A Threat to Civilization?
Now up on YouTube, the twelfth episode of my podcast:
It is also available as a podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify, and other podcatchers, as well as at LocoFoco.net:
Archives for category: YouTube
For years leftists told libertarians that corporate power could be suppressive, oppressive, tyrannical. Libertarians scoffed. Demanded evidence.
So leftists provided that evidence: they developed major social media (with a little help from the alphabet soup of U.S. “intelligence” agencies) and then used their leverage to censor information, inquiry and opinions that run counter to their narrative and party line. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter now routinely censor opinions on the coronavirus they (and the World Health Organization) don’t like. And more.
They proved their point. They became the oppressors they warned us about.
Libertarians lost the argument, and are doubly unhappy about it: they were proven wrong and they are oppressed. But leftists? Their win must be . . . bittersweet. I mean, to win by losing: by becoming the very thing you most hate!
twv
There seems to exist an institutional ban on certain ideas and areas of inquiry. Dominant paradigms — perhaps guarded by folks with ready access to tax dollars as well as established patterns of prestige — do not allow investigation into competing paradigms.
Of course, there is a lot of competition in ideas. Paradigms shift. But only by so much. Outside a prescribed (or intuited) band of acceptable dissent, the paradigm enforcers brook no denials, no expansions of knowledge, no uncomfortable conjectures.
Here we see one. A man gives a talk at a TEDx event. It is filled with scientific findings, and recounts his “pulling at a thread” (as Walter Bosley likes to put it) that unravels from the stories of our past that are approved by academic historians, paleontologists, geologists, et al. It is a fairly popular talk. But the higher-ups at TED flag it as “unscientific.”
I have watched a lot of goofy TED talks. The idea that this talk is less acceptable than many of the moralistic, inspiring, weird, and downright bizarre talks on the main TED platform is preposterous.
So. What is wrong with this TEDx talk?
It is too easy to see. It explores the idea of past catastrophes and of lost ancient civilizations. This is verboten in the academic world.
It may be that folks at TED are scared. They need the cooperation of academics, and academic schools of thought are maintained with a chillingly cold grip, strangling dissent within their ranks and consigning to complete and utter disregard those who persist in the shunned speculations and scientific work.
Read the “NOTE FROM TED,” above, an image of the YouTube page that addresses the flagging of the video in question. Read it. But better yet, watch the video:
Is this really beyond the pale?
twv
One of the most important books of the liberal/libertarian canon was extremely popular among intellectuals in the 19th century. But now? Almost no one knows about it. You can read it on Gutenberg, but hey: I interviewed Thomas Christian Williams on the book, and this is not out of left field, for Christian has established a fascinating historical truth about the book and its place in American history.
So, who is our guest this week?
Here is his biography:
If only by default, Thomas Christian Williams is the world’s leading authority on Thomas Jefferson’s anonymous translation of Volney’s Ruin of Empires. He discovered Volney while doing research for his first novel. He published an article on the subject in the January 2016 edition of Skeptic magazine. You can find it online at Skeptic.com. He recently donated a large portion of his personal collection of Jefferson translations to the research facility at Monticello.
Born in Texas, Thomas has lived in France since 1989, excepting brief stints in Andorra, Spain and Gibraltar. Thomas has worked as an accountant, a commodities trader, and as domestic affairs analyst in political section of the US Embassy in Paris. He’s currently a hypnotherapist specialized in Parts Therapy. You can find him on LinkedIn or at his website: EnglishHypnosisParis.com.
Thomas is the author of two historical fiction novels.
English Turn, Napoleon Invades Louisiana is available on Amazon. The book recounts what might have happened if Napoleon Bonaparte had not sold Louisiana to the United States. Volney, Jefferson and even Jefferson’s anonymous translation of Volney’s Ruins play important roles in this book.
Thomas is currently looking for an agent to market his 2nd novel: Kash Kachu (White House), the story of the collapse of the Native American civilization at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico.
I was set to post to LocoFoco.us, one of my Facebook pages, a link with a question. But Facebook warned me:
The article was from LewRockwell.com, “Vitamins C and D Finally Adopted as Coronavirus Treatment,” by Joseph Mercola. I have no opinion on the information, misinformation or disinformation in this article. I was going to ask for opinions. But Facebook has an agenda: when you publish too much wrongthink, no matter what the framing, the social media site is going to downgrade your page and hide it from visitors.
Indeed, it has already done so, to the LocoFoco page. I did not post the above article, for fear of an utter take-down, suppression.
No way to run a railroad, Facebook.
For instance, I would love to have seen Facebook’s fact-checkers to provide me INFORMATION or ARGUMENTATION about the article in question. I would not even mind if a ’bot did that.
But the current quasi-censorship method is not acceptable.
So, because of that, I’m going to spread another questionable source:
This man sure doesn’t approve of the medical establishment!
Take that, Facebook, you evil a-holes.
The third episode of my new podcast will go up on Monday. Until then, here is a preview:
When I was a kid, my nightmares involved tilted houses with floors you had to climb up against the incline, roosters crowing at the window, and a yawning, chthonian Immensity that Jung would have loved to analyze.
The kids these days, though, have night terrors about environmental catastrophe:
One in five children are having nightmares about climate change, according to a British survey on Tuesday, as students globally stage protests over a lack of action to curb global warming.
The Jakarta Post (Reuters), March 3, 2020
About 17 percent of children in Britain said worries about climate change were disturbing their sleep while 19 percent said these fears were giving them nightmares.
The survey of 2,000 children aged eight to 16, conducted by pollster Savanta-ComRes for BBC Newsround, also found that two in five, or 41 percent, did not trust adults to tackle the climate crisis.
While I suspect that the brand X prophecy of CO2 increases leading to “climate catastrophe” is little more than a psy-op, the more I learn about the end of the last Ice Age, which humanity somehow survived — while most megafauna did not — indicates that we can indeed encounter great climatic terrors and that those terrors can haunt humanity for millennia.
Indeed, I suspect that the notion of an underground realm of the Dead as well as the terrors of “the Tribulations” and our civilization’s fixation on the very idea of a Millennium could all derive from the strange thousand-plus years of the Younger Dryas, through which humanity may have had to live in caves to survive:
I reference here the Human Origin Project, which does not appear to be academically acceptable, because the academics have, so far, proved remarkably reticent about incorporating newly discovered facts into the stories they tell.
The kiddies, these days, are told stories about a counterfactual present and imaginary future by adults who pose as their authorities. From these serioso story time moments many quivering true believers are made.
It is not necessarily a conspiracy theory to conjecture that one reason modern academics routinely evade discussion of the astounding destruction that occurred a mere twelve thousand years ago is that by denying the facts they can better parlay pseudo-science to make plausible weak-tea terrors like “man-made climate change.”
What is going on in our current climate is mere urination into the wind compared to the fire hose of the end of the Ice Age.
It may be the job of us heretics and apostates to throw a monkey wrench into the Great Global Warming Psy-op: tell your kids and their friends that their tax-funded teachers are almost certainly misinformed, and that they should be skeptical of adults (as well as, of course, children) telling tall tales to scare them into demanding political changes neither their teachers nor they, themselves, understand.
There are plenty of real terrors we must all confront.
Including that great, chthonian enormity of our future non-existence.
Sleep well.
Disease. Despair. Distraction.
That about sums up the reasons why it took me so long to publish my own podcast. I’ve been sick this winter; not everything is hunky dory in Virkkalavia, and I am not emotionally unaffected; and I’ve been reading and working and even watching stuff on the big screen.
But I’ve postponed podcasting too long. So last night I didn’t go to sleep. Instead, I published two podcast episodes in the form of video on YouTube and audio on SoundCloud.
It’s called the “LocoFoco Netcast.” Why? Well, I’ve been referencing my politics to those of the 19th century LocoFocos for a long, long time. And why “Netcast” instead of “podcast”? Well, the way to get to the audio on SoundCloud is to put the simple URL locofoco.net into your browser. Bang. You’re there. Calling it “Netcast” reminds listeners that it can be found at LocoFoco.net.
The first episode starts with me going solo, but clipping a segment from MSNBC and another from Stefan Molyneux. That’s not very long, but I make a point that is not made elsewhere, from what I can tell. Call it a plea for “lateral thinking,” though I did not use the term in my short talk. That is, in the podcast. The rest of the episode is long conversation between James Littleton Gill and me about economist Tyler Cowen’s “State Capacity Libertarianism.” Check it out:
What’s with the title? Well, if you are curious, you know where to click.
The second episode consists entirely of an interview with the great writer David Ramsay Steele. Lee C. Waaks takes command of the interview, here, though Mr. Steele doesn’t need much prompting or managing. He is excellent as always. Our conversation is about fascism and its meaning, history, and lingering influence — that is, the subject of the lead essay of his new book:
As much work as I put into these videos, I think I prefer the audio versions that you can find on SoundCloud. Please click in and listen — and subscribe, and comment. On SoundCloud you can place your comments at precise points in the audio presentations, which is really an attractive feature, if you ask me.
Find the SoundCloud account by going to locofoco.net.
By the end of the week the podcasts should be available upon multiple podcast distributors, such as iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play. I will keep readers posted.
