When it comes to the US and GB, it is hard to tell who is the ventriloquist and who is the puppet.
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Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
How About That — It’s Not Putin or Iran Interfering In Our Election … It’s The Brits!
Posted by M. C. on October 28, 2024
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Brits, election, Iran, Putin | Leave a Comment »
All The World’s a Stage: Everything Is Fake
Posted by M. C. on October 26, 2024
The fevered competition for eyeballs / visibility has generated a self-reinforcing feedback of faking authenticity better than other spectacles. The goal isn’t to present “real life,” what would be the point of such absurdly uncompelling, boring anti-spectacle?
As every dealer knows, there’s no more reliable source of revenue than a junkie with a monkey on his back, and encouraging addiction to screens is astoundingly profitable.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct24/fake-spectacle10-24.html
No wonder we’re restless, teetering on the edge, frustrated by our addictions to fakery and excess, starved for what cannot be marketed or made profitable, so it no longer exists except in the shadows.
Everything is staged, and therefore fake. Given the near-zero cost of posting content in the digital world, everyone discovered that staging wasn’t limited to high-end political events, parades and Hollywood sets; since all the world’s a stage, everything could be staged, from every selfie on social media to every video on YouTube to every public display.
With staging comes spectacle, with spectacle comes self-serving artifice, and with artifice comes excess. The captivating idea of staging is by mimicking authenticity, we manifest an implicitly self-serving purpose: we stage the film to mimic “real life” to entertain the audience, and by this means reap a fortune.
By staging a political event, we rouse blood lust to serve our ascension to power. By staging a selfie in a swank bar sipping a costly cocktail, while home is a shared room in a squalid, overpriced flat, we serve our desire for a digitally distributed simulacrum of a status we cannot possibly achieve in our real lives.
Now that everything is staged, the competition to get noticed in a sea frothing with endless scrolls of “content” demands excess. Everything is now so sensationalized that we are desensitized to it all. As a result, everything distills down to self-parody, rendering parody impossible, for everything is already a parody of itself.
Mimicking authenticity to make the sale is now so embedded, so ubiquitous, that irony is also lost: we are living in a Philip K. Dick story come to life in which young women fabricating fake lives of glamor and luxury to boost their visibility are now competing with digitized imaginary young women that are idealized versions of the sexually compelling female.
Now that engagement is the coin of the Attention Economy realm, traditional media and social media have merged: everybody’s competing for engagement because that’s everyone’s source of income. Never mind that the Big Tech platforms skim the bulk of the engagement revenues and a handful of influencers reap the majority of what’s left; the mob is furiously dedicated to the task of picking up the pennies scattered in the sand-covered floor of the Coliseum.
In my view, engagement is the polite term for addiction, the core value proposition in Addiction Capitalism. As every dealer knows, there’s no more reliable source of revenue than a junkie with a monkey on his back, and encouraging addiction to screens is astoundingly profitable.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: fake, spectacle, Stage | Leave a Comment »
Don’t Kid Yourself About the Ignorance of American Voters
Posted by M. C. on October 26, 2024
“Immediately before the 2004 presidential election, almost 70 percent of U.S. citizens were unaware that Congress had added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, though this was a giant increase to the federal budget and the largest new entitlement program since President Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty.”
“In 1964, only a minority of citizens knew that the Soviet Union was not a member of NATO…the organization created to oppose the Soviet Union.”
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/dont-kid-yourself-about-the-ignorance-of-american-voters/
A couple weeks back, the managing editor here at the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, posted on Twitter/X about voter ignorance. The post, which featured the headline “Monetary Policy by the Taylor Rule,” along with the associated equation, concluded with the comment: “What % of voters know this and can comprehend this? How long would it take to teach everyone? Democracy is a joke, privitize [sic] everything.”
While voters might be forgiven for not being able to parse the arcane occult of highly mathematized macroeconomic policy—no matter their other scholastic qualifications, those lacking graduate training in economics are unlikely to be able to do so—a survey of voter competency across a broader range of metrics provides no great comfort.
Indeed, Knight’s criticism and prescription stand.
Consider the following recent examples a quick search revealed:
- 2017 Annenberg Public Policy Center Study: This found that only 26% of Americans could name all three branches of government, while 33% couldn’t name any branches at all, underscoring a lack of basic civic knowledge.
- 2010 Pew Research Center Knowledge Survey: Around 45% of respondents did not know that the Republican Party was generally considered more conservative than the Democratic Party, indicating a basic lack of understanding about the ideological differences between the major parties.
- 2018 National Election Studies: A significant number of voters misidentified which party controlled Congress. Despite widespread media coverage, many voters were confused about which party had the majority in the U.S. House and Senate, demonstrating low political awareness.
- 2010 Survey by Xavier University: This survey found that one-third of voters did not know that the Bill of Rights is part of the U.S. Constitution, revealing a gap in basic constitutional knowledge.
- 2019 Quinnipiac University Poll: This found that a significant percentage of Americans, over 50%, believed that Social Security was funded by a government trust fund rather than through a pay-as-you-go system where current workers’ payroll taxes fund current retirees’ benefits.
These instances illustrate a wide range of voter ignorance, from misinformation to a lack of knowledge about key political processes, policies, and historical facts. They highlight the challenges voters face in making informed decisions in elections—and this is hardly new!
Consider these earlier instances of voter ignorance, provided by the political scientist Jason Brennan in his Against Democracy:
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: American Voters, Libertarian, voter ignorance | Leave a Comment »
Criminalizing Privacy (Al Jazeera Interview)
Posted by M. C. on October 25, 2024
In this interview from Al Jazeera on October 16th, 2024; I discuss the current state of global privacy legislation, ways that we can encourage free speech without censorship, and strategies for the future of privacy around the world.
In an era where the web has converged on just a handful major companies that wield immense control over speech, we are seeing many independent voices drowned out. Instead of suppressing ideas, we can actually call out bad ideas for what they are and we can provide counterpoints. The best way to conquer bad ideas is with better ideas, not by suppressing ideas.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Al Jazeera, Criminalizing Privacy | Leave a Comment »
Elon Musk: “What Is Coming In The Next 20 Days Is UGLY And May DESTROY America…”
Posted by M. C. on October 23, 2024
Essentials are between 1:00 and 2:00.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Elon Musk | Leave a Comment »
The Ultimate Con of a Government “Rules-Based System”
Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024
This world of manners is what we are all told is the “rule-based system” whereby the US serves as kindly globocop, who only occasionally takes a little kickback from the “protected” souls. Like with the US soldiers in northern Syria, guarding Conoco oil extraction. This is why when a US president ordered troops withdrawn from Syria, the permanent bureaucrats just patted him on the head. They always know better than the people. They prefer a brain dead president, like Biden, and if not that, one with a head filled with a fluffy self righteousness and just a touch of fascism will do just fine.
The US puppet in Ukraine is feeling hot and sweaty. Europe has lost interest, his UkroNats have lost patience, and Russia is plodding steadily to Kiev and Odessa. The solution? Zelensky wants “his” nukes back from Russia, and if he keeps this up, perhaps he will get them, pointy end first.
Meanwhile, the moral high ground always claimed by US government – whether in Ukraine or the Middle East or Taiwan or Central America or the flyover states – has collapsed like the I-40 in North Carolina.
The scam kings and consorts in Washington, DC have created a royal world of manners in which they live and function. The presidency is Potemkin, and in our elections, as James Bovard explains, “voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom.”
This world of manners is what we are all told is the “rule-based system” whereby the US serves as kindly globocop, who only occasionally takes a little kickback from the “protected” souls. Like with the US soldiers in northern Syria, guarding Conoco oil extraction. This is why when a US president ordered troops withdrawn from Syria, the permanent bureaucrats just patted him on the head. They always know better than the people. They prefer a brain dead president, like Biden, and if not that, one with a head filled with a fluffy self righteousness and just a touch of fascism will do just fine.
As Americans, we have two problems. First, we the people didn’t design these rules, didn’t agree to them, and frankly would never consent to them, if we knew how they worked. That’s kind of a big problem. Second, the power exerted by government “embeds” – the media kind, the business kind, the protective racket kind – is for lack of a better word, octopussified. But unlike the James Bond thriller, the thieves and racketeers Mischka and Grischka operate out of DC.
I won’t blink if anyone notices who these criminals literally resemble in Washington, DC. Our own Mischka and Grischka have been hard at work, and like the twin criminals in the employ of a global syndicate, they are part of a crime army with big desires.
Actual rules exist in all armies, including criminal armies. These rules are Machiavellian, but the leaders we have in DC today are not Machiavellis. While no doubt immoral, they distinctly lack the objectivity, mental discipline and ability to actually manage a tabletop army, sacrificing where needed and advancing conservatively.
The US-based international order, a “ruled-based” system, is nothing more than a simple and straightforward con. The rest of the world, perhaps five billion people, understand and accept this Washington vanity for what it is. They see it, on a good day, as a shroud covering the raw greed and the strange and wondrous insecurity of the Washington political machine.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Government, Rules-Based System | Leave a Comment »
Case Study, Taiwan: A Nation is the Story We Tell Ourselves
Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024
While all things being equal it is in Beijing’s interest to play the waiting game; Washington’s relative power in the region is in steady decline, and Taiwan’s real security rests on the possibility that Washington might intervene using both military and economic weapons. But things are not standing still, and Taiwan’s porcupine strategy, to eventually be too costly to conquer, might just provoke the kind of military solution it is purportedly meant to deter.
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/case-study-taiwan-a-nation-is-the-story-we-tell-ourselves/
In his famous 1882 lecture “What is a Nation?” the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan emphasized the role of collective memory and even fictitious or selective historical narratives in the creation and maintenance of national identity, writing “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.”
What Renan was arguing is that nations are built not only on shared history but also on the myths and selective memories that bind people together. This selective forgetting often involves downplaying or erasing divisive events or highlighting certain aspects of a past to create a sense of unity and continuity. Even if that narrative isn’t entirely historically accurate, that isn’t the point. This selective memory allows a state or nation to foster a sense of unity and purpose among its citizens.
This past Thursday Taiwan’s President, Lai Ching-te, gave a highly anticipated speech on the occasion of Taiwan’s “National Day” celebrations—and Renan could hardly have been more impressed.
As one might expect of such a speech, Lai’s first on this occasion since taking office, it was full of paeans to the greatness of the state and its people, as well as the kind of dubious historical assertions, the nationalist myths, that everywhere buttress state power.
For example, Lai connected the current government on Taiwan to those presumably brave heroes who over a century ago “rose in revolt and overthrew the imperial regime,” with the intent to “establish a democratic republic of the people, to be governed by the people and for the people.” Naturally, Lai neglected to mention that the actors in question were a combination of ambivalent bureaucrats, ambitious warlords, opportunistic gangsters, and disaffected intellectuals who quickly fell to usurping and warring with one another.
Lai did not trouble himself with burdensome explanations of how after that glorious revolution the “dream of democracy was engulfed in the raging flames of war.” Rather, he skipped over how the eventual authoritarian government of the Kuomintang (KMT) was so corrupt, inefficient, and generally evil that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked preferable by comparison. Instead, he jumped to solemn remembrances of the last battles as the KMT were driven off the mainland and to the island of Taiwan, and how “though we arrived on this land at different times and belonged to different communities, we defended Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu. We defended the Republic of China.”
One notes here the subtle conflation between the regime’s flight for self-preservation and defense of those on the island who very definitely did not want them to come and bring war to their shores.
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: Ernest Renan, KMT, Kuomintang, Lai Ching-te, Taiwan | Leave a Comment »
FEMA Still Paying $9,000 For COVID Funerals, Billions On Pandemic Payouts
Posted by M. C. on October 22, 2024
by Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey
The favoring of one cause of death over another isn’t the only winners-and-losers dimension of the funeral program: There’s no reimbursement for those who’d planned ahead via pre-paid funerals. Echoing the grievances of people who saved up to pay for college only to see their neighbor’s student loans forgiven by vote-buying politicians, some families say they feel like they’re being punished for having planned for the future.
It’s All About Free Stuff and Votes
As the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) carries out widely-criticized responses to Hurricanes Helene and Milton, officials say the agency’s Disaster Recovery Fund is incapable of handling a third major storm.
While some are circulating false accusations that disaster funds have been diverted to immigrants or poured into the proxy war in Ukraine, a review of the agency’s 2024 outlays reveals a different, ongoing drain on FEMA’s coffers: Long after the end of the declared COVID-19 emergency, FEMA is still pumping out billions of dollars to pay for pandemic expenses— icluding, believe it or not, up to $9,000 each for funerals.
As previously detailed at Stark Realities, governments’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous on many fronts. While the Pandora’s box of collateral damage included widespread harm to the physical and mental health of individuals, it also dealt a blow to the nation’s fiscal well-being, as the federal government recklessly showered trillions of dollars it didn’t have on people, businesses and state and local governments—with much of that money intended to offset the effects of government’s own tyrannical and counterproductive policies.
While all but the most diehard Branch Covidians have moved on from that dark chapter, the federal government has a distinct version of “long COVID.” Though it’s not clear where all the money is going, FEMA is paying up to $9,000 each to reimburse funeral expenses for those who die from COVID.
That’s an especially odd example of government picking winners and losers. As Stanford University School of Medicine professor and prominent COVID-regime critic Jay Bhattacharya said in a social media post that drew my attention to this giveaway program and its hyper-longevity, “There are apparently more and less worthy ways to die in the U.S.”
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: COVID Funerals, FEMA, pandemic | Leave a Comment »
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