Articles by TDB

Via The Daily Bell

The downfall of freedom and happiness: dependence on institutions out of your control.

I’ve always blamed the government.

Governments start the wars, carry out the genocides, steal from the people. Governments lay the foundation of an unjust society, by creating a hierarchy from the beginning. Some make the laws, and some must live by them.

But the government is only half of the picture.

I always trusted in the power of the free market.

The free market is the true democracy which responds to the people. It is controlled by demand and quelled by consumer pressures. Economic self-interest ensures a proper check on the wealthy from becoming too evil.

But there is no free market on a macro level. There is only the collusion of the government and industry.

They have positioned themselves as the mother and the father of society. How? By destroying the institutions which once stood in their place.

The Marriage of Government and Industry

In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes a human transition. Populations went from farming societies inherently based on the sun and seasons, to industrial societies of assembly lines and time tables.

This caused many upheavals. Warm organic institutions–like family and community–were replaced by cold calculated ones–like factories and welfare. “Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.”

Of course, this meant dependence on government and industry for survival. The roles of family and community had been outsourced. Now the government would take care of you, and industry would sell you fulfillment. All the structures humans evolved with quickly melted away, or became diluted.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community. Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.

When a person fell sick, the family took care of her. When a person grew old, the family supported her, and her children were her pension fund. When a person died, the family took care of the orphans. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand… But if a person’s illness was too grave for the family to manage, or a new business demanded too large an investment, or the neighbourhood quarrel escalated to the point of violence, the local community came to the rescue.

The community offered help on the basis of local traditions and an economy of favours, which often differed greatly from the supply and demand laws of the free market. In an old-fashioned medieval community, when my neighbour was in need, I helped build his hut and guard his sheep, without expecting any payment in return. When I was in need, my neighbour returned the favour. At the same time, the local potentate might have drafted all of us villagers to construct his castle without paying us a penny. In exchange, we counted on him to defend us against brigands and barbarians. Village life involved many transactions but few payments. There were some markets, of course, but their roles were limited. You could buy rare spices, cloth and tools, and hire the services of lawyers and doctors. Yet less than 10 per cent of commonly used products and services were bought in the market. Most human needs were taken care of by the family and the community.

On a small scale level like that, people were held accountable when they leached off the system. Families and communities were also the enforcement structure of this social insurance. Gossip was an important function of accountability. You can bet people talked if someone balked at their duties. The next time they needed something, they might find themselves in a bind.

But in addition to the obvious replacements like police, welfare, and corporate jobs, there was the matter of replacing the emotional aspects family provided. Governments and industry teamed up to give us a solution.

Markets and states do so by fostering ‘imagined communities’ that contain millions of strangers, and which are tailored to national and commercial needs. An imagined community is a community of people who don’t really know each other, but imagine that they do. Such communities are not a novel invention. Kingdoms, empires and churches functioned for millennia as imagined communities…

The two most important examples for the rise of such imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe. The nation is the imagined community of the state. The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market. Both are imagined communities because it is impossible for all customers in a market or for all members of a nation really to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past…

Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense. As long as millions of Germans believe in the existence of a German nation, get excited at the sight of German national symbols, retell German national myths, and are willing to sacrifice money, time and limbs for the German nation, Germany will remain one of the strongest powers in the world.

But we can keep what we like about government and markets, and do away with what we don’t. We can form new “tribes” that give us actual mutual aid which communities once gave. We can move to or create villages that match our needs and desires.

That way, we interact with warm institutions. Structures we are a part of and can influence. They are made up of people we know, and have real relationships with.

The government gives us imagined communities in order to control us. Nationalism makes sure we are ready to fight the next war, providing bodies and wealth to fuel political ambitions.

The market gives us imagined communities as a way to sell to us. Apple users are part of an exclusive club that signal they are wealthy and hip. Doesn’t that make you feel fulfilled?

But what about a community of people who are all passionate about farming, making their own products, and trading goods and labor? We can keep our smart phones and internet access, just like 10% of the village economies of the past relied on outside merchants. But when it comes to our water, electricity, food, hygiene products, and even entertainment, it is already quite easy to provide all that on a community level.

Now that the world has been so voluntarily centralized by the internet, we can decentralize in ways that benefit us. We can create little communities without becoming hermits. We will be free to come or go as we please, no forced labor, false choices, or communist utopia. Just voluntary groups who offer warm alternatives to dictatorial and industrial institutions.

I don’t want my barber to remove my appendix when I get appendicitis. But I wouldn’t at all mind my neighbor providing my children’s education, with the help of the countless resources on the internet.

We are now in a position to meld the best of both worlds. We can reach back and choose what was great about pre-modern community governing structures. And we can hold onto the technology and civilization that we like in today’s world.

Society is like a pendulum which swings from one extreme to another. But each sway loses some energy and brings us closer to equilibrium.

The advance of industry gave mankind countless benefits. But at some point, it went too far. We need to learn how to reintegrate warm institutions into our lives, without doing away with the benefits that large scale industry has provided.

In a sense, humanity was once so dependent on small scale warm institutions that we stagnated, and could not advance. People suffocated as the pendulum stopped and reversed.

Once we finally did break free, we lost all touch with warm institutions. Cold institutions replaced the family, and now many feel alienated and depressed.

Can we find an equilibrium? Can we meld markets and governance into family and community life in a way that both frees us from the tyranny of government and corporations, but allows us to remain free individuals?

The Pendulum is Ready to Swing Back

Radical experimentation in governance is required to heal society and correct the trajectory. Stagnation is the best we can hope for with the current model of government and corporate collusion.

We need to restore the community structures of the past. We cannot simply do away with institutions people rely on and expect no turmoil. Rather, a model of a better society needs to be created.

This is why the next movement that will drastically improve civilization will be a period of decentralization of institutions, marked by voluntary association.

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Via The Daily Bell

“Is this patient under arrest?” Alex Wubbles asks the officer, being instructed by legal counsel on the phone.

“Nope,” the officer says.

“Do you have an electronic warrant?” She asks, searching for a way to legally comply with the officers.

“No,” The officer admits bluntly, getting annoyed.

The police did not have a warrant. The police did not have probable cause. The man was not under arrest. The unconscious patient could not consent.

The nurse, Alex, printed out the hospital’s policy which the Salt Lake City Police Department agreed to. She showed it to the officers. She clearly and calmly listed the three things which would allow her to give the police the blood sample: a warrant, patient consent, or a patient under arrest.

The police had none of these things.

“Okay, so I take it, without those in place, I am not going to get blood?” The Officer Jeff Payne is heard saying behind his body cam.

The legal counsel on the phone tries to tell the officer not to blame the messenger, and that he is making a big mistake.

Then, the officer attacks the nurse, Alex Wubbles. He drags her outside, and handcuffs her, while she cries.

“What is going on?!” She says exasperated, wondering why they are doing this to her.

She couldn’t just break the hospital policy and put her job in jeopardy because some police officers illegally told her to. She couldn’t simply collude with the lawbreakers–the police–and illegally hand over a blood sample on behalf of an unconscious patient.

That would have opened her up to lawsuits and job loss.

The officers were, in fact, breaking the law. They had no legal right to demand blood from an unconscious patient who could not consent.

The man they wanted blood from was a truck driver who had struck a vehicle being pursued by the police. It is unclear why they would even need a blood sample from the victim.

But none of these legal facts stopped the police from placing the nurse under arrest.

Wubbles was handcuffed and placed in a police vehicle. She was never actually charged.

You could chalk this up to one crazy officer, Detective Jeff Payne with the Salt Lake City Police.

But then his supervisor showed up to the scene. While the nurse was handcuffed in the cruiser, the supervisor started to lecture her.

“There are civil remedies,” he said, telling her she should have broken the law when the officer told her to. Of course, this ignored the fact that she would have been caught up in the civil action against the officers!

It’s like an episode of the Twilight Zone as the Supervisor lies and says the nurse was obstructing justice. All the nurse wanted was a warrant signed by a judge, the legal requirement to execute a search! And yet not just Officer Payne, but his Supervisor insist that she should have given them what they wanted, without a warrant.

Listening to the Supervisor’s justification is a real trip. He repeatedly says, things like, “If you already have a sample, we can just go get a warrant, but all I’m hearing is no, no, no.”

What? Yes, go get a warrant! That is what you have been repeatedly told by the nurse and hospital staff!

You can tell from the video she is not some anti-cop crusader. She was legitimately trying to do her job and follow the law to the best of her ability. Before she is arrested, you can tell she is worried and uncomfortable, trying her best to keep the situation calm and professional.

And then the police handcuffed and dragged a crying nurse out of the building to intimidate and harass her further.

She is a strong woman. She stood up to their bullying and lies and did not give in. Despite the best efforts of the police, she would not help them violate the Fourth Amendment rights of her patient.

Police should not be able to just handcuff people and drag them to a car as an intimidation method. Payne should be fired and charged with assault.

The supervisor should also be fired, for continuing to harass that poor woman after learning quite clearly that his officer was attempting to break the law. These people are a threat to the public.

But all too often Police Cheif’s and other officers line up behind their disreputable colleagues.

And that is why people have such a problem with the police. Fire the bad officers, and maybe the good ones can take the public spotlight.

But if the police treat nurses like this, surrounded by hospital staff, how can we expect them to treat the rest of us?

This is the Salt Lake City Police Facebook page if you would like to leave a friendly note.

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Via The Daily Bell

Would you let a five-year-old smoke a joint? I certainly hope not. Yet that would probably be less harmful than loading kids up on pharmaceuticals.

Currently, over a million American children UNDER SIX YEARS OLD are taking psychiatric drugs. Babies are literally being doped up by the pharmaceutical industry. Over 274,000 babies UNDER ONE-YEAR-OLD are given drugs, mostly for anxiety.

Anxiety drugs for babies. Have they tried motherly love? Or is that just an old fashioned, outdated concept?

You know, I like to mention society’s similarity to Orwell’s 1984. And surely the growing police state, war on drugs, and endless military campaigns–where the enemy seems to change daily–are reminiscent of the fictional dictatorship of Big Brother.

But it seems the powers that be are working tirelessly to blend together the dystopia of 1984, with that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

In that dystopia, there is no police state or war. Society has been perfectly designed by scientists, inspired by Ford’s assembly line. Babies are grown in the lab, cloned to all look alike, depending on their class. Parents are an embarrassing relic of the past. How silly to think a child needs family when they have the state!

The lower castes are deprived of oxygen as embryos to stunt their mental development. In America, they use fluoride in the drinking water instead.

In Brave New World, children listen to 24-hour propaganda in their cribs. Betas hear:

Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse.

White pride, black pride, gay pride, national pride. Pride is not meant for accidents of birth. You should be proud of accomplishments and achievements, not genetics and geography. Perhaps someone has been whispering in these radicalized children’s ears.

And how jealous the Department of Education must be of the incubators of Brave New World! They have to sometimes wait years to indoctrinate children. But at least the government gets to drug them up at a young age! And if the TV is left on, most of the programming is done for them.

Of course, the adults are drugged up in Brave New World as well, just like in America. If anyone feels the least bit anxious, nervous, sad–or any other troublesome emotion–they get “soma.” It’s the perfect mix of drugs with only pleasant feelings and no ill side effects.

The 1 in 6 Americans on antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anti-anxiety medication still have to put up with side effects.

The 50 million plus Americans on psychiatric medication sometimes kill themselves, or go mad and kill others. I guess the government is still working out the kinks. Or it’s just another creative blending of 1984 and Brave New World. In the former, the proles must be properly terrified.

And there is one more thing I can remember from Brave New World that strikes eerily similar to modern America.

At what age does the public education system start teaching sex ed? Kindergarteners in some states receive “age appropriate”–according to the government–sexual education. Some studies suggest teen pregnancies rise in areas where sex ed is taught at younger ages.

How young is too young for a sex change? Kids can now choose between 43 genders, or make up a new one! It’s like Mr. Potato head, but with their own bodies. And they will be given corresponding drugs to enhance the “natural” changes.

In the classrooms of Brave New World:

“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing…

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

Drugging the population, programming citizens with propaganda, sexualizing children, creating class divisions.

These dystopian novels were meant to be warnings, not instruction manuals.

Aldous Huxley explores how his fictional predictions progressed in his 2006 nonfiction work, Brave New World Revisited.

 

 

I like to use Audible to listen to books while doing mindless tasks like weeding the garden. Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks.

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Via The Daily Bell

Can you believe that there are at least three statues of Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington DC? There is one in South Dakota too, another in Virginia, and even more in London.

It appears all these places are overrun by racists and fascist sympathizers. How can people put up with revering a man who:

1. Literally Rounded Up 120,000 Japanese Americans, and Put them in Concentration Camps!

That was authorized by executive order 9066, which Roosevelt signed February 19, 1942.

How is this fact so often left out of any discussion about how “great” FDR was? These people were American citizens, and they were arrested for no reason other than their heritage.

He imprisoned an entire race. How is he not widely accepted as the biggest American racist of the last century? He was certainly the most effective racist.

Two reports which Roosevelt commissioned in the years prior found that Japanese Americans posed little to no risk to the government. Since FDR ignored the reports’ recommendations, it seems his violation of the rights of Japanese Americans was motivated by racism.

2. He Actually Outlawed Gold!

FDR had absolutely no respect for the people’s rights. He had no respect for the rule of law. He was a tyrant!

With Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, everyone living in America was given 25 days to turn in their gold. Yes, their property was confiscated without due process. The government set the price they paid to about $20 per ounce. Three months later, the price miraculously jumped to $35 per ounce.

The law wasn’t repealed until 1974!

3. FDR was Pen Pals With Mussolini, Whom he Admired.

It was a mutual love between FDR and Mussolini. The book, Three New Deals, shows how similar the movements of the 1930’s were in America, Italy, and Germany. It recounts how Roosevelt said:

“‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’”

And Mussolini reviewed FDR’s book Looking Forward.

“Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”

4. The Roosevelt Administration was Infested with Russian Spies.

Diana West described in her book, American Betrayal, just how well the Soviet Union infiltrated the White House. Top officials close to the President were supportive of the Soviet Regime to the point of suspicion.

In one sketchy encounter, soldiers were told to stand down when they witnessed American secrets being smuggled out of America on a plane bound for Russia, guarded by Soviet soldiers. This may be how the Soviet Union was able to make nuclear weapons.

And other policies were directly influenced by socialist sympathizers and possibly outright spies in the government during FDR’s tenure. Soviet troops were given precedence for American supplies over American troops during World War Two!

5. FDR Hated the Press and Suppressed Them.

Reason Magazine describes FDR’s War Against the Press:

Roosevelt warned in 1938 that “our newspapers cannot be edited in the interests of the general public, from the counting room. And I wish we could have a national symposium on that question, particularly in relation to the freedom of the press. How many bogies are conjured up by invoking that greatly overworked phrase?”

Roosevelt started the FCC and limited licenses for radio to six months.

It did not take long for broadcasters to get the message. NBC, for example, announced that it was limiting broadcasts “contrary to the policies of the United States government.” CBS Vice President Henry A. Bellows said that “no broadcast would be permitted over the Columbia Broadcasting System that in any way was critical of any policy of the Administration.” He elaborated “that the Columbia system was at the disposal of President Roosevelt and his administration and they would permit no broadcast that did not have his approval.” Local station owners and network executives alike took it for granted, as Editor and Publisherobserved, that each station had “to dance to Government tunes because it is under Government license.”

FDR’s government illegally intercepted telegraphs and used the ill begotten information to subpoena journalists, chilling any decent, and drying up the flow of information to reporters. A law was even proposed to give prison sentences for anyone who knowingly published false information: fake news.

Tear down this racist, fascist’s statues!

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