Democracy is vastly overrated

 

 Pure food for thoughts: 

What if democracy was not the best possible political system?

 from Doug Casey

Via InternationalMan.com,

Democracy is vastly overrated.

It’s not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people’s thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion.” Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it’s necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people.

The only form of democracy that suits a free society is economic democracy in the laissez-faire form, where each person votes with his money for what he wants in the marketplace. Only then can every individual obtain what he wants without compromising the interests of any other person. That’s the polar opposite of the “economic democracy” of socialist pundits who have twisted the term to mean the political allocation of wealth.

But many terms in politics wind up with inverted meanings. “Liberal” is certainly one of them.

The Spectrum of Politics

The terms liberal (left) and conservative (right) define the conventional political spectrum; the terms are floating abstractions with meanings that change with every politician.

In the 19th century, a liberal was someone who believed in free speech, social mobility, limited government, and strict property rights. The term has since been appropriated by those who, although sometimes still believing in limited free speech, always support strong government and weak property rights, and who see everyone as a member of a class or group.

Conservatives have always tended to believe in strong government and nation­alism. Bismarck and Metternich were archetypes. Today’s conservatives are some­times seen as defenders of economic liberty and free markets, although that is mostly true only when those concepts are perceived to coincide with the interests of big business and economic nationalism.

Bracketing political beliefs on an illogical scale, running only from left to right, results in constrained thinking. It is as if science were still attempting to define the elements with air, earth, water, and fire.

Politics is the theory and practice of government. It concerns itself with how force should be applied in controlling people, which is to say, in restricting their freedom. It should be analyzed on that basis. Since freedom is indivisible, it makes little sense to compartmentalize it; but there are two basic types of freedom: social and economic.

According to the current usage, liberals tend to allow social freedom, but restrict economic freedom, while conservatives tend to restrict social freedom and allow economic freedom. An authoritarian (they now sometimes class them­selves as “middle-of-the-roaders”) is one who believes both types of freedom should be restricted.

But what do you call someone who believes in both types of freedom? Unfortunately, something without a name may get overlooked or, if the name is only known to a few, it may be ignored as unimportant. That may explain why so few people know they are libertarians.

A useful chart of the political spectrum would look like this:

A libertarian believes that individuals have a right to do anything that doesn’t impinge on the common-law rights of others, namely force or fraud. Libertarians are the human equivalent of the Gamma rat, which bears a little explanation.

Some years ago, scientists experimenting with rats categorized the vast major­ity of their subjects as Beta rats. These are basically followers who get the Alpha rats’ leftovers. The Alpha rats establish territories, claim the choicest mates, and generally lord it over the Betas. This pretty well-corresponded with the way the researchers thought the world worked.

But they were surprised to find a third type of rat as well: the Gamma. This creature staked out a territory and chose the pick of the litter for a mate, like the Alpha, but didn’t attempt to dominate the Betas. A go-along-get-along rat. A libertarian rat, if you will.

My guess, mixed with a dollop of hope, is that as society becomes more repressive, more Gamma people will tune in to the problem and drop out as a solution. No, they won’t turn into middle-aged hippies practicing basket weaving and bead stringing in remote communes. Rather, they will structure their lives so that the government—which is to say taxes, regulations, and inflation—is a non-factor. Suppose they gave a war and nobody came? Suppose they gave an election and nobody voted, gave a tax and nobody paid, or imposed a regulation and nobody obeyed it?

Libertarian beliefs have a strong following among Americans, but the Liber­tarian Party has never gained much prominence, possibly because the type of people who might support it have better things to do with their time than vote. And if they believe in voting, they tend to feel they are “wasting” their vote on someone who can’t win. But voting is itself another part of the problem.

None of the Above

At least 95% of incumbents in Congress typically retain office. That is a higher proportion than in the Su­preme Soviet of the defunct USSR, and a lower turnover rate than in Britain’s hereditary House of Lords where people lose their seats only by dying.

The political system in the United States has, like all systems which grow old and large, become moribund and corrupt.

The conventional wisdom holds a decline in voter turnout is a sign of apathy. But it may also be a sign of a renaissance in personal responsibility. It could be people saying, “I won’t be fooled again, and I won’t lend power to them.”

Politics has always been a way of redistributing wealth from those who produce to those who are politically favored. As H.L. Mencken observed, every election amounts to no more than an advance auction on stolen goods, a process few would support if they saw its true nature.

Protesters in the 1960s had their flaws, but they were quite correct when they said, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” If politics is the problem, what is the solution? I have an answer that may appeal to you.

The first step in solving the problem is to stop actively encouraging it.

Many Americans have intuitively recognized that government is the problem and have stopped voting. There are at least five reasons many people do not vote:

1. Voting in a political election is unethical. The political process is one of institutionalized coercion and force. If you disapprove of those things, then you shouldn’t participate in them, even indirectly.

2. Voting compromises your privacy. It gets your name in another government computer database.

3. Voting, as well as registering, entails hanging around government offices and dealing with petty bureaucrats. Most people can find something more enjoyable or productive to do with their time.

4. Voting encourages politicians. A vote against one candidate—a major, and quite understandable, reason why many people vote—is always interpreted as a vote for his opponent. And even though you may be voting for the lesser of two evils, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It amounts to giving the candidate a tacit mandate to impose his will on society.

5. Your vote doesn’t count. Politicians like to say it counts because it is to their advantage to get everyone into a busybody mode. But, statistically, one vote in scores of millions makes no more difference than a single grain of sand on a beach. That’s entirely apart from the fact that officials manifestly do what they want, not what you want, once they are in office.

Some of these thoughts may impress you as vaguely “unpatriotic”; that is certainly not my intention. But, unfortunately, America isn’t the place it once was, either. The United States has evolved from the land of the free and the home of the brave to something more closely resembling the land of entitlements and the home of whining lawsuit filers.

The founding ideas of the country, which were highly libertarian, have been thoroughly distorted. What passes for tradition today is something against which the Founding Fathers would have led a second revolution.

This sorry, scary state of affairs is one reason some people emphasize the importance of joining the process, “working within the system” and “making your voice heard,” to ensure that “the bad guys” don’t get in. They seem to think that increasing the number of voters will improve the quality of their choices.

This argument compels many sincere people, who otherwise wouldn’t dream of coercing their neighbors, to take part in the political process. But it only feeds power to people in politics and government, validating their existence and making them more powerful in the process.

Of course, everybody involved gets something out of it, psychologically if not monetarily. Politics gives people a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves and so has special appeal for those who cannot find satisfaction within themselves.

We cluck in amazement at the enthusiasm shown at Hitler’s giant rallies but figure what goes on here, today, is different. Well, it’s never quite the same. But the mindless sloganeering, the cult of the personality, and a certainty of the masses that “their” candidate will kiss their personal lives and make them better are identical.

And even if the favored candidate doesn’t help them, then at least he’ll keep others from getting too much. Politics is the institutionalization of envy, a vice which proclaims “You’ve got something I want, and if I can’t get one, I’ll take yours. And if I can’t have yours, I’ll destroy it so you can’t have it either.” Participating in politics is an act of ethical bankruptcy.

The key to getting “rubes” (i.e., voters) to vote and “marks” (i.e., contribu­tors) to give is to talk in generalities while sounding specific and looking sincere and thoughtful, yet decisive. Vapid, venal party hacks can be shaped, like Silly Putty, into salable candidates. People like to kid themselves that they are voting for either “the man” or “the ideas.” But few “ideas” are more than slogans artfully packaged to push the right buttons. Voting for “the man” doesn’t help much either since these guys are more diligently programmed, posed, and rehearsed than any actor.

This is probably more true today than it’s ever been since elections are now won on television, and television is not a forum for expressing complex ideas and philosophies. It lends itself to slogans and glib people who look and talk like game show hosts. People with really “new ideas” wouldn’t dream of introducing them to politics because they know ideas can’t be explained in 60 seconds.

I’m not intimating, incidentally, that people disinvolve themselves from their communities, social groups, or other voluntary organizations; just the opposite since those relationships are the lifeblood of society. But the political process, or government, is not synonymous with society or even complementary to it. Government is a dead hand on society.

So where does that leave us for the election coming up in a few days?

It’s likely to be the most important one in the country’s history, including that of 1860. Unfortunately, no matter how you vote, it’s unlikely to head off what history likely has in store for us. Something wicked this way comes.

NSA Dodges Questions About Controversial "Backdoors" In Tech Products

 

 Yes, backdoors everywhere, obviously! But the good news is that it does not matter!

If the NSA wants to access your data, then there is probably very little you can do. But in most cases, they don't. You are just not important enough. For everybody else (outside the NSA), basic encryption software will keep you safe. For a company, your security is exactly proportional to the price you invest in security. 

For individuals, one of the best software ever, is the discontinued Truecrypt. It was discontinued for "safety concerns". Obviously a lie. To this day, no one has ever found anything wrong with Truecrypt. It was just extremely safe... difficult to crack and free! All your important data and HD should be encrypted using this software or a similar one.   

For the rest, remember: The Internet is public. And you can therefore expect nothing online to remain private. 

NSA Dodges Questions About Controversial "Backdoors" In Tech Products

Edward Snowden's whistleblowing campaign exposed the National Security Agency in 2013 for having "backdoors" into commercial technology products. The US spy agency worked with some Silicon Valley tech firms to develop covert methods of bypassing the standard authentication or encryption process of a network device so it could scan internet traffic without a warrant. 

Snowden revealed the NSA's special sauce in how it conducted domestic and foreign backdoor operations to collect vital intelligence, resulted in the agency reforming its spying process, and had to formulate new rules to limit future breaches and how it conducts spy operations, three former intelligence officials told Reuters. 

However, a recent inquiry into the new guidelines by Senator Ron Wyden, a top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, yielded absolutely nothing as the spy agency dodged questions. 

"Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families – it's only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security," Wyden told Reuters. 

"The government shouldn't have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans," he continued:

The agency refused to comment on its updated policies on current backdoor processes. NSA officials did say they were in the rebuilding trust phase with the private sector. 

"At NSA, it's common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices," said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA's year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. "We don't share specific processes and procedures."

Three former senior intelligence agency officials told Reuters that before a backdoor operation is conducted, the agency must "weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries."

Critics of the agency's spy tools say backdoors create targets for adversaries and undermine US technology trust among buyers across the world. According to Juniper, in 2015, a foreign adversary used the NSA's backdoor in its equipment. The NSA told Wyden's aides in 2018 the Juniper incident was a "lesson learned." 

Reuters cites one of the clearest examples of the NSA working with private tech firms to build backdoors: 

"... NSA's approach involved an encryption-system component known as Dual Elliptic Curve, or Dual EC. The intelligence agency worked with the Commerce Department to get the technology accepted as a global standard, but cryptographers later showed that the NSA could exploit Dual EC to access encrypted data." 

What this all suggests is that Snowden's revelations of NSA's spy tools really didn't change the agency's practices over the last seven years. Backdoors are still being used as the surveillance state marches on.

 The Murphy law: "What can go wrong, will!" is more than it seems. Or rather, it is not just "that". It is about planning around obstacles to prevail in difficult circumstances. Here's the full story of this essential law of nature.

This secret research project explains a lot about 2020

Guest Post by Simon Black

In early 1948, a group of US Air Force officers was working on a secret research project in the California desert code named MX981.

The purpose of MX981 was to test how extreme gravitational forces from fast-moving fighter jets would impact the human body.

Aviation was still pretty new; in fact, the US Air Force had only been created about six months prior, and the Defense Department wanted to find out just how much physical punishment a fighter pilot would be able to handle.

Most people have never been in a fighter jet. But I can promise you from personal experience, the gravitational force can feel absolutely crushing to the body, even causing a pilot to pass out.

At the time, it was widely believed that the maximum limit on the human body was “18 G’s”, i.e. 18 times the force of gravity. And MX981 was tasked with finding out for sure.

So the researchers built a rail-mounted, rocket-propelled sled; the idea was to get the sled moving up to 200 miles per hour, then slam the brakes so hard that the sled would come to a halt in less than a second in order to simulate extreme flight (and crash) conditions.

They nicknamed their little contraption the “Gee Whiz”. And in early 1948 they started human trials.

The guinea pig was one of the researchers– a maverick scientist named John Paul Stapp. Stapp was able to subject himself to an astounding 35Gs, far past the theoretical limit.

And at that point another researcher, Captain Ed Murphy, was sent out to take an independent reading of the experiment.

It turns out that Murphy’s crew installed their sensors incorrectly, leading to erroneous readings… not to mention all the other mechanical failures that kept taking place.

The research team was breaking new ground; nothing they were doing had been tried before. The equipment they designed was custom-built, and things broke all the time.

Murphy was reportedly irritated about the constant failures, and at some point complained that ‘if there’s any way they can do it wrong, they will.’

Years later this observation morphed into what’s known as Murphy’s Law, often stated as “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

In that context, Murphy’s Law may be the perfect summary of 2020. Riots and social unrest, political folly, Covid, brutal lockdowns, spiraling debts and deficits, etc.

Countless businesses have been closed, many forever. Even more are unemployed. And many countries are imposing fresh lockdowns after realizing that all of their measures and protections thus far haven’t done a damn bit of good because the virus is spiking once again.

At this rate it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect an extraterrestrial invasion before the year is out.

One of the more irritating aspects of this situation is the lack of consistency. Everything changes so quickly.

Covid rules, for example, change constantly. Here in Puerto Rico where I live, the governor issues a new decree every week or two; the most recent included a total shutdown of the island’s 911 emergency call centers, though gyms were allowed to increase capacity from 25% to . . . 30%!

Travel rules change even more rapidly; our Sovereign Woman, Viktorija, has been traveling around Europe for the past few months, and her flights have been canceled more times than a Confederate monument.

Businesses are in a world of hurt. They’re one breath away from being shut down by the government.

And if they’re not shut down because of Covid, they’re at risk of being burned to the ground by peaceful protesters, or put out of business by the Twitter mob for not being woke enough.

Financial markets are no better off; many stock markets around the world are trading at dangerously high valuations, propped up solely by rumors and conjecture about more free money from the government.

It’s as if the health of the economy doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people are unemployed, or businesses closed down, doesn’t matter.

Over the past few months, markets have transformed into casinos, where investors are merely gamblers placing bets on whether politicians can agree on how much debt to pile onto future generations.

And speaking of politicians, there’s a whole tribe of card-carrying Marxists now, surging ahead in their respective polls and clamoring to take over their assemblies.

They’re threatening everything from higher taxes to confiscation of entire industries.

And it’s all happened so quickly. Murphy’s Law.

But as the story goes, there’s actually another interpretation of Murphy’s Law.

In 1948, after finally figuring out the proper results of their experiment, the MX981 research team held a press conference, and a reporter asked, “How is it that no one was severely injured during your tests”

John Stapp, the maverick who strapped himself into Gee Whiz, replied, “We do all of our work in consideration of Murphy’s Law. . .”

So you see, in Stapp’s view, the idea was to identify risks… figure out the things that could go wrong… and PLAN around them.

Murphy’s Law is often viewed through the lens of pessimism– everything’s bad, everything’s going to fail.

But Stapp’s view was totally different; it was grounded in optimism and rationality– we can achieve success by avoiding mistakes… by actually spending time thinking about what could go wrong and where the potential for loss and failure might be.

This is the very essence of a Plan B.

It requires foresight and flexibility. Things will change, and a good plan needs to be adaptable to what might go wrong.

But most of all, it requires the will to actually just sit down and do it. There is no substitute for execution. After all, your Plan B isn’t going to design itself.

How I Became A Heretic To My Liberal Friends

 

We live in dangerous times! Over the last few years the markets were first to go with QE and interventionist Central Banks. Now it's democracy itself going down the drain. And there is seemingly nothing we can do. It is as if the forces controlling our societies were unstoppable. And maybe they are. 

But in this mayhem, one trend is especially concerning: Polarization of opinions.

Not only is there no room left for nuances among the deplatforming of unorthodox ideas but "friends" will hush you into silence by repeating the absurd social memes to which they are bombarded daily by news outlets which have become little more than propaganda machines. 

To keep your sanity in this mess, hearing other like-minded people voicing their concern can be reassuring. Yes, the world around you is going mad but there is no need to follow it down this road to madness.   

Here's Tom Courser going after the liberal crowds. With other arguments, we could likewise destroy conservative beliefs. What's important is to keep a sense of balance. As they used to teach at Universities during the Middle Ages when these places were real centers of learning in a sea of ignorance: Thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis.

How I Became A Heretic To My Liberal Friends

Authored by Tom Couser via AntiWar.com,

My wife has become increasingly nervous when political topics arise in conversations with our friends over dinner or drinks. She’s afraid I’ll disrupt a pleasant occasion by expressing views that are anathema to our liberal, Democratic friends.

Like what? you might ask.

Well, there are several, but the most inflammatory one is my denial that Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential election in a consequential way, much less with the intention of electing Trump.

"What?" you say. Every MSNBC-watching, New York Times WaPo-reading Democrat knows that the Russians hacked the DNC emails and passed them on to WikiLeaks to hurt the Clinton campaign. And how about all those social media posts?

The second I express myself, I am invariably accused of parroting Fox News or even of endorsing Trump. But I despise Trump and have never watched Fox news live for more than a minute or two. (Occasionally, I watch an interview with a left-leaning heretic like myself, who cannot get airtime on the "legacy media.")

How did this happen? How did I come to reject beliefs my liberal friends hold sacred?

Well, to paraphrase an old commercial, I came by my heretical views the old-fashioned way: I earned them. I looked beyond the MSM to independent sources of news and commentary, reading widely and open-mindedly and thinking critically. Some of these sources publish reporting, others opinion; many are left-leaning; most oppose American foreign policy. I weighed them against one another, and the MSM, to assess their reliability.

In short, I investigated American journalism – and found corporate media woefully misleading. I would say I found it unprofessional but, as a friend reminded me, the job of corporate journalism is to maximize profit; doing so is not conducive, to say the least, to challenging the dominant power structure and its ideology.

My current morning routine is this. Over breakfast, I read the hard copy of the New York Times, selectively and skeptically. Then I repair to my study and spend an hour or so surfing online news sources. I consult more than a dozen daily: e.g., The Intercept, Truthout, Consortiumnews.com, Antiwar.com, Current Affairs, Jacobin, RealClearInvestigations, CommonDreams, Grayzone, FAIR, Counterpunch, The Nation, and even RT. Among journalist/bloggers I consider trustworthy on Russiagate are Aaron Maté, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Caitlin Johnstone, Moon of Alabama, and Elizabeth Voss.

While still teaching (at Hofstra University), I would pick up a free copy of the New York Times on campus and read it over the course of the day. I would listen to NPR while commuting. I considered myself well informed. I was quite trustful of these sources on most topics. My views did not diverge sharply from those of my liberal friends.

But after my retirement in 2011, I began to look deeper. I’m not sure why; I did not set out to shift my politics to the left. One factor was my interest in Syria, where my father had taught at Aleppo College during the 1930s. In 2009, just before violence broke out there, I followed in his footsteps, traveling to Aleppo with my family. When the protests against the notoriously brutal and repressive Assad began, I was very sympathetic. Like the Western media, I favored the "moderate rebels."

But eventually, by reading alternative media, I came around to the view that there were not enough moderate rebels to bring about a change of regime. (The notion of a viable moderate opposition was the product of a Western PR campaign.) Eventually, I learned that the U.S was arming militant Islamists (as with the Mujahaddin earlier in Afghanistan, helping bring the Taliban to power) and eventually sending in troops in violation of international law. (They are still there.) The result was a terrible civil war. I reluctantly came to believe that the least bad short-term outcome for the Syrian people was for the Assad regime to prevail, with Russia’s help. That is what has happened. Removing Assad would have done to Syria what removing Saddam did to Iraq: worsened the havoc and suffering in the nation and the surrounding region.

But what about Assad’s gassing of his own people, you say, which was investigated by the purportedly neutral OPCW (the UN-sponsored Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Warfare) and widely reported in the Western media? Sorry, but whistleblowers among the actual inspectors eventually came forward to reveal that their firsthand findings had been distorted to fit the desired verdict. (Remember Iraq and its WMD?) But of course, the whistleblowers testimony was largely ignored by the very media that blamed the atrocity on Assad and fawned over Trump’s retaliatory attack. (The next day, Fareed Zakaria declared on CNN that "Donald Trump became president of the United States last night.")

Looked at critically, this narrative made no sense. Why would Assad, who was winning the war, risk antagonizing the world (and his people)? Why would he cross a redline drawn by the US, risking retaliation? He wouldn’t, and he didn’t. Almost certainly, these gas attacks were false flag attacks by the rebels to trigger American attacks against Syria (which they did). I have learned to ask the basic question, Cui bono? (who benefits) when reading the news. The answer is often not the party being blamed by the MSM.

As with Syria, so with Venezuela and Bolivia, with Russia and Ukraine: if you can put aside the dominant narrative promulgated by the MSM, you can find dedicated, dogged investigative journalists who challenge and debunk it. Unfortunately, the debunking necessarily lags well behind the false story. And in our short news cycle, it gets lost. Moreover, skeptical journalism gets published only in small, independent outlets. The MSM generally does not retract its stories. If it does, it does so in a whisper, someplace where the retractions will not get noticed. If you look for them, you can find them, but you have to know to look.

The most authoritative debunkers of the Russiagate/Ukrainegate narrative have been, interestingly, a group that calls itself Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Its work appears regularly at Consortiumnews.com, which was founded by Robert Parry, who broke the Iran-Contra story. The VIPs are retired intelligence officers who resent the cooking of intelligence for political ends. (Their first post was published on the day that Colin Powell testilied [sic] to the UN Security Council and the MSM stenographers published his lies; since then, they have an excellent track record.) Their retirement frees them to voice their views without permission or repercussions. The VIPs, one of whom, Ray McGovern, briefed Presidents during the Cold War, can hardly be accused of being soft on Russia.

They have shown that the so-called "hack" of the DNC emails was almost certainly a leak. Forensic examination of the megadata by William Binney, former NSA Director, indicates that the data could not have been stolen over the internet; so much information could not have been transferred as quickly as claimed. In any case, recently declassified documents reveal that Shawn Henry, the president of CrowdStrike Services, the company tasked by the DNC with examining the server (which the DNC refused to release to the FBI) admitted under oath that there was no evidence of email having been "exfiltrated," as had been reported in the corporate media and universally believed by liberals.

One irony of this, of course, is that the emails published by WikiLeaks, whose authenticity no one has challenged, were proof of the rigging of the Democratic primary by the DNC: i.e., election meddling. Given the damaging content, it seems far more likely that this was a leak by a disgruntled insider, but the blame of course is put on Russia.

As for the supposedly election-meddling social media activity. It was not directed by the Kremlin; it began before Trump was nominated and continued well past the election. The actual ads were mostly puerile, unsophisticated (and not in fluent English); many favored Clinton; some were not even about politics. It was mostly clickbait. The bottom line is that the financial investment was infinitesimal compared to those of the two candidates. This can’t have had any discernible effect on the outcome, much less a decisive one. (This is leaving aside the glaring hypocrisy of Americans complaining about meddling in our elections, when the US is the world champ in that endeavor.)

But the Russiagate narrative has served, as it was intended, to deflect attention from the failures of the Clinton campaign – and more generally from the Democratic party’s embrace of neoliberalism at home, betraying the working class, and imperialism abroad. Regrettably, too, it masks far more serious obstacles to fair elections: the Electoral College, voter-suppression, gerrymandering, Citizens United, and so on – i.e., the factors presumably in American control.

Its promotion by the MSM has fostered widespread paranoia about Russia. Thanks to the DNC and the MSM, neo-McCarthyism is epidemic among Democrats, who see Russians (I almost said Commies) under every bed.

As the late Stephen F. Cohen insisted (not in MSM, which blackballed him), this is a dangerous delusion; it significantly increases the possibility of a hot (nuclear) war.

Perhaps most alarming, in the MSM Russiagate eclipses the truly existential threat of the climate emergency. The MSM fiddles while the world burns.

Most of my friends are academics, artists or other intellectuals. It makes me sad – and crazy – that these people, who are smart and sophisticated – not "low information" voters – fall for this stuff, which is counterfactual faith-based journalism.

I could go on to list other MSM truths that I regard as "fake news." But there’s little point. It’s not that I expect my friends to believe me rather than the New York Times. What I’d like is for them to be willing to consider alternative interpretations of events and to explore non-corporate media.

Why? Well, consider the view of Noam Chomsky, who (with Edward S. Herman) long ago exposed how the MSM "manufacture" consent; he considers Russiagate a huge gift to Trump, which could hand him the election. Or consider what William Casey, director of the CIA, said when asked by incoming President Ronald Reagan to describe his agency’s mission, "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public knows is false." Part of the mission of the intelligence agencies has been to infiltrate American media and gaslight the public. But, as I suggested above, this does not prevent honest analysts from reaching their own conclusions.

I try not to blame my friends for being misguided by the MSM. After all, only a few years ago, when I read only what my friends read, I believed as they do. It’s not that I’m smarter, or more (or less) liberal than they; it’s just that I’ve made the effort to peek outside my info silo, the liberal echo chamber.

I try not to be too disputatious in conversations with friends. I don’t want to alienate them. Life is lonely enough during the pandemic without becoming persona non grata, never invited back.

On the other hand, why should I silence myself? Why should I nod sagely as friends spout what I regard as nonsense? Well, there’s no percentage in it. Sadly, conversation alone doesn’t convince or convert. Politics has become polarized and tribalized to a frightening degree; evidence and argument don’t seem to matter. People believe what they want to believe. The light bulb has to want to change. Or at least, to be open to changing. And, to be fair, it takes time and effort to explore alternative media.

But I want my friends to know that while we may all oppose Trump, we are hardly on the same page. In such circumstances, old friends should be able to agree to disagree. But how can my friends and I agree to disagree if they don’t know that we disagree?

So I will continue to speak out. Silence feels like collusion in delusion. And the stakes are high.

 

Are Social Media becoming toxic to society?

 

 

Authored by Bill Hansmann via AmericanThinker.com,

I watched an extremely troubling movie the other night on the recommendation of my friend Rich.  It was on Netflix but is also available on YouTube and is called The Social Dilemma.

We wonder why partisan rancor and political division are at an unprecedented level in our country.  This film suggests a likely answer.

We spend a lot of time on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others, but not nearly as much time as they spend on us.  It seems that these platforms are populated and are indeed driven by algorithms that are individually calibrated to give each user what the platform decides that person wants to see, demonstrated by his pushing the "LIKE" buttons.  Liberals get items with a liberal slant.  Conservatives receive stories and items that match their previous likes.  Those individuals who exhibit a liking of conspiracies get more of the same, as well as ads designed to sell black helicopters.

In other words, every time we "LIKE" an item on Facebook, our individual settings are fine-tuned.  Our news feeds, as well as our comments, are monitored and used to even more precisely shape what we see on our screens.  No two individuals get the same variety of items on their Facebook pages or on any other platform.

More and more when considering the opinions of people I know, I ask myself, How can they think that way?  How can they believe that?  They are, in fact, being programmed to feel that way by their interactions with their social media.  And unfortunately, I am receiving the same treatment, with different modalities resulting in a different mindset.

Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, taught us that if you tell a lie enough times, it will be accepted as the truth.  It is obviously also true that different spins on facts and stories can be individually tailored to each individual's demonstrated tastes.  Paul Simon penned the lyric "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."  We watch and listen to news feeds that tell us what we want to hear.  We never tune in to the others.

I'm not suggesting that Facebook, et al. possess Goebbels's evil intent.  I do suggest that they, in their driven purpose of monetizing our likes and dislikes, have inadvertently helped to drive a wedge in our population that quite possibly could lead to civil war.

I recall a social experiment from a few years back.  In one, people looked at a picture of a woman in a dress.  Half the people looking at the picture saw a blue dress, and half saw silver.

Two individuals standing side by side and seeing the opposite of each other in this experiment often questioned the sanity or truthfulness of the other.  In this instance, there was nothing designed to cause the differing results.  It would seem that in some ways, we are hardwired to interpret certain things differently.  But when you add the tactic of designing individual inputs to reinforce a belief system in the way the social platform algorithms perform, the often seen results are ironclad sets of conflicting beliefs that become woven into our population.  It is undeniably dividing our house, and we know what Lincoln told us about that.

What is the answer to these troubling circumstances?  I wish I knew.  But I find it quite telling that many of the executives of the large social platforms stated in the movie that they did not allow their children any time on the very platforms that they are selling to the rest of us.  That is certainly food for thought.

WHO urges World Leaders To Stop Using Lockdowns To Fight COVID Contagion

 

Never too late! or is it?

At this stage, it is extremely unlikely that most governments in the West will backtrack and adopt more sensible policies. If lockdowns do not work, it is simply because we are doing too little. This is how societies work. This is also how they fail. How could this time be different?

See UK second lockdown

WHO Flip-Flops: Urges World Leaders To Stop Using Lockdowns To Fight COVID Contagion

In a stunning rebuke of the "science" and the "doctors" and leftist politicians and career bureaucrats in the US and across much of The West, The Epoch Times' Evan Pentchoukov reports that The World Health Organization’s special envoy on COVID-19 has urged world leaders to stop using lockdowns as the primary control method against the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

“We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” David Nabarro told The Spectator in an interview aired on Oct. 8.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Nabarro pointed to the collateral damage that lockdowns are having worldwide, especially among poorer populations.

“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry, for example in the Caribbean or in the Pacific, because people aren’t taking their holidays. Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world because their markets have got dented. Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. Seems that we may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents, in poor families, are not able to afford it,” Nabarro said.

“This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe actually,” he added. “And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: Stop using lockdown as your primary control method, develop better systems for doing it, work together and learn from each other, but remember - lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer."

 A number of medical or public health scientists and medical practitioners have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that “current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.”

 

We are entering dangerous territory. A.I. represents a risk in itself in the long term as many scientists have already warned us, but in the wrong hands the menace is real and far more immediate.

We have seen with Covid-19 how health could be weaponized with dramatic consequences on freedom almost everywhere around the world.

Now imagine a false positive security risk, and the target is not a virus but you! 

Minority report meet the Fugitive. You are the hero. But because this is not Hollywood the outcome is grim. Welcome to the future. 

The real risk beyond AI is to link database left and right and start deducting correlations beyond the scope of our understanding. But where exactly should we stop for the sake of security in a world fraught with danger, when a majority ask for results by any means? 

The article focus on self fulfilling prophecies and as such on the current obsession with race in the US. But the real issue is broader as in the end we are all at risk. From a machine point of view, being human is being defective! 

Authored by Aaron Kesel via ActivistPost.com,

Thousands Of Mathematicians Call For Boycotting Predictive Crime A.I. From Police

By Aaron Kesel

After a flurry of police brutality cases this year and protests swarming the U.S. streets, thousands of mathematicians have joined scientists and engineers in calling for boycotting artificial intelligence from being used by law enforcement.

Over 2,000 mathematicians have signed a letter calling to boycott all collaboration with police and telling their colleagues to do the same in a future publication of the American Mathematical Society, Shadowproof reported.

The call to action for the mathematicians was the police killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and many more just this year.

“At some point, we all reach a breaking point, where what is right in front of our eyes becomes more obvious,” says Jayadev Athreya, a participant in the boycott and Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. “Fundamentally, it’s a matter of justice.”

The mathematicians wrote an open letter, collecting thousands of signatures for a widespread boycott of police using algorithms for policing. Every mathematician within the group’s network pledges to refuse any and all collaboration with law enforcement.

The group is organizing a wide base of mathematicians in the hopes of cutting off police from using such technologies. The letter’s authors cite “deep concerns over the use of machine learning, AI, and facial recognition technologies to justify and perpetuate oppression.”

Predictive policing is one key area where some mathematicians and scientists have enabled the racist algorithms, which tell cops to treat specific areas as “hotspots” for potential crime. Activists and organizations have long criticized the bias in these practices. Algorithms trained on data produced by racist policing will reproduce that prejudice to “predict” where crime will be committed and who is potentially a criminal.

“The data does not speak for itself, it’s not neutral,” explains Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision. Police data is “dirty data,” because it does not represent crime, but policing and arrests.

“So what are its predictions going to find? That police should deploy their resources in the same place police have traditionally deployed their resources.”

Several, if not all, U.S. states and major cities are thought to use some type of predictive policing or pre-crime software with known users including — Chicago, Atlanta, Tacoma, New York, and LA, though not without protesting its use. As Activist Post previously reported, many of these states are using Palantir software for their predictive crime algorithms and have been exposed for doing so, like Florida, whose police terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County.

These police organizations across the U.S. have been using what is known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat list,” you may ask?

Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right — a person who might commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown.

Activists and journalists sued the Chicago Police Department in 2017 for failing to disclose how these programs operate, as Activist Post reported.

Chicago wasn’t the only major police department exposed using predictive crime algorithms. The Los Angeles Police Department was also caught one year later in 2018 by activists from the Stop LA Spying Coalition, as Activist Post reported.

This heat list idea in local law enforcement actually originated in Miami then was rolled out in Chicago in 2013. However, Activist Post may have missed other cities that gained less media attention; and as this writer will discuss shortly, the idea comes from a federal database.

A paper released last year by MIT entitled “Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns” has been signed by some of the highest level university experts in the field of A.I. and law who warn about the “technical flaws” of these pre-crime based systems, Activist Post reported.

Fortunately for us, as Nicholas West noted, the pushback has already started in several cities, and a few police departments have dropped their programs after becoming aware of the inaccuracies. In 2018, for example, New Orleans suspended its 6-year running pre-crime program after its secret predictive policing software was exposed.

The scariest part of all this is that the New Orleans and LA police departments were actually both linked to Palantir Technologies, which directly works with the CIA and is suspected of being the current fork of PROMIS Main Core software. PROMIS pre-dates all of these local police heat lists, with algorithms that put suspected “domestic terrorists” into their own round-up lists and highly scrutinized tracked purchases, created at first by Oliver North for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush under FEMA’s Readiness Exercise — 1984 (REX-1984.)

The use of Palantir’s pre-crime algorithm software posits that other police departments may be utilizing the same software for their own pre-crime programs. Palantir is also the same company working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on its own lists to catch illegal immigrants, as Activist Post and investigative journalist Barrett Brown originally reported.

You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass surveillance PRISM which is the successor to PROMIS. Palantir’s software in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details about a top-secret government database that might have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in the event of an emergency like Martial Law.

PROMIS was forked into many reported use-cases for the U.S. government, including an intelligence application onboard nuclear submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both the U.S. government and certain allied governments for inventory tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident Americans under Main Core.

The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory; PROMIS software was used by Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.

In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:

Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.

This Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration to administration through National Security channels, according to sources.

This writer wrote extensively on Main Core and PROMIS in an investigation on the cover-up of stolen Inslaw software and murders of journalists Danny Casolaro and Anson NG Yonc, CIA intelligence operative Ian Spiro and NSA employee Alan Standorf. See: “Octopus PROMIS: The Conspiracy Against INSLAW Software, And The Murders To Cover Up A Scandal Bigger Than Watergate.”

Palantir was founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily used by the military, and Palantir is a subcontracting company in its own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.

Palantir’s Gotham software allows Fusion Center police to track citizens beyond social media and online web accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool.

According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further, Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.

Tarik Aougab, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Haverford College, one of the many mathematicians who saw recent protests against police as a an opportunity to take action against these practices said. “If there is already disproportionately large amounts of time and energy being spent criminalizing Black and brown people,” Aougab continues, “the predictions the algorithm puts forth are just going to reflect that. It’s a way to perpetuate that over-criminalization.”

The mathematicians question if predictive policing is just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“There’s a big question here: is predictive policing really getting ahead of events, or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?” McQuade explains that “crime statistics” are more accurately referred to as “arrest statistics.” They measure police behavior, which is not directly correlated with crime and violence. These arrests justify and perpetuate more arrests.

Athreya explains the boycotters will accomplish their goals by collaborating with criminal justice organizations.

We want to work through issues of how various algorithms are used in the criminal justice system, for things from facial recognition to DNA matching algorithms, where community groups and mathematicians can have a say.

In fact, one study conducted by the AI Institute last year investigated predictive policing systems and determined “in numerous jurisdictions, these systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially-biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies.”

Another subsequent 2019 audit on predictive A.I. use in Los Angeles found a serious lack of oversight or procedures around the tools, rendering them utterly useless. Researchers have also noticed police tend to pursue their own “hotspots” rather than follow the technology making the tech become an enabler to police labeling and categorizing individuals without reason, Science Mag reported.

This is only the beginning of the fight, and it’s going to be a drawn-out battle to prevent the use of this technology, not just here in the U.S. but worldwide as well. There’s no telling how long these projects have been active, and trusting the police to honestly tell us is like trusting the wolf guarding the henhouse. However, with mathematicians as well as scientists and engineers on our side we have a fighting chance.