Hardware As A Service: Nevada Brothel Begins Using Sex Robots, Internet-Enabled Sex Toys
Modern problems require modern solutions.
And that’s why Nevada’s Alien Cathouse is adapting to the technological times, according to the Daily Star. The UFO themed brothel will be soon offering up a sex robot alongside of its – well, human sex robots.
The robot is being introduced for clients who “love rough sex”, according to a Cathouse spokeswoman.
“For clients that love rough sex it’s dangerous to girls, but a sex robot can bear it,” she said.
And apparently, the human staff at the Cathouse is embracing their new electronic co-worker.
“The Courtesans are actually excited about the additional revenue stream to Alien Cathouse, and themselves …as well as the additional opportunities that might present themselves for interested parties wanting to party with a real flesh and blood courtesan and with an AI sex robot at the same time,” the spokeswoman continued.
In addition to the sex robot, the Cathouse is also introducing teledildonics – groundbreaking new technology that allows you to do things like operate someone’s butt plug, via the internet, from halfway across the world. With a country this technologically sound, it’s no wonder GDP just beat estimates.
Rod Thompson of the Cathouse said: “Alien Cathouse really [caters for] towards individuals seeking to fulfil a sexual fantasy with a porn star and we are in talks with teledildonics manufacturers in regard to having each of our suites outfitted to accommodate this technology.”
He continued: “Some of the ladies are very excited about this, because they say it gives them an opportunity to give men, women or couples that chance to experience an encounter with a real courtesan at a brothel they might not normally, because of time and or distance be able to actually physically visit. We have one of our top porn star courtesans that will be the first to book a client for this experience around Halloween this month.”
Thompson also said that for virtual visits, clients would need “compatible hardware”. Men are directed to use the Interactive Vibrating Masturbator for Men toy and women are directed to use a toy called OhMiBod.
In terms of cost, a Cathouse spokesperson said: “Persons interested can only discuss pricing within a legally licensed brothel, but generally speaking we have seen bookings range anywhere from as little as $1,000 to tens of thousands of dollars. The courtesans set their own prices and split the price of the booking 50/50 with our brothel.”
And the sex robot will get a salary too, according to Thompson: “If it is a sex robot [working] with courtesan, pricing legally will be negotiated within the brothel …and most likely even if it were a sex robot the brothel would follow the same guidelines in terms of money.”
Cathouse employee Stella Renée said of the new technology: “As an honest-to-goodness, flesh-and-blood, Cougar-ific Cuddle Queen I am very excited about the addition of sex-bot playtime and remote interaction options at the brothel. Expanding our technological and social stiletto-print is imperative. Adapt or die!”
She continued: “I for one am all about diversifying my portfolio of sexy services to meet the needs of my beloved clients. I’m an artist damn it!”
The 20th century was the century of total war. Limitations on the scope of war, built up over many centuries, had already begun to break down in the 19th century, but they were altogether obliterated in the 20th. And of course the sheer amount of resources that centralized states could bring to bear in war, and the terrible new technologies of killing that became available to them, made the 20th a century of almost unimaginable horror.
It isn’t terribly often that people discuss the development of total war in tandem with the development of modern central banking, which — although antecedents existed long before — also came into its own in the 20th century. It’s no surprise that Ron Paul, the man in public life who has done more than anyone to break through the limits of what is permissible to say in polite society about both these things, has also been so insistent that the twin phenomena of war and central banking are linked. “It is no coincidence,” Dr. Paul said, “that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”
He added:
If every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I’m quite certain it would end very quickly. The problem is that government finances war by borrowing and printing money, rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes. When the costs are obscured, the question of whether any war is worth it becomes distorted.
For now I take it as uncontroversial that central banks perform three significant functions for the banking system and the government.
First, they serve as lenders of last resort, which in practice means bailouts for the big financial firms.
Second, they coordinate the inflation of the money supply by establishing a uniform rate at which the banks inflate, thereby making the fractional-reserve banking system less unstable and more consistently profitable than it would be without a central bank (which, by the way, is why the banks themselves always clamor for a central bank).
Finally, they allow governments, via inflation, to finance their operations far more cheaply and surreptitiously than they otherwise could.
As an enabler of inflation, the Fed is ipso facto an enabler of war. Looking back on World War I, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919, “One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism. Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly; war weariness would set in much earlier.”
No government has ever said, “Because we want to go to war, we must abandon central banking,” or “Because we want to go to war, we must abandon inflation and the fiat money system.” Governments always say, “We must abandon the gold standard because we want to go to war.” That alone indicates the restraint that hard money places on governments. Precious metals cannot be created out of thin air, which is why governments chafe at monetary systems based on them.
Governments can raise revenue in three ways.
Taxation is the most visible means of doing so, and it eventually meets with popular resistance.
They can borrow the money they need, but this borrowing is likewise visible to the public in the form of higher interest rates — as the federal government competes for a limited amount of available credit, credit becomes scarcer for other borrowers.
Creating money out of thin air, the third option, is preferable for governments, since the process by which the political class siphons resources from society via inflation is far less direct and obvious than in the cases of taxation and borrowing. In the old days the kings clipped the coins, kept the shavings, then spent the coins back into circulation with the same nominal value. Once they have it, governments guard this power jealously. Mises once said that if the Bank of England had been available to King Charles I during the English Civil War of the 1640s, he could have crushed the parliamentary forces arrayed against him, and English history would have been much different.
Juan de Mariana, a Spanish Jesuit who wrote in the 16th and early 17th centuries, is best known in political philosophy for having defended regicide in his 1599 work De Rege. Casual students often assume that it must have been for this provocative claim that the Spanish government confined him for a time. But in fact it was his Treatise on the Alteration of Money, which condemned monetary inflation as a moral evil, that got him in trouble.
Think about that. Saying the king could be killed was one thing. But taking direct aim at inflation, the lifeblood of the regime? Now that was taking things too far.
In those days, if a war were to be funded partly by monetary debasement, the process was direct and not difficult to understand. The sequence of events today is more complicated, but as I’ve said, not fundamentally different. What happens today is not that the government needs to pay for a war, comes up short, and simply prints the money to make up the difference. The process is not quite so crude. But when we examine it carefully, it turns out to be essentially the same thing.
Central banks, established by the world’s governments, allow those governments to spend more than they receive in taxes. Borrowing allowed them to spend more than they received in taxes, but government borrowing led to higher interest rates, which in turn can provoke the public in undesirable ways. When central banks create money and inject it into the banking system, they serve the purposes of governments by pushing those interest rates back down, thereby concealing the effects of government borrowing.
But central banking does more than this. It essentially prints up money and hands it to the government, though not quite so directly and obviously.
First, the federal government is able to sell its bonds at artificially high prices (and correspondingly low interest rates) because the buyers of its debt know they can turn around and sell to the Federal Reserve. It’s true that the federal government has to pay interest on the securities the Federal Reserve owns, but at the end of the year the Fed pays that money back to the Treasury, minus its trivial operating expenses. That takes care of the interest. And in case you’re thinking that the federal government still has to pay out at least the principal, it really doesn’t. The government can roll over its existing debt when it comes due, issuing a new bond to pay off the principal of the old one.
Through this convoluted process — a process, not coincidentally, that the general public is unlikely to know about or understand — the federal government is in fact able to do the equivalent of printing money and spending it. While everyone else has to acquire resources by spending money they earned in a productive enterprise — in other words, they first have to produce something for society, and then they may consume — government may acquire resources without first having produced anything. Money creation via government monopoly thus becomes another mechanism whereby the exploitative relationship between government and the public is perpetuated.
Now because the central bank allows the government to conceal the cost of everything it does, it provides an incentive for governments to engage in additional spending in all kinds of areas, not just war. But because war is enormously expensive and because the sacrifices that accompany it place such a strain on the public, it is wartime expenditures for which the assistance of the central bank is especially welcome for any government.
The Federal Reserve System, which was established in late 1913 and opened its doors the following year, was first put to the test during World War I. Unlike some countries, the United States did not abandon the gold standard during the war, but it was not operating under a pure 100 percent gold standard in any case. The Fed could and did engage in credit expansion. On Mises.org we feature an article by John Paul Koning that takes the reader through the exact process by which the Fed carried out its monetary inflation in those early years. In brief, the Fed essentially created money and used it to add war bonds to its balance sheet. Benjamin Anderson, the Austrian-sympathetic economist, observed at the time, “The growth in virtually all the items of the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve System since the United States entered the war has been very great indeed.”
The Fed’s accommodating role was not confined to wartime itself. InAmerica’s Money Machine, Elgin Groseclose wrote,
Although the war was over in 1918, in a fighting sense, it was not over in a financial sense. The Treasury still had enormous obligations to meet, which were eventually covered by a Victory loan. The main support in the market again was the Federal Reserve.
Monetary expansion was especially helpful to the US government during the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson could have both his Great Society programs and his overseas war, and the strain on the public was kept — at first, at least — within manageable limits.
So confident had the Keynesian economic planners become that by 1970, Arthur Okun, one of the decade’s key presidential advisers on the economy, was noting in a published retrospective that wise economic management seemed to have done away with the business cycle. But reality could not be evaded forever, and the apparently strong war economy of the 1960s gave way to the stagnation of the 1970s.
There is a law of the universe according to which every time the public is promised that the boom-bust business cycle has been banished forever, a bust is right around the corner. One month after Okun’s rosy book was published, the recession began.
Americans paid a steep cost for the inflation of the 1960s. The loss of life resulting from the war itself was the most gruesome and horrific of these costs, but the economic devastation cannot be ignored. As many of us well remember, years of unemployment and high inflation plagued the US economy. The stock market fared even worse. Mark Thornton points out that
in May 1970, a portfolio consisting of one share of every stock listed on the Big Board was worth just about half of what it would have been worth at the start of 1969. The high flyers that had led the market of 1967 and 1968 — conglomerates, computer leasers, far-out electronics companies, franchisers — were precipitously down from their peaks. Nor were they down 25 percent, like the Dow, but 80, 90, or 95 percent.
… The Dow index shows that stocks tended to trade in a wide channel for much of the period between 1965 and 1984. However, if you adjust the value of stocks by price inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index, a clearer and more disturbing picture emerges. The inflation-adjusted or real purchasing power measure of the Dow indicates that it lost nearly 80% of its peak value.
And for all the talk of the Fed’s alleged independence, it is not even possible to imagine the Fed maintaining a tight-money stance when the regime demands stimulus, or when the troops are in the field. It has been more than accommodating during the so-called War on Terror. Consider the amount of debt purchased every year by the Fed, and compare it to that year’s war expenditures, and you will get a sense of the Fed’s enabling role.
Now while it’s true that a gold standard restrains governments, it’s also true that governments have little difficulty finding pretexts — war chief among them — to abandon the gold standard. For that reason, the gold standard in and of itself is not a sufficient restraint on the government’s ambitions, at home and abroad.
As we look to the future, we must cast aside all timidity in our proposals for monetary reform. We do not seek a gold-exchange standard, as existed under the Bretton Woods system. We do not seek to use the price of gold as a calibration device to assist the monetary authority in its decisions on how much money to create. We do not even seek the restoration of the classical gold standard, great though its merits are.
In the 1830s, the hard-money Jacksonian monetary theorists coined the marvelous phrase “separation of bank and state.” That would be a start.
What we need today is the separation of money and state.
There are some ways in which money is unique among goods. For one thing, money is valued not for its own sake but for its use in exchange. For another, money is not consumed, but rather is handed on from one person to another. And all other goods in the economy have their prices expressed in terms of this good.
But there is nothing about money — or anything else, for that matter — that should make us think its production must be carried out by the government or its designated monopoly grantee. Money constitutes one-half of every non-barter market transaction. People who believe in the market economy, and yet who are prepared to hand over to the state the custodianship of this most crucial good, ought to think again.
Interventionists sometimes claim that a particular good is just too important to be left to the market. The standard free-market reply turns this argument around: the more important a commodity is, the more essential it is for the government not to produce it, and to leave its production to the market instead.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of money. As Ludwig von Mises once said, the history of money is the history of government efforts to destroy money. Government control of money has yielded monetary debasement, the impoverishment of society relative to the state, devastating business cycles, financial bubbles, capital consumption (because of falsified profit-and-loss accounting), moral hazard, and — most germane to my topic today — the expropriation of the public in ways they are unlikely to understand. It is this silent expropriation that has made possible some of the state’s greatest enormities, including its wars, and it is all of these offenses combined that constitute a compelling popular brief against the current system and in favor of a market substitute.
The war machine and the money machine, in short, are intimately linked. It is vain to denounce the moral grotesqueries of the US empire without at the same time taking aim at the indispensable support that makes it all possible. If we wish to oppose the state and all its manifestations — its imperial adventures, its domestic subsidies, its unstoppable spending and debt accumulation — we must point to their source, the central bank, the mechanism that the state and its kept media and economists will defend to their dying days.
The state has persuaded the people that its own interests are identical with theirs. It seeks to promote their welfare. Its wars are their wars. It is the great benefactor, and the people are to be content in their role as its contented subjects.
Ours is a different view. The state’s relationship to the people is not benign, it is not one of magnanimous giver and grateful recipient. It is an exploitative relationship, whereby an array of self-perpetuating fiefdoms that produce nothing live at the expense of the toiling majority. Its wars do not protect the public; they fleece it. Its subsidies do not promote the so-called public good; they undermine it. Why should we expect its production of money to be an exception to this general pattern?
As F.A. Hayek said, it is not reasonable to think that the state has any interest in giving us a “good money.” What the state wants is to produce the money or have a privileged position vis-à-vis the source of the money, so it can dispense largesse to its favored constituencies. We should not be anxious to accommodate it.
The state does not compromise, and neither should we. In the struggle of liberty against power, few enough will oppose the state and the conventional wisdom it urges us to adopt. Fewer still will reject the state and its programs root and branch. We must be those few, as we work toward a future in which we are the many.
This is our mission today, as it has been the mission of the Mises Institute for the past 30 years. With your support, we shall at this critical moment carry on publishing our books and periodicals, aiding research and teaching in Austrian economics, promoting the Austrian School to the public, and training tomorrow’s champions of the economics of freedom.
Dear Parents Of Super-Fat Kids: Let Science Surgically Fix Years Of Terrible Habits
Are you a parent of a severely obese child whose condition is undoubtedly glandular in nature and not a result of your dietary failings?
Whatever the cause, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is now recommending that more extremely fat children undergo gastric bypass surgery with life-changing implications.
The surgery, which can cost up to $20,000, is typically not covered by public or private health insurance. This means that poor fat kids will just have to make lifestyle changes instead of making it surgically impossible for them to gorge themselves.
The guidance, issued Sunday by the AAP, is based on a review of medical evidence, including multiple studies which found that weight loss surgery in teens can result in dramatic weight loss lasting “at least several years,” according to AP.
“Safe and effective is the message here,” said Duke University pediatrics professor, Dr. Sarah Armstrong.
Child whose parents exploited his obesity in the modeling industry
Armstrong, the lead author of the new policy, says that children who haven’t gone through puberty may not quite understand the long-term implications of the surgery, however age alone should not rule out the procedure.
“It’s a lifelong decision with implications every single day for the rest of your life,” she said.
Nearly 5 million U.S. children and teens are severely obese, a near doubling over 20 years. Many have already developed related health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea and liver disease. But most kids don’t get obesity surgery, mainly because most public and private health insurance doesn’t cover it or they live far from surgery centers, Armstrong said. Costs can total at least $20,000.
Resistance from pediatricians is another obstacle. Many prefer “watchful waiting,” or think surgery is risky or will alter kids’ growth. Some don’t recommend surgery because they think “weight is a personal responsibility rather than a medical problem,” the new policy states. –AP
The academy recommends that children and teens are generally eligible for surgery if their body mass index (BMI) is above 40, or 35 in the case of major health problems. Armstrong says the guidelines may vary by gender and age, but are similar to criteria used by surgeons from the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. A BMI above 30 is considered obese.
Faith Newsome
Faith Newsome was a typical patient. At 5 feet, 8 inches and 273 pounds, her BMI was almost 42 and she had high blood pressure and prediabetes when she had gastric bypass surgery at Duke at age 16. After about a year, she had shed 100 pounds and those health problems disappeared. She slimmed down enough to become active in sports, shop for prom dresses and gain a better self-image. But to avoid malnutrition she takes vitamins, must eat small meals and gets sick if she eats foods high in fat or sugar. Her BMI, at just under 30, puts her in the overweight range. –AP
Newsome has no regrets after having her surgery, telling AP, “Teens should be able to discuss every option with their doctors, and surgery should be one of those options.”
Goal-setting, daily effort and limiting what one shovels into their mouth is another way to go – and it’s much cheaper.
In the debates over wealth inequality that have followed the publication of The Triumph of Injustice (authored by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman), there have been intense discussions of the methodological choices made in the book. There have been few considerations regarding the underlying assumptions regarding the sources of inequality.
All inequalities are bundled as if they are one and the same. While they recognize that there is an optimal level of inequality (few in the popular press point this out; they simply assume that we must be beyond this optimum), no distinctions between inequalities are made. This is by far the greatest flaw in the book, and it is shared by other authors in the field.
Why is it a flaw? Consider the following case: wealth (or income) inequality could increase even if everyone’s wealth goes up by the same proportion. This would happen as long as certain groups change in relative size within the overall population. For example, immigrants tend to have lower wealth stocks than natives. However, all immigrants could experience an increase in wealth equal to everyone else, but if the immigrants’ share of the total population doubles, then we will see an increase in inequality. This is called composition bias.
Economists have long known that it is necessary to make adjustments for this bias, which generally emerges as demographic structures change. In the 1970s, Morton Paglin published a series of articles (including one in the American Economic Review) on the topic of making such adjustments for income inequality measures. The reason for making such adjustments is that these are mechanical increases of inequality that do not speak to the ability of someone to improve his economic condition relative to others.
Why should we care today? Consider the following facts.
First, there are more immigrants in the United States (their share of the population has doubled over the last decades). While immigrants are clearly better off after moving to America, they also tend to be slightly poorer than the average American. Because they swell the lower part of the income distribution, they give the impression of rising inequality (in both income and wealth). With regard to income, David Card pointed out that immigration explained 5 percent of the recent increase in inequality.
In Canada, where immigration levels are higher, immigration explains an even larger share of the increase. But why should this increase worry us? Immigration research suggests that there are important wage gains to the natives, mild gains in economic growth, and little to no fiscal cost to the population. All of this is compounded by massive gains to immigrants themselves. Clearly, that increase in inequality is not worrisome.
Second, the age of entry in the labor market has been pushed further and further back since the 1960s. As individuals in Western countries spend increasingly long periods of time in school earning nothing and investing in their human capital to earn more later, this is easily understandable. Yet, for inequality estimates, this means that there is an increase in inequality as long as scholarly pursuits are lengthened. Again, why should we be worried about that part of the increase in inequality? As Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy pointed out, this is bound to eventually produce a leveling off in inequality and probably even a decline as someother economists point out.
Third, there is the role of old age. There is a strong age–wealth relationship: older individuals are likely to be wealthier individuals. Thus, a cross-section of all individuals in different countries could lead to incorrect inferences where older societies are confused with wealthier societies. If this misleading portrait can emerge in comparisons of different countries, it can also emerge in comparisons of one country over time if the older group grows in proportion to the rest of the population (and there are fewer younger individuals).
Of the three factors I mentioned, this is probably the most important. Magne Mogstad and some colleagues, in an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics, made adjustments to avoid this problem. The results he and his colleagues found were that the level of inequality was lower and there was a mild decline in inequality.
In another paper (published in the Journal of Economic Inequality) studying income inequality — in Norway, over a longer period of time (1967 to 2000) — Mogstad found a similar alteration: inequality fell when the adjustments for age structure were made even if the unadjusted figures suggest an increase. To be sure, such adjustments are data-intensive and these types of data are not available over very long periods of time.
As such, there are some uncertainties as to whether or not the longer time horizon (say for a period covering 1950 to today) would yield the same result. I doubt that it would, but it is likely that increase will be dampened when the proper adjustments are made. Thus, should we be worried about the part of inequality that stems from aging? A case can be made that aging has downsides, but it’s hard to see how inequality is one of these downsides.
The sum of these points is suggestive of an important task that we have as economists. We need to decompose inequality into its core components. There are components (like aging) that have no deep implications. There are components that tell us that we should welcome more inequality because it entails clear gains for everyone. This is the case with immigration, which is bound to increase inequality in a given host country (but reduce it globally by allowing massive gains to the world’s poorest).
There are, however, components that ought to be tackled. Inequality resulting from your place of birth or from your parents’ situation is offensive to most people. If all of the increase in inequality came from this source, it would be understandable to want to tackle it.
Similarly, inequality can also result from barriers being placed in the way of the poor that limit their chances at upward mobility. Rent-seeking, which redistributes to the politically connected to shield them from competition hurts the poor. Thus, as with inherited inequality, tackling these institutional sources of the inequality increase is necessary.
These are crucial distinctions never discussed by many economists at the forefront of the conversation of inequality. They are harder to make. They require intellectual discipline and hard work (both historical and statistical). Nevertheless, they are crucial to understanding correctly the rise of inequality in recent decades. All efforts that fail to attempt this decomposition should be considered in a lesser light, and praise for such efforts should be scant.
Defense Minister Taro Kono sat down with FT in an exclusive interview this week to discuss the geopolitical shifts in the East/South China Sea, Sea of Japan, and across the broader Pacific region.
Kono warned China has developed and deployed advanced weapons, something that has sparked fear with surrounding countries.
He made it clear that Tokyo won’t permit Washington to install intermediate-range missiles across Japan, a move that would be too dangerous and risk the island country into a period of worsening ties with China.
Kono’s comments remind us all that geopolitical tensions in the Eastern Hemisphere are elevated, and Tokyo is playing a delicate balancing act of pleasing Washington but trying not to upset Beijing.
“[China’s] budget, doctrine, weapon systems, the whereabouts of their weapon systems and their organization are not transparent,” Kono said. “We have been urging them to explain . . . but we really haven’t seen an improvement in their transparency. So, these new weapons systems simply add to global anxiety.”
China’s advanced military weapons were showcased to the world last month as the country prepares to surpass the US as the number one global superpower in the next decade.
At the current rate, Beijing’s ambitions of unraveling Pax Americana could be likely. Still, Washington has struck back with an economic war to limit China’s ascension, which of course, has forced global tensions/uncertainties to near-record highs.
Kono said that Tokyo is modernizing its forces by unveiling new military hardware, expanding cyberspace capabilities, and strengthening its defense industrial base.
He added that Tokyo would continue purchasing Lockheed Martin F-35s from the US but is also preparing to develop a domestic fifth-generation fighter in the early 2020s.
The Pentagon has spent the last several years building an F-35 friends circle around China, effectively surrounding the country with stealth fighter jets.
The trend at play is called Thucydides Trap. This is when a rising power (China) threatens to displace the status quo power (the US) — and is primarily the reason why China is building up its defense because it senses a shooting war with the US is inevitable.
As for Kono’s comments, he too knows the fate of the world in the next decade, and it’s one where China and the US could duke it out.
Things are getting stranger and stranger. If you would have told someone ten years ago that Dennis Rodman would one day be helping to negotiate peace between North Korea and President Donald Trump, they would have assumed you were describing some weird movie cooked up in the mind of Mike Judge or the South Park guys. But in this timeline it’s an actual news story.
Everything about the last few years has been weird. The mass media’s behavior has been weird, Russiagate was weird, Ukrainegate is weird, a former presidential candidate accusing a current presidential candidate of working for the Kremlin was weird, people constantly accusing strangers on the internet of being Russian agents is weird, factions of the US government constantly leaking information against other factions of the US government is weird, the DNC getting caught rigging their primary was weird, Hillary Clinton losing the election was weird, the Skripal poisoning was weird, US government officials openly tweeting about their Venezuela coup is weird, the breakdown of the entire mainstream Syria narrative is weird, Assange’s arrest was weird, the campaign to censor the internet is weird, and this is just stuff off the top of my head from the areas I’ve been looking at in my own narrow spectrum of focus. Anyone else could list dozens of other weird new developments from their own slice of the information pie.
I often hear people in my line of work saying “Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was!”
No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.
It’s only going to get weirder, because that’s what it looks like when old patterns start to fall away.
The human mind is conditioned to look for patterns in order to establish a baseline of normal expectations upon which to plan out future actions. This perceptual framework exists to give us safety and security, so disruptions in the patterns upon which it is based often feel weird, threatening, and scary. They make us feel insecure, because our cognitive tool for staying in control of our wellbeing has a glitch in it.
When you’re talking about a species that has been consistently patterned towards its own destruction, though, a disruption of patterns is a good thing. Our ecocidal, warmongering tendencies have brought us to a point that now has us staring down the barrel of our own extinction, and that is where we are surely headed if we continue patterning along the behavioral trajectory that we have been on. Only a drastic change of patterns can change that trajectory. And we are seeing a change of patterns.
Sure it’s sloppy as hell. Pattern disruption always is. Show me someone who recovered from a severe addiction to hard drugs who enjoyed a smooth, easy transition into sobriety with no major changes in their life besides the absence of substance abuse. Show me someone who left an abusive long term relationship whose life wasn’t drastically upended by it. People see safety in patterns, even unhealthy patterns, and they build their own patterns on the patterns of those in their lives. When any of those patterns disappear for anyone involved, it can feel unsafe for many people around them.
When patterns first start vanishing, it can look like things are getting worse. Because a disappeared pattern is an absence of something and not a thing in itself, people don’t see it, because the human mind is naturally drawn toward things and not the absence of things. So their attention will be drawn toward whatever things start to happen in the absence of the old pattern, which won’t necessarily be a pleasant or attractive thing, and they’ll say “Oh no! Things are getting worse now!” No they’re not. An unhealthy pattern disappeared, and in its absence something unappealing fell into place for a bit. But the absence of the old unhealthy pattern is a good thing, and in the long run will lead to good results, in the same way that leaving an abusive marriage may lead to financial hardship and stress in the short term but will lead to thriving in the long term.
I have become convinced in my personal life that humans are far more capable of breaking patterns than they realize. There’s an intelligence running things below the loud thinky noises of our inner narrative generators which most of us aren’t aware of, but which I’m convinced is disappearing old behavior patterns in our species, both collectively and individually.
We’re all mentally aware that things need to change away from the patterns we’ve been collectively engaged in, but we’ve been unable to bring about those changes in patterning because our efforts to do so arise from the same conditioning patterns that got us into this mess in the first place. Our patterns have led us to violent revolutions, but those just lead to governments which end up perpetuating the same old patterns we were trying to end. Our patterns have led to nonviolent political movements, but those end up being co-opted and their energy fed into the same collective patterning. Despite being told in movement after movement that the real enemy is the King or the Emperor or the aristocracy or the Jews or the Communists, over and over again the real enemy behind the curtain has ended up being our own conditioned tendency to keep repeating the same collective behavior patterns.
That’s what seems to be evaporating. Not because anyone came up with the Ultimate Political Ideology in their thinky brains, not because some clever revolutionary came up with the Ultimate Plan for Toppling the Status Quo, not because some adept killers killed those in power and replaced them with themselves, but because this mysterious guiding intelligence running the scenes far below the level of verbal thought has been disappearing our patterns in a way we don’t notice because we’re not conditioned to notice absences.
The observation of the obvious fact that humankind is deeply conditioned is what has led to philosophical debates throughout the ages of the existence of free will. How can a species so beholden to its preconditioned patterning have freedom of choice in its actions? In my experience the answer is that there is something at play within each of us which provides the potential to discard old patternings. We don’t have any free will as to how a given conditioned behavior pattern will play out as long as we’re still holding them, but there is something in all of us which is capable of opening the door to relinquishing a mental habit altogether. This is the only extent to which free will may be said to exist.
Sometimes I wonder if the world as we knew it really did end in December 2012 as so many mystics, psychics and psychonauts predicted. Not in a nuclear holocaust or giant meteor obviously, but in the beginning of an unravelling of the glue that holds human behavior patterns in place. There certainly hasn’t been a normal US presidential election since that date, and there doesn’t seem to be one on the horizon in the foreseeable future. Things have been getting stranger and stranger ever since, and this trend appears to be accelerating rather than slowing down.
Things are weird, and they’re only going to keep getting weirder. Buckle up, buttercup.
Iran Foils Plot To Oust Iraqi PM In Latest Sign Of Tehran’s Growing Influence
Violent protest movements have erupted around the world in 2019, making it perhaps the most chaotic year since 2011, when the Arab Spring uprisings that swept the Middle East toppled several governments in quick succession.
Not just Hong Kong, Venezuela, Syria but dozens of countries have been rocked by destabilizing riots and protest movements, including Lebanon, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Egypt – the list goes on. An increasingly violent protest movement in Chile recently prompted the cancellation of the APEC conference, where the US and China were supposed to iron out “Phase One” of their trade deal (now the two sides need to find some other neutral territory for their meeting).
Though the Middle East hasn’t exactly been the most stable region in recent years, 2019 has been particularly troubled. After two years of relative calm, protests that started in Baghdad one month ago have spread across the country. Roughly 250 people have been killed in the chaos that has ensued.
Meanwhile, over in Lebanon, a wave of anti-government protests has swept across the country, motivated by many of the same factors: The controversial influence of the Iranian government in local affairs, economic mismanagement and endemic poverty, and a political establishment that’s widely seen as corrupt.
But in Lebanon, earlier this week, Prime Minister Saad Hariri and his cabinet resigned. Hariri said he had “reached a dead end” following nearly two weeks of brutal protests that have convulsed the tiny nation and led to bloody clashes with the militant wing of Hezbollah, which is the junior partner to Hariri’s party in the Lebanese government.
Something similar almost happened in Iraq. According to an exclusive Reuters report, Iran stepped in to prevent the ouster of Iraqi PM Abdel Abdul Mahdi, who was reportedly on the cusp of being ousted by two of the country’s most influential political figures as the anti-government protests worsened.
The two men are themselves political rivals: Populist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Hadi al-Amiri, both of whom control Shiite backed militias
Populist Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr demanded this week that Abdul Mahdi call an early election to quell the biggest mass protests in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003.
The demonstrations are fueled by anger at corruption and widespread economic hardship.
Sadr had urged his main political rival Hadi al-Amiri, whose alliance of Iran-backed militias is the second-biggest political force in parliament, to help push out Abdul Mahdi.
But a surprise visit by Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC international offshot Quds Force intervened by asking al-Amiri and his Iranian-backed militias to continue supporting Abdul Mahdi. Several senior Iraqi officials have told reporters that Soleimani showed up at a secret meeting in Baghdad on Wednesday that was supposed to be run by Abdul Mahdi, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Soleimani and many of the militia leaders who are loyal to Amiri raised concerns at the meeting that ousting Abdul Mahdi could weaken the Popular Mobilization Forces, an umbrella group of mostly Iran-backed Shiite militias who have allies in the Iraq’s parliament and government.
As commander of the Quds force, Soleimani helps coordinate Tehran-backed militias across the region in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. He is a frequent visitor to Iraq, and, much to Israel’s chagrin, his growing influence within the Iraqi government is emblematic of Iran’s growing influence not only in Iraq, but in Lebanon and elsewhere. And if Iraq slides into chaos, Iran risks losing all of the influence it worked so hard to build. At times it seems as if Iran is an even larger powerbroker in the Shiite majority country than the US.
Abdul Mahdi’s fate remains unclear – despite the maneuver behind the scenes to keep him in place. He took office a year ago, but the protests that have rocked his government are unlike anything experienced by either of his predecessors who have ruled since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Sadr, the populist cleric, was less than pleased with Soleimani’s intervention and Amiri’s decision to go back on his pledge to try and topple the PM. “I will never enter into alliances with you after today,” Sadr reportedly said to Amiri after the meeting, according to Reuters.
A dictionary definition of asset is: a useful or valuable thing, person, or quality. The word has been much in the news lately. Usually coupled with “Russian,” it’s a favorite smear of establishment stalwarts like Hillary Clinton and establishment media like The New York Times. It’s been directed against President Trump, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and others who question the US’s interventionist foreign and military policies.
By implication, anyone who is an asset of a foreign country places the interests of that foreign country ahead of their own country’s. The term is especially odious when appended to a country commonly considered an enemy. Examining US foreign and military policy the last several decades, an unasked question is: to whom or what has that policy been “useful or valuable”? Establishment attacks on Trump and Gabbard serve to clarify who has actually been assets for unfriendly governments, and it’s not Trump or Gabbard.
At the end of WWII, the US was at the apex of its power and no nation could directly challenge it. After the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, the two countries settled into the Cold War stalemate that lasted until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. Actual use of nuclear weapons was considered potentially catastrophic, to be avoided by either side except to counter a nuclear strike—either preemptively or after the fact—by the other side. They were not considered a battlefield weapon, although there were elements of the American military command, and probably the Soviet command as well, that at various times advanced consideration of battlefield use.
The rest of the world’s nations tried to protect themselves under the American or Soviet nuclear umbrellas. Both countries’ confederated alliances—essentially empires—were based on that ultimate protection, but the very unthinkability of nuclear weapons’ use meant that other calculations entered into governments’ and rulers’ calculations of strategic advantage. Just because a nuclear power wanted something or desired a certain outcome didn’t necessarily mean a nation had to comply, especially if the envelope was not pushed too far. Were you going to drop the bomb on a country that nationalized your oil company?
The fundamental failure of both the American and Soviet leadership was to recognize a simple lesson of history: more resources and energy are required to maintain an empire than the resources and energy that the empire can extract from it. Empires are inevitably victims of their own success. As their geographic boundaries expand arithmetically, the challenges of defending borders and subjugating conquered territories expands exponentially. Loot from the colonies fuels corruption among the rulers, who typically buy off the peasantry with a bread-and-circus welfare state. Taxes rise, the state grows, money is debased, the work ethic and productivity crumble, and decadence and internal rot metastasize. Eventually the empire succumbs to revolution, invasion, or both.
Empires never win the hearts or minds of all of their conquered subjects, and some resist. Nowadays, all but the poorest of the subjugated can avail themselves of inexpensive computing and communications. Expensive offensive weaponry and large numbers of troops can be destroyed or rendered inoperative by cheap rockets and artillery, improvised explosive devices, mines, drones, and other deadly gadgetry. The locals always know the territory and language better than their conquerers and can usually count on the support of the civilian population.
The successful attack on a Saudi oil facility, allegedly by Yemeni Houthis, is unprecedented because drones were used, the target was not military but industrial, and it was on the would-be conqueror’s home territory. In the larger picture, however, it’s merely the most recent manifestation of a trend that has been going on since at least the Vietnam War: the destruction of the expensive with the cheap. The US’s multi-billion dollar power grid, say, could be brought down through a combination of sabotage and computer hacking that would probably take less than twenty dedicated “revolutionaries” and under $100,000. That too would be unprecedented, but not really surprising.
Those who have called the shots for the US since World War II could have grasped the ultimately futility of empire from even a cursory reading of history. They’ve certainly had that lesson borne home to them by their own experience, if not from the Korean War then certainly from the Vietnam War. By now, it’s obvious that empire and US interventionism has been a net loser for the US, which can no longer be said to be at an apex of unchallengeable power. If its policies have been a net loss for the US, does that mean they have been a net gain for those the US defines as its enemies?
In 1953, a coup sponsored by the CIA and Great Britain’s MI6 deposed Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, an autocratic and repressive US government puppet. He was deposed in 1979 by Shia fundamentalists, who set up a theocratic regime aligned with neither the US or the Soviet Union, although decidedly hostile to the US.
Without reviewing the tangled history of US-Iranian relations since 1979, it’s fair to say that they’ve remained hostile. It’s been the fondest hope of the US foreign policy establishment and its allies in the Middle East, notably Saudi Arabia and Israel, to unseat the theocratic regime and install another American puppet. With the exception of the Iranian nuclear agreement abrogated by President Trump, there has been little comity between the two countries’ governments. Within the Trump administration there are officials who openly talk of waging war and fomenting regime change. The administration has resorted to harsh, punitive sanctions against both the country and many of its key figures to effectuate their objectives.
Yet, “enemy” Iran has clearly been the biggest beneficiary of US policy in the Middle East. Iranian intelligence, military, and political elements have infiltrated and gained influence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, all nations against which the US or its Saudi Arabian or Israelis allies have waged offensive war. A potential “Shia Crescent” from Iran to the Mediterranean, cited as a danger justifying US interventions, is now a reality not in spite of, but because of those interventions. Iran’s standing in the Middle Eastern has not been this high for at least the last several centuries.
US hostility has also driven Iran into the loving arms of Russia and China for weapons, industrial and financial aid, and markets for its oil. This is not the only instance that Russia and China have been the beneficiaries of the US’s maladroit moves in the Middle East, Indeed, their Belt and Road initiative, spanning Asia and the Middle East and now extending to Eastern Europe and Africa, has been ideologically midwifed by the US. Nations have been offered a choice: US bullets, bombs, and bullying, or Chinese and Russian infrastructure funding and expertise.
The Chinese and Russians aren’t acting from altruistic motives, but the recipients realize that and what America offers isn’t altruistic either. Choosing the former is an easy choice with few negative consequences. What will the US do to nations that choose to enter the Russian-Chinese orbit, start dropping nuclear bombs? Take on Russia or China? The case of Syria—in the Russian orbit since the 1940s—is instructive. The US couldn’t foment its desired regime change there, although according to Obama we were fighting the “junior varsity.” Once the varsity—Russia—entered the picture it was all over for the US effort.
Even if there were no Belt and Road Initiative, the Russians and Chinese, now cast as the US’s great power enemies, have reaped enormous benefits from the US’s interventions in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Having stepped away from conquest, except for potentially the “conquests” which creditors exact from debtors who cannot pay (a favorite US stratagem), Russia and China have been able to devote substantial resources to their own infrastructures and the development of high-tech weaponry that renders any US government impetus for military confrontation with them delusional (see “The Illusion of Control, Part 1“).
Every yuan and ruble not spent on US-style interventionism, and every drop of blood not spilled, is money and manpower available for pursuits far more rewarding than intrigue, sabotage, skullduggery, corruption, regime change, war, and the infliction of collateral damage on populations who, sensing the would-be conqueror’s indifference to their plight, often become terrorists, refugees or both—”blowback”—raising the butcher’s bill even higher. Let the US and its allies bear those costs.
If US foreign and military policy for many decades has been a detriment to the US and a benefit to those the US government terms our enemies, particularly Russia, China, and Iran, are not the architects and proponents of those policies actually the “assets” of those countries? That such a group includes virtually the entire US establishment doesn’t mean that the question shouldn’t be asked, nor that the answer is not in the affirmative. Keep in mind that it is this group that has lately been throwing around terms like “assets,” “traitors,” and “treason.” In light of the clear benefits they have bestowed on the enemies of their choosing, how can intellectual turnabout in light of the actual results of their policies not be fair play?
It wasn’t Donald Trump or Tulsi Gabbard who authorized the US’s failed wars and regime-change efforts. Unlike most of her critics, Gabbard fought in some of them! That Trump continues such efforts justifiably elicits condemnation, but he’s been in office less than three years and America’s malevolent misadventures have gone on for over six decades. During that time, he’s been one of the few prominent figures to even question them, and he’s been roundly criticized for it.
The trillions of dollars spent and the millions of victims killed and wounded, whose lives have been upended, both from our own military and the nations we’ve devastated or destroyed, demands what we’ll never get—a comprehensive investigation, a thorough accounting, and justice blind to the positions, wealth, and power of the people responsible. It requires a clear-eyed assessment of how much they have benefited our enemies—and themselves—and that will mean, in all justice, calling them what they are: enemy assets, traitors guilty of the darkest treachery to their country.
Total US Debt Surpasses $23 Trillion For The First Time
After total US debt was stuck at $22 trillion for five months, from March until August, until a deal was cobbled together by Congress to once again raise the debt ceiling, the obligations of the Federal government have soared fast and furious, and in just the past three months, total US debt increased by $1 trillion, surpassing $23 trillion as of Halloween 2019: truly a scary testament to America’s insatiable thirst for debt.
Putting this increase in context: since Nov 8, 2016, when Donald Trump was elected US president, and when US debt was $19.8 trillion, the federal debt has increased by $3.2 trillion
Going further back, to November 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidency, total US debt was $10.6 trillion. Since then it has more than doubled by $12.4 trillion.
Going further back is largely meaningless, because as the two chart above show, under just the last two US presidents, total US debt has increased by 115%, to a record $23 trillion.
Over the same period, US GDP increased (in nominal dollars) from $14.8 trillion to $21.5 trillion, a far more modest increase of $6.7 trillion. This also means that over the past 12 years, or the presidency of Obama and Trump, it took $1.85 in debt to generate $1.00 in GDP growth, the highest such ratio on record.
One other startling observation: whereas US debt prior to the financial crisis of 2008 was rising at a fairly aggressive pace, extrapolating current total US debt based on where it would have been had it not been for the Fed’s housing and credit bubble, indicates a level just around $16 trillion. Instead, debt is currently at $23 trillion. This suggests that it has cost the US an additional $7 trillion in debt, or 44% of what debt would have been had it not been for the Fed’s serial bubble creation just to paper over the consequences of the global financial crisis.
The ominous side effects of this record debt pile up are starting to be felt in the US budget as well: in fiscal 2019, the government spent just shy of $600 billion on interest payments equivalent to nearly the entire US Medicare budget, and more than the amount spent on the combined costs of education, agriculture, transportation and housing.
Furthermore, as we reported last week, the US debt is expected to increase by well over $1 trillion annually for the foreseeable future: while deficit for 2019 came in just under $1 trillion, at $984 billion, it is expected to grow by over $1 trillion each year for the foreseeable future.
“Reaching $23 trillion in debt on Halloween is a scary milestone for our economy and the next generation, but Washington shows no fear,” said Michael A. Peterson, CEO of the conservative Peter Peterson Foundation. “Piling on debt like this is especially unwise and unnecessary in a strong economy.”
While the key drivers of US government spending are mandatory programs such as Social Security, Medicare and anti-poverty programs, a major fiscal stimulus enacted by the Trump administration – which as we reported yesterday failed to achieve any sustainable increase in US GDP – has grown the deficit considerably.
One final piece of bad news: according to the CBO’s baseline forecast, the US debt picture is dismal and only set to get far worse. The chart below hardly needs any explanation.
In an April 15 Boston Globe article entitled “A Message to All Professional Thinkers: We Either Hang Together or We Hang Separately,” historian Niall Ferguson described the now-routine “outing” of conservative professors at American Universities by the hard-Left Marxists who control most of them. The usual procedure is to first lie about something the conservative (or libertarian) supposedly said to whip a “Twitter mob” into a hateful frenzy. The local media then pick up on it and pile on. Spineless faculty “colleagues” either cower in fear or join the mob by signing a petition to curry favor with the administration (to increase their chances of another 1 percent pay raise). If the conservative or libertarian professor is not tenured, he or she is fired. Otherwise, he or she is marginalized, harassed, discriminated against, and “encouraged” to leave voluntarily to avoid such a miserable existence. No human resources bureaucrats are ever concerned about “hostile work environments” when it comes to academic conservatives or libertarians; only the Left is to be protected from hostility and “insensitive” speech.
The KGB-style faculty and administrators who enforce this pervasive censorship are what Ferguson calls a “Red Army of Mediocrities.” They are mediocrities because very few of them are real scholars but uneducated political rabble rousers who simply stayed in school their entire adult lives, armed with terminal degrees in such phony and fraudulent academic “disciplines” as “Feminist Theology” or “Global Studies.” They are, says Ferguson, descendants of “the illiberal, egalitarian ideology that once suppressed free speech in Eastern Europe.”The Real Lincoln: A Ne…Thomas J. DilorenzoBest Price: $1.99Buy New $7.68(as of 11:05 EDT – Details)
It’s far worse than Ferguson describes in his short op-ed, for anti-conservative and anti-libertarian discrimination in hiring has been rampant for decades. Yours truly recalls attending a Liberty Fund conference about thirty years ago where one of the other participants, Professor Henry Manne, remarked that “we have lost the universities.” That was thirty years ago, and he was referring to the nearly complete Leftist takeover already, at that time, of the American university system and its assault on academic freedom and free speech. The Leftist assault on free speech has festered exponentially since then with speech codes, safe spaces, requirements to report to the authorities “unsafe speech,” the organization of riots to “protest” conservative campus speakers, and other Stasi/KGB-style tactics.
There are a few exceptions here and there, such as Grove City College and Hillsdale College, neither of which has ever accepted government funding, and a few academic programs funded by wealthy alumni, but they are a drop in the academic ocean. Even then, the conservative academics funded by such alumni donors are usually thought of by the majority Leftist faculty as imposters in need of extermination and expulsion.
Such programs may comprise less than one percent of a university’s faculty budget, with the rest funded by government, yet the Leftist faculty complain endlessly about the supposedly illegitimate “bias” caused not by the 99% government funding but by the minute private funding. Political funding of 99% of a university’s budget could not possibly create a pro-government bias in research and teaching, they insist; only private, voluntary donations can do that. This goes for hundreds of incorrectly labeled “private” colleges and universities which, though calling themselves “private,” receive millions or billions in government funding annually. “He who takes the king’s shilling becomes the king’s man” is as true as ever.
Niall Ferguson ends his op-ed with a call for a “Nonconformist Academic Treaty” among university faculty and administrators who still defend freedom of speech. The communistic academic censors must be confronted with “massive retaliation,” just as the Soviet Union was threatened with such by NATO during the Cold War, he says. This is what he means when he says that “we” must hang together or hang separately.
Such a “treaty” would likely garner very few signatures because of the fact that, with few exceptions, American academe is a socialist institution. Almost every last college and university is partly or totally funded by government, and with government funding comes government control of the means of production, the very definition of socialism. Almost all university professors are therefore essentially government bureaucrats and, like all bureaucrats, they understand that the way to survive is to never, ever, break the rules or rock the boat, no matter how rotten the rules may be. They understand that if they do, the Red Army of Mediocrities will take its revenge, fire them if possible, or at least never again give them a merit pay raise. They may also end up being assigned an 8 A.M. class on the main campus along with an evening class at one of the far-away branch campuses on the same day as an added touch of petty revenge.
University boards of trustees are mostly useless since they are easily bamboozled, lied to, or intimidated by academic administrators. Many of them remain quiet, for to complain and not be asked back as a trustee may harm their social lives. (At my own place of employment alumnus Tom Clancy, the famous author, once complained at a trustee meeting that the tuition was so high that the son of a mailman like himself could never afford it. He was dropped from the board the next year). There are no shareholders since universities are either government bureaucracies or “nonprofit” institutions, so there is no shareholder pressure either. It is even confusing as to who the real “consumers” are since the students who sit in the classrooms are rarely the ones paying the extortionate tuition bills – at least until they graduate and are confronted with mountains of government-guaranteed student-loan debt.The Road to Serfdom: T…F. A. Hayek, Bruce Cal…Best Price: $2.31Buy New $2.99(as of 10:05 EDT – Details)
All of this creates a socialistic system of monopoly control of “higher” education that is now firmly in the hands of Leftist ideologues and a large army of uneducated, academic frauds and imposters who are sworn enemies of free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry. As F.A. Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom in a chapter entitled “The End of Truth,” under collectivism of any form, “truth” is not determined by research, discussion, debate, and scientific inquiry, but by the platitudes and decrees handed down by the state. In such a world “contempt for intellectual liberty” is “found everywhere among intellectuals who have embraced a collectivist faith and who are acclaimed as intellectual leaders.” Under such a regime “intolerance, too, is openly extolled,” wrote Hayek in 1944. This is a perfect description of American universities today.
This is the road American academe has been on for several generations now, and no “treaty” among conservative professors, most of whom are, like all government bureaucrats, just counting the days until retirement, is likely to salvage what is left of academic freedom. Salvation will lie in the private institutions of the civil society, educational institutions like the Mises Insitute, the home-schooling movement, the Ron Paul Curriculum, and most importantly, the secession of the masses from the socialist indoctrination academies that American universities, like the “public” schools, have become. Meanwhile, we need more Niall Fergusons to at least ring alarm bells over the necessity of mass resistance.
