Category Archives: Economics

The Heinous Nature of Headlines and Propaganda as an Experiment in Psychological Manipulation

Article by Gary D. Barnett.

He starts it off with a quote from Edward Bernays‘ 1928 book ‘Propaganda‘, in which he writes:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.“

(Bernays, by the way, was a nephew of Sigmund Freud.)

Then, in his own article, Barnett writes:

For most, it is a struggle to just get up and face the day, or at least that is the case for a majority of the population. Because of that, most choose to hide from reality in order to satisfy a dream-state, instead of facing the truth. It is as if the entirety of this population is in a mind-control experiment, and are being hypnotized to accept their own slavery as the best option. AI, if allowed to take over society, can accomplish that designed outcome, just as is sought by the oligarchs.

He ends his article with these words:

This reality is not accidental, it has been purposely created in order to capture the psyche of the majority. Something is greatly amiss here, as so many of this population have effectively given up on actual life in favor of a State-structured life based on fraudulent perception as a way of escaping what is real. This is terribly disturbing, as the last thing needed at this time is a country full of obedient zombies. This makes me wonder if the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” was simply a prescient preview of things to come.

“Is there any point in public debate in a society where hardly anyone has been taught how to think, while millions have been taught what to think?”

The Long Betrayal: How Modern Monetary Policy Became a Machine for Ruin

Article by Sebastian Wang.

Excerpt:

Keynes: Misused, Misunderstood, and Weaponised

Austro-libertarians often reject Keynes outright. But fairness demands a distinction between Keynes’s actual theory and what has been done in his name.

Keynes did not advocate permanent deficits or chronic inflation. His argument was specific: when private demand collapses as a result of previous political or banking mistakes, the state may need to support employment temporarily until confidence returns. He believed that deficits should occur in recessions, and budget surpluses should follow in recoveries. His famous dictum was clear:

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.”

Nothing in that sentence resembles the behaviour of modern governments.

The post-war political class discovered that Keynesian rhetoric provided a moral cover for something they already wanted to do—spend without restraint. They kept the deficits but abandoned the surpluses. They celebrated “stimulus” and ignored discipline. And so Keynes’s emergency prescription became an open-ended licence for irresponsibility.

The tragedy is that Keynes wanted to stabilise capitalism. His followers hollowed it out.

The Unholy Synthesis: Politics, Banking, and the Illusion of Wealth

By the late twentieth century, the system had settled into a stable pattern:

  1. Governments ran structural deficits.
  2. Central banks bought their bonds, expanding reserves.
  3. Commercial banks multiplied those reserves through credit.
  4. Asset prices rose.
  5. Voters mistook asset inflation for prosperity.
  6. Politicians claimed victory.

It is a mutually reinforcing cycle. The state gets cheap debt. Banks get profitable leverage. Voters get rising house prices. And the economy absorbs wave after wave of malinvestment.

But the structure is inherently unstable. It requires ever-growing debt to sustain the illusion. It cannot tolerate honest interest rates. It collapses if credit contracts. It accumulates imbalances so large that no democratic government can address them openly without committing political suicide.

This is not capitalism. It is a form of monetary serfdom disguised as modernity.

Why the System Cannot Reform Itself

Reform would require at least three impossible acts:

  • A political class willing to accept short-term pain to avoid long-term ruin.
  • A banking sector willing to surrender its privilege of creating money.
  • A voting public willing to accept falling asset prices and higher interest rates.

No such coalition exists. Every attempt at reform triggers electoral revolt. Every crisis invites a new round of emergency interventions that further entrench the existing machinery. The conclusion is harsh but unavoidable: The current monetary order cannot be reformed. It can only fail.

Thirty years of COP failures: the damning assessment of a climate process disconnected from reality

Article by Samuel Furfari, who ‘is an engineer, and PhD from University of Brussels. He is a Professor of energy geopolitics and policy. For 36 years he was a senior official in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy. He is author of numerous books.’ 

Excerpt (conclustion):

It is time to turn the page on climate illusions and recognize that the global priority must be economic development and access to energy for all. As the changing positions of emerging countries demonstrate, the future does not belong to ideological decarbonisation, but to energy pragmatism, which alone can meet people’s legitimate aspirations for prosperity, quality of life and well-being. The time has come to abandon a United Nations process that has proved ineffective and to shift international efforts to the real priorities: the fight against poverty and economic development for all through access to abundant and cheap energy.

There’s a Revolution Happening You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s Called “The Great Feminization”

Helen Andrews in a video interview with the Daily Signal.

From the description:

For the past half decade or more, conservative intellectuals have tried to answer the question: Where did woke come from?

Some believe it is rebranded cultural Marxism. Others say it came from academia with the postmodern rejection of objective truth ultimately leading to the weaponization of culture. Maybe it came from the global corporations because woke is the ideology of the new managerial elite in late-stage neo-liberalism.

But perhaps “woke” and its offspring like “cancel culture” came from something called “The Great Feminization.”

Helen Andrews, author of “Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster,” recently wrote an essay called “The Great Feminization,” a term borrowed from the pseudonymous online writer J Stone, that explains how “woke” is “an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” She joins “The Signal Sitdown” this week to discuss.

“We had a big fight called feminism in the 1970s over whether or not we thought women could be lawyers. And we decided that they could, and that’s great,” Andrews explained. “But it took a long time to go from token representation of the kind that was achieved in the heyday of second wave feminism to what we have now.” 

See also this videoed talk: Overcoming the Feminization of Culture.

In short: The two ways to overcome feminization is to remove the pro-women bias in recruitment and to remove the need for two-income households.   

See also this CompactMag article ‘The Great Feminization‘.

See this response by ‘The LOOPcast’. The woman there says Andrews doesn’t go deep enough. This speaker emphasises motherhood.

The Psychopathic Machine: How Modern Finance Learned To Live Without Conscience

Article by Mark Keenan.

Excerpts:

Debt-based money ensures that this pattern is permanent. Because all money is issued as interest-bearing credit, new debt must constantly be created to service the old. If credit creation slows, defaults rise and the political class panics. Hence the endless call for “growth,” however hollow, and the refusal to confront the costs it imposes on both nature and society. A system that must expand or die will behave like a shark—efficient, unreflective, and indifferent to collateral damage.

[. . .]

The late psychologist Hervey Cleckley defined the psychopath as a person who “knows the words but not the music.” Our financial order knows the language of prosperity but not its meaning. It can model markets to six decimal places yet cannot tell the truth about who benefits and who pays. The spreadsheets are perfect; the souls are missing.

As I examine in the book The Debt Machine, this isn’t about hating bankers or glorifying poverty—it’s about recognizing that the very architecture of money has been built to reward the traits of a machine: speed, aggression, and detachment. Unless we redesign that architecture to reward stewardship instead, we will keep mistaking the cunning of greed for intelligence or wisdom.

This is what it means to return from illusion to reality — to build an economy that serves life rather than consumes it.

Sound money, honest credit, and transparent risk are not nostalgic slogans; they are the minimum conditions for sanity in an economy. Until we recover them, we will remain ruled not by men of reason, but by a system that acts—coldly, efficiently, and predictably—like a psychopath.

Has wind power REALLY saved the UK £104 billion?

In a word, no.

Article by Kit Knightly.

Excerpts:

I’m sure it seems the height of egotism to quote myself perpetually, but I’m going to do it anyway:

“The Science” is a self-sustaining industry of academics who need jobs and owe favours.

An ongoing quid pro quo relationship between the researchers – who want honors and knighthoods and tenure and book deals and research grants and to be the popular talking head explaining complex ideas to the multitudes on television – and the corporations, governments and “charitable foundations” who have all of those things in their gift.

This system doesn’t produce research intended to be read, it creates headlines for celebrities to tweet, links for “journalists” to embed, sources for other researchers to cite.

An illusion of solid substantiation that comes apart the moment you actually read the words, examine the methodology or analyse the data.

Self-reporting surveys, manipulated data, “modelling studies” that spit-out pre-ordained results. Affiliated-authors paid by the state or corporate interests to provide “evidence” that supports highly profitable or politically convenient assumptions.

…Interlacing layers of nothing designed to create the impression of something.

This pro-mask “study” is why you should NEVER “Trust the Science”

So, is the claim true? It doesn’t matter. That is entirely beside the point. The paper has already done its job by generating headlines like this, [. . .]

This study is just a single tile in mosaic of bullshit. It helps create an image and sell a story.

In this case, the hope is that enough dodgy studies in conflict with observable reality will override people’s awareness that their energy bills are getting bigger and their bank balances smaller.

Good luck with that.