The 'evil Russia' example gets even more weird. At the same time the trivialization campaign is being run, now the Eurocrats are insisting that Russia is a threat that will invade all of Europe. But why would that matter, if Russia is really so weak? The wokust-globalist alliance would have us believe that a weak Russia can be defeated with just a little more effort, and if we fail to do that, Europe will be destroyed due to what we can only surmise is Russia's overwhelming military supported by a whiz-bang economy.
I think there's a standard grab-bag of semantic tricks originally formulated by PR gurus such as Edward Bernays, which were subsequently taken up, refined, and expanded by leftists and globalists of all stripes. Over the last 70 years, they've certainly had the patience, cunning, and money to do it. Thus their rather easy 'march through the institutions', which has culminated in every damn organization in the west being turned into a pit of politicized vipers, even your local sewing circle.
There's been no effective opposition, nor even realization that it ought to be opposed. Certainly not from conservatives, an ideologically moribund bloc of morons who've conserved nothing over the last 70 years, not even women's bathrooms. For each semantic trick, my assumption is that there exists a simple effective counter technique that can be used by the masses. It would wake them the hell up, and stomp the wokust-globalists back under the rock from which they slimed. As TomA has stated below, no more whining about each next outrage perpetrated by the enemy. No more laundry lists of complaints, no matter how cleverly described. Any damn conservative can do that, it's the only thing they know. Instead it's long past time to devise effective weapons, and then attack.
Bernays and his myriad followers (by no means the most successful of whom was Dr Goebbels) started from the assumption that you should "never give a sucker an even break". And, since "there is one born every minute", that should lead to an easy living.
The obvious remedy, to anyone with a functioning mind and the inclination to use it, is to protect people by teaching them to think critically and question everything. The short name for that is "the scientific method". Anyone who tries to suggest that science has anything to do with authority, consensus, or "settled" conclusions, is a follower of Bernays or the victim of such followers. One can even make a game of it by noticing every time someone tries to fool you and declaring it, publicly or privately according to taste and your sense of self-preservation.
Education, from the earliest records we have to nearly the present day, has had as one of its main aims to teach logical thinking and sensible scepticism. Recently, for reasons we can all guess, both logical thinking and scepticism have come under violent attack and are rarely allowed anywhere near the classroom or the lecture theatre.
In 1914 John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, told his students this:
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
We need to return to that view of education, and encourage that kind of teaching.
The leftist liberals are all-accommodating and they don't know how to say "no" to disposed minorities. When they were infiltrated by the Marxists, they had no defence. The conservatives were harder to break, so they promoted women into positions of conservative power and then appealed to their emotions. This is a simplified explanation, of course. But you're right. What you can't do is try and counter emotionally loaded propaganda with logic. Someone hyped up on lefty BS to the point of emotional overcharge ain't listening. It's like a dog with the scent of prey - the ears are no longer working, all attention is focused on the nose. Emotionally loaded propaganda can only be countered with different emotionally loaded propaganda. Memes done properly can deliver such shots with ease. I'm not talking about jokes that claim to be memes - they're just pictures with words - I'm talking about memetic warfare. A weaponised meme delivers its payload in under a second, before the brain can defend against it. The payload may take hours or days to do its job, but it does it nonetheless. Thankfully, the left can't meme and those autists who can meme won't work for the other side.
Yes, but… do you think that only the Dems / Soros creatures / supposedly Leftists / Antifa do play this game?
What I see from here at the other side of the pond is that Trump & co are as adept at these mind fucks as the other party… in topics like Charlie Kirk, immigration control, Trump family fraud & corruption, “no more wars”, reindustrializa America, etc etc etc…
May I suggest a topic for your future rant excursions.
Endless diagnosis curing nothing. We have a great many in the dissident community "studying" the problem, but solving nothing. Would it not be preferable to reallocate some of that mental energy into prospective solution options. Think contingency planning as the Overton Window euphemism. Why can't we occasionally debate remedies as an alternative to evermore detailed problem analysis? There will come a day when remedy can no longer be ignored. Why not get a head start now?
Your critique is valid. The problems, particularly the big social ones, require solutions which would result in serious problems for the writer if they were published. We need new type of people in power and they then must change the system in a particular way. Maybe I can do an essay on this that won't get me deplatformed. We'll see.
Yes, this topic must be approached gingerly in the public square so as not to incur unacceptable risk. This is where your eloquence is a valuable asset. I suggest that one venue of solution exploration could include defining the weaknesses of those that would, really will, seek to impose a techno-tyranny upon us. Exploitation is implied.
Whose weaknesses are you going to address? The ones of the “techno-tyrants”, as TomA put it in his reply, or the ones of those who don’t like the direction the (Western) world is heading to? As it seems to me the latter group is as much vocal in the “virtual” world as ineffective in the real one.
The BDS campaign against companies doing business with Israel was a total washout (at least where I live), because i) it merely told people “stop buying products X, Y and Z” without offering viable (and locally-available) alternatives; and ii) it tried to target too many companies at once, with no real focus. Can a swarm of bees take out a pack of lions? Highly unlikely. Can the same swarm of bees take out the weakest lion in the pack? Possibly. Therefore, what little energy is there to fight the system, it should probably be channelled and not spread out in many different directions.
And how about the weaknesses of the so-called “silent majority”? Most people are in total and utter denial (or so it seems to me). The narrative that says “There’s a big, bad wolf out there (Russia, Iran, etc.) and your government, for all its faults, is doing its best to protect you” seems to be working just fine. If you tried to tell people that the big bad wolf is their *own* government, who’s no longer working for them, but has been captured by unelected/foreign interests who consider the other 99% simply entries on a ledger, most would look at you in dismay, thinking you might need an involuntary commitment… I guess the denial acts as a sort of defence mechanism, as many are obviously not ready for the truth, i.e. that they have been “had” and extracted value from for their whole life.
Anyway, I do hope that you recover in full and I’m sure that whatever you decide to write about will be greatly appreciated by your readers.
By the way, since this is my first post on your substack I’d like to add, by way of belated introduction, that I took the Myers-Briggs test you recommended some time ago and came out as a INFP type with a T trait, which sounds a tad bit worrisome to a layperson like me…
Good question and I venture to say that most heads of the “dissident community” are just folks who write or podcast for a living, only difference with MSM is that they have a different niche public. And so they have exactly zero interest in stirring the pot too much, getting unwanted attention and being defunded / deplatformed.
Another vital point is that in this time of total digital surveillance ANY blogger / platform / chat thing used to effectively organize, gather people, discuss potential ways of action, brainstorm, etc is going to be monitored, infiltrated and subverted from day one and if the participants take any kind of action they would quickly end up in prison under terrorism charges. As I understand it, in the US it is SOP for the feds to infiltrate such groups and push people to commit crimes, so nothing new here.
I would have to hope that any so inclined to do real work in the direction you suggest would not be anywhere near a computer or online in any way, other than perhaps showing an interest in fashion and cuddly pets.
I think we are intelligent enough to avoid these pitfalls. Almost all of the Stasi entrapment ops have preyed upon the weak of mind and spirit. The Michigan kidnapping caper is a classic example. There would never have been an American Revolution if good men remained on the sidelines because British spies were everywhere.
The only wrong thing with this article was calling it a 'rant'; by that it almost seems that you beg forgiveness for writing it. I think (not the more polite and tautological 'In my opinion') that you are the best writer of all there is at Substack (it should be unnecessary to add that I have of course not read that many. but I do it out of politeness to those who would else rant that I can't have read all of substack). Maybe some of the substack writers come up with better jokes or more humourous metaphors, but I enjoy the points of your arguments. They are indeed giving me new thoughts, as I have recently spotted news headlines telling about motion sickness in EV - and of course, it is a campaign; and that Russia is losing the war, their soldiers, their industry, their economy, etc., which feels like the usual braindead campaign again. Thanks for taking the trouble to make the net zero calculation. I did the same some years ago and published it, but I did not go as far as you, because I thought it obvious that not only would the society/government not have enough money, but they wouldn't have the time either, or the workers to establish the infrastructure, or the skilled workers, etc. It reminded me of one of the problems of a 'problem book' I read as a kid, where the faucet leaks one drop every 15 minute into a bathtub so how long time will it take before the bathtub is full. The answer was: Never. The water will evaporate in the meantime.
So I think the real question is: How long will stupid politicians go on with the Net Zero scam in spite of reality? Because stupid people are irrational.
For now, here are two more examples of what I believe are/were coordinated PR campaigns:
1. Long Covid. It feels like an insider's joke. A falalcy upon fallacy but with plenty of bias confirmation.
2. The advent/usefulness/inevitability of AI. Yes, some things are useful - like your use of DeepSeek as a glorified search engine (which is all most AI's are for most people). Obviously, just like any search engine AI can and will be manipulated too - you proved it to your own satisfaction with the $150T number. So much for more free truthful/factual information. Sure, AI will be useful for specialized fields and for those willing and able to go deeper into specifics, like you did - but how many are remotely capable of doing that? BTW ChatGPT was useful for me when I went looking for some genealogy related clues in two foreign countries, trying to unmask events in the early 19th century. However, it took a lot of specific questions to guide it in the directions I wanted*. So yes, it did provide me with a letter of inquiry in a foreign language complete with the proper agency address and all, but all in all, I still had to do all the heavy lifting just for a couple more tidbits and perhaps one useful reference I didn't have. All in all though the great quest for AGI is simply put, idiotic. There's no need for that and no one asked for it. Neither are we asking for more out of the existing AIs. So why is everything trying to convince us it's so useful and we can't live withoutever more advanced, privacy busting AI?
*PS One little discovery I made - the ChatGPT that I used, once I directed it to a certain geographic place provided me with the information found on my very own genealogy tree that was parked on MyHeritage. Another question led to a private tree I knew of to be found only on Ancestry, which was, to my knowledge, set to "private". Ergo, the AI's can access any and all trees, both private and public (for the private ones it'll take a specific question). At the end of this quest I learnt what I already knew from my own research - full circle, and I helped train it. I really felt i should have been paid for the effort.
Rant is good. The manipulation is such that no one questions it equating to brainwashing and that was front and center during covid. So many bought into the propaganda and manipulation. These days, it's something else. Once it's recognized, one sees it everywhere. So rant away, interesting to read - Thanks!
The biggest public relations campaign not mentioned in this article is that the "pandemic" (caused by a virus that causes fatalities only with very old people that were already very sick) could only be overcome by applying an experimental "vaccine" to the whole population of the world. Of course, rather, this was contributing to reducing the population to that level that makes "net zero" possible.
Brainwashing machine of the west became a thing in itself. I even doubt it is all a sell off. Number of idiots writing absolute bullshit is so high, it is a surprise to find anything reflecting reality and real issues in our society. It is tens of years of selection. Like bbc article stating that Russia is lagging behind in icebreakers technology. The only country that builds and use atomic icebreakers is lagging behind. Behind what? Itself?
It was a good rant. Actually, I don't really care about length - as long as a piece is shorter than, say, "Das Kapital". The only important questions are how interesting and worth while it is, and how readable it is. You score high on both, so go for it! I thoroughly enjoyed this article.
Sometimes there are wheels within wheels. For example, "It demonstrated what might happen if you misbehave and don’t just eat carbs like a farm animal".
Yes... because, as we all know, ungulates (mammals with hooves) thrive on a diet of grass and little else. Like almost everyone else, I believed that until I read the superb anthology "Diabetes Unpacked", edited by Professor Timothy Noakes. In an article that he contributed to that book (Chapter 13), I came across this startling passage which Professor Noakes drops in quite casually:
'...the liver of ruminants generates the glucose they require from VFAs [volatile fatty acids]. As a result ruminants are not ever exposed to high blood glucose concentrations following the ingestion of their high carbohydrate (cellulose) diets (as now occurs for modern humans ingesting readily digested carbohydrates, whether "low" or "high" GI...every few hours).
'The end result is that all mammals subsist on high fat diets. The sole exception is humans after we were advised to adopt high carbohydrate diets by the 1977 US Dietary Guidelines!'
Digest THAT for a few minutes, hours, days, or months, depending on how long it takes to sink in... and the implications. Although many mammals EAT nothing but vegetation, their inner microbes convert it into saturated fat! Leaving human vegetarians looking ill-advised, to say the least. Our only way of getting the healthy and essential saturated fat on which other mammals live is to eat meat, eggs, fish, and dairy. Also avocado, coconut oil, and the few other vegetable sources of high-quality saturdated fat.
I definitely like, support, endorse and enjoy Dr Baltar’s shorter rants!
Only “but” is that I find it very insulting for ferrets, weasels, martens and other mustelidae to be compared to PR people. Poor animals!!
A EV “motions sickness” anecdote: I have an oldish car with internal combustion engine and zero problems with it. For some months I commuted with a coworker in his high end EV and got slight motion sickness every single ride. At the time I thought this was bc of the high end hydraulic suspension system that moved the car differently from the normal mechanical suspension. But afterwards I have travelled in ICE cars with hydraulic suspension and haven’t felt any problem. I didn’t know about this issue before reading it here and my experience definitely confirms it.
You sir are one of my favorite writers on here so rant away. I will read it. Am pretty good at smelling bullshit myself. Started as a middle school aged child watching how my friends reacted to pop culture.
"Whatever truth is out there is barely detectable through the mist of envy and need and hope. They will make their words and their numbers say anything they need them to."
Dear Gaius - you are the luckiest of all - you managed to get just about all the non-ADHD readers/writers out there in the Anglo-speaking sphere as commenters! I think that whatever rant you choose - short or long - will be a most satisfying read. We, organic/analog life forms that we are, many of us yearn for the few still around who can not only read but also like to think.
I like the rant... consider doing more.
The 'evil Russia' example gets even more weird. At the same time the trivialization campaign is being run, now the Eurocrats are insisting that Russia is a threat that will invade all of Europe. But why would that matter, if Russia is really so weak? The wokust-globalist alliance would have us believe that a weak Russia can be defeated with just a little more effort, and if we fail to do that, Europe will be destroyed due to what we can only surmise is Russia's overwhelming military supported by a whiz-bang economy.
I think there's a standard grab-bag of semantic tricks originally formulated by PR gurus such as Edward Bernays, which were subsequently taken up, refined, and expanded by leftists and globalists of all stripes. Over the last 70 years, they've certainly had the patience, cunning, and money to do it. Thus their rather easy 'march through the institutions', which has culminated in every damn organization in the west being turned into a pit of politicized vipers, even your local sewing circle.
There's been no effective opposition, nor even realization that it ought to be opposed. Certainly not from conservatives, an ideologically moribund bloc of morons who've conserved nothing over the last 70 years, not even women's bathrooms. For each semantic trick, my assumption is that there exists a simple effective counter technique that can be used by the masses. It would wake them the hell up, and stomp the wokust-globalists back under the rock from which they slimed. As TomA has stated below, no more whining about each next outrage perpetrated by the enemy. No more laundry lists of complaints, no matter how cleverly described. Any damn conservative can do that, it's the only thing they know. Instead it's long past time to devise effective weapons, and then attack.
Bernays and his myriad followers (by no means the most successful of whom was Dr Goebbels) started from the assumption that you should "never give a sucker an even break". And, since "there is one born every minute", that should lead to an easy living.
The obvious remedy, to anyone with a functioning mind and the inclination to use it, is to protect people by teaching them to think critically and question everything. The short name for that is "the scientific method". Anyone who tries to suggest that science has anything to do with authority, consensus, or "settled" conclusions, is a follower of Bernays or the victim of such followers. One can even make a game of it by noticing every time someone tries to fool you and declaring it, publicly or privately according to taste and your sense of self-preservation.
Education, from the earliest records we have to nearly the present day, has had as one of its main aims to teach logical thinking and sensible scepticism. Recently, for reasons we can all guess, both logical thinking and scepticism have come under violent attack and are rarely allowed anywhere near the classroom or the lecture theatre.
In 1914 John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, told his students this:
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
We need to return to that view of education, and encourage that kind of teaching.
"...nearly the present day..." .
You split the apple, William Tell.
The leftist liberals are all-accommodating and they don't know how to say "no" to disposed minorities. When they were infiltrated by the Marxists, they had no defence. The conservatives were harder to break, so they promoted women into positions of conservative power and then appealed to their emotions. This is a simplified explanation, of course. But you're right. What you can't do is try and counter emotionally loaded propaganda with logic. Someone hyped up on lefty BS to the point of emotional overcharge ain't listening. It's like a dog with the scent of prey - the ears are no longer working, all attention is focused on the nose. Emotionally loaded propaganda can only be countered with different emotionally loaded propaganda. Memes done properly can deliver such shots with ease. I'm not talking about jokes that claim to be memes - they're just pictures with words - I'm talking about memetic warfare. A weaponised meme delivers its payload in under a second, before the brain can defend against it. The payload may take hours or days to do its job, but it does it nonetheless. Thankfully, the left can't meme and those autists who can meme won't work for the other side.
Yes, but… do you think that only the Dems / Soros creatures / supposedly Leftists / Antifa do play this game?
What I see from here at the other side of the pond is that Trump & co are as adept at these mind fucks as the other party… in topics like Charlie Kirk, immigration control, Trump family fraud & corruption, “no more wars”, reindustrializa America, etc etc etc…
" The wokust-globalist alliance would have us believe that a weak Russia can be defeated with just a little more effort."
Just a few billion more.......make that trillion. Don't worry, you won't miss it.
If Russia does invade west of the Banderan territories it will be to save the fembois from themselves. An humanitarian mission, if you will.
I do admire Bernays and his pedo-uncle, Freud, for their works in psychoanalysis and manufacturing consent.
You made also a good rant, mate!
A rant within a rant…
May I suggest a topic for your future rant excursions.
Endless diagnosis curing nothing. We have a great many in the dissident community "studying" the problem, but solving nothing. Would it not be preferable to reallocate some of that mental energy into prospective solution options. Think contingency planning as the Overton Window euphemism. Why can't we occasionally debate remedies as an alternative to evermore detailed problem analysis? There will come a day when remedy can no longer be ignored. Why not get a head start now?
Your critique is valid. The problems, particularly the big social ones, require solutions which would result in serious problems for the writer if they were published. We need new type of people in power and they then must change the system in a particular way. Maybe I can do an essay on this that won't get me deplatformed. We'll see.
Would that new type of "people in power" mean the end of the pathocracy? If so, how do we make it happen?
Yes, this topic must be approached gingerly in the public square so as not to incur unacceptable risk. This is where your eloquence is a valuable asset. I suggest that one venue of solution exploration could include defining the weaknesses of those that would, really will, seek to impose a techno-tyranny upon us. Exploitation is implied.
Analysis of weaknesses. That's not a bad idea at all.
Whose weaknesses are you going to address? The ones of the “techno-tyrants”, as TomA put it in his reply, or the ones of those who don’t like the direction the (Western) world is heading to? As it seems to me the latter group is as much vocal in the “virtual” world as ineffective in the real one.
The BDS campaign against companies doing business with Israel was a total washout (at least where I live), because i) it merely told people “stop buying products X, Y and Z” without offering viable (and locally-available) alternatives; and ii) it tried to target too many companies at once, with no real focus. Can a swarm of bees take out a pack of lions? Highly unlikely. Can the same swarm of bees take out the weakest lion in the pack? Possibly. Therefore, what little energy is there to fight the system, it should probably be channelled and not spread out in many different directions.
And how about the weaknesses of the so-called “silent majority”? Most people are in total and utter denial (or so it seems to me). The narrative that says “There’s a big, bad wolf out there (Russia, Iran, etc.) and your government, for all its faults, is doing its best to protect you” seems to be working just fine. If you tried to tell people that the big bad wolf is their *own* government, who’s no longer working for them, but has been captured by unelected/foreign interests who consider the other 99% simply entries on a ledger, most would look at you in dismay, thinking you might need an involuntary commitment… I guess the denial acts as a sort of defence mechanism, as many are obviously not ready for the truth, i.e. that they have been “had” and extracted value from for their whole life.
Anyway, I do hope that you recover in full and I’m sure that whatever you decide to write about will be greatly appreciated by your readers.
By the way, since this is my first post on your substack I’d like to add, by way of belated introduction, that I took the Myers-Briggs test you recommended some time ago and came out as a INFP type with a T trait, which sounds a tad bit worrisome to a layperson like me…
Take care and be well!
Good question and I venture to say that most heads of the “dissident community” are just folks who write or podcast for a living, only difference with MSM is that they have a different niche public. And so they have exactly zero interest in stirring the pot too much, getting unwanted attention and being defunded / deplatformed.
Another vital point is that in this time of total digital surveillance ANY blogger / platform / chat thing used to effectively organize, gather people, discuss potential ways of action, brainstorm, etc is going to be monitored, infiltrated and subverted from day one and if the participants take any kind of action they would quickly end up in prison under terrorism charges. As I understand it, in the US it is SOP for the feds to infiltrate such groups and push people to commit crimes, so nothing new here.
I would have to hope that any so inclined to do real work in the direction you suggest would not be anywhere near a computer or online in any way, other than perhaps showing an interest in fashion and cuddly pets.
I think we are intelligent enough to avoid these pitfalls. Almost all of the Stasi entrapment ops have preyed upon the weak of mind and spirit. The Michigan kidnapping caper is a classic example. There would never have been an American Revolution if good men remained on the sidelines because British spies were everywhere.
The only wrong thing with this article was calling it a 'rant'; by that it almost seems that you beg forgiveness for writing it. I think (not the more polite and tautological 'In my opinion') that you are the best writer of all there is at Substack (it should be unnecessary to add that I have of course not read that many. but I do it out of politeness to those who would else rant that I can't have read all of substack). Maybe some of the substack writers come up with better jokes or more humourous metaphors, but I enjoy the points of your arguments. They are indeed giving me new thoughts, as I have recently spotted news headlines telling about motion sickness in EV - and of course, it is a campaign; and that Russia is losing the war, their soldiers, their industry, their economy, etc., which feels like the usual braindead campaign again. Thanks for taking the trouble to make the net zero calculation. I did the same some years ago and published it, but I did not go as far as you, because I thought it obvious that not only would the society/government not have enough money, but they wouldn't have the time either, or the workers to establish the infrastructure, or the skilled workers, etc. It reminded me of one of the problems of a 'problem book' I read as a kid, where the faucet leaks one drop every 15 minute into a bathtub so how long time will it take before the bathtub is full. The answer was: Never. The water will evaporate in the meantime.
So I think the real question is: How long will stupid politicians go on with the Net Zero scam in spite of reality? Because stupid people are irrational.
Stupid? How about bought-and-paid for? Both perhaps. Stupid people are more easily bought.
It was a good rant. Rant more.
Your inaugural short rant was perfect.
You are never silly and possess a refined sense of humor.
For me, short or long, your writing is compelling.
Thank you
Love your rant - I want more!!
For now, here are two more examples of what I believe are/were coordinated PR campaigns:
1. Long Covid. It feels like an insider's joke. A falalcy upon fallacy but with plenty of bias confirmation.
2. The advent/usefulness/inevitability of AI. Yes, some things are useful - like your use of DeepSeek as a glorified search engine (which is all most AI's are for most people). Obviously, just like any search engine AI can and will be manipulated too - you proved it to your own satisfaction with the $150T number. So much for more free truthful/factual information. Sure, AI will be useful for specialized fields and for those willing and able to go deeper into specifics, like you did - but how many are remotely capable of doing that? BTW ChatGPT was useful for me when I went looking for some genealogy related clues in two foreign countries, trying to unmask events in the early 19th century. However, it took a lot of specific questions to guide it in the directions I wanted*. So yes, it did provide me with a letter of inquiry in a foreign language complete with the proper agency address and all, but all in all, I still had to do all the heavy lifting just for a couple more tidbits and perhaps one useful reference I didn't have. All in all though the great quest for AGI is simply put, idiotic. There's no need for that and no one asked for it. Neither are we asking for more out of the existing AIs. So why is everything trying to convince us it's so useful and we can't live withoutever more advanced, privacy busting AI?
*PS One little discovery I made - the ChatGPT that I used, once I directed it to a certain geographic place provided me with the information found on my very own genealogy tree that was parked on MyHeritage. Another question led to a private tree I knew of to be found only on Ancestry, which was, to my knowledge, set to "private". Ergo, the AI's can access any and all trees, both private and public (for the private ones it'll take a specific question). At the end of this quest I learnt what I already knew from my own research - full circle, and I helped train it. I really felt i should have been paid for the effort.
Rant is good. The manipulation is such that no one questions it equating to brainwashing and that was front and center during covid. So many bought into the propaganda and manipulation. These days, it's something else. Once it's recognized, one sees it everywhere. So rant away, interesting to read - Thanks!
The biggest public relations campaign not mentioned in this article is that the "pandemic" (caused by a virus that causes fatalities only with very old people that were already very sick) could only be overcome by applying an experimental "vaccine" to the whole population of the world. Of course, rather, this was contributing to reducing the population to that level that makes "net zero" possible.
Brainwashing machine of the west became a thing in itself. I even doubt it is all a sell off. Number of idiots writing absolute bullshit is so high, it is a surprise to find anything reflecting reality and real issues in our society. It is tens of years of selection. Like bbc article stating that Russia is lagging behind in icebreakers technology. The only country that builds and use atomic icebreakers is lagging behind. Behind what? Itself?
Битва за Арктику. Как Россия начала отставать в производстве ледоколов - BBC News Русская служба https://share.google/tgZsLgHAhPAsPqdFK
It was a good rant. Actually, I don't really care about length - as long as a piece is shorter than, say, "Das Kapital". The only important questions are how interesting and worth while it is, and how readable it is. You score high on both, so go for it! I thoroughly enjoyed this article.
Sometimes there are wheels within wheels. For example, "It demonstrated what might happen if you misbehave and don’t just eat carbs like a farm animal".
Yes... because, as we all know, ungulates (mammals with hooves) thrive on a diet of grass and little else. Like almost everyone else, I believed that until I read the superb anthology "Diabetes Unpacked", edited by Professor Timothy Noakes. In an article that he contributed to that book (Chapter 13), I came across this startling passage which Professor Noakes drops in quite casually:
'...the liver of ruminants generates the glucose they require from VFAs [volatile fatty acids]. As a result ruminants are not ever exposed to high blood glucose concentrations following the ingestion of their high carbohydrate (cellulose) diets (as now occurs for modern humans ingesting readily digested carbohydrates, whether "low" or "high" GI...every few hours).
'The end result is that all mammals subsist on high fat diets. The sole exception is humans after we were advised to adopt high carbohydrate diets by the 1977 US Dietary Guidelines!'
Digest THAT for a few minutes, hours, days, or months, depending on how long it takes to sink in... and the implications. Although many mammals EAT nothing but vegetation, their inner microbes convert it into saturated fat! Leaving human vegetarians looking ill-advised, to say the least. Our only way of getting the healthy and essential saturated fat on which other mammals live is to eat meat, eggs, fish, and dairy. Also avocado, coconut oil, and the few other vegetable sources of high-quality saturdated fat.
I definitely like, support, endorse and enjoy Dr Baltar’s shorter rants!
Only “but” is that I find it very insulting for ferrets, weasels, martens and other mustelidae to be compared to PR people. Poor animals!!
A EV “motions sickness” anecdote: I have an oldish car with internal combustion engine and zero problems with it. For some months I commuted with a coworker in his high end EV and got slight motion sickness every single ride. At the time I thought this was bc of the high end hydraulic suspension system that moved the car differently from the normal mechanical suspension. But afterwards I have travelled in ICE cars with hydraulic suspension and haven’t felt any problem. I didn’t know about this issue before reading it here and my experience definitely confirms it.
You sir are one of my favorite writers on here so rant away. I will read it. Am pretty good at smelling bullshit myself. Started as a middle school aged child watching how my friends reacted to pop culture.
Please keep up the short, medium or long "rants", as entertaining and scathing as this one. It stirs up still waters, thank you!
—As for suggestions, there are so many topics to rant about, just pull them out of a hat... weasels, rabbits, balloons, or stars :)
"Whatever truth is out there is barely detectable through the mist of envy and need and hope. They will make their words and their numbers say anything they need them to."
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/06/are_women_prone_to_paranormal.html
Well done.
I hope you give John Kerry a good verbal beating for giving a speech at the WEF declaring home gardens are environmental hazards.
Dear Gaius - you are the luckiest of all - you managed to get just about all the non-ADHD readers/writers out there in the Anglo-speaking sphere as commenters! I think that whatever rant you choose - short or long - will be a most satisfying read. We, organic/analog life forms that we are, many of us yearn for the few still around who can not only read but also like to think.
I'm increasingly starting to believe that I may have the best readers on Substack!