What’s the difference between a really strong weightlifter and a really, really, really strong weightlifter?
Repetition.
*.*
A busty young thang was trying on an EXTREMELY low cut dress. As she studied herself in the mirror, she asked the sales lady if she thought it was too low cut.
"Do you have hair on your chest?" The sales lady asked.
"No - certainly NOT!!!" Replied the young thang.
The sales lady then told her, "Then it's too low cut."
*.*
A Marine returns from duty in Iraq and is immediately reassigned to a remote location in Afghanistan
That evening he arrives at his new post; a run down mosque in the middle of nowhere.
As he switches over with the marine currently stationed there, he realizes there is no bed, no clean water, no toilet, just him, his weapon and the dirt on the floor.
The next morning he wakes up to find a queue of naked men leading into the mosque. At the front, the mosque leader is in prayer with the man leading the line.
As the prayer finishes, he drops to his knees and swings his fist into the naked guys balls, flooring him! The naked guy slowly comes to his senses and crawls out of the mosque.
Confused, the marine asks the mosque leader what's going on...
"These men are thieves, rapists and murderers from all over Afghanistan." He says, "Instead of prison, their punishment is to walk through the desert in nothing but their sandals, receive Allah's justice, then return home."
The marine returns to his post and continues to watch these unusual punishments.
After 6 long months of no bed, no clean water, no toilet and witnessing this unusual justice system, his replacement arrives.
"Hey, my last post was in Korea, how is it here?" Asks the replacement. "And what's with this queue of naked guys in the middle of nowhere!?"
"Well, I'll be honest with you", replies the marine, "this a shit post, and what you're looking at here is a criminal punch line."
*.*
I was about to have sex with the wife last night when I dropped the condom. I couldn't find the bloody thing, so the wife helped me out by switching on the light.
I no longer wanted to have sex.
*.*
Important lesson learned from 2020.
If vodka doesn't fix the problem, you're not using enough vodka.
Quote of the Times;
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken
Link of the Times;
https://thebluestateconservative.com/2021/06/08/2021s-stratospheric-murder-rates-in-americas-five-black-cities/
Issue of the Times;
Karl Marx’s Road to Hell is Paved with Fake Money by M.N. Gorden
“The way to Hell is paved with good intentions,” remarked Karl Marx in Das Kapital.
The devious fellow was bemoaning evil capitalists for having the gall to use their own money for the express purpose of making more money.
Marx, a rambling busybody, was habitually wrong. The road to hell is paved with something much more than good intentions. Grift, graft, larceny, corruption and fake money are what primarily composes the pavement. Good intentions are merely dusted in to better the aesthetic.
If you want to understand what’s going on with exploding price inflation then you must understand this…
Right now in the United States we have a scam currency that’s controlled by central planners. Specifically, we have what Marx envisioned in Plank No. 5 of his Communist Manifesto:
“No. 5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.”
The Federal Reserve System, created by the Federal Reserve Act of Congress in 1913, is indeed a ‘national bank’ and it politically manipulates interest rates and holds a monopoly on legal counterfeiting in the United States.
Without the Fed’s policies of mass credit creation the U.S. government could have never run up a national debt over $28 trillion. Without the Fed’s policies of extreme credit market intervention the U.S. trade deficit for March of $74.4 billion – a new record – would have never been possible. Without the Fed’s printing press money the U.S. government could have never run annual budget deficits over $3 trillion.
The fact is centralized credit in the hands of a central bank always leads to money supply inflation. Asset price inflation and consumer price inflation then follow in strange and unpredictable ways.
These price distortions are not defects of capitalism. They’re symptoms of a scam currency managed by central planners.
Here’s why…
The Nobel Planner
The economy is a complex living organism. It continuously evolves and is always subject to change. One relationship at one moment can be completely different at another moment. Supply and demand are incessantly adjusting and readjusting to meet the conditions of the market.
These continuous interactions provide a natural and efficient response to supply shortages and gluts. Even in a moderately free market economy, bakeries do not run out of bread when there’s a wheat crop shortage. The shelves never go empty. Rather, the price of bread rises and consumers adjust their spending accordingly.
Centrally planned economies, on the other hand, are inclined to frequent, intensive and chronic shortages. Bureaucrats, armed with spiral bound planning reports and pie graphs, are incapable of fixing the proper prices for gumballs and gasoline by diktat. There’s simply too much going on and too many moving parts for them to consider.
With the best of intentions, the noble planner makes their best guess of the appropriate price control. So, too, graft and corruption takes over to ensure the fake money flows to preferred industries and providers. Then things invariably go haywire.
The supply of certain goods or commodities may be more than adequate. But when a price administrator enforces an artificially low price, consumers are prone to wasteful behavior. They’re compelled to demand a greater amount than is supplied. Hence, the store shelves remain perpetually empty.
Certainly, uniform standards work well for units and measurements. They’re critical to building consistency and standardization of hardware and parts. They’re even necessary to effective communication and computer programming. For certain things, however, uniform standards come up short…
When it comes to the pricing of goods, commodities and services, commanding fixed prices by a central authority is an utter failure. This was effectively proven by the experiences of the centrally planned economies of the old communist Eastern Bloc countries during the second half of the 20th century.
Without market determined prices for goods and services via free exchange it is impossible to establish prices that reflect actual conditions. Without prices that are grounded in reality the production and consumption relationship becomes distorted. In the absence of the natural corrective mechanism of market determined prices, oversupply or scarcity conditions extend out to absurdity.
The planners are never able to get things quite right. In time, these absurdities become ubiquitous. For example, in a socialist economy you’ll find supermarkets with long lines of people and empty shelves. Another definitive gift of socialist economies is toilets without toilet seats. How is this even possible?
Regrettably, price controls don’t stop with just goods, commodities, and services. The United States – like Europe and Japan – has been doing its darnedest during the early years of the 21st century to illustrate how the experiences of the old Eastern Bloc also apply to credit.
Remember, credit, like a commodity or good, has a price attached to it. The price of credit is the rate of interest a lender charges to a borrower. Like fixing the price of a commodity or good by a central planning authority, fixing the price of credit by a central bank – such as the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, or Bank of Japan – is also an utter failure.
Someone with even a dim perception of the world around them can peer out and discern many strange and grotesque occurrences: Housing prices that far outpace incomes. Total household debt at $14.56 trillion. Crypto millionaires. And an entire generation of Millennials that went $1.57 trillion in student loan debt for college degrees that have been debased in stature to what a high school diploma represented for prior generations.
These represent gross misallocations of capital. What’s more, they would’ve never come into existence or ballooned out to this magnitude without the Fed’s credit market price controls and counterfeiting operations.
Indeed, the results of government intervention are always the same. Stagnation, inflation, declining living standards, and widespread social disorder. No doubt, they’ll be repeated to insanity.
True capitalism requires an honest currency and market determined pricing. Remember this in the weeks to come. As prices rise, politicians and central planners – people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Janet Yellen – will look to pin inflation on evil capitalists and price gouging business owners.
Don’t believe their lies. Just follow the fake money back to its origin…
There you’ll find the Fed, hard at work, applying the pavement to Karl Marx’s road to hell.
Buckle up!
News of the Times;
https://trendingpolitics.com/bombshell-chinese-scientist-filed-covid-vaccine-patent-in-february-of-2020-then-mysteriously-died-crugg/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/06/08/judge-orders-chicago-mayor-to-clarify-her-racist-interview-policy-n1452873
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/study-hydroxychloroquine-increase-survival-rate-200-percent
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/biden-removes-chinese-military-tech-company-from-blacklist/
https://christiansfortruth.com/meet-the-jewish-billionaires-who-are-bankrolling-drag-queen-story-hour-for-your-children/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/41-year-old-father-3-children-shot-twice-jogging-atlantas-wealthiest-neighborhood/
https://www.unionleader.com/opinion/op-eds/ryan-terrell-we-need-to-celebrate-black-achievement-not-victimhood/article_e517d3f5-dc82-5f4c-bb70-9788daef1374.html
https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-sold-almost-twice-as-many-phones-as-apple-in-q3-gartner-says/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/who-chief-scientist-served-legal-notice-in-india-for-allegedly-suppressing-data-on-drug-to-treat-covid-19_3848865.html
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/08/breaking-judge-orders-school-district-to-reinstate-pe-teacher-who-opposed-transgender-policy-n1452994
https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/06/diversity-training-comes-to-nc-state-university/
https://cdn.s3-media.wbal.com/Media/2021/06/08/60e46e54-0131-415f-b357-abeb5c571d57/original.pdf
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/paypal-shuts-down-long-time-tor-supporter-no-recourse
https://www.mediaite.com/news/nbcs-dilanian-admits-no-evidence-police-cleared-lafayette-protesters-for-trump-narrative-we-thought-we-knew-was-not-the-reality/
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/09/deutsche-bank-issues-a-terrifying-warning-for-america-under-biden-n1453388
Road?
Clerisy?
Instead of saying, "Have a nice day", I say, "Have the day you deserve."
Then I just let karma sort all that stuff out.
*.*
I came home from work this evening and said to my wife, "Are we having salad for dinner?"
"Yes we are, how did you know?" she asked.
I replied, "Because I can't hear the smoke alarm."
*.*
Two women in the one horse town of Parched Gulch had daughters, each of marriageable age. But there were no prospective husbands in town due to shootings, running off with outlaws and drunk riding. And there was no chance at all of any bridegrooms turning up.
The two mothers pooled their meager resources, advertised, and sure enough, they got results: twin brothers in Cactus Corners looking for wives. The twin bridegrooms were sent for.
Along the way the twins met up with outlaws.
One was killed, the other escaped. Upon his arrival, the mothers were in immediate conflict as to whom the surviving twin belonged. They were going to kill each other over it. After all, each had a daughter's future at stake.
They took the case to Judge A.K. Hornswoggle, alcoholic, disbarred, but with Solomonic frontier wisdom. After due deliberation, Hornswoggle ruled that the young man be chopped in half and one half awarded to each daughter.
The first mother was outraged. If Hornswoggle wasn't drunk or stupid, he was a monster for suggesting such a thing.
The second mother thought it would not be a bad solution.
And pointing to the second mother, Hornswoggle said, "Your daughter gets him. You are the real mother-in-law."
*.*
A woman reported the disappearance of her husband to the police.
The officer looked at the guy's photograph, questioned her, and then asked if she wanted to give her husband any message if they found him.
"Yes," she replied. "Please tell him Mother didn't come after all."
*.*
What do sea monsters eat?
Fish and Ships.
Quote of the Times;
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Link of the Times;
https://www.theblaze.com/news/tiktok-privacy-biometrics-faceprints-china
Issue of the Times;
The New Clerisy by Leighton Akira Woodhouse
Faith in science is an oxymoron.
Sometime during the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats began proudly calling themselves “the party of science.” The moniker was a reaction to the Bush administration’s open embrace of Creationism, and its climate change denialism. The Republican Party was being led around by the nose, liberals charged, by kooky Evangelical philistines and corrupt corporate lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. It had lost its grip on reality, a development that was comically encapsulated by a Bush official’s pejorative use of the phrase “reality-based community,” in sneering reference to critics who still took things like facts seriously. Liberal bloggers appropriated the phrase to describe themselves ironically.
This new science-based identity was congruous with the ascendance of a key demographic within the Democratic coalition, one that would be instrumental in electing and re-electing President Barack Obama. Prosperous, educated professionals, once a reliable, if liberal, Republican voting bloc, had for some time been shifting their partisan allegiance. As the GOP was increasingly drawing in rural and blue collar voters and, accordingly, elevating cultural issues like guns and religion that were imperative to them, the Democrats were burnishing their appeal to urban and suburban college graduates by embracing free trade, emphasizing identity-based issues like abortion and gay rights, and proudly espousing their commitment to expert-driven, technocratic governance. This rebranding from a workers’ party to the party of sober, rational, informed wonkiness flattered these new Democratic voters’ self-conception.
Today, in the age of biological and ecological emergency, the Democrats’ scientific brand has taken center stage again, reflected in an assertion that has become something of a mantra: “I believe in science.” The line is recited by presidential candidates and printed on face masks. It was uttered by the first American to receive the Covid vaccine after FDA emergency use authorization. It had its very own annual march during the Trump years. It’s enshrined in the oath of the “In This Household We Believe” lawn sign.
To political fellow travelers, its message is unmistakable: it’s a declaration of the intellectual maturity and independence from groupthink of the left-of-center. Yet in reality, it has come to indicate the opposite. The Democratic Party has become the party not of science, but of fealty to the clerics of science. “I believe in science” has come to mean, “I do not question expert authority,” which is as antithetical to the scientific spirit as you can get. The more gravely the line is intoned, the more Orwellian it becomes.
In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri traces the exalted status of the modern scientist to the mythical figure of the early twentieth century renegade scientific genius, embodied most famously by Albert Einstein. Einstein, Gurri reminds us, was hardly a creature of the academy. He nearly dropped out of high school, and when he began publishing his scientific insights he was working not at a university but at the patent office. But Einstein’s singular genius, combined with his tenacious devotion to The Truth, made him first the equal and then the superior of every credentialed academic in the world. Like Copernicus, the intrepidness of Einstein’s spirit and the independence of his mind elevated him above the banal muck of human affairs, bringing him a step closer to the gods of nature.
This mythological image, Gurri writes, remains the template for our popular conception of the professional scientist. But the myth is wildly at odds with the reality of what science is today.
The modern scientific research industry is like a cross between a giant perpetual motion machine and a game of musical chairs. Scientific research is underwritten, in large part, by a steady stream of government funding. To keep the lights on in their labs, scientists need to tap into that stream. They do so by designing research projects that conform to whatever the government prioritizes at any particular moment. If, for instance, there was just a major terrorist attack and Congress was concerned about the threat of bioterrorism, scientific research that related to that concern would be likely to be fast tracked for funding, so it may be a good time for a savvy principal investigator to start pitching projects aimed at developing vaccines for bioengineered pathogens. The successful scientist is the one who is particularly adept at writing fundable grant applications pegged to some politically salient research objective, and then generating laboratory results that make some sort of incremental progress toward that objective to justify a renewal of that grant funding in the next cycle.
The modern professional scientist is thus less like Albert Einstein than like his co-workers at the patent office. He is a bureaucrat, albeit a highly technical one. His goal is, to be sure, to seek The Truth, but only within the very narrow parameters of what other bureaucrats and politicians have deemed to be questions worth asking.
Anthony Fauci is the Platonic form of the scientist-technician-bureaucrat, which is why he has held his position as one of the top scientists in the nation for decades and through multiple administrations. As a creature of both science and politics, he has made himself indispensable as an interface between the two worlds and as the individual best positioned to mold the former to suit the needs of the latter. After 9/11, he transformed NIH into the agency at the front line of defending America against the imminent threat of jihadis armed with weaponized plague viruses. He championed “gain-of-function” research, which essentially meant building those superviruses before the terrorists did, the better to find vaccines for them. And once the Islamic terrorist threat faded a bit from our collective memory, he re-tooled this heftily-funded research into humanity’s front line of defense against Mother Nature, “the worst bioterrorist.” Unfortunately for Fauci, in the process, he may have - oops! - created one of the biggest pandemics in human history.
From the start of the pandemic, card-carrying members of the party of science have looked upon Fauci as a figure earning his place among the pantheon of liberal American demigods, alongside FDR, Rosa Parks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Maureen Dowd dubbed him a “national treasure” and The New Yorker named him “America’s Doctor.” His visage appears on (ha ha totally ironic) prayer candles, and toddlers will soon be force fed his life story in an upcoming children’s book.
More disturbingly, the edicts issued from Fauci’s NIH have been greeted like papal encyclicals. When we were told that masks were useless against Covid for regular people and that each one you hoarded deprived a frontline caregiver of a life-saving shield, we were momentarily scolded and shunned for donning them. Fifteen minutes later, when your mask became the only thing standing between you and mass death, we were ostracized for accidentally leaving it in the car. Few asked questions about this 180 reversal, just trusting the experts’ explanation that their understanding of the virus was evolving.
More such episodes followed. When Fauci and other illustriously credentialed scientists called the lab leak hypothesis a wild conspiracy theory, the press dutifully fell in line. Suddenly, the notion that it may not have been sheer coincidence that the virus broke out in one of the three cities on the planet with a lab doing bat coronavirus gain-of-function research became too embarrassing to mention in polite company. Only today, more than a year later, are people beginning to accept that the most obvious thing in the world may not be a paranoid fantasy on par with 9/11 Truth. But now we’re being told by the same expert authorities that merely entertaining the possibility that Ivermectin may be an effective therapy against Covid-19 aligns you with people who kill themselves drinking fish tank cleaner as a Covid prophylaxis.
At every such juncture, we’ve been admonished to “believe the science.” But this is not science; it’s politics. Science demands a reflexive posture of skepticism toward received wisdom, tempered by trust in empirical evidence. Bowing habitually to expert authority on the strength of titles and credentials is the antithesis of the scientific mindset. It is precisely what Democrats adopted the “party of science” moniker to reject: willful obedience to those who hold cultural and political power.
The scientific establishment, like the political establishment, is a human institution. It’s not an impartial supercomputer, or a transcendent consciousness. It’s a bunch of people subject to the same incentives and disincentives the rest of us are subject to: economic self-interest, careerism, pride and vanity, the thirst for power, fame and influence, embarrassment at admitting mistakes, intellectual laziness, inertia, and ad-hoc ethical rationalization, as well as altruism, moral purpose, and heroic inspiration. Scientific experts deserve the respect due to them by dint of their education and experience, and they deserve the skepticism due to them by dint of their existence as imperfect actors functioning in complicated and deeply flawed human networks and organizations. If you “believe in science,” you don’t bow to their authority. You don’t transform them into living legends and teach your children to follow the example of their lives. You don’t light votive candles to them and castigate anyone who dares doubt their infinite wisdom.
Instead, you demand the best proof they can offer. You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.
In our drift toward political tribalism, these are skills we are quickly unlearning. Those who call the shots in this country are happy to have it that way.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/worse-thought-fauci-top-us-doctors-caught-conspired-disquality-hydroxychloroquine-covid-treatment-millions-dead-result/
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/german-study-finds-lockdown-had-no-effect-stopping-spread-covid
https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2021/06/04/report-high-ranking-chinese-defector-working-with-dia-has-direct-knowledge-of-chinas-bioweapons-program-and-its-very-bad-n1452251
https://www.lawofficer.com/blm-activist-molested-accused/
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/06/05/bluff-called-ron-desantis-wins-big-over-cruise-lines-vaccine-passports-n391582
https://vdare.com/articles/black-lives-matter-is-a-blood-libel-against-white-america-here-s-why
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/inconvenient-truth-due-li-ions-heavy-carbon-footprint-evs-may-offer-negligible-co2
https://www.independentsentinel.com/harriss-pr-stunt-taking-4-billion-tax-dollars-to-crime-ridden-countries/
https://theblacksphere.net/2021/06/rapist-teacher-of-the-year/
https://thebeltwayreport.com/2021/06/p6203/
https://babylonbee.com/news/a-fetus-is-just-a-clump-of-cells-says-slightly-older-larger-clump-of-cells
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/breaking-federal-judge-overturns-californias-ar15-ban/
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/06/05/paul-blasts-fauci-gain-of-function-research-support-warns-wuhan-lab-experimenting-with-viruses-that-have-15-mortality/
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
https://theothermccain.com/2021/06/05/crazy-people-are-dangerous-26/
Then I just let karma sort all that stuff out.
*.*
I came home from work this evening and said to my wife, "Are we having salad for dinner?"
"Yes we are, how did you know?" she asked.
I replied, "Because I can't hear the smoke alarm."
*.*
Two women in the one horse town of Parched Gulch had daughters, each of marriageable age. But there were no prospective husbands in town due to shootings, running off with outlaws and drunk riding. And there was no chance at all of any bridegrooms turning up.
The two mothers pooled their meager resources, advertised, and sure enough, they got results: twin brothers in Cactus Corners looking for wives. The twin bridegrooms were sent for.
Along the way the twins met up with outlaws.
One was killed, the other escaped. Upon his arrival, the mothers were in immediate conflict as to whom the surviving twin belonged. They were going to kill each other over it. After all, each had a daughter's future at stake.
They took the case to Judge A.K. Hornswoggle, alcoholic, disbarred, but with Solomonic frontier wisdom. After due deliberation, Hornswoggle ruled that the young man be chopped in half and one half awarded to each daughter.
The first mother was outraged. If Hornswoggle wasn't drunk or stupid, he was a monster for suggesting such a thing.
The second mother thought it would not be a bad solution.
And pointing to the second mother, Hornswoggle said, "Your daughter gets him. You are the real mother-in-law."
*.*
A woman reported the disappearance of her husband to the police.
The officer looked at the guy's photograph, questioned her, and then asked if she wanted to give her husband any message if they found him.
"Yes," she replied. "Please tell him Mother didn't come after all."
*.*
What do sea monsters eat?
Fish and Ships.
Quote of the Times;
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
Link of the Times;
https://www.theblaze.com/news/tiktok-privacy-biometrics-faceprints-china
Issue of the Times;
The New Clerisy by Leighton Akira Woodhouse
Faith in science is an oxymoron.
Sometime during the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats began proudly calling themselves “the party of science.” The moniker was a reaction to the Bush administration’s open embrace of Creationism, and its climate change denialism. The Republican Party was being led around by the nose, liberals charged, by kooky Evangelical philistines and corrupt corporate lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. It had lost its grip on reality, a development that was comically encapsulated by a Bush official’s pejorative use of the phrase “reality-based community,” in sneering reference to critics who still took things like facts seriously. Liberal bloggers appropriated the phrase to describe themselves ironically.
This new science-based identity was congruous with the ascendance of a key demographic within the Democratic coalition, one that would be instrumental in electing and re-electing President Barack Obama. Prosperous, educated professionals, once a reliable, if liberal, Republican voting bloc, had for some time been shifting their partisan allegiance. As the GOP was increasingly drawing in rural and blue collar voters and, accordingly, elevating cultural issues like guns and religion that were imperative to them, the Democrats were burnishing their appeal to urban and suburban college graduates by embracing free trade, emphasizing identity-based issues like abortion and gay rights, and proudly espousing their commitment to expert-driven, technocratic governance. This rebranding from a workers’ party to the party of sober, rational, informed wonkiness flattered these new Democratic voters’ self-conception.
Today, in the age of biological and ecological emergency, the Democrats’ scientific brand has taken center stage again, reflected in an assertion that has become something of a mantra: “I believe in science.” The line is recited by presidential candidates and printed on face masks. It was uttered by the first American to receive the Covid vaccine after FDA emergency use authorization. It had its very own annual march during the Trump years. It’s enshrined in the oath of the “In This Household We Believe” lawn sign.
To political fellow travelers, its message is unmistakable: it’s a declaration of the intellectual maturity and independence from groupthink of the left-of-center. Yet in reality, it has come to indicate the opposite. The Democratic Party has become the party not of science, but of fealty to the clerics of science. “I believe in science” has come to mean, “I do not question expert authority,” which is as antithetical to the scientific spirit as you can get. The more gravely the line is intoned, the more Orwellian it becomes.
In The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri traces the exalted status of the modern scientist to the mythical figure of the early twentieth century renegade scientific genius, embodied most famously by Albert Einstein. Einstein, Gurri reminds us, was hardly a creature of the academy. He nearly dropped out of high school, and when he began publishing his scientific insights he was working not at a university but at the patent office. But Einstein’s singular genius, combined with his tenacious devotion to The Truth, made him first the equal and then the superior of every credentialed academic in the world. Like Copernicus, the intrepidness of Einstein’s spirit and the independence of his mind elevated him above the banal muck of human affairs, bringing him a step closer to the gods of nature.
This mythological image, Gurri writes, remains the template for our popular conception of the professional scientist. But the myth is wildly at odds with the reality of what science is today.
The modern scientific research industry is like a cross between a giant perpetual motion machine and a game of musical chairs. Scientific research is underwritten, in large part, by a steady stream of government funding. To keep the lights on in their labs, scientists need to tap into that stream. They do so by designing research projects that conform to whatever the government prioritizes at any particular moment. If, for instance, there was just a major terrorist attack and Congress was concerned about the threat of bioterrorism, scientific research that related to that concern would be likely to be fast tracked for funding, so it may be a good time for a savvy principal investigator to start pitching projects aimed at developing vaccines for bioengineered pathogens. The successful scientist is the one who is particularly adept at writing fundable grant applications pegged to some politically salient research objective, and then generating laboratory results that make some sort of incremental progress toward that objective to justify a renewal of that grant funding in the next cycle.
The modern professional scientist is thus less like Albert Einstein than like his co-workers at the patent office. He is a bureaucrat, albeit a highly technical one. His goal is, to be sure, to seek The Truth, but only within the very narrow parameters of what other bureaucrats and politicians have deemed to be questions worth asking.
Anthony Fauci is the Platonic form of the scientist-technician-bureaucrat, which is why he has held his position as one of the top scientists in the nation for decades and through multiple administrations. As a creature of both science and politics, he has made himself indispensable as an interface between the two worlds and as the individual best positioned to mold the former to suit the needs of the latter. After 9/11, he transformed NIH into the agency at the front line of defending America against the imminent threat of jihadis armed with weaponized plague viruses. He championed “gain-of-function” research, which essentially meant building those superviruses before the terrorists did, the better to find vaccines for them. And once the Islamic terrorist threat faded a bit from our collective memory, he re-tooled this heftily-funded research into humanity’s front line of defense against Mother Nature, “the worst bioterrorist.” Unfortunately for Fauci, in the process, he may have - oops! - created one of the biggest pandemics in human history.
From the start of the pandemic, card-carrying members of the party of science have looked upon Fauci as a figure earning his place among the pantheon of liberal American demigods, alongside FDR, Rosa Parks and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Maureen Dowd dubbed him a “national treasure” and The New Yorker named him “America’s Doctor.” His visage appears on (ha ha totally ironic) prayer candles, and toddlers will soon be force fed his life story in an upcoming children’s book.
More disturbingly, the edicts issued from Fauci’s NIH have been greeted like papal encyclicals. When we were told that masks were useless against Covid for regular people and that each one you hoarded deprived a frontline caregiver of a life-saving shield, we were momentarily scolded and shunned for donning them. Fifteen minutes later, when your mask became the only thing standing between you and mass death, we were ostracized for accidentally leaving it in the car. Few asked questions about this 180 reversal, just trusting the experts’ explanation that their understanding of the virus was evolving.
More such episodes followed. When Fauci and other illustriously credentialed scientists called the lab leak hypothesis a wild conspiracy theory, the press dutifully fell in line. Suddenly, the notion that it may not have been sheer coincidence that the virus broke out in one of the three cities on the planet with a lab doing bat coronavirus gain-of-function research became too embarrassing to mention in polite company. Only today, more than a year later, are people beginning to accept that the most obvious thing in the world may not be a paranoid fantasy on par with 9/11 Truth. But now we’re being told by the same expert authorities that merely entertaining the possibility that Ivermectin may be an effective therapy against Covid-19 aligns you with people who kill themselves drinking fish tank cleaner as a Covid prophylaxis.
At every such juncture, we’ve been admonished to “believe the science.” But this is not science; it’s politics. Science demands a reflexive posture of skepticism toward received wisdom, tempered by trust in empirical evidence. Bowing habitually to expert authority on the strength of titles and credentials is the antithesis of the scientific mindset. It is precisely what Democrats adopted the “party of science” moniker to reject: willful obedience to those who hold cultural and political power.
The scientific establishment, like the political establishment, is a human institution. It’s not an impartial supercomputer, or a transcendent consciousness. It’s a bunch of people subject to the same incentives and disincentives the rest of us are subject to: economic self-interest, careerism, pride and vanity, the thirst for power, fame and influence, embarrassment at admitting mistakes, intellectual laziness, inertia, and ad-hoc ethical rationalization, as well as altruism, moral purpose, and heroic inspiration. Scientific experts deserve the respect due to them by dint of their education and experience, and they deserve the skepticism due to them by dint of their existence as imperfect actors functioning in complicated and deeply flawed human networks and organizations. If you “believe in science,” you don’t bow to their authority. You don’t transform them into living legends and teach your children to follow the example of their lives. You don’t light votive candles to them and castigate anyone who dares doubt their infinite wisdom.
Instead, you demand the best proof they can offer. You consider their motivations, their ideological biases and their conflicts of interest. You interrogate their advice, and weigh it against that of their critics. You exercise diligence. You ask questions. You trust in evidence, not in people. You think for yourself.
In our drift toward political tribalism, these are skills we are quickly unlearning. Those who call the shots in this country are happy to have it that way.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/worse-thought-fauci-top-us-doctors-caught-conspired-disquality-hydroxychloroquine-covid-treatment-millions-dead-result/
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/german-study-finds-lockdown-had-no-effect-stopping-spread-covid
https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2021/06/04/report-high-ranking-chinese-defector-working-with-dia-has-direct-knowledge-of-chinas-bioweapons-program-and-its-very-bad-n1452251
https://www.lawofficer.com/blm-activist-molested-accused/
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/06/05/bluff-called-ron-desantis-wins-big-over-cruise-lines-vaccine-passports-n391582
https://vdare.com/articles/black-lives-matter-is-a-blood-libel-against-white-america-here-s-why
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/inconvenient-truth-due-li-ions-heavy-carbon-footprint-evs-may-offer-negligible-co2
https://www.independentsentinel.com/harriss-pr-stunt-taking-4-billion-tax-dollars-to-crime-ridden-countries/
https://theblacksphere.net/2021/06/rapist-teacher-of-the-year/
https://thebeltwayreport.com/2021/06/p6203/
https://babylonbee.com/news/a-fetus-is-just-a-clump-of-cells-says-slightly-older-larger-clump-of-cells
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/breaking-federal-judge-overturns-californias-ar15-ban/
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/06/05/paul-blasts-fauci-gain-of-function-research-support-warns-wuhan-lab-experimenting-with-viruses-that-have-15-mortality/
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-psychopathic-problem-of-the-white
https://theothermccain.com/2021/06/05/crazy-people-are-dangerous-26/
Right?
A guy in New York decided he was going to swim in the Hudson River to prove that it's clean.
He was 37.
*.*
After a long time, I told my hot coworker how I felt.
She felt the same way.
So, we finally agreed to turned on the AC.
*.*
Lines:
According to a new study, 60% of us say that we have experienced some kind of déjà vu before. In a related story, 60% of us say that we have experienced some kind of déjà vu before.
Be kind. Be respectful. If you do that, they'll never expect what you really had in mind.
Amazon has bought MGM, which means the James Bond movies are now owned by Amazon. I'm thinking James Bond will continue to save the world, but he'll do that in just two days for Prime Members.
A helicopter had to make an emergency landing at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, last week. Yes, another touchdown at FedEx field that had nothing to do with the Washington Woke Club.
There's a new White Cheddar Chex Mix, for those who haven't achieved their "Quarantine 15" yet.
An animal rights group called Animal Rebellion is demanding that McDonald's switch to only serving plant-based foods by the year 2025. Can the "Crappy Meal" be far behind?
How is physically possible that three-day weekends can feel so short?
I'm waiting for the day that the name "Hoover Dam" is deemed offensive and they change it to "Hoover Darn."
I watched Zach Snyder's "Army of the Dead" over the weekend. It's the story of a mean, sadistic, cruel, undead monster who directs a zombie movie.
In Atlanta, a man drove his car right into a Barnes and Noble. Not surprising, the store owner threw the book at him.
*.*
The Five Dwarfs Who Didn't Make Snow White's Team:
Contagious
Flasher
Jittery
Psoriasis
Gassy
*.*
I don’t like stairs.
They’re always up to something.
Quote of the Times;
The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused! – Trump
Link of the Times;
https://summit.news/2021/06/02/email-researcher-who-funded-wuhan-lab-admitted-to-manipulating-coronaviruses-thanked-fauci-for-dismissing-lab-leak-theory/
Issue of the Times;
What If I’m Right? by Steve Sailer
Since the previous century I’ve been articulating in the public arena an array of interconnecting ideas about how the world works. For example, I tend to suspect that racial differences in achievement in 2021 have more to do with nature and nurture, with culture and human biodiversity, than with unspecifiable malevolence on the part of white men as dictated by the theory of systemic racism.
(Note that I don’t put very much effort into telling you how I think the world should work, just how it does work. At least, the latter’s testable.)
I usually don’t go out of my way to make specific predictions, but my instincts are, by this point, not bad. For example, I was bellowing in Taki’s Magazine from June 3, 2020, onward that society reassuring blacks that they deserved a Racial Reckoning that entitled them to riot and resist arrest was going to be a disaster for all concerned.
That raises the more general question: What if I’m right?
What if my way of thinking is, in general, more realistic, insightful, and reasonable than the conventional wisdom?
I dislike thinking of my concepts as an ideology. I don’t propound “Sailerism.” I lack the ambition and the ego. I am by nature a staff guy rather than a line boss. I like to think of my approach to understanding human society as one that will eventually seem obvious to everybody, so I shouldn’t claim credit now for what is simply solid empirical thinking applied to the more contentious subjects.
Instead, I like to tell myself, I should just keep coming up with more ideas that are (in declining order of importance to me) true, interesting, new, and funny. Eventually, people will notice how much better my approach to reality has been than that of the famous folks winning MacArthur genius grants and try to figure out for themselves how I do it so that everybody can do it too.
Or at least that’s what I hope.
On the other hand, it’s now 2021 and public discourse has just gotten stupider and more self-destructive over the course of my career.
Maybe that’s my fault?
What if I had just kept my mouth shut and, instead of challenging popular pundits to be honest and intelligent, I’d let them work it out for themselves? After all, while people who know me tend to find I’m an admirable individual, people who don’t know me tend to hate me.
Many pundits seem enraged over the idea that I might prove right. This tendency to personalize social science disputes has always struck me as dim-witted, but, apparently, the fear “What if Sailer is right?” is infuriating and/or terrifying to many. It’s almost as if what gets people mad is my being correct so often.
Thus, when I point out the facts, I’m often greeted with incoherent anger centering on the allegation that I must be a bad person for being so well-informed.
Actually, while I’m of course highly biased, my impression is that I am, at least compared with most of my fellow opinionators, rather a good person, more Orwell than Waugh.
When I started in the 1990s, my views were edgy but not unknown. Intellectually, I’m basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the domestic neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein. But I also admired liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. senator from New York) and James Coleman, as well as socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever had published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks’ book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, Inequality:
Having read Ernest van den Haag’s article on Christopher Jencks, I am reminded of an old psychiatry joke: A psychotic (egalitarian, in this little morality story) says, “All people are equal, and I’ll fight anyone who says I’m wrong.” A neurotic (Jencks) says, “People aren’t equal, and I just can’t stand it.”
My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist was always Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his “Keeping Up” column in Fortune.
What’s changed since the 1970s?
Basically, all that has happened is that the data has piled up against the Establishment view. I think it’s an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the past 49 years. And I haven’t seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st century has mostly vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like “Race does not exist” are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what’s what.
But instead of changing minds, the passing of the years has only made the dominant discourse ever more absurdly antiquarian. For example, the failure of property values to boom in black neighborhoods in the 53 years since redlining was abolished has not made it more acceptable to point out that if blacks want higher prices in their neighborhoods, they should work harder on being better neighbors.
Instead of noting that the hundreds of black inner-city riots last year have helped drive this year’s housing boom in suburbs and small towns, the prestige press has decided to obsess over the Tulsa riot of 100 years ago (which was started by blacks but ended by whites) as the reason blacks aren’t rich today.
My approach in explaining human society has been to follow the general line of Occam’s Razor that “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” or that the simplest feasible explanation is less likely to be contrived for political purposes than a more complicated Occam’s Butterknife rationalization.
And as more data continues to accumulate over the decades, my depiction of the way the world works seems to have a better track record than more fashionable theories.
Now, it’s not that I’m infallible. But (a) I like to argue, and (b) I don’t like to lose. So, I look hard for the strongest evidence so that I can make winning arguments.
And when I lose, rather than double down, I usually change my mind.
Granted, I have the usual human reluctance to admit I was wrong. But I try to deploy that in a constructive direction.
If I find, for example, that some sophomoric policy I advocated as a sophomore in 1978 can’t be justified today, I tend to assert that that may not be because I was wrong then but that times have changed since. For example, many of the Reagan-Thatcher ideas I liked in the late 1970s were successful in the 1980s–1990s, leaving us today with new problems needing new solutions.
Moreover, I would encourage intellectuals to try to subscribe to a form of vulgar Hegelianism in their personal intellectual behavior that I’ve found very useful: If you hold a thesis for what seem like good reasons, and somebody counters with a well-argued antithesis, you have three options:
—Reject the antithesis (the most common).
—Convert to the antithesis (the most dramatic).
—Look for a synthesis that makes sense of both your thesis and the other guy’s antithesis (usually, the hardest but most productive).
For example:
—Thesis: A racial group is a taxonomical subspecies.
—Antithesis: A racial group is a biologically nonexistent social construct!
—Synthesis: A racial group is a partly inbred extended family.
So, what if I’m right? How would the world look different?
Well, it wouldn’t. I’ve taken great pains to make my worldview correspond with how the world actually is.
What policies are implied by my realistic view of humanity? To my mind, nothing terribly new (although out of fashion): We need rule of law, equal protection of the laws, and other old-time principles. That African-Americans seem to have a particular tendency toward criminal violence suggests that they need more, not less, law and order than do even the rest of us.
On the other hand, the one thing that really scares me is that progressive intellectuals seem to assume that if modern science demonstrates that the races often differ genetically, well, that proves Hitler was right and therefore genocide is the only rational alternative. This malevolent insanity on the part of orthodox liberal thinkers terrifies me.
My suggestion: The dominant intellectuals should do some soul-searching and stop projecting their own viciousness onto the rest of us.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/smoking-gun-fauci-lied-millions-died-fauci-informed-hydroxychloroquine-worked-lied-public-instead-despite-science-fauciemails/
https://wirepoints.org/scope-of-pending-illinois-constitutional-amendment-goes-far-beyond-appearances-its-a-monstrous-giveaway-to-public-unions-wirepoints/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/saudi-and-russian-oil-producers-benefit-climate-activism-lobbed-western-producers
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/where-has-all-the-global-warming-gone.php
https://anthonyblogan.com/atlanta-city-councilman-votes-to-defund-police-by-73-million-winds-up-carjacked-in-atlanta/
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/03/05/baltimore-student-who-failed-all-but-three-classes-in-four-years-was-ranked-in-top-half-of-his-class/
https://supchina.com/2021/05/28/changsha-officials-give-preferential-hiring-treatment-to-male-teachers-because-chinese-boys-are-too-effeminate/
https://www.lawofficer.com/speaker-at-tulsa-rally-tells-armed-crowd-kill-everything-white-in-sight/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/scientists-successfully-test-drug-that-can-kill-cancer-cells-without-damaging-nearby-healthy-tissue
https://theblacksphere.net/2020/10/real-story-biden-first-wifes-death/
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/mexican-cartels-are-hunting-down-police-at-their-homes/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/meat-processing-hack/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/america-s-schools-are-falling-disrepair-no-solution-sight-experts-n1269261
https://www.dailywire.com/news/founder-of-black-lives-matter-in-st-paul-i-resigned-after-i-learned-the-ugly-truth-as-insider
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/governments-paycheck-protection-program-bails-billionaire-george-soros/
He was 37.
*.*
After a long time, I told my hot coworker how I felt.
She felt the same way.
So, we finally agreed to turned on the AC.
*.*
Lines:
According to a new study, 60% of us say that we have experienced some kind of déjà vu before. In a related story, 60% of us say that we have experienced some kind of déjà vu before.
Be kind. Be respectful. If you do that, they'll never expect what you really had in mind.
Amazon has bought MGM, which means the James Bond movies are now owned by Amazon. I'm thinking James Bond will continue to save the world, but he'll do that in just two days for Prime Members.
A helicopter had to make an emergency landing at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland, last week. Yes, another touchdown at FedEx field that had nothing to do with the Washington Woke Club.
There's a new White Cheddar Chex Mix, for those who haven't achieved their "Quarantine 15" yet.
An animal rights group called Animal Rebellion is demanding that McDonald's switch to only serving plant-based foods by the year 2025. Can the "Crappy Meal" be far behind?
How is physically possible that three-day weekends can feel so short?
I'm waiting for the day that the name "Hoover Dam" is deemed offensive and they change it to "Hoover Darn."
I watched Zach Snyder's "Army of the Dead" over the weekend. It's the story of a mean, sadistic, cruel, undead monster who directs a zombie movie.
In Atlanta, a man drove his car right into a Barnes and Noble. Not surprising, the store owner threw the book at him.
*.*
The Five Dwarfs Who Didn't Make Snow White's Team:
Contagious
Flasher
Jittery
Psoriasis
Gassy
*.*
I don’t like stairs.
They’re always up to something.
Quote of the Times;
The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused! – Trump
Link of the Times;
https://summit.news/2021/06/02/email-researcher-who-funded-wuhan-lab-admitted-to-manipulating-coronaviruses-thanked-fauci-for-dismissing-lab-leak-theory/
Issue of the Times;
What If I’m Right? by Steve Sailer
Since the previous century I’ve been articulating in the public arena an array of interconnecting ideas about how the world works. For example, I tend to suspect that racial differences in achievement in 2021 have more to do with nature and nurture, with culture and human biodiversity, than with unspecifiable malevolence on the part of white men as dictated by the theory of systemic racism.
(Note that I don’t put very much effort into telling you how I think the world should work, just how it does work. At least, the latter’s testable.)
I usually don’t go out of my way to make specific predictions, but my instincts are, by this point, not bad. For example, I was bellowing in Taki’s Magazine from June 3, 2020, onward that society reassuring blacks that they deserved a Racial Reckoning that entitled them to riot and resist arrest was going to be a disaster for all concerned.
That raises the more general question: What if I’m right?
What if my way of thinking is, in general, more realistic, insightful, and reasonable than the conventional wisdom?
I dislike thinking of my concepts as an ideology. I don’t propound “Sailerism.” I lack the ambition and the ego. I am by nature a staff guy rather than a line boss. I like to think of my approach to understanding human society as one that will eventually seem obvious to everybody, so I shouldn’t claim credit now for what is simply solid empirical thinking applied to the more contentious subjects.
Instead, I like to tell myself, I should just keep coming up with more ideas that are (in declining order of importance to me) true, interesting, new, and funny. Eventually, people will notice how much better my approach to reality has been than that of the famous folks winning MacArthur genius grants and try to figure out for themselves how I do it so that everybody can do it too.
Or at least that’s what I hope.
On the other hand, it’s now 2021 and public discourse has just gotten stupider and more self-destructive over the course of my career.
Maybe that’s my fault?
What if I had just kept my mouth shut and, instead of challenging popular pundits to be honest and intelligent, I’d let them work it out for themselves? After all, while people who know me tend to find I’m an admirable individual, people who don’t know me tend to hate me.
Many pundits seem enraged over the idea that I might prove right. This tendency to personalize social science disputes has always struck me as dim-witted, but, apparently, the fear “What if Sailer is right?” is infuriating and/or terrifying to many. It’s almost as if what gets people mad is my being correct so often.
Thus, when I point out the facts, I’m often greeted with incoherent anger centering on the allegation that I must be a bad person for being so well-informed.
Actually, while I’m of course highly biased, my impression is that I am, at least compared with most of my fellow opinionators, rather a good person, more Orwell than Waugh.
When I started in the 1990s, my views were edgy but not unknown. Intellectually, I’m basically an heir to the debates in the early 1970s among data-driven social scientists, with me being closer to the domestic neoconservatives like James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein. But I also admired liberals like Daniel Patrick Moynihan (the four-term Democratic U.S. senator from New York) and James Coleman, as well as socialists like Christopher Jencks. Indeed, the first thing I ever had published was a letter in National Review when I was 14 in 1973 in which I made a joke about Jencks’ book-length meta-analysis of the Coleman Report, Inequality:
Having read Ernest van den Haag’s article on Christopher Jencks, I am reminded of an old psychiatry joke: A psychotic (egalitarian, in this little morality story) says, “All people are equal, and I’ll fight anyone who says I’m wrong.” A neurotic (Jencks) says, “People aren’t equal, and I just can’t stand it.”
My role model as a statistics-driven opinion journalist was always Daniel Seligman, who more or less invented blogging with his “Keeping Up” column in Fortune.
What’s changed since the 1970s?
Basically, all that has happened is that the data has piled up against the Establishment view. I think it’s an exaggeration to say that the left totally dominates the social sciences today. I have been a human sciences aficionado for the past 49 years. And I haven’t seen any decline in social science findings supporting my general worldview, in part because I constantly adapt to new findings, but largely because new advances have typically validated the best old research. For example, the genetic revolution of the 21st century has mostly vindicated the best human scientists of the second half of the 20th century.
Granted, naive journalists tend to not get that tropes like “Race does not exist” are scams to keep scientists from getting persecuted by know-nothings. But if you read the scientific journals carefully, you will know what’s what.
But instead of changing minds, the passing of the years has only made the dominant discourse ever more absurdly antiquarian. For example, the failure of property values to boom in black neighborhoods in the 53 years since redlining was abolished has not made it more acceptable to point out that if blacks want higher prices in their neighborhoods, they should work harder on being better neighbors.
Instead of noting that the hundreds of black inner-city riots last year have helped drive this year’s housing boom in suburbs and small towns, the prestige press has decided to obsess over the Tulsa riot of 100 years ago (which was started by blacks but ended by whites) as the reason blacks aren’t rich today.
My approach in explaining human society has been to follow the general line of Occam’s Razor that “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer,” or that the simplest feasible explanation is less likely to be contrived for political purposes than a more complicated Occam’s Butterknife rationalization.
And as more data continues to accumulate over the decades, my depiction of the way the world works seems to have a better track record than more fashionable theories.
Now, it’s not that I’m infallible. But (a) I like to argue, and (b) I don’t like to lose. So, I look hard for the strongest evidence so that I can make winning arguments.
And when I lose, rather than double down, I usually change my mind.
Granted, I have the usual human reluctance to admit I was wrong. But I try to deploy that in a constructive direction.
If I find, for example, that some sophomoric policy I advocated as a sophomore in 1978 can’t be justified today, I tend to assert that that may not be because I was wrong then but that times have changed since. For example, many of the Reagan-Thatcher ideas I liked in the late 1970s were successful in the 1980s–1990s, leaving us today with new problems needing new solutions.
Moreover, I would encourage intellectuals to try to subscribe to a form of vulgar Hegelianism in their personal intellectual behavior that I’ve found very useful: If you hold a thesis for what seem like good reasons, and somebody counters with a well-argued antithesis, you have three options:
—Reject the antithesis (the most common).
—Convert to the antithesis (the most dramatic).
—Look for a synthesis that makes sense of both your thesis and the other guy’s antithesis (usually, the hardest but most productive).
For example:
—Thesis: A racial group is a taxonomical subspecies.
—Antithesis: A racial group is a biologically nonexistent social construct!
—Synthesis: A racial group is a partly inbred extended family.
So, what if I’m right? How would the world look different?
Well, it wouldn’t. I’ve taken great pains to make my worldview correspond with how the world actually is.
What policies are implied by my realistic view of humanity? To my mind, nothing terribly new (although out of fashion): We need rule of law, equal protection of the laws, and other old-time principles. That African-Americans seem to have a particular tendency toward criminal violence suggests that they need more, not less, law and order than do even the rest of us.
On the other hand, the one thing that really scares me is that progressive intellectuals seem to assume that if modern science demonstrates that the races often differ genetically, well, that proves Hitler was right and therefore genocide is the only rational alternative. This malevolent insanity on the part of orthodox liberal thinkers terrifies me.
My suggestion: The dominant intellectuals should do some soul-searching and stop projecting their own viciousness onto the rest of us.
News of the Times;
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/smoking-gun-fauci-lied-millions-died-fauci-informed-hydroxychloroquine-worked-lied-public-instead-despite-science-fauciemails/
https://wirepoints.org/scope-of-pending-illinois-constitutional-amendment-goes-far-beyond-appearances-its-a-monstrous-giveaway-to-public-unions-wirepoints/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/saudi-and-russian-oil-producers-benefit-climate-activism-lobbed-western-producers
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/where-has-all-the-global-warming-gone.php
https://anthonyblogan.com/atlanta-city-councilman-votes-to-defund-police-by-73-million-winds-up-carjacked-in-atlanta/
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/03/05/baltimore-student-who-failed-all-but-three-classes-in-four-years-was-ranked-in-top-half-of-his-class/
https://supchina.com/2021/05/28/changsha-officials-give-preferential-hiring-treatment-to-male-teachers-because-chinese-boys-are-too-effeminate/
https://www.lawofficer.com/speaker-at-tulsa-rally-tells-armed-crowd-kill-everything-white-in-sight/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/scientists-successfully-test-drug-that-can-kill-cancer-cells-without-damaging-nearby-healthy-tissue
https://theblacksphere.net/2020/10/real-story-biden-first-wifes-death/
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/mexican-cartels-are-hunting-down-police-at-their-homes/
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/meat-processing-hack/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/america-s-schools-are-falling-disrepair-no-solution-sight-experts-n1269261
https://www.dailywire.com/news/founder-of-black-lives-matter-in-st-paul-i-resigned-after-i-learned-the-ugly-truth-as-insider
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/governments-paycheck-protection-program-bails-billionaire-george-soros/
Insurance?
My boss asked me, “Why do I always have to come looking for you?”
I smiled and replied, “Because a good worker is hard to find!”
*.*
Driving my 6 year old son home from school the other day when a BMW cuts us off.
A shout of "You stupid fucking cunt!", was quickly followed by "You won't tell mummy I said that that, will you?"
"Not this time," I said, "But you've really got to watch that temper of yours."
*.*
Lines:
I love the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning, what I love even more is the sound of no one talking to me while I drink it.
When a woman laughs during an argument, the psycho part of her brain has been activated. Abort mission.
Remember: A beach body is any body on a beach.
I always say thanks to Alexa so that when the machines take over, they'll know I'm nice
Be decisive, right or wrong, make a decision. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn't make a decision.
By age 35, you should have at least one fork in your cutlery drawer that you don't like and actively frown at when you accidentally grab it.
I hope in my next life that I come back as a dog, so my pills are wrapped in cheese.
Afraid of not getting what you ordered with online shopping? Try online dating!
I used to just crastinate, but I got so good at it, I've gone pro.
Just watched three people out running past my house and it inspired to get up and close the blinds.
Some days I amaze myself. Other days, I look for my phone while holding it.
If nothing else, at least mosquitos find me attractive.
The more I get to know people, the more I understand why Noah only let animals on board the ark.
*.*
The Beach Boys walk into a bar...
"Round?"
"Round?"
"Get a round!"
"I get a round?"
"Yeah?"
"Get a round...."
"Fuck off, all of yeah." said the bababa bababarman.
*.*
Why do dogs float in water?
Because they are good buoys.
Quote of the Times;
If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. - Washington
Link of the Times;
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ivermectin-new-penicillin
Issue of the Times;
Life Insurance and Covid-19; Something Doesn’t Make Sense by Jeff Harris
You would think that during the worst Pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu life insurance companies would be hedging their bets to avoid major losses from Covid-19. I haven’t written a life policy for several years so I was wondering what was going on? I called one of the brokers I deal with that interacts with hundreds of big life insurers to get an inside look into how the Covid crisis has changed their business.
Imagine my surprise when she said it was pretty much business as usual! Last year when the hysteria was just getting ramped up she did say the companies temporarily tightened up underwriting and reduced the amount of coverage they would offer. But as time went by and the hard data came rolling in those same companies went back to business as usual.
I asked her specifically if life insurers wanted a Covid test as part of the underwriting process and she said none that she was aware of. Hmm, that’s pretty interesting isn’t it? The most lethal pandemic in decades descends on the globe with deadly mutations taking millions of innocent lives and the life insurance companies couldn’t care less.
I also asked if the cost per thousand of coverage had increased due to Covid and again she said no. Rates were pretty much the same as they were before the Covid Pandemic ravaged the earth. Life Insurance companies are very risk adverse. They don’t like losing money to unnecessary claims. The fact they’re treating Covid as a nonevent should be an indicator that something is very wrong with the whole narrative.
News of the Times;
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/28/pce-price-index.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/joe-biden-received-campaign-cash-top-russia-lobbyist-waiving-sanctions-nord-stream-2-pipeline/
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/more-leaks-facebook-whistleblowers-reveal-secret-filter-for-liberty-based/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/confirmed-black-female-was-behind-racist-instagram-hoax-account/
https://lidblog.com/illegals-bussed-into-tennessee/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/biden-admin-grants-temporary-amnesty-100000-haitians-illegally-us/
https://nationalfile.com/breaking-usps-worker-admits-to-dumping-election-ballots-in-new-jersey-dumpsters/
https://thetruedefender.com/shocking-cdc-report-the-latest-adverse-responses-on-covid-vaccination-are-devastating/
https://humanevents.com/2021/05/20/federal-judge-rules-against-women-says-christian-college-must-allow-biological-males-to-share-showers-with-females/
https://mediarightnews.com/portland-homicides-jump-800-crime-to-continue-skyrocketing-in-2021-experts-fear/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/horror-michigan-prosecutors-determined-destroy-young-conservatives-entire-life-posting-snowflake-joke-private-snapchat-group-video-freelucas/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/planeloads-of-illegal-immigrant-minors-relocated-around-u-s-in-middle-of-the-night/
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/masks-covid-tests-seized-by-cbp/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbRNgBg9Og
https://www.lawofficer.com/suspect-in-brutal-little-caesars-beating-arrested-on-assault-kidnapping-charges/
I smiled and replied, “Because a good worker is hard to find!”
*.*
Driving my 6 year old son home from school the other day when a BMW cuts us off.
A shout of "You stupid fucking cunt!", was quickly followed by "You won't tell mummy I said that that, will you?"
"Not this time," I said, "But you've really got to watch that temper of yours."
*.*
Lines:
I love the smell of freshly brewed coffee in the morning, what I love even more is the sound of no one talking to me while I drink it.
When a woman laughs during an argument, the psycho part of her brain has been activated. Abort mission.
Remember: A beach body is any body on a beach.
I always say thanks to Alexa so that when the machines take over, they'll know I'm nice
Be decisive, right or wrong, make a decision. The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn't make a decision.
By age 35, you should have at least one fork in your cutlery drawer that you don't like and actively frown at when you accidentally grab it.
I hope in my next life that I come back as a dog, so my pills are wrapped in cheese.
Afraid of not getting what you ordered with online shopping? Try online dating!
I used to just crastinate, but I got so good at it, I've gone pro.
Just watched three people out running past my house and it inspired to get up and close the blinds.
Some days I amaze myself. Other days, I look for my phone while holding it.
If nothing else, at least mosquitos find me attractive.
The more I get to know people, the more I understand why Noah only let animals on board the ark.
*.*
The Beach Boys walk into a bar...
"Round?"
"Round?"
"Get a round!"
"I get a round?"
"Yeah?"
"Get a round...."
"Fuck off, all of yeah." said the bababa bababarman.
*.*
Why do dogs float in water?
Because they are good buoys.
Quote of the Times;
If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. - Washington
Link of the Times;
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ivermectin-new-penicillin
Issue of the Times;
Life Insurance and Covid-19; Something Doesn’t Make Sense by Jeff Harris
You would think that during the worst Pandemic since the 1918 Spanish Flu life insurance companies would be hedging their bets to avoid major losses from Covid-19. I haven’t written a life policy for several years so I was wondering what was going on? I called one of the brokers I deal with that interacts with hundreds of big life insurers to get an inside look into how the Covid crisis has changed their business.
Imagine my surprise when she said it was pretty much business as usual! Last year when the hysteria was just getting ramped up she did say the companies temporarily tightened up underwriting and reduced the amount of coverage they would offer. But as time went by and the hard data came rolling in those same companies went back to business as usual.
I asked her specifically if life insurers wanted a Covid test as part of the underwriting process and she said none that she was aware of. Hmm, that’s pretty interesting isn’t it? The most lethal pandemic in decades descends on the globe with deadly mutations taking millions of innocent lives and the life insurance companies couldn’t care less.
I also asked if the cost per thousand of coverage had increased due to Covid and again she said no. Rates were pretty much the same as they were before the Covid Pandemic ravaged the earth. Life Insurance companies are very risk adverse. They don’t like losing money to unnecessary claims. The fact they’re treating Covid as a nonevent should be an indicator that something is very wrong with the whole narrative.
News of the Times;
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/28/pce-price-index.html
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/joe-biden-received-campaign-cash-top-russia-lobbyist-waiving-sanctions-nord-stream-2-pipeline/
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/more-leaks-facebook-whistleblowers-reveal-secret-filter-for-liberty-based/
https://www.thecollegefix.com/confirmed-black-female-was-behind-racist-instagram-hoax-account/
https://lidblog.com/illegals-bussed-into-tennessee/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/biden-admin-grants-temporary-amnesty-100000-haitians-illegally-us/
https://nationalfile.com/breaking-usps-worker-admits-to-dumping-election-ballots-in-new-jersey-dumpsters/
https://thetruedefender.com/shocking-cdc-report-the-latest-adverse-responses-on-covid-vaccination-are-devastating/
https://humanevents.com/2021/05/20/federal-judge-rules-against-women-says-christian-college-must-allow-biological-males-to-share-showers-with-females/
https://mediarightnews.com/portland-homicides-jump-800-crime-to-continue-skyrocketing-in-2021-experts-fear/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/horror-michigan-prosecutors-determined-destroy-young-conservatives-entire-life-posting-snowflake-joke-private-snapchat-group-video-freelucas/
https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/planeloads-of-illegal-immigrant-minors-relocated-around-u-s-in-middle-of-the-night/
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/masks-covid-tests-seized-by-cbp/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YbRNgBg9Og
https://www.lawofficer.com/suspect-in-brutal-little-caesars-beating-arrested-on-assault-kidnapping-charges/
Escaping?
Just once, I want a username and password prompt to say: "Close Enough."
*.*
A man writing at the post office desk was approached by an older fellow with a postcard in his hand. The old man said, "Sir, I'm sorry to bother you but could you address this postcard for me? My arthritis is acting up and I can't even hold a pen."
"Certainly, sir," said the younger man. He wrote out the address and also agreed to write a short message and sign the card for the man. Finally, the younger man asked, "Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"
The old fellow glanced at the card a moment and said, "Yes, at the end could you just add, 'PS: Please excuse the sloppy hand-writing.'?"
*.*
Lines:
So apparently, Bill Gates was allowed to spend a weekend every year with his former girlfriend. Who knew the Gates were open?
New York City says they're going to offer free vaccine shots for tourists. The complimentary muggings will also continue.
New food alert: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal Oatmeal. When you have to get past four words to get to the healthy one, it should be a warning.
Last week was World Bee Day. A honey of an idea.
Naomi Campbell welcomed a new baby daughter into the world this week at age 50. Apparently, the idea of raising a teenager in her late 60s sounded fun.
They're saying that up to 80% of France's vineyards have been damaged by heavy frost. That's some sobering news.
If I'm diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, does that make me a carpool?
Remember, it's physically impossible to make our own sunshine, but we can make moonshine.
Just out of curiosity, what made the Great Smokey Mountains so great?
For the record, the movie "Soylent Green" was set in the year 2022. I'd think twice about that fake meat you were considering.
*.*
A reporter asked a man how he felt when he found out that he won the lottery.
“As soon I saw the numbers line up, I knew it was going to be wife changing.”
*,*
Why haven't aliens visited our solar system yet?
They checked the reviews, but we only had one star.
Quote of the Times;
Adventure is a commitment made by the entire being, and can search our depths to bring out the best, most human qualities which remain in us. When the pack of cards has not been rigged so we win every time, then the game is real, and we find surprise, imagination, enthusiasm to succeed and the possibility of failure.
Link of the Times;
https://www.rooshv.com/30-christian-articles-i-recommend
Issue of the Times;
Escaping Serfdom by Jeff Thomas
The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.
When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.
The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.
Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.
As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.
There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”.
This was not an amount imposed or regulated by any government. The nobleman could charge as much as he wished; however, if he raised his rate significantly, he would find that the farmers would leave and move to another nobleman’s farm. The 10% was, in essence, a rate that evolved over time through a free market.
Modern Serfdom
Today, of course, if most countries levied an income tax of a mere 10%, there would be dancing in the streets. And the days of one simple straightforward tax are long gone.
Today, the average person may expect to pay property tax (even if he is a renter), sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on. The laundry list of taxes is so long and complex that it is no longer possible to compute what the total tax level actually is for anyone.
And to this, we add the hidden tax of inflation. In the US, for example, the Federal Reserve has, over the last hundred years, devalued the dollar by 98%, a hefty tax indeed. And the US is not alone in this.
Only 50 years ago, the average man might work a 40-hour week to support a wife who remained at home raising the children. He often had a mortgage on his home but might have it paid off in ten years. He paid cash for nearly everything else that he and his family owned or consumed.
Today, both husband and wife generally must be employed full time. In spite of this, they can’t afford as many children as their parents could, and they generally remain in debt their entire lives, even after retirement. This is significant inflation by any measure.
In contrast, in the Middle Ages, the cost of goods might remain the same throughout the entire lifetime of an individual.
In light of the above, the 10% that was paid by the serfs is beginning to look very good indeed.
However, the great majority of people in the First World are likely to say, “What can you do; it’s the same all over the world. You might as well get used to it.”
Well, no, actually, it’s not. There are many governmental and economic systems out there and many are quite a bit more “serf friendly” than those in the major countries.
Countries such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas have no income tax. Further, some have no property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on.
So how is this possible?
The OECD countries state that it is largely accomplished through money laundering, but this is not the case. In fact, low-tax jurisdictions are known to have some of the most stringent banking laws in the world.
The success of these jurisdictions is actually quite simple. Most of them are small. They have small populations and therefore need only a small government. Yet each jurisdiction can accommodate large numbers of investors from overseas. This results in a very high level of income per capita.
But unlike large countries, the money that is deposited or invested there is overseas money, so it is not captive. Investors can transfer it out overnight if need be.
So, even if the politicians are no better than those in larger countries (generally, they are of the same ilk), they’re aware that, like the noblemen of old, if they attempt to impose taxation, the business will dry up quickly.
In fact, such a free market dictates that the jurisdictions keep on their toes and keep trying to outdo their competitors by being more investment friendly.
Therefore, the politicians in these countries, who might be only too happy to promise entitlements to their constituents, then tax them to the hilt in order to pay for the entitlements, are kept restrained by their own system.
Are there downsides to living in a low-tax jurisdiction? Yes.
As most of them are small but require a very high standard of living in order to attract investors, they must import virtually all goods needed by residents. This means a higher cost of all goods, as compared to the cost in a country that produces such goods. However, the wage level is also higher, which tends to balance out the equation.
But there are also upsides.
Those who move to such a jurisdiction find that after the first year there (when the basics such as cars, televisions, etc., have been paid for), all further income that has been saved from taxation is beginning to get deposited in the bank.
At some point, the deposit level becomes great enough that investment becomes advisable. And as low-tax jurisdictions tend to be naturally prosperous, there is generally no limit to the opportunities for investment within the jurisdiction.
There is a further benefit to living in a low-tax jurisdiction that tends to become apparent over time. Any government that depends on major investments from overseas parties must, of necessity, be non-intrusive and non-invasive. Such a government stays out of people’s business, eschews electronic monitoring and most certainly is not given to SWAT teams crashing down doors for imagined wrongdoing.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
He was correct, but the level of tax can vary greatly from one country to the next. And just as important, the level of government intervention into the affairs of its citizenry varies considerably. In a country where the level of tax is low, the quality of life is generally correspondingly high.
A thousand years ago, noblemen, from time to time, became overly confident in their ability to keep the serfs on the farmland and demanded taxes beyond the customary “one day’s labour in ten”. When they did, the serfs of old often voted with their feet and simply moved. Today, this is still possible.
If the reader presently contributes more than one day’s labour in ten to his government, he may wish to consider voting with his feet.
News of the Times;
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/border-patrol-intercepts-child-rapists/
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/10/nearly-half-of-female-soldiers-still-failing-new-army-fitness-test-while-males-pass-easily.html
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-9-new-scientific-scandal-shaking-the-climate-alarm-industry
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/the_father_who_fought_brearley_school_racism_has_a_message_for_everyone.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/uk-plans-to-require-voter-id-to-ensure-election-integrity_3810942.html
https://conservativebrief.com/former-mayoral-candidate-40124/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=RP78
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/05/12/times-square-shooting-suspect-farrakhan-muhammad-taken-into-custody/
https://nypost.com/2020/11/20/scientists-reverse-human-aging-process-in-breakthrough-study/
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/02/03/raymond-michael-weber-vacaville-homicide/
https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/05/21/eric-clapton-astrazeneca-side-effects.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/with_shoplifting_legal_organized_crime_has_a_field_day_in_san_francisco.html
https://thelibertyloft.com/biden-waiving-sanctions-on-russian-company-raises-questions-about-colonial-pipeline-hack/
https://rumble.com/vhd2z3-jim-jordan-lays-out-the-democrat-agenda-they-dont-want-you-to-know-about.html?mref=23gga&mc=8uxj1
https://archive.ph/osCWD
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2021/05/20/mayor-illegal-guns-off-streets-police-found-one-her-home-n45478
*.*
A man writing at the post office desk was approached by an older fellow with a postcard in his hand. The old man said, "Sir, I'm sorry to bother you but could you address this postcard for me? My arthritis is acting up and I can't even hold a pen."
"Certainly, sir," said the younger man. He wrote out the address and also agreed to write a short message and sign the card for the man. Finally, the younger man asked, "Now, is there anything else I can do for you?"
The old fellow glanced at the card a moment and said, "Yes, at the end could you just add, 'PS: Please excuse the sloppy hand-writing.'?"
*.*
Lines:
So apparently, Bill Gates was allowed to spend a weekend every year with his former girlfriend. Who knew the Gates were open?
New York City says they're going to offer free vaccine shots for tourists. The complimentary muggings will also continue.
New food alert: Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cereal Oatmeal. When you have to get past four words to get to the healthy one, it should be a warning.
Last week was World Bee Day. A honey of an idea.
Naomi Campbell welcomed a new baby daughter into the world this week at age 50. Apparently, the idea of raising a teenager in her late 60s sounded fun.
They're saying that up to 80% of France's vineyards have been damaged by heavy frost. That's some sobering news.
If I'm diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, does that make me a carpool?
Remember, it's physically impossible to make our own sunshine, but we can make moonshine.
Just out of curiosity, what made the Great Smokey Mountains so great?
For the record, the movie "Soylent Green" was set in the year 2022. I'd think twice about that fake meat you were considering.
*.*
A reporter asked a man how he felt when he found out that he won the lottery.
“As soon I saw the numbers line up, I knew it was going to be wife changing.”
*,*
Why haven't aliens visited our solar system yet?
They checked the reviews, but we only had one star.
Quote of the Times;
Adventure is a commitment made by the entire being, and can search our depths to bring out the best, most human qualities which remain in us. When the pack of cards has not been rigged so we win every time, then the game is real, and we find surprise, imagination, enthusiasm to succeed and the possibility of failure.
Link of the Times;
https://www.rooshv.com/30-christian-articles-i-recommend
Issue of the Times;
Escaping Serfdom by Jeff Thomas
The concept of government is that the people grant to a small group of individuals the ability to establish and maintain controls over them. The inherent flaw in such a concept is that any government will invariably and continually expand upon its controls, resulting in the ever-diminishing freedom of those who granted them the power.
When I was a schoolboy, I was taught that the feudal system of the Middle Ages consisted of serfs tilling small plots of land that belonged to a king or lord. The serfs lived a meagre life of bare subsistence and were subject to the tyranny of the king or lord whose men would ride into their village periodically and take most of the few coins the serfs had earned by their toil.
The lesson I was meant to learn from this was that I should be grateful that, in the modern world, I live in a state of freedom from tyranny, and as an adult, I would pay only that level of tax that could be described as “fair”.
Later in life, I was to learn that, in the actual feudal system, some land was owned by noblemen, some by common men. The commoners typically farmed their own land, whilst the noblemen parcelled out their land to farmers, in trade for a portion of the product of their labours.
As a part of that bargain, the nobleman would pay for an army of professional soldiers to protect both the farms and the farmers. Significantly, unlike today, no farmer was required to defend the land himself, as it was not his.
There was no exact standard as to what the noblemen would charge a farmer under this agreement, but the general standard was “one day’s labour in ten”.
This was not an amount imposed or regulated by any government. The nobleman could charge as much as he wished; however, if he raised his rate significantly, he would find that the farmers would leave and move to another nobleman’s farm. The 10% was, in essence, a rate that evolved over time through a free market.
Modern Serfdom
Today, of course, if most countries levied an income tax of a mere 10%, there would be dancing in the streets. And the days of one simple straightforward tax are long gone.
Today, the average person may expect to pay property tax (even if he is a renter), sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on. The laundry list of taxes is so long and complex that it is no longer possible to compute what the total tax level actually is for anyone.
And to this, we add the hidden tax of inflation. In the US, for example, the Federal Reserve has, over the last hundred years, devalued the dollar by 98%, a hefty tax indeed. And the US is not alone in this.
Only 50 years ago, the average man might work a 40-hour week to support a wife who remained at home raising the children. He often had a mortgage on his home but might have it paid off in ten years. He paid cash for nearly everything else that he and his family owned or consumed.
Today, both husband and wife generally must be employed full time. In spite of this, they can’t afford as many children as their parents could, and they generally remain in debt their entire lives, even after retirement. This is significant inflation by any measure.
In contrast, in the Middle Ages, the cost of goods might remain the same throughout the entire lifetime of an individual.
In light of the above, the 10% that was paid by the serfs is beginning to look very good indeed.
However, the great majority of people in the First World are likely to say, “What can you do; it’s the same all over the world. You might as well get used to it.”
Well, no, actually, it’s not. There are many governmental and economic systems out there and many are quite a bit more “serf friendly” than those in the major countries.
Countries such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas have no income tax. Further, some have no property tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, value added tax, inheritance tax, and so on.
So how is this possible?
The OECD countries state that it is largely accomplished through money laundering, but this is not the case. In fact, low-tax jurisdictions are known to have some of the most stringent banking laws in the world.
The success of these jurisdictions is actually quite simple. Most of them are small. They have small populations and therefore need only a small government. Yet each jurisdiction can accommodate large numbers of investors from overseas. This results in a very high level of income per capita.
But unlike large countries, the money that is deposited or invested there is overseas money, so it is not captive. Investors can transfer it out overnight if need be.
So, even if the politicians are no better than those in larger countries (generally, they are of the same ilk), they’re aware that, like the noblemen of old, if they attempt to impose taxation, the business will dry up quickly.
In fact, such a free market dictates that the jurisdictions keep on their toes and keep trying to outdo their competitors by being more investment friendly.
Therefore, the politicians in these countries, who might be only too happy to promise entitlements to their constituents, then tax them to the hilt in order to pay for the entitlements, are kept restrained by their own system.
Are there downsides to living in a low-tax jurisdiction? Yes.
As most of them are small but require a very high standard of living in order to attract investors, they must import virtually all goods needed by residents. This means a higher cost of all goods, as compared to the cost in a country that produces such goods. However, the wage level is also higher, which tends to balance out the equation.
But there are also upsides.
Those who move to such a jurisdiction find that after the first year there (when the basics such as cars, televisions, etc., have been paid for), all further income that has been saved from taxation is beginning to get deposited in the bank.
At some point, the deposit level becomes great enough that investment becomes advisable. And as low-tax jurisdictions tend to be naturally prosperous, there is generally no limit to the opportunities for investment within the jurisdiction.
There is a further benefit to living in a low-tax jurisdiction that tends to become apparent over time. Any government that depends on major investments from overseas parties must, of necessity, be non-intrusive and non-invasive. Such a government stays out of people’s business, eschews electronic monitoring and most certainly is not given to SWAT teams crashing down doors for imagined wrongdoing.
Benjamin Franklin famously said, “Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
He was correct, but the level of tax can vary greatly from one country to the next. And just as important, the level of government intervention into the affairs of its citizenry varies considerably. In a country where the level of tax is low, the quality of life is generally correspondingly high.
A thousand years ago, noblemen, from time to time, became overly confident in their ability to keep the serfs on the farmland and demanded taxes beyond the customary “one day’s labour in ten”. When they did, the serfs of old often voted with their feet and simply moved. Today, this is still possible.
If the reader presently contributes more than one day’s labour in ten to his government, he may wish to consider voting with his feet.
News of the Times;
https://thenationalpulse.com/breaking/border-patrol-intercepts-child-rapists/
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/10/nearly-half-of-female-soldiers-still-failing-new-army-fitness-test-while-males-pass-easily.html
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-5-9-new-scientific-scandal-shaking-the-climate-alarm-industry
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/the_father_who_fought_brearley_school_racism_has_a_message_for_everyone.html
https://www.theepochtimes.com/uk-plans-to-require-voter-id-to-ensure-election-integrity_3810942.html
https://conservativebrief.com/former-mayoral-candidate-40124/?utm_source=CB&utm_medium=RP78
https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2021/05/12/times-square-shooting-suspect-farrakhan-muhammad-taken-into-custody/
https://nypost.com/2020/11/20/scientists-reverse-human-aging-process-in-breakthrough-study/
https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2021/02/03/raymond-michael-weber-vacaville-homicide/
https://www.visiontimes.com/2021/05/21/eric-clapton-astrazeneca-side-effects.html
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/with_shoplifting_legal_organized_crime_has_a_field_day_in_san_francisco.html
https://thelibertyloft.com/biden-waiving-sanctions-on-russian-company-raises-questions-about-colonial-pipeline-hack/
https://rumble.com/vhd2z3-jim-jordan-lays-out-the-democrat-agenda-they-dont-want-you-to-know-about.html?mref=23gga&mc=8uxj1
https://archive.ph/osCWD
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2021/05/20/mayor-illegal-guns-off-streets-police-found-one-her-home-n45478
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.