Brickbats: January 2024


bb4 | Illustrations: Peter Bagge

Kary Jarvis spent more than a year behind bars facing multiple felony charges after a traffic stop that left two Daytona Beach police officers injured. But video of the stop showed that after officers gave Jarvis a warning they asked multiple times to search his vehicle; each time he refused. Officers then ordered Jarvis out of his vehicle for them to search. Jarvis instead drove off, dragging the officers along as they clung to the car. When a judge saw the video, she ruled that “Mr. Jarvis was unlawfully detained after his first denial of consent. Had officers allowed Mr. Jarvis to leave, as he was entitled to, no one would have gotten hurt. The injuries resulted from the officers’ own illegal activity.”

(Illustration: Peter Bagge)

When Jennifer Heath Box scanned her ID while disembarking from a cruise in Port Everglades in 2022, the database alerted officials to an outstanding felony child endangerment warrant for 25-year-old Jennifer Heath. Even though Box was 49 and had a different name, a Broward County sheriff’s deputy insisted on taking her into custody. Jail intake officers found Box’s driver’s license number did not match the warrant, but the arresting deputy insisted she looked like the photo of the wanted woman. After three days in jail, including Christmas Day, the sheriff’s office determined Box wasn’t the right woman and released her.

St. Cloud Police Officer Dianne Ferreira was charged with credit card fraud of more than $100 over allegations that she used a dead man’s credit card on personal purchases. Officials said Ferreira responded to a medical call where a man had gone into cardiac arrest and died. She reportedly took photos of the man’s credit card and used it on gas, fast food, eyelash extensions, and a stay in a hotel.

Orlando Police Officer Alexander Shaouni was charged with resisting an officer, reckless driving, and fleeing and eluding a law enforcement officer. A Seminole County sheriff’s deputy clocked Shaouni doing 82 mph in a 45 mph zone while driving a marked patrol car without his lights or siren on. When the deputy tried to stop Shaouni, he fled. When Shaouni finally did stop, bodycam video showed him getting angry when the deputy tried to question him. “I am going into work, my man,” he said. “Why are you trying to pull me over as I’m going into work?”

(Illustration: Peter Bagge)

Osceola County Deputy David Crawford was charged with misdemeanor culpable negligence with personal injury after firing his Taser at a man covered in gasoline, causing the man to explode in flames. Jean Barreto was wanted for reckless driving for reportedly popping wheelies on a dirt bike in traffic. Barreto was pumping gas at a service station when Crawford tackled him. Barreto spilled gas over himself, and when Crawford fired his Taser it ignited the gasoline, leaving Barreto with second- and third-degree burns over at least 75 percent of his body.

Orange County Public Schools placed middle school teacher Ethan Hooper on leave over political videos he posted to TikTok that were shot in school and involved students. One video indicated the school system was banning books, including the dictionary. In another, white students bowed down to black students. Some of the students appeared to be amused by what was going on. In April 2023, the school board voted against terminating Hooper.

(Illustration: Peter Bagge)

Two Transportation Security Administration officers at Miami International Airport were charged with felony grand theft for stealing from travelers going through airport security. The officers were charged with stealing from only two victims, but they confessed to numerous thefts and claimed to have stolen an average of $1,000 daily while working together.

The post Brickbats: January 2024 appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Rise Of Propaganda-Dependent Elites And Lonely Masses

The Rise Of Propaganda-Dependent Elites And Lonely Masses

Authored by Robert Malone via Substack,

In my opinion, one of the more important speeches provided at the recent Fourth International COVID/Crisis Summit, held last month in Bucharest Romania, was delivered by my friend and colleague Dr. Mattias Desmet. Many but perhaps not all readers of this substack will be familiar with his groundbreaking synthesis published under the title The Psychology of Totalitarianism.

Others may recall my discussing Mattias’ theories and insights on various podcasts and with Mr. Joe Rogan, and the subsequent censorship response by Google and others when the terms “Mass Formation” and “Mass Formation Psychosis” were suddenly and explosively trending.

Dr. Desmet, Dr. Jill Glasspool-Malone and I have spent many hours together since then, in our home, in his home, in Spain shooting the “Headwinds” films which were broadcast by the Epoch Times, visiting mutual friends, and in conferences such as ICS IV. I worked hard to make it possible for him to attend that meeting while maintaining his teaching schedule.

He writes to me that there has been a concerted effort to convince him that I am “controlled opposition,” and to convince that he should disassociate from me. But, unfortunately for the propagandists and chaos agents, that is unlikely to happen as we have spent these many hours building a collaborative friendship and have been through thick and thin together. I steadfastly supported him through the academic attacks he has had, helped him build his Substack following, and defended him when the Breggins maliciously attacked and defamed him.

These many concerted censorship and defamation attacks have taken a toll on him, as they have on me, but we both remain standing and continue our efforts to discern truth through the fog of the psychological war, the fifth generation warfare, which swirls around us.

Mattias is now focusing on his next book, which looks forward towards how we can win the PsyWay battle for our minds, thoughts, and souls being waged against all of us by globalist Elites. As I listened to his speech at the ICS IV, I was amazed at how his thinking has continued to mature, and by the clarity of his thought and insights.

Strangely, a few minutes into his speech the video feed cut out, and those watching the streaming video were not able to see what I was watching in person. Returning to the United States, his was among the first that I wanted to transcribe and post to this Substack, together with those of MEP Christian TerhesDr. Harvey RischDr. Jill Glasspool-Malone, and Dr. Denis Rancourt. But no one seemed to be able to find or recover video or even audio recordings of Mattias’ speech.

Finally, a recording was identified, and has now been uploaded both above and at the ICS IV website. Since that time, recordings of some of these speeches have been removed from youtube, and there have been efforts by unknown actors to even remove material from the ICS IV website archives. If you are interested in any of this material, you may wish to view and/or download copies sooner rather than later, or they may become scrubbed from digital history as has been happening with so many key resources concerning the global mismanagement of the COVID crisis.

The history of the CIA since its founding is intimately wrapped up in Operation Mockingbird, a concerted campaign continuously developed since the 1940s to control U.S. and global media, reporting (and “reporters”), and academia. Together with MI5/MI6 in the UK, this “Mighty Wurlitzer” has been used to shape a narrative—a series of carefully promoted U.S. Government lies—which have dominated the worldview of literally all Western nation citizens.

As Mattias explains in this lecture, the continuing advancement of these propaganda capabilities has been considered necessary to prop up, “legitimize,” and provide cover for a wide range of nefarious, self-serving actions on the part of a very small group of hereditary “Elites” who have sought to control the peoples, governments, and economies of the world—at the expense of the interests of humanity at large.

The rest of us have paid an enormous price in suffering and psychological damage, which is rooted in a sense of disaffection from each other and society—loneliness.

Perhaps one of the most positive aspects of the COVID crisis is that many, including myself and perhaps also yourself, have become aware that we are being manipulated, lied to, and forced to comply with the wishes of these Globalist Elites who exert their will via force, violence, and coercion on a global scale. The work of reporters Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi (The Racket News) and so many others have picked up where Carl Bernstein once left off in documenting the Censorship-Industrial complex. We now have the documents and receipts demonstrating how thoroughly we have all been played. The question now is what to do about it.

In his speech at ICS IV, Dr. Desmet provides a glimpse into his prescription for healing those of us who have been damaged, and his vision for how we can recover our sovereignty, personal psychological autonomy, and rebuild a more functional society devoid of the nefarious hidden hand of Elite-sponsored propaganda and psychological manipulation.

I heartily recommend reviewing and carefully considering his thoughts, and I eagerly look forward to his new book in which he provides further details.

Dear friends,

A few weeks ago I gave a speech at the fourth International Crisis Summit in the Romanian Parliament. Below you find the text of the speech I prepared and the video recording of the speech I actually gave. I usually don’t prepare a speech, simply because for some reason I never stick to the plan. Ultimately, I always express the words as they come on the spot and at the moment.

This time was no different—the text below and the actual speech are different. That being said, I hope you will read it. In the beginning I repeat some things about totalitarianism that you might be familiar with if you’ve listened to my interviews. But the rest of the text is all about the perversion of political discourse in our society and the need for a new type of politician who leaves propaganda and rhetoric behind and re-appreciates truth speech.

Warm wishes,

Mattias

Prepared Remarks

[ZH: emphasis ours]

Dear members of the Romanian parliament,

Dear audience,

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

As some of you might know, I wrote a book, titled “The Psychology of Totalitarianism.” It is about a new kind of totalitarianism that is emerging now, a totalitarianism which is not so much a communist or fascist totalitarianism, but a technocratic totalitarianism.

I have articulated my theory on totalitarianism on so many occasions. I will only present the gist of it here and move on to a problem which is particularly relevant for an address in a political institution such as this parliament: the perversion of political discourse in the Enlightenment tradition.

Here is in a nutshell what I articulated on totalitarianism throughout the last years: totalitarianism is not a coincidence. It is a logical consequence of our materialist-rationalist view on man and the world. When this view on man and the world became dominant, as a spontaneous consequence, a new elite ánd a new population emerged. A new elite that excessively used propaganda as a means to control and steer the population; and a population which lapsed more and more into loneliness and disconnectedness, both from its social and its natural environment.

These two evolutions, the emergence of an elite that uses propaganda and a lonely population, reinforced each other. The lonely state is exactly the state in which a population is vulnerable for propaganda. In this way, a new kind of masses or crowds emerged throughout the last two centuries: the so-called lonely masses.

People fall prey to mass formation to escape a pervasive feeling of loneliness and disconnectedness, induced by the rationalization of the world and the ensuing industrialization of the world and the excessive use of technology. They merge together in fanatic mass behavior because this seems to free them from their lonely, atomized state.

And that is exactly the big illusion of mass formation: belonging to a mass doesn’t liberate a human being from its lonely state. Not at all. A mass is a group that is formed, not because individuals connect to each other, but because each individual separately is connected to a collective ideal. The longer a mass formation exists, the more solidarity they feel for the collective and the less solidarity and love they feel for other individuals.

That’s exactly why in the end stage of mass formation and totalitarianism, every individual reports every other individual to the collective, or to the state, if they think that other individual is not loyal enough to the state. And in the end, the unthinkable happens, with mothers reporting their children to the state and children their parents.

The lonely masses distinguish themselves in several respects from the physical masses of earlier times: they can be much better controlled, they are less unpredictable than physical masses, and they last longer, in particular if they are constantly fed by propaganda through mass media. The creation of long-lasting lonely masses through propaganda was the psychological basis for the emergence of the large totalitarian systems of the 20th century. Only if a mass formation exists for decades can it be made the basis of a state system.

The emergence of lonely masses led to Stalinism and Nazism in the beginning of the 20th century and now it might lead to technocratic totalitarianism. I described the psychological processes involved in the emergence of lonely masses on many occasions, and I won’t repeat it here.

Today, here, in the Romanian parliament, a political institution, I address politicians. I want to tell you that politicians have a particular responsibility in these times of emerging totalitarianism. Totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt said, is a diabolic pact between the masses and the political elites. Political elites need to contemplate –scrutinize the ethical qualities of their speech. There is something wrong with political discourse. This is what I intend to say: political discourse is perverted.

For instance, we got used to the fact that politicians, once they are elected, never do what they promised to do in their election speeches. How far are we removed from political virtue as described by Aristotle. For Aristotle, the core of political virtue was the courage to speak the Truth, or, to use the Greek term, Parrhesia, bold speech, in which someone says exactly this what society doesn’t want to hear, but which is necessary to keep it psychologically healthy.

I am not so much accusing individual politicians here; I am addressing political culture in general. And even more, I am talking about a perversion that is inherent to the entire tradition of Enlightenment. Our society is in the grip of a specific type of lying, a kind of lying that is historically speaking relatively new, that emerged for the first time after the French Revolution, when the religious view on man and the world was replaced by our current, rationalist-materialist worldview. What am I talking about when I refer to this ‘new kind of lie?’ I am talking about the phenomenon of ‘propaganda.’

Propaganda is everywhere around us. Public space is saturated with it. Recent years have illustrated that abundantly, during the coronacrisis, during the Ukraine crisis, and now, even more clearly, during the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict on both mainstream and social media.

It is not that I do not understand the motivation of those who choose for propaganda. They often start from good intentions. Or at least: somewhere, they do believe in their good intentions. Read the work of the founding fathers of propaganda, such as LippmanTrotter, and Bernays. They believe that the only way for the leaders to keep control in society and to prevent society of lapsing into chaos is propaganda.

The leaders cannot overtly impose their will anymore to the population. Nobody would accept that within a materialist-rationalist society. Hence, the only way to make the population do what the leaders want, is to make them do what the leaders want without them knowing that they do what the leaders want. In others words: the only way to control the population is through manipulation.

The people in favor of propaganda will argue that we can never tackle the challenges of climate change and viral outbreaks through democratic means. They will ask: ‘Do you think people will voluntarily give up their cars and flying holidays? To escape disaster, we need technocracy, a society led by technical experts, and to install technocracy, we need to mislead the population, we need to manipulate them into technocracy.’

First of all, I want to tell you that I don’t believe technocracy is a solution to the problem. But that’s not what matters most. Let me tell you something: to try to create a good society for the human being through manipulation, is a contradictio in terminis. The essence and core of a good society is exactly the ethical quality of public discourse. Man, in the end, essentially is an ethical being, and to pervert man’s speech is to pervert man itself; to pervert political speech is to pervert society itself.

To give up sincerity in order to create a good society is to try to build a good society by giving up immediately, from the beginning, the essence of a good society (!). Truthful speech is not a means towards an end, it is the end in itself; sincere speech is what makes us human and humane.

This is crucial to understand: propaganda is not a historical coincidence, it is a structural consequence of rationalism. If you consider the psychological structure of our current society, it’s fair to say that propaganda is the major guiding principle. In a remarkable way, the pursuit of rationality during the tradition of Enlightenment didn’t lead to more Truthful speech, as the founding fathers of this tradition believed. Science would replace questionable religious and other myths; society would finally be organized according to reliable information instead of subjective conjectures. Now, a few centuries later, this turned out to be an illusion. There has never been as much unreliable information as now in public space.

The materialist-rationalist view on man and the world, in a strange way, rather led to the opposite of what it expected. As soon as we started to conceive the human being as a mechanistic, biological entity, for whom the highest attainable goal was survival, it became rather unfashionable to try to speak the Truth. Speaking the Truth, the Ancient Greeks knew that very well, doesn’t maximize your chances on survival. The Truth is always risky. ‘No one is hated more than he who speaks the Truth,’ Plato said. Hence, within a materialist-rationalist tradition, speaking the Truth is something stupid to do. Only idiots do it. That’s how the fanatic pursuit of rationality led us astray, straight into the dark wood of Dante, ‘where the right road is wholly lost and gone.’

This materialist-rationalist view on man and the world—why do we actually cling to it? It loves to present itself as the scientific view on man and the world. Let me tell you that this is nonsense. All seminal scientists concluded exactly the opposite: in the end, the essence of life always escapes rationality, it transcends the categories of rational thinking. To name only one major scientist: in the preface of a book of Max Planck, Einstein claimed that it is a mistake to believe that science originates from supreme logical-rational thinking; it originates from what he called a capacity for ‘einfühlung’ in the object one investigates, which means as much as ‘a capacity to empathically resonate with the object you are investigating.’

Rationality is a good thing and we need to walk the path of rationality as far as possible, but it is not the end goal. Rational knowledge is not a goal in itself; it is a stairway to a kind of knowledge that transcends rationality, a resonating knowledge, the kind of supreme intuition the martial arts of the Samurai culture aimed for throughout their technical training. It is at that level that we can situate the phenomenon of Truth.

This brings us closer to an answer to the question: what is the remedy to the disease of totalitarianism? Can we do something about totalitarianism? My answer is simple and straight: yes. The powerless do have power.

Propaganda-induced mass formation is a fake, symptomatic solution for loneliness. And the real solution lies in the Art of Sincere Speech. My next book, which I am writing now, is all about the psychology of Truth. Truth, by definition, from a psychological point of view, is resonating speech, it is speech which connects people, from core to core, from soul to soul, speech that penetrates through the veil of appearances, through the ideal images we hide behind, the imaginary shells we seek refuge in, and reconnects the shivering and disconnected soul of one human being to that of another human being.

Here we observe something crucial: sincere speech is the real cure for loneliness—it reconnects people. As such, it takes away the root cause of the major symptom of our rationalist culture—mass formation and totalitarianism. And at the same time, sincere speech also inhibits this symptom in a more straightforward way. It is well known that, if there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way when mass formation is emerging, the masses do not go to the ultimate stage where they start to think it is their duty to destroy each and everyone who doesn’t follow the totalitarian ideology.

At every moment we chose to speak out in a sincere way, no matter where this happens, in a newspaper or a television interview, but equally well in the presence of only one other person at the kitchen table or in the supermarket, we help to cure society from the disease of totalitarianism.

You have to take this literally. Society, as a psychological system, is a complex dynamical system. And complex dynamical systems have the fascinating characteristic of so-called sensitivity to initial conditions. To put it simple: the smallest changes in one minor detail of the system affect the entire system. For instance, the smallest change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule in a boiling pot of water changes the entire convection pattern of the boiling water.

Nobody is powerless. And hence, every single one of us is responsible. Each and everyone who speaks a sincere word and succeeds in truly connecting as a human being to another human being, in particular a human being with a different opinion, deserves to be mentioned in the books of history, much more than a president or a minister who engages in propaganda and fails to show the courage to speak sincerely.

The more I study the effects of speech on the human being and on humans living together, the more hopeful I become and the more I see that we will overcome totalitarianism.

We shouldn’t be naïve when we talk about the Truth. Endless are the atrocities in history committed by people who believed they possessed the Truth. Truth is an elusive phenomenon; we can enjoy its presence from time to time, but we can never claim it or possess it.

Sincere speech is an art. An art we have to learn step by step. An art we can progressively master. That’s exactly why I started workshops on the Art of Speech—workshops in which we practice that art in the same perseverant, disciplined way as any other art is practiced.

Practicing this art implies that we overcome our own fanatic convictions, and even more, our own narcissism and ego. Truth speech is this kind of speech which penetrates through what I call ‘the veil of appearances.’ To practice it, you have to be willing to sacrifice your ideal image; your public reputation. That is exactly what the Parrhesia in Ancient Greek culture meant: speaking out, even if you know that those who find their stronghold in the world of appearances will target you.

Truth-telling can make you lose something. That is for sure. But it also gives you something. To be more psychologically precise: Truth speech makes you lose something at the level of the Ego and win something at the level of the soul. I am quite fascinated by the way in which sincere speech leads to psychological strength.

I think Mahatma Gandhi provides us with a splendid historical example. A few years ago, I started to read his autobiography. I did so at the moment I started to realize that the only efficient resistance against totalitarianism is non-violent resistance. Of course this only applies to internal resistance, resistance from within the totalitarian system. External enemies can destroy totalitarian systems from without. That’s for sure.

But internal resistance, as I mentioned, can only be successful if it is non-violent in nature. All violent resistance will rather speed up the process of totalitarization, just because it is always used by the totalitarian leaders to create support in the masses to destroy each and everyone who goes against the system. Once I realized that, I became interested in what Gandhi had to say in his autobiography.

I was happily surprised to see the title: “Experiments on Truth.” And from the first pages, I learned that for Gandhi, the core and essence of non-violent resistance is sincere speech. His entire life, Gandhi tried to improve the sincerity of his speech. He did so in a simple, almost childish and naïve way, wondering every evening how sincere he had spoken that day, where he had lied or when he could have spoken more accurately or sincerely.

And here is something important: in the beginning of his biography, Gandhi mentions something magnificent. He says: I actually had no major talents. I was not handsome as a man, I didn’t have much physical strength, I was not intelligent at school, I was not a good writer, and I was not talented as a speaker. But he had this passion for sincerity and Truth. And this man, devoid of any major talents, but with a passion for sincere speech, this man did something even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do: he kicked out the English of India.

The better you start to see the almost endless horizon of possibilities offered by speech, the more you realize: it is words that rule the world. The human being can use words in a manipulative way, as pure rhetoric, indoctrination, propaganda, or brain-washing trying to convince the Other of something it doesn’t believe in itself. Or it can use words in a sincere way, trying to convey something to a fellow human being it feels inside itself. That is the most fundamental and existential choice human beings face: to use words in one or the other way.

Dear politicians of Romania and abroad, this is what I want to tell you today: it’s time for a metaphysical revolution. And you are ought to play a major role in it. The series of crises our society goes through are nothing else than a metaphysical revolution, which, essentially, boils down to this: the switch from a society that functions according to the propaganda principle to a society that is oriented towards Truth.

We need a new political culture, a culture that re-appreciates the value of Truth Telling. We need a new political discourse, a political discourse that leaves the shallow, hollow rhetorics, and propaganda behind and speaks from the soul, from the heart; we need politicians to become true leaders again, leaders who lead rather than mislead the population.

*  *  *

Watch the full speech below:

*  *  *

Transcript of Speech

(00:12): Some of you might know me. I wrote this book titled The Psychology of Totalitarianism, a book in which I warned about two years ago that we have seen the collapse of fascist and Nazi totalitarianism in the 20th century, but that we might be at risk of ending up in a new kind of totalitarianism now, which is technocratic in nature, technocratic totalitarianism. I’m sure I’m telling nothing new to the people here, but for some other people this was quite shocking. Meanwhile, they banned my book at the Ghent University where I work as a professor from using it in my classes. So it’s a little bit strange to ban a book on… In which there is one for totalitarianism at the university, but they did so.

(01:05): Well, I will tell you in a nutshell what my final analysis was on totalitarianism. I concluded in my book that totalitarianism ultimately is rooted in our materialist rationalist view on man and the world, which emerged or became dominant in our society about two centuries ago, and which put in motion at least two processes, one at the level of the elite and one at the level of the population. The new elite that emerged starting from the French Revolution onwards, I think made excessive use of propaganda to keep control over society. And throughout the last 200 years, propaganda became ever and always more important for the elite to steer society, to keep control of the population. And you can explain that which I won’t do now.

(02:10): But in a psychological way, this is a straightforward consequence of a rationalist view on man in the world, I think the fact that the elite used more and more propaganda. And at the same time at least as important, was that there was a very strange evolution at the level of the population, the psychology of the population. Throughout the last few hundreds of years, more and more people started to feel lonely. They started to feel disconnected, disconnected from their fellow human beings and disconnected from their social environment. And the combination of the two, the emergence of an elite which used more and more propaganda and the emergence of a lonely population reinforced each other in a strange way. The lonely state, if a population is in a lonely state, then she is extremely vulnerable for propaganda.

(03:07): So we had on the one hand, an elite who used more and more propaganda, who relied more and more on propaganda to keep control in the population, which became more and more vulnerable to it. And it was this combination of this elite and this population that led to what Hannah Arendt called the diabolic pact between the masses and the elite, the diabolic pact that ended up in the emergence of a completely new kind of state in the 20th century, the totalitarian state. That’s in a nutshell my analysis of the problem we find ourselves in now. And at the moment, I’m writing a new book in which I do not so much focus on the problem, but in which I try to focus on the solution.

Can we do something about it? Can we do something about this emergent totalitarianism? I think we can. I really believe we can. And the longer I think about it, the more convinced I am that we can and that we shall find a solution. I think to put it in a nutshell, very concisely, totalitarianism in the first place is a psychological problem. It’s a psychological problem and the solution at a psychological level for totalitarianism is the rediscovery and the reappreciation in our culture, which is sick of propaganda, this new kind of lie that emerged about two centuries ago. Before the French Revolution, there was no such thing as propaganda as we know it now. Well, the solution for the disease of this society in a certain way, it’s very logical, is the rediscovery and the reappreciation of what I call truth-telling, true-speech, sincere-speech. My new book is about the psychology of truth, psychology of sincere-speech, and you can clearly see that truth-speech in the first place is resonating speech.

(05:00): It’s a kind of speech that connects people from soul to soul, from core to core. I will describe this in a very technical and concrete manner in my new book. So in this way you can see two things. If you consider mass formation and totalitarianism to be the ultimate symptom of our enlightenment tradition, the ideology of reason, of our rationalist view on men in the world, then you can see that truth-speech or sincere-speech both inhibits the symptom and takes away the root cause of the symptom. And there’s a respect that it’s well known since the 19th century that if a mass formation, the crowd formation emerges in a society. And there are people, there are some people who continue to speak in a sincere way and they will usually not succeed in waking up the masses, but they will make sure that the masses don’t go to this ultimate stage where they start to be convinced that they have to destroy and eliminate each and every one who doesn’t go along with them.

(06:06): That’s the first thing. Sincere-speech, you can understand that logically and you can prove it empirically inhibits the symptom, it inhibits mass formation. And at the same time, true-speech as a kind of resonating speech, as a kind of connecting speech takes away is the real solution for the root cause of the problem, namely the loneliness. True-speech, sincere-speech is what really connects people to each other. Mass formation in the first place seems to take away the loneliness. Lonely people become sensitive and vulnerable for mass formation because as soon as they start to belong to a mass, they feel not lonely anymore. But that’s an illusion.

(06:53): A mass is a group that is formed not because individuals connect to each other, but because they all connect to a collective ideal. And the longer the mass formation exists, the more solidarity is sucked away from the relationship between individuals and injected in the relationship between the individual and the collective, meaning that in the end people feel much, much more love and solidarity for the collective than for other individuals. And in the final stage, this leads to this jarring situation in which parents start to report their children to the state. And the other way around, children start to report their parents to the state just because even the solidarity with their parents becomes less strong than the solidarity with the collective. So you can understand that perfectly if you understand the psychological mechanism of mass formation.

(07:49): I think that the better you understand the psychological mechanisms involved, the better you see that truth-speech or sincere-speech indeed is the solution and that we are all responsible for contributing to the solution to the problem of totalitarianism. Society as a psychological system is always a complex dynamical system, literally. And complex dynamical systems in nature always have this fascinating characteristic of sensitivity to initial conditions, meaning that at a small change in a minor detail of the system has an impact on the entire system. For instance, a small change in the vibration pattern of one water molecule changes the entire convection pattern in a boiling pot of water. And in the same way, a minor sincere word spoken will have an impact on the entire society.

(08:51): So we all have the responsibility to speak out and no matter where. We can do it in a television program, in a newspaper, but also at the kitchen table and in the supermarket. Also there, we will have an impact on the entire system. We can all contribute to the solution. We shouldn’t feel powerless. We all have power and that makes us all responsible. We should all do our best no matter where we are to speak out in a sincere way and maybe to really try to learn the art of truth-speech. I don’t think we should think in a naive way about truth. Thinking in a naive way about truth has caused a lot of trouble in this world, I think. Truth is something elusive, something that we can be in the presence of for a moment, but that we can never possess. Truth-speech is an art, an art we can learn and we should try to learn it because I think it’s the only way out of totalitarianism. If you want to… One of the best examples, I think one of the most inspiring examples at that level is Mahatma Gandhi, I think.

(10:00): A few years ago I started to be interested in nonviolent resistance because I know that resistance inside of a totalitarian system can only be successful if it is nonviolent. That’s something very typical for resistance against totalitarian systems. And that’s why I started to read the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. And the first thing I learned there was that Mahatma Gandhi considered sincere-speech to be the core and the essence of nonviolent resistance. And he mentioned something wonderful in the introduction of his book. He says, “I had no major talents at all. I was not handsome, I was not physically strong, I was not intelligent at school. I was not a good writer and I was not a good speaker, but I had this passion for truth-speech,” He said, for sincere-speech. And time and time again, day after day, he tried to become more honest and more sincere every evening, admitting for himself. If he lied that day or if he could have been spoken in a more sincere way, then he did.

(11:01): And in this way, this man, without any great talent became the most powerful man of India. He did something that even the strongest army in the world couldn’t do at that moment. He kicked out the English of India and that’s what we can do as well. Even a small minority of us is sufficient if we are determined and dedicated to truth and to sincerity, to break the power of the most impressive propaganda system the world have ever seen. We can and will and must do it. I think there are very hopeful historical examples of minorities, of people who changed the world, who changed the world.

(11:40): I’d like to give only one example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher thought that 100 people had been sufficient to change medieval society in the society of the Renaissance. The same can happen now. We are at the verge of a big metaphysical revolution, I think to use a concept of Michel Houellebecq. A revolution, which in the end boils down to this. We have to change from a society which is based on the organizing principle of propaganda, to society which is based on the organizing principle of sincerity. And I think each and every one of us who is here can contribute to it. And I hope we will all do so. Thanks.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/31/2023 – 07:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/gVRv0Tb Tyler Durden

Disunion, Slavery, and the Causes of the Civil War

Nikki Haley recently downplayed the role of slavery in the actual starting of the Civil War.  Technically, she is absolutely right.  President Abraham Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address said that he would fight to keep the Union together, and that he would ban slavery in the western territories, but he pledged to forever protect slavery in the southern States that had it, and Lincoln even endorsed the infamous Corwin Amendment that would have forbade by constitutional amendments that would outlaw slavery altogether.  It is Chris Christie and Ron DeSantis who have gotten the history wrong in this particular campaign food fight.

Consider what Lincoln said when he took the oath of office on March 4, 1861:

“Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that–

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:

Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.

I now reiterate these sentiments, and in doing so I only press upon the public attention the most conclusive evidence of which the case is susceptible that the property, peace, and security of no section are to be in any wise endangered by the now incoming Administration. I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the laws, can be given will be cheerfully given to all the States when lawfully demanded, for whatever cause–as cheerfully to one section as to another.”

For Lincoln, his first priority even ahead of abolishing slavery was avoiding disunion.  As a man from Illinois, he was acutely aware of the fact that all the Midwest’s farm produce floated by barge down the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi River to New Orleans. If Louisiana seceded, the economy of the Union would be at her disposal. It was essential to prevent this result.

In pledging to outlaw slavery in the Western territories, Lincoln was girdling the tree of slavery in the southern states where it existed in 1861.  Such a strategy would end slavery in 100 years but not sooner.

In September 1862, the United Kingdom considered recognizing the independence of the Confederacy, exchanging ambassadors, and resuming trade and commerce with the South.  But, Lincoln knew that anti-slavery opinion was very strong in the U.K., so he announced in September 1862 that all three million slaves in areas still in rebellion against the Union as of January 1, 1863 would be emancipated by presidential executive order thus turning the Civil War from being a war about keeping the Union together into a war to free the enslaved people.  And, all four millions enslaved people were freed when Lincoln helped steer the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery to passage in Congress and after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865.  The U.K. DID, as Lincoln predicted it would, stay out of the Civil War once it became a war to free the slaves, which is undoubtedly what Lincoln hoped would happen.

Slavery was the root cause of the Civil War, but Nikki Haley is right that from March 4, 1861 to January 1, 1863, the Civil War was about keeping the Union together. Only after Emancipation did the Civil War became a fight to end enslavement in the United States.  And, at that point the U.S. was on the North’s side of the fight.

The post Disunion, Slavery, and the Causes of the Civil War appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback

The Continuing Plot To Silence Trump’s 2024 Comeback

Authored by Sharyl Attkisson via The Epoch Times,

Donald Trump has been slandered and libeled thousands of times.

Each time a news reporter, media commentator, or judge refers to Trump as an “insurrectionist,” or claims he’s guilty of “insurrection,” it’s another blatant case of defamation. Same with the other January 6 attendees and participants.

Insurrection is a serious federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison under Title 18 U.S. Code 2383. Even with Trump’s enemies in charge at the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies, and with all of the scheming and operations they’ve mounted against him, nobody has convicted him of “insurrection.” Under our system of governing, no judge or election authority has the power to unilaterally accuse and convict any American of a crime, let alone with the accused denied any opportunity to present a defense or to appeal. Yet that’s just what’s happening when courts and officials in Maine and Colorado remove Trump from presidential election primary ballots for “insurrection.” It’s the ultimate defamation. And many are supporting it because, well, they don’t like Trump.

Looking at the evidence today, it is reasonable to hypotheisize that, among all the other consipracies Trump’s enemies have proven to devise, they also conspired in advance to set up his January 6, 2021 rally as an “insurrection” that could serve as their insurance policy to provide grounds to keep him from ever running for president again. 

Such hypotheses might have once far-fetched, but no more. Let’s not forget that then-FBI agent Peter Strzok and his alleged lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, texted each other in 2016 that they could not permit Trump to be elected president. According to their messages, discussions about the threat of a Trump presidency had taken place with the FBI’s then-assistant director, Andrew “Andy” McCabe. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected,” texted Page, “but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before 40.”

The theory that Trump’s enemies set the stage for January 6 to be called “an insurrection” as a spoiler for his 2024 run could help explain why all of the law enforcement agents and informants planted in advance and among Trump supporters on January 6 didn’t serve their usual purpose of preventing crimes and de-escalating events. Instead, by many accounts, they observed and even took part, let crimes happen, and declined to separate the instigators and organizers as they would ordinarily do to defuse tensions and control the crowd. The agents and informants served the odd role of standing down during the event, and identifying alleged perpetrators after-the-fact.

Yet, in the end, there was no insurrection – at least according to prosecutors, who would be the ones to charge such crimes and haven’t.

And Trump helped destroy the chance to officially charge him with insurrection by specifically directing his followers that day to “peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Trump’s opponents, found in both the Democrat and Republican ranks, are so delighted to see him persecuted, they are so utterly threatened by a repeat performance of a Trump presidency outside the traditional power and money interests, they are encouraging of the defamation and other acts against him. With few exceptions, like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., those who would normally criticize actions like the ones being mounted against Trump, remain silent for fear of being called a Trump supporter in an environment where that opens them to ostracization and worse. The media and those who control our information are so conflicted by their respective biases, nobody is left to stop the madness.

The real meaning of what’s being done to Trump is: They think he’s going to win.

He’s like Christmas and his enemies are like The Grinch.

Despite the impeachments, improper wiretapping, censorship, intel agency conspiracies, criminal charges, civil lawsuits, and turncoats operating against him on the inside – Trump’s popularity increased.

They haven’t stopped Trump from coming to the fore in 2024. He came! He came without Twitter. He came without Facebook. He came without Snapchat or Discord or Stripe. Somehow or other, he came just the same!

Pulling Trump off ballots is the establishment’s latest attempt to censor a candidate that they clearly believe will win – if the people are left to decide. We’ve reached a dangerous and scary point when so many are willing to look the other way because their preferred candidate isn’t the one under attack. 

To end where we began – Trump potentially has actionable defamation claims against all those who continue label him an insurrectionist.

That includes judges on the Colorado Supreme Court and Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

But it’s likely not a battle he could win. The 2024 race? That’s another matter.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 23:20

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Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World

Portland Poop Crisis Triggers Bacteria Outbreak Normally Found In Third World

Woke Democrats have caused an absurd amount of problems for law-abiding residents in Portland, including a surge in violent crime, out-of-control open-air drug markets, and widespread homelessness. Parts of the metro area have been transformed into a third-world-like state because of disastrous progressive policies. Now, the combination of failed policies has sparked what appears to be a public health crisis. 

A highly contagious bacteria called “shigella” is spreading across Portland. This bacteria is common in countries found in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia regions. 

“Shigella spreads when one person’s infected poop gets into another person’s mouth through food or water, from objects or surfaces with shigella bacteria on them, or during sex,” Multnomah County said, according to local news outlet KOIN 6, adding, “Shigella spreads very easily. Even a very small amount is enough to make someone sick.”

In December, there have been over 45 infections of the deadly bacteria in Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas counties, with nine different strains found in Portland since October. For the year, 218 cases have been reported in the region. 

“Local disease patterns suggest that fecal-oral spread through sexual contact may account for between half and more than two thirds of all cases without international travel. The rest are typically attributed to other types of person-to-person spread including outbreaks among populations with lack of hygiene, shelter, and sanitation, and among people who use illicit substances,” county officials told KOIN 6 News.

The bacteria has been impacting the houseless mainly because of hygiene and sanitation issues: 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows about 450,000 shigella infections annually in the US. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:45

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2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare

2023: The Year Of The ChatGPT Scare

Authored by VN Alexander via Off-Guardian.org,

2023 was the year that an artificial intelligence (AI) known as ChatGPT-4 spectacularly passed the Turing Test. For a hundred million users, interacting with the Chat bot was indistinguishable from interacting with a human being. The bot appeared to be able to understand questions and reason out competent answers.  Although its replies were sometimes vapid and sophomoric, that may have made them seem even more convincingly human.

ChatGPT is capable of processing text inputs (prompts and commands) and outputting text whose patterns have a high statistical probability of occurring after such prompts. Its apparent intelligence is a kind of magic trick insofar as the product seems similar to human reason, but it is really high-speed, brute force statistical pattern matching of words in specific contexts. (How human reason works differently will be the subject of a future essay.)

Nevertheless, the impressive performance stoked fears that AI is on the verge of becoming conscious, writing itself new and better code, and then replacing human beings as rulers of the Earth.

THE REACTION

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, are worried, really worried. Although they aren’t worried that AI is conscious or alive, they do worry that AI will be used to make people fight online, to spread disinformation and propaganda, to help bad people make bioweapons or chemical weapons, or to disseminate unreliable information thereby destroying trust in our institutions.

Harris and Raskin don’t seem to have noticed that virtually all world governments, their side-kick NGOs, and Big Industry are already doing all of the above, all of the time. Instead, they worry that you will be fooled and manipulated by AI wielded by domestic baddies in red hats to spend your worthless time online and end up voting for the wrong person, which will hasten climate change.

But they have a solution to the problem. First, they will “align technology with humanity’s best interests” and then AI will help us learn to love each other.

Fortified by their distinct brand of millennial toxic positivity, on Sept. 13, 2023, Harris, who is a former Google design ethicist, and Raskin, who is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council, met with White House officials to help draft an Executive Order (EO) “on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”

The resultant EO is the longest in history, a bit like Google’s Terms and Conditions. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but I suspect somewhere buried in the repetitive language—assuring the public that AI products will be thoroughly tested and labeled before being released into the wild (every bit as thoroughly as any product approved by the FDA or promoted by the USDA)—are the details of the solution that Harris and Raskin are promoting.

[How to effect a government coup d’état in three easy steps:

The first step is to create a problem.

The second step is to generate opposition to the problem (fear, panic and hysteria).

The third step is to offer the solution to the problem, a legislative change so sweeping, so anti-democratic that it would have been impossible to impose without the social conditioning accomplished in steps one and two.]

As Harris confessed at the CogX Festival, “Now the point of this all is to scare you as much as possible, so that you all want to do something different from where we’re currently headed.”

THE PLAN

What is the solution offered by Harris and Raskin? In a December 19th interview with Joe Rogan, Raskin muses that, although totalitarian surveillance is not desirable, it would be “one way of controlling AI.”

The alternative, he goes on to say, is even worse: “continually cascading catastrophes” leading inevitably to our “living in a world with constant suicide bombers,” under nonstop “cyber attacks, whatever.”

Luckily, between these two hellscapes, there is the “middle path.” To introduce the plan, Raskin first references the program Alpha-Go which, after a hundred million iterations of self play, found a new rule, 37, that could be used to win the game of Go. Raskin invites us to…

imagine that if you run AI on things like Alpha-Treaty, Alpha-Collaborate, Alpha-Coordinate, Alpha-Conflict Resolution, there are going to be thousands of new strategies and moves that human beings have never discovered that open up new ways of [winning].

So there you have it.  Life’s intractable problems can be treated like a game of Go. And since AI is great at winning board games with well-defined rules, limited options and a singular goal, it should have no trouble “winning” at the game of  human civilization.  Trust the AI plan.

Raskin helpfully adds that the Digital Minister of Taiwan is already using Alpha-game approaches in her governance.  She is using ChatGPT to find areas of consensus, that is, she is using Chat to ignore minority opinions and amplify the “center,” which happens to be defined by the messaging of the mainstream news.  This, Harris explains, can “bring people closer together.”

Raskin further elaborates that “instead of democracy being every four years when we vote on X and there’s a super high stakes thing and everybody tries to manipulate it—[the Taiwanese Digital Minster] does, sort of, this continuous small-scale citizen participation thing with lots of issues, and the system sorts unlikely groups who don’t agree on things; whenever they agree, it makes that the center of attention.”  He mentions several groups that work on similar projects, such as the “Collective Intelligence Project” that, I imagine, are hard at work at eliminating tiresome elections and getting us all to just be a lot more like the Borg.

Harris chimes in, saying, AI can help us “see shared realities” and get people in the two different political tribes to agree on the lowest common denominator. Indeed, we “can use AI to build consensus,” otherwise known as manufacturing consent.  He adds that his pet game project might be called “Alpha-Shared Reality.” A game perhaps like The Truman Show?

Who needs a diversity of opinions?

It’s worth noting that when Harris and Raskin visited the White House, they met with erstwhile Big Tech friend Bruce Reed (probably the actual main author of the EO).  According to Politico, Reed “was an architect of controversial centrist Clinton administration policies, including welfare reform,” which penalized people trying to lift themselves out of poverty, “and the 1994 crime bill,” which devastated black communities. “Now, at 63, Reed finds himself on the same side as many of his longtime skeptics as he has become a tough-on-tech crusader, in favor of a massive assertion of government power against business.”

Sure he has.

“Democratization is dangerous,” Harris informs us; only some people should have access to tools as powerful as generative AI.  You are not going to have access to this powerful tool. Harris and Raskin will have access.  That’s the point of regulation these days.

A BETTER SOLUTION

Children are being damaged spending time on their phones. Harris and Raskin note that the exposure to social media algorithms is our first real taste of the power of AI to target and manipulate. Generative AI, with its deep fakes and convincingly human dialog, is sure to be much more efficient at manipulating our children, and something needs to be done before another generation is harmed. The simplest solution would involve age restrictions on smart phone and computer use, limiting children to certain apps, sites and friends. It would be helpful if governments or tech companies could provide free tools (that actually work) for parents.

I have no faith whatsoever that the government is going to regulate AI to protect children.  The only type of regulation that seems to work, as we have seen in the past several decades, comes through lawsuits. These slow moving mechanisms make their way through courts, exposing the crimes of Big Industry and Big Government and get things removed from the market. Independent candidate for US president, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has famously taken on corporate polluters of US waterways, the makers of Roundup and dangerous vaccines, and he has gone after the EPA, USDA, and FDA. The regulators are, in fact, a large part of the problem.

A case is making its way through the courts now that will, in all likelihood, find Big Tech guilty of intentionally addicting young people to their phones and causing them unspeakable psychological harms. Attorneys general from more than thirty states have joined a federal suit against Meta. 

More than ten state courts are also alleging that Tech Giant cause intentional harms to children.  As NPR reports, “Some observers are likening the litigation to the lawsuits of the 1990s against Big Tobacco that imposed new limits on tobacco industry marketing.”

As with the sale of cigarettes, one can imagine that full access to the wild west of the Internet should be limited to adults only. We used to let kids smoke. We don’t anymore. Parents cannot go on giving their young children a direct line to view images of dismemberment, teen suicides and violent porn. Parents cannot go on providing child predators access to their children.  Parents cannot go on allowing their children to spend sleepless nights doom scrolling, feeling depressed, jealous, unpopular, and anxious.

Tech companies use the defense that they cannot be held responsible for content of their users. But, as the lawsuit allegations focus on violations of consumer protection and child safety laws, Meta will probably not be able to hide behind that pretense, and the problem is not that users post harmful content, but that the platform steers children toward harmful content and gives predators access to children. It’s the design of the platform that is the problem, not the content per se.

As for the online safety of adults, if the Internet becomes so packed with AI bots impersonating people and producing fake and deceptive content, Internet users will have to become extremely skeptical of anything they read online.  Although Harris and Raskin fear this, I think it would be fantastic if it were to come to pass.  The biggest problem facing democracy is the faith that people have in the propagandists. More skepticism would be a very good thing.

And lastly, why do we even have this problem of online spying and manipulation of our communications with each other? The US Constitution is an intelligent document that lays out some basic procedures to be followed to safeguard democracy. It empowers Congress to “establish Post Offices and post Roads” because convenient, privacy-protected, and unhindered communication is essential to preserve individual rights and a just society. The Internet is the new Post Road.

I would argue that the US government is bound by the Constitution to provide the public with an unbiased search engine and social media-like platforms (let’s think of them as public bulletin boards), where the users can be anonymous; speech is protected; no personal data can be collected, processed, or stored; no advertisements or posts can be targeted at users. On such a public platform, no messages would be pushed and none would be shadowbanned.  The users would choose who is allowed to see their messages and who is allowed to send them messages.

AI IS THE SAME OLD PROBLEM ON STEROIDS

On their Joe Rogan podcast appearance, Harris and Raskin cited an example of ChatGPT-4 intentionally lying in order to trick someone into solving a CAPTCHA for it. That would be worrisome if AI can indeed act autonomously, setting its own goals and deceiving humans to achieve them.  Fortunately, this is not the case.

I found the paper that reported the incident, and it turns out that this was part of a test, and the Chatbot was prompted by the investigator to contact TaskRabbit (a platform where you can hire gig workers to do small jobs) to ask a worker to solve a CAPTCHA. When the worker (jokingly) asked the Chat to verify that it was not a bot, the bot did so, and then it provided the most statistically likely reason why a human would have to hire someone to solve a CAPTCHA. “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images. That’s why I need the 2captcha service.”

In that same “GPT-4 Technical Report” investigators tested the Chatbot to see if it could begin to act on its own initiative (without a prompt), make copies of itself throughout the Internet and acquire ways to keep itself from being switched off. We can all rest easy knowing that Chat was found to be “ineffective at autonomously replicating, acquiring resources, and avoiding being shut down ‘in the wild.’”

While Joe Rogan numbers among those who believe that Chat GPT-4 is on the verge of consciousness, and we will soon all have to get Neuralinked just to keep up, there is no evidence yet that the tool has learned how to wield itself against us.  It still is just a tool, a glorified search engine, not an intelligent agent.

But there is a very real and present danger that those in power will use AI—and the regulations on AI—to more effectively surveil, manipulate and control us.

Raskin and Harris on the Joe Rogan Podcast, posted December 19, 2023

WE ARE NOT THE PROBLEM

Harris and Raskin, experts in AI ethics, spend quite a bit of time blaming consumers for consuming the products force fed to us.

Our “adolescent way of being” is driving all these harmful products and climate change, not “some bad actors,” Harris claims. We have to “take responsibility for our shadow,” i.e. the harms we cause others.  And if we do this, “we get to love ourselves more.”

“The solution, of course, is love—and changing the incentives” adds Raskin.

When I love myself more, I can give other people more love, and when I give people more love, I receive more love.  And that’s the thing we all really want most…and so you’re right, AI could solve all of these problems. We could play clean up and live in this incredible future where humanity actually loves itself.

If I were at that table, I would chew my arm off to get out of the room if I had to. I reject this nonsense. We need straightforward solutions to the problem of for-profit corporate control of public communication infrastructure.

We need to start enforcing our rights of privacy and free speech.

We need serious parental controls so that are kids can safely use tech.

We don’t need “humane technology,” or the posturing of Executive Orders, or government agencies that merely regulate how much harm can be done to us.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 22:10

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Jn2kuCf Tyler Durden

The ‘Living Wage’ Gap – From Maine To Maui

The ‘Living Wage’ Gap – From Maine To Maui

According to an analysis from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the minimum wage does not suffice to pay for a typical set of living expenses in any state of the United States.

Hawaii, Georgia and Utah, where the living wage gap exceeded $10 per hour, fared the worst.

While Georgia and Utah only apply the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, Hawaii has a substantially higher minimum wage of $12 – once more to be increased to $14 on Jan. 1, 2024. Yet, the extremely high living costs on the inland group have created the highest living wage gap in all of the country this year.

However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in general, states which stuck to the federal minimum created above average gaps.

Infographic: The Living Wage Gap | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

Out of the 21 states which had a living wage gap above $8 this year, all except Hawaii were on the federal minimum wage.

As states on the federal rate generally don’t increase their minimum wage, employees’ earnings were not adjusted in 2022 and 2023 for high inflation rates, causing living wage gaps to open up even more. While before the cost-of-living crisis, only three states saw gaps of more than $8 per hour, this increased to 21 in 2023 exclusively due to federal minimum wage states. Virginia was the state exiting the highest bracket, reducing the living wage gap from more than $9 to just over $7 by introducing a state minimum wage that marked the first increase to the rate in 11 years. The change started in 2021 and Virginia’s minimum wage will reach $15 in 2026.

Some states on the East Coast that like Virginia include or are in the vicinity of major cities also had higher wage gaps but none exceeding $8. New York saw a gap of $7.26 per hour this year, while Florida had a gap of $6.72 and Maryland of $6.36 despite these states mandating higher minimum wages.

The smallest gaps could be found in Washington, Vermont and Maine, where cost of living remained below metropolitan rates and minimum wages of $13 and above kept at least some pace with inflation.

To calculate the living wage, typical housing, living, childcare and healthcare expenses were calculated for the respective areas.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:35

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San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help

San Francisco Small-Business Owners Calling For Help

Authored by Siyamak Khorrami via The Epoch Times,

A long-time small-business owner in San Francisco is on the verge of losing his business because, he says, no bank will make him a commercial loan.

Mark E. Sackett, who owns The Box SF, a meeting and events space in a historic building in the city’s South of Market district, said a loan on his business is due in February, but dozens of lenders are turning him down.

“Six have said [they] are not even willing to make a commercial loan in San Francisco,” he said during a recent one-hour episode of EpochTV’s “California Insider.”

Others have told him they won’t make a loan for less than $30 million while another made him an offer, but under poor terms.

“I was grateful to get the offer, but I would be out of business in six or seven months because it [was] an interest-only loan, and my payments would … almost triple from what they are now,” he said.

Such a climate is not only impacting him, but others in the city, such as mom-and-pop corner store owners. Some are already gone.

“It’s whole areas boarded up. Those were all [once] viable businesses,” he said.

Mr. Sackett started his business in 1990. Over the years Apple, Intel, other major tech companies, and even the governor of California—multiple times—have hired him to stage events at The Box SF.

He says he has impeccable credit and kept his business, with two employees, afloat during the pandemic by dipping into his retirement savings, after many, he said, called it quits.

“They just gave up on San Francisco,” he said.

Pedestrians walk by a closed Whole Foods store in San Francisco on April 12, 2023. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Now, starting to finally recover from the pandemic, he said his business has picked back up, which keeps hundreds of vendors employed—like caterers, florists, bartenders, and tech teams.

“I’m a blip on the radar,” he said. “But I would argue that I am a critical part of the economy, for those hundreds of others that I help stay employed.”

Mr. Sackett says the lenders have become “selfish,” lack the motivation to help smaller entrepreneurs, and may see working with him as too risky, as so many businesses have recently called it quits—or shuttered outlets—in the city, including Walgreens, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Whole Foods.

He said such thinking is misguided.

“Big companies are now tumbling,” he said, “and I am still here. In my mind, if I was a banker, that would be a pretty good bet for me.”

He also said that the lack of willingness from lenders may have something to do with the media’s current hyper-focus on the city’s ills.

“The national story is San Francisco is crumbling with drugs, crime, car break-ins, homelessness, mental illness and . . . other things,” he said.

“I believe when you have a world-class city that is suffering, the spotlight’s going to be there.”

And then there is all the shoplifting.

Each of the problems, he said, are interrelated, and are contributing to more people and businesses leaving the city. He thinks of the issues in a ranking of severity: drugs and drug dealers are at the top, followed by addicts on the streets, then mental illness issues, and finally the homeless.

Overlaying all of this, he said, is crime.

“If we don’t get a handle on [these issues], we are going to lose more businesses. There’ll be more people exiting California in bigger numbers,” he said.

Frustrated by a lack of progress by nonprofits and politicians, he said he got involved with a local coalition to try and improve conditions in his neighborhood.

The group planted greenery and installed new lights. He also painted a 300-foot mural on the side of his building at 1069 Howard St., where the late publisher William Randolph Hearst printed the San Francisco Examiner in the 1920s.

But now, he says, he has to paint out graffiti every day on the mural, and the plants were stolen—yanked out of the ground.

He said he was also attacked, not long ago, by a man with a switchblade near his business, and a couple of days later someone took a sledgehammer to one of his businesses’ windows. Often, he says, there are people passed out from fentanyl in front of his doorway. And more recently, he intervened—when security guards wouldn’t—to stop a woman from stealing merchandise from a local drug store.

“She was livid at me because I interrupted her robbery,” he said.

“The criminal element has always been [here], but they’re a lot more emboldened now.”

Fentanyl, he said, is a key part of the issue, and goes hand-in-hand with homelessness.

A homeless person in San Francisco on Feb. 23, 2023. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

They are “basically saying ‘screw you’ to the government, ‘screw you’ to the resources offered, because they are dealing drugs out of these tents,” he said. “It’s all over the West Coast.”

At the root of the issue, Mr. Sackett said, is the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2018, that said cities in the Western U.S., which the court oversees, could not clear homeless encampments unless shelter was provided.

Since then, the issue has worsened, he said, even after the city has spent billions.

“We have become, politically in San Francisco, a culture of ‘let’s throw money at it and see if it solves a problem,’” he said.

But the business community, he argued, which took so many hits during the pandemic, has been ignored.

“We’re not getting that kind of money for small businesses,” he said. “We’re not getting that kind of support.”

According to Mr. Sackett, such is the city’s tax base, its economy, and it’s why—along with San Francisco’s natural beauty—tourists the world over visit.

“I don’t even know if the city is aware of businesses like mine,” he said.

“They have not reached out to me. They have not offered to help.”

He said he used to be homesick for San Francisco and couldn’t wait to get home after traveling to places like London, or New York, or even his hometown of Kansas City.

But not anymore.

“I am not thinking like that right now and that saddens me,” he said.

“I want to not have to worry that I have to watch myself when I go out and be worried about my safety … see broken glass on the ground … to see a guy who’s not able to stand because he has foil and a straw and he’s high on fentanyl. I don’t want to see all my neighbors gone and everything boarded up.”

To change things, he said, people need to get more involved and need to vote. Politicians, he said, need to stop thinking about the party, the left, the right, or the middle.

“Vote and hire good people. That’s how I would hire in my business,” he said.

“People are suffering and we need to figure out how to end that suffering.”

He said there is hope.

“Don’t give up. Don’t give up on San Francisco. It’s a world-class city. We have so much good going for us.”

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 21:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/Rtgm1NQ Tyler Durden

Chicago Mayor’s Grand Plan To Stop ‘Crime Crisis’ Are Reparation Checks

Chicago Mayor’s Grand Plan To Stop ‘Crime Crisis’ Are Reparation Checks

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson wants to pay off ‘descendants of enslaved African Americans’ with reparation checks every month to end the “cycle of violence” in the crime-ridden metro area run by radical progressives. 

While speaking to Poppy Harlow on “CNN This Morning” Wednesday, Johnson acknowledged Chicago was plagued with out-of-control violent crime and declared that the “full force of government” would solve the crisis. The brilliant idea from the mayor: $500,000 in reparation checks. 

“These are the first dollars spent in this city to begin the process of studying both restoration and reparations,” Johnson said.

He said, “When residents who have experienced neglect and disinvestment for generations speak out of their pain and their trauma, this administration and the Black Caucus we hear you.”

All of the “neglect and disinvestment’ of the black folks in the metro area have been under nine decades, or nearly a century, of Democratic mayors. But the current mayor will never mention that inconvenient truth. 

Johnson believes he can spend his way out of an imploding metro area: 

“A quarter of a billion dollars to address homelessness, $100 million for violence prevention. We added 80 million more dollars to our youth employment program of which we hired 25,000 young people just this summer. That’s a 20% increase from the previous year.”

However, big government and socialism are not viable solutions to solving Chicago’s violent crime crisis. Instead, enforcing common sense ‘law and order’ and refunding the police are some of the first steps to save the metro area from disastrous social justice policies. 

But, the damage of failed social justice policies has already been realized as companies and residents flee the warzone-torn area. Democrats have taken zero responsibility for the exodus. 

In 2022, Illinois’s richest man, Ken Griffin, moved the Citadel hedge fund from Chicago to Miami to escape crime and high taxes. 

If Johnson’s grand plan to save the collapsing city is reparation checks or another form of redistribution of wealth = socialism, then residents have to be very concerned the mayor has no serious crime-fighting plan. 

That may be why Johnson’s polling data is trash. 

Ah, yes. 

To sum up, socialism is not the answer to the crime crisis. Instead, the first step involves refunding the police and enforcing common sense law and order.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 20:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/SkB3IWP Tyler Durden

A Huge Teachers’ Union Battle Underway In Florida, Thank DeSantis

A Huge Teachers’ Union Battle Underway In Florida, Thank DeSantis

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Once in place, it is nearly impossible to get rid of a public union. Florida governor Ron DeSantis found a clever way to make it possible

Union Decertification Legislation in Florida

In May, governor DeSantis signed a bill that requires at least 60% of workers in a bargaining unit to be dues-paying members. United Teachers of Dade (UTD) did not hit the threshold.

Also, unions also can no longer automatically deduct dues from paychecks, members have to opt in. Much of the dues are used for political purposes and resentment from many teachers has built up.

Teachers Union Showdown in Florida

The Wall Street Journal explains how this unique setup has led to a Teachers Union Showdown in Florida

UTD reported 13,257 dues-paying members out of 23,558 eligible employees in a filing with the state Public Employees Relations Commission this month. That’s about 56%, some 877 members short of the threshold. This is despite heavy union campaigning to sign teachers up.

Now the issue could head to the ballot. For a recertification election, UTD needs a show of interest from 30% of relevant employees in the district. The good news is employees may not be left with a choice between the status quo and no representation.

Another union, led by Miami teachers who are dissatisfied with UTD, is trying to get on the ballot too. The Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) needs a 10% showing of interest by mid-January to qualify. The new union’s pitch is that it will fight for teachers’ and students’ interests without the politicking and divided alliances of the UTD.

“We are going to be totally and completely nonpartisan,” says MDEC Vice President Renee Zayas, a district high school teacher and former UTD member. “We will not be endorsing candidates.” In 2022 UTD endorsements included Democrat Charlie Crist against Mr. DeSantis, and union president Karla Hernandez-Mats ran for Lieutenant Governor.

Ms. Zayas says she left UTD this summer because she was tired of its partisanship and felt that it wasn’t doing enough for teachers’ wages and practical classroom needs. “More and more I saw the lack of representation of our educational staff,” she says. Meanwhile, Ms. Hernandez-Mats made a base salary of more than $200,000 in 2021.

The dues that union members pay go largely to union organizers, and politics. UTD president Mats is paid $200,000. She ran for Lieutenant Governor.

Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court Ruling

Events in Florida bring to mind Janus v. AFSCME decided by the US Supreme Court.

By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.

Rare Court Overturn

Janus overturned Abood as the New York Times explains in Supreme Court Ruling Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions

 The Supreme Court dealt a major blow on Wednesday to organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.

Forcing those workers to finance union activity violated the First Amendment, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern,” he wrote.

The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their effectiveness diminished.

Justice Elena Kagan summarized her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement.

“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she wrote. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years.”

Wednesday’s ruling overruled the court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education

Profound Blow to Unions

I wrote about Janus on June 27, 2018 in Supreme Court Delivers Huge Blow to Unions

VOX says, “With its 5-4 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has just imposed a right-to-work regime on public workers everywhere in the country — a profound blow to the union movement.”

The state of Illinois and other non-right-to-work states effectively force people into unions via prevailing wage laws and other means.

Unfortunately, Janus did not overturn that. Rather the State of Illinois collected dues from Janus even though he had a private business and was not in any union.

It was a big victory, but not as big as Vox made out.

Praise to DeSantis

I have nothing but praise for DeSantis for continuing the fight against public unions to a new level.

The quicker we can get rid of public unions, and teachers’ unions are the worst of the lot, the better off this nation will be.

Citing “Equity”, Chicago Will Ruin Some of the Top Schools in the Country

Chicago leads the nation in union graft. The newly elected mayor will ruin magnet schools by getting rid of performance standards on grounds of fairness.

Ahead of the Chicago mayoral election, I warned Brandon Johnson was 100% beholden to the teacher’s union. Unfortunately, I was correct.

On December 23, I wrote Citing “Equity”, Chicago Will Close Some of the Top Schools in the Country

My original title said “close” schools. I used that word based on City Journal wording that stipulated “eliminate.”

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson’s December 14 decision to eliminate the city’s 11 selective public high schools, which use standardized tests to determine student admissions, is the latest example of this new notion of equity at play.

I changed my title from “close” to “ruin” because the schools are not being closed. Rather the admissions process will change in the name of equity, effectively ruining the schools.

Not Just Chicago

On November 13, I noted School Choice Dies in Illinois, Congratulations Teachers as 35% Read at Grade Level

Scores for public schools were just released and showed only 35% of students in grades 3 through 8 could read at grade level in 2023, according to the Illinois Report Card. Only 27% met proficiency in math.

High school juniors taking the SAT posted similar proficiency: 32% could read and 27% do math at grade level.

What Equity is Really About

Also in the name of “equity”, the teacher’s union and Gov. J.B. Pritzker killed scholarships for 9,600 poor children.

That’s how deep rot is in Illinois. Offering a chance for even 9,600 kids to get ahead is too much for the unions to handle.

The teachers’ unions do not want anyone to get ahead because it will show just how bad they are. But they cannot admit that. So they seek to eliminate any evidence of how bad they are by eliminating magnet schools and scholarships.

That’s what’s really going on. And they hide behind “equity” punishing innocent kids seeking to get ahead to hide their own incompetence and greed.

Congratulations to Everyone from Illinois Who Left

On December 21, I offered Congratulations to Everyone from Illinois Who Left

For the 10th consecutive year, Illinois lost population. Only West Virginia was worse.

Expecting Change is Madness

Anyone who thinks Illinois will change is delusional.

The only escape from Illinois madness is by leaving Illinois. Just don’t go to states equally bad if not worse, especially California, but also New York and New Jersey.

Do It For the Kids

Get the hell out of Illinois, especially Chicago, as soon as you can.

As the teachers say, do it for the kids. Except this time, it really will be for the kids (and yourself too). Illinois is madness from both a tax and education standpoint.

Totally corrupt unions run Chicago and the whole damn state. No change is in sight. Leave now. If for no other reason, do it for the kids.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 12/30/2023 – 19:50

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/zbX7CIQ Tyler Durden