One hundred percent, a great article... There's a saying - The truth welcomes questions a lie does not like challenges - obviously not a direct quote here, but along those lines... The west has slowly lost what remains of free speech, debate is no longer allowed, a group of (frequently incompetent or corrupt) experts will tell you the truth and how to think. Funny how a large chunk of society swallowed this bullsh!t, when there were enough evidence that a lot of the "truth" they were peddling was plainly lies. Even science was proving them wrong, yet you "went against community standards " if you shared unfavorable research on social media that went against the narrative. I mean it went so far that Facebook"fact checked" the British Medical Journal !! Now they need a conference on restoring trust stopping the spread of misinformation? It's a total joke (a joke that isn't funny).
Eg: the myth that FOIA solved this problem has fooled many into believing that all they need do is file a FOIA Request, and the data will gush forth like a 1920s Permian Basin oil well. Try it yourselves, folks. Try and see what the good ol' federal government has in the way of data on YOU. Just filing the paperwork "properly" can take months, occasionally years. Myth and reality often do mesh, but rarely without work, and seldom in the way we were told they "should".
Lol, so true! Reminds of when I went into the San Mateo County records office and asked to see a list of all recent house sale prices. They gave me a pencil and said I could sit at a terminal and look up properties I had the address for already.
I objected, "But this is public data!"
The answer was that I could sit there with the pencil and write things down, or not. And then someone quietly told me that the office was staffed entirely by Realtors(TM) who watch that data for their own personal profit and they were not about to let just anyone see it. They had those government jobs solely to help their private careers as realtors.
Granted, that was about 15 years ago, but I don't think the basic principle has changed. Government runs for the benefit of government employees, not for you.
Nope, still the same in Georgia! You need to be a REGISTERED person (not necessarily a realtor -- if you paid (as lot!) you could have access.... the 'registration' was just a county BILL!
"all data collected by public agencies and regulators must be wholly open to the public AS SOON AS IT IS COLLECTED. ANY DATA WITHHELD WILL RESULT IN THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF THE AGENCY HEAD. period.
Some Europolitician, Borrell, I think said yesterday that blocking Russian news and criminalizing the expression of pro-Russian opinions is necessary "to protect freedom of speech in Europe".
Censorship to protect freedom of speech? That is some "war is peace, freedom is slavery" straight up 1984 level bullshit there.
Let grown ups decide what they do and don’t want to hear or believe. When the government decides, any information we ingest is simply propaganda. This nanny state we’ve become wants to control every aspect of your life, for your own good of course.
Every time I hear something Schwab has said I want to tell him to go fu** himself and make sure he hears by writing it on a piece of card and ramming it down his throat. The man makes me feel violent and I'm surprised he's still with us. I suppose his pact with the Devil protects him.
As Lewis Black says, the good die young but pricks live forever. I am hoping that when he goes, the solar battery generations go out and his cryogenically frozen body defrosts so we are rid of this evil two legged evil virus! Gates doesn’t look well with his man boobs, so I don’t think he will be around for that long. He hasn’t aged well. !
“Asked what is the key thing poor countries should do, Cowperthwaite once remarked: "They should abolish the Office of National Statistics." In Hong Kong, he refused to collect all but the most superficial statistics, believing that statistics were dangerous: they would lead the state to to fiddle about remedying perceived ills, simultaneously hindering the ability of the market economy to work. - When he became Financial Secretary, the average Hong Kong resident earned about a quarter of someone living in Britain. By the early 90s, average incomes were higher than Britain's. Cowperthwaite made Hong Kong the most economically free economy in the world...”
i would be all for abolishing all public agencies that count or assess anything, but i think it's currently politically impossible.
what might make it possible is an intervening period of fully open data that allowed parallel structures to emerge and exceed the governmental ones and thereby let more people realize that we can get rid of them.
Open the books and minimize internet censorship. It is the control of the people asking questions that truly harms us. Statistics are merely a tool. Some tools work better in certain situations. My cats question everything. 😼
Except to GET someone primaried, you need to awaken the VOTING sheep! EVERYONE says the Congress ... things.... (I decided to QUIT maligning weasels!) need to be chucked out.... But then they vote and vote and vote again for THEIR "thing" -- because "he does good stuff for our district!" (r "I like his haircut" or "he votes over and over to take money from the NATION to give MY subspecies extra bennies!")
How about the elimination of ALL of the administrative law agencies, gato? They are IMHO, as dangerous as the “deep state” technocratic bureaucracies. Isn’t that where the real power is?
...also have a deepwater port on the world's biggest ocean and the busiest shippin lane, next to several rising economic superpowers.
not saying Cowperthwaite didn't do the right thing, but I'm pretty sure Afghanistan and Kenya weren't smashing out the deep forensic citizen analytics during that time period, and they both actually went in reverse.
Well Hong Kong had been in British hands since 1899 with its deep after port and busy shipping.
Cowperthwaite arrived in HK in 1945, so the British were still in charge of Kenya and nobody was in charge of Afghanistan. Kenya after independence went down the Socialist rabbit hole with the Moscow trained political set believing that the economy and prosperity could be planned and controlled from the centre, so you bet the Government was ‘counting’ things.
Afghanistan was /is/likely ever will be a tribal shit-hole with no functional central Government.
Wow thanks. Problem is they don’t care about national income they care only about their own and brainwash the weak into cooperating with them. Trump was on his way of fixing this but you see who shot him down?
The "people don't trust us because of misinformation" narrative is psychotic. Reading independent journalists is sort of a pain in the ass. I would love to wake up in the morning, have my coffee, and read the New York Times like in the good ol' days. After my morning NYT read, I would love to think to myself "oh, so that's what's going on in the world today." I would love to share a consensus reality with everyone around me.
But there came a point when the lies and propaganda just became to brazen to bear anymore. So now I read alternative media, aka "misinformation," as my primary news sources. These eminent intellectuals who blame "misinformation" for causing distrust have fallen for the third-cause fallacy. My distrust of establishment information was never caused by my consumption of "misinformation." Rather, the underlying cause of both my distrust of establishment information and my consumption of "misinformation" is the fact that establishment institutions lie, flagrantly, over and over again, and always in predictable directions. The lack of self-awareness by these people is astounding.
My theory is these people have become basically paid actors. They spew whatever nonsense they are told to spew. Maybe they believe, maybe they don’t, but that’s how they collect a pay check. The days of the newspaper guy with his nose to the grindstone trying to get a big scoop are long gone in corporate media. Luckily for us, those investigative and inquisitive types are able to now survive as independent journalists, allowing places like stubstack to thrive. The corporate news is just a scripted TV show that exists to entertain the low information, non inquisitive types that would rather just plop in front of a TV.
Well, they thrive as long as WE throw them a few pennies for their work! Cut out one weekly coffee (at least!) and subscribe to your fav (two or three or more) independents! Yes?
I am glad about and interested in your use of the word "psychotic," as that particular word seems to be bandied about in recent days in various places; however, it has been aimed at the duped misinformation consumers, rather than purveyors.
As in: the symptoms of psychosis are being delusional about the reality that everyone else knows to be true, being paranoid; stubbornly clinging to unusual, false beliefs; becoming withdrawn; disordered thinking and speech; hallucinations; neglect of personal grooming.
I have been wondering about how the diagnostic criteria for psychosis could be applied to either the mainstream narrative believers or the dissident disillusioned who now question everything.
The world does seem crazy right now. Sanity is attractive.
In ordinary times, whether one is delusional is judged in relation to society's norms. But we know from history that society's mainstream can collectively become psychotic. It happens over and over again. The question, then, is whether we are in such a time and such a society now. I would answer in the affirmative.
I think Desmet's The Psychology of Totalitarianism does a fantastic job of describing the present moment. In such a time, to conform is to be psychotic. I also believe (and this is supported in Desmet's book) that the instability and establishment lies can trigger a counter-mass psychosis, and I think that is what is going on in real far out conspiracy theory circles. I am quite comfortable with my sense-making in these tumultuous times and thus do not question my sanity, no matter how far my views deviate from those of the people around me. Though of course it is still nice to have Substack and writers like EGM to assure me I am not alone.
"The lack of self-awareness by these people is astounding."
As someone who lives deep inside the Blue bubble, I just want to add that "these people" exist inside a plush epistemic cocoon where there is just zero possibility they could be wrong about anything, and zero possibility that their every act is not of the highest most pristine moral standards.
By existing inside various narrative-enforcing echo chambers, our elites in media, academia and culture have convinced themselves that they are infallible and deserve to rule unimpeded.
It is very much a cross bw a top-down Cultural Revolution and a mass cult conversion into fundamentalism.
I keep thinking unimpeachable revelations that contradict the narrative are going to break through and wake people up, and to my dismay it keeps not happening. Recent developments that really should have shaken people out of their delusions include the CJR Russiagate analysis, the Twitter Files revelations l, the Cochrane review on masking, the Cleveland Clinic vaccine data, and now we have Sy Hersh’s Nordstream piece. But all of this information is conspicuously absent from mainstream sources.
Not only that, but referencing them in NYT comments gets you censored every time. Even when confronted with this information, MSM believers ignore it or find some way to spin it, thinking to themselves “if this really were true, surely NYT and NPR would be telling me about it.” The level of mind control is unbelievable.
Your pessimism about the fever breaking is probably warranted. I was raised in a blue bubble (Seattle), spent much of adulthood in a red bubble (Montana), and have lived in Asia since the beginning of the Trump administration. So I don’t have a ground level view of the insanity. Sometimes I think it couldn’t really be that bad. But when these counter-narrative revelations keep being ignored or spun beyond recognition, it’s hard to have much faith that these people will snap out of it anytime soon.
From my perspective as someone whose friends and family are just about all big-city liberals and loyal Democrats:
First, as you say: if it's not in the Times it doesn't exist, didn't happen, and if it did, it's some kind of rightwing plot or hoax; for these people, the Times/NPR etc are both Pravda and the Bible, they create and define their worldview, often to the point of verbatim quotes;
Second, and more importantly, things like Russiagate, Twitter, the unraveling of the Covid narrative are all footnotes to be ignored compared to the main text: conservatives and Republicans are all dangerous, evil bigots. Of course Trump is a hateful tyrant, DeSantis is even worse, he hates gay children and black people, and if any of these people get into power they'll enact some kind of Klan-flavored Nazi party platform.
So the proximate cause is a bad case of media poisoning/social contagion and the result is that these people have been trained and conditioned into believing that only bad people question the narrative, that Social Justice beliefs are simply proper etiquette for all sophisticated people, and that their loyalty and obedience are a small price to pay to prevent a possible Nazi takeover.
You have really nailed it. I will only add that the cognitive dissonance for my parents, having one of their children (me) questioning everything, has made it hard for them to conclude that "only bad people" question the narrative, because they love me and know I'm not bad. What they have concluded instead is that I am misguided and have been taken in by the propaganda I foolishly expose myself to, because I do not have a television, nor do I read the WaPo or the NYT. I get my information on the internet* (and a few books), so therefore I am not discerning. I am an idiot, in other words. They are the smart ones.
*(they watch MSNBC, CNN, local (DC) news, and read print versions of Washington Post, NYT, mainly). They mock people who think other than they do of being brainwashed, low-intelligence consumers of FOX TV.
I have been admonished, whenever I (rarely, anymore) send a particularly good article or study their way, that my "source" is some "discredited, right-wing-funded" propaganda outfit -- and before they would even read a word of what I send, they google the article or author, and google tells them basically not to read it. So they don't.
Weird, because I will read what they send me. I decided to be aware of what's out there so I could decide for myself, rather than be told what to think.
I am beyond heartbroken over the destruction of lifelong relationships by the informational aspects of this war. It's been heading this way for years, but ramped up recently. I got off the train they are on about 12 years ago and we have only continued our divergent paths. I miss what we used to have, the close connection. I can definitely sort of understand why people reinforce their brainwashing programming, in order to retain those connections and relationships. It's quite painful to be ostracized, dismissed, ridiculed, uninvited, and all of those things.
Too, too familiar every word. When interacting with family I don’t discuss and expend tremendous energy pretending all’s well. It’s exhausting. I avoid it. The growing distance is saddening, the irresistible pull downward into heartbreak. My very small circle of like-mindeds has saved my sanity. I think ‘they’ were quite aware that trauma would debilitate in a number of ways even for refusniks. It has, but not in such a way as to cloud my thinking nor clearly that of large swaths across the globe. We’re all we’ve got left to bushwhack us out of this mess. I have faith that the collective energy will do so but lawdy it’s a slow, painful grind. Not giving up. Not giving in. I’ll die first. It’ll be worth it.
I've had similar experiences and when I read about your parents the image that came to mind is of someone preparing for a public debate and instead of studying etc they just attack their opponent a la Tonya Harding to cripple them and cancel the debate. The idea being that they have no interest in anything like reasoned debate or good-faith disagreement, but just need to see their opponent gone and hurt or worse.
The only thing I can compare this to is what I've read about the wars of the Protestant Reformation: for large stretches of the 16th century in Europe all that mattered was whether you were Catholic or Protestant. This was the first and last thing anyone wanted to know about you—whether you were friend or foe—and all else flowed from there.
I think the analogy can be extended to our current situtation: people who believe in the God of Social Justice hate all other gods, especially the prior reigning belief systems based on either the Christian God or the American ideal symbolized by the Founding Fathers.
It's really Team 1776 vs Team 1619, and I guess looming up ahead is either some kind of truce and peace agreement or something ugly that could lead to a second Civil War.
It is the consultant manifesto…..define problem with solution (to be sold) in mind generally for the purpose being to accumulate more money, power and influence. Once the funding source dries up….move on to the next problem to be identified and “fixed.” Often the next problem/issue was created by the aforementioned solutions put forth to address the initial supposed difficulty. And these days the attention span of the public is so short…..it seems we forget almost immediately that the culprits feeding us the supposed solutions are more into ‘selling’ than actually fixing anything.
Long quote, but I think he summarizes the problem:
"...The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit,” namely, the proposition “that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes,” or what David Ehrenfeld labeled “the arrogance of humanism.”
That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules.
Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to “fine tune” or “jump start” the economy, or “grow” jobs, or produce a “quick fix” for the ailing government school system.
Even as modern society manifests its collapse in the form of violent crime, economic dislocation, seemingly endless warfare, inter-group hostilities, the decay of cities, a growing disaffection with institutions, and a general sense that nothing “works right” anymore, faith in the traditional model continues to drive the pyramidal systems.
Most people still cling to the belief that there is something that can be done by political institutions to change such conditions: a new piece of legislation can be enacted, a judicial ruling can be ordered, or a new agency regulation can be promulgated.
When a government-run program ends in disaster, the mechanistic mantra is invariably invoked: “we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that this doesn’t happen again.”
That the traditional model itself, which is grounded in the state’s power to control the lives and property of individuals to desired ends, may be the principal contributor to such social disorder goes largely unexplored..."
Excellent quote. I agree—-EXCEPT, I don’t think the end game is tweaking the system anymore. They know the system is beyond repair in more ways than one. They are purposefully working on building the new system and are trying to get as much bang for their buck as the old one collapses—-that is, as much intel, data, information they can to inform the processes and systems that they hope to implement in the place of the governments of the “failed” nation states. Their solution is global and encompasses humanity as a single entity or species to be managed by one system. Or at least that is my working hypothesis. And it is not a single ruler or body of people. We are dealing with people who are loyal to a concept and are racing to be the ones with the most component parts for the new system. Think of it as them seeing the human existence individually and collectively as a giant system. Like a computer system….it can be programmed. But they are looking at things a wee bit differently these days….they are not going to attempt a system from the top down. Rather they are actually trying to understand the individual being better so that they can put in place a system which incorporates the individual into a bigger system based on their understanding of how the individual behaves, reacts, self actualizes.
And this plays right into their arrogance and hubris. They see themselves as being elite because if their successes in the old system. This new competition pits them against each other and is ramping up on all fronts the push to garner as much info. as fast as possible to feed into their algorithms in search of the right electrical pulses to sustain humanity on their terms. That is, as a tool versus seeing humanity as one’s right to be and self actualize in a world of unique opportunities. They are doing that, but we are just building blocks in their current project. They are looking for the holy grail….both in terms of physical health and human consciousness. They seek to solve life….they are busy defining the terms in all kinds of new ways and collecting data that they expect will help them find the answer to controlling humanity and engineering our own evolution….thereby bypassing that which nature has in store for us.
We have to all wake up and realize that NO political system can prevent the corruption. WE the PEOPLE have to participate. IN ALL OF IT.
Imagine El Gato Malo's proposed solution could be implemented everywhere, in every facet of governance...with major feedback...from town councils to state governments...they all need to be decentralized and distributed...the second area I would propose is the FED RESERVE...give it back to the STATE BANKS.
And the airport swab tests. With the utter disregard for rules they could have selected people of interest to collect DNA. All kinds of abuses occurred throughout COVID. Turning military psyops inward to used against population occurred in country after country. Western democratic countries. There is no accountability. Power is so concentrated governments only need to appease a very small select group.
We have to pick out a few things that were obvious lies, and show the truth and put posters up everywhere before this misinformation summit. I see they talk about misinformation but never say what they are talking about so we can get it proved or disproved.
One great thing to come out of all this has been the public conversation (on Substack especially) between censored experts and regular people, either non-academic experts or experts in other fields, or people who are simply curious, non-credentialed critical thinkers.
For far too long, information has been kept behind paywalls, siloed, compartmentalized, barricaded. Now, it is coming out. But the most beautiful thing has been the dialogues that are happening in public view on platforms such as this, which did not happen to such a degree before. People in different fields are connecting, information is being shared, debated, and the playing field has been enlarged and somewhat leveled.
We can all participate if we choose to have something to say. We can all teach what we know and learn from one another.
I've learned a ton in the past couple years that previously I would have had to pursue a higher degree to even gain access. This is a wonderful direction.
Now, the remaining walls of the fortress of our institutions need to be bulldozed. Let the information out so that we can all sort through the data and decide for ourselves.
“... people who are simply curious, non-credentialed critical thinkers.” <open sarcasm> How do we get credentialed as a critical thinker? I’ll take one of those. <close /sarc> Not at your expense, honest. A second “like” 👍 on your thoughts after the integrated button.
Peppered throughout the cat’s writing. Provides a lift even on heavy material. (Ha! Lift... heavy... 🙃🙄 ...clunker compared to eloquent. I’ll go now...)
Egm...indeed. I call him our modern day Thomas Paine. Articulate,witty, and inspirational...then there's mean meme pools on Sunday. That's awesome sauce.
Dude...you stumbled and good stuff happened! That's like... you can't help but to ooze interesting stuff! Huzzah!!
I apologized to a poor gal at Planet Fitness because I started to explain Why caffeine might stop her headache... " Sorry, I'll shut up now...my head is just filled with this shit..."
Screw the institutions-save the ideals they were built on and start over without baseless opportunists and posturing sycophants.
The definition of "institutionalized" isn't limited to residence in a locked facility; institutionalized is a matter of perception, an inability to understand outside a given context, now obviously at the expense of the individual said institution claims to protect and support.
Gotta be real careful with an exception for PII. I understand why some allowance like that would be needed, but it would be the most likely wedge used to prop the door open so the data rats can escape out the back.
Right. Just a matter of how "PII" is defined and what leeway is granted in terms of bureaucratic "judgment." How best to avoid the end result being the same as the biosecurity surveillance state this measure would be aimed at preventing.
"all data collected by public agencies and regulators must be wholly open to the public. period."
Corollary: If you can't publish it for "privacy" reasons, then you may not collect it in the first place.
(European data/privacy regulations may actually be a decent model for this, and it's not an infringement of anyone's rights when you're restricting the *government*, rather than the citizens, in what it may or may not do.)
According to a privacy policy, Personal Health Information (PHI) has many access points in place including business partners, students, research, law enforcement, health oversight agency, public health authorities, others who are interested in healthcare, and/or other specialized government functions. I did not see mention of anonymous.
Yes. And since PHI is digitized (thank you NOT, Obama), the number of people who access it took a great leap. Any of your list could have requested it in past but didn't bother usually with minor matters. Now it's all available w a few keystrokes. And HIPAA SHMIPAA.
Global warming, sorry ‘climate change’, is an industrial scale case of data retroactive manipulation to a political end. We should also insist on a mechanism whereby all changes to released data are documented and accounted for.
And consider…..why is this the rallying cry? Why have those who like to game the system latched onto the problem to be “defined” as climate change? What is the solution they want to sell us? Be careful not to fall into the trap of looking at the narrative for the answers….remember the narrative is a marketing tool.
We know that they want to sell us the “mechanics” of reducing climate change in theory. But if that were truly the objective they would be taking other steps personally that they CLEARLY are not.
Now…..yes, they want more money, power, and influence…..but there is something more driving them here. Their allegiance to the crumbling narrative is an indicator of how important the quest is that they are on…..and it’s not about cooling the planet.
And because the narrative is crumbing and they are literally stringing us along…..while they must know that something like this gathering on or around correcting “disinformation” will not fix anything.
So what are we missing? What underlies all of this nonsense.
Are we being studied for how we react to lies, deceptions, narratives that don’t match up with physical reality?
Are they studying (with data and social media platforms/big tech) how we process information, what synapsid are firing, how we reconcile or deal with info. inconsistent with personal experience, how we deal with information that reaffirms our personal experience or physical reality?
Consider all the polarizing issues that are being literally pumped into and fed to society at this time. And all of it can be tracked and traced regarding reactions of millions on line. For what purpose?
I truly think that we need to start looking at these world affairs as being studies in human reaction….they have covered war, gender, race relations, poverty and class interactions, education, healthcare, familial relationships, etc. At this point, nothing is saved. Everything is game.
Now, consider the obsession with AI. And our obsession with data collection as the key to understanding reality. What if the reality or landscape they are studying is the human brain /consciousness….and doing it in reverse. They are collecting data not to affirm direction but to better understand how our brain works so they can hack it OR use it for their benefit.
Well see nobody is ever happy when them peasants eat from the Tree and their eyes are opened and won't close back down again obediently as demanded.
It's been a great natural experiment, seeing all the vicious slashing and burning in the Garden of Info done even by very smart people purportedly on the side of free knowledge and resistance to The Bad Guys, so I don't want anyone putting their hands on the freeflowing River of Everything and trying to bend its course to their will.
Everyone has human weaknesses, biases, fits of temper, the tender places that set them off if touched, and we always did need and shall always need forever to do our own research, finding those who seem to demonstrate their trustworthiness and compare what they say against others who seem to demonstrate the same, and share what we find within our own communities, wherever we find them. That's it. Dreamtime over and done with. Teach yer kids well.
As a former employee who was fired (from a board that included a study on misinformation in its portfolio) for refusing to be vaccinated, I can say from experience that the National Academies of Sciences have almost nothing to do with science. It is a non-profit that gets most of its funding from three letter agencies (like NSF) to push political narratives. Committee members are chosen to serve based on their politics (after that, the criteria becomes ethnicity, sex and sexual orientation). Projects often arise from Directors' political leanings (and they only lean one way). Within the organization, none of this is secret.
One hundred percent, a great article... There's a saying - The truth welcomes questions a lie does not like challenges - obviously not a direct quote here, but along those lines... The west has slowly lost what remains of free speech, debate is no longer allowed, a group of (frequently incompetent or corrupt) experts will tell you the truth and how to think. Funny how a large chunk of society swallowed this bullsh!t, when there were enough evidence that a lot of the "truth" they were peddling was plainly lies. Even science was proving them wrong, yet you "went against community standards " if you shared unfavorable research on social media that went against the narrative. I mean it went so far that Facebook"fact checked" the British Medical Journal !! Now they need a conference on restoring trust stopping the spread of misinformation? It's a total joke (a joke that isn't funny).
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
We've come to the point where the malfeasance of government accountability has literally led to the law being an instrument of illegality.
Eg: the myth that FOIA solved this problem has fooled many into believing that all they need do is file a FOIA Request, and the data will gush forth like a 1920s Permian Basin oil well. Try it yourselves, folks. Try and see what the good ol' federal government has in the way of data on YOU. Just filing the paperwork "properly" can take months, occasionally years. Myth and reality often do mesh, but rarely without work, and seldom in the way we were told they "should".
Lol, so true! Reminds of when I went into the San Mateo County records office and asked to see a list of all recent house sale prices. They gave me a pencil and said I could sit at a terminal and look up properties I had the address for already.
I objected, "But this is public data!"
The answer was that I could sit there with the pencil and write things down, or not. And then someone quietly told me that the office was staffed entirely by Realtors(TM) who watch that data for their own personal profit and they were not about to let just anyone see it. They had those government jobs solely to help their private careers as realtors.
Granted, that was about 15 years ago, but I don't think the basic principle has changed. Government runs for the benefit of government employees, not for you.
Nope, still the same in Georgia! You need to be a REGISTERED person (not necessarily a realtor -- if you paid (as lot!) you could have access.... the 'registration' was just a county BILL!
Thanks Avalanche. I posted your comment to my own site:
https://patrick.net/post/1346528/2022-07-06-corruption-thread?start=129#comment-1929057
Designed for your convenience
Depending, of course, who "your" is.
Comfortably NUMBered
A proposed augmentation:
"all data collected by public agencies and regulators must be wholly open to the public AS SOON AS IT IS COLLECTED. ANY DATA WITHHELD WILL RESULT IN THE IMMEDIATE TERMINATION OF THE AGENCY HEAD. period.
As long as you mean real termination, sure.
Eh, I'd give them a 48 hour grace period before termination. Systems go down for maintenance, network glitches, etc. No IT system is perfect...
That's not remotely what Lawrence is suggesting.
Some Europolitician, Borrell, I think said yesterday that blocking Russian news and criminalizing the expression of pro-Russian opinions is necessary "to protect freedom of speech in Europe".
Censorship to protect freedom of speech? That is some "war is peace, freedom is slavery" straight up 1984 level bullshit there.
Let grown ups decide what they do and don’t want to hear or believe. When the government decides, any information we ingest is simply propaganda. This nanny state we’ve become wants to control every aspect of your life, for your own good of course.
I don't ever recall hearing the words "misinformation" and "disinformation" used very often before the Covid plandemic power grab.
Because the global government needs to shove it through asap. They WILL NOT BE STOPPED.
Why Why Why, Why do you hate Our Freedom (R)?
We need to post this and repost it all over the internet, on all the online newspapers and media..and to those crappy experts now discussing globally.
Are we allowed to do that?
If public institutions want our trust, maybe they could try not lying so much?
I know, that's crazy talk.
"The populace must be mentored." Klaus Schwab, Tien Wei interview, CGTN. You must be re-educated to learn trust you worthless eater.
Every time I hear something Schwab has said I want to tell him to go fu** himself and make sure he hears by writing it on a piece of card and ramming it down his throat. The man makes me feel violent and I'm surprised he's still with us. I suppose his pact with the Devil protects him.
As Lewis Black says, the good die young but pricks live forever. I am hoping that when he goes, the solar battery generations go out and his cryogenically frozen body defrosts so we are rid of this evil two legged evil virus! Gates doesn’t look well with his man boobs, so I don’t think he will be around for that long. He hasn’t aged well. !
Being evil does nobody's health any good. It must eat away at you. Look at the state of Jacinda Ardern, she looks worn away.
Agree. Who's behind klaus, the real leaders of cult?
Dig the anger Cary
Let's hope there is a God to solve this particlar problem and get away with it.
Run when you hear this is for the GREATER GOOD!
As a practical matter, what that usually means is that this is something that would prove embarrassing to humans of influence and authority.
Anything for the “greater good” will make all involved more miserable or worse off by default.
As Pete Buttigieg would say - we need to create a more equitable world. 🤡
Pete - you run along a create that more equitable world. On another planet.
We'll figure out what to do with this one.
Or "for the children"...
And those that talk of saving "The Planet" are NOT caring "environmentalists", but raging communo-fascists. ALWAYS.
Let’s hear it for groupthink. 🎉 🥳 🤮👊🏻
Sounds like insurrection to me!
Here’s how. Stop the counting!
“Asked what is the key thing poor countries should do, Cowperthwaite once remarked: "They should abolish the Office of National Statistics." In Hong Kong, he refused to collect all but the most superficial statistics, believing that statistics were dangerous: they would lead the state to to fiddle about remedying perceived ills, simultaneously hindering the ability of the market economy to work. - When he became Financial Secretary, the average Hong Kong resident earned about a quarter of someone living in Britain. By the early 90s, average incomes were higher than Britain's. Cowperthwaite made Hong Kong the most economically free economy in the world...”
Was it not taught that once a statistic is used as a measure of performance, that statistic will be gamed?
i would be all for abolishing all public agencies that count or assess anything, but i think it's currently politically impossible.
what might make it possible is an intervening period of fully open data that allowed parallel structures to emerge and exceed the governmental ones and thereby let more people realize that we can get rid of them.
Open the books and minimize internet censorship. It is the control of the people asking questions that truly harms us. Statistics are merely a tool. Some tools work better in certain situations. My cats question everything. 😼
Exactly! Like you and Joe Smalley and Ivor Chudov and Matthew Crawford and damn I am forgetting the other brilliant statisticians here on Substack.
Ya'll have been saving the rest of us.
We owe you.
Let's write it into a law and STUFF it into Congress...and anyone who doesn't vote for it
gets Primaried.
Except to GET someone primaried, you need to awaken the VOTING sheep! EVERYONE says the Congress ... things.... (I decided to QUIT maligning weasels!) need to be chucked out.... But then they vote and vote and vote again for THEIR "thing" -- because "he does good stuff for our district!" (r "I like his haircut" or "he votes over and over to take money from the NATION to give MY subspecies extra bennies!")
Term limits should have been passed years ago. I am afraid now it is too late.
How about the elimination of ALL of the administrative law agencies, gato? They are IMHO, as dangerous as the “deep state” technocratic bureaucracies. Isn’t that where the real power is?
All open source. Everything.
YES. And the Republician's should include
"All open source. Everything."
in their platform as an absolute must do!
My economics Prof, (over a half century ago), used that observation to begin his, "Don't take yourself too seriously" lecture.
...also have a deepwater port on the world's biggest ocean and the busiest shippin lane, next to several rising economic superpowers.
not saying Cowperthwaite didn't do the right thing, but I'm pretty sure Afghanistan and Kenya weren't smashing out the deep forensic citizen analytics during that time period, and they both actually went in reverse.
Well Hong Kong had been in British hands since 1899 with its deep after port and busy shipping.
Cowperthwaite arrived in HK in 1945, so the British were still in charge of Kenya and nobody was in charge of Afghanistan. Kenya after independence went down the Socialist rabbit hole with the Moscow trained political set believing that the economy and prosperity could be planned and controlled from the centre, so you bet the Government was ‘counting’ things.
Afghanistan was /is/likely ever will be a tribal shit-hole with no functional central Government.
Wow thanks. Problem is they don’t care about national income they care only about their own and brainwash the weak into cooperating with them. Trump was on his way of fixing this but you see who shot him down?
The "people don't trust us because of misinformation" narrative is psychotic. Reading independent journalists is sort of a pain in the ass. I would love to wake up in the morning, have my coffee, and read the New York Times like in the good ol' days. After my morning NYT read, I would love to think to myself "oh, so that's what's going on in the world today." I would love to share a consensus reality with everyone around me.
But there came a point when the lies and propaganda just became to brazen to bear anymore. So now I read alternative media, aka "misinformation," as my primary news sources. These eminent intellectuals who blame "misinformation" for causing distrust have fallen for the third-cause fallacy. My distrust of establishment information was never caused by my consumption of "misinformation." Rather, the underlying cause of both my distrust of establishment information and my consumption of "misinformation" is the fact that establishment institutions lie, flagrantly, over and over again, and always in predictable directions. The lack of self-awareness by these people is astounding.
My theory is these people have become basically paid actors. They spew whatever nonsense they are told to spew. Maybe they believe, maybe they don’t, but that’s how they collect a pay check. The days of the newspaper guy with his nose to the grindstone trying to get a big scoop are long gone in corporate media. Luckily for us, those investigative and inquisitive types are able to now survive as independent journalists, allowing places like stubstack to thrive. The corporate news is just a scripted TV show that exists to entertain the low information, non inquisitive types that would rather just plop in front of a TV.
Well, they thrive as long as WE throw them a few pennies for their work! Cut out one weekly coffee (at least!) and subscribe to your fav (two or three or more) independents! Yes?
I am glad about and interested in your use of the word "psychotic," as that particular word seems to be bandied about in recent days in various places; however, it has been aimed at the duped misinformation consumers, rather than purveyors.
As in: the symptoms of psychosis are being delusional about the reality that everyone else knows to be true, being paranoid; stubbornly clinging to unusual, false beliefs; becoming withdrawn; disordered thinking and speech; hallucinations; neglect of personal grooming.
I have been wondering about how the diagnostic criteria for psychosis could be applied to either the mainstream narrative believers or the dissident disillusioned who now question everything.
The world does seem crazy right now. Sanity is attractive.
In ordinary times, whether one is delusional is judged in relation to society's norms. But we know from history that society's mainstream can collectively become psychotic. It happens over and over again. The question, then, is whether we are in such a time and such a society now. I would answer in the affirmative.
I think Desmet's The Psychology of Totalitarianism does a fantastic job of describing the present moment. In such a time, to conform is to be psychotic. I also believe (and this is supported in Desmet's book) that the instability and establishment lies can trigger a counter-mass psychosis, and I think that is what is going on in real far out conspiracy theory circles. I am quite comfortable with my sense-making in these tumultuous times and thus do not question my sanity, no matter how far my views deviate from those of the people around me. Though of course it is still nice to have Substack and writers like EGM to assure me I am not alone.
I agree with you. Sanity is a high value for me, and these are interesting times, for sure.
I dunno, so many humans are insane that it must feel like a sort of self-gaslighting to be a sane human surrounded by so many crazies.
"The lack of self-awareness by these people is astounding."
As someone who lives deep inside the Blue bubble, I just want to add that "these people" exist inside a plush epistemic cocoon where there is just zero possibility they could be wrong about anything, and zero possibility that their every act is not of the highest most pristine moral standards.
By existing inside various narrative-enforcing echo chambers, our elites in media, academia and culture have convinced themselves that they are infallible and deserve to rule unimpeded.
It is very much a cross bw a top-down Cultural Revolution and a mass cult conversion into fundamentalism.
I don't see this fever breaking anytime soon.
I keep thinking unimpeachable revelations that contradict the narrative are going to break through and wake people up, and to my dismay it keeps not happening. Recent developments that really should have shaken people out of their delusions include the CJR Russiagate analysis, the Twitter Files revelations l, the Cochrane review on masking, the Cleveland Clinic vaccine data, and now we have Sy Hersh’s Nordstream piece. But all of this information is conspicuously absent from mainstream sources.
Not only that, but referencing them in NYT comments gets you censored every time. Even when confronted with this information, MSM believers ignore it or find some way to spin it, thinking to themselves “if this really were true, surely NYT and NPR would be telling me about it.” The level of mind control is unbelievable.
Your pessimism about the fever breaking is probably warranted. I was raised in a blue bubble (Seattle), spent much of adulthood in a red bubble (Montana), and have lived in Asia since the beginning of the Trump administration. So I don’t have a ground level view of the insanity. Sometimes I think it couldn’t really be that bad. But when these counter-narrative revelations keep being ignored or spun beyond recognition, it’s hard to have much faith that these people will snap out of it anytime soon.
From my perspective as someone whose friends and family are just about all big-city liberals and loyal Democrats:
First, as you say: if it's not in the Times it doesn't exist, didn't happen, and if it did, it's some kind of rightwing plot or hoax; for these people, the Times/NPR etc are both Pravda and the Bible, they create and define their worldview, often to the point of verbatim quotes;
Second, and more importantly, things like Russiagate, Twitter, the unraveling of the Covid narrative are all footnotes to be ignored compared to the main text: conservatives and Republicans are all dangerous, evil bigots. Of course Trump is a hateful tyrant, DeSantis is even worse, he hates gay children and black people, and if any of these people get into power they'll enact some kind of Klan-flavored Nazi party platform.
So the proximate cause is a bad case of media poisoning/social contagion and the result is that these people have been trained and conditioned into believing that only bad people question the narrative, that Social Justice beliefs are simply proper etiquette for all sophisticated people, and that their loyalty and obedience are a small price to pay to prevent a possible Nazi takeover.
You have really nailed it. I will only add that the cognitive dissonance for my parents, having one of their children (me) questioning everything, has made it hard for them to conclude that "only bad people" question the narrative, because they love me and know I'm not bad. What they have concluded instead is that I am misguided and have been taken in by the propaganda I foolishly expose myself to, because I do not have a television, nor do I read the WaPo or the NYT. I get my information on the internet* (and a few books), so therefore I am not discerning. I am an idiot, in other words. They are the smart ones.
*(they watch MSNBC, CNN, local (DC) news, and read print versions of Washington Post, NYT, mainly). They mock people who think other than they do of being brainwashed, low-intelligence consumers of FOX TV.
I have been admonished, whenever I (rarely, anymore) send a particularly good article or study their way, that my "source" is some "discredited, right-wing-funded" propaganda outfit -- and before they would even read a word of what I send, they google the article or author, and google tells them basically not to read it. So they don't.
Weird, because I will read what they send me. I decided to be aware of what's out there so I could decide for myself, rather than be told what to think.
I am beyond heartbroken over the destruction of lifelong relationships by the informational aspects of this war. It's been heading this way for years, but ramped up recently. I got off the train they are on about 12 years ago and we have only continued our divergent paths. I miss what we used to have, the close connection. I can definitely sort of understand why people reinforce their brainwashing programming, in order to retain those connections and relationships. It's quite painful to be ostracized, dismissed, ridiculed, uninvited, and all of those things.
What's done is done. There's no going back.
Too, too familiar every word. When interacting with family I don’t discuss and expend tremendous energy pretending all’s well. It’s exhausting. I avoid it. The growing distance is saddening, the irresistible pull downward into heartbreak. My very small circle of like-mindeds has saved my sanity. I think ‘they’ were quite aware that trauma would debilitate in a number of ways even for refusniks. It has, but not in such a way as to cloud my thinking nor clearly that of large swaths across the globe. We’re all we’ve got left to bushwhack us out of this mess. I have faith that the collective energy will do so but lawdy it’s a slow, painful grind. Not giving up. Not giving in. I’ll die first. It’ll be worth it.
I've had similar experiences and when I read about your parents the image that came to mind is of someone preparing for a public debate and instead of studying etc they just attack their opponent a la Tonya Harding to cripple them and cancel the debate. The idea being that they have no interest in anything like reasoned debate or good-faith disagreement, but just need to see their opponent gone and hurt or worse.
The only thing I can compare this to is what I've read about the wars of the Protestant Reformation: for large stretches of the 16th century in Europe all that mattered was whether you were Catholic or Protestant. This was the first and last thing anyone wanted to know about you—whether you were friend or foe—and all else flowed from there.
I think the analogy can be extended to our current situtation: people who believe in the God of Social Justice hate all other gods, especially the prior reigning belief systems based on either the Christian God or the American ideal symbolized by the Founding Fathers.
It's really Team 1776 vs Team 1619, and I guess looming up ahead is either some kind of truce and peace agreement or something ugly that could lead to a second Civil War.
Well said. That’s essentially the diagnosis in a nutshell.
same here in the suburbs of DC.
The blue states are the worst.
Great post.
I'm thinking it may have gone from lacking self-awareness to mockery.
We need more agencies and commissions to discover what went wrong and how to fix it......!
They always use that excuse. No solutions come from it and accountability is never an objective.
The true objective is to allow enough time to go by so the public loses interest.
worse, it seems to be to run a one wat ratchet of power accumulation.
grab power, make mess, empanel yourself to assess the mess, grab more power to fix it. repeat.
It is the consultant manifesto…..define problem with solution (to be sold) in mind generally for the purpose being to accumulate more money, power and influence. Once the funding source dries up….move on to the next problem to be identified and “fixed.” Often the next problem/issue was created by the aforementioned solutions put forth to address the initial supposed difficulty. And these days the attention span of the public is so short…..it seems we forget almost immediately that the culprits feeding us the supposed solutions are more into ‘selling’ than actually fixing anything.
Long quote, but I think he summarizes the problem:
"...The belief that order must be intentionally generated and imposed upon society by institutional authorities continues to prevail. This centrally-directed model is premised upon what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit,” namely, the proposition “that man is able to shape the world according to his wishes,” or what David Ehrenfeld labeled “the arrogance of humanism.”
That such practices have usually failed to produce their anticipated results has generally led not to a questioning of the model itself, but to the conclusion that failed policies have suffered only from inadequate leadership, or a lack of sufficient information, or a failure to better articulate rules.
Once such deficiencies have been remedied, it has been supposed, new programs can be implemented which, reflective of this mechanistic outlook, will permit government officials to “fine tune” or “jump start” the economy, or “grow” jobs, or produce a “quick fix” for the ailing government school system.
Even as modern society manifests its collapse in the form of violent crime, economic dislocation, seemingly endless warfare, inter-group hostilities, the decay of cities, a growing disaffection with institutions, and a general sense that nothing “works right” anymore, faith in the traditional model continues to drive the pyramidal systems.
Most people still cling to the belief that there is something that can be done by political institutions to change such conditions: a new piece of legislation can be enacted, a judicial ruling can be ordered, or a new agency regulation can be promulgated.
When a government-run program ends in disaster, the mechanistic mantra is invariably invoked: “we will find out what went wrong and fix it so that this doesn’t happen again.”
That the traditional model itself, which is grounded in the state’s power to control the lives and property of individuals to desired ends, may be the principal contributor to such social disorder goes largely unexplored..."
- Butler Shaffer
Excellent quote. I agree—-EXCEPT, I don’t think the end game is tweaking the system anymore. They know the system is beyond repair in more ways than one. They are purposefully working on building the new system and are trying to get as much bang for their buck as the old one collapses—-that is, as much intel, data, information they can to inform the processes and systems that they hope to implement in the place of the governments of the “failed” nation states. Their solution is global and encompasses humanity as a single entity or species to be managed by one system. Or at least that is my working hypothesis. And it is not a single ruler or body of people. We are dealing with people who are loyal to a concept and are racing to be the ones with the most component parts for the new system. Think of it as them seeing the human existence individually and collectively as a giant system. Like a computer system….it can be programmed. But they are looking at things a wee bit differently these days….they are not going to attempt a system from the top down. Rather they are actually trying to understand the individual being better so that they can put in place a system which incorporates the individual into a bigger system based on their understanding of how the individual behaves, reacts, self actualizes.
And this plays right into their arrogance and hubris. They see themselves as being elite because if their successes in the old system. This new competition pits them against each other and is ramping up on all fronts the push to garner as much info. as fast as possible to feed into their algorithms in search of the right electrical pulses to sustain humanity on their terms. That is, as a tool versus seeing humanity as one’s right to be and self actualize in a world of unique opportunities. They are doing that, but we are just building blocks in their current project. They are looking for the holy grail….both in terms of physical health and human consciousness. They seek to solve life….they are busy defining the terms in all kinds of new ways and collecting data that they expect will help them find the answer to controlling humanity and engineering our own evolution….thereby bypassing that which nature has in store for us.
We have to all wake up and realize that NO political system can prevent the corruption. WE the PEOPLE have to participate. IN ALL OF IT.
Imagine El Gato Malo's proposed solution could be implemented everywhere, in every facet of governance...with major feedback...from town councils to state governments...they all need to be decentralized and distributed...the second area I would propose is the FED RESERVE...give it back to the STATE BANKS.
All of what you said plus end EO's
Exactly.
Weapons of Mass Destruction...how ya like those apples America?
You should read the commission report they released on the WMD fiasco. It will seriously make your stomach turn.
I feel so much safer having to take the change out of my pocket at the airports!
Speaking of airports; I would not be surprised at all if those body scanners are really to gather biometric info.
And the airport swab tests. With the utter disregard for rules they could have selected people of interest to collect DNA. All kinds of abuses occurred throughout COVID. Turning military psyops inward to used against population occurred in country after country. Western democratic countries. There is no accountability. Power is so concentrated governments only need to appease a very small select group.
I heard those pcr tests were purposely close to brain barrier. Yikes, I didn't take.
I told jury duty folks I didn't want to, and they gave me Tele assignment.
Gates of hell:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/GDJNkhfpNvfH/
Yup. Spot on.
I've yet to be convinced it ends well.
In addition to a dose of full body ionizing radiation. A two-fer, give *and* take. Just stand still, you won’t feel a thing.
Hands up. Don't move...this will be painless...
We have to pick out a few things that were obvious lies, and show the truth and put posters up everywhere before this misinformation summit. I see they talk about misinformation but never say what they are talking about so we can get it proved or disproved.
I hope it works. Try..
But sadly...
I really think this is a great idea.
There have been so many lies that they seem to have all canceled out, ending at truthiness to the peeps.
Well if there are enough of us to print them out and put them in ....ahem. ......waiting rooms and community bulletin boards.
Yeah sort of like congressional hearings
Trot out the dog, show the audience all the tricks. Bring on the pony and show how the dog does tricks with the pony.
Dog, pony, it's all phony....useless
Coffee shot out of my nose when I read this line: “hey, what if we just stopped lying all the fricking time?”
Seriously? A three-day conference on misinformation run by the same people who have been running a three-year three-card Monte scam on us? GMAFB.
One great thing to come out of all this has been the public conversation (on Substack especially) between censored experts and regular people, either non-academic experts or experts in other fields, or people who are simply curious, non-credentialed critical thinkers.
For far too long, information has been kept behind paywalls, siloed, compartmentalized, barricaded. Now, it is coming out. But the most beautiful thing has been the dialogues that are happening in public view on platforms such as this, which did not happen to such a degree before. People in different fields are connecting, information is being shared, debated, and the playing field has been enlarged and somewhat leveled.
We can all participate if we choose to have something to say. We can all teach what we know and learn from one another.
I've learned a ton in the past couple years that previously I would have had to pursue a higher degree to even gain access. This is a wonderful direction.
Now, the remaining walls of the fortress of our institutions need to be bulldozed. Let the information out so that we can all sort through the data and decide for ourselves.
“... people who are simply curious, non-credentialed critical thinkers.” <open sarcasm> How do we get credentialed as a critical thinker? I’ll take one of those. <close /sarc> Not at your expense, honest. A second “like” 👍 on your thoughts after the integrated button.
Just assume everything pushed by the lying MSM and gubmint is bad for you.
Easy.
august assemblage of academic info-assassins...🤣🤣🤣
Wasn't that magnificent??
Peppered throughout the cat’s writing. Provides a lift even on heavy material. (Ha! Lift... heavy... 🙃🙄 ...clunker compared to eloquent. I’ll go now...)
"Bruh, do you even lift? "
Me: Naw...I let the cat do my heavy lifting .
HI, I appreciated the effort!
I didn’t mean to do it, it just... happened. Dumb stumble. No effort. Lame in the final analysis.
I’m with you, let the cat do the heavy lifting. Some masterful turns from his pen.
Egm...indeed. I call him our modern day Thomas Paine. Articulate,witty, and inspirational...then there's mean meme pools on Sunday. That's awesome sauce.
Dude...you stumbled and good stuff happened! That's like... you can't help but to ooze interesting stuff! Huzzah!!
I apologized to a poor gal at Planet Fitness because I started to explain Why caffeine might stop her headache... " Sorry, I'll shut up now...my head is just filled with this shit..."
Awkward.
Please stumble across my path anytime you like!
A moment of grace? You knew when to back off? Some don’t. Awkward never even registers. You’ good. 😉
Screw the institutions-save the ideals they were built on and start over without baseless opportunists and posturing sycophants.
The definition of "institutionalized" isn't limited to residence in a locked facility; institutionalized is a matter of perception, an inability to understand outside a given context, now obviously at the expense of the individual said institution claims to protect and support.
Exactly
Fill them in with sand and chain their office chairs together, like they did to parks and swingsets.
The institutions have become Disneyland for these profligate parasites.
I believe you’re being too kind.
If I were king they'd be first against the "wall".
Gotta be real careful with an exception for PII. I understand why some allowance like that would be needed, but it would be the most likely wedge used to prop the door open so the data rats can escape out the back.
agreed, but letting everyone in america see your earnings and health data by name is highly problematic and no one wants that.
Right. Just a matter of how "PII" is defined and what leeway is granted in terms of bureaucratic "judgment." How best to avoid the end result being the same as the biosecurity surveillance state this measure would be aimed at preventing.
"all data collected by public agencies and regulators must be wholly open to the public. period."
Corollary: If you can't publish it for "privacy" reasons, then you may not collect it in the first place.
(European data/privacy regulations may actually be a decent model for this, and it's not an infringement of anyone's rights when you're restricting the *government*, rather than the citizens, in what it may or may not do.)
According to a privacy policy, Personal Health Information (PHI) has many access points in place including business partners, students, research, law enforcement, health oversight agency, public health authorities, others who are interested in healthcare, and/or other specialized government functions. I did not see mention of anonymous.
Yes. And since PHI is digitized (thank you NOT, Obama), the number of people who access it took a great leap. Any of your list could have requested it in past but didn't bother usually with minor matters. Now it's all available w a few keystrokes. And HIPAA SHMIPAA.
Global warming, sorry ‘climate change’, is an industrial scale case of data retroactive manipulation to a political end. We should also insist on a mechanism whereby all changes to released data are documented and accounted for.
And consider…..why is this the rallying cry? Why have those who like to game the system latched onto the problem to be “defined” as climate change? What is the solution they want to sell us? Be careful not to fall into the trap of looking at the narrative for the answers….remember the narrative is a marketing tool.
We know that they want to sell us the “mechanics” of reducing climate change in theory. But if that were truly the objective they would be taking other steps personally that they CLEARLY are not.
Now…..yes, they want more money, power, and influence…..but there is something more driving them here. Their allegiance to the crumbling narrative is an indicator of how important the quest is that they are on…..and it’s not about cooling the planet.
And because the narrative is crumbing and they are literally stringing us along…..while they must know that something like this gathering on or around correcting “disinformation” will not fix anything.
So what are we missing? What underlies all of this nonsense.
Are we being studied for how we react to lies, deceptions, narratives that don’t match up with physical reality?
Are they studying (with data and social media platforms/big tech) how we process information, what synapsid are firing, how we reconcile or deal with info. inconsistent with personal experience, how we deal with information that reaffirms our personal experience or physical reality?
Consider all the polarizing issues that are being literally pumped into and fed to society at this time. And all of it can be tracked and traced regarding reactions of millions on line. For what purpose?
I truly think that we need to start looking at these world affairs as being studies in human reaction….they have covered war, gender, race relations, poverty and class interactions, education, healthcare, familial relationships, etc. At this point, nothing is saved. Everything is game.
Now, consider the obsession with AI. And our obsession with data collection as the key to understanding reality. What if the reality or landscape they are studying is the human brain /consciousness….and doing it in reverse. They are collecting data not to affirm direction but to better understand how our brain works so they can hack it OR use it for their benefit.
Well see nobody is ever happy when them peasants eat from the Tree and their eyes are opened and won't close back down again obediently as demanded.
It's been a great natural experiment, seeing all the vicious slashing and burning in the Garden of Info done even by very smart people purportedly on the side of free knowledge and resistance to The Bad Guys, so I don't want anyone putting their hands on the freeflowing River of Everything and trying to bend its course to their will.
Everyone has human weaknesses, biases, fits of temper, the tender places that set them off if touched, and we always did need and shall always need forever to do our own research, finding those who seem to demonstrate their trustworthiness and compare what they say against others who seem to demonstrate the same, and share what we find within our own communities, wherever we find them. That's it. Dreamtime over and done with. Teach yer kids well.
edited for spelling
Well said!
As a former employee who was fired (from a board that included a study on misinformation in its portfolio) for refusing to be vaccinated, I can say from experience that the National Academies of Sciences have almost nothing to do with science. It is a non-profit that gets most of its funding from three letter agencies (like NSF) to push political narratives. Committee members are chosen to serve based on their politics (after that, the criteria becomes ethnicity, sex and sexual orientation). Projects often arise from Directors' political leanings (and they only lean one way). Within the organization, none of this is secret.
This is the ONLY road back to credibility.
These are not State secrets, this is information that has a immediate, material impact on our lives--plus, as you said, we paid for it. Cough it up.
I would much rather their offices become condos, but these institutions are too entrenched at this point.
There's another way....
Hope I don't get in trouble.
Spot on!