This Has Nothing To Do With A Smoke Filled Room

THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH A SMOKE FILLED ROOM

Right on queue, we all fell for it, we all thought, “Everything has changed, nothing will be the same.” We have a new global war to fight. Who and what will make us secure, will make you secure?

It’s the same crisis in a new decade, but this time it may actually be different.

I am not a big fan of Corbet, but it is time to delve into things like we never have before. What kind of "RESET" do we want? I can imagine what the wealthy and powerful want.

The plebs are just getting in the way of their GAME A, Game of Thrones. They don't want to throw useless jobs at us anymore; they don't want to rely on our consumer addictions when they know full well Climate Change is coming to shut down the competition on all sides of the Game.

So what kind of reset do we want, the infinite game, Game B, Zeitgeist Movement, something else? We had better rev up that think global and act local trope. We are running out of time.

There is no doubt that those who emerge from the system and believe in it and have the power within it took advantage of the Covid-19 opportunity and that this kind of opportunism arises from the system's logic. Some of the "players" may not even be aware of this, just as most of the plebs have no idea how to start asking questions.

Mundane Realms, Agency, Sovereignty and Comfort

Realms — A field or domain of activity or interest.

Realms emerge as preconditions from which conscious or unconscious attitudes towards life arise. One rarely chooses one's domain; instead, we inherit it. People say that one can choose one's friends but not one's family. Perhaps when we choose, we are only reacting to elements inherent in our preconditions. Many forces beyond our will program our wants and needs. Today, a sophisticated suite of technologies engineered to do this; how these technologies work is unknown to most of us.

What kind of person believes she has helped create the system in which she lives and relies upon? When is this belief not just an illusion or a delusion?

It seems that one must first be aware of a panoply of options and possibilities before the power to make a choice becomes available. What preconditions are required for one to have that kind of sense of agency and sovereignty? What kind of natural circumstances allows a person to experience freedom within the constraints of reality? 

I don't expect that knowing what you may know about life in Syria since 2015, you would have chosen to have been born there when you could have been born somewhere with a stable and peaceful future. Of course, we don't decide where we are born. Our birth, we attribute to fate or the mysterious machinations of God. 

How do the necessary preconditions for freedom, agency, sovereignty, health, and sustainability come about? Curiosity, ingenuity, creativity, endurance, and many other qualities are needed for these things to become the latticework of society. 

In complex living systems, balance is natural. Symbiosis is the crux of biology; everything in the ecosystem is interdependent. All elements working in concert find a way to express themselves perfectly within a given context and time. 

Homo Sapiens is the only animal we know of that can disrupt living systems to such a degree that we can change them entirely or destroy them. Our conscious and subconscious thoughts can also modify nature in positive or negative ways. How can we gain control over our thoughts to such a degree that we can find equilibrium, health, and peace, liberating the positive, creative forces within our imaginations?

Think of a family huddled in a cellar in 2018 in abject terror, avoiding bullets and bombs. During pauses in the violence, when, for a brief moment, while sensing that the horror may end, memories of merely being a proud member of a family and community come flooding back.

Familiar things are so comfortable and complete— as we perform routine habits, a mindless sense of well being, only broken by occasional shocks and insults, takes over and time dilates. 

In times of peace and stability, we can take things for granted; death becomes so remote that it's easy to think of heaven, not as something we long for but as an inevitable outcome— a reward for living a good life. During the good times, we can experience unity and bliss in a moment of clarity and peak experience, and although it is transient, it is there, even though one gets the sense that it can't be held or owned. Moments like these appear as a dark field, a movement, and a rest. 

On the impoverished side of The Cage (and I am speaking of poverty in its broadest sense), where there is only violence, pain, and chaos, endurance is paramount for survival. A wide-eyed numbness brought on by ongoing trauma is one's only respite from acute pain and suffering. Everything gives way to the organisms inertia. Where there is complete powerlessness, only this stubborn inertia can remain. Time and luck will determine whether one can enter The Cage from there.

Understand that in all realms of existence, we remain the animals we are following our nature that transcends higher faculties.

As one experiences the inherent spectrum of possibilities in each realm, one's sense of joy, contentment, desire, comfort, pain, and suffering are entirely different in quality and kind. Each domain is capable of reflecting unique qualities within individuals and society. Various Cages manifest and reflect unique attributes to various Bubbles or Castles. 

In each realm, whatever one's circumstances might be, except for one's struggle with desire, everything is mundane.

Next, let's talk about the realm we call The Cage. 

THIS PANDEMIC DID NOT HAVE TO BE SO CATASTROPHIC

Since the start of the pandemic, hundreds of doctors have successfully used hydroxychloroquine to treat patients symptomatic of COVID-19 infections. In frustration at the media negativity about this safe, effective medicine American doctors have sent an open letter to Dr Fauci raising their concerns.

August 12, 2020

Anthony Fauci, MD
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Washington, D.C.

Dear Dr. Fauci:

You were placed into the most high-profile role regarding America’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic. Americans have relied on your medical expertise concerning the wearing of masks, resuming employment, returning to school, and of course medical treatment.

You are largely unchallenged in terms of your medical opinions. You are the de facto “COVID-19 Czar”. This is unusual in the medical profession in which doctors’ opinions are challenged by other physicians in the form of exchanges between doctors at hospitals, medical conferences, as well as debate in medical journals. You render your opinions unchallenged, without formal public opposition from physicians who passionately disagree with you. It is incontestable that the public is best served when opinions and policy are based on the prevailing evidence and science, and able to withstand the scrutiny of medical professionals.

As experience accrued in treating COVID-19 infections, physicians worldwide discovered that high-risk patients can be treated successfully as an outpatient, within the first 5 to 7 days of the onset of symptoms, with a “cocktail” consisting of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin (or doxycycline). Multiple scholarly contributions to the literature detail the efficacy of the hydroxychloroquine-based combination treatment.

Dr. Harvey Risch, the renowned Yale epidemiologist, published an article in May 2020 in the American Journal of Epidemiology titled “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis”. He further published an article in Newsweek in July 2020 for the general public expressing the same conclusions and opinions. Dr. Risch is an expert at evaluating research data and study designs, publishing over 300 articles. Dr Risch’s assessment is that there is unequivocal evidence for the early and safe use of the “HCQ cocktail.” If there are Q-T interval concerns, doxycycline can be substituted for azithromycin as it has activity against RNA viruses without any cardiac effects.

Yet, you continue to reject the use of hydroxychloroquine, except in a hospital setting in the form of clinical trials, repeatedly emphasizing the lack of evidence supporting its use. Hydroxychloroquine, despite 65 years of use for malaria, and over 40 years for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, with a well-established safety profile, has been deemed by you and the FDA as unsafe for use in the treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 infections. Your opinions have influenced the thinking of physicians and their patients, medical boards, state and federal agencies, pharmacists, hospitals, and just about everyone involved in medical decision making.

Indeed, your opinions impacted the health of Americans, and many aspects of our day-to-day lives including employment and school. Those of us who prescribe hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin/doxycycline believe fervently that early outpatient use would save tens of thousands of lives and enable our country to dramatically alter the response to COVID-19. We advocate for an approach that will reduce fear and allow Americans to get their lives back.

We hope that our questions compel you to reconsider your current approach to COVID-19 infection.

Questions regarding early outpatient treatment

1. There are generally two stages of COVID-19 symptomatic infection; initial flu like symptoms with progression to cytokine storm and respiratory failure, correct?

2. When people are admitted to a hospital, they generally are in worse condition, correct?

3. There are no specific medications currently recommended for early outpatient treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 infection, correct?

4. Remdesivir and Dexamethasone are used for hospitalized patients, correct?

5. There is currently no recommended pharmacologic early outpatient treatment for individuals in the flu stage of the illness, correct?

6. It is true that COVID-19 is much more lethal than the flu for high-risk individuals such as older patients and those with significant comorbidities, correct?

7. Individuals with signs of early COVID-19 infection typically have a runny nose, fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of smell, etc., and physicians send them home to rest, eat chicken soup etc., but offer no specific, targeted medications, correct?

8. These high-risk individuals are at high risk of death, on the order of 15% or higher, correct?

9. So just so we are clear—the current standard of care now is to send clinically stable symptomatic patients home, “with a wait and see” approach?

10. Are you aware that physicians are successfully using Hydroxychloroquine combined with Zinc and Azithromycin as a “cocktail” for early outpatient treatment of symptomatic, high-risk, individuals?

11. Have you heard of the “Zelenko Protocol,” for treating high-risk patients with COVID 19 as an outpatient?

12. Have you read Dr. Risch’s article in the American Journal of Epidemiology of the early outpatient treatment of COVID-19?

13. Are you aware that physicians using the medication combination or “cocktail” recommend use within the first 5 to 7 days of the onset of symptoms, before the illness impacts the lungs, or cytokine storm evolves?

14. Again, to be clear, your recommendation is no pharmacologic treatment as an outpatient for the flu—like symptoms in patients that are stable, regardless of their risk factors, correct?

15. Would you advocate for early pharmacologic outpatient treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 patients if you were confident that it was beneficial?

16. Are you aware that there are hundreds of physicians in the United States and thousands across the globe who have had dramatic success treating high-risk individuals as outpatients with this “cocktail?”

17. Are you aware that there are at least 10 studies demonstrating the efficacy of early outpatient treatment with the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail for high-risk patients — so this is beyond anecdotal, correct?

18. If one of your loved ones had diabetes or asthma, or any potentially complicating comorbidity, and tested positive for COVID-19, would you recommend “wait and see how they do” and go to the hospital if symptoms progress?

19. Even with multiple studies documenting remarkable outpatient efficacy and safety of the Hydroxychloroquine “cocktail,” you believe the risks of the medication combination outweigh the benefits?

20. Is it true that with regard to Hydroxychloroquine and treatment of COVID-19 infection, you have said repeatedly that “The Overwhelming Evidence of Properly Conducted Randomized Clinical Trials Indicate No Therapeutic Efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ)?”

21. But NONE of the randomized controlled trials to which you refer were done in the first 5 to 7 days after the onset of symptoms- correct?

22. All of the randomized controlled trials to which you refer were done on hospitalized patients, correct?

23. Hospitalized patients are typically sicker that outpatients, correct?

24. None of the randomized controlled trials to which you refer used the full cocktail consisting of Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Azithromycin, correct?

25. While the University of Minnesota study is referred to as disproving the cocktail, the meds were not given within the first 5 to 7 days of illness, the test group was not high risk (death rates were 3%), and no zinc was given, correct?

26. Again, for clarity, the trials upon which you base your opinion regarding the efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine, assessed neither the full cocktail (to include Zinc + Azithromycin or doxycycline) nor administered treatment within the first 5 to 7 days of symptoms, nor focused on the high-risk group, correct?

27. Therefore, you have no basis to conclude that the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail when used early in the outpatient setting, within the first 5 to 7 days of symptoms, in high risk patients, is not effective, correct?

28. It is thus false and misleading to say that the effective and safe use of Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc, and Azithromycin has been “debunked,” correct? How could it be “debunked” if there is not a single study that contradicts its use?

29. Should it not be an absolute priority for the NIH and CDC to look at ways to treat Americans with symptomatic COVID-19 infections early to prevent disease progression?

30. The SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 virus is an RNA virus. It is well-established that Zinc interferes with RNA viral replication, correct?

31. Moreover, is it not true that hydroxychloroquine facilitates the entry of zinc into the cell, is a “ionophore,” correct?

32. Isn’t also it true that Azithromycin has established anti-viral properties?

33. Are you aware of the paper from Baylor by Dr. McCullough et. al. describing established mechanisms by which the components of the “HCQ cocktail” exert anti-viral effects?

34. So- the use of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin (or doxycycline) and zinc, the “HCQ cocktail,” is based on science, correct?

Questions regarding safety

1. The FDA writes the following: “in light of on-going serious cardiac adverse events and their serious side effects, the known and potential benefits of CQ and HCQ no longer outweigh the known and potential risks for authorized use.”So not only is the FDA saying that Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work, they are also saying that it is a very dangerous drug. Yet, is it not true the drug has been used as an anti-malarial drug for over 65 years?

2. Isn’t true that the drug has been used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis for many years at similar doses?

3. Do you know of even a single study prior to COVID -19 that has provided definitive evidence against the use of the drug based on safety concerns?

4. Are you aware that chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine has many approved uses for hydroxychloroquine including steroid-dependent asthma (1988 study), Advanced pulmonary sarcoidosis (1988 study), sensitizing breast cancer cells for chemotherapy (2012 study), the attenuation of renal ischemia (2018 study), lupus nephritis (2006 study), epithelial ovarian cancer (2020 study, just to name a few)? Where are the cardiotoxicity concerns ever mentioned?

5. Risch estimates the risk of cardiac death from hydroxychloroquine to be 9/100,000 using the data provided by the FDA. That does not seem to be a high risk, considering the risk of death in an older patient with co-morbidities can be 15% or more. Do you consider 9/100,000 to be a high risk when weighed against the risk of death in older patient with co-morbidities?

6. To put this in perspective, the drug is used for 65 years, without warnings (aside for the need for periodic retinal checks), but the FDA somehow feels the need to send out an alert on June 15, 2020 that the drug is dangerous. Does that make any logical sense to you Dr. Fauci based on “science”?

7. Moreover, consider that the protocols for usage in early treatment are for 5 to 7 days at relatively low doses of hydroxychloroquine similar to what is being given in other diseases (RA, SLE) over many years- does it make any sense to you logically that a 5 to 7 day dose of hydroxychloroquine when not given in high doses could be considered dangerous?

8. You are also aware that articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet, one out of Harvard University, regarding the dangers of hydroxychloroquine had to be retracted based on the fact that the data was fabricated. Are you aware of that?

9. If there was such good data on the risks of hydroxychloroquine, one would not have to use fake data, correct?

10. After all, 65 years is a long-time to determine whether or not a drug is safe, do you agree?

11. In the clinical trials that you have referenced (e.g., the Minnesota and the Brazil studies), there was not a single death attributed directly to hydroxychloroquine, correct?

12. According to Dr. Risch, there is no evidence based on the data to conclude that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous drug. Are you aware of any published report that rebuts Dr. Risch’s findings?

13. Are you aware that the FDA ruling along with your statements have led to Governors in a number of states to restrict the use of hydroxychloroquine?

14. Are you aware that pharmacies are not filling prescriptions for this medication based on your and the FDA’s restrictions?

15. Are you aware that doctors are being punished by state medical boards for prescribing the medication based on your comments as well as the FDA’s?

16. Are you aware that people who want the medication sometimes need to call physicians in other states pleading for it?

17. And yet you opined in March that while people were dying at the rate of 10,000 patient a week, hydroxychloroquine could only be used in an inpatient setting as part of a clinical trial- correct?

18. So, people who want to be treated in that critical 5-to-7-day period and avoid being hospitalized are basically out of luck in your view, correct?

19. So, again, for clarity, without a shred of evidence that the Hydroxychloroquine/HCQ cocktail is dangerous in the doses currently recommend for early outpatient treatment, you and the FDA have made it very difficult if not impossible in some cases to get this treatment, correct?

Questions regarding methodology

The Key to Defeating COVID-19 Already Exists. We Need to Start Using It

1. In regards to the use of hydroxychloroquine, you have repeatedly made the same statement: “The Overwhelming Evidence from Properly Conducted Randomized Clinical Trials Indicate no Therapeutic Efficacy of Hydroxychloroquine.” Is that correct?

2. In Dr. Risch’s article regarding the early use of hydroxychloroquine, he disputes your opinion. He scientifically evaluated the data from the studies to support his opinions. Have you published any articles to support your opinions?

3. You repeatedly state that randomized clinical trials are needed to make conclusions regarding treatments, correct?

4. The FDA has approved many medications (especially in the area of cancer treatment) without randomized clinical trials, correct?

5. Are you aware that Dr. Thomas Frieden, the previous head of the CDC wrote an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 called “Evidence for Health Decision Making – Beyond Randomized Clinical Trials (RCT)”? Have you read that article?

6. In it Dr. Frieden states that “many data sources can provide valid evidence for clinical and public health action, including “analysis of aggregate clinical or epidemiological data”-do you disagree with that?

7. Frieden discusses “practiced-based evidence” as being essential in many discoveries, such SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome)-do you disagree with that?

8. Frieden writes the following: “Current evidence-grading systems are biased toward randomized clinical trials, which may lead to inadequate consideration of non-RCT data.” Dr. Fauci, have you considered all the non-RCT data in coming to your opinions?

9. Risch, who is a leading world authority in the analysis of aggregate clinical data, has done a rigorous analysis that he published regarding the early treatment of COVID 19 with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. He cites 5 or 6 studies, and in an updated article there are 5 or 6 more-a total of 10 to 12 clinical studies with formally collected data specifically regarding the early treatment of COVID. Have you analyzed the aggregate data regarding early treatment of high-risk patients with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin?

10. Is there any document that you can produce for the American people of your analysis of the aggregate data that would rebut Dr. Risch’s analysis?

11. Yet, despite what Dr. Risch believes is overwhelming evidence in support of the early use of hydroxychloroquine, you dismiss the treatment insisting on randomized controlled trials even in the midst of a pandemic?

12. Would you want a loved one with high-risk comorbidities placed in the control group of a randomized clinical trial when a number of studies demonstrate safety and dramatic efficacy of the early use of the Hydroxychloroquine “cocktail?”

13. Are you aware that the FDA approved a number of cancer chemotherapy drugs without randomized control trials based solely on epidemiological evidence. The trials came later as confirmation. Are you aware of that?

14. You are well aware that there were no randomized clinical trials in the case of penicillin that saved thousands of lives in World War II? Was not this in the best interest of our soldiers?

15. You would agree that many lives were saved with the use of cancer drugs and penicillin that were used before any randomized clinical trials–correct?

16. You have referred to evidence for hydroxychloroquine as “anecdotal”- which is defined as “evidence collected in a casual or informal manner and relying heavily or entirely on personal testimony”- correct?

17. But there are many studies supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine in which evidence was collected formally and not on personal testimony, has there not been?

18. So it would be false to conclude that the evidence supporting the early use of hydroxychloroquine is anecdotal, correct?

Comparison between the US and other countries regarding case fatality rate

(It would be very helpful to have the graphs comparing our case fatality rates to other countries)

1. Are you aware that countries like Senegal and Nigeria that use Hydroxychloroquine have much lower case-fatality rates than the United States?

2. Have you pondered the relationship between the use of Hydroxychloroquine by a given country and their case mortality rate and why there is a strong correlation between the use of HCQ and the reduction of the case mortality rate.?

3. Have you considered consulting with a country such as India that has had great success treating COVID-19 prophylactically?

4. Why shouldn’t our first responders and front-line workers who are at high risk at least have an option of HCQ/zinc prophylaxis?

5. We should all agree that countries with far inferior healthcare delivery systems should not have lower case fatality rates. Reducing our case fatality rate from near 5% to 2.5%, in line with many countries who use HCQ early would have cut our total number of deaths in half, correct?

6. Why not consult with countries who have lower case-fatality rates, even without expensive medicines such as remdesivir and far less advanced intensive care capabilities?

Giving Americans the option to use HCQ for COVID-19

1. Harvey Risch, the pre-eminent Epidemiologist from Yale, wrote a Newsweek Article titled: “The key to defeating COVID-19 already exists. We need to start using it.” Did you read the article?

2. Are you aware that the cost of the Hydroxychloroquine “cocktail” including the Z-pack and zinc is about $50?

3. You are aware the cost of Remdesivir is about $3,200?

4. So that’s about 60 doses of HCQ “cocktail,” correct?

5. In fact, President Trump had the foresight to amass 60 million doses of hydroxychloroquine, and yet you continue to stand in the way of doctors who want to use that medication for their infected patients, correct?

6. Those are a lot of doses of medication that potentially could be used to treat our poor, especially our minority populations and people of color that have a difficult time accessing healthcare. They die more frequently of COVID-19, do they not?

7. But because of your obstinance blocking the use of HCQ, this stockpile has remained largely unused, correct?

8. Would you acknowledge that your strategy of telling Americans to restrict their behavior, wear masks, and distance, and put their lives on hold indefinitely until there is a vaccine is not working?

9. So, 160,000 deaths later, an economy in shambles, kids out of school, suicides and drug overdoses at a record high, people neglecting and dying from other medical conditions, and America reacting to every outbreak with another lockdown- is it not time to re-think your strategy that is fully dependent on an effective vaccine?

10. Why not consider a strategy that protects the most vulnerable and allows Americans back to living their lives and not wait for a vaccine panacea that may never come?

11. Why not consider the approach that thousands of doctors around the world are using, supported by a number of studies in the literature, with early outpatient treatment of high-risk patients for typically one week with HCQ + Zinc + Azithromycin?

12. You don’t see a problem with the fact that the government, due to your position, in some cases interferes with the choice of using HCQ. Should not that be a choice between the doctor and the patient?

13. While some doctors may not want to use the drug, should not doctors who believe that it is indicated be able to offer it to their patients?

14. Are you aware that doctors who are publicly advocating for such a strategy with the early use of the HCQ cocktail are being silenced with removal of content on the internet and even censorship in the medical community?

15. You are aware of the 20 or so physicians who came to the Supreme Court steps advocating for the early use of the Hydroxychloroquine cocktail.In fact, you said these were “a bunch of people spouting out something that isn’t true.”Dr. Fauci, these are not just “people”- these are doctors who actually treat patients, unlike you, correct?

16. Do you know that the video they made went viral with 17 million views in just a few hours, and was then removed from the internet?

17. Are you aware that their website, American Frontline Doctors, was taken down the next day?

18. Did you see the way that Nigerian immigrant physician, Dr. Stella Immanuel, was mocked in the media for her religious views and called a “witch doctor”?

19. Are you aware that Dr. Simone Gold, the leader of the group, was fired from her job as an Emergency Room physician the following day?

20. Are you aware that physicians advocating for this treatment that has by now probably saved millions of lives around the globe are harassed by local health departments, state agencies and medical boards, and even at their own hospitals? Are you aware of that?

21. Don’t you think doctors should have the right to speak out on behalf of their patients without the threat of retribution?

22. Are you aware that videos and other educational information are removed off the internet and labeled, in the words of Mark Zuckerberg, as “misinformation.”?

23. Is it not misinformation to characterize Hydroxychloroquine, in the doses used for early outpatient treatment of COVID-19 infections, as a dangerous drug?

24. Is it not misleading for you to repeatedly state to the American public that randomized clinical trials are the sole source of information to confirm the efficacy of a treatment?

25. Was it not misinformation when on CNN you cited the Lancet study based on false data from Surgisphere as evidence of the lack of efficacy of hydroxychloroquine?

26. Is it not misinformation as is repeated in the MSM as a result of your comments that a randomized clinical trial is required by the FDA for a drug approval?

27. Don’t you realize how much damage this falsehood perpetuates?

28. How is it not misinformation for you and the FDA to keep telling the American public that hydroxychloroquine is dangerous when you know that there is nothing more than anecdotal evidence of that?

29. Fauci, if you or a loved one were infected with COVID-19, and had flu-like symptoms, and you knew as you do now that there is a safe and effective cocktail that you could take to prevent worsening and the possibility of hospitalization, can you honestly tell us that you would refuse the medication?

30. Why not give our healthcare workers and first responders, who even with the necessary PPE are contracting the virus at a 3 to 4 times greater rate than the general public, the right to choose along with their doctor if they want use the medicine prophylactically?

31. Why is the government inserting itself in a way that is unprecedented in regard to a historically safe medication and not allowing patients the right to choose along with their doctor?

32. Why not give the American people the right to decide along with their physician whether or not they want outpatient treatment in the first 5 to 7 days of the disease with a cocktail that is safe and costs around $50?

Final questions

1. Fauci, please explain how a randomized clinical trial, to which you repeatedly make reference, for testing the HCQ cocktail (hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc) administered within 5-7 days of the onset of symptoms is even possible now given the declining case numbers in so many states?

2. For example, if the NIH were now to direct a study to begin September 15, where would such a study be done?

3. Please explain how a randomized study on the early treatment (within the first 5 to 7 days of symptoms) of high-risk, symptomatic COVID-19 infections could be done during the influenza season and be valid?

4. Please explain how multiple observational studies arrive at the same outcomes using the same formulation of hydroxychloroquine + Azithromycin + Zinc given in the same time frame for the same study population (high risk patients) is not evidence that the cocktail works?

5. In fact, how is it not significant evidence, during a pandemic, for hundreds of non-academic private practice physicians to achieve the same outcomes with the early use of the HCQ cocktail?

6. What is your recommendation for the medical management of a 75-year-old diabetic with fever, cough, and loss of smell, but not yet hypoxic, who Emergency Room providers do not feel warrants admission? We know that hundreds of U.S. physicians (and thousands more around the world) would manage this case with the HCQ cocktail with predictable success.

7. If you were in charge in 1940, would you have advised the mass production of penicillin based primarily on lab evidence and one case series on 5 patients in England or would you have stated that a randomized clinical trial was needed?

8. Why would any physician put their medical license, professional reputation, and job on the line to recommend the HCQ cocktail (that does not make them any money) unless they knew the treatment could significantly help their patient?

9. Why would a physician take the medication themselves and prescribe it to family members (for treatment or prophylaxis) unless they felt strongly that the medication was beneficial?

10. How is it informed and ethical medical practice to allow a COVID-19 patient to deteriorate in the early stages of the infection when there is inexpensive, safe, and dramatically effective treatment with the HCQ cocktail, which the science indicates interferes with coronavirus replication?

11. How is your approach to “wait and see” in the early stages of COVID-19 infection, especially in high-risk patients, following the science?

While previous questions are related to hydroxychloroquine-based treatment, we have two questions addressing masks.

1. As you recall, you stated on March 8th, just a few weeks before the devastation in the Northeast, that masks weren’t needed. You later said that you made this statement to prevent a hoarding of masks that would disrupt availability to healthcare workers. Why did you not make a recommendation for people to wear any face covering to protect themselves, as we are doing now?

2. Rather, you issued no such warning and people were riding in subways and visiting their relatives in nursing homes without any face covering. Currently, your position is that face coverings are essential. Please explain whether or not you made a mistake in early March, and how would you go about it differently now.

Conclusion

Since the start of the pandemic, physicians have used hydroxychloroquine to treat symptomatic COVID-19 infections, as well as for prophylaxis. Initial results were mixed as indications and doses were explored to maximize outcomes and minimize risks. What emerged was that hydroxychloroquine appeared to work best when coupled with azithromycin. In fact, it was the President of the United States who recommended to you publicly at the beginning of the pandemic, in early March, that you should consider early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and a “Z-Pack.” Additional studies showed that patients did not seem to benefit when COVID-19 infections were treated with hydroxychloroquine late in the course of the illness, typically in a hospital setting, but treatment was consistently effective, even in high-risk patients, when hydroxychloroquine was given in a “cocktail” with azithromycin and, critically, zinc in the first 5 to 7 days after the onset of symptoms. The outcomes are, in fact, dramatic.

As clearly presented in the McCullough article from Baylor, and described by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, the efficacy of the HCQ cocktail is based on the pharmacology of the hydroxychloroquine ionophore acting as the “gun” and zinc as the “bullet,” while azithromycin potentiates the anti-viral effect. Undeniably, the hydroxychloroquine combination treatment is supported by science. Yet, you continue to ignore the “science” behind the disease. Viral replication occurs rapidly in the first 5 to 7 days of symptoms and can be treated at that point with the HCQ cocktail. Rather, your actions have denied patients treatment in that early stage. Without such treatment, some patients, especially those at high risk with co-morbidities, deteriorate and require hospitalization for evolving cytokine storm resulting in pneumonia, respiratory failure, and intubation with 50% mortality. Dismissal of the science results in bad medicine, and the outcome is over 160,000 dead Americans. Countries that have followed the science and treated the disease in the early stages have far better results, a fact that has been concealed from the American Public.

Despite mounting evidence and impassioned pleas from hundreds of frontline physicians, your position was and continues to be that randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have not shown there to be benefit. However, not a single randomized control trial has tested what is being recommended: use of the full cocktail (especially zinc), in high-risk patients, initiated within the first 5 to 7 days of the onset of symptoms. Using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin late in the disease process, with or without zinc, does not produce the same, unequivocally positive results.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, in a 2017 New England Journal of Medicine article regarding randomized clinical trials, emphasized there are situations in which it is entirely appropriate to use other forms of evidence to scientifically validate a treatment. Such is the case during a pandemic that moves like a brushfire jumping to different parts of the country. Insisting on randomized clinical trials in the midst of a pandemic is simply foolish. Dr. Harvey Risch, a world-renowned Yale epidemiologist, analyzed all the data regarding the use of the hydroxychloroquine/HCQ cocktail and concluded that the evidence of its efficacy when used early in COVID-19 infection is unequivocal.

Curiously, despite a 65+ years safety record, the FDA suddenly deemed hydroxychloroquine a dangerous drug, especially with regard to cardiotoxicity. Dr. Risch analyzed data provided by the FDA and concluded that the risk of a significant cardiac event from hydroxychloroquine is extremely low, especially when compared to the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients with high-risk co-morbidities. How do you reconcile that for forty years rheumatoid arthritis and lupus patients have been treated over long periods, often for years, with hydroxychloroquine and now there are suddenly concerns about a 5 to 7-day course of hydroxychloroquine at similar or slightly increased doses? The FDA statement regarding hydroxychloroquine and cardiac risk is patently false and alarmingly misleading to physicians, pharmacists, patients, and other health professionals. The benefits of the early use of hydroxychloroquine to prevent hospitalization in high-risk patients with COVID-19 infection far outweigh the risks. Physicians are not able to obtain the medication for their patients, and in some cases are restricted by their state from prescribing hydroxychloroquine. The government’s obstruction of the early treatment of symptomatic high-risk COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, a medication used extensively and safely for so long, is unprecedented.

It is essential that you tell the truth to the American public regarding the safety and efficacy of the hydroxychloroquine/HCQ cocktail. The government must protect and facilitate the sacred and revered physician-patient relationship by permitting physicians to treat their patients. Governmental obfuscation and obstruction are as lethal as cytokine storm.

Americans must not continue to die unnecessarily. Adults must resume employment and our youth return to school. Locking down America while awaiting an imperfect vaccine has done far more damage to Americans than the coronavirus. We are confident that thousands of lives would be saved with early treatment of high-risk individuals with a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin. Americans must not live in fear. As Dr. Harvey Risch’s Newsweek article declares, “The key to defeating COVID-19 already exists. We need to start using it.”

Very Respectfully,

George C. Fareed, MD, Brawley, California

Michael M. Jacobs, MD, MPH, Pensacola, Florida

Donald C. Pompan, MD, Salinas, California

Will They Have The Intestinal Fortitude For A Knife Fight?

During a global pandemic, the United States continues its experiment with a lack of leadership, science denial, and neoliberalism.

Where is the much-touted BIG DATA? Of course, Big Data serves MONEY too, so why hasn't Fed created funds been thrown into brute force big data projects to parse the pandemic and develop best practices for combating challenges surrounding it?

In the United States, nothing happens without money. The Players have had a good looting spree. They control the capital. For things to get back to "normal" (extracting resources at a fever pace to support economic growth through mindless consumerism), they are going to have to deal with the monster virus.

Why don't the players pay large, global, tax-dodging companies with important shareholders some big bucks so they can crunch the SARS-COVID-2 data and get the Bread & Circuses show back on the road? They own those companies, after all.

Could it be that the Players believe that there is no hope for their business model moving forward? Have they lost their faith in the global neoliberal economic growth model? Are they throwing in the towel and preparing their bug-out mansions near the poles? Is this their last night at the poker table?

Come on Players; you are all geniuses, you can throw some of those ones and zeros at solving some of these problems so we can all stay entertained and full of dreams until wet-bulb earth puts an end to your self-terminating game.

Who are the Players going to lord over while they're hunkered down in their fortified mini city-states? They'll have to direct their blood lust for power against each other. Are they planning to develop a Game of Thrones World?

Someone should come up with a uber-lux dojo chain to teach oligarchs how to knife fight. They could go at each other with sticks, canes, swords, and knives just for sport once the plebs have died off in mass numbers. Playing the role of a noble knight might provide some excitement for them. Oh, I forgot, the Players let other people do the fighting.

The Players had better get busy training before their private armies put an end to them once they realize that for the first time in human history, resources have suddenly become, in fact, very scarce.

THE C.S.I. EFFECT 2020 AND A HAPPY ENDING

The "CSI EFFECT" 2020— Two heroic researchers from The W.H.O. go to China to investigate the origins of SARS-COVID-2 and discover that the mainstream narrative was correct. There is a beginning, middle, and an end, just like on T.V.

The Players/Looters can get back to business scrambling to control assets and resources before the Great Game ends. Wear your mask, wash your hands, don't touch anyone, keep your distance, make sure your government buys and stockpiles expensive pharmaceuticals that may or may not work, take your supplements, pray, fight, protest, and wait for a vaccine that may or may not help 10 to 60 percent of the people who get it. And please, for God's sake, follow President Bush's advice, updated for 2020, and, "Just go shopping on Amazon."

The spectacle will resume at a stadium near you once the Players have had their fill of assets. Your businesses will be chopped up by private equity and dumped, your jobs will be automated. Don't expect any dividends if you don't own stocks/equities.

Now, get back to your computer in the kitchen and work your tail off. Take that online course to get an inside track on that web-based job. Hop on that cargo ship while working your gig economy labor contract as you travel the world and bear witness to the decline of the tech-driven-industrial consumer culture. Maybe you will get lucky and land on a farm, do not "pass go," collect peaches from the orchard.

As we all know, we are required to carry a tracking device at all times; we are not be able to live without it. Carry it until you are wearing it and remember, they are watching you. Wear it until it's integrated into your body, augmenting your consciousness more directly than through old fashioned media. Embody it until you are uploaded into the cloud.

Don't panic; only the war machine's investors make money on panic and fear. Stay peaceful and follow direction— you know the drill, you've read the novels. Reestablish a conventional mainstream narrative that supports the wealthy to ensure a reasonable extension of relative comfort, food, and entertainment until hot-bulb earth makes it impossible to live in most parts of the planet. Sophisticated scientists, engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs will make sure your neurotransmitters make you feel stimulated and "happy."

We are poorly programmed agents (not free agents) whose function is to perpetuate a self-terminating game that only sociopaths play. Above all, we must make the players believe that they desire our affection. If not, they will kill us all and play with their robots.

But don't think about all of that. Focus on nominating your brother for Queer Eye or your daughter winning a ZOOM delivered American Idol contest. Know in your hearts that someday your Super Bowl M.V.P. will be going to Disney World that feels a lot more like West World. And remember, people don't solve problems, guns solve problems.

Jesus loves you, Mohamed is the profit, after the cycles of birth and death there is liberation, meditation is good, Sam Harris is smart, Jordon Peterson is wise, Science/Technology/Engineering is amazing, Donald will make America great again in his second term, Black Lives Matter, you too can empathize with a rape victim, aluminum staws will save the planet, we will terraform Mars, Elon Musk is a genius, Bill Gates know more about everything than anyone and can give more to charities he deems worthy than you can, Robert Deniro is oppressed, Tucker Carlson is a public intellectual, not an entertainer, the Democrats and Republicans are different parties, you need a new iPhone, open-source is scary, Capitalism is the best economic system ever, Lefties cause cancer, a plant-based diet costs money just like a keto diet or a paleo diet, etc.

Come on, let's reinvigorate this story. Let's fix it. It was a good story despite the endless war, environmental destruction, inequality, climate change, and so on. It's fun and exciting!

I have a solution. Make inflation taboo. End taxes for everyone, yes, of course, corporations are people too. Give everyone 100K USD equivalent a year and keep extracting resources to provide growth in products and services. Bail everything and everyone out like a perfect version of modern monetary theory and let people return to their consumer habits. We will worship elites, whether they are preachers, business people, sportspeople, or entertainers. Life will be good until the earth can no longer support humans. The end will look more biblical then. Perhaps that's the poetic end we've always wanted.

Come on, folks, let's work our asses off for @TheRealApocalypse.

Daniel Schmachtenberger— the only way we'll have a future

We hope you will thoroughly understand Daniel Schmachtenberger’s train of thought. It is vital that we do.

FUTURE THINKERS PODCAST

In this episode of Future Thinkers:

• The generator functions of existential risks

• The impact of win-lose games, multiplied by exponential technology

• Win-lose games in the essence of capitalism, science, and technology

• How to solve multi-polar traps

• How to replace rivalry with anti-rivalry

• The design criteria of an effective civilization

• The characteristics of complex and complicated systems

• Open-loop vs. closed-loop systems

• Scalable collective intelligence, sense-making, and choice-making

• The relationship between choice and causation

• Natural and conditioned experiences 

• The difference between power and strength

• The path to a post-existential-risk world

• How to increase our self-sovereignty

• Why incentives are intrinsically evil

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Today on the show we welcome back Daniel Schmachtenberger, the co-founder of Neurohacker Collective and founder of Emergence Project.

After addressing the existential risks that are threatening humanity in one of our earlier episodes, Daniel now dives deeper into the matter. In the following three episodes, he talks about the underlying generator functions of existential risks and how we can solve them.

Win-Lose Games Multiplied by Exponential Technology

As Daniel explains, all human-induced existential risks are symptoms of two underlying generator functions.

One of these functions is rivalrous (win-lose) games. This includes any activity where one party competes to win at the expense of another party. Daniel believes that win-lose games are at the root of almost all harm that humans have caused, both to each other and to the biosphere. As technology is increasing our capacity to cause harm, these competitive games start to exceed the capacity of the playing field. Scaled to a global level and multiplied by exponential technology, these win-lose games become an omni lose-lose generator. When the stakes are high enough, winning the game means destroying the entire playing field and all the players. 

Daniel then looks into some of the issues that capitalism, science, and technology have created. Among byproducts of these rivalrous games are what he calls “multipolar traps”.  Multipolar traps are scenarios where the things that work well for individuals locally are directly against global well-being. He proposes that our sense-making and choice-making processes need to be upgraded and improved if we want to solve these traps as a category.

Daniel believes that the current phases of capitalism, science, technology, and democracy are destabilizing and coming to an end. In order to avoid extinction, we have to come up with different systems altogether and replace rivalry with anti-rivalry. One of the ways to do that is moving from ownership of goods towards access to shared common resources. Daniel argues that we are at the place where the harmful win-lose dynamics both have to and can change.

He also proposes a new system of governance that would allow groups of people that have different goals and values to come to decisions together on various issues.

Humanity’s current predatory capacity enhanced with technology makes us catastrophically harmful to the environment that we depend on. Daniel challenges the notion of “the survival of the fittest”, and argues that it is not the most competitive ecosystem that makes it through, but the most self-stabilizing one.

Complicated Open-Loop Systems vs. Complex Closed-Loop Systems

The biosphere is a complex self-regulating system. It is also a closed-loop system, meaning that once a component stops serving its function, it gets recycled and reincorporated back into the system. In contrast, the systems humans have created are complicated, open-loop systems. They are neither self-organizing nor self-repairing. Complex systems, which come from evolution, are anti-fragile. Complicated systems, designed by humans, are fragile. Complicated open-loop systems are the second generator function of existential risks. 

Open loops in a complicated system, such as modern industry, create depletion and accumulation. This means that resources are depleted on one end of the chain and waste is accumulated on the other end. A natural complex system, on the contrary, reabsorbs and processes everything, which means there is no depletion or waste in the long run. This makes natural systems anti-fragile. By interfering with natural complicated system, we affect the biosphere so much that it begins to lose its anti-fragility. 

At the same time, man-made complicated systems are outgrowing the planet’s natural resources to the point where collapse becomes unavoidable.

Daniel explains that the necessary design criteria for a viable civilization which is not self-terminating are:

• Creating loop closure within complicated man-made systems

• Having the right relationship between complex natural and complicated man-made systems

• Creating anti-rivalrous environments within which exponential technology does not threaten our existence

The Relationship Between Choice and Causation

Daniel explains that adaptive capacity increases in groups, but only up to a point. After a certain point, adding more people starts having diminishing effects per capita. This results in people defecting against the system because that’s where their incentives are. He proposes that we create new systems of collective intelligence and choice-making that can scale more effectively.

Science has given us a solid theory of causation. Through science, we have gained incredible technological power that magnifies the outcomes of our choices. We don’t have a similarly well-grounded theory of choice, an ethical framework to guide us through using our increased power. When it comes to ethics, science rejects all non-scientific efforts, such as religious ideas or morals. Instead, win-lose game theory has served as the default theory of choice in science. This has lead to dangerous myopia towards the existential risks that are generated from win-lose games.

It is necessary to address these ethical questions, especially in terms of existential risk we are now at. We have to improve the individual and collective choice-making to take everything in consideration and realize how we are interconnected with everything around us. “I” is not a separate entity, but an emergent property of the whole.

We need to have a theory of choice that relates choice and causation. The core to the solution, as Daniel explains, is the coherence dynamics, which internalizes the external and includes it in the decision making process.

The Path to a Post-Existential-Risk World

Daniel talks about the need for individuals and systems to have strength as opposed to power. Strength is not the ability to beat others, the ability to maintain sovereignty in the presence of outside forces.

The path to the post-existential risk world is towards a civilization that is anti-rivalrous, anti-fragile, and self-propagating. Ultimately, we have to create a world that has not only overcome today’s existential risks but is also a world where humanity can thrive.

FTP057, 058, 059: Daniel Schmachtenberger – Solving The Generator Functions of Existential Risks

Euvie: I’m reading Carl Young right now and he’s talking about his experience [00:01:30] of going to live with the [inaudible [0:01:32] Indians and how it completely just blew apart his conception of what was natural and how the western world view is different from other world views. He noticed that they were so happy and serene and they felt as one with their environment and they had this very special relationship with the sun. It was very beautiful but, at the same time, he realized how they were very vulnerable to [00:02:00] the invasion of western civilization. If we create a new civilization operating system that is not oriented towards winning wars, then how do we ensure that it doesn’t get destroyed by those who are?

Daniel: Imagine there’s a group of people that get a stronger theory of causation. They learn Newton’s physics and now they can use calculus to plot a [inaudible [0:02:22] curve and make the [inaudible [0:02:23] hit the right spot every time, rather than the pendulum dousing, which is hit or miss. That belief is going to catch on [00:02:30] and that’s why science really caught on, took us out of the dark ages, was because it led to better weapons and better agriculture tech and better real shit. It proliferated because it was proliferative. If we increase our theory of causation, that ends up catching on.

If we could increase our theory of causation and our theory of choice, and the relationship between them, that would actually be the most adaptive. Especially in the presence of where our particular game-theoretic model of choice, with the extension of causation we have, is definitely self-determinating, [00:03:00] definitely anti-adaptive. I know we’ve been on for a long time. There’s really only one more thing that I want to share that closes this set of concepts. Remember we said that any source of asymmetric advantage, competitive advantage in a win-lose game will end up, once it’s deployed, being figured out and utilized by everybody. You just up the level of ante in the playing field.

We also said that in the [inaudible [0:03:25] and many of the tribes we’ve mentioned [00:03:30] lost win-lose games. We don’t want to try and build something that’s just going to lose at a win-lose game, but we know that if it tries to win at win-lose games it’s just still part of the same existential curve that we’re on. It has to not lose at a win-lose game while also not seeking to win. It’s basically not playing the game but it is oriented about how not to lose. It’s a very important thing. We can think about power, the way we have traditionally thought of power, as a power over or power [00:04:00] against type dynamic – game-theoretic, win-lose dynamic. Any agent that deploys a particular kind of power leads to other agents figuring how to deploy the same and other kinds of power. Power keeps anteing up until we get to problems.

We could think about another term we might call strength, which is not the power to beat someone else but it’s the ability to not be beaten by someone else. It’s the ability to maintain our own sovereignty and our own coherence in the presence of outside forces. We could talk about my power, “Can I go beat somebody up?” [00:04:30] But my strength is, “Can my body fend off viruses? Can I fend off cancers? Can I actually protect myself if I need to protect myself?” Which is different than, “Can I go beat other people up?” The power game is the game we actually have to [inaudible [0:04:45]. Power over dynamics means rivalrous dynamics, mean win-lose dynamics, is the source of evil.

It’s not that money is the source of evil, it’s that power over where I think my wellbeing is anti-coupled to yours ends up being [00:05:00] the source of evil and money’s just very deep in the stack of power dynamics. Status is and certain ways of relating to sex and a number of things are. We have to get rid of the power over dynamics. It doesn’t mean that I can’t develop the strength that makes me anti-fragile in the presence of rivalry. Then I say, “What kind of capacity can I develop that doesn’t get weaponized by somebody else and used against me, given that any asymmetric capacity I get can be weaponized?” There’s really only one and this is a really interesting thing.

[00:05:30] If I make the adaptive capacity of… Say we’re trying to make a new civilization as a model and a new [inaudible [0:05:38] civilization, new economics, new governance, new infrastructure, a new culture that has comprehensive loop closure, doesn’t create accumulation or depletion, doesn’t have rival risk games within it etcetera. If I try to have some unique adaptive capacity via a certain type of information tech, the other world will see that information tech and [00:06:00] use it for all kinds of purposes including against me where there’s an incentive to do so. The same is true if I use military tech or if I use environmental extraction tech, I’m still in the same problem.

If my advantage, if the advantage of the way this civilization’s structured has to do with increase coherence in the sense-making and choice-making between all the agents in the system, all the people in the system, increase interpersonal coherence, this cannot be weaponized. Anyone else employing it is now just a [00:06:30] system it’s self-propagating. For instance, when we start playing rivalrous games we start realizing that it’s not just us against somebody else, its teams against larger teams. Then the idea with a team is we’re supposed to cooperate with each other to compete against somebody else.

They compete against someone else idea ends up going fractal and I end up even competing against my teammates sometimes, and that’s part of why the collective intelligence doesn’t scale thing is because I’ll cooperate with my other buddies [00:07:00] on the basketball team unless there’s also a thing called most valuable player and I’m in the running for it and I have a chance to make the three-point shot rather than pass, even though it decreases the chance of the team winning. Now, I have an inventiveness alignment. I might go for that. Then it gets bigger where there’s a couple of us that both want the same promotion to the same position at the company and we’re actually going to try and sabotage the other one, even though that harms the company because my own incentive is not coupled with their [00:07:30] incentive and with the company.

Then I can look a couple of different government agencies that are competing for the same chunk of the budget. They will actually seek to undermine each other so they get more of the budget when they’re supposed to be on the same team called that country. What we realize is we get this thing called fractal disinformation, fractal decoherence, and defection happening everywhere. That creates the most broken information ecology and the least effective coordination and cooperation possible. [00:08:00] That’s everywhere, that’s ubiquitous. It’s the result of that underlying rivalry. As we mentioned before, if I have some information, I want to make it to where nobody else can use it. I’m going to trademark it, patent it, protect my intellectual property. Before I release it, I actually want to disinform everybody else about it, tell them the gold is somewhere else so that they go digging somewhere else and don’t pay attention to what I’m doing.

If I am both hoarding information, disinforming others, and [00:08:30] keeping my information from being able to be synthesized with others, that means I’m going to not let my knowledge about cancer research and whatever it is be out there because I gotta make the [inaudible [0:08:39] back. The best computer that the world could build doesn’t exist because Apple has some of the IP but Google has some of the IP, and 10 other companies have some of the IP. The best computer that science knows how to build can legally not be built in this world. And the best phone [00:09:00] and the best car and the best medicine and the best every fucking thing there is because we keep the actual adaptive knowledge from synthesizing, let alone that everybody’s having to reproduce the same fucking work because we don’t want to share our best practices.

Then almost all the budget is going into marketing against the other ones rather than actual development and the marketing’s just lying in manipulation, at least, about why ours is comprehensively better when they then have to say the same thing about what their IP does that’s good and our IP does [00:09:30] another thing. Imagine if we had a world where all the IP got to be synthesized. Nobody was disinforming anybody else. Nobody was sabotaging anyone else. Everyone was incented to share all of the info. To synthesize all the info, to synthesize all of the intellectual property ideas etcetera, work towards the best things possible, imagine how much more innovation would actually be possible, how much more collective intelligence and capacity would actually be possible.

If our source of adaptive advantage [00:10:00] is that, is we make a world and now we have to come back to – we were talking about – if you possess a good and I no longer have access to it, we’re in a rivalrous relationship. You possess a piece of information that I don’t then get to have access to, we’re in rivalrous information of knowledge etcetera. If you have access to something and we’ve structured the nature of access where we have engineered the scarcity out of the system as such that you’re having access doesn’t make me not have access, and you having access leads to you [00:10:30] being a human who has a full life and some of your full life is creativity and generativity.

Now, not only do you have full access to those transportation resources but also maker studios and art studios and education and healthcare and all the kinds of things that would make you a healthy, well adaptive, creative person – and every well-adapted person’s creative. Nobody wants to just chill out watching TV all the time unless they were already broken, broken by a system that tried to incent them to shit that nobody wants to do or, if they can get a way out, they will but they’re a broken person. If someone was supported in an educational system [00:11:00] to pay attention to what they were innately fascinated and to facilitate that, they will all become masterful at some things with innate, intrinsic motivation to do those things.

Now, in a world where we support everybody to have access to the things that they are intrinsically incented to want to create. If, right now, I get status by having stuff but if we are engineering [inaudible [0:11:24] system everyone has access, nobody possesses any of it, everybody has access to all of it. There’s no status of having things and it’s totally boring. [00:11:30] There’s no differential advantage, the only way you get status, the only way you get to express the uniqueness of what you are is by what you create. Now, the whole system’s running towards that but you don’t create something to get money because money for what, to have access to shit you already have access to? Because you get to be someone who created that thing and both your own intrinsic express of it and extrinsically getting to offer to the world that would recognize that.

Now, we have a situation where we all have access to commonwealth resources that create an anti-rivalrous relationship to [00:12:00] each other. Obviously, I’m just speaking about this at the 100,000-foot level. We could drill down on what the actual architecture looks like but there is actual architecture here. It is viable, it meets the design of criteria. We have sense-making processes where we look at what a good design would be before making a proposition for a design that doesn’t lead to polarization and radicalization, that lead to progressively better synergistic satisfiers and get us out of theory of trade-offs and into [inaudible [0:12:27] also as a way of having people be [00:12:30] more unifiable and on the same team.

If I’ve got this world where it’s the source of competitive advantage if you want to call it that, is that it is obsolete at a competition within itself, it has real coherence. Then not only is the quality of life erratically higher because the people don’t feel lonely and they actually have creative shit to do and they aren’t being used as instrumental pawns to some other purpose etcetera, and the quality of life is better because they’re actually making better medicine and better technology and better [00:13:00] etcetera because of the ability for the IP to synthesize and everything else. This world can also out-innovate in really key ways in other places in the world. Then, rather than the rest of the world wanting to attack it, it can actually say, “Here, we’ll export solutions you want.” The rest of the world starts to create a positive dependence relationship.

The rest of the world says, “Shit, we want to be able to innovate. Why were they able to solve that problem we weren’t able to solve?” Because our guys were sabotaging each other and their guys weren’t sabotaging each other. We say, “Great, [00:13:30] here’s the social technology to use. Now, as soon as the implement that, it’s not being weaponized, that’s just the world actually shifting. That’s where this model actually becomes a new base [inaudible [0:13:37] the world starts flowing to. You have to do that. You create a prototype of a false act civilization that is anti-rivalrous, that is anti-fragile against rivalry – strengths, not power – and that is auto-propagating that by the nature of the solutions that it is exporting and by its own adaptive capacity, its own design [00:14:00] starts to implemented in other places. That’s ultimately, the desire. That is a path to a post-existential risk world, which is building it in prototype in a way where it auto-propagates.

Mike: That’s so exciting.

Euvie: Are there places where these prototypes are being built?

Daniel: Kind of but not really. There are intentional communities where people are trying to practice some things they feel will be relevant, a closed look agriculture [00:14:30] system where they at least have regenerative agriculture and maybe some kinds of social coherence technologies where they have a better system of conflict resolution than our current judicial system. Better parenting, better education. We have those things and those are cool and they’re valuable but they still have to buy their computers from Apple and fly on a Boeing to get somewhere that depends upon environmental destruction and war. They can’t actually provide a high-tech civilization, they’re not yet [00:15:00] civilization models and the civilization models are all part of this one dominant civilization model. This is the next endeavor.

Before a full-stack civilization occurs, obviously partial ones but that is directed towards a full stack civilization have to occur. Because in the world we’re talking about, there is no place for the things currently called judges or lawyers or politicians or bankers. Those systems don’t exist. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t an equivalent of a judicial system that is totally fucking different from the level of the theory [00:15:30] of ethics to the [inaudible [0:15:31]. Somebody has to be getting trained in the civics of that system. There’s nothing like banking but there are things like paying attention to how the accounting of this new economy works but people have to be trained in that. I’ll give you one, for instance, we think about the physical economy.

We’ll take attention out and just look at physics. We see that there are at least three different kinds of physics involved in the materials economy that are fundamentally different in their math. There is a physics of atoms, [00:16:00] physical atoms. There is a physics of energy and there is a physics of bits. Right now, those are fungible. I can use the same dollar to buy software or to buy energy or to buy metals or physical stuff, food. There’s a fixed number of atoms of a certain type on the planet that are reasonably accessible.

Right now, we’re just taking them from the environment in a way that causes depletion and then putting them back into the environment as waste in a way that causes accumulation toxicity on both sides. [00:16:30] You can’t keep doing that, we have to close loop it where we have been, give or take, a finite amount of metals. Not just metals but hydrocarbons, everything. A finite amount of atoms that are in a closed-loop relationship but they can be upcycled because we have the energy to upcycle them, which means putting the same atoms into a higher pattern – where the pattern is evolving, the pattern’s stored in bits.

If I take the atoms out of one battery, put it into a new battery which evolved as battery technology. That new battery is in bits, a blueprint. [00:17:00] I’m going to use energy to take the atoms in the current form, disassemble them and reassemble them into this new battery. There’s a fixed amount of atoms – we have to close loop those. There’s not a fixed amount of energy. We get new energy from the sun every day but we have a finite bandwidth of how much we get, we have to operate within. That’s not closed-loop, we can use that up and it has entropy. Within that bandwidth, we [00:17:30] have to work. Bits are fundamentally unlimited – limited only by the computing of the energy and matter. That can keep expanding basically indefinitely.

Once I’ve made a bit, I can reproduce it exponentially without any unit cost because I can reproduce it exponentially without unit cost once I’ve developed at once. I get an exponential return on software in a way that I could never get on atomic stuff, which is why Elon has a hard time raising money for the physical stuff, and [00:18:00] WhatsApp sold for 19 billion dollars. It’s why all the unicorns are software and mostly social tech or fintech or something that is actually doing not good things for the world can create exponential returns. It’s why Silicon Valley has basically mostly just invested in software stuff. If you make those fungible, you’ll actually be moving the energy away from the atom and away from the energy into the virtual. Away from the physical into the virtual, even though the virtual depends [00:18:30] on the physical, so you’re actually debasing the substrate upon which it depends.

You notice that since the bit we can keep having more of forever, they don’t go through an entropy degradation when we use them, the energy we can use entropically degrades but we get more of it every day and the atoms don’t entropically degrade but we have to keep cycling them and there’s a fixed number. The physics, the accounting of those are totally different. That’s not one economy that’s totally fungible to its self-appointed accounting system. That’s three completely separate [00:19:00] but interacting physical economies. Again, we already said we’re not owning goods, we’re having access to shared commonwealth services. To really go into it, it’s a lot of things. These are examples of some of the considerations that have to happen to actually be able to think about things like economics at a level of depth that is appropriate to the nature of the issues.

If we don’t answer the question of what makes a good civilization. We simply say [00:19:30] what allows civilization to endure. We start with, let’s just say we don’t want the existential catastrophic risk. There’s a whole bunch of different types of existential catastrophic risks that all have the same generator function, so we have to create categorical solutions to the generator functions. It turns out that those are the generator functions that have made all the things that we intuitively have experienced as sucking – like violence and environmental devastation.

Solving those generator functions doesn’t just allow us to survive [00:20:00] in maybe some dystopian dynamic. Anti-rivalrous dynamics with each other and close loop dynamics and the proper relationship between the complicated and the complex. Scalable collective intelligence systems in a right understanding in theory of choice and relationship with the theory of causation end up being a way of mapping to a world that is definitely [inaudible [0:20:20] on any meaningful definition of [inaudible [0:20:23] and any meaningful consideration of what good could mean. We come back to this mythopoetic. [00:20:30] We can’t keep going the way that we’re going. There’s a purgatory coming and it’s going to go one way or the other. One way is really shitty and one way’s really lovely.

That’s a true story. Bucky Fuller said utopia or oblivion and it’s going to be hit or miss until we’re actually there. We’re not gonna know which way it goes. That’s the thing we’re just kind of in on is what it takes if we try to solve the various risks in isolation is impossible, we fail. If what it takes to solve them categorically ends up [00:21:00] also mapping to how we engage everyone in creating the true, the good, and the beautiful that is theirs to create progressively better, both upregulating their sense-making of what that is with themselves and with each other being able to make that, scaling the collective intelligence that is progressively answering those questions better.

Mike: Can you leave us with some book recommendations for anyone who wants to read up on this a little more and expand their understanding?

Euvie: Books or other resources.

Daniel: Yes. [00:21:30] I wish I could share more things than I can but a lot of what we’re thinking in terms of a new civilization design like this is new. It doesn’t mean it’s not drawing on lots of elements. Couple things. We mentioned Jeffrey West’s work Scale on collective intelligence, that’s very valuable. We talk about some of the dynamics of game theory that have to shift and so finite and infinite games are just my favorite starting point. It’s one of the types of books that is very simple but has multiple levels of depth [00:22:00] of meaning. If you read it multiple times, you’ll gain new insights.

Euvie: That one blew my mind.

Mike: Yup, me too.

Daniel: James Carse, very beautiful. I have a blog, civilizationemerging.com that has some articles on these types of topics. There’s also a booklist there with a heap of books.

Euvie: Great.

Mike: Awesome. This, as always, is enlightening and so fun.

Daniel: There are books that are valuable and there’s obviously all of your podcasts available. If you had the [00:22:30] experience of anything that I said making sense and actually seeming obvious. But then you also realize you never thought it in that particular way, then there’s a question, “Why did I never think it in that way, even though it seems obvious after the fact?” That’s one of the properties that clarity has is it can add novel insight but that seems obvious and [inaudible [0:22:50] relates to everything that we know.

Then we say, “Okay, I wasn’t thinking about rivalrous dynamics and upping the ante clearly enough, [00:23:00] I wasn’t thinking about the exponential economy and software and atoms all being fungible. There’s a problem there. I wasn’t thinking about open loops, closed loops in this particular way.” You can. If you start just asking for yourself, “What do I think is actually wrong?” Of all the things that seem wrong, what do they have in common? Why are those things that are wrong, wrong? Then go deeper. Keep going deeper with that. Don’t look for one answer. Are there a number of different things that come together [00:23:30] that are partial answers to this? What would solving that look like? There are resources of other peoples thinking on these things but they won’t replace. They will inspire.

They won’t replace your own deep thinking on these things for your own sense-making. The resource that I would offer the most is when you are bothered by something or you wish some beautiful thing existed more than it does, really think hard about why things are the way they are. Know that the first thoughts you will come with [00:24:00] are not that good. If you stop, you won’t get beyond there. If you really keep working on it and thinking about it and then going and researching in light of that question and then thinking about it more, you actually start to get novel and meaningful and deeper sense-making that is aligned with what is yours to pay attention to and work on.

Euvie: To relate to what you said earlier, I think it really helps to use different modes of inquiry. People can get stuck in just intellectual inquiry or just [00:24:30] spiritual inquiry. But all are valuable. When we can see the same thing from several different perspectives, it becomes a 3D object, rather than just being flat.

Daniel: You just actually mentioned one of my favorite practices is really endeavoring to see and experience the world through the perspective of someone else and actually see and experience it. If I’m still thinking, “No, if I was in their position, I wouldn’t do that,” I haven’t got it yet. If I was in their position, I would do. If I’m really putting myself [00:25:00] in a position, I would get enraged by the things they’re enraged by. I would get excited by the things they’re excited by. This, both as a practice of empathy and connection, as a practice of understanding, as a practice of intelligence and learning because I see different things. If I look at the world through the lens of a mechanical engineer, I see shit everywhere that mechanical engineers see that you never saw.

This is different than if you look through the lens of a fashion designer, or you look through the lens of a game theory person. They’re looking at different things. Or an evolutionary biologist. [00:25:30] There’s a whole universe I wasn’t paying attention to – like when you buy a car and you see it everywhere, you put on a lens and you start seeing all kinds of stuff, effective sense-making. Also, as a kind of spiritual technology of getting out of the default mode of what you think you are. When I’m trying to be someone else, it’s not my personality that can do that. If I’m trying to take their personality, it’s not perspective that can do it. It’s the same consciousness witnessing my perspective that can then witness somebody else’s. As soon as I do that, I actually dissociate from just being [00:26:00] my personality and then I get some more spaciousness around it and less reacted by it.

Euvie: This also relates to not just looking through the lens of different personalities or different modern frameworks, it’s also looking through the lens of premodern frameworks or even animal frameworks and that can all be very useful, as well. If we look at the world through the lens of quote-unquote primitive tribe, then different things come into focus and different things become very meaningful and very powerfully meaningful. It [00:26:30] resonates through your whole being… wow. That’s not to be dismissed, because there’s something there.

Mike: At the very minimum, for self-discovery, it’s super useful because we spent more time as those primitive versions of ourselves than we have the modern versions. You can untie a lot of behaviors that you don’t really realize you have based off of just looking at the world from a primitive standpoint.

Daniel: If your [inaudible [0:26:55] decide to go visit the Amazon and live with a tribe [00:27:00] and experience the world through those eyes and be affected by it and then look at how they can incorporate elements of that experience of the world and their previous experience of the world to being able to live more fully. That would be beautiful. This was wonderful, I really appreciated being here with you both. I really do want to say that I love your podcasts and I love what you’re creating, both of you together. It’s very easy to have [00:27:30] well informed dystopian views and it’s easy to not think about things or it’s easy to have poorly informed positive views.

To have well informed positive views is actually tricky. If we keep being anything like the kinds of people that we have always been, that do really wonderful and really atrocious shit with our power but having exponentially more power, they’re all dystopian scenarios. We have to be something really different than we’ve ever been, which requires some type of deep [00:28:00] shift that could make that happen. That requires some deep thinking, some deep imagination. I know that what you are really dedicated to doing here on the show. I’m reminded of this quote from the book of Romans. It says the pathway to heaven and narrow and steep and the pathway to hell is wife and many. It’s just like a way of thinking about thermodynamics, which is that there’s just more ways to break shit than to build it.

There’s not that many ways all the cells can in your body [00:28:30] can come together that make you, the emergent property of you. There’s a lot of ways that you just get 150 pounds of goo. We say, “Okay, we’ve got a lot of power and most of those scenarios with a lot of power suck. How could we have this much power that doesn’t suck? How could we have this much power and not use it against each other?” We start seeing Orwell and control systems and we start saying, “That sucks, too.” To keep thinking through, “How could we have it that doesn’t suck that can’t depend on aliens or Jesus [00:29:00] coming back? How do we get us to be that kind of consciousness?” It’s a really good way of thinking about how to actually address these problems.

If we can’t [inaudible [0:29:09] without vision, man perishes. If we can’t even see a well-grounded positive future and positive use of the technological capacity have, we are not going to make it. I love that you all have this space dedicated to exploring a topic. The incentive is always evil. It’s a bitch. I don’t want to [00:29:30] move from perverse incentive to positive incentive. Positive incentive means my sense-making has determined what I think is good and I’m going to try and extrinsically override your sense-making to make a choice aligned with my sense-making.

I’m going to use an extrinsic reward strategy to co-opt your sovereignty and have your choice making be based on my sense-making incentive scheme rather than your own sense-making. That is always the basis of evil. If I want to have a collective [00:30:00] intelligence that’s actually intelligent, I need everyone to have intrinsic sense-making and choice-making that is incorruptible, which means it’s not being co-opted by extrinsic reward and punishment schemas. I got this wrong at first. I use to say, “We have to create a world where the incentive of every agent is rigorously aligned with the wellbeing of every other agent and of the commons, that is wrong.

What is right is to say that we must [00:30:30] rigorously remove any place where the incentive of an agent is misaligned with the wellbeing of other agents and the commons, but an adequate future is one that has no system of structural incentive.

Euvie: That’s a mind-blower.

Daniel: The cells in your body are actually not trying to get the other ones to do what they want them to do. They have their own internal sense-making processes and they do what makes sense to them. What makes sense to them also happens to be [00:31:00] what’s good for the ones around them, because they depend on the ones around them and vice versa and they’re in a communication process. The brain is not overriding the cells and in no way could handle the complexity necessary of the cells not doing their own sense-making. Better incentive schemas as a transition, which is happening in the blockchain, is nice. It’s worse than more perverse incentives but it is transitional, not post-transitional.

It actually does not address existential-risk, it doesn’t give us the right collective intelligence. The right collective intelligence has to be [00:31:30] fractal sovereignty. Meaning, at the level of an individual and every group size, it has its own intact sense-making and choice-making that ends up being vectoring towards Omni consideration. The level of shift that we’re talking about is hard to imagine.

Mike: Yeah. What has to be invented to even begin a transition and then be put to rest so that the next version can come along is such a long road.

Daniel: The reason we [00:32:00] incent people is because we have a civilization that needs a lot of shit done that is not fun. It’s dreadful stuff. We want to get the people to do the dreadful stuff. If we created a commonwealth where everyone had access to resources, then nobody would do the dreadful stuff and then the state would have to force them. That’s why we don’t like communism. Then you get the state imperialism. We say, “Okay, cool, let the free market force them instead,” it’s economic servitude but at least that doesn’t look like somebody did it because the [00:32:30] market is just the anonymous thing.

If you don’t do the shitty job, you’re homeless and you’re kids can’t eat. Cool. But we’ll tell you the story that you can work your way up and become wealthy, even though statistically we know that it’s silly, it happened to those two guys that one time. Even though statistically the rest of the time having more resources makes it easier to make more resources, and having less resources makes it harder to make more resources. The system has a gradient that makes it actually continue in the direction of inequality, not otherwise. [00:33:00] That’s where incentive came from. That’s the good side.

The negative side is a few controlling the many is to use incentive, reward, and punishment, and to get people to do the shitty things we have to do them. This is using choice to create a system of causation – incentive is a causal system, game theory is a causal system – to control the choice of others. Control or co-op. I want to have my theory of choice effect [00:33:30] causal dynamics that are only causal. I.e. If I make an automated robot, I haven’t actually made a sentient being a utility. I’m going to say something even deeper, which is instrumental relationships are evil.

Mike: Can you expand that?

Daniel: Yeah. If I’m interacting with you to meet some people that you know to get my network ahead or to get some knowledge from you or to gain access to something or to whatever it is, I have something [00:34:00] that I want to do that you are an instrument towards, you are a path towards. It’s a utilitarian ethic. You are a ends to a means for me. However I relate with you, however it affects your own sovereign, sentient experience is a place I might externalize harm because it’s not why I’m relating with you.

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Daniel: Again, a healthy world, a world of the future, other people need to have intrinsic [00:34:30] value independent of utilitarian value to everyone. That’s a part of the culture. Not just the other people and other beings, all kinds of sentient beings, but relationships have intrinsic value. I’m going to invest in the integrity of our relationship independent of me getting anything out of it because it is actually the basis of meaningfulness itself. Which is why in a utilitarian and instrumental dynamic, we’re getting ahead while feeling utterly fucking meaningless and destroying everything [00:35:00] that is meaningful in the process. That is us being hooked to addiction to a stupid game, where what we think we want is not what we actually want, and what we think of as a win is actually an Omni stupid thing.

This is why the Hindu concept of Dharma was a virtue ethic, not a utilitarian ethic and there was a very meaningful set of concepts of, “Do what is inherently right in your relationships with life, [00:35:30] independent of what the outcome might be, because you really don’t know what the fucking outcome is going to be.” If you try and just figure out what the outcome is going to be, you’re going to be wrong a lot of times and you’re also going to justify a lot of unethical stuff. Utilitarianism is the rampant ethics that anyone who’s paying attention to ethics pays attention to right now. It’s not without any merit but it is also problematic. It is up there with democracy and capitalism and the philosophy of science in terms of being a [00:36:00] problematic thing, to be the dominant system.

We cannot actually predict in complex systems well enough to do a utilitarian thing and the intrinsic dynamics of a relationship in another being end up becoming moved to being a means to an ends other than them. As soon as I start factoring everything meaningful along the chain of whatever I think my outcome is to where my outcome is actually being in a way that is an integrity with an honouring of all life, [00:36:30] now it’s a virtue ethic.

Euvie: Yeah. I was having this conversation recently about people who are obsessed with life hacking and optimizing everything. When they get into that mindset, eventually they get to what they call optimizing relationships and then they start putting people on a value hierarchy where they want to interact with high value people and they want to get a high value woman and they’re using these tactics to find and attract the most high value woman. It’s funny, because those people, [00:37:00] in my experience, are some of the most existentially unhappy people that I’ve met. They will never demonstrate it outward, in an outward way, but that’s what I’ve noticed. That people who try to optimize everything in this kind of utilitarian way end up really profoundly unhappy.

Daniel: It’s the same thing as continuously pursuing a better high. It’s, “I’m getting a hit from winning at a particular thing, so I’ve got to try to win at it all the time.” But, “I need the hit because my baseline [00:37:30] is that life feels fucking meaningless because I don’t actually have any real relationships and I don’t even know what meaning means. I don’t even know what intimacy means.” That hyper normal environment needs hyper normal stimuli to feel anything. The fact that I use people instrumentally has people end up not liking me, which makes me hurt even more, which makes me want another hit even more.

Mike: People like you make it super easy. You just come on and it’s like we listen to audiobooks all day then we get to actually talk [00:38:00] to the person who’s coming up with the cutting-edge ideas themselves. It’s quite interesting, thank you.

Daniel: Bye ya’ll.

Euvie: It’s always wonderful getting our brains blown by you, thank you.

Daniel: Thank you both, this was really fun.

Mentions:

• Solving the generator functions -Daniel’s blog post

• Overcoming existential risk by redesigning civilization – interview with Daniel on FringeFM

Book Recommendations:

• Geoffrey West – Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies

• David Chalmers – The Character of Consciousness

• James P. Carse – Finite and Infinite Games

More from Future Thinkers:

• Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Global Phase Shift (FTP036)

• Daniel Schmachtenberger on Neurohacking (FTP042)

• Daniel Schmachtenberger on Neurogenesis (FTP043)

• Daniel Schmachtenberger on Winning Humanity’s Existential Game (FTP046)

DiEM25— FOR OUR TIME & FOR OUR FUTURE

Globe Hackers enthusiastically and actively support DiEM 25.

Support People Support Life

A MANIFESTO FOR DEMOCRATISING EUROPE

For all their concerns with global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy! They speak in democracy’s name but only to deny, exorcise and suppress it in practice. They seek to co-opt, evade, corrupt, mystify, usurp and manipulate democracy in order to break its energy and arrest its possibilities.

For rule by Europe’s peoples, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of:

• The Brussels bureaucracy (and its more than 10,000 lobbyists)

• Its hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika they formed together with unelected ‘technocrats’ from other international and European institutions

• The powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty

• Bailed out bankers, fund managers and resurgent oligarchies perpetually contemptuous of the multitudes and their organised expression

• Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom and solidarity to betray their most basic principles when in government

• Governments that fuel cruel inequality by implementing self-defeating austerity

• Media moguls who have turned fear-mongering into an art form, and a magnificent source of power and profit

• Corporations in cahoots with secretive public agencies investing in the same fear to promote secrecy and a culture of surveillance that bend public opinion to their will.

The European Union was an exceptional achievement, bringing together in peace European peoples speaking different languages, submersed in different cultures, proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity. The European Union could have been the proverbial Beacon on the Hill, showing the world how peace and solidarity may be snatched from the jaws of centuries-long conflict and bigotry.

Alas, today, a common bureaucracy and a common currency divide European peoples that were beginning to unite despite our different languages and cultures. A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating Europeans and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash. Proud peoples are being turned against each other.Nationalism, extremism and racism are being re-awakened.

At the heart of our disintegrating EU there lies a guilty deceit: A highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. Its purpose is to prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and environment. The price of this deceit is not merely the end of democracy but also poor economic policies:

• The Eurozone economies are being marched off the cliff of competitive austerity, resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries and low investment in the core countries

• EU member-states outside the Eurozone are alienated, seeking inspiration and partners in suspect quarters where they are most likely to be greeted with opaque, coercive free trade deals that undermine their sovereignty.

• Unprecedented inequality, declining hope and misanthropy flourish throughout Europe

Two dreadful options dominate:

• Retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states

• Or surrender to the Brussels democracy-free zone

There must be another course. And there is!

It is the one official ‘Europe’ resists with every sinew of its authoritarian mind-set:

A surge of democracy!

Our movement, DiEM25, seeks to call forth just such a surge.

One simple, radical idea is the motivating force behind DiEM25:

Democratise Europe! For the EU will either be democratised or it will disintegrate!

Our goal to democratise Europe is realistic. It is no more utopian than the initial construction of the European Union was. Indeed, it is less utopian than the attempt to keep alive the current, anti-democratic, fragmenting European Union.

Our goal to democratise Europe is terribly urgent, for without a swift start it may be impossible to chisel away at the institutionalised resistance in good time, before Europe goes past the point of no return. We give it a decade, by 2025.

If we fail to democratise Europe within, at most, a decade; if Europe’s autocratic powers succeed in stifling democratisation, then the EU will crumble its hubris, it will splinter, and its fall will cause untold hardship everywhere – not just in Europe.

WHY IS EUROPE LOSING ITS INTEGRITY AND ITS SOUL?

In the post-war decades during which the EU was initially constructed, national cultures were revitalised in a spirit of internationalism, disappearing borders, shared prosperity and raised standards that brought Europeans together. But, the serpent’s egg was at the heart of the integration process.

From an economic viewpoint, the EU began life as a cartel of heavy industry (later co-opting farm owners) determined to fix prices and to re-distribute oligopoly profits through its Brussels bureaucracy. The emergent cartel, and its Brussels-based administrators, feared the demos and despised the idea of government-by-the-people.

Patiently and methodically, a process of de-politicising decision-making was put in place, the result being a draining but relentless drive toward taking-the-demos-out-of-democracy and cloaking all policy-making in a pervasive pseudo-technocratic fatalism. National politicians were rewarded handsomely for their acquiescence to turning the Commission, the Council, the Ecofin, the Eurogroup and the ECB, into politics-free zones. Anyone opposing this process of de-politicisation was labelled ‘un-European’ and treated as a jarring dissonance.

Thus the deceit at the EU’s heart was born, yielding an institutional commitment to policies that generate depressing economic data and avoidable hardship.Meanwhile, simple principles that a more confident Europe once understood, have now been abandoned:

• Rules should exist to serve Europeans, not the other way round

• Currencies should be instruments, not ends-in-themselves

• A single market is consistent with democracy only if it features common defences of the weaker Europeans, and of the environment, that are democratically chosen and built

• Democracy cannot be a luxury afforded to creditors while refused to debtors

• Democracy is essential for limiting capitalism’s worst, self-destructive drives and opening up a window onto new vistas of social harmony and sustainable development

In response to the inevitable failure of Europe’s cartelised social economy to rebound from the post-2008 Great Recession, the EU’s institutions that caused this failure have been resorting to escalating authoritarianism. The more they asphyxiate democracy, the less legitimate their political authority becomes, the stronger the forces of economic recession, and the greater their need for further authoritarianism. Thus the enemies of democracy gather renewed power while losing legitimacy and confining hope and prosperity to the very few (who may only enjoy it behind the gates and the fences needed to shield them from the rest of society).

This is the unseen process by which Europe’s crisis is turning our peoples inwards, against each other, amplifying pre-existing jingoism, xenophobia.The privatisation of anxiety, the fear of the ‘other’, the nationalisation of ambition, and the re-nationalisation of policy threaten a toxic disintegration of common interests from which Europe can only suffer. Europe’s pitiful reaction to its banking and debt crises, to the refugee crisis, to the need for a coherent foreign, migration and anti-terrorism policy, are all examples of what happens when solidarity loses its meaning:

• The injury to Europe’s integrity caused by the crushing of the Athens Spring, and by the subsequent imposition of an economic ‘reform’ program that was designed to fail

• The customary assumption that, whenever a state budget must be bolstered or a bank bailed out, society’s weakest must pay for the sins of the wealthiest rentiers

• The constant drive to commodify labour and drive democracy out of the workplace

• The scandalous ‘not in our backyard’ attitude of most EU member-states to the refugees landing on Europe’s shores, illustrating how a broken European governance model yields ethical decline and political paralysis, as well as evidence that xenophobia towards non-Europeans follows the demise of intra-European solidarity

• The comical phrase we end up with when we put together the three words ‘European’, ‘foreign’ and ‘policy’

• The ease with which European governments decided after the awful Paris attacks that the solution lies in re-erecting borders, when most of the attackers were EU citizens – yet another sign of the moral panic engulfing a European Union unable to unite Europeans to forge common responses to common problems.

WHAT MUST BE DONE? OUR HORIZON

Realism demands that we work toward reaching milestones within a realistic timeframe. This is why DiEM25 will aim for four breakthroughs at regular intervals in order to bring about a fully democratic, functional Europe by 2025.

Now, today, Europeans are feeling let down by EU institutions everywhere. From Helsinki to Lisbon, from Dublin to Crete, from Leipzig to Aberdeen. Europeans sense that a stark choice is approaching fast. The choice between authentic democracy and insidious disintegration. We must resolve to unite to ensure that Europe makes the obvious choice: Authentic democracy!

When asked what we want, and when we want it, we reply:

IMMEDIATELY: Full transparency in decision-making.

• EU Council, Ecofin, FTT and Eurogroup Meetings to be live-streamed

• Minutes of European Central Bank governing council meetings to be published a few weeks after the meetings have taken place

• All documents pertinent to crucial negotiations (e.g. trade-TTIP, ‘bailout’ loans, Britain’s status) affecting every facet of European citizens’ future to be uploaded on the web

• A compulsory register for lobbyists that includes their clients’ names, their remuneration, and a record of meetings with officials (both elected and unelected)

WITHIN TWELVE MONTHS: Address the on-going economic crisis utilising existing institutions and within existing EU Treaties.

Europe’s immediate crisis is unfolding simultaneously in five realms:

• Public debt

• Banking

• Inadequate Investment, and

• Migration

• Rising Poverty

All five realms are currently left in the hands of national governments powerless to act upon them. DiEM25 will present detailed policy proposals to Europeanise all five while limiting Brussels’ discretionary powers and returning power to national Parliaments, to regional councils, to city halls and to communities. The proposed policies will be aimed at re-deploying existing institutions (through a creative re-interpretation of existing treaties and charters) in order to stabilise the crises of public debt, banking, inadequate investment, and rising poverty.

WITHIN TWO YEARS: Constitutional Assembly

The people of Europe have a right to consider the union’s future and a duty to transform Europe (by 2025) into a full-fledged democracy with a sovereign Parliament respecting national self-determination and sharing power with national Parliaments, regional assemblies and municipal councils. To do this, an Assembly of their representatives must be convened. DiEM25 will promote a Constitutional Assembly consisting of representatives elected on trans-national tickets. Today, when universities apply to Brussels for research funding, they must form alliances across nations. Similarly, election to the Constitutional Assembly should require tickets featuring candidates from a majority of European countries. The resulting Constitutional Assembly will be empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that will replace all existing European Treaties within a decade.

BY 2025: Enactment of the decisions of the Constitutional Assembly

WHO WILL BRING CHANGE?

We, the peoples of Europe, have a duty to regain control over our Europe from unaccountable ‘technocrats’, complicit politicians and shadowy institutions.

We come from every part of the continent and are united by different cultures, languages, accents, political party affiliations, ideologies, skin colours, gender identities, faiths and conceptions of the good society.

We are forming DiEM25 intent on moving from a Europe of ‘We the Governments’, and ‘We the Technocrats’, to a Europe of ‘We, the peoples of Europe’.

Our four principles:

• No European people can be free as long as another’s democracy is violated

• No European people can live in dignity as long as another is denied it

• No European people can hope for prosperity if another is pushed into permanent insolvency and depression

• No European people can grow without basic goods for its weakest citizens, human development, ecological balance and a determination to become fossil-fuel free in a world that changes its ways – not the planet’s climate

We join in a magnificent tradition of fellow Europeans who have struggled for centuries against the ‘wisdom’ that democracy is a luxury and that the weak must suffer what they must.

With our hearts, minds and wills dedicated to these commitments, and determined to make a difference, we declare that.

eo.

OUR PLEDGE

We call on our fellow Europeans to join us forthwith to create the European movement which we call DiEM25.

• To fight together, against a European establishment deeply contemptuous of democracy, to democratise the European Union

• To end the reduction of all political relations into relations of power masquerading as merely technical decisions

• To subject the EU’s bureaucracy to the will of sovereign European peoples

• To dismantle the habitual domination of corporate power over the will of citizens

• To re-politicise the rules that govern our single market and common currency

We consider the model of national parties which form flimsy alliances at the level of the European Parliament to be obsolete. While the fight for democracy-from below (at the local, regional or national levels) is necessary, it is nevertheless insufficient if it is conducted without an internationalist strategy toward a pan-European coalition for democratising Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda, and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional and national level.

Our overarching aim to democratise the European Union is intertwined with an ambition to promote self-government (economic, political and social) at the local, municipal, regional and national levels; to throw open the corridors of power to the public; to embrace social and civic movements; and to emancipate all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power.

We are inspired by a Europe of Reason, Liberty, Tolerance and Imagination made possible by comprehensive Transparency, real Solidarity and authentic Democracy.

We aspire to:

• A Democratic Europe in which all political authority stems from Europe’s sovereign peoples

• A Transparent Europe where all decision-making takes place under the citizens’ scrutiny

• A United Europe whose citizens have as much in common across nations as within them

• A Realistic Europe that sets itself the task of radical, yet achievable, democratic reforms

• A Decentralised Europe that uses central power to maximise democracy in workplaces, towns, cities, regions and states

• A Pluralist Europe of regions, ethnicities, faiths, nations, languages and cultures

• An Egalitarian Europe that celebrates difference and ends discrimination based on gender, skin colour, social class or sexual orientation

• A Cultured Europe that harnesses its people’s cultural diversity and promotes not only its invaluable heritage but also the work of Europe’s dissident artists, musicians, writers and poets

• A Social Europe that recognises that liberty necessitates not only freedom from interference but also the basic goods that render one free from need and exploitation

• A Productive Europe that directs investment into a shared, green prosperity

• A Sustainable Europe that lives within the planet’s means, minimising its environmental impact, and leaving as much fossil fuel in the earth

• An Ecological Europe engaged in genuine world-wide green transition

• A Creative Europe that releases the innovative powers of its citizens’ imagination

• A Technological Europe pressing new technologies in the service of solidarity

• A Historically-minded Europe that seeks a bright future without hiding from its past

• An Internationalist Europe that treats non-Europeans as ends-in-themselves

• A Peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its East and in the Mediterranean, acting as a bulwark against the sirens of militarism and expansionism

• An Open Europe that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness spreading insecurity in the name of security

• A Liberated Europe where privilege, prejudice, deprivation and the threat of violence wither, allowing Europeans to be born into fewer stereotypical roles, to enjoy even chances to develop their potential, and to be free to choose more of their partners in life, work and society.

Carpe DiEM25
www.diem25.org

F*%CK YOU MONEY

"The Weak" is composed of a gang, a syndicate of rulers, we sometimes call oligarchs who think that keeping the people ignorant, stressed, and distracted is a strong strategy. They have never comprehended a history book in their lives, much less anything having to do with science. Having endured years of abuse, or having been sheltered from any real challenge, or via dumb fate, having been blessed with inherited entitlement, "Rulers" wallow in self-indulgence, groupthink, mal-motivated reasoning, always engaged in forceful social signalling— their minds and souls, at a young age, turn into toxic sludge. They all too often have omnicidal dreams during their fitful sleep. The ruled often suffer from the same pathology with similar results, mostly due to an engineered desire to become "Rulers."

Rulers engineer a world in which they get more attention than their remit requires. Getting too much of this kind of mal-formed attention makes our restless rulers pay attention to the noise while risk piles up. Imagine Dorian Gray with a tactical knife and an AR15 with oversized clips taped together, cocked and loaded, staggering around the back garden, snorting "blood-coke" and shedding tears because enough is never enough. You don't want that guy looking at the real picture before he's disarmed, but how does one put the genie back in the bottle? How can society reform and heal people who fund research into immortality like all the mercury drinking, narcissistic, ruler-alchemists before them? They are becoming pure poison. And remember, Twenty-First Century megalomaniacs have access to neutron and hydrogen bombs, and that's a game-ending genie. Let's not even talk about their denial of natural systems.

So, we plebs can blame the players for creating, maintaining and ending a sick game. We can forgive ourselves for not knowing what we were doing. We were determined to be ignorant. Call it planned obsolescence.

The players are weak because they forgot where they get their power. We are vulnerable because we don't dare to remind them. Perhaps the players and their victims have no idea what real power is.

And, it's unfortunate that healthy people find it impossible to converse with their rulers. Not having these difficult conversations is perhaps the most consequential mistake.

Let's do a little experiment to determine the difference between the ruler-players and the plebs who give them their power. Try this, speak this out loud, and then monitor how it makes you feel. If you can, say it many times while videoing yourself: "Fuck you money, fuck-you-money, FUCK YOU MONEY, I've got fuck you money..."

Did you feel entitled, competitive, superior, aggressive, vengeful, a bit angry, perhaps even violent?

Now try something else like, "I love my curious soul." I love, I love, I love... How does that make you feel?

Fuck you, Money.

Climate Change Information Resources

Here is a collection of science-based resources for researching and learning about climate change.

Climate Communication: Science & Outreach

Michael Mann is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, and is the lecturer of edX’s online course on Climate Change called “Climate Change and Global Impacts.”

• https://www.climatecommunication.org

Climate Disinformation Database - DeSmog Blog

An extensive database of individual climate deniers and organizations involved in the global warming denial industry.

• https://www.desmogblog.com/global-warming-denier-database

Climate Misconceptions

Yale Climate Connections - Yale University

• https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2010/12/common-climate-misconceptions-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide/

David Suzuki Foundation - Science and LearningCentre

Welcome to the David Suzuki Foundation’s free online library containing more than a decade’s worth of fundamental science, research, and policy work.

This library is a resource for scientists, researchers, journalists, students, activists, and others. We hope it helps connect you with the work of our Science and Policy experts, advancing our collective knowledge of the environmental movement, the challenges we face, and the solutions within our grasp.

• https://davidsuzuki.org/science-learning-centre/

DeSmog Blog

DeSmog launched in January 2006 and quickly became the world’s number one source for accurate, fact-based information regarding global warming misinformation campaigns. It is an independent group of investigative journalists investigating the climate-denial fraud.

• https://www.desmogblog.com

The Logic of Science

1. Debunking 25 Arguments Against Climate Change in 5 Sentences or Less Each

• https://thelogicofscience.com/2016/10/18/debunking-25-arguments-against-climate-change-in-5-sentences-or-less-each/

2. Don’t cherry-pick your experts

• The Logic of Science

  • https://thelogicofscience.com/2019/08/26/dont-cherry-pick-your-experts/

3. Global Warming - Logic of Science

• An excellent science site designed for the average reader to make sense of the science. Topics are well organized and cover most of the bases.

  • https://thelogicofscience.com/global-warming/

NASA Climate Science Website

• NASA’s Climate home page

  • http://climate.nasa.gov

• NASA’s Teachable Moments:

  • https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/column/teachable-moments/

• The Evidence

  • https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

• Causes

  • https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

• Effects

  • https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

• Solutions / Resources

  • https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/resources/

Real Climate .org

RealClimate.org - “...one of the best sources on the Internet for clear, accessible, but soundly scientific, discussion about climate change.” ~ James Hoggan, p. 112, “Climate Cover-Up.”

Co-founded by Michael Mann And edX Academy (an e-Learning arm founded in part by Penn State University.

• realclimate.org

Scientific American

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/7-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense/

Skeptical Science

Scientific skepticism is healthy. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer-reviewed scientific literature say?

https://skepticalscience.com

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Rule Of Law Is A Sham

This article by Ralph Nader in Lapham’s Quarterly is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how the world works. The Law is a scam, and at present, not serving the people, but rather, at the service those who game the system.

Land of the Lawless | Lapham’s Quarterly

In the late 1970s, I had lunch with the head of the Internal Revenue Service. I broached a subject long on my mind: “I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein ’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

If this seems shocking, beware—lawlessness is an overwhelming fact of American life, though little attention is paid to this many-unsponsored phenomenon. How many times have we been told that our country is under the rule of law and that nobody is above it? Yet the country’s legal life is defined instead by major zones of lawlessness created, in one aspect, by noncompliance and lack of enforcement and, in another, by raw power, which can be political, economic, or armed. These multiplying zones have pushed the rule of law into little more than a torrent of dysfunctional myths.

You might think attending one of America’s 205 accredited law schools would help a person see through all this. But with few exceptions, law schools teach the rule of law as if it were the norm—as if public condemnations of criminal acts and sometimes prosecuted violations mean our culture really is defined by its laws. Courses push students to hone their analytic skills to find conflicts, inconsistencies, distinctions, ambiguities, and textual improvements in the formal legal system. Rarely is the rule of law exposed for what it is, though from time to time schools of legal thought do examine this—as did the “legal realists” at Yale Law School from the 1920s to the 1950s or the “critical legal studies” professors from the 1970s through the 1990s. But the language of these schools was too abstruse. The scholars did not focus enough on reaching outside their academic groves and were mostly unable to foster any kind of social justice movement that could make the law mean what it should—that is, justice.

It is better to live unknown to the law.

—Irish proverb

Over the past century, as laws have become more remote from public education and distant from popular access, they have also become more complex and more pervasive. In parallel, the various zones of lawlessness have expanded and the rule of power has increased. Occasional high-profile prosecutions or sanctions have helped promulgate the idea that laws are effective in their coverage, but such prosecutions have often been ineffective, with corporations demanding that Congress eliminate criminal penalties for willful and knowing violation of the law. To give just one example, corporate lobbyists succeeded in eliminating the criminal penalty from the 1966 automobile- safety laws, even when people were killed due to knowing violations of the government’s motor-vehicle safety regulations.

To see through a myth as pervasive as our rule of law requires a journey through these zones of lawlessness. Taking it may provoke the constructive outrage that can come from an informed sense of injustice.

Let’s start with systematic violations of the law that escape enforcement year after year. First, the health care industry, in which at least 10 percent of what our country spends goes down the drain from computerized billing fraud and abuse. According to Harvard professor Malcolm Sparrow, author of License to Steal, this 10 percent figure represents the minimum amount. Applying it to this year would produce a fraud amount of about $350 billion. The fraud is rarely prosecuted. In 1992 the Government Accountability Office estimated a comparable 10 percent drain, but Congress continued to starve the enforcement budgets of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice. These agencies recover less than $3 billion of what’s defrauded from Medicaid, Medicare, and Tricare military insurance each year—appallingly low, given that commercial crooks defraud an estimated $60 billion from Medicare alone.

Even more alarming is what we learn from a May 2016 report from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine estimating that there are a minimum of 250,000 lives lost yearly due to preventable problems in our nation’s hospitals. That’s an average of 5,000 deaths a week. These deaths stem largely from continual negligence—which can include accidents, misdiagnoses, malpractice, and hospital-induced infections—but criminal negligence and outright profit-driven criminality are also prevalent. Though these mass violations are supposed to be actionable by public prosecution and by private civil action under our tort laws, far less than 5 percent of potential civil cases are brought to attorneys by next of kin. Prosecutions are much rarer.

Also deeply underreported are the crimes that take place in the lawless zone of wage theft. A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute—which draws on surveys of state labor departments and attorneys general as well as data from the Department of Labor and class-action settlements—estimates $50 billion a year is stolen from mostly low-income workers, while terribly weak enforcement budgets and priorities led to the recovery of only some $2 billion in 2015 and 2016 combined.

The EPI examines wage theft through minimum-wage violations, overtime violations, tipping violations, and employee misclassifications. On average, it finds that workers suffering minimum-wage violations are cheated out of $64 a week, or $3,300 annually —all while the federal minimum wage has been frozen at $7.25 an hour. Such theft is clearly illegal. But in 2016, the EPI reports, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division had only a thousand investigators responsible for 7.3 million workplaces. And workers rarely file private claims anyway, as they are often forced to sign away their right to go to court in order to have a job in the first place.

The more laws, the more lawbreakers.

—Tao Te Ching, 500 BC

This is contract peonage, quite simply. But aside from the rare case of stolen-wage restitution, employers are almost never prosecuted under criminal laws. The absence of civil and criminal deterrence assures that big-time wage theft is part of the American worker’s nightmare.

Corporations further assert their power over the rule of law through tax evasion and avoidance. As Congress cut the IRS budget over the past decade (with inflation adjusted, down more than 25 percent from 2009), the agency has been increasingly unable to enforce the law against what it says is $400 billion a year in “uncollected taxes”—a sum that does not even include huge “avoided taxes” that flow from corporate lobbyists driving their agendas through a greased Congress. The result of this, says Robert McIntyre, who was the director of Citizens for Tax Justice for many years, is that citizen taxpayers have to pay more taxes and receive fewer public services or else incur larger government deficits.

Ongoing myths about the law serve to camouflage or protect these truly dominant acts of power—that’s an important reason for the near nonexistence of regular compliance reports by regulatory agencies to Congress and the public. Such reports would not only show widespread noncompliance and minimal enforcement, they would also reveal just how little help the aggrieved classes receive from legal processes. And, of course, indentured enforcement agencies do not have much interest in publicizing widespread violations of such magnitude. Doing so might generate an appropriate level of outrage —which could spur a movement to change the system that powerful institutions are more interested in keeping the way it is.

Why would government want to help diminish these zones of lawlessness? It, too, operates in one. Our uncontrollable national-security government has given us secret wars, secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret prisons, unauthorized secret budgets, unlawful surveillance of attorney-client communications, blatant snooping on all Americans, unauditable secret expenditures for quagmires abroad, and even redacted published judicial decisions. Though due process of law is arguably the greatest legal achievement of Western civilization, unlawful imprisonment (now euphemistically called “detention,” regardless of duration) of domestic persons and aliens are the stuff of media exposés that mostly go nowhere. Our government has too often shunted aside probable cause and upended habeas corpus and other bulwarks of due process. And U.S. courts contribute to the impunity through knee-jerk procedures blocking lawsuit challenges due to presumed “lack of standing” or by saying that a dispute is “political” and can only be resolved between the executive and legislative branches.

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws.

—Tacitus, 110

Then, when legal bodies do attempt to speak out against this lawlessness, they are ignored. In 2005 and 2006, the normally reticent and conservative American Bar Association (under its president Michael Greco) sent three unprecedented white papers to President George W. Bush asserting that he was in violation of the Constitution. Neither Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney ever bothered to acknowledge, much less respond to, these charges from the largest bar association in the world.

The government continued its extensive violations of our constitutional freedoms. In January 2012, an extraordinary article was published in the Washington Post by George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley outlining ten of them, which flowed from the official misuses of laws as well as from the instruments of oppression themselves, including all-too-routine prosecutorial abuses and law​lessness among police and in prisons. New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 State of the State address picked up on a similar theme, giving a shocking statistic: 75 percent of all inmates languishing in New York City jails have not been convicted of a crime but are simply awaiting trial. (Although not the subject of this essay, the lawlessness of the powerful—through their actions or inactions—have often worked to worsen the incidence of street and domestic violence.)

The view is no better on the international stage, where law cannot keep up with the violent insults of noncompliance with constitutions, treaties, or statutory restraints— from the general precepts of the laws of war to specific provisions of the Geneva Conventions. National sovereignties are routinely overridden by undeclared wars of choice, drone killings, illegal armed incursions, torture, and the widening license accorded military contractors. Greenhouse gases originate in one nation but traverse the globe, leading to devastating impacts. All are outside of any legal frameworks.

The maturation of the so-called corporate state has made all this even more entrenched. A major factor is military contracting. In September 2007 the government-contracted Blackwater Corporation used weaponized vehicles to slaughter fourteen unarmed Iraqis in one of Baghdad’s public squares. This briefly occasioned some attention from Congress, but by the end of October, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had officially informed the House Oversight Committee that— remarkably—there was no law covering the actions of Blackwater and their private police in Iraq. It seems that any crimes committed by corporations commissioned by the Defense and State Departments to perform guard duty and other classified tasks fell into a gap between Iraqi law—from which they were exempted by the U.S. military occupation—and the laws of the U.S. military itself. The rights of the individual guards were less clear; though some have been prosecuted, a single conviction for first-degree murder was overturned in circuit court in 2017.

Such lawless zones only become more complicated as technology advances. The daily evidence of international cyberwarfare and hacking—as well as corporate espionage— occurs without any framework of international law. There is presently no serious effort by the community of nations to negotiate international treaties regarding this volcanic, intrusive technology that, apart from stealing personal and official records, can destroy the critical infrastructure of societies.

Recourse does—or should—exist. America inherited from medieval England two great liberation movements for private action against wrongdoers: the law of contract and the law of torts. These two pillars of our private law are meant to empower wrongfully injured or defrauded people against wrongdoers by giving them their day in court with a trial by jury.

Lobbying legislatures seriously weakens the content and use of tort law. Though the latter is euphemistically called “tort reform,” it is a reform for corporations, not people. Corporate lobbyists have succeeded in having legislation enacted that arbitrarily ties the hands of judges and juries, who are the only ones who see, hear, and evaluate the evidence in each case in court. These lobbyists seek nothing less than impunity and immunity for their corporate entities.

Prominent lawyers, too, have been involved in weakening these remedies. Their unprofessional conduct flows from their status as so-called officers of the court, whose ethical responsibilities should be pointing them instead toward widening access to justice and its judicial institutions. But corporate law firms are the brains behind the political and economic dom​ination of corporatism and its corporate state, which runs roughshod over weakening labor unions and consumer-defense organizations. They systematically obstruct use of the law by the very people meant to be protected by it.

One pervasive way this affects consumers is in debit- or credit-based cell-phone payment plans—an intricate system of consumer incarceration in which cell-phone users surrender access and privacy and become beholden to fine-print contractual servitude. Any attempts to fight back mean one is confronted with a series of difficult tasks, including reaching a human being working for the vendors. Consumers then have to deal with low bargaining power, nonexistent alternative competition, and the potential arbitrary actions of lowered credit ratings and credit scores. The judiciary usually protects vendors by invoking the myth of consumer consent while precluding practical remedies by the aggrieved. Computerized transactions between consumers and financial vendors have turned unconscionable penalties and fees into corporate profit centers worth tens of billions of dollars a year, especially against the poor, who are forced into these difficult, rigged arrangements and so pay more.

This sort of thing is happening everywhere. Fast-expanding zones of lawlessness emerge from all kinds of rapid changes occurring in societies, from new technologies to new forms of capital to more complex inter-relationships between people and artificial entities like corporations. With government contracts there are the entrenched, complex, often secret abuses by corporate vendors, especially in the military and corporate welfare arenas. These official exercises of power without legal authority are bipartisan under both major political parties.

Law does not keep up, and the modern denizens of lawless territory like it that way. Just ask Wall Streeters, whose economic power allows them to deal in tax havens, complex commercial partnerships, and speculative derivatives that few humans can even understand, much less regulate. Where were the legal boundaries breached by the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, and the White House during the massive bailout of Wall Street and other companies? George W. Bush’s secretary of the Treasury, former chief of Goldman Sachs Henry Paulson, openly told the Washington Post that he “didn’t have the authorities for anything,” but “someone has to pull it all together.”

In a court of fowls, the cockroach never wins its case.

—Rwandan proverb

It would be nice to believe such actions were aberrations from the rule of law. But they’re not; lawlessness in its many exercised forms of raw power is itself the norm. What it has wrought is the institutionalization of criminality—with overworld and underworld often blurring together—producing inequality of wealth and income, planting the seeds of political seizures by dictatorial, plutocratic, and oligarchic forces.

What can be done? We start with the lawyers, who are not only invested with the monopolistic right to be attorneys for clients but should also be obliged, as officers of the court subject to their code of professional ethics, to be the sentinels for the administration of justice. Some are heroically assuming this august obligation to the people. But far too few of the 1.3 million lawyers in America see the rule of law for the myth it is; too few see the rule of power for the lawlessness it creates. More of them must assume the higher significance of their calling, to respond to the silent cries for justice—which nearly two centuries ago Senator Daniel Webster called “the great interest of man on Earth” and “the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.”

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a lecturer, attorney, author, political activist, and four-time candidate for president of the United States. In 2015 he founded the American Museum of Tort Law in Winsted, Connecticut.

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/rule-law/land-lawless

Yuval Harari's Talk at Davos on Existential Threats

Everyone needs to consider Yuval Harari’s concerns. His observations are clear and accurate. People must get involved and pressure our business and political leaders to work towards solutions to these threats. We need to know about these risks and decide how we want to confront them.

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first Century, humanity faces so many issues and questions, that it is really hard to know what to focus on. So I would like to use the next twenty minutes to help us focus of all the different issues we face. Three problems pose existential challenges to our species.

These three existential challenges are nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. We should focus on them.

Now nuclear war and ecological collapse are already familiar threats, so let me spend some time explaining the less familiar threat posed by technological disruption.

In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.

First, we might face upheavals on the social and economic level.

Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs, and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough. Suppose you are a fifty-years-old truck driver, and you just lost your job to a self-driving vehicle. Now there are new jobs in designing software or in teaching yoga to engineers – but how does a fifty-years-old truck driver reinvent himself or herself as a software engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full potential.

Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.

The AI revolution might create unprecedented inequality not just between classes but also between countries.

In the nineteenth Century, a few countries like Britain and Japan industrialized first, and they went on to conquer and exploit most of the world. If we aren’t careful, the same thing will happen in the twenty-first century with AI.

We are already in the midst of an AI arms race, with China and the USA leading the race, and most countries being left far far behind. Unless we take action to distribute the benefit and power of AI between all humans, AI will likely create immense wealth in a few high-tech hubs, while other countries will either go bankrupt or become exploited data-colonies.

Now we aren’t talking here about a science-fiction scenario of robots rebelling against humans. We are talking about far more primitive AI, which is nevertheless enough to disrupt the global balance.

Just think about what will happen to developing economies once it is cheaper to produce textiles or cars in California than in Mexico? And what will happen to politics in your country in twenty years, when somebody in San Francisco or Beijing knows the entire medical and personal history of every politician, every judge, and every journalist in your country, including all their sexual escapades, all their mental weaknesses and all their corrupt dealings? Will it still be an independent country or will it become a data-colony?

When you have enough data you don't need to send soldiers, in order to control a country.

Alongside inequality, the other major danger we face is the rise of digital dictatorships, that will monitor everyone all the time.

This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which I think might be the defining equation of life in the twenty-first century:

B x C x D = AHH!

Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh.

If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.

A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and decisions, and can ultimately make decisions for us.

Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That's what we are.

The power to hack humans can be used for good purposes – like providing much better healthcare. But if this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first-century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history. And we already have a number of applicants for the job of twenty-first-century century Stalin.

Just imagine North Korea in twenty years, when everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet which constantly monitors your blood pressure, your heart rate, your brain activity twenty-four hours a day. You listen to a speech on the radio by the great leader and they know what you actually feel. You can clap your hands and smile, but if you're angry, they know, you'll be in the gulag tomorrow.

And if we allow the emergence of such total surveillance regimes, don’t think that the rich and powerful in places like Davos will be safe, just ask Jeff Bezos. In Stalin’s USSR, the state-monitored members of the communist elite more than anyone else. The same will be true of future total surveillance regimes. The higher you are in the hierarchy – the more closely you’ll be watched.

Do you want your CEO or your president to know what you really think about them?

So it is in the interest of all humans, including the elites, to prevent the rise of such digital dictatorships. And in the meantime, if you get a suspicious WhatsApp message, from some Prince, don't open it.

Now if we indeed prevent the establishment of digital dictatorships, the ability to hack humans might still undermine the very meaning of human freedom. Because as humans will rely on AI to make more and more decisions for us, authority will shift from humans to algorithms and this is already happening.

Already today billions of people trust the Facebook algorithm to tell us what is new, the Google algorithm tells us what is true, Netflix tells us what to watch, and the Amazon and Alibaba algorithms tell us what to buy.

In the not-so-distant future, similar algorithms might tell us where to work and who to marry, and also decide whether to hire us for a job, whether to give us a loan, and whether the central bank should raise the interest rate.

And if you ask why you were not given a loan, and why you the bank didn't raise the interest rate the answer will always be the same – because the computer says no. And since the limited human brain lacks sufficient biological knowledge, computing power and data – humans will simply not be able to understand the computer’s decisions.

So even in supposedly free countries, humans are likely to lose control over our own lives and also lose the ability to understand public policy.

Already now how many humans understand the financial system? Maybe one percent to be very generous. In a couple of decades, the number of humans capable of understanding the financial system will be exactly zero.

Now we humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. What will be the meaning of human life, when most decisions are taken by algorithms? We don’t even have philosophical models to understand such an exsistence.

The usual bargain between philosophers and politicians is that philosophers have a lot of fanciful ideas, and politicians basically explain that they lack the means to implement these ideas. Now we are in an opposite situation. We are facing philosophical bankruptcy.

The twin revolutions of infotech and biotech are now giving politicians the means to create heaven or hell, but the philosophers are having trouble conceptualizing what the new heaven and the new hell will look like. And that’s a very dangerous situation.

If we fail to conceptualize the new heaven quickly enough, we might be easily misled by naïve utopias. And if we fail to conceptualize the new hell quickly enough, we might find ourselves entrapped there with no way out.

Finally, technology might disrupt not just our economy, politics and philosophy – but also our biology.

In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life-forms. After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.

Our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life and in using our new divine powers of creation we might make mistakes on a cosmic scale. In particular, governments, corporations and armies are likely to use technology to enhance human skills that they need – like intelligence and discipline – while neglecting other humans skills – like compassion, artistic sensitivity and spirituality.

The result might be a race of humans who are very intelligent and very disciplined but lack compassion, lack artistic sensitivity and lack spiritual depth. Of course, this is not a prophecy. These are just possibilities. Technology is never deterministic.

In the twentieth century, people used the same industrial technology to build very different kinds of societies: fascist dictatorships, communist regimes, liberal democracies. The same thing will happen in the twenty-first Century.

AI and biotech will certainly transform the world, but we can use them to create very different kinds of societies. And if you're afraid of some of the possibilities I’ve mentioned, you can still do something about it. But to do something effective, we need global cooperation.

All three existential challenges we face are global problems that demand global solutions.

Whenever a leader says something like “My Country First!” we should remind that leader that no nation can prevent nuclear war or stop ecological collapse by itself, and no nation can regulate AI and bioengineering by itself.

Almost every country will say: “Hey, we don’t want to develop killer robots or to genetically engineer human babies. We are the good guys. But we can't trust our rivals not to do it. So we must do it first”.

If we allow such an arms race to develop in fields like AI and bioengineering, it doesn’t really matter who wins the arms race – the loser will be humanity.

Unfortunately, just when global cooperation is more needed than ever before, some of the most powerful leaders and countries in the world are now deliberately undermining global cooperation. Leaders like the US president tell us that there is an inherent contradiction between nationalism and globalism, and that we should choose nationalism and reject globalism.

But this is a dangerous mistake. There is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism. Because nationalism isn’t about hating foreigners. Nationalism is about loving your compatriots. And in the twenty-first century, in order to protect the safety and the future of your compatriots, you must cooperate with foreigners.

So in the twenty-first century, good nationalists must be also globalists. Now globalism doesn’t mean establishing a global government, abandoning all national traditions, or opening the border to unlimited immigration. Rather, globalism means a commitment to some global rules.

Rules that don’t deny the uniqueness of each nation, but only regulate the relations between nations.

And a good model is the Football World Cup.

The World Cup is a competition between nations, and people often show fierce loyalty to their national team. But at the same time the World Cup is also an amazing display of global harmony. France can't play football against Croatia unless the French and the Croatians agree on the same rules for the game. And that’s globalism in action.

If you like the World Cup – you are already a globalist.

Now hopefully, nations could agree on global rules not just for football, but also for how to prevent ecological collapse, how to regulate dangerous technologies, and how to reduce global inequality. How to make sure, for example, that AI benefits Mexican textile workers and not only American software engineers. Now of course this is going to be much more difficult than football – but not impossible. Because the impossible, well we have already accomplished the impossible.

We have already escaped the violent jungle in which we humans have lived throughout history. For thousands of years, humans lived under the law of the jungle in a condition of omnipresent war. The law of the jungle said that for every two nearby countries, there is a plausible scenario that they will go to war against each other next year. Under this law, peace meant only “the temporary absence of war”.

When there was “peace” between – say – Athens and Sparta, or France and Germany, it meant that now they are not at war, but next year they might be. And for thousands of years, people had assumed that it was impossible to escape this law.

But in the last few decades, humanity has managed to do the impossible, to break the law, and to escape the jungle. We have built the rule-based liberal global order, that despite many imperfections, has nevertheless created the most prosperous and most peaceful era in human history.

The very meaning of the word “peace” has changed.

“Peace” no longer means just the temporary absence of war. Peace now means the implausibility of war.

There are many countries which you simply cannot imagine going to war against each other next year – like France and Germany. There are still wars in some parts of the world. I come from the Middle East, so believe me, I know this perfectly well. But it shouldn't blind us to the overall global picture.

We are now living in a world in which war kills fewer people than suicide, and gunpowder is far less dangerous to your life than sugar. Most countries – with some notable exceptions like Russia – don’t even fantasize about conquering and annexing their neighbors. Which is why most countries can afford to spend maybe just about two percent of their GDP on defense, while spending far, far more on education and healthcare. This is not a jungle.

Unfortunately, we have gotten so used to this wonderful situation, that we take it for granted, and we are therefore becoming extremely careless. Instead of doing everything we can to strengthen the fragile global order, countries neglect it and even deliberately undermine it.

The global order is now like a house that everybody inhabits and nobody repairs. It can hold on for a few more years, but if we continue like this, it will collapse – and we will find ourselves back in the jungle of omnipresent war.

We have forgotten what it's like, but believe me as a historian – you don’t want to be back there. It is far, far worse than you imagine.

Yes, our species has evolved in that jungle and lived and even prospered there for thousands of years, but if we return there now, with the powerful new technologies of the twenty-first century, our species will probably annihilate itself.

Of course, even if we disappear, it will not be the end of the world. Something will survive us. Perhaps the rats will eventually take over and rebuild civilization. Perhaps, then, the rats will learn from our mistakes.

But I very much hope we can rely on the leaders assembled here, and not on the rats.

Thank you.

— Yuval Noah Harari Davos, 2020

Who Should We Pay Attention To?

pay attention to the living

The mainstream news media is concerned with people fighting for money, power and attention. Alternative media is concerned with how and why people are fighting for money, power and attention. Social critics, educators, philosophers, engineers, scientists and various kinds of creators are concerned with exploring and articulating possible worlds where people aren't concerned with fighting for money, power and attention.

People do not know what "democracy" is, they have never experienced anything democratic. People do not know what "free agency" means, and most have never explored concepts of "free will." People are emotional and reactionary — rarely are they creative and progressive. Young people are generally emotional, reactionary, and prone to take more risks. The wealthy and powerful use their emotions to make money.

The police become the enemy when a particularly egregious insult finally ignites people's wrath. Anger usually arises after people have been meek followers contented with bread and circuses for so long that they have not been paying attention to the machinations and abuses of the ruling class. The potential for police departments to become fascist tools of the ruling class lies dormant, waiting for violence to unleash their lethal, anti-social potential.

Our social-economic system is pathological. Most people can not perceive this because to do so would be to acknowledge that one is part of the disease. People set the streets alight at night and beat each other in streetfights; during the day, people shop blissfully at the mall, play computer games, and work for corporations that dictate how they may live their lives. We do this for money, of course. We are conditioned for this.

Human beings in such circumstances resemble mindless zombies with a voracious appetite for bread and circuses.

All living beings exist in a symbiotic relationship with their environment. For human beings, a very social species, relationships are quite complicated, and the price of living in harmony with nature is high, although it may not seem so when we can extract so much material wealth and utility from nature. The cost of mindlessness for society is the blood of victims of war. The price for global, industrial consumerism is extinction. We can not avoid paying the price; nature always collects. To understand this, study the laws of thermal dynamics.

The cost of carbon emissions in our pseudo-civilization is extinction. Human society has not known civilization yet, although one might argue that we have been moving in that direction.

Revolution comes around to war, and war equals violence. History tells us this again and again. If one is willing to kill and be killed, then go ahead, surrender to the system — pay the price.

One's consciousness must take many things into account if one is to develop the creativity to move beyond these cycles.

Homo Sapiens live and die. A zombie is a virus, though not a living one, mindlessly consuming itself like a soulless machine.

It is time to resuscitate. It is time to put the soul back into the mind.

https://www.bfi.org/

First, define what you are trying to achieve.

This Is The Thing

I've enjoyed getting lost; I've enjoyed discovering whatever came of the journey. I've experienced losing what I thought I'd found – again and again. Getting lost while not knowing what I was looking for, with only the comfort of what I am, has been a privilege. Reveling in heartbreaks and letdowns, the flawed perfection theory and my wacko bona fides have always been an undeserved comfort to me. Never really suffering, never banged up abroad, awash in tears and proud of it I stumbled along in some mysterious grace. Is it the height of arrogance to know death can not humiliate me? Understanding life as a struggle for humility and knowledge as something that doesn't belong to me is not heroic. The banal beauty of it all can almost be painful it's so good.

That entropic mystery, the illusion of time is nothing as the Buddhists say. I am aware of my strange predetermined, WEIRD background that predetermines nothing in a deterministic universe. I sense the magic of consciousness I'm somehow conscious of that seems to give me agency. I intuitively feel nothing would simulate me. I know I could get bored with my self-illusion – someday. I experience the pure sense of joy that comes more often than not as an undeserved gift. Mystery, it is all a mystery. Do we all live utterly selfish lives in one way or another where we make a few people happy and disappoint the rest whose opinions and sensibilities matter only as threads in the fabric of illusion? Within the noise, if we can not find stillness, silence, and solitude, we will never truly exist. We must not merely find these qualities; we must be them. Only then can we begin to understand genuinely ecstatic connections.

Feeling connected and in love with a few marvelous people, thankfulness flows like a river of life. That's the thing.

Hong Kong, My Friend

So you tried peaceful protest in 2014, and now it's time to take the gloves off?

"The history of sea power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war. The profound influence of sea commerce upon the wealth and strength of countries was clearly seen long before the true principles which governed its growth and prosperity were detected."

"The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice." – Alfred Thayer Mahan

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"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." 

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

We have the theory of asymmetric information in economics and the balance of power theory in geopolitics. (Believe me, they are relevant to what I’m saying below.) Emotional reactions to events are never theoretical, but it's essential to understand major Theories if we are going to change things we want to change or maintain things we want to maintain.

It's almost impossible to gauge the many influences that ignite our actions, but we have to try.

We are awash in information that updates every second. It's easy to spark outrage. It's harder and harder to establish well-founded perspectives on fast-paced events.

What's happening in Hong Kong now is hard for me to write about because it's not as straight forward or as narrowly focused as many people might think. Also, I've lived and worked in Hong Kong for many years, and I like the place. I've seen it change, a lot, since I first visited with my parents in 1967. I have waxed nostalgic over many good times and circumstances that I've known here over the years.

After the failure of the "Umbrella Movement," it was inevitable that something would eventually set off more mass action as Hong Kong struggles with its identity during Beijing's ongoing takeover of the Special Administrative Region.

I won't attempt to go into detail or address the structural and political issues involved; there is no shortage of intelligent and informed opinion on the subject. I can only share my impressions as an attempt to break through my own confusion on the matter.

I have spoken to quite a few people about why they are participating in the protests. It seems to me that young people are worried about losing their unique sense of identity. They are concerned about the future. They are concerned about Hong Kong's special status, basic law, human rights, housing, the economy; all the things most people are concerned with around the world.

Take a look at what young people are doing in Russia now. They appear to have similar concerns about their elections.

My intuition tells me that there are interests on both sides of the border that may be operating in bad faith. I haven't found any specific evidence of this so far so I won't go into it. When I talk to people or read articles, it's clear that, especially among young people, trust in the police and the Hong Kong government is diminishing. It's also clear that young people I've talked with don't trust the Communist Party of China.

Young Hong Kong people have grown up in a unique environment with a culture influenced by British Crown Rule from 1847 to 1997. Things are different here. Over the decades of my activities in Hong Kong, I've always found it to be a friendly, open place where a person can do business and live life. It's not a perfect place, no place is, but it can be an excellent place to live and work; it has been for me.

Hong Kong is a complex, international community, open to the world. Its legal system is easy to navigate. Real estate is king. It's gone through many cycles of economic development and reinvented itself many times over its relatively short history. When mainland China opened up, Hong Kong was an essential element of China's strategy for economic growth. Today, so many things have changed. The Pearl River Delta region is a true mega-city. The pace and breadth of development in the region are impressive. I first visited China in 1980, and I can tell you that China is like a timelapse movie. In the late nineties, I'd look out the window of my old apartment in Shanghai watching highway construction; the highway was going up so fast that it seemed that if you took a train to Hangzhou for the weekend, it would be completed when you got back. Hong Kong is a perpetual construction site. The place where I live in Hong Kong is growing so fast that I sometimes wonder what will come of it all. Make debt through development to make money, I guess. Read, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins, and I think you'll understand where the CCP got their Belt and Road idea. When people are indebted to you, you have "leverage." Hong Kong is continually reclaiming land so they can build on it and increase revenue. Amidst all of this glorious development, the world-class shopping malls, five-star hotels, and private housing estates, most people live modest lives in small concrete apartments.

Most Hong Kong people seem relatively content, no matter how hard life is. Hong Kong has always felt like a safe city to me, a place where you can stagger home blind drunk and not get mugged. It's a place where you can enjoy relationships with people from around the world. It has beautiful places to hike, some attractive beaches, good local food, and lots of shopping areas. Hong Kong's location is also ideal for doing business in Asia.

It's clear to me that Hong Kong people desire to maintain their unique Hong Kong identity. People don't want to become "mainland Chinese." They like their educational system; they enjoy their open connection to the world. They will tolerate the inequality, crowded conditions, the lack of space, and so on if they can just be allowed to maintain their unique culture.

Unfortunately, culture is an emergent thing, always changing, never fixed. Most people will know that Chinese history is long, complicated, and profound. China is becoming a superpower again, and there has never been more at stake. If things go well, the world may benefit from China's new status; if not, we could see another world war. There exists a naturally pressurized context that includes forces way beyond its borders. I've read quite a bit over the years about China, and I still feel way out of my depth when I think about current events in light of the geopolitical ramifications of the ongoing "great game" as dominant players game theory their power plays in the Asia region.

Below are some of my concerns.

In places where demonstrations aren't regularly taking place, Hong Kong is doing its best to maintain business as usual. Is business as usual, a good thing?

I find the motivations of the protestors to be a bit naive. I can't see how their current tactics will meet with a positive result. I understand, however, that they feel that there is nothing else they can do, they feel as if they have found only dead ends down every path. In my opinion, this is evidence of a lack of imagination and sophistication in their leadership. Perhaps there isn't any leadership.

The protests seem like emotional reactions to events and a perceived loss of identity, not strategically designed to engage in a practical course of action that might achieve positive engagement from the CCP.

They are compelled to struggle, but, unfortunately, they most likely won't achieve success. And yet, as Chris Hedges says, "I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." I'm not saying China is a fascist State. One could say, "We fight for our freedom and identity not because we will win, but because we value our freedom and identity." They are worried that they are losing something precious that they will never get back once lost; this is a compelling reason to "revolt."

The global socio-economic system is unsustainable, any local, conventional action intended to reform the system while maintaining the status quo is doomed to fail. As it collapses, only terrible things can happen to our environment, our ecosystem, our habitat, culture, and health. It's time to recognize that what's happening in Hong Kong, the United States, the U.K., Russia, Central America, Venezuela, Brazil, India, and many other places in the world stems from the same baked in causes. We need a global, coordinated effort to address structural issues and redesign our economic system, emphasizing sustainability, health, and justice for all. Of course, global efforts start locally.

Can we do that? Probably not but its a betrayal of everything good about Homo Sapiens if we don't try.

Climate change is already changing everything anyway, and we can't stop that no matter what we do so we might as well prepare for it for the consequences and allocate the resources needed to continue the journey towards civilization. I don't think we are genuinely civilized yet.

We are living in a period where understanding the big-picture takes on enormous importance. We have to understand the forest and the trees.

We must avoid global conflict and work together across nations to solve problems. A global conflict would be the end of our species. We don't seem to be concerned with biodiversity or the sixth extinction, but shouldn't the lives of our grandchildren matter enough to transcend our differences for peace and long-term prosperity and health?

Hong Kong must find a way to work successfully with the CCP. Gunboats are not coming to Hong Kong's rescue. If people feel the government isn't prepared to help at all, and therefore limit their tactics, it's going to be a long hard road until they finally arrive at an unknowable destination.

There are things worth fighting for, and there are aspects of culture worth preserving, but things are always changing and how you flow with the changes makes all the difference.

I'm hoping people take a break from breaking things on the street and form community comities where they can work on ways to achieve a better Hong Kong by analyzing history, geopolitics, economics, society, culture, technology, science, etc. Young people need a coherent strategy that has a chance of success. I hope they endeavor to come up with proposals that are so good they can't be ignored. Focus on values that are profound and indispensable. The more informed the efforts are, the more likely we are to create long-term solutions.

Also, I hope they focus on the real, structural problems, identify roadblocks, understand their blind spots and the blind spots of their opposition, comprehend the limitations of all sides, and work to help each other overcome all challenges. I'm afraid that if young people aren't patient enough to collaborate, they will ultimately lose the fight.

When Hell breaks loose, it will be too late for anything but panic and suffering. Until then, we must be positive and keep searching for answers.

I know people here believe that the government isn't listening. That's frustrating, indeed. Sometimes when people aren't listening, it's best to find new questions, broaden the conversation, establish common ground, and let parties know that you are in it for the long run and you will do what it takes to find solutions.

More unrest may have horrible unintended consequences. There is a massive power imbalance, and we should recognize this. None of this is to say that people here shouldn't continue to struggle for what they believe is essential.

I feel that China doesn't want things to break down. It benefits no one if Hong Kong stumbles into chaos. Don't give up trying new things. It's not helpful to believe that one's tried everything and nothing will work except unrest.

Here's an excellent resource for peaceful civil disobedience strategies.

About The Wildfire Project

Our world is shifting rapidly. All the systems that shape our lives are in crisis or collapse. Wildfire supports social movements to navigate this time, and adapt and grow through it, by stepping into collective agency in the face of physical, political, and spiritual violence.

Wildfire does more than just activist facilitation. We support organizational transformation as we all navigate the unstable terrain of change. Our Partnerships take grassroots movement groups through creative, experiential, long-term processes that help them shift their own group cultures through cycles of practice. This includes moving through generative conflict; connection to land, our bodies, ritual and song; grounding the work in study, history, and political education; navigating power, rank, and leadership; building concrete strategy and organizing skills; finding balance between purpose & belonging; assisting interpersonal transformation, and building cultures of curiosity learning.

Our programs prepare these groups, and individuals within them, to lead grassroots social movements toward their own potential – to help us all become become big, bold, visionary, and strategic enough to build the world we all deserve.

In addition to our core Partner Programming (see Partner Groups below for more), we also coordinate fellowships and convenings, offer coaching, and facilitate coalitions, single workshops & retreats, pop-ed curriculum development, and meetings for groups on a shorter-term basis.

Civil disobedience can work, but it's a marathon, not a sprint, it takes time and requires sacrifices. A sense of urgency is essential, at this point incremental change may not save us but we have to understand that to achieve success we can't merely go on with our comfortable lives expecting a better status quo than the one that's lead to all the problems in the first place. Also, we can't rely on "creative destruction." Sometimes, when we break things, they remain broken.

Of course, if you are content, maybe nothing can move you. Many people are lazy and fearful of change. Some people have it so good that they will do anything to defend their position. Be careful while backing these people into a corner.

Most importantly, if you are going to break the system, you have to have something better to replace it. We need vision and concrete ways to implement our ideas. We have to design and engineer a new way of living in this world, and we have to convince influential players that change is for their benefit as well.

I'm not optimistic. We are relatively spoiled people, unaccustomed to discomfort. Most of us would settle for some more money and a few more material possessions. If the lights went out for a month, many of us wouldn't survive. Most of us have no idea what keeps the lights on anyway. We could care less about our environment as long as we can go shopping and watch Netflix after work. We are more concerned with who will win the football match than we are about whether our companions feel loved.

I have noticed while doing business here, that when people are focused on making money, everything else in their lives is secondary. They are myopic, only concerned with power, prestige, security, and the things money can buy. We fly off to beautiful places only to trash them for a selfie and to say that we've been there. We rush here and there and lose ourselves in noise.

It's time to reevaluate everything and get serious about working together to make things better for everyone. Of course, if you think things are great and can only get better than you probably think people like me are insane. Well, sit back, enjoy the show, and come what may...

One more thing, when you step out into the streets to fight, you have to understand that you might get hurt. It has to be worth it to you. How long can you handle the pain before you give in? How many sacrifices are you prepared to make and for what exactly. What are you building? What do you want? Why do you want it? How are you going to get it? How are you going to maintain it? The answers to these questions must be crystal clear. Don't think that they are simple questions, the more you know, the more complex these questions become.

Regardless of how you feel about these questions, you'll need to train to be tough. Things are not going to get more comfortable under our current socio-economic way of doing things. New challenges are coming faster than ever. These days, if we want to increase our agency, our ability to make good choices that have a positive impact on life and our future, we have to learn new things continually. We even have to learn to defend ourselves from progress. It's true; certain kinds of rapid growth aren't always good for us. Our world has never been more complex than it is today. All the great things we've developed in our history could disappear in a moment if we aren't careful.

My heart goes out to the young people here; I tear up after I talk with them. They seem so innocent to me. I'm getting old.

One has to be reasonably sophisticated to make good things happen these days. Sure, we can appeal to our basest emotions and move the masses, but what will that achieve? Power? Power for whom? Today, more than ever, we need to know how things work and the consequences of our actions. And, above all, we need each other.

Good luck, my friend, all the best, Hong Kong.

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I always wonder about the human rights record of the U.S.A. Never the less, some organizations are keenly interested in what happens in Hong Kong.

Ask Your Representatives to Co-Sponsor Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019

Below is a view from a Beijing media organization as penned by Tom Fowdy, a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities.

Just what do people in Hong Kong want?

Given this, whilst news outlets are portraying events in the territory as a noble and chauvinistic struggle between good and evil, the reality is that this is a much more all-embracing social conflict whereby a sense of local exceptionalism is unable to come to terms with the pragmatic implications of its own existence.

However, uprooting the territory and inducing political chaos is not going to change the status quo. Instead, it will only serve to increase the sentiment in Beijing that Hong Kong as it stands is a liability to the stability of the country and region.

I often wonder what freedom is in various contexts. I wonder what democracy means to most people. I wonder what free will is and all sorts of things. I watch cycles of unrest happen over and over again, everywhere. I live through economic bubbles and crashes. I watch wars, police actions and social turmoil on T.V. I know the ice is melting in the Arctic and on Greenland and I know that’s not a good thing. I wonder if consumerism makes anyone happy. I’ve come to believe that the way things are organized is far from optimal. I’m constantly improving the discipline required to operate my bull shit detector kit. My epistemic humility grows by the day. I question the value of hope. I am more focused on what can be done and on whether people can find ways of doing things together. I know that human life is about community, sharing and interdependence. Perhaps the values that underpin that will make a comeback in the Anthropocene when bread and circuses had never been more exciting, entertaining and in some cases enlightening.

"Final Evasion" will not be the final scandal unless we do some real work, now.

Horrific scandals of corruption and greed emerge into public scrutiny almost monthly. The amount of information about these crimes is voluminous and factual and yet, people yawn, go fishing and wait for the next horrific scandal as if it were an episode of House of Cards. I can only surmise that we are all so utterly programmed to conform to this system that we can hardly think about the ramifications of our pathological culture of greed to our own families.

These tragic crimes are in your face, and we only seem to care when it's someone close to us that gets destroyed. What's worse is that we don't do a damn thing to reform the root causes of our affliction. It's as if an advertising agency convinced all of us that cancer and war are great things for society because a few big businesses become wildly profitable, and a few people grow super rich. Wait a minute, not "as if," this is our society; this is what we tolerate year after year.

Please read the article below. Are we not shocked? What does that say about us?

For 30 years, prosecutors and victims tried to hold Jeffrey Epstein to account. At every turn, he slipped away.

By Marc Fisher, Jonathan O'Connell

At the beginning, middle and end of his career, Jeffrey Epstein faced a reckoning with his misdeeds. At every stage, he managed to avoid the efforts of prosecutors and victims to confront him with his financial chicanery and sexual abuses. On Saturday, he apparently chose to end his life rather than face what he had done. 

“That money would have been my real retirement,” said Veriena Braune, a 91-year-old retired teacher in Granbury, Tex., who invested all of her savings — $112,000 — in bonds that a young Epstein sold for his partner, Steven Hoffenberg. She lost every penny of the money. 

“Somebody should know: that Epstein did a number on a little teacher in Texas,” Braune said. 

Hoffenberg, who headed up the investment scheme and spent 18 years in prison because of it, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that Epstein was “the architect of the scam.” Federal prosecutors agreed. Yet Epstein was never charged. His name, initially included in prosecutors’ descriptions of the scheme, quickly vanished from the record. 

“I thought Jeffrey was the best hustler on two feet,” Hoffenberg said. “Talent, charisma, genius, criminal mastermind. We had a thing that could make a lot of money. We called it Ponzi.” 

Hoffenberg pleaded guilty in 1995 to mail fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion in two scams — one designed to misuse the assets of two Illinois insurance companies and the other fleecing more than $460-million from about 200,000 investors who bought notes and bonds from Hoffenberg’s Towers Financial Corp. 

“Last year, I got a call at home from no less than Steven Hoffenberg,” said Marvin Gerber, another victim of the scam and a tour operator on Long Island who lost about $250,000 that he’d invested in promissory notes that Epstein and Hoffenberg were selling. “He said he sat in jail for years trying to figure out how he was going to get the money to give back to the people who lost it. He said he was going to try to get it from the guy who absconded with the money – Epstein. But of course, I got nothing. From the very start, I was screwed.” 

Last year, two of the victims in the scam filed suit against Epstein seeking the return of their original investments. Two months later, they dropped their suit. 

'Genius' with 'no moral compass' 

Epstein’s career in finance started at Bear Stearns, the investment banking firm that hired him away from his job teaching math at the tony Dalton School. (It may have helped that he came to Bear Stearns after having tutored the son of the firm’s chairman.) He quickly rose to become a limited partner but left the company suddenly in 1981. Epstein later testified in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation that some people at the firm thought his departure had to do with “an illicit affair with a secretary,” but Epstein said he had been questioned by his bosses about an improper loan he’d made to a friend to buy stock. 

He spent the next few years on his own, trying to build a money management practice known as J. Epstein & Co. In 1987, he met Hoffenberg. 

In the late ’80s, Hoffenberg was, by his own account, a schemer. “I was always under investigation,” he said. From afar, he seemed successful – he briefly owned the New York Post, and he rented a floor in Trump Tower (“Donald’s crowd was my crowd,” Hoffenberg said). But much of Hoffenberg’s career involved schemes to separate investors from their money. He figured Epstein had the smarts to help him do that on a much bigger scale. 

Hoffenberg said he was introduced to Epstein by Douglas Leese, a British arms dealer. “The guy’s a genius,” Hoffenberg said Leese told him. “He’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.” Leese did not respond to messages seeking comment. 

Between about 1987 and 1993, Epstein worked for Hoffenberg, who paid him $25,000 a month and gave him a $2-million loan in 1988 that Epstein would never have to pay back, according to court documents. 

Hoffenberg’s firm, Towers Financial, started out as a collection agency, buying bills that were owed to other firms and collecting as much of the unpaid debts as it could. In 1986, after adding business units in finance and leasing, Towers reported nearly 1,200 employees and nationwide sales of $95-million. 

Hoffenberg — like Epstein a Brooklyn native who never finished college — was on his way to acquiring many of the trappings of New York’s financial elite, including chauffeured luxury cars, speedboats and a 72-foot yacht. 

But in 1987, Towers began constructing one of the largest frauds in history. The scheme began when Towers acquired the parent of two insurance companies, Associated Life Insurance and United Fire. Then, Towers launched a takeover attempt against Pan Am, the once-proud but then-struggling airline. 

To boost its chances, Towers told the SEC that it had an expert on its team: Epstein. Towers called him “a financial advisor who has been familiar with Pan Am for approximately six years” and was now advising Towers. 

What neither regulators nor Pan Am knew was that, as Hoffenberg admitted later in court, Towers had begun devising a classic Ponzi scheme, named for a swindler who defrauded investors by moving money back and forth to create the false impression that profit was being made. 

After acquiring the insurance companies, Towers began siphoning funds from them to make its bid for Pan Am look viable. Hoffenberg and Epstein also began pulling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, court documents show. Hoffenberg issued more than 50 checks from the insurance companies to pay his stepdaughter’s tuition, expenses on his private plane and monthly $25,000 checks to Epstein. 

“I advanced money to Epstein perpetually because I thought this thing could work,” Hoffenberg said. “He could sell anything. People loved him.” 

When the airline takeover failed, the insurance companies faltered. Then, in 1988, Towers took another $1.8-million from the insurers and used it to attempt another airline takeover, of Emery Air Freight. Towers filed fake financial information to accountants and investors to cover its tracks, according to court records. 

That takeover also failed, leaving the insurance companies insolvent. The looting of the two insurers left 4,000 Illinois customers out $9-million that had been set aside to cover their medical bills. Another 2,200 Ohio customers lost about $1.8-million. 

The IL Dept. of Insurance placed the companies in receivership. The state and the SEC sued Towers. 

But Hoffenberg and Epstein weren’t done. According to prosecutors, they expanded the fraud dramatically. Beginning in 1988, Towers began selling more than $270-million worth of promissory notes, offering returns of 12 to 16 percent and marketing them largely to people of modest means, among them widows, retirees and people with disabilities. 

Hoffenberg and his company used several million dollars from those investors to show Illinois regulators that they were putting sufficient capital into the insurance companies to guarantee that those insurers could cover claims. But that money actually wasn’t available to pay claims because it had been used in the efforts to take over the airlines. 

“I call it a turnover,” Hoffenberg said this week. “You raise a dollar here, you pay a dollar there. Epstein was brilliant at this.” 

Sometimes, the machinations went very wrong. The money Towers used to try to buy control of Emery Air Freight was lost when Emery’s stock price plummeted. 

By 1993, prosecutors in Illinois and New York who had spent years investigating Hoffenberg’s companies were ready to spell out their findings. 

In front of a grand jury in Chicago, federal prosecutor Edward Kohler walked Hoffenberg, who had just agreed to cooperate with the government, through the design of the scam. In the narrative Kohler laid out, Epstein was the technical wizard who kept the money moving around to support Hoffenberg’s various schemes. 

Over and over, Kohler asked Hoffenberg whether Epstein had designed Towers’ scams. Hoffenberg affirmed the prosecutor’s story at every turn. 

“Jeffrey Epstein was the person in charge of the transactions,” Hoffenberg said. 

“Epstein was trying to manipulate the price of the stock?” Kohler asked. 

“Yes,” Hoffenberg replied. 

“You didn’t object to that, sir?” 

“No,” Hoffenberg said. 

That was in November 1993. Three months later, Epstein’s name disappeared from the case. 

Beginnings of mysterious wealth 

In court hearings, FBI reports and affidavits throughout 1994 and 1995, prosecutors and FBI agents referred to Hoffenberg’s “co-conspirators,” “confederates” and “others.” 

A review of court files finds no further reference to Epstein as the case moved toward a conclusion that convicted Hoffenberg and sent him to prison for 18 years. 

Kohler, still a prosecutor in the US attorney’s office in Chicago, declined to comment on why Epstein was removed from the case. 

“All I can tell you is it was 25 years ago,” Kohler said this week. “I really haven’t thought about it since then.” 

Other prosecutors who worked on the cases said that Hoffenberg was always their primary target and that Epstein was removed from the government’s narrative because he cooperated with prosecutors. 

“Epstein was not the focus of what we were doing,” said Barry Gross, who represented the Illinois Department of Insurance in the case against Hoffenberg. “We were trying to take over these insurance companies and eliminate the Hoffenberg management to protect the policyholders. Epstein was someone Hoffenberg favored, and he transferred substantial insurance company funds to Epstein. If you’re looking at Epstein’s mysterious accumulation of wealth, it sounds right that this is the place to start. But Epstein was never our focus.” 

Hoffenberg also cooperated with the government, beginning in March 1993. But his deal collapsed in early 1994, when, according to testimony by prosecutor Daniel Nardello, Hoffenberg violated the agreement by starting three new collection agencies and lying about it to prosecutors — effectively continuing the scheme that got him in trouble in the first place. Through a spokesman, Nardello declined to comment. 

One month after the government presented its version of the case with Epstein as a major player, Hoffenberg admitted to prosecutors that “he had lied to the government in an effort to find a way to support his family,” Nardello wrote in an affidavit. Nardello moved to terminate the government’s deal with Hoffenberg. 

Amy Millard, a federal prosecutor in New York who handled the case during sentencing, said Hoffenberg’s repeated lying made it difficult to rely on anything he said. She pushed to revoke his bail and move forward with the charges. 

“I did not think he was a credible witness,” she said. Hoffenberg was hospitalized with depression in 1970; a psychiatric exam when he was sentenced in 1996 concluded that although he was narcissistic, he was “well oriented” and not “disturbed or impaired.” 

Why Hoffenberg did not give prosecutors details of Epstein’s role in the scheme as part of his bid for a reduced sentence remains something of a mystery. 

Gary H. Baise, a Washington lawyer who represented Hoffenberg during his incarceration, said the judge in the case, Robert W. Sweet, told him years later that the purpose of the long sentence was to get Hoffenberg to give up co-conspirators. Sweet died this year. 

“Judge Sweet did not like the idea that he had sentenced Steven to 18 years, but he said, ‘By golly, I was trying to break him,’ ” Baise said. “He couldn’t figure out why Steve didn’t blow the whistle on Epstein or others.” 

Baise said he also couldn’t figure it out. Clearly, any friendship between the two men had ended. After Hoffenberg was released from prison in 2013, Baise and his wife met Hoffenberg in New York, where the newly freed man unexpectedly offered to take them to Epstein’s townhouse. Baise said a young woman greeted them at the door, took their names and disappeared inside. When she returned, Baise said, she slammed the door in their faces. 

Four other Towers executives were convicted of roles in the fraud, generally serving little or no jail time. 

Hoffenberg said he had decided he could not rat out a partner. He said variously that he was under threat from Epstein to remain silent and that prosecutors faced similar pressure to drop Epstein from their case. Hoffenberg offered no evidence for his allegation, which Nardello, the prosecutor at the time, called “desperate and ludicrous. . . . Hoffenberg’s insinuations reflect only on his apparent ability to project his corrupt view of the world onto others.” 

Hoffenberg said Epstein’s role in the scam eats at him. “He got away with it because I didn’t cooperate,” Hoffenberg said. “How could you remove the architect of the crime from the story of the crime? I screwed myself, but I also got in bed with the wrong set of criminals. The whole thing blew up, but he wasn’t touched.” 

Victims' Last Hope 

Frail and in ill-health, Hoffenberg says his last goal in life is to reimburse investors who lost money in the Towers scam. He intends to do that with Epstein’s money. “Every dollar Epstein has raised since leaving me has been tainted because everything came from the money he stole in Towers,” Hoffenberg said. 

In 2016, Hoffenberg and some of his victims joined forces to file suit against Epstein, seeking restitution. But when a judge expressed skepticism that Hoffenberg could legally be part of a class action with his own victims, Hoffenberg withdrew the suit. 

Some of the victims say they believe Hoffenberg is truly remorseful. Others aren’t buying it. 

“The concept of Hoffenberg being penitent is pure theater,” said Gross, the lawyer who represented Illinois in the insurance case. 

“I’m not looking to clear my name,” said Hoffenberg, who was interviewed in his room at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut, where he was awaiting surgery. “I’m 74, I’m in a hospital bed, what do I have to gain? I owe people half a billion dollars. The only way they get paid is with the money that Epstein took, which originally comes from the Towers scam.” 

But although Hoffenberg claims to know where Epstein stashed his money overseas, he has not contacted law enforcement and doesn’t plan to. “They know my number,” he said. 

Epstein’s death by hanging in his cell in a New York jail appears to be a macabre final escape in a long series of evasions by a fabulously wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who used his private jet and Palm Beach parties to lure presidents and plutocrats into his orbit. 

Equal parts charismatic and devious, he was a Wall Street washout with a knack for numbers and, according to those who worked with him, a mind set on deceit. From his beginnings as a college dropout who scored a job as a math teacher at a Manhattan prep school to his career as a millionaire adviser to some of the nation’s top corporate executives and politicians, Epstein acted as if the rules of life did not apply to him. 

A decade ago, he avoided a long prison sentence even after police and prosecutors amassed an enormous array of evidence showing that he regularly abused girls at his Palm Beach mansion and on a Caribbean island that he’d bought. In that case, as at several pivotal points throughout his life, Epstein avoided the law by deploying some of the nation’s most famous lawyers and leaning on friendships with powerful figures in politics, business and academia. 

Epstein’s ability to slip away even when those around him are held to account reaches back to well before he’d accumulated any fortune. Epstein, who died at 66, reported to federal authorities recently that he was worth $559 million, but some of his associates contend he had much more than that hidden overseas; others wonder whether he had anything close to that sum. Whatever the truth, he worked to build the impression that he was wealthy and influential, helping him connect with powerful people who for many years defended his character when rumors emerged that he was abusing women and girls. 

The story of Epstein’s first great escape is a tale of financial wizardry and brazen criminality, in which hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their retirement money, their life’s savings, on an investment intended to enrich only its creators. 

For some reason the original video is suddenly gone today.

Trump sitting next to Ivanka admits that he is a sexual predator. What is the response of Ivanka Trump? Inappropriate giggling. By the time they made this video, Trump had been accused of raping Ivanka's mother pic.twitter.com/ADJcxSTxjw

— ☇RiotWomenn☇ (@riotwomennn) August 2, 2018

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If you want this destruction to end and believe that people and society must be better, more morally and ethically grounded, then read the following book and give your train of thought a healthy upgrade.

Understand The Contradictions

I know "white" men in Hong Kong who are racist (although they pretend not to know it) and misogynistic (although they would deny it). They would feel much better in a "white" country, although, ironically, they livein an Asian country. They believe that the only thing a woman is good for is cheating on their wives. Some of these men don't work; their wives support them. There is a contradiction there, no?

U.S. candidates for President talk about saving capitalism by paying people a universal, basic income while ignoring structural issues that produced inequality, underemployment, and poverty. They can't see the contradictions within their non-solutions.

Below is an excerpt from Niall Ferguson's book, "The War Of The World – History's Age of Hatred."

This list is from a Nazi handbook for young couples produced in 1933.

1. Remember that you are German.

2. If of sound stock, do not remain unwed.

3. Keep your body pure.

4. Keep spirit and soul pure.

5. As a German, choose someone of German or Nordic blood for your partner.

6. When choosing your spouse, look into their lineage.

7. Health is a precondition of external beauty.

8. Marry only out of love.

9. Seek not a playmate but a partner in marriage.

10. Wish for as many children as possible

The Nazis knew that they would be needing cannon fodder and they also needed an enemy they could focus on and rob. They found that in their highly integrated Jewish community. You know what followed.

What do you suppose “pure” meant to the authors of the handbook? Search your spirit and soul and leave your answer in the comment section below.

Ferguson's book is far from perfect, but it's a fascinating read and worth your time, in my opinion. The shocking thing about reading a history book like this now is how many aspects of the cultures it describes are echoed in today's extremist rhetoric.

If you don’t read the book, please read this review of the book by Nicholas Humphrey: Killer Instinct: a Review of Niall Ferguson's "World of War: History's Century of Hatred".

And from Nazis handbooks on marriage, I'd like to jump ahead to our present-day Alt-Right. Please watch the video below about why some women are spokespeople for the Alt-Right.

Today we'll be discussing the women of the alt right, specifically focusing on their rhetoric and recruiting strategies. We'll shine a spotlight on prominent women in the movement, including Lana Lokteff, Ayla Stewart, Faith Goldy and Lauren Southern (although I guess Lauren officially quit as I was editing this vid...lets hope it sticks.)

Did you understand the contradictions she describes in the video? I hope you did. Either these women are simply opportunists entertaining a niche market, or they are very conflicted. At the very least their logic is tragically flawed.

The next video talks about the flawed logic of our leaders who are dead set on ignoring structural issues in favor of tired tropes of the past. They are ineffectual, and nothing but mass action will discourage them from the delusion that they are fit to lead. As you watch, please be mindful of the contradictions the commentators are pointing out.

Ben Burgis debunks the argument that education alone is the best anti-poverty program.

Education may not be a panacea, but it would greatly help society if voters educated themselves.

Be always mindful of contradictions.

If You Can't Criticize Your Government You Aren't Free

I had to post this segment of The Jimmy Dore show because its main point is absolutely on the mark. Representatives are supposed to criticize the government. If you live in a government without representatives who are critical of the government, you are living in a dictatorship.

A few quick takeaways off the tops of my head:

1. Rand Paul is a hypocrite who takes Ayn Rand too seriously

2. People in the USA don't now history

3. Americans are very easily manipulated

4. The vast majority of people in the USA are immigrants (define immigrants)

5. California was part of Mexico before it was taken by the United States

6. The United States hasn't done working people any favors for decades

7. They mentioned a lot of excellent books that every American should read

I could go on with the list; the segment is full of insight from beginning to end. I have to add that it's disappointing that so many people in the United States are militantly, and stubbornly willfully-ignorant. People in the United States are infected by an ideology that they don't understand. The problem is how to develop an intellectually curious and active society again.

#TheJimmyDoreShow is a hilarious and irreverent take on news, politics and culture featuring Jimmy Dore, a professional stand up comedian, author and podcaster. With over 5 million downloads on iTunes, the show is also broadcast on KPFK stations throughout the country.

• America: A Farewell Tour

• Guns Germs and Steel

• The People’s History of the United States

• Death of the Liberal Class

• Listen Liberal

Why Will There Be A World War In The 21st Century?

This is an important presentation that everyone should watch. We need to understand these things if we are going to avoid catastrophe. The world you know was created by the science of WAR. The geniuses you worship are only marketing guys. Do you want more control over your life and future? Understand what this man is saying.

George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures explains how war is closer to our lives than we think. Is our sense of security false? Are we really the craftsmen of our futures?

Beau Provides a Fresh Voice of Compassionate Reason

I have to share this. I feel what he’s saying in the depths of my mind and spirit, in my body and soul. If America is ever great, it’s the young people today that will make it so. They will create a new story that will develop into a truly great country that will help our human family achieve greatness. Finally.

Right on brother Beau. America does have the potential to be great and it's the wisdom of our youth that will launch that process. Thanks to people like you. All honest intellectuals are teachers.

InterReflections – A Film by Peter Joseph

If you can afford it, please support this film. It will be a big step up from his other films and should have much greater impact.

2019 video update by Peter Joseph regarding the long-delayed InterReflections film trilogy project. www.interreflectionsmovie.com

We are looking forward to seeing this film.