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https://www.theepochtimes.com/author-jeffrey-a-tucker

A Culture of Lies and the Healing Power of Truth

To a friend, I was trying to explain what made the Brownstone Institute annual conference and dinner in Miami this past weekend so very special. It was just fantastic that The Epoch Times covered it with a livestream, which is now up and ready to watch.

The interviews were great all day but the special moment came in the evening with the speech by Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo. There were other magical moments as when Harvey Risch of Yale, a great hero to so many, made a dinner appearance and gave remarks.

And yes, the setting was idyllic, with the view of the ocean and the glorious Miami skyline, which today rivals New York City in its majesty. If you have been to New York lately and compared the two, you can see where the future is headed.

Florida of course served as a great sanctuary during this three years of crisis, and the entire state has faced an epic influx of residents and capital. It really does feel like an island of freedom and sanity in a world gone mad.

All of that was very special but does not get to the root of why there was so much magic in the air. The real reason traces to the discomfort that comes from living in a world of lies and finally being with people and courageous leaders who are helping to find our way back to truth. This is what made the event so spectacular. It was not just educational. It was also therapeutic. It helps heal the soul to encounter truth in such times.

I suggested from the podium that the event could have gone on for days, or weeks, or months, or years, and everyone cheered. I was speaking not about the event itself but the acts of truth telling. We really should live in times of truth. We need this desperately for mental and physical health. It has been crushing to realize the full extent of the corruption of our society’s commanding heights. We are all exhausted of it and more than ready for a dramatic change.

It was ironic that while the event was taking place, Elon Musk was putting out the first batch of information on what is being called the Twitter Papers. There is no more dispute about the collusion between the Deep State, the Democrats, intelligence officials, and Twitter to suppress information related to the 2020 election. Twitter here is a stand-in for the whole of the mainstream media machine: censorship was the rule.

But while the Hunter Biden laptop story is a politically charged issue, it only scratches the surface of the lies we’ve been fed for nearly three years, most having to do with COVID, the great issue of the day. Public health agencies pumped out vast propaganda and developed reliable relationships with mainstream media to back it all.

You can pick the subject: it was all gibberish. The idea that everyone was equally vulnerable was the core lie or that we didn’t know enough about the virus early on to embark on a rational policy path. There were early claims that the virus lives on surfaces and that school and business closures were going to make the problem go away.

Then we were told that masks will prevent us from getting sick, claims that never had any scientific backing. Just this weekend, I received a note from the actual inventor of the N95 mask who told me that it was a preposterous claim from the beginning, that a porous masks could stop a virus, any more than a chain-link fence can block sand particles. It doesn’t take high-end science to figure this out so public health agencies were lying all along.

The lies about the vaccines were among the most egregious. They said repeatedly and often that the key to not getting sick was to get vaccinated and to do so would also stop transmission, even though not even the manufacturers made such claims. When people resisted because they did not trust the vaccines and most people realized that they were not needed, the mandates came and forcibly injected billions of people the world over. And now we see that the risks of adverse effects were far greater than anyone admitted.

And these vaccines were supposed to be the reason why we did not need repurposed drugs that we now know would have saved many lives. We faced a pandemic without medical clarity on the best therapies and this was entirely due to the neglect and propaganda by public health agencies.

And as we gradually came to intuit the truth about all these subjects—that the destruction of the economy, the federal budget, our communities, and workplaces was all completely unnecessary—we took note of the strange way in which the major media just kept amplifying the lies. We used to think of social media as a pathway for getting truth out but then the censorship and bans began, and we all have friends who were silenced.

The huge number of institutions that played along is shocking to realize. It was all the main portals through which we get information, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the companies related to them. We were surrounded on all sides.

Making matters worse, government regulations prevented us from gathering in conferences and groups including even families, while travel restrictions stopped us from getting to see loved ones in a time of crisis. What was the point of all this? It wasn’t about virus control, clearly. It was about some very powerful people seizing control of the whole of our lives and stopping us from complaining about it.

Never forget that the first relief we got from lockdowns came in the summer of 2020 when people were allowed to get out and protest racism but it was obvious even then that this was a channeling of anger. Elites allowed us to complain about one injustice but not about others, so population energy was being manipulated even then toward political ends. Once the fervor for that approved cause died down, we were told to get back to our lives of isolation and sit at home and listen to more lies.

We never imagined that anything like this would happen in this country. It seems unthinkable even now, and the pain is intensified even further by the near absence of any admissions of wrongdoing. We are only finding out the truth in dribs and drabs. And as the information comes out, we are all being forced to piece together the truth based on scraps of data we get from here or there.

As just one example, it’s utterly shocking to learn that a crypto exchange founded in the Bahamas in 2019 would become the world’s second largest while shelling out millions and maybe billions in funding to universities, nonprofits, major media companies, and politicians that backed the mainstream story, which meant mostly Democrats but some Republicans too.

FTX folded weeks after the midterm elections when markets turned against the company to reveal the fraud. Then venues like the New York Times and others got to work immediately trying to whitewash one of the biggest financial scams in U.S. history. We are really supposed to believe that all of this is a coincidence? Absurd. It’s very obviously a diabolical racket.

It’s shocking to consider that we only know bits and pieces and that there is so much more to come out. Not even FOIAs have been very helpful in discovering precisely why all this happened. They arrived with 95 percent of the content redacted but it is never clear why. What are they trying to hide from us? How deep is the corruption? There must be far more else we would have had transparency by now.

So yes, this is going to go on for many years, as intrepid journalists and writers do their best to get to the truth and reveal it even as the perpetrators of this disaster keep shifting around and hiding. Consider too just how fragile truth is. But for The Epoch Times, what media would we have had to keep truth alive? But for one of the world’s richest men having bought Twitter, where would we be today?

We are supposed to live in a free society governed by a Constitution, and yet here we are. The solution, most obviously, is not to suspend the Constitution, as Trump very unhelpfully suggests, but rather to rediscover it and enforce it. For this country, this is the right path but it is going to take all our energies to get there.

In the meantime, we need to be at events and with people who have a burning passion to know and tell what is true. We need this for our own intellectual integrity but also for our emotional sanity and spiritual health. If I were to summarize the words of Joseph Ladapo at the Brownstone event, this is precisely how I would state it. We should not fear truth. We should embrace it as an essential part of living the good life.

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/12/11/the-biggest-obstacle-to-real-freedom-is-the-belief-that-we-already-have-it/

The Biggest Obstacle To Real Freedom Is The Belief That We Already Have It

If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.

Whenever I broach this subject I always get a deluge of objections along the lines of, “Well I’d much rather live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you do if you lived in one of those places!”

And I always want to ask them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to criticisms of their cult?

Because that’s ultimately what holds power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north: indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation.

Without mass-scale indoctrination into power-serving narratives about nation, government and world, the power structures which rule over us would immediately collapse. People would cease voluntarily behaving in ways that benefit those power structures, cease acknowledging their government as a legitimate authority, cease pretending elections are real procedures for determining their government’s actions, cease believing they’re receiving truthful information from the mass indoctrination media, and use the power of their numbers to organize in ways which benefit the many rather than an elite few.

This is what one is defending when one objects to being told that they don’t live in a free society. Their objection is itself the product of the reality they are denying.

In reality we are not truly freer under our rulers than people are under the governments that our rulers hate. Sure people can post criticisms of their elected officials online, but those criticisms will be dismissed and ignored by everyone who matters, they are being directed at political figureheads with no real power, and they are coming from minds that have been deeply indoctrinated into power-serving worldviews. Your rulers do not care if you’re a Democrat who hates Republicans or a Republican who hates Democrats, as long as you’re plugged in to one of the authorized reality tunnels.

As Noam Chomsky put it, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.” In a totalitarian state people are physically abused into conformity and obedience; in a “democracy” people are psychologically abused into conformity and obedience. In a sense someone who lives under overt totalitarianism is freer than a westerner who’s been indoctrinated by the most powerful propaganda machine ever devised, because at least they’ve got their minds. At least they know who their persecutors are.

Sure it’s more pleasant to live in a society where you can say whatever you feel the impulse to say and live however you’ve got the financial capability to live. It would be even more pleasant to live in a vat with your brain jacked into a virtual world where your every desire is satisfied — but it wouldn’t be freedom. It would be prison disguised as freedom.

I run into libertarian types who say they don’t live in a free society because they are forced to pay taxes and pay their employees a minimum wage and have their business regulated by federal agencies etc, but the real reason they don’t live in a free society is so very, very much more pervasive than that. They don’t live in a free society because people can’t even think freely.

It’s hard to even imagine how much freer our mental lives would be if we weren’t being continuously herded into artificial confines for thinking about the world. For thinking about what our real problems are. About what solutions to those problems are possible. About the kind of world we could have if we really put our minds to it. About the vast, vast spectrum of political opinion that exists outside the tiny authorized bandwidth of the mainstream Overton window.

It’s actually pathetic how constricted and confined minds are inside the indoctrinated mainstream worldview. Have you ever marvelled at how some of the most intelligent people you know can buy into the most obvious articles of propaganda? This is because intelligence by itself is not enough to protect someone from indoctrination; snapping out of the narrative matrix takes wisdom, and a fair amount of dumb luck. But think about how much brain power would be freed up if intelligent minds weren’t being corralled into the tight confines of official perspectives. How much more our species could achieve if brilliant minds had real freedom and not just the illusion of it.

This is why everything mainstream is stupid, from movies to TV shows to politics to punditry. It’s not because people are stupid, it’s because we live in a highly controlled civilization that only elevates power-serving bullshit. Bullshit that comes from constricted, limited minds and facilitates the constriction and limitation of minds.

We who live in so-called free, liberal democracies like to tell ourselves a fairy tale that we live in a society that respects and prioritizes individuality, but the truth is the exact opposite: our society does everything it can to stomp true individuality out of existence and herd us through conformity-manufacturing processing systems. What’s presented as “individualism” increasingly means having the freedom to express your uniqueness by having endless brands and varieties of products to choose from while thinking the same thoughts as everyone else about your government, your economic systems, your nation and your world.

Real individualism would encourage radical individuality and divergence from orthodoxies. The so-called liberal democracies of the western world do the exact opposite, hammering us into authorized power-serving perspectives and herding us into mainstream partisan echo chambers where we get to argue about how the empire should exist instead of if it should. Real individuality is stomped out and replaced with prostheses of mindless consumption and partisan thought.

Our project, then, as prisoners in a profoundly unfree society, is to help awaken as many people as we can to the reality of how unfree we really are. To be voices whispering in the matrix, beckoning the dreamers toward the real world in whatever ways we can. Engaging our creativity and finding more and more ways to get people to question if everything they’ve been told about their world is really true....

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https://weeklyhubris.com/climate-sciences-two-best-kept-secrets/

Climate Science’s Two Best-Kept Secrets

The best-kept secret in climate science is something I’ve mentioned previously in this space: the aerosol masking effect. The latest peer-reviewed paper I’ve seen that documents the impact of loss of aerosol masking was published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on 15 June 2021. It indicates a 55 percent increase in global-average temperature in the wake of aerosols falling out of the atmosphere. 

As professor James Hansen has said in many interviews and presentations, the aerosols fall out of the atmosphere in about 5 days. As the paper in Nature Communications indicates, the 55 percent increase in global-average temperature will be particularly evident on land . . . where most of us live. Specifically, the temperature will rise 133 percent over land. More about that shortly.

Interestingly, Craig Luck and Ivor Powell clearly understand the consequences of losing stratospheric ozone as a result of nuclear facilities melting down. Luck and Powell co-wrote the 2021 film, Finch, which subtly displays the consequences of losing aerosol masking. It’s not only Luck and Powell, though: I’m not a climate scientist, yet I understand what happens when stratospheric ozone is stripped away. I understand the importance of the rate of environmental change for all species, including human animals.

The second-best-kept secret in climate science is called nuclear winter. I receive email messages every few days with links to papers indicating an abrupt cooling of Earth in the wake of nuclear bombs being dropped during war. The idea of a nuclear winter has been floating around for two or three generations, and it offers a simplistically optimistic message, the likes of which is absolutely loved by the masses. The wrongheaded narrative goes like this:

Step one: Military conflict will lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Never mind that exactly one country in the history of this planet has used nuclear weapons in wartime: the increasingly fascist country of my birth, the Divided States of America. Will we follow our own lead, more than 77 years later?

Nothing would surprise me, in light of politicians undoubtedly knowing what I know. As Canadian-American public figure John Kenneth Galbraith wrote on page 22 of his 1977 book, The Age of Uncertainty, “People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.” Politicians are among the most privileged people on Earth. Quite a few of them are also sociopaths, because that’s what this society produces at the highest levels of government.

Step two: The hellfire resulting from nuclear weapons will block the sun. As an oversimplified result, this greatly accelerated and greatly exaggerated version of aerosol masking will cool the planet. Crop failures follow, thus leading to massive starvation. A few million people survive, of course, because everybody believes they are the stars of the show. These people live in remote locations, notably in the Southern Hemisphere. In these fairy tales, there is no mention of the stripping away of stratospheric ozone due to ionizing radiation. There is no mention of the loss of habitat for the myriad species that support the existence of Homo sapiens.

Step three: Having learned nothing from millennia of experience, humans go on to repopulate the stunningly bountiful Earth as it makes a stunningly rapid recovery back to the planet none of us knew before the ongoing Mass Extinction Event began as a result of exceptionally rapid planetary overheating. The final result is a minor inconvenience for a generation or two, after which our favorite species reproduces like hamsters in a cage.

So, that’s it: A three-step plan to nirvana, starting with nuclear war. This is the kind of story that captures the wishful, wish-filled imaginations of people constantly misinformed by governments, so-called climate scientists, and media personalities. A far more likely outcome from nuclear war is loss of habitat for humans, and therefore loss of habitat for life on Earth. But that story doesn’t sell, does it? And in the United States of Advertising, as this country was called by American author, journalist, and comedian Paul Krassner, it’s all about sales.

What’s this about temperature rising 133 percent over land, as indicated in the 15 June 2021 issue of Nature Communications? As professor Andrew Glikson wrote in his 9 October 2020 book, The Event Horizon, “During the Anthropocene, greenhouse gas forcing has risen by more than 2.0 W/m2, equivalent to more than [sic] >2º C above pre-industrial temperatures, which constitutes an abrupt event over a period not much longer than a lifetime.”

Let’s conservatively assume the current planetary temperature, so far, is only 2º C above the 1750 baseline. In that case, the global-average temperature resulting from loss of aerosol masking will hit about 4.7º C within a few days after aerosol masking is lost. If we conservatively assume the temperature rise occurs during the winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and therefore the full impacts are not realized until the following spring and summer, this exceptionally rapid rise in global-average temperature will cause loss of habitat for humans within the few months to follow. The follow-on effects, including the rapid increase in global-average temperature leading to the acceleration of dozens of self-reinforcing feedback loops, will take Earth quickly to a 5- to 6-degree Celsius temperature rise.

This idea of 5 or 6 degrees causing the extinction of all life on Earth comes from an open-access, peer-reviewed paper I’ve mentioned previously in this space. I refer specifically to the 13 November 2018 paper by Strona and Bradshaw in Scientific Reports. Titled, “Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life during extreme environmental change,” the paper points out that a global-average temperate increase of 5-6º C above the 1750 baseline within a few centuries will doom to extinction all life on Earth. As ecologists Strona and Bradshaw report in this paper, the ability to adapt to environmental change is critical for the continued persistence of all species here on Earth. The ability to adapt to such rapid changes applies to all organisms, including human animals.

Several species in the genus Homo have already gone extinct, primarily from rapid changes in the temperature of Earth. If Homo sapiens turns out to be as “special” as the previous species in our genus, then we, too, will soon disappear.

There are plenty of other secrets held by the climate-science community. Consider, for example, the critically important and seldom-discussed rate of environmental change. Only ecologists and conservation biologists seem to understand this important facet of life on Earth. There are far too few ecologists and conservation biologists conducting research in the domain of climate science. On the other hand, there are many engineers, physicists, and astronomers studying climate change. Apparently, the exponential function is poorly understood by these folks.

Another point of misunderstanding is the importance of methane as a greenhouse gas. How important is it? Methane is many times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The numbers I commonly see are in the range of 12 to 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. These figures are accurate only if the source of methane stops emitting the methane. If emissions continue, as self-reinforcing feedback loops typically do, then methane is easily 100 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

I’ll quote again from the ultra-conservative political body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC concluded the following in its 8 October 2018 report, Global Warming of 1.5^o: “These global-level rates of human-driven change far exceed the rates of change driven by geophysical or biosphere forces that have altered the Earth System trajectory in the past . . . ; even abrupt geophysical events do not approach current rates of human-driven change.” 

Fast-forward to the IPCC and its 24 September 2019 report, IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate: “Ocean acidification and deoxygenation, ice sheet and glacier mass loss, and permafrost degradation are expected to be irreversible on time scales relevant to human societies and ecosystems.” This IPCC report indicates an overheated ocean was responsibility for the irreversibility of climate change. In other words, in two reports published less than a year apart, the IPCC concluded climate change is extremely abrupt—more abrupt that at any other time in planetary history—and also irreversible.

There are many more secrets, of course. There are lies of commission. There are lies of omission. There are certain pieces of information deemed too important for distribution to the masses. If you’re looking for yet another reason we’re headed for extinction, I think this will do.

I mentioned Craig Luck and Ivor Powell, the co-writers of the 2021 film, Finch. While I’m commenting on films that portray reality more accurately than some climate scientists and media personalities, I’ll turn to the 2007 film No Country for Old Men. My favorite line came from actor Barry Corbin playing Ellis: “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

No, you can’t stop what’s coming. Neither can I, as much as I wish otherwise. What we can do is live with integrity. I’d recommend it. We can also find joy by bringing happiness to other people in our lives. I’d recommend that, too.