Tag: finance

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Students at Manchester University have demanded that the word “black” when used as a negative expression such as the word “blackmail” should be banned because it is “divisive.”

Yes, really.

The complaint was prompted by a university study surround issues affecting Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) staff and faculty.

Citing concerns of black people, the report noted that there were “linguistic concerns about Black being associated with negative expressions” such as “blackmail” and “black sheep.”

After the report labeled the use of words which included “black” as “divisive and not inclusive,” the university’s student union demanded that “any other use of the word ‘black’ as an adjective to express negative connotations” should be banned in research papers, lecture slides, and books published by professors.

Students claimed that such words were based on a “colonial history” and should be abolished in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.

However, Lexicographer Jonathon Green pointed out that such claims were completely erroneous given that the background environment of “identity politics” “simply wasn’t there at the moment of coinage.”

As in America, many students have been indoctrinated to believe that one of the primary purposes for going to university is to lobby for speech and words to be banned.

Back in September, Bristol University announced that it would crack down on “diet culture and fatphobia” language so as not to offend obese people and those with eating disorder.

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German authorities have defended domestic regulators and politicians – including BaFin, the Germany equivalent of the SEC, along with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s finance minister Olaf Sccholz – past the point of public believability. It’s clear, as former CEO Markus Braun’s lawyers are arguing, that the German officials who were tasked with holding companies accountable instead protected Wirecard – until Ernst & Young refused to sign off on the company’s financial statements earlier this year after failing to track down more than $2 billion that the company claimed was stashed in the Philippines.

Wirecard’s sudden slide into insolvency, which made several short-seller’s rich, led to the arrest of Braun (whose formerly sterling reputation as an evangelist for the transformative power of data and technology has likely been forever blemished) while former COO Jans Marsalek managed to successfully evade authorities (it’s believed he is hiding out in Russia, possibly with the protection of Russian intelligence services). Public fury was directed initially at Braun, who was released on €5 million bail, a massive sum for somebody who had the vast bulk of their wealth tied up in shares of a now-worthless company, but has since migrated to German regulators who ignored numerous reports from shortsellers over the years, even going on the offensive and targeting an investigative reporter from the FT, alleging some fantastical scheme about the reporter cooperating with short sellers.

In recent weeks, the perception that EY’s business in Germany would simply weather this storm without any lasting repercussions has faded as German lawmakers and regulators have called for a criminal investigation into EY.

They claimed that top managers at EY’s German unit were likely aware of Wirecard’s fraud (at least, on some level), and likely enabled the company for years.

And on Tuesday, the FT – the paper that masterminded the investigation that brought Wirecard down – reported that German regulators purportedly have evidence that EY signed off on some of the company’s results, even though auditors new some of the statements were “factually inaccurate”. Apas, Germany’s regulator that oversees auditing firms, has obtained the evidence, and is turning it over to prosecutors to help further a criminal probe.

Some of the wrongdoing dates to 2017, when EY reportedly gave Wirecard a pass despite the fact that the “issues” highlighted in EY’s complaints to the company couldn’t be easily resolved. In reality, the stonewalling of the audit team by executives at Wirecard was clearly suspect.

However, in 2017 EY was just days away from denying Wirecard the crucial all-clear, according to documents reviewed by Apas. On March 29 of that year EY warned Wirecard that a qualified audit was imminent and shared a draft version of a qualified opinion with its client, people familiar with the documents told the FT. One of the sticking points raised by EY were protracted delays to a forensic audit by EY’s anti-fraud team into alleged accounting manipulations at a Wirecard subsidiary in India, which was being stonewalled by Wirecard executives. Just days later, the auditors changed their minds. On April 5, they signed an audit opinion that stated: “Our audit has not led to any reservations.” Apas found that it was unreasonable to believe that the issues could have been resolved within a few days, according to people familiar with the matter. The watchdog told prosecutors that therefore EY’s unqualified audit was “factually inaccurate”.

In terms of personnel, it looks like the two key players on the EY side are Andreas Loetscher and Martin Dahmen, who were the lead partners of the EY unit charged with auditing Wirecard. Dahmen eventually left EY in 2018 to become the head of accounting at Deutsche Bank.

Last week the EY auditing partners, Andreas Loetscher and Martin Dahmen told MPs that they were being probed by Apas over their work for Wirecard and declined to give testimony to the parliamentary inquiry commission into Wirecard. EY told the Financial Times on Monday that because of “the ongoing confidentiality obligation” the firm and Mr Dahmen were unable to discuss details of the audit procedures at Wirecard. Based on its current understanding of the facts, “our colleagues conducted their audit procedures professionally, to the best of their knowledge and in good faith”, the firm said. The auditing firm stressed that it was “actively working towards a legally effective release from the confidentiality obligation after which we will be able to provide details.” Mr Loetscher, who in 2018 left EY to become Deutsche Bank’s head of accounting, declined to comment. Apas previously said that it categorically does not comment about its work, pointing to strict legal confidentiality requirements. Munich prosecutors are evaluating the evidence sent by Apas and have not decided whether to open a criminal investigation of EY partners. Under German law, auditors found guilty of such misconduct can be punished with up to three years in jail.

Around the time Dahmen left, Wirecard infamously tried to cover up the massive fraud by engineering a buyout of Deutsche Bank. Though that deal apparently died on the vine.

Of course, DB had access to all the short-seller reports warning about potential fraud at Wirecard. But Dahmen’s previous “experience” working on Wirecard’s books could have of course been very relevant. And now Deutsche Bank is buying up some of the remnants of Wirecard’s loan book.

Authored by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.news,

Brits could be denied entry into bars, theaters, and sporting events if they can not prove they’ve received vaccination against COVID-19, according to the head of the United Kingdom’s vaccine rollout.

Nadhim Zahawi, the newly appointed minister to oversee the UK’s COVID-19 vaccine deployment, says the proof of vaccination could be held on a phone application already used in Britain as part of the government’s track and trace system.

“… I think you’d probably find that restaurants and bars and cinemas and other venues, sports venues, will probably also use that system as they’ve done with the app,” Zahawi told the BBC on Monday.

“The sort of pressure will come both ways: from service providers – who will say ‘look, demonstrate to us that you have been vaccinated’ – but also we will make the technology as easy and accessible as possible.”

Zahawi explained that while the vaccine should be voluntary, he believes Brits will find that most businesses will require proof of vaccination before providing service.

“I think people have to make a decision but I think you’ll probably find many service providers will want to engage in this in the way they did with the app,” he said.

In September, England’s National Health Service launched a smart phone app that alerts users if they have spent more than 15 minutes around or have been within six feet of another user who has tested positive for COVID-19. It also warns users if they have been in a pub, restaurant, or other kind of hospitality venue at the same time as someone who has symptoms.

Zahawi denied to provide any deadlines on when the vaccine would hit the UK market but did express hope that it would be available before Christmas.

The Ministers “new normal” outlook comes on the heels of Australia’s largest airline announcing that it is considering mandating a COVID-19 vaccinations for travelers who wish to fly with them internationally.

“We are looking at changing our terms and conditions to say, for international travelers, that we will ask people to have a vaccination before they can get on the aircraft,” CEO of Qantas airline, Alan Joyce said in an interview with Aussie news last week.

“I think that’s going to be a common thing talking to my colleagues in other airlines around the globe.” Joyce would add.

Perhaps coming as no surprise, both Nadhim Zahawi and Alan Joyce have ties to the World Economic forum, the organization behind the “Great Reset” agenda which has the stated goal of molding a post COVID world to its vision.

Today in “resistance is futile” news…

The British Army’s Information Warfare Unit is being deployed to deal with “anti-vaccine propaganda” heading into the rollout of the vaccine, The Daily Mail reports. The unit was launched in 2010 and is part of the Army’s 77th Brigade, which “often works with psychological operations”.

In fact, “solders are already monitoring cyberspace for Covid-19 content”,  the report reveals. The move comes as a response to a growing number of both anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests. Late last week, for example, more than 155 anti-lockdown protesters organized in Central London, marching through Westminster and chanting “shame on you” and “freedom”. 

Others waved signs reading “All I want for Christmas is my freedom back”, “Ditch the face masks” and “Stop controlling us”. The country is implementing similar fines and restrictions for businesses as the U.S. government. And, similarly, businesses are starting to take matters into their own hands and defy lockdown orders.

 

In the U.S., many business owners are now clinging to the constitution. In the U.K., many are “using the Magna Carta as a defense – quoting an article that allowed Barons to ignore unfair rules in the 13th Century.”

Some in the country have said they will refuse the vaccine and will do the same for the children. Others have called it a “mass sterilization program”. Other Brits simply “feel the Government is wielding too much power,” the Daily Mail notes. 

The country is also launching a probe into “vaccine disinformation”, including an investigation into (of course) Russia. 

A Cabinet Office spokesman said late last week:  “As we edge closer to a vaccine we continue to work closely with social media companies and other organizations to anticipate and mitigate any emerging anti-vax narratives and promote authoritative sources of information.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

A New survey has found that a majority of 55% of British people believe that the Black Lives Matter movement has enflamed racial tensions rather than improving the situation in the country.

The poll, conducted by Opinium, found that only 17% of respondents actually believe the movement has had a positive impact on race relations in the UK.

Even 44% of people from ethnic minority backgrounds agree that BLM has had a negative impact.

A whopping 70% of conservatives agree that the movement has stoked racial disharmony:

55% of all British adults and 44% of ethnic minorities think that Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests inflamed racial tensions pic.twitter.com/oHwygx3WIj

— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) November 28, 2020

Commenting on the findings, the director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education based at the University of Birmingham, Professor Kalwant Bhopal told The Guardian that it shows white people “feel their privilege is being threatened and questioned”.

This is a bizarre comment to make, given that a sizeable portion of non-white people agree with the sentiment that BLM has worsened race relations.

“When they see something like BLM they do what they can to protect it [their white privilege] and there is a backlash,” Bhopal added, displaying severe cognitive dissonance.

The British government is, once again, out of step with the public on this issue, given that at the height of a national lockdown it allowed BLM protests to go ahead unimpeded, and even consented to statues of historical figures, including Winston Churchill, as well as war memorials being covered by boxes at the best of the BLM mob.

The findings in the UK mirror the backlash for BLM in the US, where opinion shifted massively against the movement after repeated violent clashes with police, mass looting and rioting resulted from many BLM gatherings.

Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

What is a ‘digital Iron Curtain’?

It is when Big Digital, as Professor Michael Rectenwald terms these western Tech Goliaths, become ‘governmentalities’, using a word originally coined by Michel Foucault to refer to the means by which the ‘governed’ (i.e. ‘we the people’) assimilate, and reflect outwardly, a mental attitude desired by the élites: “One might point to masking and social distancing as instances of what Foucault meant by his notion of governmentality”, Rectenwald suggests.

And what is that desired ‘mentality’?

It is to embrace the transfiguration of American and European identity and way-of-life. The presumptive U.S. President Elect, the European élites, and top ‘woke’ élites moreover, are publicly committed to such “transformation”: “Now we take Georgia, then we change the world,” (Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, declared, celebrating Joe Biden’s ‘victory’); “Trump’s defeat can be the beginning of the end of the triumph of far-right populisms also in Europe”, claimed Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council.

In short, the ‘Iron Curtain’ descends when supposedly private enterprises (Big Digital) mutually inter-penetrate with – and then claim – the State: No longer the non-believer facing this coming metamorphosis is to be persuaded – he can be compelled. Regressive values held on identity, race and gender quickly slipped into a ‘heresy’ labelling. And as the BLM activists endlessly repeat: “Silence is no option: Silence is complicity”.

With the advent of Silicon Valley ideology’s ubiquitous ‘reach’, the diktat can be achieved through weaponising ‘Truth’ via AI, to achieve a ‘machine learning fairness’ that reflects only the values of the coming revolution – and through AI ‘learning’ mounting that version of binary ‘truth’, up and against an adversarial ‘non-truth’ (its polar opposite). How this inter-penetration came about is through a mix of early CIA start-up funding; connections and contracts with state agencies, particularly relating to defence; and in support for propaganda campaigns in service to ‘governmentalist’ narratives.

These U.S. Tech platforms have, for some time, become effectively fused into the ‘Blue State’ – particularly in the realms of intelligence and defence – to the extent that these CEOs no longer see themselves as state ‘partners’ or contractors, but rather, as some higher élite leadership, precisely shaping and directing the future of the U.S. Their objective however, is to advance beyond the American ‘sphere’, to a notion that such an élite oligarchy eventually would be directing a future ‘planetary governance’. One, in which their tech tools of AI, analytics, robotics and machine-learning, would become the mathematical and digital scaffold around whose structure, the globe in all its dimensions is administered. There would be no polity – only analytics.

The blatant attempt by Big Tech platforms and MSM to write the narrative of the 2020 Facebook and Twitter U.S. Election – coupled with their campaign to insist that dissent is either the intrusion of enemy disinformation, ‘lies’ coming from the U.S. President, or plain bullsh*t – is but the first step to re-defining ‘dissenters’ as security risks and enemies of the good.

The mention of ‘heresy and disinformation’ additionally plays the role of pushing attention away from the gulf of inequality between smug élites and skeptical swathes of ordinary citizenry. Party élites might be notoriously well-known for unfairly enriching themselves, but as fearless knights leading the faithful to battle, élites can become again objects of public and media veneration – heroes who can call believers ‘once more unto the breach!’.

The next step is already being prepared – as Whitney Webb notes:

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, GCHQ, which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda”, [and that] raise concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development – and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.

Similar efforts are underway in the U.S., with the military recently funding a CIA-backed firm … to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis, and the U.S. military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed …

The Times reported that GCHQ “has begun an offensive cyber-operation to disrupt anti-vaccine propaganda being spread by hostile states” and “is using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State” to do so … The GCHQ cyber war will not only take down “anti-vaccine propaganda”, but will also seek to “disrupt the operations of the cyberactors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.”

The Times stated that “the government regards tackling false information about inoculation as a rising priority as the prospect of a reliable vaccine against the coronavirus draws closer,” suggesting that efforts will continue to ramp up as a vaccine candidate gets closer to approval.

This larger pivot toward treating alleged “anti-vaxxers” as “national security threats” has been ongoing for much of this year, spearheaded in part by Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the UK-based Center for Countering Digital Hate, a member of the UK government’s Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force, which is part of the UK government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.

Ahmed told the UK newspaper The Independent in July that “I would go beyond calling anti-vaxxers conspiracy theorists to say they are an extremist group that pose a national security risk.” He then stated that “once someone has been exposed to one type of conspiracy it’s easy to lead them down a path where they embrace more radical world views that can lead to violent extremism … Similarly, a think tank tied to U.S. intelligence argued in a research paper published just months before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis that “the U.S. ‘anti-vaxxer’ movement would pose a threat to national security in the event of a ‘pandemic with a novel organism.’”

Just to be clear, it is not just the ‘Five Eyes’ Intelligence Community at work – YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided this week to remove a Ludwig von Mises Institute video, with more than 1.5 million views, for challenging aspects of U.S. policy on the Coronavirus.

What on earth is going on? The Mises Institute as ‘extremist’, or purveyor of enemy disinformation? (Of course, there are countless other examples.)

Well, in a word, it is ‘China’. Maybe it is about fears that China will surpass the U.S. economically and in Tech quite shortly. It is no secret that the U.S., the UK and Europe, more generally, have botched their handling of Covid, and may stand at the brink of recession and financial crisis.

China, and Asia more generally, has Covid under much better control. Indeed, China may prove to be the one state likely to grow economically over the year ahead.

Here’s the rub: The pandemic persists. Western governments largely have eschewed full lockdowns, whilst hoping to toggle between partial social-distancing, and keeping the economy open – oscillating between turning the dials up or down on both. But they are achieving neither the one (pandemic under control), nor the other (saving themselves from looming economic breakdown). The only exit from this conundrum that the élites can see is to vaccinate everyone as soon as possible, so that they can go full-steam on the economy – and thus stop China stealing a march on the West.

But 40%-50% of Americans say they would refuse vaccination. They are concerned about the long term safety for humans of the new mRNA technique – concerns, it seems, that are destined to be rigorously de-platformed to make way for the “required” saturation of pro-vaccine messaging across the English-speaking media landscape.

There is no evidence, yet, that either the Moderna or the Pfizer experimental vaccine prevented any hospitalizations or any deaths. If there were, the public has not been told. There is no information about how long any protective benefit from the vaccine would persist. There is no information about safety. Not surprisingly there is public caution, which GCHQ and Big Digital intend to squash.

The digital Iron Curtain is not just about America. U.S. algorithms, and social media, saturate Europe too. And Europe has its ‘populists’ and state ‘deplorables’ (currently Hungary and Poland), on which Brussels would like to see the digital ‘Curtain’ of denigration and political ostracism descend.

This month, Hungary and Poland vetoed the EU bloc’s €1.8 trillion budget and recovery package in retaliation for Brussel’s plan effectively to fine them for violating the EU’s ‘rule of law’ principles. As the Telegraph notes, “Many European businesses are depending on the cash and, given the ‘second wave’ of coronavirus hitting the continent, Brussels fears that the Visegrád Group allies” could hold a recovery hostage to their objections to the EU ‘rule-of-law’ ‘fines’).

What’s this all about? Well, Orbán’s justice minister has introduced a series of constitutional changes. Each of them triggering ‘rule-of-law’ disputes with the EU. The most contentious amendment is an anti-LGBT one, stating explicitly that the mother is a woman, the father is a man. It will add further restrictions for singles and gay couples adopting children, and it will confine gender transition to adults.

Orbán’s veto is yet more evidence of a new Iron Curtain descending down the spine of – this time – Europe. The ‘Curtain’ again is cultural, and has nothing to do with ‘law’. Brussels makes no secret of its displeasure that many Central and Eastern European member-states will not sign up to ‘progressive’ (i.e. woke) values. At its root lies the tension that “whilst Western Europe is de-Christianising, Europe’s central and eastern states are re-Christianising – the faith having been earlier a rallying point against communism”, and now serving as the well-spring to these states’ post-Cold War emerging identity. (It is not so dissimilar to some ‘Red’ American conservative constituencies that also are reaching back to their Christian roots, in the face of America’s political polarisation.)

These combined events point to a key point of inflection occurring in the western polity: A constellation of state and state-extended apparatuses has openly declared war on dissent (‘untruths’), foreign ‘disinformation’ and opinion unsupported by their own ‘fact-checking’.

It takes concrete form through Big Digital’s quiet sanctioning and punitive policing of online platforms, under the guise of tackling abuse; through nation-wide mandatory re-education and training programmes in anti-racism and critical social theory in schools and places of work; by embedding passive obedience and acquiescence amongst the public through casting anti-vaxxers as extremists, or as security risks; and finally, by mounting a series of public spectacles and theatre by ‘calling out’ and shaming sovereigntists and cultural ‘regressives’, who merit being ‘cancelled’.

In turn, it advances an entire canon of progressivism rooted in critical social theory, anti-racism and gender studies. It has too its own revisionist history (narratives such as the 1619 Project) and progressive jurisprudence for translation into concrete law.

But what if half of America rejects the next President? What if Brussels persists with imposing its separate progressive cannon? Then the Iron Curtain will descend with the ring of metal falling onto stone. Why? Precisely because those adhering to their transformative mission see ‘calling out’ transgressors as their path to power – a state in which dissent and cultural heresy can be met with enforcement (euphemistically called the ‘rule of law’ in Brussels). Its’ intent is to permanently keep dissenters passive, and on the defensive, fearing being labelled ‘extremist’, and through panicking fence-sitters into acquiescence.

Maintaining a unified western polity may no longer be possible under such conditions. Should the losers in this struggle (whomsoever that may be), come to fear being culturally overwhelmed by forces that see their way-of-being as a heresy which must be purged, we may witness a powerful turn towards political self-determination.

When political differences become irreconcilable, the only (non-violent) alternative might come to be seen to lie with the fissuring of political union.

NATO has previewed a new study that calls for major reform and provides a proposed outline for its future long term strategy entitled “NATO 2030 – United for a New Era”. The report is raising eyebrows given its focus on the rise of China, which it says should be considered the Atlantic military alliance’s number two enemy and rival over the next decade. 

The report compiled by a committee of NATO exports advances 138 proposals to reform NATO along these lines. According to one NATO diplomat cited in Reuters, “China is no longer the benign trading partner that the West had hoped for. It is the rising power of our century and NATO must adapt.”

Specifically it calls for NATO maintaining a decisive technological edge over China, which itself has been undergoing a major reform of its military and intelligence capabilities, rapidly modernizing both under a long term plan of President Xi Jinping. 

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said just ahead of the report’s publication, “China is investing massively in new weapons. It is coming closer to us, from the Arctic to Africa. China does not share our values… and tries to intimidate other countries,” according to statements at a Monday news conference. 

Yet Stoltenberg also tried to temper what Beijing will no doubt see as a hostile posture, also saying at the briefing, “China is not our adversary. Its rise presents an important opportunity for our economies and trade. We need to engage with China on issues such as arms control and climate change. But there are also important challenges to our security.”

An unnamed official source in Brussels was further cited in Russia’s TASS as saying, “The report recommends establishing special structures, which must guarantee NATO’s technical dominance over China and protect the member states from China establishing an economic control over their strategic sectors of economy.”

The report also “notes the necessity to prevent China from establishing control over the key commodity sources, including new-generation ones, in the third countries, in Africa in particular,” according to the TASS source. Lithium was offered was one prime example as essential to development of advanced electronics and communications in the future.

Meanwhile on Tuesday China responded preemptively to the much anticipated report, with the Foreign Ministry saying Europe and America’s “coercive diplomacy” are damaging good relations. The statement underscored that China’s defense spending per capita is actually lower than many countries within NATO.

“The common values of all mankind that China advocates and adheres to are peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom. I don’t know if these six words can also be recognized by NATO member states. Is this a value that we should hold together?” FM spokesperson Hua Chunying asserted.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

– Philip K. Dick

There is nothing worse than the politicization of science. If there is one thing that 2020 has taught us it is that we live within this basic framework.

Science is nothing today if not political.

But it’s beyond even that. This is a framework of experts in all major intellectual arenas, be it economics, psychology, diet or health. And they have all been tied in some basic way to public safety and the role of government in administering that goal, supposedly for the betterment of all of us.

Now, the use of science and the scientific method is perfectly applicable when illuminating underlying physical laws of the universe. But it is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.

And politics is nothing if not obsessed with ends rather than means.

The problem, however, is that positivism, of which the scientific method is the implementation of said philosophy, ultimately has limited application in the real world.

This is because it rejects the illumination of truth through the use of intellect and logic, relying solely on experience.

Because positivism cannot create hypotheses, only test them. The process of generating hypotheses is known as a priori — the deriving of knowledge from that which has come before, some but not all of which derived from the results of positivist methodology, i.e. experiment and experience.

A priori arguments rely on intellectual rigor and logic to produce hypotheses based on what is known. Experimentation, via positivism, i.e. the scientific method, is then used to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ said hypothesis.

From Theory to Theorem

To give an example. The Gibbs Free Energy equation was derived from an a priori set of postulates built on the proven theorems through which mathematics were derived.

In short, we built math through logic and reason, a priori, and men like Gibbs used those mathematical tools to derive their equations which govern the way matter interacts.

Where positivism comes in is in testing Gibbs’ equation to see if it, indeed, holds up to scrutiny. And under very specific boundary conditions it does.

Theory? A priori. Practice and application? Positivism.

This distinction is truly the most important thing that needs to be interjected back into our political discourse. Hell, I’d like it to come back into our scientific discourse, c.f. the nonsense about dark matter, global warming etc.

The problem we have today with modern liberalism, especially those in the sciences, is this misapplication of positivism to subjects where variables are explicitly beyond its ability to control for.

This is why appeals to ‘believe all scientists’ and ‘science has spoken’ are, at best, specious, even if they have the veneer of truth to them. Because when you set up an experiment without proper controls none of the conclusions you draw from it are defensible.

They may point you to inquire further, certainly, and that is an unqualified good thing in the search for truth. But it cannot be a bludgeon by which that search for truth ends simply because someone got their intellectual cookie either.

In the down and dirty world of politics hastily drawn conclusions from poorly-controlled ‘science’ can be used to write really provocative headlines capable of swaying public opinion.

Again, I point you to both theories about dark matter and global warming.

Because we live in an age of experts it is easy to do this and create both mass hysteria as well as arm marginally if not wholly untrained people with bad arguments about how to craft policy.

Worse, now we’ve unleashed them on Twitter to ensure no real conversation is possible.

Manufacturing Consent

Listen very carefully to most political arguments that start with, “the data suggests” or “experts say” and what you most likely will hear is someone talking out of their ass but appearing to have facts on their side.

Because using positivism in the social sciences is just inappropriate. In medicine it’s the great frontier and by definition is difficult to get any kind of definitive answer from.

Once you’ve done real science, like I have, and have had your ass kicked by simple systems like an electroplating bath or a groundwater sample you realize that our knowledge of the subtle chemistry of human beings is at best, hubris.

So, undergirding any policy discussion with “what the science says” isn’t just dishonest it’s dangerous.

Because, in essence, it’s all a giant appeal to authority logical fallacy. My argument is right because He said so. The whole of ‘science as policy’ industry is nothing more than that.

And when you factor in the corrupting nature of government funding of science picking winners and losers for grant money, you really have to question what it is you think you know about just about everything you’ve ever been told.

Now, I’m not being reductionist here in saying we shouldn’t use ‘science’ no matter how specious to inform policy.

Quite the contrary. I accept that politics has to deal with time pressures after all, certainly in a fluid situation like a pandemic. But, at the same time, we have to be cognizant of its limitations and use it only to support basic human rights principles.

Conversely, that means we explicitly don’t use them as an excuse to trample human rights out of fear, ignorance or good ol’ fashioned opportunity.

Politics is where the philosophy and science meet and, at times, explode.

For more than 100 years Progressives and ‘leftists’ of various stripes have appealed to science to engineer a better society through the misapplication of the scientific method to build their arguments.

They have pursued this to the exclusion of all other considerations to ‘prove’ to the world that the community as a whole is always bettered by the suppression of the individual through shared policy goals and ill-defined/ever expanding definitions of human rights.

And because they are driven ideologically and not intellectually they ignore any and all failures of the policies adopted in the name of their stated goals.

Black Communist Swans

The former U.S.S.R. was the original ‘technocracy’ built on these ideas. Today’s leftists still think it got a bad rap. It’s pathetic.

But they can’t give it up because they just know that if they run just one more experiment with slightly different rules, controlling these variables this time, the outcome will be different.

Welcome to the arguments of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s no different than the Cultural one or the Bolshevik one or the French one.

This is a fundamental misapplication of positivist thinking: asserting your hypothesis is correct when the ‘data’ tells you it’s wrong. You don’t get to keep back-fitting the data to fit the hypothesis and call that proof.

That’s the absolute antithesis of ‘science.’

And even then, the data is clear. Communism doesn’t work.

But I know that because Mises rigorously deconstructed all forms of collectivism a priori in his seminal work, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis published in 1922.

The 20th century experiments in communism and other flavors of socialism all support Mises’ conclusions, again derived a priori from first principles of human behavior. Do we really need another one?

Communism — and all forms of collectivism — destroys capital, wastes time and its adherents kill millions in their quest to find the perfect system. But they are chasing their own tails begging a question that was already answered a priori.

There really was a black swan on the horizon.

If not for the vast mineral wealth in the form of oil and gas the U.S.S.R. wouldn’t have lasted half as long as it did. And even then all it took was an oil price war in the 1980’s to bring it down.

FYI, there’s a lesson in there for other nakedly tyrannical petrostates, including those enlightened ones in Scandinavia. When the oil runs out Norwegians I hope you have something else to export other than lutefisk.

While here in the U.S. a similar technocracy was built slowly through the corruption of the institutions of education, politics and culture, all using the same positivist arguments.

But ‘Science’ Says…

Modern leftists pride themselves on believing in the rationality of science. Many going so far as to discount all religion and culture as nothing more than quaint customs of the mouth-breathing rubes in flyover country.

And with COVID-19 we’ve reached the height of this practice of imbuing scientists with a god-like knowledge of what we should do given any thorny political problem.

That’s why pseudo-intellectuals and midwits in white suburbia bought into the lies of Anthony Fauci, while ignoring the flip-flopping of him, the CDC, the WHO, and every other ‘expert.’

This science worship neatly bypasses politicians you don’t like to support whatever argument you want to believe. It doesn’t matter that it’s now just as much a religion as Christianity or Islam.

If the high priest of ‘science’ says masks are necessary on Tuesdays but not Thursdays then they simply go along with it because the alternative is admitting that your priests are just hucksters with fancy government titles.

It also absolves people of the responsibility of making the hard decisions. The experts have all that worked out.

Which brings me to what actually started this blog post.

One of these true high priests of ‘scientism,’ the straight-out-of-central-casting Neil Degrasse Tyson opined recently on RT about how disappointed he was with humanity over not coming together over COVID-19.

“I thought that when the coronavirus landed that we would’ve all banded together and say: ‘We’re all human and that’s a common enemy, like an alien invasion. We’ve all seen it in the movies. We got to be together on this one.’ But it didn’t happen to my great disappointment in our species.”

At this late date for a guy like Mr. Tyson to go on thinking COVID-19 was such an existential threat to humanity as an alien invasion is really stunning.

I thought this guy was supposed to be smart? Like really smart?

It’s like he’s forgotten that Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which I’m sure he read, wasn’t an operating manual for society but rather a warning of where this fetishization of official smart people leads.

I may just be some ‘deplorable’ boob living in the sticks of N. Florida, but last I checked more people are alive today than there were at the beginning of this pandemic.

Or maybe my understanding of math isn’t sufficient to handle a number as big as 7.7 billion.

Or that, according to the U.S. government’s population clock, a baby is born every 8 seconds on this planet and a person dies every 10. Now, with my admittedly only 3 years of college level calculus, I may not be as qualified as Mr. Tyson to judge the validity of 10 being greater than 8, so forgive my arrogance in thinking this.

But this seems like pretty strong evidence that COVID-19 isn’t a threat to humanity as a whole.

Further, I’m just a lowly degreed chemist and not an ‘astrophysicist’ like Mr. Tyson so maybe there’s something else I’m missing here.

The Reality Bomb

This false equivalence of an alien invasion we would all willingly fight is not the same as a virus with a slightly elevated risk of death versus the annual flu. This is the very definition of ‘not intellectually rigorous.’

In fact it’s the opposite. It is purposefully deceptive and manipulative emotional blackmail that should be beneath the contempt of a ‘scientist’ of Mr. Tyson’s stature.

He goes on further:

“I don’t mind political fights. Political fights are fine when you’re talking about policy and legislation. But you should never have a political fight about…scientific research that has been objectively shown to be true in peer-reviewed journals,” Tyson said, adding that doing so is a “recipe for disaster.”

Now this I agree somewhat with, which is why I consider this more like Coronapocalypse: The Movie and not a true existential threat to humanity which required any kind of policy decision which sparked this political fight he’s crying crocodile tears over.

Because, and I’m sure Mr. Tyson would agree with this if he were a scientist, there is little “…scientific research that has been objectively shown to be true in peer-reviewed journals…” about COVID-19 which has been properly discussed in the public sphere.

And yet very polarizing policies are in place depriving people of not only their rights, which he seems cavalier to, but also their future prosperity.

Since the ‘science’ has been used by governments assume a level of control over our movements and activities far beyond the scope of what the ‘science’ has shown. And since when the science isn’t settled shouldn’t we settle back on first principles to minimize human suffering along all vectors, not just the one variable, virus transmission, we think we’re controlling, especially for most people the survival rate is greater than 99.9%?

And even this position undermines the basic framework of human rights by placing some cost/benefit analytic overlay on society giving the social engineers more credit than they deserve.

On the best of days in the simplest physical systems, getting objectively true data from any experiment is a painstakingly difficult work. Reviewing it and assessing its validity in relation to known physical laws of the universe is even harder work. Thinking that somehow we can use this to craft global policy is frankly, prima facia evidence of psychosis devoid of empathy.

At best, this is the role commentators like Mr. Tyson are supposed to fill to keep us grounded in the humility of our ignorance.

But it’s clear from his positions Mr. Tyson has forgotten that basic point.

But what should I have expected from someone who continues to support scientifically unproven junk like dark matter, which we’ve never found any evidence of, and CO2-induced global warming, which openly denies the magnetic and electrical interplay between the earth and the sun on our climate.

And these are his chosen fields of study.

But this is what comes when one school of thought, positivism, corrupts both the science and the politics in a feedback loop of granted favors and the open suppression of a priori arguments.

Because that’s where we are today and it will get worse before it improves. Our society has become post-rational.

By that line of reasoning I was wrong in my opening thesis statement. There is something worse than the politicization of science, the denial that it’s even possible.

*  *  *

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Bill Gross’s civil court battle with his neighbor, tech entrepreneur Mark Towfiq – the two men are suing one another for alleged harassment after a feud over a garden sculpture spiraled out of control – continued this week, with Towfiq telling the jury (since that’s what this has come to) that he feared he was in for trouble as soon as he learned that Gross was interested in the home next door.

Describing Gross as an “angry billionaire with a short fuse,” Towfiq testified that an acquaintance working at Pimco had offered his “condolences” when Towfiq told him Gross might be his new neighbor, before regaling him with stories about Gross’s antics at PIMCO.

Gross’s lawyers cross-examined Towfiq as well as Patrick Boyd, identified in the Bloomberg report on the hearing only as the former owner of the home.

For those who haven’t been following the story, the two Laguna Beach neighbors are embroiled in a nasty feud with Towfiq suing Gross for harassment for allegedly blasting ear-splitting music from his state of the art sound system that reportedly drowned out the sound of the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway.

Since being forced out of PIMCO, a firm he co-founded back in the 1970s, Gross has cultivated a reputation as a loose cannon who won’t hesitate to terrorize those whom he believes have wronged him. Court filings in his divorce told of the billionaire using fart spray and rotting fish to make a home he had shared with his ex-wife unlivable.

When Towfiq texted Gross to ask him to turn the music down, Gross reportedly replied that Towfiq must ‘drop the complaint’ about a yard sculpture Gross had installed, or else the nightly “concerts” would continue.

Gross’s lawyer, Jill Basinger, told Orange County Superior Court Judge Kimberly Knill that she aimed to prove Towfiq was “obsessed” with Gross and his girlfriend, Amy Schwartz, a former professional tennis player, “and has been stalking him at all hours.”

Basinger drew attention to the fact that Towfiq appeared to be ‘concerned’ about Gross moving in even before the billionaire had bought the property.

“I’d seen the news of how he’d treated his family, his employees,” Towfiq said, referring to the many reports about Gross (some of which were originally published by the Wall Street Journal). Basinger also brought up a lawsuit where another former neighbor had allegedly sued Towfiq, though apparently the neighbor had actually sued the city for granting Towfiq certain building permits. Towfig said when he notified Patrick Boyd, the previous owner of Gross’s home, about some construction related debris left behind, Boyd had warned him to clean it up because he didn’t want to piss off Gross.

“I had told him that he had left a bunch of pipes in the side yard and he said, ‘I don’t want an angry billionaire with a short fuse to be upset with me,’ or something like that,” Towfiq said.

In an affidavit filed with the court, Boyd said he was “alarmed” to learn that Towfiq had security cameras pointed at his backyard, which allowed him to spot Gross as he toured the property, long before he bought the house. “It was also a bit unsettling to learn Mr. Towfiq was keeping track of my guests in the backyard,” Boyd said in the filing. Towfiq insisted he only began taping Gross’s property after police suggested he “document” the loud music Gross allegedly played to terrorize him.

“Taking videos and pictures on my own property seems like a fundamental right,” he said.

Towfiq also revealed that he had been a PIMCO client for a few years before Gross left the firm, between 2008 and 2012. Testimony is set to continue tomorrow, but the fact that this case is still going on is almost as shocking as anything that’s been revealed so far. Gross is notorious for his puckishness and pigheadedness in legal disputes. It’s almost hard to believe this all started because of a garden statue.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Iran continues to release details surrounding the killing of its top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. On Monday, a senior Iranian official said a controversial group of Iranian exiles based in Albania could have been involved in the assassination.

“We have some clues but surely the ‘Monafeghin’ group was involved and the criminal element behind it is the Zionist regime and Mossad,” Ali Shamkhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, told state TV.

The “Monafeghin” refers to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition led by the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). The MEK is a controversial group widely considered to be a cult, and up until 2012, was designated as a terrorist group by the US government.

For their part, the MEK denied any role in Fakhrizadeh’s death. The MEK released a statement and rejected Iran’s claim as “rancor and lies.” The group said the accusation was “nothing new” since they’ve been implicated in previous assassinations of Iranian scientists.

Between 2007 and 2012, five scientists were killed inside Iran. Although never officially acknowledged, the attacks have been attributed to Israel. In February 2012, anonymous US officials told NBC News that the MEK carried out these attacks.

The NBC story said the MEK is “financed, trained and armed” by Israel’s secret service. Later that year, in September 2012, then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton ordered the MEK to be removed from the US terror list after giving heaps of money to US officials.

The MEK started as a Marxist-Islamist group that was founded in the 1960s and opposed the US-backed Shah. Throughout the 1970s, the MEK killed scores of the Shah’s police force, and the group played a role in the 1979 revolution. After the revolution, the MEK was at odds with the Ayatollah and opposed the new Islamist government, staging attacks against the Mullahs.

Trump may only have seven weeks left in office, but he’s given his top advisers the green light to batter the Iranian regime—anything that doesn’t hazard a full-on war before Joe Biden is inauguratedhttps://t.co/zZnjbEPVIZ

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 1, 2020

After being forced out of Iran in the 1980s, the MEK was welcomed in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who gave the group refuge at a military base known as Camp Ashraf. From the base, the MEK staged terrorist attacks inside Iran and sided with Hussein in the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq war. For these reasons, it is believed the MEK has little to no support inside Iran today.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US government commissioned a report on the MEK from inside their former headquarters at Camp Ashraf. The report concluded that the MEK has “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.”

The MEK is now based in Albania and has a presence in France. In July, the group’s leader Maryam Rajavi held the MEK’s annual Free Iran conference virtually from her compound known as Ashraf 3 in Tirana, Albania. The event featured speeches from several former and current US officials, including President Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, a MEK favorite. Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ) and Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) were the only sitting members of Congress to speak at the conference.

US officials are paid well for attending MEK events. President Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao collected $50,000 from the MEK for a five-minute speech in 2015. Although he was missing from the latest conference, Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton has collected hefty sums from the MEK. Records show the MEK has paid Bolton at least $180,000 for speeches over the years.