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"When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree."

-- George Bernard Shaw

News and Opinion

In A World Ruled By Propaganda, A Sane Worldview Will Necessarily Be A Fringe Worldview

One of the worst mistakes you can make when formulating your understanding of the world is to begin with the assumption that the truest and most accurate position must lie somewhere near the center of the two major political perspectives you see laid out all around you.

It’s a mistake not only because assuming that the center position must be the best one is a type of fallacious reasoning known as the middle ground fallacy (the correct position between “Drink a gallon of bleach daily for good health” and “Drink zero bleach daily for good health” is not “Drink half a gallon of bleach daily for good health”); it’s also a mistake because the entire framing arises from a situation that has been artificially engineered by the powerful.

It’s a well-documented fact that the rich and powerful pour vast fortunes into manipulating the political and media landscape in ways that serve their interests. Their control over the news media and Silicon Valley tech platforms is used to set the agenda and influence public perception by determining what issues will receive attention and which won’t in ways that preserve the political status quo they’ve built their empire upon, thereby shrinking the Overton window of acceptable debate down to a very narrow spectrum whose outcomes can’t threaten their interests in any way.

We just discussed this dynamic with regard to US aggressions against Russia and China; the Overton window is being narrowed to a debate between which US enemy should be the target of the most imperial aggressions, with voices who advocate detente with both countries finding no platform in mainstream politics or media. This is what Noam Chomsky was talking about when he said “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

People assume there must be truth in the mainstream worldview because so many others are invested in the mainstream worldview, when really the only reason that worldview is mainstream in the first place is because so much wealth and influence has gone into making it mainstream. In reality the assumption that the truth exists anywhere in either of the two mainstream political viewpoints promoted by the managers of the western empire is an example of the bandwagon effect, which describes the cognitive bias in which humans tend to take on beliefs, behaviors, styles and attitudes solely because that’s what the people around them are doing.

This bias would have had evolutionary advantages early on in our development as a species. Back when our evolutionary ancestors were prey for prehistoric carnivores, it was a survival advantage to start running for your life if you saw other members of your tribe running, even if you personally didn’t see what they were running from. As primates whose survival depended on social cohesion, being rejected by the tribe would mean almost certain death by predation or starvation, so it was necessary to conform in whatever ways prevented that rejection from happening.

But we don’t live in prehistoric times anymore. We live in a civilization with a highly complex information environment that is being continually manipulated away from truth and accuracy and toward the advantage of powerful people who rule over us. If you go along with the herd, you’ll be deceived.

In truth the so-called “centrists” or “moderates” of our world are really violent extremists, because they support the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on our planet, and are only regarded as moderate because they sit in the mid-range of a completely artificially created spectrum. A perspective that is actually sane will be about as far away from their perspective as you can get.

Because the majority of people have been duped by propaganda into espousing mainstream political perspectives, those with an accurate read on things will necessarily be a small fringe minority until that dynamic changes. As long as your entire civilization is structured around deceit-based perspectives which serve the powerful, going along with the crowd will prevent you from forming a truth-based perspective that serves human interests.

So you’ll have to get comfortable rejecting mainstream orthodoxies, dismissing mainstream media, and shunning mainstream politics, because those things are all inseparably interwoven with the matrix of deceit by which our rulers have pulled the blindfold over this civilization. This won’t be a sign that you’re out of touch or a kooky crackpot or some snobby hipster who rejects all things mainstream out of a pathological need to be different, it will be a sign that you are seeing things clearly.

Prigozhin plane crash, domestic and external actors

Yevgeny Prigozhin onboard plane in fatal crash, says Russia

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner paramilitary chief who launched an armed mutiny in June, has been reported dead. Russia said he was onboard a private jet that crashed in the Tver region near Moscow, killing all 10 onboard.

Rosaviatsia, the Russian aviation authority, said Prigozhin and senior Wagner commander Dmitry Utkin were among 10 people travelling on the Embraer business jet that crashed on Wednesday evening. ...

The Embraer jet crashed in the Tver region while flying between Moscow and St Petersburg, Prigozhin’s home city. Video posted online apparently showed the small jet trailing a plume of smoke before slamming into the ground and erupting in flames.

Putin says ‘talented businessman’ Yevgeny Prigozhin has died

Vladimir Putin has confirmed the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, calling the Wagner mercenary chief a “talented businessman” with “a difficult fate.”

In a meeting at the Kremlin, Putin addressed Wednesday’s crash of Prigozhin’s business jet for the first time, offering “sincere condolences” to the families of the 10 people on board.

“I have known Prigozhin for a long time, since the 1990s. He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved the necessary results for himself but also for the greater good when I asked him. He was a talented man, a talented businessman,” the Russian leader said, speaking about the warlord in the past tense.

Putin added that Prigozhin’s Wagner group “made a significant contribution to the fight against nazism in Ukraine”.

“We remember this, know this, and won’t forget it,” he said.

Putin said he was told that Prigozhin had returned from Africa earlier on Wednesday, shortly before his apparent death, and had held meetings with officials in Moscow. He said that Russian investigators would pursue the investigation into the crash “to the end”.

North Korea fails in second attempt to launch spy satellite as rocket crashes into sea

North Korea’s second attempt to place a spy satellite in orbit has failed after the rocket booster experienced a problem during its third stage, state media reported, as space authorities vowed to try again in October.

The first attempt in May also ended in failure when the new Chollima-1 rocket crashed into the sea.

Thursday’s pre-dawn launch came in the first hours of an eight-day window that North Korea had given for the attempt.

The nuclear-armed country has been seeking to place what would be its first military spy satellite into orbit, saying it eventually plans a fleet of satellites to monitor moves by US and South Korean troops.

“The flights of the first and second stages of the rocket were normal, but the launch failed due to an error in the emergency blasting system during the third-stage flight,” state news agency KCNA said of Thursday’s launch.

South Carolina’s all-male highest court upholds six-week abortion ban

South Carolina’s new all-male highest court on Wednesday reversed course on abortion rights, upholding the state’s strict six-week ban on the procedure.

The panel overrode an earlier decision in which the court decided a similar restriction was unconstitutional.

The court on Wednesday found that the state constitution’s protection against “unreasonable invasions of privacy” did not include a right to abortion, and that the state law was “within the zone of reasonable policy decisions rationally related to the state’s interest in protecting the unborn”. ...

The decision was 4-1, with the chief justice, Donald Beatty, in the minority.

Philadelphia police change narrative in killing of Eddie Irizarry by officers

Philadelphia’s police commissioner said on Wednesday that a police officer who shot and killed a driver who was sitting in his car last week in north Philadelphia is being suspended and will be fired. Danielle Outlaw said that officer Mark Dial will be suspended with intent to dismiss him in 30 days for refusing to cooperate in the investigation of the 14 August shooting death of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry.

Newly released surveillance video appeared on Wednesday to contradict the police department’s initial narrative of events. On 14 August, Irizarry was shot and killed in his car in the north-east suburb of Kensington. In a press conference shortly after the incident, Cpl Jasmine Reilly told reporters that Irizarry had stepped out of his vehicle “with a … knife” following a traffic stop and that officers gave “multiple commands for him” before Irizarry “lunged at the officers”.

“One of the officers discharged his weapon multiple times,” Reilly said.

Two days after the incident, Outlaw, the commissioner, told reporters that the initial account of events was not what actually happened, as she announced that Irizarry was “driving erratically” and that he was going the wrong way down a one-way street before he pulled into a parking spot. Two officers then approached Irizzary who was inside, not outside, his vehicle when he was shot by one of the officers, according to the revised police statement.

Rudy Giuliani surrenders at Georgia jail in Trump election subversion case

Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, surrendered to authorities at the Fulton county jail on Wednesday on charges that he helped lead a racketeering enterprise and conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state of Georgia.

The surrender in Atlanta marks a jarring moment for Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor who made his name with aggressive racketeering cases, now facing a racketeering charge himself.

Krystal And Saagar: VIVEK Wins, Debate Losers

Tropical forests face ‘massive leaf death’ from global heating, study finds

Tropical forests could become so hot that some kinds of leaves will no longer be able to conduct photosynthesis, according to a study published in the journal Nature. The photosynthetic machinery in tropical trees begins to fail at about 46.7C on average. The research suggests that forests may be nearing dangerous temperature thresholds sooner than expected.

Using a combination of high-resolution data from Nasa’s thermal imaging instruments on the International Space Station and ground-based experiments in tropical forests across the world, researchers found that a small fraction, approximately 0.01% of all leaves, are already exposed to temperatures beyond their functional limits.

Models predict that once we hit a global temperature increase of 3.9 C, these forests might experience mass leaf damage. Warming leaves, even if now in low numbers, act as a “canary in a coalmine for tropical ecosystems”, said Chris Doughty, an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University and the lead researcher of the study.

He said the leaf-warming experiments had revealed a nonlinear rise in temperatures. “We were really surprised that when we warmed leaves by 2, 3 or 4C, the highest leaf temperatures actually increased by 8C. This shows a concerning nonlinear feedback that we were not expecting,” said Doughty.

Volcanoes and wildfires offset 20% of global heating over eight years

Explosive volcanic eruptions and wildfires have offset global heating by around a fifth over the last eight years, a study shows. In particular the eruption of Calbuco in southern Chile in 2015 and the 2019-20 Australian wildfires injected vast amounts of smoke and gas into the high atmosphere, which helped to cool the planet by absorbing heat leaving the Earth and reflecting sunlight back to space.

Pengfei Yu from Jinan University in China and his colleagues used data gathered by high altitude balloons over the Tibetan plateau and the US to model the cooling impact of stratospheric volcanic eruptions – those that inject ash into the high atmosphere – and wildfires.

Their results, which are published in Geophysical Research Letters, show that these events have produced a greater than average amount of cooling in recent years.

In Japan's neighbors, fear and frustration over Fukushima radioactive water release

‘It’s a beast’: landmark US climate law is too complex, environmental groups say

When President Joe Biden passed the Inflation Reduction Act a year ago, Adrien Salazar was skeptical. The landmark climate bill includes $60bn for environmental justice investments – money he had fought for, as policy director for the leading US climate advocacy coalition Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJA).

But after much discussion, the grassroots group realized they did not have the resources to chase after IRA funding. It would have to hire new staff and develop a specific program to apply for grants to access those funds. The coalition is stretched thin as is: organizing local and state campaigns, leading community engagement, and planning youth programming. GGJA decided it would not apply to funding opportunities at all.

“It is not within our capacity to try to build a program that helps our members access federal funding. We just don’t have the capacity to do that,” Salazar said. Many employees lack the time or knowhow to take on grant opportunities. “We’re a national organization. How can we imagine a small organization that’s doing neighborhood, grassroots-level door-knocking to have the capacity to also navigate the federal bureaucracy?”

Indeed, many of the small, community-based organizations that would benefit from funding the most are facing hurdles to competing for these investments. Together, their experiences tell a story that echoes other environmental justice experts’ concerns about the IRA – that the monumental spending package won’t assist the communities that need the money the most.

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

Sunk Cost Fallacy In Ukraine

Niger Coup Takes Bonapartist Turn

The Scourge of Corporate Financialization: Income Inequity, Employment Instability, Productive Fragility

Report Warns 'Today's Climate Crisis Is Tomorrow's Banking Crisis'

Why Did Alberta Put the Brakes on Its Booming Clean Energy Industry?

Choosing to Evolve

Discovered in the deep: an octopus’s garden in the shade

A Little Night Music

Junior Wells – What My Mama Told Me

Junior Wells - Help Me

Junior Wells - I'll Take Care Of You

Junior Wells – Someday Baby

Junior Wells - Scratch My Back

Junior Wells -What'd I Say

Junior Wells - Messin' With The Kid

Junior Wells - Little By Little

Junior Wells – Up In Heah

Junior Wells – Watch Me Move