Tag Archives: Information

Information Is Broken, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on February 6, 2023 | 1 comment

Once upon a time, information purveyors had an economic incentive to make sure the information they purveyed was correct. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

Humanity is informed as never before; nothing in the historical record compares. This, unfortunately, is not a particularly good thing.

The provision of information, if it is to bless mankind, must have quality control built into it… it must have a feedback mechanism with teeth. Barring that, it can spiral out of control, as, indeed, it has.

Consider that almost everyone in the modern world is flooded with information. Even the poorest people walk around with phones beeping at them a dozen times per day, delivering little packets of it. And for active people the info-delivery is far greater. Even the delivery devices themselves, smart phones, have become status symbols.

But who is providing all that information, and what price do they pay for delivering bad information?

The previous era of information delivery was dominated by newspapers; they provided most of the information for daily living. And that system, problematic though it could be, had effective feedback mechanisms. Newspaper readers paid for the information they received. And so, if they made bad decisions because of bad information, the newspaper would have a problem on their hands.

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Posted in Business, Culture, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Technology

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Bonfire of the Governments, Part One, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 16, 2022 | 42 comments

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Expect chaos to continue making new highs.

When Machiavelli wrote The Prince he had Vladimir Putin in mind. The president of Russia has adroitly sought, maintained, and used power, the theme of Machiavelli’s masterpiece (see “The Black Belt Strategist,” Robert Gore. SLL, July 19, 2018). That he is an amoral snake is both true and laughable as a criticism coming from the amoral snakes who populate Western power structures. Nobody who slithers to the top of those pits is anything other than an amoral snake. Western snakes hate Putin because he’s repeatedly outsnaked them.

Call Putin a rattlesnake for he clearly rattled before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That he was ignored is a worrisome indication of the epistemological breakdown that grips the West. Its leaders are unable to grasp that Putin meant what he said because they rarely mean what they say. Facts are not facts and the truth is whatever narrative they’re promoting at the moment. It’s become axiomatic that power flows from control of the narrative.

Until it doesn’t. Power flows from understanding reality and making use of what it can offer. If narratives were power, Ukraine’s army would be in Moscow by now. We haven’t seen this kind of excessive excrement from governments and their media minions since . . . Covid. Narratives are for simple-minded sheep and the wolves who devour them.The propaganda is devoid of any mention of: the 2014 U.S.-sponsored coup against a democratically elected government; rampant corruption within the Ukrainian oligarchy; Ukranian payola to American political figures (e.g., the Bidens and Clintons); widespread neo-Nazi infestation of Ukraine’s military and government; their eight-year war on its Russian-heritage citizens in eastern Ukraine; the government’s willful failure to adhere to the Minsk accords that were meant to resolve that conflict, or the latest—U.S. supported bioresearch labs in Ukraine.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Energy, Environment, Eurasian Axis, Financial markets, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Military, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Technology, Trade, Tyranny, War

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The Dam Is Breaking

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Posted on November 13, 2021 in Uncategorized

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Liberal Democratic Anarchy, by The Zman

Posted on April 15, 2021 | 2 comments

Modern technology leaves no time to think, no time to reflect, no time for anything but random emotion and crowd psychology. From The Zman at theburningplatform.com:

In theory, the difference between mob rule and liberal democracy is that the former operates outside of authority, while the latter is limited by a set of principles. The former is operating in the moment while the latter is deliberative. Instead of just doing what feels right in the moment, like exacting revenge, liberal democracy has processes and limits, forcing people to think about what they are doing before they act. It is majority rule slowed to a crawl by the ideals of western liberalism.

The problem is that liberal democracy is an industrial age political philosophy that is unsuited for the technological age. Fifty years ago, information flowed primarily by words on a page, carried around by men. Television and radio sped up the flow of information, but the information still got into those networks by foot. Before it could be on television, someone had to go out to the scene, make video, carry it back to the studio and then edit it. It was still a slow world.

Today, information flows at the speed of light. A conspiracy theory can be hatched and promoted to millions on-line in a matter of minutes. As the old expression goes, a lie is around the world before the truth is out of bed. It is why the race hoax has become a phenomenon of this age. By the time the truth of the incident has been revealed, we are onto the third or fourth race hoax. These stories collectively build up in the system to the point where they cumulatively become a truth of their own.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, Law, Politics

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The State Is Destroying Freedom, Life, and History By Censoring and Eliminating Information and Speech, by Gary D. Barnett

Posted on February 6, 2021 | 1 comment

Wholesale attacks on civil liberties are the hallmarks of totalitarian regimes. From Gary D. Barnett at lewrockwell.com:

“The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all — is called “life.” Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft — and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

State censorship has been evident over all time, but what is happening today, especially considering the ease of access and the voluminous amount of information available, is far beyond the scope of understanding for most in this country. The Internet is a wonder, but it is a very sharp double-edged sword. The real power among us understands this concept intimately, while the ‘public’ has little awareness of the potential for the controllers to eliminate history and speech by using the very tool that should allow for an expansion of learning and intellect. The Internet can store and make available all the works of man, both past and present, and all this information is seemingly accessible to anyone with little effort, but is that really the case?

The risk that is missed by most, is that as easy as it is to access information today, that information can be manipulated, hidden, or eliminated just as easily, and that process could be controlled by a central ‘authority’ through any of its fascist partnerships. If much of the underlying information of recorded history; books, journals, letters, and all historical and political records and writings, can be captured, controlled, or even destroyed by nefarious efforts, then that would leave available only what is stored digitally. This would be an abomination, because it would also allow for the loss of much hard knowledge of the past and present by those controlling the Internet and communication systems. For this horror to occur, all books would not have to be destroyed, but if much of the important information were restricted from view by whatever means, or made very difficult to access, then people would know only what the state wanted them to know.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda

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The coronavirus threatens the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power, by Cary Huang

Posted on February 9, 2020 | 1 comment

Science is the weapon of choice when dealing with something like the coronavirus, and science requires the free flow of information. The free flow of information is anathema to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. From Cary Huang at scmp.com:

Authoritarianism has made this outbreak worse, not better. The state’s strength in controlling information and suppressing dissent is a weakness in fighting disease

Nature is unpredictable and sometimes vengeful. Different societies and political systems have different ways of managing it.

Viruses and epidemics can occur in any country. But they have become more dangerous and challenging in modern times as globalisation means they spread faster and farther than ever.

Thus the coronavirus, thought to have originated in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, is spreading across the world.

As it does so, it tests not only China’s health infrastructure and management. The course of the epidemic and the government’s responses raise profound questions about the capacity and dynamism of China’s system of one-party rule.

For sure, China’s leadership is now doing everything to contain the virus, just as they had done in fights against natural disasters such as the Sichuan Earthquake in 2008. In fact, China’s command-and-control systems might prove more efficient than anything the free democracies could manage when it comes to mobilising resources.

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Posted in Government, Media, Medicine, Politics

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Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on June 14, 2019 | Leave a comment

Above all, governments must control the flow of information, and anything that threatens that control must be eliminated. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

A new article by Forbes reports that the CEO of Crowdstrike, the extremely shady cybersecurity corporation which was foundational in the construction of the official CIA/CNN Russian hacking narrative, is now a billionaire.

George Kurtz ascended to the billionaire rankings on the back of soaring stocks immediately after the company went public, carried no doubt on the winds of the international fame it gained from its central protagonistic role in the most well-known hacking news story of all time. A loyal servant of empire well-rewarded.

Never mind that US government insiders like Hillary Clinton had been prepping for escalations against Russia well in advance of the 2016 elections, and that their preexisting agendas to shove a geostrategic obstacle off the world stage benefitted from the hacking narrative as much as George Kurtz did.

Never mind that Crowdstrike is tied to the NATO narrative management firm known as the Atlantic Council, which receives funding from the US government, the EU, NATO, Gulf states and powerful international oligarchs. Never mind either that Crowdstrike was financed with a whopping $100 million from Google, which has had a cozy relationship with US intelligence agencies since its very inception.

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Posted in Crime, Cronyism, Government, Imperialism, Intelligence, Media, Politics

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Ten Reasons Why Governments Fail, by Anthony P. Mueller

Posted on November 24, 2018 | Leave a comment

Why governments don’t work. From Anthony P. Mueller at mises.org:

When politicians and bureaucrats fail to deliver what they promise — which happens a lot — we’re often told that the problem can be solved if only we get the right people to run the government instead. We’re told that the old crop of government agents were trying hard enough. Or that they didn’t have the right intentions. While it’s true that there are plenty of incompetent and ill-intentioned people in government, we can’t always blame the people involved. Often, the likelihood of failure is simply built in to the institution of government itself. In other words, politicians and bureaucrats don’t succeed because they can’tsucceed. The very nature of government administration is weighted against success.

Here are ten reasons why:

I. Knowledge

Government policies suffer from the pretense of knowledge . In order to perform a successful market intervention, politicians need to know more than they can. Market knowledge is not centralized, systematic, organized and general, but dispersed, heterogeneous, specific, and individual. Different from a market economy where there are many operators and a constant process of trial and error, the correction of government errors is limited because the government is a monopoly. For the politician, to admit an error is often worse than sticking with a wrong decision – even against own insight.

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Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Economy, Government, Law, Morality, Philosophy

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The Verifiable Information Vacuum From Syria, by Peter Crowley

Posted on April 12, 2017 | Leave a comment

The government’s virtual stranglehold on information from foreign war zones makes it impossible to determine the truth. From Peter Crowley at antiwar.com:

It is hard to underestimate the paucity of objective information coming from Syria.

Wars always have their propaganda machine feeding media sources, from the Israeli Army’s largely false assertions that Hamas used human shields during the 2014 Gaza War to Robert McNamara’s claim that American campaigns were leading to success in Vietnam. But rarely has the public been fed and believed information from a rebel opposition dominated by terrorist groups, as is the case in the Syrian Civil War. The lack of the civil war’s neutral information may be the case in the recent images we saw from apparent chemical attacks in Khan Sheikhoun, Idlib province, Syria, where Al-Nusra is the most powerful opposition group.

The Syrian opposition has been trying to get the US to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of the conflict. After the US’s “leading from behind” in the NATO-led overthrow of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi, the Syrian opposition assumed that Assad’s head would be next on the US’s chopping block. But this would not come to pass.

It should be remembered that these initial anti-Assad protests were certainly legitimate acts of dissent and the Assad regime overreacted with disproportionate violence. In response, protesters grew in number and the regime increased its violence, leading to the development of an armed opposition, shortly after which the US, Europe and Gulf States called for Assad to step down. Though receiving arms and funding from its international supporters, the rebel opposition had trouble coalescing and remained highly disorganized, during which time terrorist groups, such as al-Nusra, ISIS and Ahrar al Sham, established themselves in Syria. These terrorist groups were far more organized and effective at fighting than the discombobulated opposition and soon became the principal anti-regime actors in Syria. Thousands of disaffected fighters from the “moderate” opposition joined these terrorist groups, as they proved to be the most effective fighting forces against Assad.

To continue reading: The Verifiable Information Vacuum From Syria

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Government, Media, War

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