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The Price Of Sophistry | The Z Blog

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

That truth in the current crisis is that the clever arguments and complex logical constructs of the last half century contained no truth value. The sophist of our age profited greatly from their arguments, but the result is the ungovernable mess that is modern America.

https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28897

Z Man

In modern usage, the terms sophism and sophistry are used interchangeably with “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading.” A sophist is someone who relies upon fallacious arguments or reasoning to win a debate. Someone can be accused of sophistry because they are too stupid to see the flaws in their reasoning. Other times they are accused of deliberately misleading arguments. The motivation is malice rather than stupidity or carelessness.

This negative view of sophistry was not always so. We get the word from the Greeks who used the word to mean teacher. A sophist hired himself out to rich families to instruct their sons in philosophy, math, rhetoric and music. The ability to debate in public was an important skill for an ambitious Athenian, so educating your children to be convincing orators was a primary goal of rich parents. A good sophist was one who was good at making convincing arguments.

Our negative view of this also comes from the Greeks. The reason we know about Socrates is we have the writings of Plato, who tells us Socrates was opposed to sophistry in his day. He thought arguments had to be logically sound and factually accurate, rather than just convincing. Of course, Socrates was forced to drink poison by the Athenians, because he was condemned for undermining public virtue. It turns out that the truth does not always set you free.

The reason any of this matters is that in democratic societies, there is a tension between these same two claims. On the one hand, winning the crowd is vital to democratic politics and the marketplace. This was true in ancient Athens and it is true on social media today. On the other hand, we are a society that believes deliberate deception is wrong, so factual accuracy is important. Winning the crowd through deceptive means is viewed as immoral.

This tension has been at the heart of mainstream conservative politics. One camp, the Straussians, think that winning the argument, which in politics means winning elections, is all that matters. The alternative camp insists that being right is what matters, even if it is not always popular. The former camp is correct that the goal of politics in a democratic system is to win elections, but the other side is also right that winning elections means nothing if the result is bad policy.

This conflict is at the heart of this back and forth between Michael Anton and Paul Gottfried over natural rights and traditionalism. Anton is a Straussian so he is therefore unencumbered by logic and factual accuracy. He simply wants to convince people that a society rooted in natural rights is the only choice, if America is going to hold together for much longer. Gottfried and others point out that natural rights do no exist and therefore they cannot be a foundation for anything.

What you see in the back and forth is that Gottfried in his short responses is describing things with as much accuracy as possible. He makes a descriptive claim, while Anton, in his lengthy responses, makes prescriptive claims. One side describes things as they are, while the other side argues for how they should be. Anton believes he is in the right because his proposition would solve the problem of governing a majority-minority society, while Gottfried is right because he is factually correct.

This conflict between the descriptive and the prescriptive is turning up in the dissident critique of the conservative movement. Conservatives argue that they are upholding the constitution and the natural rights tradition in America. Dissidents point out that no matter how elegant the arguments are in favor of conservatism and its natural rights foundation, the results, to this point, have been disastrous. In other words, the facts contradict the claims, no matter their intent.

The shadow over all of this, of course, is the purging of the paleocons from conservatism by the neocons and their Straussian enablers. Free from facts and reason, the winners in that struggle were able to conjure the history they needed to support their prescriptive claims, which solved a problem for conservatives. Like a python, they swallowed the Civil Rights Movement whole and digested it into their theories of the founding and their natural rights arguments.

That bit of history is what hangs over the back and forth between Gottfried and Anton and it is what hangs over the dissident critique of conservatism. The neocons and their Straussian enablers won the argument, but to what end? What was the point of winning the argument if the result was the present catastrophe? Anton would like to reframe this as the old neocon versus paleocon dispute, but no amount of words can conceal the elephant in the room. His side won the battle and lost the war.

In the end, this is the lesson of sophistry. It can only flourish in a culture that sees winning the argument as an end in itself. This is the curse of democracy, which brought down ancient Athens and is bringing down the New Athens. The truth is like a corpse in that it can never be truly concealed. The sophists think they can weigh the truth down with words, but like the body bobbing to the surface after the spring thaw, the truth eventually reemerges into the life of a society.

That truth in the current crisis is that the clever arguments and complex logical constructs of the last half century contained no truth value. The sophist of our age profited greatly from their arguments, but the result is the ungovernable mess that is modern America. Like Havel’s green grocer, we must now live in the truth which means shedding the sophistry that has led us to the present catastrophe. The truth may not set us free, but it will keep us from being erased from the book of life.

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Monetary Freedom Instead of Central Banking – The Future of Freedom Foundation

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

The boom-bust cycles of inflations and recession and the political use of money-creation to serve the deficit spending needs of governments will never be effectively and permanently ended until central banking has been ended. Monetary matters must be fully returned to the market process of competitive supply and demand.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/monetary-freedom-instead-of-central-banking/

by Richard M. Ebeling

The United States and most of the rest of the world are, once again, in the midst of an inflationary crisis. Prices in general are rising at annualized rates not experienced by, especially, the industrialized countries of North America and Europe for well over 40 years. More than 50 percent of the U.S. population is under 40 years of age, meaning that half of the people in the country have never experienced in their life time a period of rising prices such as is now occurring.Monetary central planning is no more desirable or workable than any other form of government central planning.
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It is not surprising, therefore, the shock that it has had for so many. There was a period of time in the late 1970s when price inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), was going up at an annualized rate of nearly 15 percent. That was the highest since during the American Civil War, more than a hundred years earlier. So, the nearly 9 percent price inflation in the summer of 2022 was something totally new for the average American family.

Prices do not all rise by the same amount at the same time

It is worth keeping in mind that the headline CPI number is only a statistical averaging of a selected group of individual prices chosen to reflect the representative purchases of an “average” urban American family in terms of the goods purchased and their relative amounts in a hypothetical “basket” of items. Break that down into the subcategories of different goods and services, and many of these subgroups of goods have been registered as rising much more or noticeably less than the general CPI number. For instance, in August of 2022, fuel oil prices were almost 69 percent higher than a year earlier, while food prices in general were between 11 and 13 percent above where they were in August of 2021. Housing prices were “only” 6 percent above 12 months earlier.

But any way that it is looked at, this is a new experience for most Americans used to an average rise in prices of only 2 to 3 percent a year for much of the last four decades. It is one thing to be a bit irritated because something that cost, say, $100 last year costs $102 today. But it is another matter entirely when what cost $100 last year may now cost $133 or even $169. When that is happening not to just one or two or three significant items in a basket of purchased goods but to many or most of what is regularly being bought, “inflation” becomes a budgetary crisis for many families across the country.

Rising prices are the effect of an earlier monetary action

What is missed in all of this is that the general rise in prices is a symptom and not the cause of the problem. We all know that if we take someone’s temperature, the number registered on the thermometer indicating a fever is not the cause of that fever; it is merely telling us that person’s body temperature is above what is considered “normal.” It does not explain or answer what is behind the “read” on the thermometer.

Suppose that someone has a regular income of $1,000 and that he spends, say, $500 on commodity “x,” $250 on commodity “y,” and $250 on commodity “z.” If this is all the money at his disposal and he wants to increase his spending on commodity “y” to $300, then he must reduce his purchases by $50 on either commodity “x” or commodity “z,” or some reduced combination of the two. He might draw down previously accumulated cash holdings or borrow the $50 from someone else. But in the former case, there will be a point at which he has drawn down all his available cash, and he must therefore restrict his overall purchases to his regular $1,000 income. If he borrows the money, it means that the lender must reduce a loan to another borrower by $50.

Whether it’s an individual or a community of individuals, the total sum of money available to that person or group of individuals sets the maximum of dollars offered in exchange for desired goods and services, as a whole. Only if the number of dollars in the hands of that individual or community increases can the demand for and prices of one or more goods rise without some complementary decline in money demand for some other good(s). Overall “price inflation” cannot occur over any sustained period of time without a preceding or contemporaneous increase in the total amount of money in the economic community of buyers and sellers.

The gold standard served as a “check” on inflation

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“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us” |

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

In other words, by his inaction Putin has convinced Washington and its European puppet states that he doesn’t mean what he says and will endlessly accept ever worsening provocations, which have gone from sanctions to Western financial help to Ukraine, weapons supply, training and targeting information, provision of missiles capable of attacking internal Russia,

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/12/19/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Dear friends, This website is read by many and supported by few.  I ask those readers who have never contributed to consider responding to this last request of 2022.

“Putin Has Misread the West And if He Doesn’t Wake Up Soon, Armageddon Is Upon Us”

Mike Whitney Interviews Paul Craig Roberts

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/putin-has-misread-the-west-and-if-he-doesnt-wake-up-soon-armageddon-is-upon-us/

Question 1—You think that Putin should have acted more forcefully from the beginning in order to end the war quickly. Is that an accurate assessment of your view on the war? And—if it is—then what do you think is the downside of allowing the conflict to drag on with no end in sight?

Paul Craig Roberts—Yes, you have correctly stated my position. But as my position can seem “unAmerican” to the indoctrinated and brainwashed many, those who watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times, I am going to provide some of my background before going on with my answer.

I was involved in the 20th century Cold War in many ways: As a Wall Street Journal editor; as an appointee to an endowed chair in the Center for Strategic and International Studies, part of Georgetown University at the time of my appointment, where my colleagues were Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor, and James Schlesinger, a Secretary of Defense and CIA director who was one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Virginia; as a member of the Cold War Committee on the Present Danger; and as a member of a secret presidential committee with power to investigate the CIA’s opposition to President Reagan’s plan to end the Cold War.

With a history such as mine, I was surprised when I took an objective position on Russian President Putin’s disavowal of US hegemony, and found myself labeled a “Russian dupe/agent” on a website, “PropOrNot,” which may have been financed by the US Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, or the CIA itself, still harboring old resentments against me for helping President Reagan end the Cold War, which had the potential of reducing the CIA’s budget and power. I still wonder what the CIA might do to me, despite the agency inviting me to address the agency, which I did, and explain why they went wrong in their reasoning.

I will also say that in my articles I am defending truth, not Putin, although Putin is, in my considered opinion, the most honest player, and perhaps the most naive, in the current game that could end in nuclear Armageddon. My purpose is to prevent nuclear Armageddon, not to take sides. I remember well President Reagan’s hatred of “those godawful nuclear weapons” and his directive that the purpose was not to win the Cold War but to end it.

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Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok’s Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests.

Bizzaro World is now the real world

https://open.substack.com/pub/greenwald/p/reflecting-new-us-control-of-tiktoks?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android

Accusations of Chinese tyranny are often based on demands from Beijing that Google and Facebook comply with their censorship orders as a condition for remaining in China. Reports over the years suggested that these firms typically comply: Google was building a censored search engine suited to Chinese demands; The New York Times has claimed Facebook developed a censorship app as its entrance requirement to the Chinese market, and Vox accused Apple of succumbing to Chinese censorship demands by banning an app from its store that had been used by protesters in Hong Kong demanding liberation from control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But now the tables appeared to be turning when it comes to U.S. censorship demands and TikTok. Threats to ban or severely limit the Chinese-owned-and-controlled platform from the U.S. have been hovering over TikTok’s head through both the Trump and Biden years. The most common justification offered for the threat is that TikTok’s presence in the U.S. empowers China to propagandize Americans, a concern that escalated along with the platform’s massive explosion among Americans. Since early 2021, TikTok has been the most-downloaded app both worldwide and in the U.S. In August, Pew Research conducted a “survey of American teenagers ages 13 to 17” and found that “TikTok has rocketed in popularity since its North American debut several years ago and now is a top social media platform for teens among the platforms covered in this survey.”

Concerns over China’s ability to manipulate U.S. public opinion were based on claims that China was banning content on TikTok that was contrary to Beijing’s interests. Western media outlets were specifically alleging that the Chinese government itself was censoring TikTok to ban any content that the CCP regarded as threatening to its national security and internal order. “TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” warned The Guardian in late 2019.

Rather than ban TikTok from the U.S., the U.S. Security State is now doing exactly that which China does to U.S. tech companies: namely, requiring that, as a condition to maintaining access to the American market, TikTok must now censor content that undermines what these agencies view as American national security interests. TikTok, desperate not to lose access to hundreds of millions of Americans, has been making a series of significant concessions to appease the Pentagon, CIA and FBI, the agencies most opposed to deals to allow TikTok to stay in the U.S.

See the rest here

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The High Cost of Blowing Up the World: Ukraine and the 2023 NDAA — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on December 29, 2022

This is why there are no audits on stolen and Russian destroyed US supplied weapons.

What we do know is that $22.9 billion will go towards that Kiev will be expected to use to buy more weapons from private U.S.-based defense contractors and much of the rest will be enjoyed by NGOs and Non Profits which will more often than not be run by figures closely tied to those same creatures in the Washington swamp who voted for these bills.

https://strategic-culture.org/news/2022/12/27/high-cost-of-blowing-up-world-ukraine-and-2023-ndaa/

Matthew Ehret

Will Americans wake up to the reality that they’ve been walking on the wrong side of history for too long or has the point of no-return been crossed?

Bipartisan insanity was on display again this week as the U.S. congress responded to Biden’s requested $37 billion in additional aid to Ukraine by giving him $45 billion bringing the total U.S. support to its Davos-managed disposable ward up to $111 billion.

The aid was part of an overall omnibus spending bill passed by both houses of Congress was a gargantuan $1.7 trillion and included $858 billion in defense spending which far exceeds any sum ever spent by a U.S. government in history.

Of that $858 billion, $817 billion is allocated directly to the U.S. Department of Defense while the remaining $29 billion will be allocated to national security programs within the department of energy.

Continuing to Weaponize Taiwan

2023 NDAA Funds will be used to “strengthen” Taiwan in the Pacific with $12 billion authorized to assist Taiwan in purchasing weapons from the U.S. military industrial complex (with the $12 billion in ‘loans’ needing to be paid back over the course of the next five years of course). Of this fund, $100 million will be given directly to contractors to fill up a “contingency stockpile” to be used by Taiwan “in case of any future conflict”.

Additionally Taiwan will be invited to participate in the next U.S.-led Rim of the Pacific Military Exercise in 2024 and thus greater “Pacific NATO” strategy encircling mainland China. This exercise and broader Pacific NATO (aka Quad) anti-China arsenal of puppet colonies will be boosted by an additional $11.5 billion will be allocated to the Pacific Deterrence Initiative ‘to counter malign Chinese influence in the Pacific’.

Just as Ukraine has suffered U.S.-directed color revolutions in 2004 and 2014, so too has Taiwan been strung through a similar NED-funded ‘Sunflower Revolution’ regime change in 2014 which saw the Kuomintang Party taken out of power just as final stages of an economic integration agreement with mainland China were being finalized.

Billions have been tagged to purchase Lockheed Martin Corp’s (LMT.N) F-35 fighter jets and ships made by General Dynamics but beyond airforce, one of the biggest and most dangerous boosts in spending this year has been absorbed by a fixation on ‘space warfare’.

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How Twitter hid US-military info ops from the public – Responsible Statecraft

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2022

Recent ‘files’ released by the social media giant’s new CEO Elon Musk reveal double standards on outing covert gov’t-backed programs.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid-us-military-info-ops-from-the-public/

Written by
Eli Clifton

Emails from the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal communications shared with Lee Fang at The Intercept as well as other journalists following Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform — reveal that the company had knowledge of a U.S. military-linked information operation and did not publicly acknowledge the operation or provide transparency to the general public after the operation was discovered.

That appears to be a clear violation of Twitter’s principles about state-backed information operations as laid out by Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth in 2019. Indeed, Twitter made a point of disclosing the details of accounts, and the content of their tweets, when they were identified as part of government linked information operations, beginning in 2018.

Roth wrote, in a statement of principles that is still published on Twitter’s website:

We believe Twitter has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the public conversation — including through the timely disclosure of information about attempts to manipulate Twitter to influence elections and other civic conversations by foreign or domestic state-backed entities. We believe the public and research community are better informed by transparency.

Fang, in his article published on Tuesday, details how Twitter “whitelisted” — a function that provided accounts with invulnerability to Twitter’s detection mechanisms that might decrease visibility for accounts engaged in spam or abuse — a list of accounts provided by U.S. Central Command in 2017. The accounts engaged in activities including: touting the accuracy of drone strikes in Yemen, promoting U.S. backed militias in Syria, and spreading anti-Iran messages in Iraq.

An official working at CENTCOM promised that the accounts would be labeled as “USG-attributed, Arabic-language accounts tweeting on relevant security issues,” but many of the accounts subsequently deleted these disclosures and concealed their affiliation with the U.S. government after Twitter granted them the special status.

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What It’s Really About – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2022

“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.” —FBI Press release in response to the Twitter files.

  Of course, those crimes and sins were committed against people in distant lands. Now, the administrative weight of the US is rolling over its own citizens, and over the Constitution — and the news media is uniformly and enthusiastically in favor of suppressing the news about it.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/what-its-really-about/

James Howard Kunstler

     What’s most appalling about the Twitter revelations of the Intel Community’s years-long strangle-hold on social media is not just the evil fuckery itself of the FBI, CIA, and others colluding to gaslight the US electorate, but the fact that there is no institution in the land that can intervene to adjudicate or discipline these rogue agencies. Nobody expects the FBI’s parent, the Department of Justice, to look into any of this.

     Not so many years ago, the force counter-balancing criminal misconduct in the government was the news media, even if the reporters and editors claimed to be on the political Left. Or, shall we say, especially if they were on the Left, because the Left in those days fervently championed free speech. Reporters of that long-ago day (Seymour Hersh, John Sack, and Michael Herr) would be out digging up the true facts of a big event — say, the US Military’s deadly blunders and scams in Vietnam — and editors would plaster screaming headlines about it on the front page: GENERAL SAYS “WE HAD TO DESTROY THE VILLAGE TO SAVE IT!” When the venerable news-spieler Walter Cronkite of CBS began to hint that the war was a fiasco, public opinion across the country shifted decisively against it.

     Of course, those crimes and sins were committed against people in distant lands. Now, the administrative weight of the US is rolling over its own citizens, and over the Constitution — and the news media is uniformly and enthusiastically in favor of suppressing the news about it. How that happened is one of several cosmic mysteries of our time, along with who exactly runs “Joe Biden,” and how did the many nations of Western Civ adopt in lock-step Covid-19 policies aimed at harming their own people?

      No reporter even of the alt.news division tried to get inside the head of New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet during the years of RussiaGate. Did he believe all that crap his paper was putting out? Now, you realize, it’s established fact (in the federal court record) that the Steele Dossier and everything spun off of it was a flim-flam confected by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. But even at the time, say 2017 to 2019, independent journalists were reporting the truth about it — for example, the FBI’s long-running fraud in the FISA Court — while The New York Times ardently inveighed against any emerging fact-pattern that broke through its wall of propaganda. The Times was showered with awards for that, including the Pulitzer Prize for its completely fallacious RussiaGate coverage.

      One easy answer is that The Times and many of its “legacy” cohorts — The WashPo, CBS, NBC, and ABC — have volunteered to be the public relations office of the Democratic Party, covering-up anything and everything the Party does against the public interest. And while that appears to be the case, it still doesn’t explain how these outfits became the enemies of truth itself, and by extension, enemies of reality.

     The easy answer to that is the psychological derangement provoked by Donald Trump when he entered politics, and the absolute fugue state of deranged fury that blossomed among the “elite” when Mr. Trump had the temerity to actually win a national election — since he was perceived to be the avatar of all the sub-human boobs dwelling in the Great Darkness between New York and Los Angeles.

     But that explanation has an odor of contrivance. Those benighted boobs were the very people who most deserved the Democratic Party’s sympathy, the folks who had toiled in the great factories, now shuttered and off-shored, who volunteered for America’s wars without complaint, who were suffering now in idleness and poverty. The party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman suddenly wanted to crush these “deplorable” people. Huh…?

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How the FBI Used Twitter to Lie to You – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2022

But the most remarkable thing about the agency is that Theodore Roosevelt created the FBI via executive order after Congress refused his request to create a national police agency. Now that agency, born in defiance of congressmen who saw no constitutional place for a national police force, is staffed by people who think it’s their right to use any means they can find or develop, to override the constitutional procedure for choosing our president.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/how_the_fbi_used_twitter_to_lie_to_you.ht

By Trish Randall

The FBI we know is a creation of Hollywood. From the beginning, J. Edgar Hoover sought to insert the bureau into movies and TV shows, to portray the agency as grounded in American values, and special agents as righteous competence personified. Even on the far-out “X-Files,” with its hinting at nefarious government activities, Agent Mulder’s one flaw was idealism bordering on naivete. For over a century, Hollywood has upheld the belief that a federal law enforcement/internal quasi-spy agency is necessary for the safety of a free society and its citizens.

This image of the FBI fails to highlight an important fact. The FBI is allowed to lie to you. They can lie to acquire information or encourage a confession. Unlike entertainment, agents don’t need a story to fill a certain screen time, or number of theater seats. They just need to convince a very small audience just dumb enough to reveal something incriminating to their new friends.

The Bureau had Hunter Biden’s laptop by December 2019, before Joe Biden was the Democrat candidate. Although Biden was such a ghost candidate that all his campaign events combined wouldn’t have filled a stadium washroom, trained, experienced FBI employees were desperate for the opposing candidate to lose, just as they’d opposed Candidate Trump in 2016.

The targets for the FBI’s 2020 fabrication were Twitter staffers with titles like “Trust and Safety,” “Site Integrity,” “Product Trust,” or “Legal Policy and Trust.” They mostly worked to prevent 280-character tweets causing distress to potential readers with marginalized identities. There were many ex-FBI staff at Twitter, including attorney James Baker. Twitter staffers were primed to expect nefarious Russian efforts to influence the 2020 presidential election, including fake information, a laptop that didn’t belong to Hunter Biden or was hacked, salacious contents that were false and would be leaked. Being asked to help the FBI and given temporary Top Secret Clearance were ego-feeding perks. Twitter executive Yoel Roth apparently enjoyed running out of boring names for meetings with the FBI.

Twitter staff was groomed to squash a story from Russian agents, with no evidence of Russians targeting the 2020 election. After spending $100,000 on ads in 2016 with no effect, the Russians had apparently given up.

Some people working at Twitter couldn’t see how Twitter rules against hacked materials or misinformation were applicable to the Hunter laptop story published by the NY Post in October 2020. Yet they blocked the laptop story, including the link to the original story from being shared on Twitter — or even via private messages (or DMs) between Twitter users.

The operation hid the truth just long enough that the laptop documenting crimes by the family of the next president stayed mostly unknown until after the election. By March 2022, people who had voted for the man elected in Nov. 2020 were saying they would have voted differently if they’d heard about the laptop sooner.

It would seem awfully risky to use this flimsy story to convince a social media company to keep a secret that could be revealed by other means. Why not hold an official FBI press conference to claim that Russians loaded a laptop with fabricated evidence of Biden family crimes — perhaps adding some patently ridiculous material? The Russians would announce, “That wasn’t our work.” The FBI would reply, “Of course the Russians would say that.” The controversy would probably still be going back and forth.

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ESG’s Perverse, Narrow, Fraudulent Ethical Principles – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2022

Failure of basic fiduciary duties to investors is just the tip of ESG fraud iceberg

By Paul Driessen

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2022/12/paul-driessen/esgs-perverse-narrow-fraudulent-ethical-principles/

Warning: Your retirement fund may have been Shanghaied by BlackRock or other Wall Street asset managers who’ve unilaterally decided that the tens of trillions of dollars of other people’s money they control should be used to advance political causes they favor – to “make the world a better place.”

As most people know, ESG stands for Environmental protection, Social justice, and Governance of corporate and societal affairs. They’re all noble-sounding causes. However, under ESG they’re centered around progressive, woke agendas, with prevention of “manmade climate cataclysms” uppermost. Fund assets are used to drive “net zero” climate agendas and punish or de-fund fossil fuel companies.

That narrow focus creates serious problems. Those trillions of dollars are supposed to be passively invested in index and other funds, under fiduciary obligations to secure maximum returns in support of state, local, corporate and personal retirement and investment accounts. Under ESG, however, strong returns are too often sacrificed to serve politicized agendas, often in collusion with governments, activists and other financial institutions, and thus also in violation of antitrust laws and basic ethical principles.

That’s why Asset manager Vanguard recently left the UN-sponsored “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.” Meanwhile, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and other states are pulling tens of billions of dollars out of BlackRock, State Street and other Wall Street asset management firms, for violating fiduciary duties. It’s just the tip of the fraud iceberg.

Woke ESG practitioners also employ narrow ES&G definitions to virtue-signal, pontificate and impose prescriptive agendas with little or no regard for the consequences. When the “existential threat of manmade climate change” is the primary arbiter, enormous problems associated with replacing fossil fuels with “clean renewable energy” are simply ignored, suppressed and censored out of the analysis.

People and planet realities absolutely have to be included in any ethical ESG analysis.

Environmental protection. Rather than looking only at the temperatures, storms, droughts, rising seas and other environmental costs that climate models falsely blame on fossil fuel emissions – any accurate and honest ESG scorecard must also assess the enormous ecological impacts from wind-solar-battery (WSB) energy systems that will supposedly replace oil, gas and coal.

WSB systems and associated transmission lines do not appear spontaneously, via Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change (MAGIC). They require mining on unprecedented scales. President Biden’s initial batch of offshore wind turbines alone would require 110,000 tons of copper, refined from 25,000,000 tons of ore, after removing 40,000,000 tons of overburden – plus millions of tons of iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, concrete, plastics and other materials … from billions of tons of ores.

Replacing all U.S. coal and gas electricity generation with WSB – plus gasoline vehicles and gas stoves and furnaces – would require tens of thousands of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules for vehicles and backup electricity storage, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Has BlackRock calculated the ore body and mining requirements for that? For a global transition?

All those turbines, panels, modules, transmission lines, mines, processing plants and factories have to be located somewhere. Have the ESG potentates determined in whose backyards they will go? (Probably not Larry Fink’s or John Kerry’s.) Have they assessed the impacts on scenery, habitats and wildlife? the air and water pollution from the mines and other operations? the likelihood that endangered right whales would be driven to extinction by wind turbine installations off the U.S. Atlantic Coast?

Do all these WSB mines, foundries, factories and impacts even get (obviously negative) ESG scores?

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Notes from the Digital Gulag | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on December 28, 2022

In fact, for many true dissidents, it will likely become inevitable. But what will it mean? Will Big Digital make survival outside of its reach impossible? When does the digital gulag become more than virtual? At what point does your life depend on Big Digital? Digital identity and CBDCs will seal many fates; one will either opt into the totalitarian regime or face the consequences of complete exclusion.

https://mises.org/wire/notes-digital-gulag

Michael Rectenwald

As the author of Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, I guess I should not be surprised to find myself squarely in the digital gulag—banished, perhaps permanently, from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter permanently suspended my account several weeks ago, mere days before Elon Musk took over the helm. Although I cannot be sure, I may have been banned because I suggested that the transgender movement is part of a multipronged neo-Malthusian depopulation campaign. (Note that I said nothing to or about any transgender individuals and thus broke no “Twitter rules,” whatever they may be. I may have been mistaken, but surely being “correct” is not a condition for major social media use. Or is it? Of course it is.)

Now Facebook has demanded proof that I am who I say I am, and has completely barred me from my account, which has been, at least temporarily, utterly erased from the site. I submitted a picture of my driver’s license, which Facebook rejected, and then a picture of my passport along with my license. I await Facebook’s response, which I read could take anywhere from forty-eight hours to forty-five days to arrive.

I am considering deleting my account, so I will lose thousands of followers and contact with many people with whom I’ve become friends. That’s how the digital gulag system works. One is sucked into social media networks, and then the social media networks have control over your connections, which they can sever on a whim.

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