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Year Zero 97: Incentives – The People vs The State
The state, politicians, and bureaucrats are not, have not, and will not be incentivized to act in your best interest, or the best interest of the citizenry. The health, wealth, and power of the state directly contradicts the interests of a free people and must be combatted through revolutionary counter-economic methods.
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Trump Proposes $4.8 Trillion Budget
Israeli Colonizers: ‘Put US In Its Place’
Not even Donald “Sheldon Adelson’s Private Property” Trump is Zionist enough for the Israeli right:
Settler leaders call on PM to ‘put US in its place,’ swiftly annex W. Bank land
Settler leaders reacted in fury to US Ambassador David Friedman’s Sunday clarification that the White House would not support immediate and uncoordinated annexation of parts of the West Bank by Israel, with one prominent West Bank mayor calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ignore the warnings from Washington and put the Trump administration “in its place.”
“The United States cannot prevent Israel from doing anything,” said Jordan Valley Regional Council chairman David Elhayani, who serves as the chairman of the Yesha Council umbrella group of settlements.
Elhayani in a statement called on the prime minister “to fulfill his commitment to the residents of Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley to apply sovereignty before the elections, and to do this as soon as possible.”
Palestinians as Pawns
Trump’s “vision” for Palestine well illustrates that in his eyes (not to mention the eyes of Netanyahu, Kushner, and others), the Palestinians are mere pawns to be manipulated in the service of Israel’s and Trump’s designs.
This can be readily seen in an obscure provision of Trump’s plan, which “contemplates the possibility” that Israel and the future pseudo-state of Palestine could together redraw their boundaries so that nearly a dozen Palestinian towns within Israel, in an area adjacent to the line separating Israel from the West Bank known as the Triangle, would become part of the future pseudo-state. Were that to happen, the residents, who today are Israeli citizens, would lose that status without their consent and become citizens of the new pseudo-state. That would be an injustice.
While Palestinians are at best second-class citizens in Israel, they evidently do not like being ordered about by two entities they distrust: the Israeli government and the Israel-empowered Palestinian Authority, both corrupt and unmindful of individual rights. Netanyahu would no doubt like to see these towns transferred to the future pseudo-state (if there must be one) because that would mean fewer Palestinian Israeli voters and members of parliament. It would be ethnic cleansing by another means.
Read more here.
The State in a State of Tantrum
People today, world
wide, are a wealthier lot than any previous collection of humans that have ever existed upon the planet.
People today are living longer than any previous generation to come before us. A LOT longer.
People today are insanely more literate and connected than any previous set of humans on planet Earth.
People today can be statistically demonstrated to be far more welcoming of humans of alternate ethnicities and far more open to cultures other than their own. Additionally, violent crime rates have been plummeting for decades with no end in sight.
People today survive childbirth and subsequently childhood to a vastly greater degree than children of the past.
Even in the United States, the largest scale experiment worldwide at mixing cultures and ethnicities, is showing a flattening in the gap of child poverty between races and ethnicities.
The Earth is greener today than it was 100 years ago and getting greener every day!
These blanket statements literally have no end. I can keep making them and probably get 200-300 pages of objective and provable claims similar to the ones above. One can find many studies proving these claims. They’re not even hard to find.
Given that reality you would think humanity might be celebrating. We’re not. I would like to say that we’re unhappier now than ever. I suspect that isn’t true though. Having dove deep in the study of history I’m fully aware of the graven conditions heaved upon the many that came before us.
We are damn unsettled though. Restless. Unfulfilled. Scared. Anxious. Polarized.
Why?
Well I don’t know. Some of it may be biological, as indicated here and here.
I heard an observation in a podcast some time ago. Pretty certain it was Jordan Peterson. The observation went something along the lines of outlining the rise of the independent journalists and the avalanche of highly consumed podcasts and programs that followed. Leaving aside subjective judgements of value, it seems obvious that this content creation and consumption has a natural declining impact on the consumption of traditional media sources. Something for which Peterson holds in little regard.
I agree with him.
When a business, any business, begins to lose market share and profits suffer, how do they respond? Do they roll over and die? Or do they make an effort of adjustment to recapture lost share and profit?
Obviously, they react and adjust. It’s not always successful or in time nor does it always resonate with an ever-changing consuming public, but they do react.
How does traditional media respond? How else could they? They make any effort at all to gain attention. Views. Consumers. Market Share as a source of advertising revenue. How can they gain extra attention? Well, how does any two-year-old? They resort to their most basic human nature. They get as loud as possible to direct eyes toward their content. How does media get loud, throw a tantrum, scream? They get as inflammatory, abrasive and polarized as they can. No headline is too extreme if it generates clicks and views, right?
I heard Peterson lay out this argument and it resonated with me. It struck me as truth. Something you could intuitively tune in to, witness and even, to some degree, objectively monitor and track over time.
I think this observation correctly informs what is happening in Western politics in 2020 as well. I think the emperor is starkly naked and always has been. I think with the development of worldwide connectivity and the ability for humans to establish trusting relationships with anyone, anywhere, is laying waste to the protective wall that we call government brick by brick.
I think more and more humans are waking up to realize that all of this success and advancement has happened as a result of sovereign individuals developing preferences and other sovereign individuals making a motivated effort to satisfy those preferences. Markets.
I think more people are beginning to see that with an increasingly educated global populace we are now educating more engineers and scientists than exist current professional engineers and scientists in the West. These innovators will work hard to appease natural market preferences. There’s no way to stop progress. There’s no evidence to suggest that progress will ever halt.
The definition of progress, over time, certainly changes and creeps, but it still progresses, nonetheless.
I think the State in the West is not blind to this. I think they see diminishing returns relative to their market share. They’ve creeped in scope so greatly that not even a passive tax base can fund their endeavors. Hence an ever-inflating supply of money. (We’ll pay for that soon, rest assured)
How does the State respond? How else could they? They make any effort at all to gain the perception of relevancy. Laws. Regulations. Brute enforcement. Taxes. How do they react? Well, how does any two-year-old? They resort to their most basic human nature. The State throws a tantrum. They get as loud as possible to direct eyes toward anything they can claim as positive outcomes of their actions, regardless of how weak the argument. They get as inflammatory, abrasive and polarized as they can in an effort to attract the attention of those they feel most likely to pay attention. Their “base.” No claim is too extreme if it generates obedience, right?
I think they’re screaming for attention. Anxiously searching for relevancy. Desperately attempting to convince a population waning in confidence of their importance. The danger they want us to believe we all face absent their divine protection.
This isn’t some grand conspiracy of old, white, malevolent men sitting around a dark room with cigars and plotting the destruction of the Earth. These are well-intentioned, albeit sociopathic, humans of all ages and colors who are personally wedded to the success of an archaic and violent system of authority.
In some ways it’s akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Candidates on campaign trails get increasingly dramatic and rhetorically divisive for no reason other than to accumulate attention to oneself as a candidate. You can see, track and to some degree measure this reality over time. Mostly all the tales of suffering screamed from the campaign trail are not actually reflective of the experience realized by the actual citizens of any given country. Now that doom and gloom has been professed and “winning candidate” made promises to address, it’s perceived by systems of authority that action needs to be taken. It’s no wonder none of these agencies ever make progress or solve problems. It’s no wonder they tend to create more problems unintentionally than ever existed to begin with.
It’s rather easy to demonstrate that all of the good news shared above has occurred mostly in spite of the existence of nationalistic, violent governments. Nationalism itself was an innovation, progress defined, progress realized. It was a movement away from archaic systems based solely upon the proclaimed divinity of birthright and wedded violent authority to monarchies.
The time had passed for monarchies as humans continued to grow, advance, learn and progress.
Just as the time had passed for that ancient system of statehood, so too is the time passing for nationalism. So too is the time passing for citizens to go to war in the interest of the State as directly opposed to the interest of each citizen and each community.
I’d love to say that humans will learn to live and love without the existence of coercive authority, though that’s likely not the next step in our journey. However, I am confident, that this next iteration will be at least one degree abstracted and improved upon what we have come to know as national governments.
And that’s progress to celebrate. Little as it may be. We might even be able to realize this evolution without violence. Human progress suggests as much.
The Libertarian Case for Equality
Can one consistently believe a majority of 535 congressmen have the right to coercively rule 330 million Americans, and believe in equality?
If you believe one group should monopolize AR-15s and taxation, do you believe in equality?
In this video, I attempt to refute the statist position on equality, and justify the claim that only the libertarian/voluntarist position is dedicated to achieving equality in the genuine sense; equality of rights under natural law.
BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/video/IyGaSyLazkiz/
LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b/The-Libertarian-Case-for-Equality:8
Archive: https://archive.org/details/vidthelibertariancaseforequality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
We Should Be Wary Of A “Bio-PATRIOT Act”
With a new global pandemic scare, the time has come to watch out for those who would exploit it. A severe public health crisis could lead to calls for a new cabinet position, and new government powers to intervene into the personal health of American citizens. This is especially likely given the broken state of the healthcare system due to all of the bad and politicized, crony policies that have been passed over the last couple of decades.
First of all, however, is this virus a big deal? Yes. It’s highly infectious, and may take a long time to produce noticeable symptoms. Most people won’t die from it, but a meaningfully high proportion of those infected could require significant medical intervention to save. Even with such intervention, a meaningful percentage of people will die anyway. This mortality rate is currently estimated to be around 2% (which is high), however, I personally wouldn’t trust any specific numbers at this point. What we can trust are the actions and events taking place. For one, China’s massive response. Second, the astonishing rate of infectious spread on the quarantined cruise ships. Third, the fact that cases are beginning to appear in places like Thailand and Singapore where the infected person never traveled to China. Based on the word of epidemiologists as well as a review of the basic time frame associated with this virus, a peak of cases globally wouldn’t occur until between mid-March and mid-April.
The United States may do relatively well in containing this outbreak, mostly because very few people use public transportation relative to other countries. In Japan where everyone uses public transit, for example, it seems as if even a minor outbreak would spread very quickly. Even so, even if the United States does better than other nations, that doesn’t mean there won’t be a panicked public narrative once cases begin to emerge.
The likelihood of a proposed new public health emergency cabinet position is high. Remember how the Democratic Party is always trying to get the CDC to study gun violence? With a full time public health emergency response department, we could see backhanded intrusions into civil liberties and constitutional rights via “public health concerns”.
No matter what else is going on: war, the economy, the drug war, etc., if a public health “PATRIOT Act” is proposed, fighting it should become the single unifying purpose of the libertarian, alternative media, alternative left and right wings of American politics. I can hardly imagine a more dangerous and insidious, invasive development in the law and politics than a “Bio PATRIOT Act”.
Imagine if alternative media, called “fake news rumors,” becomes classified as a public mental health epidemic. Next, speech is controlled, folks pointed to “trusted sources” to contain the mental health outbreak. Whether or not this is likely to happen, the radical left has applied this form of reasoning in the past. Imagine if saying that the US is funding terrorists in Syria is classified as “paranoid delusion”. A US Air Force psychologist, a Major, who interviewed me for my conscientious objector application, joked that this was what he was screening for (after I passed whatever the test was). His words were that a previous applicant claimed that, “the CIA created ISIS.” This was classified as paranoid delusion and that applicant didn’t pass the test. I’m serious. Military service members are subject to UCMJ which means they do not have the same civil liberties as civilians. Thus, if a public health emergencies act passed, and curtailed civil liberties in the name of public health, you can imagine what kinds of arguments the government would make.
All alternative media could end up treated like Chelsea Manning.
Public health emergencies are tricky. Terrorism, in my opinion, is sort of a “fake” crisis. Other than the one or two extraordinary cases, most people are not threatened by terrorism. However, a genuine global pandemic is a true threat to everyday folks. Moreover, if a bio-engineered disease is released into the world, even if people recover, any old terrorist group could get their hands on it since so many would be infected by it. It would be very very hard to convince regular folks to be skeptical of government calls to assume extraordinary powers to combat this kind of threat.
With this in mind, I propose that fighting this kind of political development might require the invocation of a little conspiracy theory. For example, do we really trust Bill Gates and all his money researching diseases? Why was his dad a public advocate of eugenics? Why did Bill Gates help pay for a study of a hypothetical coronavirus outbreak just a few weeks before one started in Wuhan? I honestly have no idea if there’s a connection, and I don’t care, frankly. However, I’d happily spread such rumors if only to promote the slightest skepticism in people’s minds. There is perfectly rational cause to be skeptical of an intrusive and powerful new government agency meant to fight public health emergencies. This whole situation is about our right to be skeptical. We would be fighting those who want to remove our right to be skeptical, in the name of public health.
So, get ready folks.
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