Why We Don't See Sentient Extraterrestrials

declineoftheempire |  Generally speaking, there are two answers to the question Is There Intelligent Life In The Universe?, where the term "intelligent life" means technologically advanced sentient beings broadly similar to humans. In the first essay I discussed optimistic answers to this question. Optimists imagine a Universe teeming with more advanced versions of ourselves, an answer which coincides (not coincidentally) with their vision of a bright human future.

This week we look at the views of the pessimists, who constitute a small minority of those concerned with astrobiological questions. Pessimists believe that Homo sapiens is alone and unique in the observable Universe, or believe that species broadly similar to Homo sapiens are very rare.

I am a pessimist, a position which follows from prolonged contemplation of the Fermi Paradox, which Paul Davies called "the eerie silence" (see the first essay).  Let me begin with an illuminating quote from Lee Billings, whose book Five Billion Years of Solitude was recently published by the Penguin Group (October, 2013).

The book’s title, Five Billion Years of Solitude, is actually a subtle nod to some things I’ve changed my mind about in the course of my research.

It’s a reference to the longevity of Earth’s biosphere. Earth’s life emerged shortly after the planet itself formed some 4.5 billion years ago, and current estimates suggest our world has a good half-billion years left until its vibrant biosphere of diverse, complex multicellular life begins sliding back to microbial simplicity.

When I first began planning this book, I believed that we would eventually find clear signs of life beyond our solar system, and suspected that contact with other cosmic civilizations was just a matter of time, for they were probably common throughout our galaxy. I believed that humans had a future, a destiny, beyond the Earth, and that our discoveries of other habitable or inhabited worlds would galvanize society to strive to voyage to the stars. I no longer hold these beliefs as foregone conclusions.

My optimism for humanity’s long-term prospects has dimmed.

I now believe that while life may be widespread in the universe, creatures like us are probably uncommon, and technological societies are vanishingly rare, making the likelihood of contact remote at best.

I am less confident than I once was that we will find unequivocal signs of life in other planetary systems within my lifetime. I believe that, when seen in the fullness of planetary time, our modern era will prove to have been the fulcrum about which the future of life turned for, at minimum, our entire solar system.

I believe that we humans are probably the most fortunate species to have ever arisen on Earth, and that those of us now alive are profoundly privileged to live in what can objectively be considered a very special time.

Finally, I would guess that though we possess the unique capacity to extend life and intelligence beyond Earth into unknown new horizons, there is a better-than-even chance that we will fail to do so.

The human story may end as it began — in nasty, brutish, and short isolation on a lonely, solitary planet. The book in part is my attempt to explain and come to terms with these beliefs, beliefs that I would very much like to be proved wrong.

 

 

GoFundme Was Gonna Just Steal Donations To The Anti-Vax Mandate Protestors

medium |  The update we issued earlier (below) enabled all donors to get a refund and outlined a plan to distribute remaining funds to verified charities selected by the Freedom Convoy organizers. However, due to donor feedback, we are simplifying the process. We will automatically refund all contributions directly — donors do not need to submit a request. You can expect to see your refund within 7–10 business days.

GoFundMe Statement on the Freedom Convoy 2022 Fundraiser (2/4/2022)

• GoFundMe supports peaceful protests and we believe that was the intention of the Freedom Convoy 2022 fundraiser when it was first created.
• We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.

To ensure GoFundMe remains a trusted platform, we work with local authorities to ensure we have a detailed, factual understanding of events taking place on the ground. Following a review of relevant facts and multiple discussions with local law enforcement and city officials, this fundraiser is now in violation of our Terms of Service (Term 8, which prohibits the promotion of violence and harassment) and has been removed from the platform.

Organizers provided a clear distribution plan for the initial $1M that was released earlier this week and confirmed funds would be used only for participants who traveled to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest. Given how this situation has evolved, no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organizers — we will work with organizers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities chosen by the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers and verified by GoFundMe.

All donors may submit a request for a full refund until February 19th, 2022 using this dedicated refund form.

I Fully B'lee Brandon And His MSM Proxies Smear Anybody Who Kwestins Them...,

caitlinjohnstone  |  One thing I’ve been meaning to write about these last few days has been the way mass media pundits have been insinuating or outright asserting that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is literally an agent of the Russian government.

Carlson has been accused of promoting Russian propaganda by mainstream narrative managers for frequently criticizing the Biden administration’s hawkish posture toward Russia regarding the entirely unsubstantiated claim that Moscow is preparing to launch an unprovoked military invasion of Ukraine. We’ve been seeing things like Anderson Cooper innocently musing that “It is striking how neatly Kremlin propaganda seems to dovetail with Carlson’s talking points” and this CNN segment from December with Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter and tinfoil hat Russiagater Julia Ioffe wondering aloud about why Russian state media seem to be so fond of Carlson. By mid-January, Democratic Party operatives were openly demanding that Carlson be investigated for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

“This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States,” tweeted former DNC official Alexandra Chalupa, best known for colluding with the Ukrainian government in 2016 on opposition research against Donald Trump.

This isn’t journalism, it’s an ongoing FARA violation. Tucker Carlson needs to be prosecuted as an unregistered agent of the Russian Federation and treason under Article 3, Sec. 3, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution for aiding an enemy in hybrid warfare against the United States. https://t.co/5JkLuCKoBn

— Alexandra Chalupa (@AlexandraChalup) January 19, 2022

The accusations and insinuations increased, eventually leading to Carlson outright denying being a Russian agent in a recent interview with The New York Times saying, “I’ve never been to Russia, I don’t speak Russian. Of course I’m not an agent of Russia.”

As you would expect, this denial was then spun by the same demented mainstream pundits who’ve spent the last five years being wrong about Russia as evidence that Carlson is a Russian agent.

“Tucker Carlson told The New York Times he’s not a Russian agent amid controversy over his pro-Kremlin stance,” blares a headline by Business Insider.

 

Cain't B'lee Matt Lee Kwestined Ned Price Like This....,

WaPo  |  Moscow is considering filming a fake attack against Russian territory or Russian-speaking people by Ukrainian forces as a pretext to invade its neighbor, the Biden administration said Thursday, warning that the resulting propaganda footage could include “graphic scenes of a staged false explosion with corpses.”

Russia has already recruited the people who would be involved in the fabricated attack video, and Russian intelligence is intimately involved in the effort, a senior Biden administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration.

“We believe that Russia would produce a very graphic propaganda video, which would include corpses and actors that would be depicting mourners and images of destroyed locations, as well as military equipment at the hands of Ukraine or the West, even to the point where some of this equipment would be made to look like it was Western-supplied,” Defense Department press secretary John Kirby said Thursday during a briefing at the Pentagon.

The Russian disinformation effort would be “right out of their playbook,” Kirby said, noting that most activity of that nature is approved at the highest levels of the Russian government. Kirby said the Biden administration felt it was important, upon learning of such plans, “to call it out.”

The allegations by the Biden administration were met with pushback due to the lack of specificity and evidence. At a briefing, State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked repeatedly if the United States would provide evidence supporting the alleged Russian plot. He declined to do so, citing the need to protect intelligence sources and methods.

When asked about the level of confidence Washington has in the information, Price said that “this is derived from intelligence in which we have confidence … otherwise we would not be making it public in the way we are.” He said the United States does not know if the Russians will use the alleged video but that the U.S. disclosure was designed to prevent it from happening.

Cain't B'lee Ayesha Rascoe Kwestined Jen Psaki Like This...,

realclearpolitics  |  According to President Biden this morning, the latest leader of the "Islamic State" group detonated a bomb killing his wife and family during a U.S. special forces raid near the Syria-Turkey border last night that resulted in his death. At least 13 other people died according to local sources and members of an apparently unrelated Syrian family on the lower floor of the building were injured.

NPR White House correspondent Ayesha Rascoe asked during an Air Force One press gaggle on Thursday if we were going to see any evidence of that claim. 

OTHER QUESTION: With regard to the civilian casualties in Syria, is the administration saying that they were caused entirely by the bomb detonating, or by crossfire from the one lieutenant engaging with U.S. forces? Give us some clarity on that.

JEN PSAKI: Obviously these events just happened overnight. So I'm going to let the Department of Defense do a final assessment, which I'm certain they will provide additional detail on once it is finalized.

AYESHA RASCOE, NPR: Jen, will there be any, like evidence or, like, release to support the idea -- I know the U.S. has put out a statement that they [ISIS leader or his associates] detonated the bomb themselves. But will the U.S. provide any evidence? Because there may be people who are skeptical of the events that took place and what happened to the civilians.

JEN PSAKI: Skeptical of the U.S. military's assessment when they went and took out an ISIS terror-- a leader of ISIS, that they are not providing accurate information? And ISIS is providing accurate information?

AYESHA ROSCOE: Well, not ISIS, but I mean. The U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians, I mean that is a fact.

JEN PSAKI: Well, as you know, there is an extensive process that the Department of Defense undergoes. The president made clear from the beginning at every point in this process that doing everything possible to avoid civilian casualties was his priority and his preference.

I just reconfirmed and I think our national security colleague who did a briefing this morning also reiterated that the individual who was the target detonated himself, killing his entire family. Given, these events just happened less than 24 hours ago, we're going to give them time to make a final assessment and they will provide every detail they can. 

Jews Weren't White Until They Were

usatoday |  If race were real – in a biological sense – it would stay the same across history. But it doesn't. It changes.

That's how people like me became white. Yes, you read that right. Jews weren't white … until we were.

 The horror of the Holocaust thoroughly discredited the idea of Jews as a race. But race itself – as a concept – was still going strong. Slowly, and unevenly, white Americans welcomed Jews into theirs.

Tensions between Jewish and Black people

That has been a source of tension between Jews and African Americans ever since. James Baldwin wrote in 1967 that Black people were tired of Jews claiming that their own experience of prejudice was “as great as the American Negro’s suffering.” That was false, Baldwin wrote, and it fueled Black antisemitism.

“The most ironical thing,” Baldwin added, “is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man.”

You could hear echoes of that frustration in Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on Monday, when she denied the racial dimensions of the Nazi genocide against Jews.

“This is white people doing it to white people,” she said, when challenged on the claim, “so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”

She was wrong about that, and – to her credit – she apologized for it. But she was right that most Jews have changed their race since that time, which has never been an option for African Americans.

Race makes us imagine that our differences are inherent. And from there, it's just a short step to the idea that some people are inherently superior – or inferior – to each other. We need a new language to talk about all of this, openly and honestly. Jews aren’t a separate race, biologically speaking. But neither is anyone else.

Jewishness (And Anti-Semitism) Is WTF WE TELL YOU IT IS!!!

israelnationalnews |  The Anti-Defamation League, which has faced charges in recent years that it has become too politically active, changed its definition of racism for the second time in two years after critics attacked its previous definition as narrowly focused.

According to a report in Breitbart, the ADL’s original definition of racism was: ”Racism is the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”

In late 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the ADL changed its definition of racism to state: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

The ADL said that the new definition was created to “reflect that racism in the United States manifests in broader and systemic ways.”

Yet, critics argued it was too narrow and left out other types of racism. The ADL also began to categorize Jews based on skin color – with fellowships aimed at “Jews of Color,” Breitbart reported.

But this week, the ADL again changed its definition of racism to an “interim” definition that was broader and was more reflective of the previous definition.

The interim definition states: “Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained the change in a Medium op-ed published on Wednesday, saying that while the updated definition “explicitly acknowledged the targeting of people of color – among many others – by the white supremacist extremism we have tracked for decades,” the “new frame narrowed the meaning in other ways.”

“By being so narrow, the resulting definition was incomplete, rendering it ineffective and therefore unacceptable,” Greenblatt said. “It’s true, it’s just not the whole truth. It alienated many people who did not see their own experience encompassed in this definition, including many in the Jewish community.”

 

ADL Deeply Disturbed By Characterizations Of Jews As A Race

ADL  |  New Orleans, LA, February 26, 2018 … Anti-Defamation League (ADL) South Central Regional Director Aaron Ahlquist issued the following statement regarding Joshua Bonadona’s employment discrimination lawsuit against Louisiana College:

“ADL is deeply offended by the perception of Jews as a race found in both allegations against the College and the plaintiff’s assertions in the lawsuit.  According to a court filing, the administration was motivated in its actions because of Mr. Bonadona’s “Jewish blood” and Mr. Bonadona is attempting to circumvent the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s religious employer exemption by characterizing his “Jewish heritage” as racial.

The notion of the Jewish “race” originated from the 19^th Century concept of “racial science,” which took root in Western Europe.  In response to the decline of the influence of traditional Christianity, as well as the rise of Jewish assimilation and social mobility, anti-Semites adopted racial arguments as a new rationalization for their hatred of Jews.

The idea that Jews are not only a religious group, but also a racial group, was a centerpiece of Nazi policy, and was the justification for killing any Jewish person who came under Nazi occupation –– regardless of whether he or she practiced Judaism. In fact, even the children and the grandchildren of Jews who had converted to Christianity were murdered as members of the Jewish “race” during the Holocaust.

Based on Congress’ 19^th Century conception of race, the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1980s ruled that the definition of “non-white races” found in post-Civil War anti-discrimination laws, includes Arabs, Chinese, Jews and Italians.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which explicitly covers national origin and religion, does not embody these antiquated views.  Although Mr. Bonadona’s attorney certainly could try to bring claims under these 19^th century laws, we believe that attempting to create similar legal precedent under the Civil Rights Act perpetuates harmful stereotypes and views about Jews.

What unites Jews as a people, whether they come from Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, is a common culture, rooted in a common religion. Jews throughout the world are joined by a religious and cultural heritage rather than a racial sameness.  The allegations against Louisiana College, if true, would indicate a very troubling and deeply offensive view by the institution that it perceives and discriminates against Jews as a race.”

Whoopi Didn't Learn From The Example Made Of Nick Cannon (REDUX 7/25/20)

For 100 minutes, not a single truth was discussed outside the truth that Abraham Cooper is supremely arrogant about being in a position of strength and control, and very explicitly says as much to the slobbering, grinning, and thoroughly chastened and humiliated negroe "celebrity".

Nick Cannon's jaws and knees must really, really hurt after a hundred minutes of grinning, bowing and scraping before this nasty little Brooklyn mensch.

Finally, isn’t it in the nature of contemporary culture, with its emphasis on entertainment, consumption, and sex, to be the perfect environment in which to hide many “Invisible Gorillas”? Isn’t it a whirlwind of fixations and distractions, replete with untold numbers of “woke” viewers happy to report that they’ve been enthusiastically counting passes and have the accurate number? Isn’t it rather the axiom of our time that, from the idiotic Left to the idiotic Right, Invisible Gorillas stroll freely and unhindered, laughing and waving as they go, hidden in plain sight?

Tried to tell you where this is headed last week Manifesto of Secure Tolerance

Fascism Has BEEN HERE: I Assume You Understand The Reality Of Your Situation?

off-guardian  |  you are not supposed to talk about how money controls social institutions and how our values, beliefs and norms are determined by the interests of the ruling class, and how the economic caste order effectively enforces capitalist imperatives to perpetuate the reign of money and violence.

Believe it or not, today, this sort of understanding is labeled as “conspiracy.” Right, you are a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy nut case if you happen to call out corporate crimes, their criminal conspiracies and so on and so forth.

How obvious can it get? Rich people dominate corporate politics with the good old righteousness of exceptionalism, and a colonial attitude with the kinder, gentler face of liberal politics, and it is perfectly OK to call a simple Marxist analysis of exploitation a “conspiracy.”

The tendency to obscure the mechanism of capitalism is mirrored exactly among many of those who oppose the overwhelming push for Covid lockdowns, Covid “vaccine” mandates and so on. For many of those who stand on the other side of the virus event, the entire mobilization is described as a “communist takeover.”

That’s right. All those diehard capitalists who have been conspiring to perpetuate their interests through World Economic Forum, IMF, World Bank and so on are communists now. How convenient? You can’t have capitalism without opportunism.

But the whole thing makes perfect sense. Both ends of the capitalist spectrum, fascists and social democrats, have always struggled to perpetuate capitalist hegemony together. At the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to perpetuate the capitalist caste hierarchy and their righteous positions within it.

One step with the left leg goes forward as the right leg moves forward to balance the momentum of the imperial hegemony — just as the hopelessly corrupt Hilary Clinton gives birth to a Donald Trump Presidency, which, in turn, gives the Democratic Party a reason to exist.

Left, right, left, right, the empire moves forward as it gently shifts its weight left to right. As they march the imperial-scape together, they sing derogatory smears against any revolutionary momentum.

Both sides are free to argue and fight as long as they adhere to the imperial imperatives of capitalism. The corporate media ensure that the narratives are told to fit this dynamic. Those who do not belong to the dynamics are portrayed as “others”–fringe extremists to be demonized from multiple angles.

How does the empire gain its mythical aura of authority? Easy. They play a good old protection racket scheme against unsuspecting “good people.”

For example, they tell people that terrorists are coming, while “secretly” funding the killers in ways which are not so secret to the people. People get the idea: “Oh I see. we have to pay the protection fee. Otherwise, we get fucked up.”

Or, for example, they tell people that plague is coming, and force people to get injected with special medicines. If the people refuse, their jobs are taken away, their families are split apart, you can’t eat at a restaurant and so on. They can effectively turn everyone into a dangerous element with an infection until proven “healthy” by the designated means of the authority.

There goes the presumption of innocence along with informed consent out of the door.

This is a big deal. There is a huge reason why an authority must prove someone guilty without a reasonable doubt. Otherwise, people can be arbitrarily accused of committing any crime and then punished for it. And without informed consent, people can be forced to drink Cool Aid just because they are told to do so.

Moreover, as soon as the feudal overloads deal with the life and death of the people, they effectively consecrate themself as gods. A politician would claim that Covid “vaccines” are sent by God. Cultural figures would start accusing those who refuse the medication of “defying the law of nature,” defying “science” and so on, effectively turning Bill Gates and the rest of the snake oil salesmen into gods of our times.

So now it seems that even this pretend “democracy” is being taken away by the acceptance of decrees under an “emergency” just like any other fascist take-over.

SitRep: Where You Worrisome Pissant Are - Right About Now...,

off-guardian |   I am afraid I am not all that excited about the current hoopla regarding our apparent victory over the mainstream narrative. I simply don’t believe it entirely.

We’ve made a run, so to speak, maybe have gotten too rowdy, too powerful, and we are being given a bit of slack so we don’t break the line.

This run is not being executed only by the folks on our side of the fence, but by the sheep as well. We are ALL tired, we are all ready to get out of this mess and call it a day.

It seems like a sensible tactic on their part—to let out a little line, but still keeping us hooked and apparently still in their control.

All this euphoria about us finally winning the battle and that the narrative is finally crumbling indicates to me that we may be getting lost in the weeds of apparent success and the hook and line is still, in reality, firmly embedded in our flesh, only to suddenly reel us in again, after a dizzying and disorienting taste of freedom. I don’t like it.

Most everyone is familiar with the 1950’s Harvard experiment conducted by a rather soulless Curt Richter. Rats were placed in a tank where they had to frantically tread water to survive. Typically they lasted only 15 minutes or so before giving up, sinking, and subsequently drowning.

A second set of experiments showed that if the rats were saved right before their demise, dried off and given a little respite, and then again returned to the tank of water, they could tread, and stay alive, for up to 60 hours.

They called this the “hope experiment,” which is relevant to the current happenings.

To maintain the narrative, people must maintain some sort of hope. When we are about to throw in the towel we are given a little slack in the line, and when the pressure hits again—with a new variant, a new virus, or, in a radical right turn, a nuclear war threat — we can sustain our loyalty, and ultimate compliance, believing we will not drown but will be saved at the last minute by our surrogate parents and archetypal “protectors.”

These tactics work in different ways with the masses on opposing sides of the fence. The sheep need the slack when they are about to throw in the towel of compliance. The rest of us are not about to throw in the towel, but are about to gain greater potential of harm to the narrative—they respond to both situations with the same tactic, but with different results depending on where you sit in this whole mess.

Who Do You Suppose Is Buying Up Musicians' Catalogs Like HotCakes?

LATimes |  The exit of Young and Mitchell was enough to get Spotify Chief Executive Daniel Ek to release a lengthy statement on Spotify’s “critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.” He didn’t mention Rogan by name. 

There’s a reason Billboard put Ek at No. 4 on its music business Power List for 2022. The Stockholm company counts 381 million users, including 172 million paying subscribers, in 184 countries, and in 2020 paid out $5 billion in music royalties, accounting for roughly 20% of recorded music revenues that year.

Cutting off that profit pipeline would be a big deal for artists and their labels. Young said leaving Spotify would cost him 60% of his streaming earnings.

Although artists these days make most of their money touring, royalty checks from Spotify are not easy to part with. Billboard estimated that Young and Mitchell are forsaking 10% of their annual earnings to bail on Spotify.

“Streaming income, while by no means the whole income picture, is the key income source now, and it’s driving the sky-high valuations that are allowing some artists to sell off and then sail off into the sunset with a yacht-load of cash,” said Bill Hochberg, a music industry lawyer in Los Angeles.

Spotify’s power extends beyond the balance sheet. The company, through its curated playlists such as RapCaviar, functions as the equivalent of a Tower Records in its heyday, combined with the biggest radio station conglomerates. Getting onto a popular Spotify playlist is a supercharged version of getting onto a record store end cap in the 1990s, exposing new artists to millions of listeners.

The company’s status as a promotional tool is as important as its function as a moneymaker through actual listening, and that helps touring bands develop the fan bases that buy concert tickets.

Music rights are complicated

Even when artists want to leave Spotify — and some do — it isn’t as simple as pressing the skip button. The top musicians typically don’t have direct relationships with streaming services; their music appears on the app through licensing deals with their labels and publishers.

The big labels — Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music — all have licensing deals with Spotify, as do the indies through music rights agency Merlin. Artists such as Mitchell have to go through their labels to get their tunes off the platform.

Many artists don’t even own their catalogs, creating additional difficulties. Top-tier songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen have sold their songs and recordings for nine-figure payouts. It’s unlikely the owners of those catalogs would want to forgo Spotify’s streaming revenue after forking over so much money in the hopes that streaming would make their investments pay off.

 

 

Today I Learned That Anti-Semitism Is A Threat To Democracy Itself

pbs  |  Israel on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish an upcoming report accusing it of apartheid, saying the conclusions of the London-based international human rights group are “false, biased and antisemitic.”

Amnesty is expected to join the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem in accusing Israel of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state and because of its treatment of its own Arab minority.

Israel dismissed the other reports as biased, but is adopting a much more adversarial stance this time around. Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has said Israel expects intensified efforts this year to brand it as an apartheid state in international bodies and hopes to head them off.

In a statement issued Monday, he said Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts,” and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.”

“Israel isn’t perfect, but we are a democracy committed to international law, open to criticism, with a free press and a strong and independent judicial system,” Lapid said.

Amnesty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Amnesty’s report “denies the state of Israel’s right to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people.”

Thought And Speech Unsanctioned By The Ruling Class Is Misinformation

foxnews  |  It's still amazing that someone like Joe Rogan has become the subject of such hatred and venom from the leftists media and their allies in academic and public medicine. Rogan has drawn such strong levels of invective for simply going against the ruling class on issues such as COVID-19 and, more broadly, the classically liberal principles of free, open, and rigorous debate with diversity in thought," NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told Fox News. 

"Despite having had a long career in Hollywood and supported politicians like Bernie Sanders, none of his past behaviors are enough in the eyes of today's left. It's conform or be silenced. It's twisted and, quite frankly, lame brained for them to voice support for free speech and the First Amendment but insist Rogan shouldn't be allowed to have a prominent platform," Houck continued. "It's not only important to point out how he's not to be confused with a conservative, but it's almost an imperative to illustrate just how authoritarian and close-minded too many on the left have become."

CNN has particularly feuded with Rogan; the two sides feuded when Rogan took ivermectin to tread COVID-19 and the liberal outlet ran the narrative that he had taken "horse dewormer" and a "livestock drug." Rogan fired back in an interview with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta that his network was "lying" and Gupta conceded some of CNN's people had misspoken.

During a headline-making appearance on Rogan’s podcast, Gupta pointed to the "snarky" statement released by the FDA saying, "You are not a horse. You are not a cow," in order to encourage people to not take ivermectin, but Rogan remained persistent on calling out CNN's coverage of a drug that's been "given out to billions and billions of people" and resulted in a Nobel Prize.

Rogan first told Gupta that his ivermectin was "prescribed to me by a doctor," forcing the CNN correspondent to say the drug "shouldn't be called" horse dewormer.

The fight continued when CNN fumed in a statement to the Washington Post that Rogan had undermined faith in effective vaccines, adding "the only thing CNN did wrong here was bruise the ego of a popular podcaster who pushed dangerous conspiracy theories." The Post's Erik Wemple wrote at the time that the statement from CNN "sounds more like the work of an advocacy group than a journalism outfit."

Dollars To Donuts The Blackstone Group Is Behind The Spotify Market Manipulation

Spotify was never going to drop Joe Rogan because his long form podcast is the strategic lynchpin for making Spotify profitable. Spotify's 6 year history shows it can't profit from music streaming alone, but that in order to achieve profitability, it needs to book advertising revenue, and THAT's what the podcasting content is for.

Spotify is scheduled to announce its Q4 results this Wednesday. In the interim, the musically and popularly irrelevant Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Nils Lofgren have cost Spotify billions in market value through their virtue signaling shenanigans. Kudos to the shrewd manipulators who pulled this charade off and managed to capitalize on the short term decline in Spotify market valuation.

Spotify's shares have subsequently dropped by 6% in just three days, from January 26 to January 28 (via Variety), following Young's protest.  Spotify has not been having the greatest of times even before the loss this controversy caused. Its stock price had already dropped earlier this month, as the company reported a 25% fall in share value on January 25, a day before this all started.

Despite that, the popular streaming service stated that it had already removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to the pandemic since its start. 

 

rollingstone |  Neil Young has sold 50 percent of the worldwide copyright and income interests in his 1,180 song catalogue to Hipgnosis Songs Fund Limited, the U.K. investment firm founded by manager-turned-investor Merck Mercuriadis. The move comes days after Hipgnosis, which has spent the last year snapping up music catalogs left and right, announced it had acquired 100% of Lindsey Buckingham’s publishings rights as well as Jimmy Iovine’s producing royalties.

 

blackstone |   Blackstone and Hipgnosis Song Management launch $1 billion partnership to invest in songs, recorded music, music IP and royalties

Glenn Greenwald Misses The Spotify Forest For The Censorship Trees

greenwald |  The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest. Rogan has simply become too influential, with too large of an audience of young people, for the liberal establishment to tolerate his continuing to act up. Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures. Shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported in September, 2020 that Spotify employees were organizing to demand that some of Rogan's shows be removed from the platform, Rogan invited Alex Jones onto his show: a rather strong statement that he was unwilling to obey decrees about who he could interview or what he could say.

On Tuesday, musician Neil Young demanded that Spotify either remove Rogan from its platform or cease featuring Young's music, claiming Rogan spreads COVID disinformation. Spotify predictably sided with Rogan, their most popular podcaster in whose show they invested $100 million, by removing Young's music and keeping Rogan. The pressure on Spotify mildly intensified on Friday when singer Joni Mitchell issued a similar demand. All sorts of censorship-mad liberals celebrated this effort to remove Rogan, then vowed to cancel their Spotify subscription in protest of Spotify's refusal to capitulate for now; a hashtag urging the deletion of Spotify's app trended for days. Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history's largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice.

Jack Cocchiarella @JDCocchiarella

Spotify chose Joe Rogan over Neil Young. I’ll choose Apple Music over Spotify.

January 27th 2022

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Obviously, Spotify is not going to jettison one of their biggest audience draws over a couple of faded septuagenarians from the 1960s. But if a current major star follows suit, it is not difficult to imagine a snowball effect. The goal of liberals with this tactic is to take any disobedient platform and either force it into line or punish it by drenching it with such negative attacks that nobody who craves acceptance in the parlors of Decent Liberal Society will risk being associated with it. “Prince Harry was under pressure to cut ties with Spotify yesterday after the streaming giant was accused of promoting anti-vax content,” claimed The Daily Mail which, reliable or otherwise, is a certain sign of things to come.

One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify. With the stock price of Spotify declining as these recent controversies around Rogan unfolded, a strategy in which Spotify is forced to choose between keeping Rogan or losing substantial musical star power could be more viable than it currently seems. “Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week after rock icon Neil Young called out the company for allowing comedian Joe Rogan to use its service to spread misinformation about the COVID vaccine on his popular podcast, 'The Joe Rogan Experience,’” is how The San Francisco Chronicle put it (that Spotify's stock price dropped rather precipitously contemporaneously with this controversy is clear; less so is the causal connection, though it seems unlikely to be entire coincidental):

Three Geezerwaffen Plus One Replacement Negroe Out To Get Joe Rogan

hollywoodreporter  |  Nils Lofgren, a longtime guitarist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, is among the musicians to pull music from Spotify in the wake of the streaming platform spreading COVID-19 misinformation.

He follows Neil Young, who announced Wednesday that he would remove his catalogue in protest of COVID vaccine misinformation being spread on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Joni Mitchell, who followed in solidarity soon after.

Both musicians referred to an open letter sent to Spotify from 270 professionals in the scientific and medical communities, calling on the streaming service to address misinformation distributed on the platform.

In a statement shared to the Neil Young Archives on Saturday, Lofgren shared: “A few days ago, my wife and I became aware of Neil and Daryl [Hannah] standing with hundreds of health care professionals, scientists, doctors and nurses in calling out Spotify for promoting lies and misinformation that are hurting and killing people.”

Lofgren noted that 27 years of his music has been taken off the service and that he is also reaching out to labels that own his earlier music to have that removed as well. The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Spotify for comment.

“Neil and I go back 53 years,” Lofgren’s statement continued. “Amy and I are honored and blessed to call Neil and Daryl friends, and knew standing with them was the right choice.”

MOAR Censorship PUH-LEEZ!!!!

taibbi |  Censors have a fantasy that if they get rid of all the Berensons and Mercolas and Malones, and rein in people like Joe Rogan, that all the holdouts will suddenly rush to get vaccinated. The opposite is true. If you wipe out critics, people will immediately default to higher levels of suspicion. They will now be sure there’s something wrong with the vaccine. If you want to convince audiences, you have to allow everyone to talk, even the ones you disagree with. You have to make a better case. The Substack people, thank God, still get this, but the censor’s disease of thinking there are shortcuts to trust is spreading.

Lastly, while the Post certainly has its own problems in this area, the Guardian editors should puke with shame for even thinking about condemning anyone else’s “misinformation,” while their own fake story about Assange’s “secret talks” with Paul Manafort in the Ecuadorian embassy remains up. Leaving an obvious hoax uncorrected will tend to create a credibility problem, and you compound it by pointing a finger elsewhere. There is a lesson in this for health authorities, too. Clean your own houses, and maybe you won’t have such a hard time being believed. 

I’ve used Substack to show the amazingly diverse range of speech deemed unallowable on private platforms, from raw footage of both anti-Trump protests and the January 6th riots, to satirical videos no one had even seen yet, to advocates and detractors of the medication Ivermectin, to a Jewish tweeter’s pictorial account of Hitler’s life, to a now proven-true expose about the president’s son. The latter case is on point, because the widely distributed story that the New York Post’s Hunter Biden report was Russian disinformation was the actual disinformation. If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed.

This puts the issue of the reliability of authorities front and center, which is the main problem with pandemic messaging. One does not need to be a medical expert to see that the FDA, CDC, the NIH, as well as the White House (both under Biden and Trump) have all been untruthful, or wrong, or inconsistent, about a spectacular range of issues in the last two years.

 

All One Hundred Seven Chapters Of The Book Of Enoch

The Book Of Enoch REDUX (Originally Posted 9/12/17)

wikipedia |  The Book of Enoch (also 1 Enoch;^[1] Ge'ez: መጽሐፈ ሄኖክ mätṣḥäfä henok) is an ancient Jewish religious work, ascribed by tradition to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, although modern scholars estimate the older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) to date from about 300 BC, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably to the first century BC.^[2]

It is not part of the biblical canon as used by Jews, apart from Beta Israel. Most Christian denominations and traditions may accept the Books of Enoch as having some historical or theological interest, but they generally regard the Books of Enoch as non-canonical or non-inspired.^[3] It is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, but not by any other Christian groups.

It is wholly extant only in the Ge'ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin fragments. For this and other reasons, the traditional Ethiopian belief is that the original language of the work was Ge'ez, whereas non-Ethiopian scholars tend to assert that it was first written in either Aramaic or Hebrew; Ephraim Isaac suggests that the Book of Enoch, like the Book of Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew.^[4]:6 No Hebrew version is known to have survived. It is asserted in the book itself that its author was Enoch, before the Biblical Flood.

Some of the authors of the New Testament were familiar with some of the content of the story.^[5] A short section of 1 Enoch (1:9) is cited in the New Testament, Epistle of Jude, Jude 1:14–15, and is attributed there to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:8), although this section of 1 Enoch is a midrash on Deuteronomy 33. Several copies of the earlier sections of 1 Enoch were preserved among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

America's Civil War: Provincial Lesser-Rich vs. Urban Mega-Rich

tabletmag | But what of the states and the federal government? These two tiers of the U.S. constitutional order are merely the battlegrounds on which the intra-elite feuds of the American metro areas are fought.

In states like Texas, in which Republicans control the state government while the big cities are controlled by the Democratic hourglass coalition, there is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between progressive city councils that enact left-wing policies and right-wing legislatures passing legislation to overrule them. The Texas state legislature has used state law to annul ordinances of the far-left Austin City Council ranging from plastic bag bans, to enabling an explosion of homeless encampments in public spaces, to declaring Austin a “sanctuary city” whose police officers would be ordered to refuse to collaborate with federal immigration authorities.

The state usually wins, because under our constitutional system the policies of cities, counties, and local governments under most state constitutions can be overruled in many areas by the state government. In this way, metro area conservatives, having lost city councils to progressive Democrats, can use allies in state government to defeat their enemies downtown.

But the downtown Democratic coalition has allies of its own in the federal government. Beginning in the 1960s, Democrats—by then having become the urban party they are today—discovered that by means of federal “grants-in-aid,” they could circumvent state legislatures and go directly to Congress. According to one estimate, in 2018 federal aid to state and local governments, taking the form of grants to specific programs in areas from K-12 education to environmental policy to transportation and infrastructure, amounted to $697 billion, doled out via 1,386 separate programs that bind localities to the federal government.

As a result of all of these targeted federal spending programs, about one-third of state spending actually comes from the federal government.

This in turn means that a substantial number of state and local government employees are in effect paid by the federal government, either to administer grants or to ensure compliance with the many complicated federal regulations attached to the grants.

Many of the “culture war issues” that divide left and right are provoked by the metro area left’s attempt to use federal regulations to impose policies that could not be passed by the city council or the state government. The threat that the federal government would cut off aid to colleges and universities was used to intimidate them into compliance with controversial leftist sexual harassment policies denying due process to the accused under the Obama administration. Also in the Obama years, the federal government used the threat of cutoffs of federal aid and civil rights lawsuits to bully state governments and local school districts into letting biological boys and men compete in female sports teams and use female showers, locker rooms, and restrooms. In the case of the latter controversy, the federal government’s pressure on state legislatures and local school districts was reinforced by extortion from “woke” national and multinational corporations, which fund Democrats.

When federal grants-in-aid and corporate blackmail are understood as weapons of the downtown Democrats, the power of Republican red state legislatures to override blue city ordinances looks less impressive. While targeted grants-in-aid may benefit only a few state citizens, it is the noisy few who will fill up the phone lines to state legislators if the federal government threatens to cut them off as part of a progressive blackmail campaign. Democratic legislators have also found ways of tying more popular forms of federal aid—for transportation, housing, and schools—to more arcane priorities in cultural areas, forcing localities to choose between embracing Democratic ideas of race, gender, and sexual orientation or risk losing federal funding for schools and highways.

Even more intimidating is extortion by left-leaning corporations. Particularly in poorer, more working-class Republican states, the state economic development strategy often involves luring major national or multinational corporate investment. The socially (though not economically) progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans who run corporate America can insist that the states competing for their money not only shower them with tax breaks but also write New York and Bay Area social values into state law, or suffer an investment boycott.

 

One Little Town, Three Thousand People, Two Starkly Different Realities...,

AP |  The newspaper hit the front porches of the wind-scarred prairie town on a Thursday afternoon: Coronavirus numbers were spiking in the farming communities of western Minnesota.

“Covid-19 cases straining rural clinics, hospitals, staff,” read the front-page headline. Vaccinate to protect yourselves, health officials urged.

But ask around Benson, stroll its three-block business district, and some would tell a different story: The Swift County Monitor-News, the tiny newspaper that’s reported the news here since 1886, is not telling the truth. The vaccine is untested, they say, dangerous. And some will go further: People, they’ll tell you, are being killed by COVID-19 vaccinations.

One little town. Three thousand people. Two starkly different realities.

It’s another measure of how, in an America increasingly split by warring visions of itself, division doesn’t just play out on cable television, or in mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.

It has seeped into the American fabric, all the way to Benson’s 12th Street, where two neighbors -- each in his own well-kept, century-old home -- can live in different worlds. 

In one house is Reed Anfinson, publisher, editor, photographer and reporter for the Monitor-News. Most weeks, he writes every story on the paper’s front page. He wrote that story on clinics struggling with COVID-19.

He’s not the most popular man in the county. Lots of people disagree with his politics. He deals with the occasional veiled threat. Sometimes, he grudgingly worries about his safety.

While his editorials lean left, he works hard to report the news straight. But in an America of competing visions, some here say he has taken sides. 

Nowhere in the Monitor-News, for example, will you find reports that local people are dying because they’ve been inoculated.

“There are no alternative facts,” Anfinson says. “There is just the truth.”

But whose truth?

His neighbor, Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.

He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: “I just know that I’m doing their funerals.”

He’s also certain that information “will never make it into the newspaper.”

Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.

“You’re lying to people,” he says. “You flat-out lie about things.”

 

 

 

Corporate Government Mommies And Daddies Aren't Going To Save You

ianwelsh  |  In face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are OK with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you that everything is OK while they sprint for the lifeboats: aka. New Zealand.)

For over 10 years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that America’s the only developed nation heading for failed state, for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but America’s one of the leaders (Britain’s another) and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.

But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse: not in time.

We’re all in a big ship, it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon and the entire thing is going to sink.

And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps,  have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.

But this article isn’t about “we are fucked”, it’s about “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”

And one of the big reasons for this is the need for daddy. One of the big hurdles to radicalization is that it means you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your interest, but are your enemies.

I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple  years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.

But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family and other groups because at some level you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come thru and take care of.

All your life government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc… They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like  you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.

Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders and those they lead.

An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.

But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change and environmental collapse and all our other problems (handle doesn’t mean stop, but many problems are essentially trivial and can be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls) means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely and we need to entirely get rid of our current leadership class, who have proved their incompetence and ill will.

That’s radical. That’s a leap.

Since A Good Childhood Is Key To Everything In Life: Matthew 25:40-45 - Or Nah?

annehelen  |  The vast majority of societies on this planet still understand family as their primary, most cherished bond. Blood relation or not, there is an understanding that forsaking these bonds is a form of unforgivable treachery, understandable only in circumstances of abject trauma. Within this paradigm, all parties should do whatever possible to maintain the bonds of family, even if those bonds require continued suffering.

In some societies, this understanding is changing. There are several, overlapping reasons for this change — related to mobility, LGBTQ rights and visibility, access to therapy, and more — yet for people who are estranged, the experience can still feel incredibly solitary. Most people who aren’t estranged are very, very bad at talking about it; in society at large, estrangement remains something to be “sorry” about: a regret, a sorrow, a throbbing absence.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are so many reasons why people cut off contact with close and distant family. Some are immediately legible in description, others are not, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that contact became unendurable, damaging, or, in my case, brought out the very worst in who I was. As you’ll see in the answers below, it is rarely swift. It is rarely without pain. But that doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

While putting together these responses, I was reading Rin Reczek and Emmy Bosley-Smith’s Families We Keep, forthcoming this May, which surveys the various negotiations of LGBTQ people who’ve chosen to maintain or cut off ties to family members. It’s a difficult book, filled with rejection and compromise intercut by flashes of stability and support. And their conclusions are bracing: they argue that “compulsory kinship,” in which we work to sustain bonds to family irregardless of the harm those bonds have caused, is at once insidious and deeply damaging.

“The compulsory relationship between parents and children might sound like a great deal to some—especially those with healthy parent-child ties,” Reczek and Bosley-Smith write. “Of course, the parent–adult child tie can result in a life full of positivity, love, and kindness. But for many people this is not the case. We believe if parent-adult child relationships aren’t good for everyone, then parents’ primacy in our social structure and in adult children’s social identities must be questioned. Even though there are some “good” parents, the fact that “bad” ones have so much power should provoke us to radically rethink our societal reliance on this kinship institution.”

Reczek and Bosley-Smith invite us to consider what an “ethic of care” might look like, in which all people, no matter their age or their existing family, could experience “a sense of belong and identity, alongside emotional, practical, and financial help.” That sense can come from community, but it should also come from the safety nets we put in place as a society. Put differently, your safety and nourishment as a child, as a young adult, as a parent, as someone with specific medical or emotional needs, as an aging person — none of it should be wholly contingent on the luck (truly!) of being born into a family that is financially or emotionally able to provide them for you.

All of these stories, as one of the respondents put it, are “beautifully complex.” If you’re estranged, I hope they make you feel less alone in some way. If you’re not, I hope they offer some insight into how to talk with and support those who are estranged — but more importantly, that they push you to think about what’s lost when we rely so fully on family as our primary source of support.

Houston Eviction Courts Back To Pre-Pandemic Levels

houstonpublicmedia |  The state rent relief program is out of money. The national eviction moratorium ended months ago. Pandemic unemployment benefits in Texas expired over the summer. While the pandemic isn’t over, most of the state’s court safety regulations have ended or are set to expire soon.

That means more eviction filings and, in some areas, crowded courtrooms that make it near impossible to stay safely distant indoors: So far this month, more than 4,600 eviction cases have been filed in Harris County as the omicron variant led to climbing case counts and hospitalizations.

During the week of Jan. 10, more than 2,033 cases were filed in Harris County, compared to 693 cases filed during the same period last year, according to Jeff Reichman, principal at the consulting firm January Advisors.

“That’s almost three times as many cases filed this January as there were last January,” Reichman said. “We’re really on trend with pre-pandemic numbers.”

In 2020, 2,180 cases were filed during the same time period.

Earlier this month, during the week of Jan. 10, more than 2,033 cases were filed in Harris County compared to 693 cases filed last year, Reichman said. During the same week of 2020, 2,180 cases were filed.

The increase in eviction cases is hitting some courts more than others: Just as some neighborhoods have far more evictions, certain courts take on far more cases.

Last Tuesday, Harris County Judge Lincoln Goodwin’s court scheduled 275 evictions to be heard on the same day — half of them at 9 a.m. and the other half at 1 p.m.

Every seat in the courtroom was taken. A line stretched down the hallway and into the parking lot. The judge and court staff weren’t wearing masks.

Eric Kwartler, an attorney with South Texas College of Law, said he feels at risk of getting COVID-19 when he’s there representing renters.

“Do I feel safe? No. I never do,” Kwartler said. “I never feel safe when I go into an environment like that.”

The court has cut back on virtual hearings, Kwartler added, only allowing virtual hearings for those who submit proof of a positive COVID test.

“I had a client cough on me at one point and then tell the court that his wife was at home with COVID,” Kwartler said.

Egregores REDUX (Original Post 1-20-08)

"EGREGORE: An engergized astral form produced consciously or unconsciously by human agency. In particular, (a) a strongly characterized form, usually an archetypal image, produced by the imaginative and emotional energies of a religious or magical group collectively, or (b) an astral shape of any kind, deliberately formulated by a magician to carry a specific force. The Aurum Solis "The Kabbalah names 72...national angelic regents, which the Hebrews call Elohim; the metaphysical technical term Egregors is also used for them. Derived from the Greek word egreoros, it means "watcher" or "guardian." The office of a Watcher is to protect from outside pressures a region or ethnic group assigned to its care. The region is always measured off from another posing a threat of some sort to it. A given group of persons (the group of those being protected) is "tied" to a certain area of jurisdiction....Here, too, we meet the "riddle of the founding of cities and states...." What is more, both the ancient Romans, and quite recently the Chinese, have recognized the existence of guardian spirits set over cities. Indeed, one author reports as follows on the occult was wages on enemy cities by ancient Rome: "The Romans, when besieging a city, made a habit of carefullly enquiring the name of the city and of its guardian spirit. When they knew these, they would summon the guardian spirit of the city and its inhabitants, and conquer it. " Willy Schrodter, from: Commentaries on The Occult Philosophy of Agrippa "Originally, it was human beings who, in union with certain spiritual powers, generated the egregors of science, of medicine, and of Canada or any other country. But, then, they lost control of them; and these egregors directed them in such a way as to make them become unconscious and passive. As soon as an egregor causes blood to flow in any manner whatsoever it soils its inner light with an instinctive power and becomes a negative force of domination." "The egregors that are created unconsciously, and in fits of passion, live only to destroy, giving birth to instincts of power and domination inside their members. They are the true cause of war and of the conflicts pitting everyone against everyone else." Olivier Manitara, from: "The Egregor of the Dove and the Triumph of Free Peace" What is an egregore?