Monday, August 17, 2015

Could Google Sway Election Outcomes? Study Says ‘Googlemandering’ Could Determine Winners

Could Google Sway Election Outcomes?


Study Says ‘Googlemandering’ Could Determine Winners   ~  LOL nawww    every~body knows "our" elections/selections  r on the up&up  ....just ask  any dummycock,republipube kook ( & THAT'S you! any regis~terd voter )   u's keep 'vot~in' the lesser of 2 evils IN  .... & still u's haven't figured out that.... evil + evil =    FUCKING EVIL   ... hey "vote" fer me  i'lll tell right up front ...i'll piss yer  $$$$ away in veg~ass on this ,that  ...maybe some hooks ...if the wifey  will let me :O
Man smiling with winner medal : Stock Photo


Photo credit: Adapted from Dwight Burdette / Wikimedia
Photo credit: Adapted from Dwight Burdette / Wikimedia
Can you Google the future?Google could have a massive impact on elections if it tweaked its search algorithm just enough to favor certain candidates, researchers found.
A peer-reviewed study conducted by the American Institute for Behavioral Research found that the order of Google search results about candidates — ranked according to positive and negative stories — had a significant effect on which candidates voters chose to cast their ballots for. Additionally, WhoWhatWhy found this could have a great impact on local and congressional races.
Algorithms — a slew of complex mathematical formulas that generate your search results — could be manipulated by tech executives and programmers to try to sway elections. A story by Wired magazine details the study that explains how exactly this could happen.
One of the study’s authors, psychologist Robert Epstein, went so far as to say: “Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”
The study consisted of multiple experiments conducted over several years in controlled laboratory settings and in a real election in India. The authors found that voters were more likely to choose a candidate if the search engine linked to more positive articles about that person.
Tim Groeling, chair of the Department of Communication Studies at UCLA, told WhoWhatWhy that the abundance of information disseminated through other channels of information in a general election (advertisements, news coverage, comments by friends and so on) may minimize the search engine effect in closely-followed major races.
However, the relative obscurity of some candidates in smaller contests may drive more voters to search engines for their source of information, according to Groeling. He explained: “in down-ticket races where there are fewer ads, less public interest, and far less media coverage, this sort of manipulation might have an effect.”
The Powers of Local Politicians
Even if Google just affected local politics, it would still have a significant indirect impact on the presidential election. Many election laws are decentralized and vary from state to state, meaning it’s local politicians who would implement voter ID requirements, regulate the use of absentee ballots or early voting, manipulate districts through gerrymandering, and so on.
Favoring selected local lawmakers via search could therefore have a big effect on access to the ballot — and thus, greatly impact  the race for the White House.
How the Wizards Behind the Screen Could Keep Their Powers
In a more self-serving manner, Google could also stack the deck in its favor. If, for example, Congress or a state government is debating laws that would impact the search giant, Google could tweak its algorithm to try to get its adversaries kicked out of office and its friends elected.
No one can definitively quantify the impact of Google on an election, but if the study is correct and the company could sway races by even a few percentage points, it could still have an outsized influence on presidential balloting in certain key states.
The 2012 presidential election, which was a fairly comfortable win for Barack Obama, still saw six states decided by margins of five percentage points or less. If Mitt Romney had won the three biggest of them (Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania), he would be president now.
Epstein also noted that it would not be out of the ordinary for Google to try and influence public opinion. In the past, it has mobilized its users against the SOPA and PIPA acts — proposed legislation ostensibly designed to fight piracy, but perceived by many in Silicon Valley as threatening an open Internet.
And Google  is already trying to influence the government via traditional means. It is one of the most influential corporations in Washington. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Google spent $3,844,345 on contributions to federal candidates, leadership PACs, parties, 527 committees and other outside spending groups in the 2014 election cycle. Google also ranked sixth in the amount it spent on lobbying Congress and federal agencies in the first quarter of 2015.
Even without intent to manipulate search results, Epstein says, Google’s algorithms are so complex that they could operatively end up favoring one candidate or another.
And there’s no easy fix. After all, how could a regulatory agency mandate Google to write an algorithm in such a  way to avoid  the scenario Epstein has labeled “googlemandering.”
Our Internet society is clearly giving Google — and other tech giants like Facebook and Twitter — immense power, similar to the influence that the three major television networks once enjoyed.
It is not inconceivable that one corporation could, intentionally or inadvertently, decide the outcome of a future election. Indeed, we have no way of knowing if it already has.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Flag background (White House / Flickr)

Retro Games Industry Booming Despite Pirate-Options Being Super Available

from the breaking-the-myth dept  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150817/09563431981/retro-games-industry-booming-despite-pirate-options-being-super-available.shtml

We've all heard it before: [industry X] can't compete in the marketplace because the public just wants everything for free. It's a mantra taken up by the film industry, the recording industry, the literary industry, and the video game industry. And, almost always, we've found that the mantra is complete nonsense. Instead, it's been clear that the public is more than willing to purchase that which is scarce and valued. It's just that those scarce and valued things are often times not the content itself.

The retro-gaming industry is instructive in this for two reasons. Piracy is typically much easier for retro games than modern titles. Most of the older consoles have been fully emulated at this point, with ROMs and games readily available for them online. For older PC titles, retro games often have no DRM or have been cracked so long ago that the cracked files are also readily available. In addition, retro titles aren't policed the same way that modern releases are. And, yet, despite all of that, or perhaps because of it, the retro-gaming industry is exploding.

Sites like GOG.com and Steam's client offer old games with smaller pricetags. The major console-makers like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all have their own marketplaces for digital downloads of retro games. Those marketplaces must be doing quite well, considering that the consoles and publishers continue to support them and expand the retro-game catalogs. And, for the actual old products, the interest and prices for retro-game pieces are skyrocketing.


Giulio Graziani says it makes him feel a bit like a drug dealer, even though he's not buying anything illegal. It's part of his job digging up a steady supply of video games from the 1980s and 1990s for his store, VideoGamesNewYork, which specializes in everything from Atari and Gameboy to rare prototype NES cartridges.
Graziani, 50, has been in business since 2003, but says the market only recently began to spike. "Five years ago, I could drive through Texas and stop in little towns and buy everything," he says. "Now they're selling games out there for more than I do!" Even simple pieces, like The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which cost $12 in 2010, now go for $25. More coveted games, like Nintendo's Earthbound, can fetch hundreds of dollars, even thousands if they're in the original box.
It's always been this way. Collectors of art will always pay for original pieces, or for the items that go along with the actual content. If the public simply wanted everything for free when it came to gaming, anyone could go on the internet and get an emulator and a copy of The Legend of Zelda and have at it. But, of course, there are scarce items that go along with the collectables that can't be downloaded, and so the prices are paid, even as they rise. And it's not peanuts we're talking about here. Estimates for how big the retro-gaming market is come in at something like $200 million per year.

For those who aren't collectors, however, there's still a reason to buy.
Luckily, for a casual retro gamer, there are some cheap solutions to get a quick dose of nostalgia. Nintendo's Virtual Console allows you to download classic titles to play on the Wii U or Nintendo 3DS. The Retron 5 console by Hyperkin sells for $159.99 and supports games for 10 systems, including NES, SNES, Famicom, SENES, Genesis and Game Boy.
Add to that GOG and Steam, along with the old-game marketplace Sony and Microsoft offer, and the RtB here should be clear: ease of purchase and the platform. Much like it is understood that iTunes is attractive because of the platform, rather than the music catalog that is also available via piracy, so do gamers appreciate the convenience offered by these marketplaces. Which is why they're growing and selling more and more.

If anything should signal the end of the "everyone wants everything for free" myth, let it be retro-gaming.

AT&T Collaboration with the NSA Reveals US Corporate-intelligence Nexus      ~ hehe holy fucking ~a, wit ALL the collecting/storing/listening ...  from 'our' NA~ZI er errr um NSA super buds   ???  & how fucking much u wanna bet ...'nother vaulted super ninjaaa  sneaks the fuck past OUR super duper gov. ass~facials ..nets  yea 'nother 8,9 16,17 yr old secret agent super solds or some devious fucks "hid~in" in a cave/mud fucking hut  & we'll get the same ole ..well "we" didn't C that fucking cumming ... but if u's just let us jam this elec~trode  UP ALL cit's ass's ...you'll b safe  ...yep ,yup yea  ..right  Dude ???

metadata-nsa-cell-phone-spying
Classified NSA documents published by the New York Times and ProPublica this weekend have further exposed the vast scale of collaboration between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the major telecommunications giants in carrying out illegal and unconstitutional spying operations.
The new documents, which come from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, originate from between 2003 and 2013. The participation of at least nine major tech firms in joint projects with NSA Special Source Operations was already revealed in documents leaked by Snowden in 2013, but the identities and roles of the firms involved remained murky.
The NSA’s longest and most fruitful corporate partner, which goes by the codename “FAIRVIEW” in the leaked documents, is AT&T. Repairs made to a FAIRVIEW fiber optic cable near Japan directly coincided with the rupturing of AT&T lines in the same location caused by a 2011 earthquake, the reports found.
The scale of the data transferred to the US intelligence agencies makes a mockery of claims from the Obama administration that the spying has been “targeted” at alleged terrorists.
AT&T was the first corporation to support NSA’s aim to have “live,” real-time surveillance of the internet. Some 400 billion Internet metadata records were sent to the NSA in one month toward the beginning of the company’s involvement in this program in 2003.
From 2003 onward, AT&T transferred billions of emails sent on US networks to the NSA. It embedded surveillance hardware in at least 17 of its US-based internet centers.
NSA documents describe AT&T as “highly collaborative” and praise the company for its “extreme willingness to help” with NSA operations around the world. AT&T maintains a “close partnership with FBI” and provides access to “Cable Stations/Switches/Routers (IP Backbone),” the documents state.
By 2011, AT&T was also giving the NSA 1.1 billion cell phone records per day. As the Times notes,
“This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.”
AT&T’s involvement in NSA spying was “global” in scope, one document states. The company helped transform the United Nations headquarters into an NSA listening post, with all UN internet communications passing into the hands of surveillance agents.
According to the documents, by 2013, AT&T was providing the NSA with access to 60 million foreign-to-foreign emails a day.
However, AT&T is only one of many companies involved. Telecommunications giant Verizon (referred to within the framework of a program called STORMBREW) collects data from eight interconnected sites across the continental US. STORMBREW also provides the NSA with access to seven “international choke points,” the documents state.
NSA protocols call for agents to exercise maximum courtesy in their dealings with the corporations, on the grounds that US intelligence ties to the corporations constitute “a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”
It has already been established by previous Snowden-leaked documents that the US government maintains secret contracts with the communications firms, paying out large sums of cash as part of its corporate operations.
According to the latest leaked documents, in 2011 alone the NSA paid AT&T nearly $190 million.
The Obama administration has worked to cover for the illegal actions of the companies in collaborating with warrantless mass surveillance. Earlier this year, the White House successfully blocked a lawsuit by AT&T customers demanding redress for privacy violations resulting from the company’s contracts with the US government.
In the wake of the Snowden revelations that began in 2013, the Obama administration has worked to ensure that all the spy programs would continue. In June of this year, the White House backed passage of the USA Freedom Act, which purported to end only one of the many programs that have been set up to spy on the population of the United States and the world: the metadata phone records program.
In fact, the new legislation merely transfers the responsibility to store phone records from the NSA itself to the telecommunications companies. As made clear by the revelations on AT&T’s role in collaborating with the NSA, this amounts to little more than changing the name of the sign on the door, since the telecommunications firms essentially function as extensions of the spy apparatus.

Did You Know That The U.S. No Longer Has Any Strategic Grain Reserves At All?

Posted by George Freund on August 17, 2015


By Michael Snyder, on August 16th, 2015

Once upon a time, it was popular to say that the U.S. government only had enough wheat stored up to provide everyone in America with half a loaf of bread.  But that is not true anymore.  Recently, I discovered that the U.S. does not have any strategic grain reserves left at all.  Zero.  Nada.  Zilch.  As you will see below, the USDA liquidated the remaining reserves back in 2008.  So if a major food crisis hit this country, our government would have nothing to give us.  Of course the federal government could always go out and try to buy or seize food to feed the population during a major emergency, but that wouldn’t actually increase the total amount of food that was available.  Instead, it would just give the government more power over who gets it.
The U.S. strategic grain reserve was initially created during the days of the Great Depression.  Back then, the wisdom of storing up food for hard times was self-evident.  Unfortunately, over time interest in this program faded, and at this point there is no strategic grain reserve in the United States at all.  The following comes from the Los Angeles Times

The modern concept of a strategic grain reserve was first proposed in the 1930s by Wall Street legend Benjamin Graham. Graham’s idea hinged on the clever management of buffer stocks of grain to tame our daily bread’s tendencies toward boom and bust. When grain prices rose above a threshold, supplies could be increased by bringing reserves to the market — which, in turn, would dampen prices. And when the price of grain went into free-fall and farmers edged toward bankruptcy, the need to fill the depleted reserve would increase the demand for corn and wheat, which would prop up the price of grain.
Following Graham’s theory, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a grain reserve that helped rally the price of wheat and saved American farms during the Depression. In the inflationary 1970s, the USDA revamped FDR’s program into the Farmer-Owned Grain Reserve, which encouraged farmers to store grain in government facilities by offering low-cost and even no-interest loans and reimbursement to cover the storage costs. But over the next quarter of a century the dogma of deregulated global markets came to dominate American politics, and the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act abolished our national system of holding grain in reserve.
As for all that wheat held in storage, it became part of the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust, a food bank and global charity under the authority of the secretary of Agriculture. The stores were gradually depleted until 2008, when the USDA decided to convert all of what was left into its dollar equivalent. And so the grain that once stabilized prices for farmers, bakers and American consumers ended up as a number on a spreadsheet in the Department of Agriculture.
Of course if there are no major national emergencies of any kind and life just continues on normally for decades to come, this will not be an issue.

But what if something does happen?

Right now, we are already witnessing all sorts of “mini food cataclysms”.  For instance, bees just continue to die in unprecedented numbers all over the globe.  During the most recent year, U.S. beekeepers lost approximately 40 percent of their colonies
Widespread deaths among bees, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, were first reported about a decade ago, but the problem has not diminished and may have been especially bad recently.
Beekeepers across the United States lost roughly 40 percent of their colonies from April 2014 to April 2015, according to an annual survey conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership and Apiary Inspectors of America, with funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Another cataclysm is happening with bananas.  In fact, it is being reported that the specific type of banana that we eat right now is in danger of being wiped off the face of the globe
Bananas are in big trouble. While the beloved fruit remains as popular as ever, its crops across the world have been hit with an infectious fungus and the damage is irreparable.
The Cavendish species of banana, which was introduced in 1965, is currently the primary banana export in the world. And it’s being completely ruined by Tropical Race 4, a fungal disease that began in Malaysia in 1990 and has since spread to Southeast Asia, Australia, and finally Africa in 2013.
Believe it or not, this is not the first time a fungus has wiped out an entire species of the bright yellow fruit. By 1965, the Gros Michel species of banana—which lasted longer, were more resilient, and didn’t require artificial ripening—was eradicated after what was called the Panama disease, a different strain of a similar fungal disease wiped out the world’s commercial banana plantations.
In addition, the recent bird flu epidemic was responsible for the deaths of 48 million turkeys and chickens.  This has driven egg prices through the roof
U.S. egg prices continued their upward climb following the most devastating outbreak of bird flu in decades, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report this week.
Prices of large Grade A eggs delivered to store doors in the Midwest Regional area hit a range of $2.73 to $2.81 per dozen, the report showed.
Indianapolis Business Journal notes this is the most expensive eggs have been, according to data that stretches back to 2000.
More than 48 million birds have been affected since avian flu first was spotted in the U.S. in December.
And of course there are many, many more examples of significant problems that are hitting our food supply.  The following short list comes from one of my previous articles

-More than 40 percent of our fresh produce comes from the state of California, but thanks to the worst multi-year drought in the history of the state much of the region is turning back into a desert.

-Also due to the persistent drought, the size of the U.S. cattle herd is now as small as it was during the 1950s, and the price of beef has doubled since the last recession.

-Over the past few years, something called “porcine epidemic diarrhea” has wiped out approximately 10 percent of the entire pig population in the United States.

-Just off the west coast of the United States, a wide variety of sea creatures are dying in unprecedented numbers.  For example, the sardine population along the west coast has dropped by a staggering 91 percent just since 2007.

-Down in Florida, citrus greening disease is absolutely crushing the citrus industry.  Crops just keep on getting smaller year after year.

Are you starting to see what I am talking about?

In many years, the world already eats more food than it produces.  We don’t have much room for error, and there are some countries that are already experiencing a full-blown food crisis.  The nation of Guatemala is one of them
Nearly one million people in Guatemala are struggling to feed themselves as poor rainfall has led to drought and shrunken harvests, worsening hunger among the poor, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said.
Linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon, this year’s drought has hit subsistence farmers living in Central America’s “dry corridor” that runs through parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, hard.
“In Guatemala, 170,000 families, approximately 900,000 people, have no food reserves left. This is the third consecutive year they have been hit by drought,” Diego Recalde, head of FAO in Guatemala, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In recent articles, I have also mentioned the growing food crisis in Venezuela.  Things have gotten so bad that soldiers dressed in riot gear are now policing supermarkets
Soldiers with riot shields, tear gas canisters, and rifles patrol lines in Maracaibo, a major city in the northwest.
Scarcity is particularly acute here because smugglers — taking advantage of the leftist government’s policy of fixing prices on some goods — buy products to sell for profit in nearby Colombia.
“We have to maintain control otherwise there would be chaos,” said Lieutenant Carlos Barrera, 21, pushing back crowds at one supermarket.
As you read this, intense food shortages are also affecting Syria, the Soloman Islands, Yemen, Zimbabwe, and several nations in southern Africa.

Just because you may live in a “wealthy western nation” does not mean that this will not impact you someday as well.

In fact, a major study was just released that came to the conclusion that global “food shocks” are going to become much more common in the years ahead.  The following comes from the Guardian
The likelihood of such a shock, where production of the world’s four major commodity crops – maize, soybean, wheat and rice – falls by 5-7%, is currently once-in-a-century. But such an event will occur every 30 years or more by 2040, according to the study by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience.
Such a shortfall in production could leave people in developing countries in “an almost untenable position”, with the US and the UK “very much exposed” to the resulting instability and conflict, said co-author Rob Bailey, research director for energy, environment and resources at Chatham House.
Sadly, I believe that things are going to turn out to be far worse than even that report is projecting.

I am convinced that we are moving into a time when increasing volcanic activity, shifting weather patterns, geopolitical instability and severe economic problems are going to create critical shortages of food all over the planet.

So what will you and your family do when those times arrive?

 http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/did-you-know-that-the-u-s-no-longer-has-any-strategic-grain-reserves-at-all

The Age of Transition and Scientism Fraud

18lqapi3rbca0jpghttp://jaysanalysis.com/2015/08/14/the-age-of-transition-and-scientism-fraud/
We will engineer your gender out of you for the planet!
By: Jay Dyer
Ours is the great transition age. For the masses, the glowing assumption is that the transition and transformation age we are undergoing is the work of a long, evolutionary process of “natural” “progress.” Wandering about their bubbles, these presuppositions never go challenged or examined, having dobbed their cafeteria plate lives from a long string of newsbite phrases and empty slogans overheard in establishment schooling. “We are evolving,” and “We live in an era of change,” and numerous other advertising blurbs that underlie modernity’s plastic ideology actually form the basis for most of humanity’s worldview. Yet are any of these assumptions actually true? Are we in living in an era of “progress” and “human ascent”?
I answer in the negative and the reasons for my dark assessment are many. Listening to a recent interview between someone of a truly skeptical bent with a figure in the scientism/skeptical crowd, I was irked to hear a bevy of fallacies and incongruences and unexamined assumptions that will here be analyzed with scalpel-like precision. As mentioned above, what precisely is meant by the terms “evolution,” “change,” “progress” and “Nature”? According to those in the ranks of establishment scientism, these are givens, terms of brute factuality and reason, all of which mystically coalesce to give us the “best possible model” of the world under the new grand narrative mythos of “science.”
What is meant by “evolution”? According to modern scientism, the observation of small-scale changes in a species that appear to aid in the species’ extension into the future through reproduction is the basic understanding of evolutionary adaptation. Thus, because certain breeds of animals can be bred with fitter members of the species, we can extrapolate that large-scale aeons of time resulted in the origins of all life from a single amoeba. When it is pointed out that aeons – millions of years – of adaptation and change are not observed, the reply is that bacteria purportedly adapt under conditions of pressure. Thus, it follows that all life mutated under conditions of pressure to “evolve” into what we see today.
Destroy them with Weird Psyience!
Destroy them with Weird Psyience!
On the surface, this has an appearance of being reasonable. Almost no one denies micro-evolutionary adaptation and change, that within the mechanics of various organisms there resides the DNA programming to adapt to environmental circumstances. Where the bait and switch comes is the dogmatic assertion that from this observation, it is certain that all life originated from a single cell millions of years ago, following billions of years of “Big Bang” expansion. The evidence for these theories nowadays is, of course, taken as dogmatic fact, with any dissension on these matters scorned and mocked. Why? Because religion is irrational and “unscientific” and cannot be tested. Yet can these assertions be tested as scientific?
The reply is that they are proven by carbon dating and observing various UV rays that appear to “expand” from the presumed “singularity” point. There are numerous problems with these claims, but the most glaring will suffice in illustration. First, carbon dating is notoriously unreliable, with examples of testing on recent artifacts showing outrageous time stamps for items that are manifestly not ancient. Further, the carbon dating itself works on the assumption of millions of years of evolutionary, chaotic flux, which begs the question. In other words, if your testing methods already operate on the assumption that matter is aeons in age, then the results of the tests are obviously predetermined.
Second, the appearance of light expanding from some locale is only as coherent as the assumption that it comes from some point of singularity, of which there is absolutely no observable evidence. As you point these facts out to those enmeshed in the religion of scientism, many will admit these are “theories,” but they are “the best models we have.” Says whom? Why does the scientism crowd never admit they are subject to biases and greed (for grants)? How is it that science or the lab is magically averse to the failings of the rest of human endeavors? “Ah, well, yes, it is subject to those things, but that is the beauty of science, we are always changing and adapting our theories to fit the evidence,” the general response comes.
To a degree, this is true. Science does posit new theories and does refine its previous analyses as new data emerges. Yet as I’ve pointed out many times, for this methodology to be consistent, they would have to also conduct scientific experiments into the question of the empirical scientific method itself, as well as its governing assumptions. This is never, ever done, aside from one establishment-funded study that tried to implicate lab bias into a ridiculous Marxist framework. On the contrary, there is a motivating impetus to not conduct this kind of investigation, because it would expose much of scientism’s fraud and deception, where we would discover the scientific establishment is the servant of the same master as the banking, economic and entertainment fields, all of which operate under the (fallacious) umbrella of consensus reality.
The scientific establishment is a hierarchy that operates just like any other corporation of government entity, where knowledge is apportioned on a need-to-know basis. Biologists are afraid, for example, to speak on the matter of physics because they aren’t “physicists,” while mathematicians are afraid to speak on the matter of astronomy because they aren’t “astronomers.” This ridiculous segmentation of knowledge (and there is nothing wrong with specialization) is itself also predicated on the presupposition of scientism, that reality is not a meaningful, coherent universe, but a random, chaotic mutation of accidental consequence. “It just is,” becomes the scientistic refrain, and if you don’t accept that premise and consider any other options, you are a fool.
Scientism is your friend!
Scientism is your friend!
What begins to become clear is that this is a weighted game that has nothing to do with discovering what is true, objective and “factual” in the “natural world,” but rather a realm of gatekeepers that demand adherence to a predefined set of orthodoxies that determine who is a “scientist” and who is worthy of “peer review.” Furthermore, scientism is entirely grounded in an old, outdated epistemology known as empiricism which has been dissected, refuted and annihilated so many times by cogent philosophers and logicians its continued existence is ironically miraculous. Of all the persons who ought to adhere to their much-touted “logic” and “reason,” these fools are the most irrational, incoherent and nonsensical of all, as they perpetually melt under the 100 degree flame of foundational presuppositional inquiry (and that’s a lab test I’ve done many times that appears to always hold true).
Arrogantly assuming they know, when in fact they do not (having a gadfly appearance of knowledge), scientism likes logic when it suits, quickly to discard and dispense with such rigors when the heat comes. “All human knowledge comes through sense experience” begins their assumptions, yet when pressed as to whether this proposition itself is a fact of sense data (which it obviously is not), universal claims suddenly dissipate and this great commandment is hailed as an obvious given. It’s a new maxim, a new commandment from the gods of the Enlightenment, and you daren’t ask such questions. Yet if science is so groundbreaking and revolutionary in character, why is it so afraid of these basic questions of epistemology?
The general reply at this stage is that science cannot, should not and will not answer such absurd “metaphysical” questions. Now wait a minute here – on what basis did this suddenly get shelved into the “metaphysical” category? Says whom? By what standard does the individual scientist know that asking questions of this nature are “metaphysical,” as opposed to questions concerning lab data? You begin to see how many and multifaceted the mere assumptions are for scientism to operate. Despite the fact that their starting point is a foundational contradiction, the rest of the world is expected to gaze in awe upon the entire edifices that are constructed upon these fallacies, with rational inquiry unwelcomed. This, you see, is the role of philosophy, and is quite clearly the reason true philosophical inquiry it is hated by scientism (as Tyson recently demonstrated).
Also crucial to note is the structure of scientism and the establishment, whose fraudulent bases are continuously exposed openly, with the public becoming none the wiser. This year alone papers were produced from peer review that give the appearance of black holes being both impossible and non-existent, as well as existing. “Dark matter” pervades our universe, yet, wait, no it’s back to ancient conceptions of aether. Quantum physics is real, yet wait, it is pseudo-science theory. In other words, “science,” like all the other industries, operates under the public’s naïve assumption that it is a unified, governing body of non-biased, neutral geniuses, engaged in the noble endeavor of furthering the “progress” of human “knowledge.” Again we see those amorphous, undefined, inchoate terms.
Simple philosophical questions should come to bear on these multitudes of theories, and were “scientists” better trained in logic and metaphysics (which they are not), we might avoid many of these ridiculous pitfalls. For example, if Einstein’s relativity is true, there is no fixed point of reference from which to determine which stellar bodies are orbiting which, nor the theory that the universe expanded from a single, compressed atomic mass. This preposterous notion is a clear signpost of the irrationality of scientism, as is the popular theory of how planets formed – that random chunks of space dust got caught in orbits, started spinning, and over billions of years, like bellybutton lint, congealed into a sphere from which life happened to spring forth from primal sludge. Truly it is the case that only academics could believe such fairy tales which are far more laughable than religious creation narratives.
The belly button lint planetary theory of "science."
The belly button lint planetary theory of “science.”
And so the age of transition is not the transition into the era of utopian scientific progress, transhumanism, technological immortality and United Nations kumbaya most think, it is the age of transitioning away from all traditional forms of culture. It is the age of transition into a new global mythology that is created and manufactured in the same way the culture industry creates cultures in various regions and nations. It is a scientific dictatorship that is not scientific, but dogmatic, fascist and hierarchically structured on a need-to-know basis that blatantly hides, obfuscates and rejects actual data and information about human origins and life, only to be replaced by the most preposterous theories of primal sludge, lint ball planets and imagined aeons of unobserved billions of years, meaninglessly exploding forth from the universe’s (Fantasia level) singularity point.
This is not progress, these retarded theories are a regress into explanatory models with no explanatory power. They need to be called out for what they are – replacement mythologies – that are rehashed forms of ancient atomism, dressed up in scientistic garb. It is time to reject these phonies, liars, dupes and establishment hacks, and recognize they suppress real science and inquiry for the purpose of control. Their control is not about human progress, but the Orwellian opposite, the dysgenics plan of destroying man. We need only think of the Lancet, Oxford’s most prestigious medical journal, whose editor recently stated in a matter-of-fact tone that half the world’s scientific literature is fraudulent:
“Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (source)
This is quite disturbing, given the fact that all of these studies (which are industry sponsored) are used to develop drugs/vaccines to supposedly help people, train medical staff, educate medical students and more.
It’s common for many to dismiss a lot of great work by experts and researchers at various institutions around the globe which isn’t “peer-reviewed” and doesn’t appear in a “credible” medical journal, but as we can see, “peer-reviewed” doesn’t really mean much anymore. “Credible” medical journals continue to lose their tenability in the eyes of experts and employees of the journals themselves, like Dr. Horton.
He also went on to call himself out in a sense, stating that journal editors aid and abet the worst behaviours, that the amount of bad research is alarming, that data is sculpted to fit a preferred theory. He goes on to observe that important confirmations are often rejected and little is done to correct bad practices. What’s worse, much of what goes on could even be considered borderline misconduct.
Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is considered to another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:
“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”  (source)