The United State of War

Trump's despicable war might be coming to a close for now (as Israel continues to pummel Lebanon). One can hope. But take a look back at US military involvement in the Middle East and the constant war-mongering by the US for many decades. Biden/Harris stood watch over the leveling of Gaza. Harris was ready and willing to do what Trump just did.

Obama was a most unusual "Peace President."

It disgusts me that this comes strongly from both political parties. Americans have no option to vote for no war. Nor do we have any option to vote for candidates who are not controlled by the AIPAC and the government of Israel. Our "leaders" keep us in the dark and do the opposite of what we vote for. Our government system is rotted to the core. It pains me to write these words.

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“I’m Communist with my Family . . . “

Brivael - FR makes sense here:

There’s a phrase I love: “I’m communist with my family, socialist with my friends, liberal with my country, and capitalist with the rest of the world.”

This phrase is brilliant because it sums up the number one mistake people make when thinking about economic systems: applying what works on a small scale to a large scale without understanding that the complexity of systems changes everything.

Communism with your family works. You share everything, you don’t keep score, each person gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs. And it works. Because you’re 4 or 5 people, you know everyone intimately, trust is total, cheating is impossible to hide, and love replaces economic incentives.

Socialism with your friends works too. A group of 20-30 people. You share restaurant bills, you help a buddy move, you lend a hand without keeping count. Reciprocity is natural because you know each person and your reputation is on the line.

But as soon as you scale up to a country, 68 million people, everything falls apart. Why? Because the complexity of systems is non-linear. Organizing 5 people is trivial. Organizing 50 is difficult. Organizing 50 million is a problem of fundamentally different complexity. It’s not just “harder.” It’s qualitatively a different problem.

At large scale, you no longer know the people. Trust disappears. Cheating becomes invisible. Free riders proliferate. The information needed to coordinate 68 million people exceeds the capacity of any central planner. This is the economic calculation problem of Mises (1920) and the dispersed knowledge of Hayek (1945). A central brain can’t process the information that millions of market prices transmit in real time.

That’s exactly why communism produces happy families and dead countries. The model doesn’t scale. Not because people are mean. Because the complexity of systems makes centralized coordination impossible beyond a certain threshold.

And that’s the fundamental judgment error that most people who subscribe to Marxist theses make. They take their experience of sharing in a family or among friends, a model that works for 5-20 people, and they extrapolate it to 68 million people while completely ignoring the emergence of complexity. “If it works at home, it should work for the country.” No. The physics of complex systems says exactly the opposite.

The free market is the only system that scales. Because it doesn’t depend on personal trust, nor on good will, nor on an omniscient planner. It depends on prices that transmit information, incentives that align behaviors, and competition that corrects errors. It’s a system designed to work with strangers, at any scale.

Be communist with your family. Socialist with your friends. And liberal with everything else. Because the size of the system determines the model that works. Not your good intentions.

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About the Transgender Treatment Censorship Tsunami

The you remember the inorganic wave of brand new "obvious" things we were all supposed to believe and say about transgender topics? I agree with Greg Lukianoff that it was surreal. I spoke up with questions and concerns that were repeatedly blasted with religious fervor. But here we are now, and it's clear that the transgender religious movement distorted everything around it, including our First Amendment rights. One big moment to upright the ship was the Cass Report. Another was the mass closing of transgender clinics. And now a new Finnish study.

[You can see many many posts on this topic (I published more than 150 articles at this site) here:

Greg Lukianoff:

In my career defending academic freedom and free speech, I never saw anything become as immediately radioactive as views that ran counter to the narrative on trans issues. Papers were retracted, compelled speech was treated as normal, and people were canceled for saying things that would have sounded like common sense just a few years earlier. It seemed to become a kind of secular blasphemy overnight. And usually, that is a sign that the true believers know, at some level, that they are on shaky ground.

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The Secret Government of the United States

I'm 100% in agreement with Bret Weinstein here. I'm 100% in agreement with Bret Weinstein here.

Not only do things not add up. What's is truly bizarre is to watch so many people of power and influence do 180 degree flips on dozens of prominent issues over the past six years without feeling any need to justify their change of opinion. No new facts are being offered on issues that affect millions or tens of millions of us and, further, the corporate media pretends that nothing interesting is happening. Weinstein:

I think we Americans have to have a conversation with ourself about not only how broken our system is and what it is resulting in us doing, but how does it actually work? What is it that is actually driving us to do what we do? And you know, we can see parts of it. We can see lobbying. It's the loophole in our system where the system is pay-for-play, that is used day in and day out by corporations to get us to do things that are bad for our health, bad for our long term financial well-being bad in every regard. But obviously our adversaries abroad will have noticed that we have a pay-for-play system, and if they aren't taking advantage of it, that would be surprising. I would like to know why they would have missed the opportunity.

So presumably they are, and that also applies to our allies. Unfortunately, that is to say, anytime somebody has an interest that is in conflict with the interest that we Americans actually have, they are in a position to nudge us in their direction, and we are undoubtedly being nudged. On the other hand, I don't think that can be the sum total of it. And I will tell you, I don't like saying any of this. I don't want to be doing this. The the reason that the Epstein phenomenon, whatever it was, is so important, is that it suggests a hidden power structure that was there for leverage. It is unfortunate that in the edit that we have been shown, we don't have conclusive evidence of who what they were after, or even how the leverage worked. All we can see is strong evidence that there was something logically it is implied that it was connected to intelligence services. Ours, likely Israel's, who knows who else? But the when you see your government, your president, functioning in ways that do not add up, it's like watching a planet behave oddly because of the gravity of some object you haven't found yet, right? There's the implication that there's something with power in this system that is undeclared. As far as we know, it's unnamed. And the central question is, what is it? How does it work? And how much effect is it having on what we do.

 

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What Public Health “Experts” Got Wrong about Covid

Justin Hart has offered an excellent annotated list. Visit his post for more detailed descriptions of what our public health experts got wrong during COVID, along with ample links. Hint: They got everything wrong. 

I’m Justin Hart — father of nine, data analyst, author of Gone Viral. I spent six years tracking COVID data professionally and ran one of the most-cited COVID data platforms during the pandemic. I’m not a crank, and this isn’t a rant. It’s an itemized bill.

The List

I’ve maintained this list for years. Every point represents something our institutions told us confidently, enforced aggressively, and got demonstrably wrong. Not “debatable.” Wrong.

Here’s the short list of everything these institutions got wrong during Covid:

    • Origin of the disease — wrong

    • Transmission — wrong

    • Asymptomatic spread — wrong

    • PCR testing — wrong

    • Fatality rate — wrong

    • Lockdowns — wrong

    • Community triggers — wrong

    • Business closures — wrong

    • School closures — wrong

    • Quarantining the healthy — wrong

    • Impact on youth — wrong

    • Hospital overload — wrong

    • Plexiglass barriers — wrong

    • Social distancing — wrong

    • Outdoor spread — wrong

    • Masks — wrong

    • Variant impact — wrong

    • Natural immunity — wrong

    • Vaccine efficacy — wrong

    • Vaccine injury — wrong

Twenty items. Every one sourced. Every one with real consequences for real people.

That’s not a crisis of public trust. That’s a record of institutional failure.

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