Fodder for the Greater Vision

Fodder for the Greater Vision

The Ministry of Truth is on 'pause.' Maybe go underground for a while. Work on its mask. But something revealing has occurred in the Ministry mess. What about The Tsarina?

What about the Disinformation Governance Board’s director, Nina Jankowicz?

Mayorkas struggled to answer questions about the board’s work in front of lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this month. He had no idea who this woman was or why anyone would be upset. So she was just destroyed, destroyed by the casual indifference that her leaders showed.

Senate Democrats abruptly canceled a hearing last week, where Jankowicz was scheduled to testify, after a multiple of her videos went viral, including one showing her bragging about being the "Mary Poppins of disinformation." Democrats were reluctant to have Jankowicz face questioning from Republicans, prompting them to scrap the event altogether, which led to the board being disbanded.

She has a rather weird history, working for a CIA front and for a right-wing group in Ukraine. It is a shadowy and peculiar story but the real story is that she is an airhead. How could this silly woman with her Mary Poppins songs be in any government position at all?

The only thing worse is how she was sacrificed and butchered by her resumed friends in the government. They just rolled her out to the potential criticism. No justification. No defense. Exposed and left on her own. Like the Russian U.S. President Joe Biden nominated Saule Omarova.

“Until I came to the US, I couldn't imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today's world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn't always ‘know best.’” This person, a professor at Cornell University, was picked to be America’s next comptroller of the currency. The comptroller of the currency! A 2020 article written by Omarova suggests the need for a government-controlled “people’s ledger” that would “end banking as we know it”

When criticism mounted, “I am an easy target," she said. "An immigrant, a woman, a minority. I don’t look like your typical comptroller of the currency. I have a different history. I am easy to demonize and vilify.”

These people have a religious certainty in their righteousness and simply cannot conceive of an honest, thoughtful differing opinion. Disagreement is always stupid and ugly. And they are always angry at their critics and not their leaders who sacrifice them so casually and ineptly.

Buffaloing the People

Buffaloing the People

Taking the outlier as representative of large groups misunderstands the basic idea of 'outlier.' 

President Biden traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., to visit the scene of Saturday's insane massacre at a grocery store. Strangely, he called on Americans to reject white supremacy and criticized the racist conspiracy theory that inspired the shooter, as if this madman had a philosophy deserving opposition.

"White supremacy is a poison. It's a poison running through our body politic, and it's been allowed to fester and grow right in front of our eyes. No more," Biden said in remarks Tuesday at a community center alongside local leaders. "We need to say as clearly and forcefully as we can that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America."

House Democrats plan to vote this week on a bill to combat white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups.

"What happened here is simple and straightforward: Terrorism. Terrorism. Domestic terrorism," Biden said, calling the shooting a "murderous, racist rampage" carried out in the name of a "hateful and perverse ideology."

In America, evil will not win, I promise you. Hate will not prevail. White supremacy will not have the last word," Biden said.

But this is is simply and straightforwardly not true. This crazy man is not a conspirator, he is a public health failure.

Biden--and Schumer--have taken a lunatic and made him emblematic of a larger threat to the nation. When you purposely use the outlier to create a false world to rally your brownshirts, you are a despicable politician.

Question 67

Question 67'

The Buffalo shooter isn’t a “lone wolf.” He’s a mainstream Republican.'--Rolling Stone

How is the hatred element in a crime determined? Do criminals seek out people they hold in high regard for victimization? Do some criminals 'love their enemy?'

A question I don't know the answer to: Has there ever been a successful democracy with multiple races?

Saw Schumer last night blame Republicans for the Buffalo murders. He referenced 'replacement theory.' I am a high school graduate and I had to look it up. Schumer is a really bad guy. So are whoever he is speaking for.

Heard the new Press Secretary. We are gonna miss Psaki.

‘I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time… that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction… And I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology… Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.’--Clark
Probably not thinking about a culture where you can build a career in Animosity.

Question 66

Question 66

Fetterman said Sunday that he had suffered a stroke.
“On Friday, I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to the hospital to get checked out,” the Democratic front-runner for U.S. Senate said in a statement. “The good news is I’m feeling much better, and the doctors tell me I didn’t suffer any cognitive damage. I’m well on my way to a full recovery.”
Is there any other line of 'work' where a neurological injury would not disqualify you? But, then, Biden has had two craniotomies. 

We certainly are led by the nation's best.

Under this cartel of countries, with foreign governments committed to refusing to compete for capital by cutting tax rates, the incentives for U.S. companies to avoid high U.S. taxes are seriously reduced. So are the incentives for governments to keep their own tax systems modest.--deRudy
Tax Cartels!

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. 

You can cut down on fertilizer by cutting down on food, just like you can cut down on energy by cutting down on fuel.
Apparently poverty, starvation, and decline are superior to a lot of things we take for granted.

Pelosi wants to establish price controls.

Just before Russia invaded, former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden doubted the veracity of reports of Russia's alleged "invasion" of Ukraine and suggested that statements without evidence could provoke an escalation of the crisis.
"So... if nobody shows up for the invasion Biden scheduled for tomorrow morning at 3 a.m., I'm not saying your journalistic credibility was instrumentalized as part of one of those disinformation campaigns you like to write about, but you should at least consider the possibility,"

What a guy.

Sunday/Reminiscences

Sunday/Reminiscences

“If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.”

The Book? Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel. The rub? Nagel, an avowed atheist and a professor of philosophy and of law at New York University with terrific standing in the scientific community, suggests that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and offers thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained by, its material dimensions. While “there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one,” he writes, “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.”

"Comforting enough?" The establishment has gone nuts. "The shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker." (Pinker) "A bad book like this, by a philosopher with a good name, gives philosophers in general a bad name." (Alwin) "..will certainly lend comfort (and sell a lot of copies) to the religious enemies of Darwinism." ----the financial motive dismissal (Dupres) "No one could possibly think he has shown that a massively successful scientific research program like the one inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.."---no kidding (Leiter and Weisberg)

In The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr concedes that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. He then cites Colin McGinn’s suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Soooooo.....we should accept materialistic explanation on ....what? You guessed it: Faith! A solution as old as man to the God problem now must be applied to the materialism problem.

There is a lot of wonderfully ironic stuff here as you go through the responses to this book. The reviews are painful cries of tortured men. And there is no answer evident. But it is enlightening to see supposed "outside the box" thinkers congeal into a regiment and walk in lockstep as soon as possible. And heaven--or materialism--help you if you transgress the dogma.

Questions 65

Questions 65

Watching the disastrous Pens game I was struck by the number of repeating commercials, sometimes back-to-back.
Maybe a statute of limitations.

President Joe Biden announced on Thursday, May 12, that his administration is canceling the Alaskan Oil & Gas Lease, according to a report from CBSNews.com. The lease would have given companies the opportunity to drill for oil in Cook Inlet, Alaska, an area spanning 1 million acres.
In a statement to CBS News, the Department of the Interior said that there was a “lack of industry interest in leasing in the area.”
Is everything PR?

The PA. Republican senate race is astonishing. A recent Fox News poll showed Oz with 22 percent support; McCormick, the former CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, with 20 percent; and Barnette at 19 percent.

Ten people have been taken into custody after 17 were shot in Milwaukee Friday evening near the Bucks-Celtics basketball game, police said Saturday.

In ethics, the proportionality principle dictates that “responses should be proportional to the good that can be achieved and the harm that may be caused,” as Kate Jackson-Meyer from Boston College has put it. This obvious notion, which would be offered by any guy in a bar, is a ethics 'principle.'
'It’s far past time we ask ourselves when abundance really means excess, when our precautionary measures against Covid have gone too far, when we have ignored the costs and lost all sense of proportionality.'--bauer

Question 64a

Question 64a

The Rangers reverted to old-time hockey last night, trying to hurt the first line. It looked as if they knocked Crosby out.

Hockey will never expand their fan base if incapacitating their major talents is seen as an acceptable tactic.

Ralston College in Georgia, which describes itself as a “new institution of higher education dedicated to free inquiry and human flourishing,” said last week that it had appointed Jordan Peterson as chancellor.

“The surge in gun violence across the United States in 2020 pushed the firearm homicide rate that year to its highest level in a quarter-century, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday. ”Over half of 2020 gun deaths were suicides.”
Did you know that?

Father Coughlin, nearly a century ago, had 30-40 million listeners. Tucker Carlson, yes the highest-rated show on cable news, last week had 3 million viewers.

Bloomberg has an article suggesting that Netflix is in some serious trouble. Serious. Netflix’s market share has been declining steadily and has now fallen below 50%. One estimate claims that the company’s share of consumers fell more than 30% in a single year.