Author Archives: rg

How science (doesn’t) work

Todd Hayen has written an article in Off-Guardian.org on (supposedly) “Knowing All that We Need to Know“.

Excerpt:

There is really nothing new to learn, and what we cannot explain, we will relegate to “promissory materialism”—a term invented to say that if we can’t explain now through material means, one day we will be able to—we now know the building blocks of reality, nothing is a true mystery.

Now, not all scientists are so arrogant to believe this. Some just while away in their labs with their theories, their experiments, and their reliance on the “scientific method” to prove or disprove their hypotheses. These are the true scientists. But they too have their traumas, which are always trying to get the best of them. They are constantly attacked in academia by other scientists trying to prove they are wrong—thus go the wars of falsification, a constant in the world of academic science—a necessary constant.

But this relentless battle can have its deleterious effect on those engaged in it. Trauma is trauma, and it all has negative effect in some way. These scientists get hardened, and often are unwilling to let go of treasured beliefs. They fight hard for what they hold to be truth about the mechanisms of the natural world, and the longer they hold a truth, the more difficult it becomes to pull it down from its exalted pedestal.

God forbid, then, politicians get involved. Any person of authority will grab any sort of scientific “idea” (which they will call truth) that supports their agenda, and they will run with it. They will do whatever they can to support the false idea that the “science is set” and that any contrary idea is thrown in the waste bin by vilifying the notion, the purveyor of the notion, or censoring the contrary idea altogether. “We know everything!” They spout out. “It is all figured out, follow the science!”

I would suspect that a lot of real scientists that hear this sort of thing rub their chin and say, “well, that isn’t exactly right . . .” but they want to keep their jobs at the lab, or their tenured position at the university, or their stature among their peers and instead mutter, “yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket.” Some of them are probably even unconscious that is what they are doing.

Never Forget: Leftists Showed Their True Authoritarian Colors During Covid

Article by Brandon Smith

Excerpts:

And why did so many Americans (mainly leftists) jump on the authoritarian bandwagon when it comes to lockdowns and forced vaccination?

I want to explore the psychology of such people here, because I think it’s the natural inclination of the public today to move on quickly from the discomfort of terrible events and ignore the deeper implications. We cannot move on from this, because the ultimate problem was never solved. These same leftists and globalists were never admonished for their behavior, they never had to admit they were wrong and they WILL attempt the same draconian measures again in the future if left unchecked.

[. . .]

The political left uses the mentally ill as a bludgeon, an easily manipulated tool for chaos. During the lockdowns and restrictions the establishment and the media stoked the fires of paranoia.  By themselves they have no power; they need the crazed mob as a weapon to keep the rest of the country afraid and in line. They needed good little Stasi, always watching, always correcting, always screaming at those without masks, attacking those that refused to get vaxxed and mocking those that spoke out about scientific inconsistencies.

And, in return, the establishment made the mentally ill feel as if they were normal. For a fleeting moment in time, the most unstable and narcissistic people on the planet were made to feel like THEY were on the right side of history and rationality. It was a parasitic feedback loop that almost destroyed the last vestiges of America.

[. . .]

All of this could very well happen again. The big tyrants and tiny tyrants are still out there, waiting for the next crisis; the next panic event to take the public off their guard. Another viral event is unlikely, but they do seem anxious to use climate change, war and economic turmoil as the next great “reset” button. In the end, there will have to be a dramatic shift in how the liberty minded interact with the authoritarian left. It is clear that we cannot share the same country, or the same civilization. Our values are fundamentally at odds. It’s only a matter of time before a single spark ignites a firestorm.

The real crisis is global gaslighting

Forget global boiling – it’s global panic-mongering we should be angry about.

Article by Brendan O’Neill.

Excerpts:

The mainstream media may have been awash with images of wildfires in Greece, Cyprus and Portugal over the past fortnight, and newsreaders might be wringing their manicured hands over the blistering temperatures in southern Europe and the stern homilies for wicked humanity contained in such heat, but the fact is that less of our planet is on fire than was the case 20 years ago. In the early 2000s, around three per cent of the Earth’s land caught fire. It’s been trending downward since. In 2022 just 2.2 per cent of land caught fire – a ‘record low’. Yes, in places like Canada more land has been consumed by nature’s flames, but in much of the rest of the world, including Africa and Europe, we’ve seen ‘lower burning’, Lomborg reports.

Climate-change alarmists are wrong about everything. Not only are they wrong when they say today’s heatwaves are uniquely destructive. They were also wrong when they said the Great Barrier Reef was dying. They were wrong when they predicted a New Ice Age. They were wrong when they said a ‘population bomb’ was about to go off. They were wrong about ‘acid rain’. They were wrong about ‘deforestation’: in truth, 618,000 square kilometres of forest has been added to our planet each year since 1982.

The Infuriating Climate Alarm

Concerning, amongst other things, the stupid remark about "global boiling"

Article by Ian Davis.

In the UK, we all know that this summer has been rubbish. We had a few weeks of glorious sunshine in June and since then it’s been bloody miserable. It’s been cold, wet and the dog has got trench-foot. Which isn’t great because he stinks at the best of times—bless him.

Yet, according to the UN Secretary General and blithering buffoon, António Guterres, we’ve entered the “era of global boiling.” Though not in the UK—or anywhere else for that matter

Just as we were during the pseudopandemic, we are once again invited to reject the evidence of our own senses and “trust” whatever we are told by the “experts,” although Guterres is not a meteorologist. Mind you, Bill Gates isn’t an epidemiologist and everyone “trusted” his “expert” opinion during the pseudopandemic, so who cares?

Continue reading here.

Scotland’s Covid inquiry is destroying the case for lockdowns

See here.

Excerpts:

Croft is similarly downboat about the vaccines, which I think is unwarranted. He says it ‘remains unclear as to whether or not Covid-19 vaccination has resulted in fewer deaths from Covid-19’. But it seems fairly clear that vaccines did break the link between cases and deaths in the spring and summer of 2021. Still, Croft is right to say that the protection they offered was brief and incomplete. Long before vaccine passports were imposed on Scots in autumn 2021, there was abundant evidence that vaccines did not stop infection and transmission. This should have blown the bottom out of the case for vaccine passports. That it failed to stop them is a disgrace.

Unsurprisingly, Croft’s report hasn’t gone down well with the lockdown-supporting press in Scotland. He has been attacked as being ‘not an expert’ in viral pandemics. I don’t know Croft and hold no personal brief for him, but his CV indicates a much longer experience of microbiology-related public health than, say, public-health academic Devi Sridhar, who exerted much influence on Scotland’s Covid response. Military medicine – where he spent his career – takes a great interest in epidemics. They have stopped many armies, from Charles VIII at Naples (syphilis) to Admiral Vernon at Cartagena (yellow fever).

No Western public-health agency advocated lockdowns for a respiratory viral pandemic before 2020. The approach was adopted ad hoc during the Covid pandemic because, as Professor Neil Ferguson (who has scant prior coronavirus experience) infamously told The Times, the government realised it could ‘get away’ with a China-style lockdown after Italy imposed one in February 2020.

The Problem With Environmentalists

They have succumbed to fear-mongering and a psychological urge to "return to Eden"

The disagreement I have with environmentalists is, I think, on two levels.

The first level is the propagandistic level, the relentless, baseless fearmongering. For example the General Secretary of the UN, António Guterres, proclaiming last month that the “era of global boiling has arrived”.

That attempt to create a panic “meme”, spread throughout the world by a sickeningly compliant media, is, on the face of it, beyond ridiculous. What will they say next year, or next decade? Maybe this: “Earth has now reached the aggregate phase of plasma”.

How does the spreading of these kinds of memes tally with the most frequently repeated commandment in the Bible, namely “do not be afraid”?

The other level also has deeply religious connotations. On the deepest level, environmentalists appeal to the “urge to go back to Eden”. Psychologically speaking the “unwillingness to grow up”. That appears a bit harsh as a statement. However, state education and media pronouncements are designed to see in “Big Brother” or rather “Big Daddy”, the state and the corporations it is living in symbiotic relationship with, as the only saviour. No other God allowed, and no individual thinking and research either.

Succumbing to this trend is an expression of the fear of responsibility, responsibility which was given to us by God before the Fall, to “fill the earth and govern it” (Gen 1:28, other translations say: “subdue it”, or, as the Amplified Bible writes: “subjugate it [putting it under your power]”). Governing entails responsibility. To whom? Ultimately to God.

Environmentalists however don’t tend to think that way. Or if they do, they like to appeal to the government (i.e. Caesar) to sort out what they consider to be a problem. Instead of doing it themselves. They pass on the responsibility to the government. Thereby rendering to Caesar what in truth is God’s. Empowering Caesar in a way contrary to what Jesus commanded.

In Genesis 2:15, it says (again in the Amplified Bible): “So the Lord God took the man [He had made] and settled him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it.” Note that “cultivate” precedes “keep”. That means, again, taming nature and making it amenable for human use.

In other words: We are not to “retreat” to Eden (impossible anyway according to Genesis 3:24). Attempts to do so will cause no end of troubles. That’s not “fearmongering”, that’s a statement aligned with the commandment to “fear God” (e.g. 1 Peter 2:17). We were not even meant to remain in Eden before the Fall (at least, not exclusively), but to venture out into the world and govern and cultivate it. For what purpose? To be, as the image of God, the cultivators of nature – under God’s guidance and commandments – and stewards of the resulting Kingdom of God.

In other words, instead of retreating to Eden, which is conceptually at the heart of environmentalism, we are to progress towards the Kingdom of God. One of the central commandments of God which enables us to do exactly that is of course “thou shalt not steal”. This is a commandment we are progressively, institutionally breaking on a massive scale: The progressive abrogation of private property through taxes (way beyond the tithe), regulation and inflation.

Private property rights is the main instrument with which humans can exert their stewardship under God. The manifold stealing of theses rights is what lies at the heart of our environmental problems. But it is this root, this economic, institutional and not least spiritual root, that the institutions committing the infringements are loath to address, because they profit from continuing with their infringements. Most environmentalists appear to be totally oblivious of this root problem. Or, if they are aware of it, they are silent about it for reasons that may sometimes even be nefarious.

It is interesting to note that it is often the biologists who want to do the retreating and the economists who want to do the progressing. This was exemplified by the bet that the economist Julian Simons arranged with the enviromento-alarmist biologist Paul Ehrlich in 1980. Here’s an article about it. To quote from it:

To make his case, Simon published an article in Social Science Quarterly that taunted Paul Ehrlich, the main proponent of imminent doom, into taking a bet on their respective views. If population growth was outpacing the finite quantity of resources, the prices of key resources should (theoretically) be rising. If prices increased, then Ehrlich would be vindicated. If not, Simon would be. Ehrlich chose five resource prices and bet on their trends over a decade. Simon won the debate, as all five commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten) declined in the wager period of 1980 to 1990. 

(Ehrlich then offered a counter-bet which Simon rejected, for good reasons. Read about it in the above linked article.)

I think this disagreement between a biologist and an economist is almost archetypal. I think so because biologists argue from the point of view of nature, and economists from the point of view of humans.

Economists also are trained to think in terms of cost-benefit analyses, which may entail more than just monetary costs and benefits. Which is why the world should listen more to Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician who has emerged from the environmentalist movement saying that, while he believes human made climate change is happening, it is “not the end of the world“. He even explains how a rising temperature will actually save lives and that there are much more pressing problems we could and should solve and which we could do with much less effort and thus save – human – lives.

It’s no wonder most people are not aware of positions like Lomborg’s. They have been essentially frozen out of the debate. Which is one of the reasons I became instantly suspicious when I saw how the media handled the Covid pandemic and started pushing for “solutions” which served a nefarious agenda, while obviously ignoring a proper cost-benefit analysis of the promoted measures.

I had seen it all before, in relative “slow motion”, during the preceding decades of climate debate and policies. I continue to see it now.

They knew all along

. . .that the vaccines didn't prevent transmission or infection

Apologies for the F-word in the title. 

Russel Brand, 12 minutes: 

From the description: 

As new documents appear to indicate the entire justification for vaccine mandates may have been based on a falsehood — and that public health officials knew it, whilst the government was strong-arming social media companies to censor alternative views – where does this leave our institutional trust? 

And, I ask, what were (and are) their real aims?

The Errors of Ayn Rand

“Why I No Longer Consider Myself an Objectivist”, writes the author of the substack “Contemplations on the Tree of Woe” (summarising his longer article):

One of my friends recently described my Physiocratic project as “libertarianism for the real world.” It is perhaps better described as Objectivism for actual people in the real world.

A proper philosophic system for actual people in our real world must take into account that human faculties entail more than just reason; that existence is bigger than mere materialism; that the human afterlife might matter as much as the human life; that the flourishing of human life entails reproduction and not just survival; and that human interaction is necessarily both positive-sum and zero-sum. Unfortunately, Objectivism does none of those things.

Had Ayn Rand considered Objectivism an open system, to which subsequent philosophers could contribute, I would call myself a Neo-Objectivist seeking to improve upon the structure she built. But she was explicit that Objectivism was not open; one either agreed with her about everything, or one was not an Objectivist.

I no longer agree with her about everything. Hence, Physiocracy. Let us contemplate this on the Tree of Woe.

The Problem With “The Media”

Mainstream Journalists Are Cloistered Ivy League-Educated Trust Fund Kids

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests — it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families, who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated. As insiders of the mainstream press have attested, it’s widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.

This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Taibbi in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power. These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of; the “us vs them” dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched, and now the press see themselves and the politicians they fraternize with as “us” and the general public as “them”.

There are other factors at play with regard to elite education. The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013; if your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment.

Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

“The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system, starting as a child in school,” Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview. “You’re expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don’t accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you’re weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering… which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism.”

The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization. All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities, journalists, pundits and politicians who’ve proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the sources we’ve been taught to look to for information about our world continually feed us stories which give the impression that the status quo is working fine and this is the only way things can possibly be? Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas?

This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime because that’s exactly what they are.

Schwab’s Daughter Confirms COVID was a Precursor to Climate Lockdowns

Idolatrous Gaia-worship in a nutshell

Writes Martin Armstrong:

“Nicole Schwab, the offspring of World Economic Forum mastermind Klaus Schwab, admitted that COVID was simply a precursor for coming climate lockdowns.”

Armstrong writes that the short video clip (50 seconds) found in the above link is “from a June 2020 panel discussion in Switzerland”. I can’t verify that, but if it’s true, it’s interesting how close they’re all sitting in this one room.

Anyway, the main point here is Schwab junior’s last sentence, which end with “we’ve really started to position nature at the core of the economy.”

Nature. Not humans. And certainly not God.

That’s Gaia-worship in a nutshell. Idolatry.

And it’s evil to the core, because it automatically means some humans, the “elite” will have to have unlimited power over all the rest, decide what is good for “nature” and act accordingly, broken egg-shells and all.