peakprosperity | Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton recently agreed:
Income inequality is not killing capitalism
in the United States, but rent-seekers like the banking and the
health-care sectors just might, said Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton on Monday.
If an entrepreneur invents something on the order of another
Facebook, Deaton said he has no problem with that person becoming
wealthy.
“What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich,” Deaton said in a luncheon speech to the National Association for Business Economics.
Rent seekers lobby and persuade governments to give them special favors.
Bankers during the financial crisis, and much of the health-care system, are two prime examples, Deaton said.
Rent-seeking not only does not generate new product, it actually slows down economic growth, Deaton said.
“All that talent is devoted to stealing things, instead of making things,” he said.
freakonomics | We tend to think of medicine as a science, but for most of human
history it has been scientific-ish at best. In the first episode of a
three-part series, we look at the grotesque mistakes produced by
centuries of trial-and-error, and ask whether the new era of
evidence-based medicine is the solution.
freakonomics | How do so many ineffective and even dangerous drugs make it to market? One reason is that clinical trials are often run on “dream patients” who aren’t representative of a larger population. On the other hand, sometimes the only thing worse than being excluded from a drug trial is being included.
freakonomics | By some estimates, medical error is the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. How can that be? And what’s to be done? Our third and final episode in this series offers some encouraging answers.
ZH | The percentage of people who are business owners relative to the overall employed population, is at an all time low.
The Fast Company,Shark Tank echo chamber would have you believe that entrepreneurialism is in a bubble.
It’s not.
Unprofitable, tech-centric gimmicks that are fueled by loosed monetary policies from the Fed are in a bubble. Legitimate businesses that produce cash flow and grow the middle class are not being created much, if at all.
Because the US has been waging war on the self-employed since the
1950’s, we not only have very few self-employed people in the workforce,
we also have multiple generations of journalists who have ZERO
experience engaging with those who run an actual business.
This is why NO ONE in the media gets Trump or the impact of his policies.
None of them have ever had to make payroll or create something from
nothing. They’ve spent the last eight years literally kowtowing to a man
who openly told the self-employed, “you didn’t build that.”
The same can be said for economists.
Time and again, you will see academics like Paul Krugman write op-eds
suggesting that Trump is going to collapse the economy. Krugman has
never once had to actually run a business. His entire career has been
one of writing the equivalent of glorified book reports for other people
who write glorified book reports to read.
If you ran a McDonalds or plumbing business implementing anything
Krugman claims, you’d be broke within six months. The man lives in a
world of excel spreadsheets and faculty meetings, not the world of
revenues and payroll.
So what is Trump doing?
First off, Trump is getting rid of regulations.
Economists don’t understand the impact of this because none of their
models include regulations. According to an economist, you simply “start
a business.” These people have no concept of the business costs of
licenses and the like.
Business owners care far more about regulations than taxes. Get ride
of stifling regulations and you can start growing your business more
aggressively.
I can tell you, business owners would happily pay more in
taxes if they were doing 50% more in revenues. No business owner feels
successful paying less in taxes on a business with zero growth.
Regarding taxes themselves, Trump understands them better than anyone in politics in the last 30 years.
Why?
Because as a business owner, Trump has been paying more taxes than
the media or politicians can believe. This is why the obsession with
Trump’s personal taxes is beyond moronic.
As a business owner, Trump has been paying taxes on property, payroll
tax, taxes on some products, excise taxes, and a slew of others than
journalists and economists don’t even know exist.
NewYorker | In 1993, when Nick Patterson mailed
Robert Mercer a job offer from Renaissance, Mercer threw it in the
trash: he’d never heard of the hedge fund. At the time, Mercer was part
of a team pioneering the use of computers to translate languages. I.B.M.
considered the project a bit of a luxury, and didn’t see its potential,
though the work laid the foundation for Google Translate and Apple’s
Siri. But Mercer and his main partner, Peter Brown, found the project
exciting, and had the satisfaction of showing up experts in the field,
who had dismissed their statistical approach to translating languages as
impractical. Instead of trying to teach a computer linguistic rules,
Mercer and Brown downloaded enormous quantities of dual-language
documents—including Canadian parliamentary records—and created code that
analyzed the data and detected patterns, enabling predictions of
probable translations. According to a former I.B.M. colleague, Mercer
was obsessive, and at one point took six months off to type into a
computer every entry in a Spanish-English dictionary. Sebastian Mallaby,
in his 2010 book on the hedge-fund industry, “More Money Than God,”
reports that Mercer’s boss at I.B.M. once jokingly called him an
“automaton.”
In 2014, Mercer
accepted a lifetime-achievement award from the Association for
Computational Linguistics. In a speech at the ceremony, Mercer, who grew
up in New Mexico, said that he had a “jaundiced view” of government.
While in college, he had worked on a military base in Albuquerque, and
he had showed his superiors how to run certain computer programs a
hundred times faster; instead of saving time and money, the bureaucrats
ran a hundred times more equations. He concluded that the goal of
government officials was “not so much to get answers as to consume the
computer budget.” Mercer’s colleagues say that he views the government
as arrogant and inefficient, and believes that individuals need to be
self-sufficient, and should not receive aid from the state. Yet, when
I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for Mercer and Brown’s
translation project, they secured additional funding from DARPA,
the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercer’s disdain for “big
government,” this funding was essential to his early success.
Meanwhile,
Patterson kept asking Mercer and Brown to join Renaissance. He thought
that their technique of extracting patterns from huge amounts of data
could be applied to the pile of numbers generated daily by the global
trade in stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. The patterns could
generate predictive financial models that would give traders a decisive
edge.
medium | “This
is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit
them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen
before. They’re capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional
leash and never letting them go,” said professor Jonathan Albright.
Albright,
an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started
digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president.
Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key
experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at
Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore,
Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power
at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was
about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a
much bigger and darker puzzle — a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being
used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific
political agendas.
By
leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots,
Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company
called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys
on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in
public opinion. Many of these technologies have been used individually
to some effect before, but together they make up a nearly impenetrable
voter manipulation machine that is quickly becoming the new deciding
factor in elections around the world.
Most
recently, Analytica helped elect U.S. President Donald Trump, secured a
win for the Brexit Leave campaign, and led Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign
surge, shepherding him from the back of the GOP primary pack to the
front.
The
company is owned and controlled by conservative and alt-right interests
that are also deeply entwined in the Trump administration. The Mercer
family is both a major owner of Cambridge Analytica and one of Trump’s
biggest donors. Steve Bannon, in addition to acting as Trump’s Chief
Strategist and a member of the White House Security Council, is a
Cambridge Analytica board member. Until recently, Analytica’s CTO was
the acting CTO at the Republican National Convention.
Presumably
because of its alliances, Analytica has declined to work on any
democratic campaigns — at least in the U.S. It is, however, in final
talks to help Trump manage public opinion around his presidential
policies and to expand sales for the Trump Organization. Cambridge
Analytica is now expanding aggressively into U.S. commercial markets and
is also meeting with right-wing parties and governments in Europe,
Asia, and Latin America.
Cambridge Analytica isn’t the only company that could pull this off — but it is the most powerful right now. Understanding
Cambridge Analytica and the bigger AI Propaganda Machine is essential
for anyone who wants to understand modern political power, build a
movement, or keep from being manipulated. The Weaponized AI
Propaganda Machine it represents has become the new prerequisite for
political success in a world of polarization, isolation, trolls, and
dark posts.
thesaker | Okay, so I am not being honest with this title. But hey, since
Harvard does list my blog as a ‘fake news’ source, I might as well
indulge, at least once, into some absolutely shameless click baiting and
“fake newsing” :-)
What a fall from grace, really. Harvard University, arguably THE
symbol of US academia, has now joined such “prestigious” (not) actors
like CNN or the BBC in the ideological scramble to discredit free
information sources. For somebody like me who studied in US colleges
and who got two degrees in the USA, it is really sad.
paulcraigroberts | What is scary about the US and Europe is not merely the gullibility
and insouciance of such a large percentage of the populations. What is
very frightening is the willingness of the media, government officials,
military, and members of professional organizations to lie for the sake
of their careers. Try to find any shame among the liars that their lies
expose humanity to thermo-nuclear annihilation. It is not to be found.
They don’t care. Just let me have the Mercedes and the McMansion for
another year.
The Saker, an observant being, says that the color revolution being
conducted by the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, the
presstitutes, the liberal/progressive/left, and by some Republicans
against President Trump is “de-legitimizing the entire [democratic]
political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United
States is built as a society.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46658.htm
The consequence, says The Saker, is that “the illusion of democracy and
people power” has been destroyed both domestically and abroad. The
propaganda picture of “American Democracy” has lost its believability.
As the false picture crumbles, so does the power that was based on
authority constructed by propaganda.
The Saker asks: do we face an endless horror or a horrible end?
As George Orwell said decades ago, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
This is the way the criminals who rule us see it, and it is the way
their whores in the media see it. If you tell the truth in America, you
are a purveyor of fake news and possibly a traitor.
libertyblitzkrieg | " I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That
is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is
supported by the overwhelming number, perhaps 98—at least—of his
colleagues would come to the floor and object and walk away.
The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no
justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO
that is under assault from the Russians. So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin."
This video should alarm all Americans. McCain is accusing a fellow
Senator of disloyalty and allegiance to a foreign power simply because
he disagrees with him. It’s remarkably similar to what we saw Adam
Schiff do a few months ago in an embarrassing interview with Tucker
Carlson.
hotair | Via the Daily Wire,
that’s quite a claim. The president of the United States using a
foreign intelligence agency to spy on the other party’s presidential
candidate, for the obviously illicit purpose of erasing any domestic
paper trail of his actions? “Scandal of the decade” material. And yet it
falls not to the Fox News investigative team to break the story but to
legal commentator Andrew Napolitano — and not on one of Fox’s marquee
shows like O’Reilly or Tucker but on Fox & Friends and Martha
MacCallum’s program. You’d think a scoop like this would be in 50-point
font on the Fox website, but as I write this at around 4:45 ET, they’re
leading with a story about a probe of IT staffers who work for House Democrats. How come?
Sean Davis thinks this is a game of telephone gone bad inspired by the “Trump dossier,” which was compiled by a British ex-spy. Could be. It gains some plausibility from the fact that the U.S. and UK are part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement, which of course includes the NSA and GCHQ
(Britain’s NSA). It’ll also seem a bit more credible than it might have
in light of the surprise resignation in January of Robert Hannigan as
head of the GCHQ. Hannigan stepped down three days after Trump’s
inauguration, ostensibly for personal reasons, having served just two
years on the job. With news swirling at the time about the Trump
dossier, some Brits speculated
that the real reason he resigned might have been “related to British
concerns over shared intelligence with the US in the wake of Donald
Trump becoming president.” On top of all that, the Times reported
just two weeks ago that two foreign intelligence agencies, the British
and the Dutch, had provided intelligence on meetings allegedly held last
year between Trump “associates” and Russian officials in European
cities.
rutherford | “The first and most important thing to understand about politics is
this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy.
Every government that exists — or ever existed, or ever will exist — is a
kleptocracy, meaning ‘rule by thieves.’ Competing ideologies merely
provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what
they produce. If the taxpayer/voters won’t willingly fork over to end
poverty, then maybe they’ll cough up to fight drugs or terrorism.
Conflicting ideologies, as presently constituted, are nothing more than a
cover for what’s really going on, like the colors of competing gangs.” —
Author L. Neil Smith
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to
suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in
which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful,
and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government
agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict
mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
This begs the question: if the government is overstepping its
authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law but no
one seems to notice—and no one seems to care—does it matter if the
government has become a tyrant?
Here’s my short answer: when government wrongdoing ceases to matter, America will have ceased to be.
Just consider the devastation wrought in one week in the life of our American kleptocracy:
activistpost | WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested on Twitter Tuesday Hillary
Clinton and certain unnamed members of the U.S. Intelligence Community
are plotting a takeover by Vice President Mike Pence.
“Clinton stated privately this month that she is quietly pushing for a Pence takeover,” Assange tweeted. “She stated that Pence is predictable hence defeatable.”
Clinton stated privately this month that she is
quietly pushing for a Pence takeover. She stated that Pence is
predictable hence defeatable.
“Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover,” he added in another tweet. “Did not state if Pence agrees.”
Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately
this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover. Did not state if
Pence agrees.
Further, he continued, “By handing unilateral power to
the CIA over its drone strikes at this time White House signals that
bullying, disloyalty & incompetence pays.”
By handing unilateral power to the CIA over its
drone strikes at this time White House signals that bullying, disloyalty
& incompetence pays
In response to shocked reactions to the tweets, Pence lambasted Assange’s suggestion of a takeover as “absurd” and “frankly offensive” in an interview with radio host Laura Ingraham
The object of this fear and loathing? An obscure essay (now available only on web archives) titled "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement,"
written in 2001 by Eric Heubeck, a former associate of the late Paul
Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation. Not only has his essay been
removed from Free Congress's website, but Heubeck has apparently
withdrawn from public life, as this author has not been able to contact
him.
In the estimation of Yurica and her fellow leftists, Integration concretely articulates a plan developed by "Christian Theocrats" to seize political power and use it forcefully to dismantle the domain of liberalism (secularism, welfare, multiculturalism, affirmative action, etc.) and enforce a fundamentalist Christian order in America. In brief, Yurica sees Integration as an American, Christian version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is the full meaning of the smear term "Dominionism" coined by the left. As Yurica sees it, this evil plan is well on its way to victory; one can visualize her shuddering as she imagines jackbooted, goose-stepping "Theocrats" chanting "Sieg Heil!"
kansascity | Vice President Mike Pence has been pushing for Kansas Gov. Sam
Brownback to land a job in President Donald Trump’s administration,
according to sources.
Brownback would not comment on a possible
appointment during his first public appearance since reports that he is
under consideration to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for
food and agriculture, a post that is based in Rome.
Pence, a
former congressman who served as governor of Indiana, is close to
Brownback and has been advocating to find him a job in the
administration, according to several people familiar with the situation
but not authorized to speak publicly as a matter of practice. Trump has
considered Brownback for several jobs but has not yet offered one.
Brownback
said in August that Trump’s decision to choose Pence as his running
mate had helped persuade him to support Trump’s candidacy despite his
initial reservations. Brownback went onto serve on Trump’s agricultural
and Catholic advisory committees.
“Mike, I know well,” Brownback
said in August. “He’s a good man. He’s a man of faith. I have confidence
in Gov. Pence, and you know elections are about choices in
policy...What he’s shown in the picking of Pence is a willingness to get
good people around him, and you’ve got to realize that’s the way a
nation is run.”
The two men have shared staffers over the years.
Brownback’s former chief of staff, David Kensinger, served as a
consultant on Pence’s 2012 gubernatorial campaign shortly after stepping
down from his post in the Brownback administration.
The Star’s
sources say that talks between Brownback and the Trump administration
are ongoing, but the governor refused to clarify the matter Thursday.
“I’m
just not going to make any comments about any of that. I’m glad to see
the administration off to a strong start on job creation and security
issues, which is the key things they ran on, but I’m not making comments
about it,” Brownback said Thursday after handing out a humanitarian
award to a Kansas physician.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article137424678.html#storylink=cpy
motherjones | An ambitious effort by a Republican governor to drastically cut his state's taxes
is crumbling—and that's a bad omen for Donald Trump and Republicans in
Congress who are hoping to slash tax rates at the national level.
Shortly after he became governor of Kansas in 2011, Sam Brownback
went to work on rewriting the state's tax code. Together with the
Republican-dominated legislature, he eliminated the top income tax
bracket, lowered everyone else's income tax rate, and created a loophole
that allowed some business owners to pay no state income taxes at all.
Brownback sold the cuts as a way to jolt the Kansas economy to life,
promising major job growth thanks to the lower tax rates. To pass these
tax measures, Brownback worked to replace moderate Republicans in the
legislature who opposed his ideas with true-believer conservatives. He
helped knock off nine moderate Republican incumbents, and the effort
paid off when his tax reform passed in 2012.
But instead of the miracle growth that Brownback promised, the tax
cuts have left a widening crater in the state budget. State economic
growth has lagged behind the national pace, and job growth has stagnated.
Lawmakers have been left scrambling each year to pass unpleasant
spending cuts when tax revenue comes in below expected levels, leading
to contentious fights in the legislature and state courts over reduced public school funding.
When the state legislature convened last month, it faced a $320 million
budget shortfall that needed to be closed before the end of the current
fiscal year in June—and a projected additional $500 million shortfall
for the next fiscal year.
After more moderate Republicans joined the GOP-dominated legislature
following last November's election, the party has appeared more willing
to concede defeat and ditch Brownback's tax experiment. Last week, the
state House and Senate passed
a bill that would generate more than $1 billion by eradicating most of
Brownback's reforms. It would raise personal income tax rates (though
still not as high as the pre-Brownback rates) and end the loophole that
has allowed 330,000 business owners—including subsidiaries of
Wichita-based Koch Industries—to avoid paying income taxes.
chicagotribune | The federal government is projected to spend $4.091 trillion
next year, with roughly two-thirds of that going mostly toward Social
Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, poverty assistance and interest payments on the government
debt. This spending is expected to be left untouched in the budget
proposal next week.
What Trump will propose changing is
the rest of the budget, known as discretionary spending, which is
authorized each year by Congress. Slightly more than half of this
remaining money goes to the military, and the rest is spread across
agencies that operate things like education, diplomacy, housing,
transportation and law enforcement.
Among Trump's
expected proposals are an increase in military spending of $54 billion,
more money to start building a wall along the border between the United
States and Mexico, and the creation of new initiatives that expand
access to charter schools and other educational programs.
To
offset that new money, Trump will propose steep cuts across numerous
other agencies. Although final numbers remain in flux, his advisers have
considered cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development's
budget by $6 billion, or 14 percent, according to a preliminary budget
document obtained by The Washington Post. That is a change that Trulia
chief economist Ralph McLaughlin said could "put nearly 8 million
Americans in both inner-city and suburban communities at risk of losing
their public housing and nearly 4 million at risk of losing their rental
subsidy."
Preliminary budget documents have also shown
that Trump advisers have also looked at cutting the Environmental
Protect Agency's staff by about 20 percent and tightening the Commerce
Department's budget by about 18 percent, which would impact climate
change research and weather satellite programs, among other things.
Trump
and his advisers have said that they believe the federal workforce is
too big, and that the federal government spends - and wastes - too much
money. They have said that Washington - the federal workers and
contractors, among others - has benefited from government largesse while
many other Americans have suffered. Federal spending, they have argued,
crowds the private sector and piles regulations and bureaucracy onto
companies.
When “the left” endlessly debates which core issues or
constituencies must be sacrificed for political gain, as if economic
justice for the poor and the working class could be separated from
social justice for women and people of color and the LGBT community and
immigrants and people with disabilities, it is no longer functioning as
the left.
When LGBT claptrap, gluten free food, political correctness and other
such niceties beat out programs to serve the basic needs of the common
people nothing "left" is left. The priority on the left must always be
the well-being of the working people. All the other nice-to-have issues
follow from and after that.
Many nominally social-democratic parties in Europe are on the same
downward trajectory as the Democrats in the U.S. for the very same
reason. Their real policies are center right. Their marketing policies
hiding the real ones are to care for this or that minority interest or
problem the majority of the people has no reason to care about. Real
wages sink but they continue to import cheep labor (real policy) under
the disguise of helping "refugees" (marketing policy) which are simply
economic migrants. (Even parts of the German "Die Linke" party are
infected with such nonsense.)
The people with real economic problems, those who have reason to fear
the future, have no one in the traditional political spectrum that even
pretends to care about them. Those are the voters now streaming to the
far right. (They will again get screwed. The far right has an economic
agenda that is totally hostile to them. But it at least promises to do
something about their fears.) Where else should they go?
bibliotecapleyades |
The years 1982-1986 marked the period Pat Robertson and radio and
televangelists urgently broadcast appeals that rallied christian followers
to accept a new political religion that would turn millions of christians
into an army of political operatives. It was the period when the militant
church raised itself from centuries of sleep and once again eyed power.
At the time, most Americans were completely unaware of the militant
agenda
being preached on a daily basis across the breadth and width of
America.
Although it was called "christianity" it can barely be recognized as
christian. It in fact was and is a wolf parading in sheep’s clothing: It
was
and is a political scheme to take over the government of the United
States
and then turn that government into an aggressor nation that will
forcibly
establish the United States as the ruling empire of the twenty-first
century. It is subversive, seditious, secretive, and dangerous.[9]
Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is
frequently called "christian Reconstructionism." Its doctrines are shocking
to ordinary christian believers and to most Americans.
Journalist Frederick
Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism,
"seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite
that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’"
He described the
ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate "…labor unions, civil rights
laws, and public schools." Clarkson then describes the creation of new
classes of citizens:
"Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently christian
men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this
theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy,
heresy, adultery, and homosexuality." [10]
Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one
investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify
themselves as religious conservatives said,
"They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’"
[11]
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy
Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy
at Cornell University wrote,
"In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in
Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had
distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, "How to
Participate in a Political Party."
It read:
"Rule the world for God.
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push
an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don’t flaunt your christianity.
"christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control
political parties and so it is very important that mature christians
have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God
willing."
[12]
Dominionists have gained extensive control of
the Republican Party and the apparatus of government throughout the United
States; they continue to operate secretly.
Their agenda to undermine all government social
programs that assist the poor, the sick, and the elderly is ingeniously
disguised under false labels that confuse voters. Nevertheless, as we shall
see, Dominionism maintains the necessity of laissez-faire economics,
requiring that people "look to God and not to government for help."
[13]
It is estimated that thirty-five million Americans who call themselves
christian, adhere to Dominionism in the United States, but most of these
people appear to be ignorant of the heretical nature of their beliefs and
the seditious nature of their political goals. So successfully have the
televangelists and churches inculcated the idea of the existence of an
outside "enemy," which is attacking christianity, that millions of people
have perceived themselves rightfully overthrowing an imaginary evil
anti-christian conspiratorial secular society.
When one examines the progress of its agenda, one sees that Dominionism has
met its time table: the complete takeover of the American government was
predicted to occur by 2004.[14]
Unless the American people reject the GOP’s
control of the government, Americans may find themselves living in a
theocracy that has already spelled out its intentions to change every aspect
of American life including its cultural life, its Constitution and its laws.
Born in christian Reconstructionism, which was founded by the late
R. J. Rushdoony, the framers of the new cult included,
Rushdoony
his son-in-law Gary North
Pat Robertson
Herb Titus, the former Dean of
Robertson’s Regent University School of Public Policy (formerly CBN
University)
Charles Colson, Robertson’s political
strategist
Tim LaHaye
Gary Bauer
the late Francis Schaeffer
Paul Crouch, the founder of TBN, the
world’s largest television network,
...plus a virtual army of likeminded television
and radio evangelists and news talk show hosts.
Dominionism started with the Gospels and turned the concept of the invisible
and spiritual "Kingdom of God" into a literal political empire that could be
taken by force, starting with the United States of America.
Discarding the original message of Jesus
and forgetting that Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world," the
framers of Dominionism boldly presented a Gospel whose purpose was to
inspire christians to enter politics and execute world domination so that Jesus could return to an earth prepared for his earthly rule by his
faithful "regents."
religionandpolitics | Much has been made of the fact that Pence at one time described himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” However, Pence has become reticent about the shift in his faith identity, according to Craig Fehrman, who wrote a 2013 profile of him for Indianapolis Monthly.
Instead, he prefers to call himself an “ordinary Christian.” Pence “was
torn between his family’s faith and background and a new more exciting
faith,” Ferhman explained.
Pence continued to call himself a Catholic until the mid-1990s, when
he began attending an evangelical megachurch in Indianapolis. In her story about Pence’s evolving faith, Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post
noted that it was during this period when “white evangelicals and
conservative Catholics in the United States started to realize they had a
lot more in common than their more denominationally tribal parents
realized.” Together, Catholics and evangelical Christians worked to
protect “traditional marriage” and enforce greater abortion
restrictions.
Pence earned a law degree from Indiana University in 1986 and entered
private practice. After running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988 and
1990, he became the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation,
part of a Koch brothers-backed network, which bills itself as promoting
“the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues” by
“exalt[ing] the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially as
they apply to the interrelated freedoms of religion, property, and
speech.” It was during his four-year tenure there, which coincided with
this fuller embrace of evangelical Christianity, that Pence first began
promoting “traditional family” ideologies and policies in earnest.
Pence then became the host of a talk radio show—“Rush Limbaugh on decaf,”
is how he described his radio persona—as well as a local Sunday TV
show. Pence maintained ties, however, with his former organization. In
1996, he published in the foundation’s journal an essay
in which he lambasted the Republican Party’s move away from
“traditional Pro-Family conservatives.” His evidence was the 1996 RNC
speakers’ line-up, which included “pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and
proponents of Affirmative Action.” He lamented that the GOP had
abandoned the combative posture epitomized by Pat Buchanan’s “culture war”
speech at the 1992 convention. Pence even included a bit of unintended
foreshadowing of the rise of Trump. He wrote that not only did the 1996
RNC’s retreat from conservatism make for bad politics, it made for bad
TV; “ratings were dismal,” he noted.
In 2000, Pence was elected to the House of Representatives. There he
became a leader among movement conservatives committed to rolling back
federal intervention in education and healthcare, business and
environmental regulations. Until just last week, he called climate change “a myth”
based on faulty science. In the House, he voted to block policies that
would curb greenhouse gases. In 2002, he took to the House floor to call for science textbooks
to “be changed” to reflect that evolution “taught for 77 years in the
classrooms of America as fact” is just a “theory,” and that “other
theories of the origin of species,” notably “intelligent design,” should
also be included alongside evolution.
nybooks | As for the underlying mechanisms, we now have a general idea of how
they might work because of another strange inversion of reasoning, due
to Alan Turing, the creator of the computer, who saw how a mindless
machine could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing what it was doing.
This can be applied to all kinds of calculation and procedural control,
in natural as well as in artificial systems, so that their competence
does not depend on comprehension. Dennett’s claim is that when we put
these two insights together, we see that
all
the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of
uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more
competent—and hence comprehending—systems. This is indeed a
strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of
Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last.
And he adds:
Turing
himself is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts,
concrete and abstract, are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian
processes in the same way spider webs and beaver dams are….
An
essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution,
much of which, Dennett believes, is as uncomprehending as biological
evolution. He quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith’s definition, from which it is
clear that the concept of evolution can apply more widely:
Evolution
by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in
the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes
different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.
In the biological case, variation is caused by mutations in DNA,
and it is heritable through reproduction, sexual or otherwise. But the
same pattern applies to variation in behavior that is not genetically
caused, and that is heritable only in the sense that other members of
the population can copy it, whether it be a game, a word, a
superstition, or a mode of dress.
This is the
territory of what Richard Dawkins memorably christened “memes,” and
Dennett shows that the concept is genuinely useful in describing the
formation and evolution of culture. He defines “memes” thus:
They are a kind of way of behaving
(roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned,
denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
They
include such things as the meme for wearing your baseball cap backward
or for building an arch of a certain shape; but the best examples of
memes are words. A word, like a virus, needs a host to reproduce, and it
will survive only if it is eventually transmitted to other hosts,
people who learn it by imitation:
Like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication, and every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.
Free To A Good Home
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I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to
remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the
ni...
If Free Will Is False, Destiny Is True
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Free will is like God: perhaps dead, its absence having something to say
about morality (what Nietzsche meant by “Gott ist tot” was that the
Christian God ...
FREE BOOK: On Nonviolence
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“Michael Barker’s interrogation of nonviolent protest tactics and regime
change is both timely and important. Drawing on cases ranging from American
democr...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
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(Damn, has it been THAT long? I don't even know which prompts to use to
post this)
SeeNew
Can't get on your site because you've gone 'invite only'?
Man, ...
First Member of Chumph Cartel Goes to Jail
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With the profligate racism of the Chumph Cartel, I don’t imagine any of
them convicted and jailed is going to do too much better than your run of
the mill ...
