Month: January 2022

Kazakh Chaos On Cue Ahead Of Crunch US-Russia Security Negotiations

Kazakh Chaos On Cue Ahead Of Crunch US-Russia Security Negotiations

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The timing of violent protests rocking Russia’s southern neighbor Kazakhstan inevitably raises questions. Russian officials are due to meet American and NATO counterparts within days to discuss far-reaching security proposals in unprecedented geopolitical negotiations.

In a surprise development, however, Russian troops are this week being deployed along with other forces from the six Central Asian states belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization to help restore order in Kazakhstan at the request of its president. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has accused “foreign-trained terrorist gangs” of being responsible for the dramatic unrest in the former Soviet Republic.

It seems that events this week in Kazakhstan are aimed at distracting Moscow or, worse, undermining Russia’s international standing in scheduled talks with the United States and its NATO allies concerning the bigger picture of security and peace in Europe.

Key security proposals were put forward by Moscow three weeks ago to reduce mounting tensions between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies over Ukraine. Moscow has called for a rollback in U.S. and NATO forces near its borders. This came after weeks-long Western media reports claiming that Russia was plotting to militarily invade Ukraine. Moscow has repeatedly rejected those claims as baseless and hysterical. Meanwhile, there are real concerns that the NATO-backed regime in Kiev may be planning a provocation against Russia by launching an offensive on Ukraine’s breakaway southeastern region and its ethnic Russian population. The Kiev regime has been waging a civil war against the region since the NATO-backed coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014.

The U.S.-Russia security discussions are scheduled to take place on January 10 in Geneva. They will be followed by further meetings between Russian and NATO officials. A phone conversation between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his American counterpart Joe Biden at the end of last month gave the forthcoming talks a preeminence, and rightly so too. Moscow has warned that if its “red line” security demands are not responded to then it will use other military-technical methods to safeguard national security. Moscow has put a narrow timeframe on the discussions to yield satisfactory results.

Washington and its NATO allies were evidently taken aback by Moscow’s determination to draw an inviolable line on years of military expansion towards Russia’s borders, the culmination of which has precipitated the latest tensions caused by Ukraine. The gravity of Moscow’s position appears to have been registered by the Western allies who promptly scheduled the security discussions for next week.

Then along comes the upheaval sweeping Kazakhstan this week. The protests erupted on January 2 ostensibly over a hike in transport fuel prices.

Significantly, the speed with which the protests spread across this giant Central Asian country – four times the size of France – and the rapid escalation of deadly violence would indicate an extraordinary orchestration of events. Dozens of police officers have been reportedly killed by armed demonstrators. Security forces have also shot dead allegedly armed protesters. Government buildings and the international airport in the most populous city Almaty have been attacked. All this tumult in the space of two days resulted in a state of emergency being declared on January 5 and the request for security assistance from the CSTO bloc. The bloc comprises Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.

The events have an unerring similarity to U.S.-sponsored regime-change operations that have taken place in other nations, most notably Ukraine, Syria and Belarus, among other countries. Tellingly, the White House issued an immediate denial of involvement before that possibility was even publicly suggested. Now there’s a guilty conscience at work! The American embassy in Kazakhstan had also warned of public protests over the anticipated fuel price increases.

It has been noted by astute observers that the CIA-linked Rand Corporation earlier endorsed this kind of disruption in Kazakhstan as a means for distracting Moscow with regional security apprehensions.

In the next few days, we will see if the security situation in Kazakhstan can be stabilized with support from the CSTO members and political concessions granted by President Tokayev. The fuel hikes have been revoked and the government has been sacked. Thousands of demonstrators have been arrested. Still, there are reports of ongoing armed clashes.

The timing and the who-gains question inescapably point the finger of suspicion at foreign incitement. Washington and its NATO allies are calling for the Kazakh authorities to allow “the right to peaceful protest”. Western media will no doubt crank up reports that portray restoring public order as repression by a “Russian-backed regime”. CTSO troops’ presence can be twisted into a distorted image of Kremlin-instigated “foreign occupation”. No doubt, too, the NATO-backed Kiev regime will cry foul over another “Russian invasion”.

The all-too-easy geopolitical convenience suggests there is no mere coincidence with the watershed negotiations about to get underway between Russia and the United States over Ukraine and the general encroachment of NATO on Russia’s borders.

Those negotiations were set to begin with Moscow having a moral authority to make legitimate security demands on Washington and the U.S.-led NATO alliance. It is right that the historical trend of ramping up military threats against Russia has to end. The turmoil that has suddenly blown up in Kazakhstan seems like an opportune way to undermine Russia’s resolve to challenge the U.S. and NATO over their by-now habitual aggressive policy.

That is the bigger picture that should not be lost amid the chaos unfolding in Kazakhstan.

Tyler Durden
Sun, 01/09/2022 – 07:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3HQZPAf Tyler Durden

The Reactionary Tradition Out to Annihilate American Liberty


book1

A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, by Matthew Rose, Yale University Press, 196 pages, $28

For portions of the MAGA right, the stakes in politics seem unbearably high. They imagine their elections stolen without consequences, their children menaced by transsexuals in the schools, their fathers’ manufacturing jobs shipped away by globalist corporations that mock their values. People whose worldviews sicken them seem to control every citadel of political and cultural power and to brook no opposition.

Even President Donald Trump seemed powerless to shift America back to the country they wanted. And so several institutions and thinkers of the intellectual right have declared that it’s time to take the gloves off in a way even Trump would not. It’s time, they argue, to fight against “liberalism”—not just the attitudes associated with the Democratic Party, but the historical idea of a social order based on people’s ability to make their own choices about what to do with their lives and property, to live and travel where they wish, to choose meanings, family structures, attitudes, and lifeways freed of any obligation to national or ethnic traditions. They want the American right to get tough and to crush progressivism at its root.

Thus, there has been a small intellectual revival of mostly forgotten or despised thinkers often dubbed “reactionary.” In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose of the Morningside Institute assesses five of them: Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis.

Just six years ago, a book covering these characters would have seemed a mere curiosity for those who get a frisson of forbidden delight dancing on the intellectual edge, exploring paths so far from an acceptable national norm that they have the louche appeal of the intellectual freak show, not relevant to actual American electoral politics.

But as Rose notes, a younger right is rising that finds reactionary ideas relevant and appealing: “Republican politicians won’t know them all…but their young aides will,” he writes. “At conservative magazines, senior editors don’t read them, but their junior staff do.” The ranks of the self-styled “new nationalist conservatives” are filled with these reaction-curious types. They “take as a premise,” Rose explains, “that American conservatism as it had defined itself for generations is intellectually dead. Its defense of individual liberty, limited government, and free trade is today a symptom of political decadence.”

Many libertarians have believed they had allies on the right, in fighting for those principles against the progressive left. To the extent that Rose’s reactionaries and their epigones guide the right side of the spectrum, the libertarian is more than ever trapped on a hellish battlefield watching two dominant forces fight to destroy American liberty, for different goals and from different premises.

These reactionary writers see, in Rose’s words, “humans as naturally tribal, not autonomous; individuals as inherently unequal, not equal; politics as grounded in authority, not consent; societies as properly closed, not open.”

Rose regards Spengler, an early 20th century German historian who predicted the death of the West, as the “intellectual godfather” of the reactionary right. Spengler believed that Western civilization had a Faustian drive toward the achievement of greatness. And to Spengler, liberalism—with its supposedly squalid obsessions with political equality and with meeting each other’s needs through peaceful trade—”detests every kind of greatness, everything that towers, rules.”

Rose interprets Spengler as believing “there is no place outside of a particular culture from which human beings can think, feel, or communicate”—an idea generally used to endorse authoritarian attempts to defend cultures from allegedly corrupting external influences. In its obsession with the vital importance of group distinctions and differences, reactionary thought starts to resemble woke arguments for irreducible cultural relativism.

Next: Julius Evola, a 20th century Italian occultist with a substantial far-right following. The pop reactionaries seem to believe that any “normal” person should obviously be disgusted by the excesses or laxness of modern mores. But those without some prerational neurotic aversion to having choices about love, family, religion, how to work, and where to live would more likely dismiss Evola as an absurd freak coping with his own problems and anxieties by insisting human beings are essentially like dogs requiring a system of strictly imposed outside discipline.

Such reactionaries believe, without historical evidence or even a compelling theory, that people are happier and flourish better with fewer choices, with a life less rich with the comforts and options provided by markets and liberalism. It is usually hard to believe even they would be happy in that sort of life, given that they tend to be intellectual misfits and malcontents. Liberal modernity, in Evola’s time and now, has certainly seen lonely people dissatisfied with the choices they’ve taken, but that gets nowhere close to proving that a nonliberal society would more assuredly generate a greater proportion of truly satisfied, flourishing people.

Francis Parker Yockey was an anti-Semitic international man of mystery in various post–World War II underground movements, both fascist and communist, that opposed America’s festering liberalism. He argued that the West in its best sense lost World War II, which he saw as a German effort to, in Rose’s words, “build a society that could escape the slavery of communism and the anomie of liberalism.”

Less important perhaps than his continued ideological influence—he’s the figure in this book you are least likely to hear about from anyone trying to be part of an aboveground political conversation—is the bizarre and colorful figure Yockey cut. He was eventually arrested in 1960 with luggage filled with seven birth certificates, passports from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the U.S., an address book entirely in code, and “drafts of three pornographic short stories.” The best thing Rose can say for him is that his willingness to shape and eventually ruin his own life in pursuit of his vision of Western greatness shows a man who was “deadly sincere, his words having been sealed by the testimony of his life.”

By contrast, Alain de Benoist, one of the fathers of the French New Right, shows where reactionary thinking has the most policy implications. American politicians will not be able to restore preliberal lifeways and destroy the global market economy, but they can pursue immigration policies that keep people of different ethnicities and cultures out, or try to.

De Benoist’s “identitarianism” insists that preventing the free movement of goods and human beings is in service of humanity’s glorious heritage of difference. No true democracy can exist, he says, if the “people” are not truly one distinct people; de Benoist insists, as Rose sums it up, that “human identity is always mediated through group membership” and that “human beings do not exist, even in their most private aspects, as mere individuals.” No one, in other words, can be happy not living roughly the same way as some long-dead ancestor they never met.

The fifth figure in Rose’s quintet is Samuel Francis, best known to the mainstream as a columnist for The Washington Times. Francis wrote presciently in the 1990s about the coming Trumpist movement of “middle American radicals” against global trade and liberal values. In his later years he felt it vital to add that the only valuable middle American was a white middle American.

Reactionary ideas are woven through MAGA and its intellectual enablers. In right-wing publications such as American Greatness and The American Mind, we see arguments that order outweighs liberty, that autarchy and cultural purity outweigh free markets and free movement. Those attracted to these ideas suggest that the “other side” is not “playing by the rules,” and therefore that state action to crush those who believe things the right does not is warranted (with a wounded insistence that They started it!). These neo-reactionaries value, or say they value, the Spartan virtues of toughness and violence over tolerance, trade, and other allegedly weak cosmopolitan ideas that in fact make life rich and salubrious.

Libertarians—alone again, naturally—shouldn’t accept that because reactionaries hate the left so very, very much, they must be embraced as allies. A proper libertarianism seeks the personal liberty that each of those sides wants to squelch. Both reactionaries and progressives are menaces to the civic peace that a flourishing civilization relies on, since both seek to remake the social world to their liking by force.

The post The Reactionary Tradition Out to Annihilate American Liberty appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Reactionary Tradition Out to Annihilate American Liberty


book1

A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, by Matthew Rose, Yale University Press, 196 pages, $28

For portions of the MAGA right, the stakes in politics seem unbearably high. They imagine their elections stolen without consequences, their children menaced by transsexuals in the schools, their fathers’ manufacturing jobs shipped away by globalist corporations that mock their values. People whose worldviews sicken them seem to control every citadel of political and cultural power and to brook no opposition.

Even President Donald Trump seemed powerless to shift America back to the country they wanted. And so several institutions and thinkers of the intellectual right have declared that it’s time to take the gloves off in a way even Trump would not. It’s time, they argue, to fight against “liberalism”—not just the attitudes associated with the Democratic Party, but the historical idea of a social order based on people’s ability to make their own choices about what to do with their lives and property, to live and travel where they wish, to choose meanings, family structures, attitudes, and lifeways freed of any obligation to national or ethnic traditions. They want the American right to get tough and to crush progressivism at its root.

Thus, there has been a small intellectual revival of mostly forgotten or despised thinkers often dubbed “reactionary.” In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose of the Morningside Institute assesses five of them: Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis.

Just six years ago, a book covering these characters would have seemed a mere curiosity for those who get a frisson of forbidden delight dancing on the intellectual edge, exploring paths so far from an acceptable national norm that they have the louche appeal of the intellectual freak show, not relevant to actual American electoral politics.

But as Rose notes, a younger right is rising that finds reactionary ideas relevant and appealing: “Republican politicians won’t know them all…but their young aides will,” he writes. “At conservative magazines, senior editors don’t read them, but their junior staff do.” The ranks of the self-styled “new nationalist conservatives” are filled with these reaction-curious types. They “take as a premise,” Rose explains, “that American conservatism as it had defined itself for generations is intellectually dead. Its defense of individual liberty, limited government, and free trade is today a symptom of political decadence.”

Many libertarians have believed they had allies on the right, in fighting for those principles against the progressive left. To the extent that Rose’s reactionaries and their epigones guide the right side of the spectrum, the libertarian is more than ever trapped on a hellish battlefield watching two dominant forces fight to destroy American liberty, for different goals and from different premises.

These reactionary writers see, in Rose’s words, “humans as naturally tribal, not autonomous; individuals as inherently unequal, not equal; politics as grounded in authority, not consent; societies as properly closed, not open.”

Rose regards Spengler, an early 20th century German historian who predicted the death of the West, as the “intellectual godfather” of the reactionary right. Spengler believed that Western civilization had a Faustian drive toward the achievement of greatness. And to Spengler, liberalism—with its supposedly squalid obsessions with political equality and with meeting each other’s needs through peaceful trade—”detests every kind of greatness, everything that towers, rules.”

Rose interprets Spengler as believing “there is no place outside of a particular culture from which human beings can think, feel, or communicate”—an idea generally used to endorse authoritarian attempts to defend cultures from allegedly corrupting external influences. In its obsession with the vital importance of group distinctions and differences, reactionary thought starts to resemble woke arguments for irreducible cultural relativism.

Next: Julius Evola, a 20th century Italian occultist with a substantial far-right following. The pop reactionaries seem to believe that any “normal” person should obviously be disgusted by the excesses or laxness of modern mores. But those without some prerational neurotic aversion to having choices about love, family, religion, how to work, and where to live would more likely dismiss Evola as an absurd freak coping with his own problems and anxieties by insisting human beings are essentially like dogs requiring a system of strictly imposed outside discipline.

Such reactionaries believe, without historical evidence or even a compelling theory, that people are happier and flourish better with fewer choices, with a life less rich with the comforts and options provided by markets and liberalism. It is usually hard to believe even they would be happy in that sort of life, given that they tend to be intellectual misfits and malcontents. Liberal modernity, in Evola’s time and now, has certainly seen lonely people dissatisfied with the choices they’ve taken, but that gets nowhere close to proving that a nonliberal society would more assuredly generate a greater proportion of truly satisfied, flourishing people.

Francis Parker Yockey was an anti-Semitic international man of mystery in various post–World War II underground movements, both fascist and communist, that opposed America’s festering liberalism. He argued that the West in its best sense lost World War II, which he saw as a German effort to, in Rose’s words, “build a society that could escape the slavery of communism and the anomie of liberalism.”

Less important perhaps than his continued ideological influence—he’s the figure in this book you are least likely to hear about from anyone trying to be part of an aboveground political conversation—is the bizarre and colorful figure Yockey cut. He was eventually arrested in 1960 with luggage filled with seven birth certificates, passports from Germany, Britain, Canada, and the U.S., an address book entirely in code, and “drafts of three pornographic short stories.” The best thing Rose can say for him is that his willingness to shape and eventually ruin his own life in pursuit of his vision of Western greatness shows a man who was “deadly sincere, his words having been sealed by the testimony of his life.”

By contrast, Alain de Benoist, one of the fathers of the French New Right, shows where reactionary thinking has the most policy implications. American politicians will not be able to restore preliberal lifeways and destroy the global market economy, but they can pursue immigration policies that keep people of different ethnicities and cultures out, or try to.

De Benoist’s “identitarianism” insists that preventing the free movement of goods and human beings is in service of humanity’s glorious heritage of difference. No true democracy can exist, he says, if the “people” are not truly one distinct people; de Benoist insists, as Rose sums it up, that “human identity is always mediated through group membership” and that “human beings do not exist, even in their most private aspects, as mere individuals.” No one, in other words, can be happy not living roughly the same way as some long-dead ancestor they never met.

The fifth figure in Rose’s quintet is Samuel Francis, best known to the mainstream as a columnist for The Washington Times. Francis wrote presciently in the 1990s about the coming Trumpist movement of “middle American radicals” against global trade and liberal values. In his later years he felt it vital to add that the only valuable middle American was a white middle American.

Reactionary ideas are woven through MAGA and its intellectual enablers. In right-wing publications such as American Greatness and The American Mind, we see arguments that order outweighs liberty, that autarchy and cultural purity outweigh free markets and free movement. Those attracted to these ideas suggest that the “other side” is not “playing by the rules,” and therefore that state action to crush those who believe things the right does not is warranted (with a wounded insistence that They started it!). These neo-reactionaries value, or say they value, the Spartan virtues of toughness and violence over tolerance, trade, and other allegedly weak cosmopolitan ideas that in fact make life rich and salubrious.

Libertarians—alone again, naturally—shouldn’t accept that because reactionaries hate the left so very, very much, they must be embraced as allies. A proper libertarianism seeks the personal liberty that each of those sides wants to squelch. Both reactionaries and progressives are menaces to the civic peace that a flourishing civilization relies on, since both seek to remake the social world to their liking by force.

The post The Reactionary Tradition Out to Annihilate American Liberty appeared first on Reason.com.

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Despotism Is The New Normal: Looming Threats To Freedom In 2022

Despotism Is The New Normal: Looming Threats To Freedom In 2022

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution.”

– Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America

Despotism has become our new normal.

Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.

These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.

This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.

The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual freedoms now and in the year to come.

Censorship. The most controversial issues of our day—gay rights, abortion, race, religion, sexuality, political correctness, police brutality, et al.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom of speech but only when it favors the views and positions they support. Thus, while on paper, we are technically free to speak, in reality, we are only as free to speak as the government and tech giants such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow. Yet it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Unfortunately, censorship is just the beginning. Once you allow the government and its corporate partners to determine who is worthy enough to participate in society, anything goes.

The Emergency State. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves. Therein lies the danger of the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security. This is the power grab hiding in plain sight.

Pre-crime. The government is about to rapidly expand its policing efforts to focus on pre-crime and thought crimes. Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism, a broad label that can be applied to anything or anyone the government perceives to be a threat to its power.

The Surveillance State. This all-seeing fourth branch of government, comprised of a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors, watches everything we do, reads everything we write, listens to everything we say, and monitors everywhere we go. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Genetic privacy. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government—helped along by Congress (which adopted legislation allowing police to collect and test DNA immediately following arrests), the courts (which have ruled that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime), and local police agencies (which are chomping at the bit to acquire this new crime-fighting gadget)—has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

Bodily integrity. It doesn’t matter what your trigger issue is—whether it’s vaccines, abortion, crime, religion, immigration, terrorism or some other overtly politicized touchstone used by politicians as a rallying cry for votes—we should all be concerned when governments and businesses (i.e., the Corporate State) join forces to compel individuals to sacrifice their right to bodily integrity on the altar of so-called safety and national security. This debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccines to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

Gun control. After declaring more than a decade ago that citizens have a Second Amendment right to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense, the Supreme Court has now been tasked with deciding whether the Constitution also protects the right to carry a gun outside the home. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun rights in particular, and the rights of the citizenry overall, the U.S. government has adopted a “do what I say, not what I do” mindset. Nowhere is this double standard more evident than in the government’s attempts to arm itself to the teeth, all the while viewing as suspect anyone who dares to legally own a gun, let alone use one in self-defense. Indeed, while it still technically remains legal to own a firearm in America, possessing one can now get you pulled over, searched, arrested, subjected to all manner of surveillance, treated as a suspect without ever having committed a crime, shot at, and killed.

Show Your Papers Society. With every passing day, more and more private businesses and government agencies on both the state and federal level are requiring proof of a COVID-19 vaccination in order for individuals to work, travel, shop, attend school, and generally participate in the life of the country. By allowing government agents to establish a litmus test for individuals to be able to engage in commerce, movement and any other right that corresponds to life in a supposedly free society, it lays the groundwork for a “show me your papers” society in which you are required to identify yourself at any time to any government worker who demands it for any reason. Such tactics can quickly escalate into a power-grab that empowers government agents to force anyone and everyone to prove they are in compliance with every statute and regulation on the books.

Singularity. Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that Elon Musk has announced his intentions of implanting brain chips in humans sometime in 2022. The digital universe—the metaverse—is expected to be the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one. Remaining singularly human and retaining your individuality and dominion over yourself—mind, body and soul—in the face of corporate and government technologies that aim to invade, intrude, monitor, manipulate and control us may be one of the greatest challenges before us.

Despotism. Even in the face of militarism, fascism, technotyranny, surveillance, etc., the gravest threat facing us as a nation may well be despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money. The American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

“We the people” are the hope for a better year.

Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In such a scenario, no one wins.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/08/2022 – 23:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3HQuwpd Tyler Durden

YouTuber Accused Of Staging Plane Crash For Likes And Views

YouTuber Accused Of Staging Plane Crash For Likes And Views

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating YouTuber and former Olympic snowboarder Trevor Jacob after he posted a video online showing him bailing out of a plane after alleged engine issues. 

“The FAA is investigating this event,” the agency said. “The agency does not discuss open investigations.” 

The incident occurred in Los Padres National Forest near Cuyama, California, in November. It wasn’t until Dec. 24 when he uploaded the video onto YouTube, showing the alleged engine failure above rocky terrain. The YouTuber then opens the plane’s door and bails out with a parachute—cameras located on the plane capture the entire incident. 

Jacob lands to safety while the plane smashes into the side of a mountain. He locates the crash and shows the wreckage.

The video has gone viral, with nearly 600k views, 5.9k likes, and 36k dislikes. The reason for a large number of dislikes is that followers believe the video was possibly staged.

Robert Perry, a flight instructor based out of Santa Ynez Airport, California, said he is suspect of Jacob’s crash. He pointed the biggest red: the pilot was wearing a parachute during takeoff. 

Others on social media said Jacob “faked a plane crash for clout.” 

What stands out to us is why did Jacob strap on a parachute before taking off? That’s unusual among private pilots. 

Watch the full video here. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/08/2022 – 23:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3t7cjQb Tyler Durden

How The Geopolitics Of 2021 Will Shape The Year Ahead For Bitcoin

How The Geopolitics Of 2021 Will Shape The Year Ahead For Bitcoin

Authored by Nick Fonseca via BitcoinMagazine.com,

Developments around the global regulation, hash rate and adoption of Bitcoin made for a unique year in 2021. So how will 2022 play out?

This past year was certainly a unique one for bitcoin. We saw the first bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) get approved in the United States, the largest-ever Bitcoin conference in Miami, the much anticipated Taproot upgrade, all-time highs nearing $70,000, oh, and a nation state made bitcoin legal tender. Despite all this exciting news, some things never change — the FUD was as prevalent as ever. Bitcoin saw a variety of bans throughout 2021 and, to no one’s surprise, China stole the show in this regard.

Below is a list of bitcoin bans in 2021 alone:

With 2021 nearly in the rearview mirror, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what geopolitical bitcoin moves will occur throughout 2022. Below, I offer up a few questions to think about as we approach the new year:

  • On a global scale, will we see bitcoin regulation turn friendly or grow increasingly hostile?

  • Will hash rate continue to accumulate in the U.S. (possibly eclipsing a 50% share) or will we see a greater distribution moving forward?

  • Will another country adopt bitcoin as legal tender? And if so, which one? There couldn’t be multiple throughout 2022, could there?

These questions fall into three categories: hash rate, regulation and adoption. I’ve addressed each below in more detail.

REGULATION

If we step back and look at 2021 regulation on a global scale, would you think the overall trend was friendly or hostile? Even with the passing of El Salvador’s Bitcoin law, I’d say the global regulatory environment is still quite hostile toward Bitcoin. Iran, Turkey and Nigeria all made hostile moves in 2021. India and the State of New York considered hostile regulatory action as well. We all know what happened in China.

While the news of bans and corresponding FUD was prevalent, there is still a sense of optimism in the air. After the dust settled post-El Salvador’s bitcoin law, the obvious next question was: Who’s next? Many assumptions have been made about it being another Latin American country. This certainly makes sense.

In retrospect, El Salvador was almost the perfect country to make this huge leap. It is a small nation that has struggled economically and doesn’t have autonomy over its currency. As a dollarized country, Salvadorans are subject to the whim of the U.S. dollar and the Federal Reserve. I’m not going to debate whether severing ties with the colón in 2001 was the right move (Alex Gladstein covered that topic well here), but I certainly think taking a step toward a Bitcoin standard was.

El Salvador, like many countries in Latin America, is often harmed by U.S. foreign policy and International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention. The Cantillon effect created by the U.S. hurt the people of El Salvador by inflating their local currency (and any benefits accompanied by this hidden tax are not seen by Salvadorans), enacting sanctions and controlling trade policy. The IMF harms the people of El Salvador by keeping the country indebted and degrading its credit quality to ensure unfavorable terms for future loans (or even holding hostage future lending prospects).

“El Salvador bond spreads to U.S. Treasuries hit a record high on Thursday on growing investor fears the Central American nation will not reach a potential $1 billion loan agreement with the International Monetary Fund and faces negative credit implications linked to its use of bitcoin.”

–Reuters

So, what did El Salvador do about this? It opted out (though not completely). It took a step in the direction of financial sovereignty and a corresponding step away from nefarious U.S. statecraft and IMF financial tyranny. But El Salvador is not the only struggling, dolarized country in Latin America. So, again I’ll ask, who’s next?

Politicians across Latin America have been equipping their laser eyes, starting to engage with the bitcoin community and proposing pro-bitcoin legislation. Little has materialized as of this writing (on the surface, at least), but we all know bitcoin acts “gradually, then suddenly.”

Congressman Carlitos Rejala of Paraguay, Mexican lawmaker Eduardo Murat Hinojosa, Panamanian congressman Gabriel Silva and Brazil’s Federal Deputy Aureo Ribeiro have all signaled support for bitcoin in one way or another.

It very well could be one of these countries that becomes the next Bitcoin hub, whether it be via a legal tender law or otherwise friendly regulation. And just maybe, we won’t be talking about another single country making bitcoin legal tender, but a handful when we look back at 2022.

Even if Alexander Höptner’s prediction of five more developing countries adopting bitcoin as legal tender by the end of 2022 turns out to be accurate, there will still be FUD (there will always be FUD). We likely haven’t seen the last of Bitcoin bans and they may become more sophisticated and more strictly enforced as financial elites across the globe feel the increased pressure put upon them by this new freedom money.

“In reality, U.S. economic statecraft is alive and well in the region, and helped foment the dire conditions that sparked the recent wave of uprisings.”

–Alexander Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, on recent protests across Latin America

HASH RATE

In the fall of 2019, Mainland China controlled approximately 75% of the global Bitcoin hash rate. That number fell, but was still over 50% as we kicked off 2021. Now, in the early days of 2022, it sits at 0%.

This was one of the best stories in bitcoin in 2021. Sure, the FUDsters were sounding the alarm when China banned bitcoin mining this past summer, but that was to be expected and they failed to zoom out. China enacting a legitimate and all-out ban on bitcoin mining certainly hurt the overall hash rate at the time, so the price dropped accordingly. Alarms were sounded. Articles were written. The death of bitcoin was yet again declared.

Not so fast. Many bitcoiners knew this would actually be a good thing. It may not have been obvious from the outside looking in, but it was clear as day to those who get it. A mass exodus of bitcoin mining from China would result in a greater distribution of global hash rate. This is a huge deal. Not to mention that this does away with one of the most prominent anti-bitcoin arguments — that China has too much control of Bitcoin infrastructure or might co-opt the network by a hostile miner takeover.

As is evident in the below visual, many countries benefited from the China mining ban: Russia, Kazakhstan and the United States chief among them. The U.S. started the year with roughly an 11% share of the global hash rate. This number (as of August, per the most recently available data) sits at 35%. What are the odds this number continues to grow? When does it go from something to celebrate to a point of concern?

 Image source

As an American, I was happy to see miners coming to the U.S. However, stepping back and recognizing just how fast the U.S. tripled its hash rate, I believe there’s some cause for concern. I wouldn’t want any one country to lay claim over China’s vacated throne of the dominant player in global hash rate. Is it possible that 75% of the hash rate being in the U.S. would actually be worse than when that same concentration was in China?

The U.S. might be behind the EU in terms of sustainability regulation, but it seems intent on closing that gap fast. With so many corporations leaning into ESG, the topic of ESG and Bitcoin is certainly not going anywhere. This would call into question bitcoin’s fungibility if “green bitcoin” were to be priced at a premium. It would also be in direct conflict with the free market ethos that Bitcoin naturally promotes.

While the Chinese regulatory environment was uncertain and oftentimes really harsh toward bitcoin, it ultimately decided to push miners out as opposed to co-opting them. Since miners benefit from economies of scale, they’ll likely trend toward centralization over time. This makes regulatory capture more of a concern, whether it be in China, the U.S. or another other country. The next time a major geopolitical move is taken by a global mining power, it might take the form of state control rather than a ban. Even though El Salvador mining bitcoin with geothermal energy is undoubtedly really cool, state-owned bitcoin mining facilities is not a trend I want to see emerge.

This might be a bit farther out than 2022. It might be unrealistic altogether. Maybe it’s even one of those chances bitcoiners would be willing to take, as it might not arise until we’re at or near hyperbitcoinization. Still, it’s worth some consideration as we look ahead to the short- and long-term futures of bitcoin.

ADOPTION

Bitcoin adoption has exploded over the years and is now estimated to be north of 100 million users. Bitcoin users include institutional and retail investors, humanitarians, bankers, government officials, large and small businesses, refugees and everyone in between. Even if we were to say “that 100 million seems really low” and infer it might be closer to double that, we’d only be at roughly 4% to 5% of adults owning bitcoin globally. That’s comparable to the internet in 1999.

If we continue the trends seen in Bitcoin adoption over the past couple years, the number of global users will reach one billion sooner than we know it. Trying to predict what will happen to bitcoin’s price, hash rate or adoption in the short term is a fool’s errand, but we can say with near certainty that Bitcoin’s user base will expand over longer periods of time.

It’s impossible to know exactly how many users there are, but below are some trends that clearly illustrate how adoption is rapidly increasing:

  • Six percent of U.S. investors (defined as those with $10,000 invested in stocks, bonds or mutual funds) say they own bitcoin, up from 2% in 2018.
  • Institutional investors are beginning to favor bitcoin over gold.
  • Bitcoin’s use for everyday savings, peer-to-peer transactions and remittance payments is becoming more prevalent in the places that need it most (for example, adoption shot up 1,200% year-over-year in Africa).

The final bullet point above goes hand in hand with the growth of the Lightning Network. This has been my personal favorite trend in Bitcoin adoption this year. Nation state and institutional adoption will certainly have a greater upward pull on bitcoin’s price, but the Lightning Network is how we onboard millions and eventually billions around the globe, enabling near-instant and zero-cost micropayments. The Lightning Network has more than tripled in capacity this year and the below image shows just how robust development is within the Lightning ecosystem.

Image source

The velocity with which Bitcoin is adopted by the average person may have less impact on the price compared to when whales make big splashes, but it is a signal that needs to be closely monitored. The President of El Salvador cited bitcoin’s adoption in Bitcoin Beach as a use case for the country’s legal tender law. Regulation and adoption go hand-in-hand, and often it is assumed that regulation will impact adoption, and not the other way around. That statement might sound logical, but bitcoin has been known to challenge our assumptions.

Places like Nigeria, Pakistan, India and China have all been quite hostile toward Bitcoin and yet, their citizens are among the most prevalent users. Why is that? That’s because bitcoin is freedom money. The need for bitcoin in each of those countries is higher than that in the West. 

Bitcoin is not just number go up (in monetary terms) technology, it is adoption go up technology. I’ve heard the phrase “bitcoin is inevitable” frequently used within the community. I’m not one to take things for granted, but that is a statement I agree with given a long enough time horizon. If I game out polar scenarios, one with favorable and one with unfavorable regulation, I end up at the same result of increased adoption.

Many individuals and even more institutions need friendly regulation for them to get on board, whereas financial tyranny, extreme inflation and societal repression will force the disenfranchised to opt-out of their current monetary system.

Closing out this point with one of my big questions for 2022: Will bitcoin adoption explode this upcoming year? Or will it go up at a more controlled pace?

I highly doubt I’ll be looking back at 2022 a year from now and be writing an article about how the number of global bitcoin users actually went down since I wrote this piece. What I’ll be looking out for instead is certain dominos falling that push the rate of adoption to something we’ve never seen before.

WRAPPING UP

While I addressed hash rate, adoption and regulation separately in this article, they certainly can’t be separated in real life. Each of these three ideas are inherently linked.

I’m incredibly bullish on bitcoin looking ahead to 2022 and even more so as we look farther out. That doesn’t mean we don’t have anything to be weary of and that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of work left to do, people to onboard, and FUD to fight, but I remain as optimistic as ever. My hope is that 2022 is another great year for Bitcoin and that one year from today I can pen a similar piece as we head into 2023.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/08/2022 – 22:30

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China’s Lunar Lander Makes First On-Site Detection Of Moon Water

China’s Lunar Lander Makes First On-Site Detection Of Moon Water

China’s fifth lunar exploration mission of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program has found the first on-site evidence of water on the moon’s surface, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed Science Advances journal on Friday. 

The study, titled  “In situ detection of water on the Moon by the Chang’E-5 lander,” led by a joint research team of scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS) detected water on the moon via reflectance spectral data from the lunar lander. Here’s a more in-depth explanation of the discovery from the study: 

We estimate up to 120 parts per million (ppm) of water (OH + H2O) in the lunar regolith, which is mostly attributed to solar wind implantation. A light-colored and surface-pitted rock (named as CE5-Rock) is evident near the lander.

Images and water content at the Chang’E-5 landing site

The reflectance spectra suggest that CE5-Rock could be transported from an older basalt unit. CE5-Rock exhibits a stronger absorption, near 2.85 μm, than the surrounding regolith, with estimation of ~180 ppm of water if the model for estimating water content of regolith is applicable to rock samples, which may suggest an additional source from the lunar interior. 

The low water content of the regolith may suggest the degassing of mantle reservoir beneath the Chang’E-5 landing site. 

There have been many orbital observations that have detected evidence of water on the moon. NASA recently confirmed the presence of water ice. China’s discovery is the first evidence of on-site water detection. 

China is expected to plan additional missions to examine the content and distribution of lunar surface water. 

Meanwhile, China’s been conducting missions across the solar system. Last week, its Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter took stunning high-definition images of the red planet.   

China wants to become dominant in space as it recently launched a new high-tech space station. Just wait until Beijing decides to militarize the heavens above us. 

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/08/2022 – 22:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3HMjIbN Tyler Durden

The Eight Degrees Of Ignorance And Stupidity

The Eight Degrees Of Ignorance And Stupidity

Authored by Darren Smith via JonathanTurley.org,

Our host on numerous occasions makes a strong case in labeling today’s zeitgeist as “The Age of Rage”. It would certainly seem to be so if one focuses on what stereotypically comes out of the news media and political figures we lend our ears to. Yet I would go a step further and suggest the root cause of some of this rage is composed of two elements: power-lust and simple human stupidity.

I believe many people fail to recognize how intertwined is the lust for power and the enabling forces of stupidity. Stupidity can be manipulated to achieve that power. It is said that money is the blood of the powerful. Yet, why spend money when too many can be so easily controlled or recruited for free simply by instead appealing to ignorant or stupid individuals.

Both sadly and obviously however, ignorance and stupidity is not limited to the news or politics, it is manifest in human society generally. The trick is to recognize and extricate it from our lives whenever possible. So in a mostly cynical and possibly comical study of the problem, I propose there are levels and flavors of both ignorance and stupidity and to apply such a study is a first step toward minimizing its damaging potential.

If you could excuse the pretense, I might suggest this study to also be corollary to Carlo Cipolla’s “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity“. I will then attempt to quantify Ignorance and Stupidity into both cardinal and ordinal enumerations. For those unfamiliar with Mr. Cipolla’s laws, here follows a basic primer:

  1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

  2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

  3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

  4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

  5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

While I believe Mr. Cipolla’s laws provide some interesting insight, it treats stupidity as an absolute; that is, without a gradient as to how badly it manifests. So I offer to you, the reader, a possible method to quantify ignorance and stupidity so that you may successfully counter it in a reasonably measured fashion.

The Eight Degrees of Ignorance and Stupidity

0: Used for reference only, zero degree represents an organism that lacks any mechanism for thought or cognition, relying only on reflex or stimulus-response to changes in its environment. Plants and simple animals comprise this level. There have been debates in some circles as to whether or not plants exhibit a behavior or communicate based upon stress or environmental challenges, though it is an interesting proposal I will leave that debate to others.

First Degree Ignorance: In this example a person or animal having 1st degree ignorance is where the person due to infancy or perhaps early childhood is not physically capable of understanding the facts or information presented to them due to either the transient condition of their age or stage of development or that they lack a sufficiently matured biological structure within their brain necessary to process the information. The state for which a person or animal resides in is not one to be judged as a failure or shortcoming. It is simply the nature of the person or animal at this stage in their lifetime.

Second Degree Ignorance: The simplest definition of this degree is that the person or animal is capable of understanding the facts but is not aware of their existence. Every person or animal living has this at some time or concerning some form of information. Not all facts can ever be known. Yet it is incumbent upon intelligent organisms to manage the known/unknown deficit to be successful.

Third Degree Ignorance: At this stage the person can be taught how to recite an outcome or answer but does not fully understand the underlying reason, process, or cause for the fact or event. The knowledge the person possesses is casual and limited, and hence they can be vulnerable to situations where the outcome is defective or malformed. Yet, the person lacks the ability to correct it by repairing the mechanism.

Fourth Degree Ignorance: At this stage, the beginnings of negligence come into play, where the person or animal causes unnecessary harm to themselves or others by willfully failing attend to learning or intellectual growth required by their environment or social station.

Fifth Degree (Stupidity): Fifth degree separates human beings from most animals. While this degree’s definition relies mostly upon nomenclature, such as instinct versus cognitively derived strategy, it does require a certain intellectual threshold be met to transition from ordinary ignorance (inability to conceive a proper result), to stupidity (ability to conceive a proper result but willingly refusing to do so by disregarding the truth or the process of deriving truth). This is the most prevalent level of stupid among the general population.

The inchoate notion of recklessness incorporates into this degree.

Another form of expression within this degree is that while the person displaying stupidity might not immediately be contributing to the stupid act, it is also that the act resulted from the culmination of a series of events whereby the stupid person continually failed to exercise attention to truth and was somewhat predestined to commit to stupidity by default.

Sixth Degree (Unyielding Stupidity): At this stage the Unyielding Stupid express total unwillingness to accept any fact presented to them that is contrary to their own presumptions, regardless of even monumental levels of proof from all other sources. No amount of convincing will succeed in dislodging their false belief or facilitate their acceptance of truth. In fact, the strength in which they will hold their falsehood is nearly proportionate to the amount of effort wasted by others trying to convince them otherwise.

They also tend to accept new information as “factual” based on a very low initial bar of proof, especially if presented to them by a source they blindly assign credibility. Once falsehood becomes resident in their mind it is nearly impossible to rehabilitate by contrary, yet factual evidence. From this they incorporate falsehoods into their thinking and behavior; which of course leads to feedback loops of bad decision making and the consternation of all around them.

Normally minded individuals will certainly experience frustration and annoyance in having to be forced into proximity with the Unyielding Stupid. It is one of the rare quantifiable aspects of human emotion: the aggravation is measured as the inverse of the square of the distance the victim finds themselves from the stupid person’s mouth or keyboard. For one’s own mental wellbeing this flavor of stupid is better observed from a safe distance and at best if not at all.

As detrimental as these persons are, they fortunately lack high levels of motivation and tend to be rather benign in their ability to infect others’ tranquility of reason. This is not to say that they keep to themselves but their continual blundering tends to cap the damaging potential to those around them. Great care must be taken of course to guard at all costs against the entrance of the Unyielding Stupid into one’s life or worse, government and politics. That systemic degree of dysfunction which envelopes their lives usually serves as a moderator to their damaging ability. Theirs is a counterintuitive example of laziness being a benefit to others and society, or at least a buffer against damaging potential.

Also counterintuitively, these individuals are also easily manipulated by others who they’ve assigned expertise or kinship. They tend to place greater importance on the person or ideal they devote themselves to rather than the information or events presented by that person. So by extension they blindly follow a few because they both lack the ability to effectively think for themselves and that everyone else who might disagree is wrong.

Individuals routinely manifesting Unyielding Stupidity relegate themselves to having their sole prominent achievement as proving the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Seventh Degree (Militant Stupidity): This by far is not only the worst level of a stupid person it is also the most dangerous.

A person espousing Militant Stupidity possesses all the traits of the Unyielding Stupid, but rather than otherwise being somewhat benign, actively prosecutes against capability and intellect while forcing stupidity upon the general population. They view the notion of free thinking, scientific methodology, reason, or working debate as existential threats that must be exterminated at any cost. They have no tolerance of any idea that is not closely held by them or their cohorts and seek the maximum punishment against those they perceive as threats or unwilling to submit to idiocy. They become unhinged easily and quickly resort to anger and shouting. In fact, they seem to be almost permanently offended or outraged when dealing with those outside their inner circle. Yet just like their lesser brethren, the Unyielding Stupid, they surrender themselves into being manipulated. And to their greater detriment, their militancy facilitates their vulnerability to be prompted into action.

An auxiliary to Militant Stupidity is what is known as a “Useful Idiot”, that is a disrespected individual who can be easily summoned to blindly perform dirty-work on behalf of unscrupulous yet powerful individuals or organizations. Organizations that can thereby maintain plausible deniability of responsibility for the damage the Useful Idiot germinates. These are the most recruitable of Useful Idiot.

The Militant Stupid proffer themselves as highly intelligent and also command a delusional birthright mandate to lead others. They are completely incapable of benevolent, effective leadership yet are actually otherwise sheep who believe they are wolves or the shepherd. This narcissism is the yoke from which they can be controlled.

A good laugh can be generated by easily beckoning Useful Idiots and the Militant Stupid into identifying themselves among a crowd or audience simply by voicing a generic reference to stupid people in general. Both types of creature will be the first to jump up in outrage and either demand the speaker be punished or they will also proclaim that they are the smartest people in the room. It works nearly every time and seems to stem from a hair-trigger like proclivity on their part to be irrational and easily offended—“offended” being their preferred state of being. Deep down, there might be a faint yet secret notion within some of them that they possibly are not the smartest or brightest, but they perceive this as a vulnerability that must not be revealed or exposed by others. Consequentially, they overreact to this perceived threat by attacking others with shotgun-like precision. When having provoked the Militant Stupid into identifying themselves within the crowd, some of them become so ferociously animated in their rage and screaming that you begin to wonder when the demon possessing their body will tear its way out and unleash pandemonium upon the fleeing crowd. Pitiful and annoying perhaps, but at least the drama can certainly break the monotony of an otherwise boring town council meeting or lecture. So the useful idiot does have some utility, I suppose.

Eighth Degree (Self-Actualized Stupidity): This seemingly contradictory and oxymoronic term nomenclates a rare and paradoxical creature of bad habit, the Self-Actualized Stupid. This strangely benevolent person lends their self to a unique form of justice and that propensity, I suspect, is hardcoded into the DNA of humanity as a form of error correction; halting further replication into the biosphere. The recessive allele of this gene expresses itself as the Self-Actualized Stupid, and the dominant expresses as the Schadenfreude Trait within the realm of human thought.

The Self-actualized Stupid generally possess a higher than average level of general intelligence, a requisite attribute to construct and conduct their own demise. With them the endgame’s culmination of their stupidity ranges from an absolute reputation worthy of universal ridicule, to the other pole being a successful laureate for the Darwin Awards.

In the former, they quickly achieve fame through misfortune by committing acts or making statements that are so preposterous and exaltedly stupid they evoke thunderous levels of laughter and elation in society, vanquishing any possible taint or perceivable threat this type of stupidity might engender. Not only is their own credibility eviscerated, but the whole of society buoys itself in joy from the occasional reminder of the humor brought forth again by the replaying of such a stupid act or statement. It is akin to the stupid creating a Big Bang of a blunder on video, with YouTube as the Cosmic Microwave Background reverberating its echoes.

One shining example of a ridiculed, self-actualizedly stupid person was a man who several years ago posted a YouTube video of his challenging a large cactus to a test of wills, or quills so to speak. I do not know which species of cactus this was, but it appeared very menacing—being more bush-like than tall, while wielding a ferocious arsenal of thick, inch-and-a-half long needles more accurately described as nails. He announced his grievance to the audience. As it was the cactus, being level 0, was unable to accept such a challenge, it was nevertheless clear from the beginning who was not going to get satisfaction in this duel.

I suspect this need to battle the cactus was inspired from an earlier meme where lesser stupids posted videos of their forceful grappling of cactus houseplants with their bare hands and proclaiming supremacy in overcoming the ensuing pain. Not to be outdone, our Self-actualized Stupid candidate drove into the hinterlands in search of a more formidable opponent. Upon locating such, he positioned his car next to the cactus, climbed atop the car and belly flopped himself into a new definition of agony and suffering. In a way it appeared the cactus swallowed him whole in a manner similar to how a Venus Fly Trap ensnares its prey. Though his seconds managed to extricate him…there he lay, frozen in pain, shrieking in despair, reduced to being a human bed of nails begging to be plucked. Prior to this spectacle of foolhardiness he somehow managed to summon the inspiration to at least put on a facemask, boxing gloves, and goggles. Notwithstanding, he could not escape his nature; the recessive alleles prevailed and his stupendous stupidly neglected to realize that going into this challenge shirtless and in shorts would not end well for him. Dozens and dozens of quills remained impaled in his body, to be yanked out to the gruesome tune of his wailing. I admittedly was a bit disappointed the producers of the video did not provide a musical score to this act, perhaps some baroque chamber music with a harpsichord plucking a note for each quill extracted. A missed opportunity for sure, yet macabre and perhaps fitting I would say: for I came to realize after witnessing such a grand spectacle that this man was decidedly beyond all others.

I observed then that this person was clearly stupider than every other individual within the Animal Kingdom. No animal, not salamander, not ape, nor thing that slithers would ever commit itself to such a depravedly foolhardy game—cactus diving—at least not intentionally. An animal would at best be sufficiently cunning to avoid such cactuses or at least if it had never previously encountered such it would approach cautiously. At a minimum, after perhaps a slight stinging to the snout the experience would impart forever in the animal’s mind a thing to be avoided. Yet it takes a human being, having a brain capable of both driving a car to approach this cactus and a mind stupid enough to deliberately leap into it with the hopes of generating more likes on a YouTube.

I suppose he succeeded in affording several schadenfreude-driven people free entertainment for a couple minutes. But more importantly the damage he did was his own to suffer and he set a precedent for lesser stupid people not to follow in his manner. For even they would break from their tradition of self-described omnipotence and recognize this level of stupidity was beyond theirs to attempt. The wider audience…they were at least offered a fleeting distraction from the constant strain of having to deal with the malignant banality of the Unyielding and Militant Stupid otherwise infesting life.

On balance I would be remiss to not offer a degree of respect of the Self-Actualized Stupid. It is difficult, if not impossible for ordinary people, and even greatly creative thinkers, to convincingly mimic the skill level and artistic expression commanded by the Self-Actualized Stupid. We are constrained by our own sense of self-preservation and reason, and thus our capacity to conjure the ideas and thoughts of these savants will never compare. They on the other hand are unbound by caution and reasonability, modern-day Icaruses to the Suns of Social Media. Best of all, they are benign.

So I submit for your review the Eight Degrees of Ignorance and Stupidity. May God have mercy on our souls.

Tyler Durden
Sat, 01/08/2022 – 21:30

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3rjxpsn Tyler Durden