban Women” [New York Magazine]. “When Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol and University of Pittsburgh’s Laura Putnam set out to document ‘the resistance’ that has sprung up in the last two years, they found that ‘college-educated, middle-aged women in the suburbs’ had most changed their political practices under Trump, now making up about 70 percent of participants in local progressive movements. The Women’s March leaders are constantly driving their members toward intersectionality—the idea that the liberation of women, people of color, the LGBT community, and other oppressed communities are all tied together.” • Nice to have that clarified. Note the complete erasure of economics and class.
“Resistance Is the Right Strategy for Dems, Even If It Costs the Senate in 2018” [David Atkins, Washington Monthly]. “If doing the right thing and channeling the anger and resistance of young people, women, the educated and people of color costs Democratic Senate seats in North Dakota or Missouri, that is unfortunate. But it’s a small price to pay over time for securing the House with its fearful investigative power over Trump, and even more importantly the loyalty of the people who constitute America’s majoritarian future.” • This is warmed-over Ruy Teixeira, the “coalition of the ascendant” (the so-called Obama Coalition). Never change, Democrats! Never change! (Maybe if Obama hadn’t deported so many Latinx voters and set up the apparatus Trump is now abusing, they’d have been more “loyal”? Just a thought.)
Books cause literacy. News at 11 :
“Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind” [Smithsonian] (original). “Growing up with few books in the home resulted in below average literacy levels. Being surrounded by 80 books boosted the levels to average, and literacy continued to improve until libraries reached about 350 books, at which point the literacy rates leveled off. The researchers observed similar trends when it came to numeracy; the effects were not as pronounced with information communication technology tests, but skills did improve with increased numbers of books.”
