A World Without Truth is a Game Without Rules

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

While recovering from an injury years ago I had some time on my hands.  Between various books and chapters, I watched several episodes of the HBO television series “Game of Thrones”  (GoT). The show ran eight seasons from 2011 to 2019 and I found the series to be very well-produced with an impressive cast of actors and intriguing plotlines.

There are elements of fantasy in GoT as in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” paired with echoes of epic storytelling from medieval legends like Robin Hood or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But what appealed to me the most in the early seasons of GoT were the gritty politics and the realistic human consequences of actions, alliances, and betrayals.

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The Metaphysics Underlying The Sunset of the West

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 

There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.

-Proverbs 16:25

 

The heart is deceitful above all things…

-Jeremiah 17:9

 

When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is setting.

– Lin Yutang, Chinese philosopher

 

Upon the recommendation of a blog commenter, I recently read “The Crisis of Modernity”  by Italian professor and philosopher, Augusto Del Noce (1910 – 1989).  The book was published in 2014 and is a brilliant compilation of twentieth-century essays and speeches by Del Noce.  His philosophical insights are profound and his conclusions and societal predictions, especially regarding Scientism and the Technocracy, are eerily similar to those of English author and theologian C.S. Lewis  – see my previous posts entitled “The Abolition of Man Amid the Consequences of Reality”,  and “Gnostic Parasitism in the Post-Modern Simulacrum”, and “A Postmortem on Postmodernism”.

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THE ROAD TO PERDITION IS PAVED WITH EVIL INTENTIONS – A FINAL RECKONING

In Part 1 of this article I pointed out how we have allowed ourselves to be cowed by authoritarian “experts” who have proven to be nothing but incompetent and wrong every step of the way, while the financiers have used the crisis once again to pillage the citizens as they did in 2008/2009.

The absurdity of shutting down this country based on academic death models that make economist and climatologist models look highly accurate in comparison, can be seen in the ludicrousness of the following chart. And realize we did this on purpose because of a virus that will kill .018% of the U.S. population. And most of those deaths will occur in several highly dense urban enclaves, with the rest of the country barely affected.

By shutting down the country the government has crushed virtually every business in the country and putting tens of millions out of work, with resulting crash in tax revenues at the Federal, State and Local level. At the same time, Trump and everyone in Congress have become Bernie Sanders socialists, except most of it is corporate socialism. The deficit was already on track to top $1.2 trillion, but with the $2.2 trillion stimulus package, and more to come, the deficit this year and next will approach $3 trillion.

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Moral hazard is a situation in which one party gets involved in a risky event knowing that it is protected against the risk and the other party will incur the cost. It arises when both the parties have incomplete information about each other.”

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves ‘naturally’ elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thereby stabilizing the market as a whole.”

Robert Heller, Federal Reserve Board, 1989

“Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

Hannah Arendt

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The entrepreneur profits to the extent he has succeeded in serving the consumers better than other people have done.”

Ludwig von Mises

“Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.”

Edward Abbey

“The fundamental law of the market is: the customer is always right.”

Ludwig von Mises

Americans are Stuck in Abusive Relationships with Power

Guest Post by Mike Krieger

And we recently discovered, if it was not known before, that no amount of power can withstand the hatred of the many.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Americans are brought up to believe all sorts of myths about the country we call home. We’re told our economy is a free market meritocracy governed by the rule of law. We’re told our civil liberties, enshrined in the Bill of Rights, are inviolable and protected by the most powerful military in the world. A fighting force entrusted with the admirable and monumental task of defending freedoms at home, and democracy and human rights abroad. We’re told we exist in a system of self-government, in which our votes matter and our voices heard. In practice, none of this is true.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider, but it was a very corrupting business.”

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them… It wasn’t God who was dead. We were.”

Ray A., Practice These Principles

“Oh where is the noble face of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness, and none act with fear of the gods?”

Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders that we are not going to be judged.”

Czesław Miłosz

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing–that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.

The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish. What is more harmful than any vice? Active pity for all failure and weakness— christianity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Ephesians 6:12

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders that we are not going to be judged.”

Czesław Miłosz

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Twelve Tips For Making Sense Of The World

Guest Post by Caitlin Johnstone

In an environment that is saturated with mass media propaganda, it can be hard to figure out which way’s up, let alone get an accurate read on what’s going on in the world. Here are a few tips I’ve learned which have given me a lot of clarity in seeing through the haze of spin and confusion. Taken separately they don’t tell you a lot, but taken together they paint a very useful picture of the world and why it is the way it is.

1. It’s always ultimately about acquiring power.

In the quest to understand why governments move in such irrational ways, why expensive, senseless wars are fought while homeless people die of exposure on the streets, why millionaires and billionaires get richer and richer while everyone else struggles to pay rent, why we destroy the ecosystem we depend on for our survival, why one elected official tends to advance more or less the same harmful policies and agendas as his or her predecessor, people often come up with explanations which don’t really hold water.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

Tacitus, Agricola

“The disempowered want change; those in power want predictability and consistency. The more you can guarantee predictability and consistency to those in power, the more those in power will reward you.”

Caitlin Johnstone

“Anyone who deprived her of something she wanted deserved what he got.”

Jim Thompson, The Grifters

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“U.S. support for the Sunni camp was made clear by the fact that Trump made Riyadh his first foreign stop as president, by his willingness to sell the Saudis $110 billion in military equipment, and by his repeated criticisms of Iran during his speech. Why the United States would want to tilt toward either side in the Sunni-Shiite divide is mystifying.

These two sects have been at odds for centuries, with no signs of a detente. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization, is Sunni. The same goes for al-Qaeda, the group founded by Osama bin Laden that brought down the World Trade Center on 9/11.”

USA Today, In Saudi Arabia, Trump turns Sunni

“I served in all commissioned ranks from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”

Smedley Butler, USMC

“I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office— “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.”

General Wesley Clark, Seven Countries in Five Years

“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.”

Michael Parenti

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“He [Robert McNamara] believed in what he did, and thus the morality of it was assured, and everything else fell into place. It was all right to lie and dissemble for the right causes. It was part of service, loyalty to the President, not to the nation, not to colleagues, it was a very special bureaucratic-corporate definition of integrity; you could do almost anything you wanted as long as it served your superior.”

David Halberstam

“How little do the lips and heart agree!
How joyfully do people break their word!
We both are strangers in a strange land.”

Jean Racine

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On the Road to Oblivion: “Quality, Thy Antonym is Equality!”

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

 “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

― C.S. Lewis

On Thanksgiving eve, I was notified of a circumstance which caused me to drive thirteen hours round trip the following weekend.  The event which precipitated my travels is now beside the point, but I will say, given prior commitments and work scheduling, I was compelled to go alone. I didn’t mind. So I booked my hotel located in a major American metropolis, and that Saturday, packed my bag, grabbed my toothbrush and car keys, and bid my bewitching bride fare-thee-well.

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Power Corrupts: A Culture of Compliance Breeds Despots and Predators

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

Power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.

We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses aspiring actresses and gets away with it.

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Abraham Lincoln

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

George Orwell, 1984

“Patience is power.
Patience is not an absence of action;
rather it is “timing”
it waits on the right time to act,
for the right principles
and in the right way.”

Fulton J. Sheen

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QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind. ”

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.”

Frank Herbert

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf