Uncategorized – Rhyme of Reason

Veganism and libertarians

Some people think veganism is libertarian. Because an animal deserves the same respect one human a human gives to another, by following the NAP. This sounds nice and feels nice, but does veganism work? Let’s look at it more carefully.

Eating meat is healthy and thus necessary. Thus a healthy human is a hunter either directly or indirectly. Veganism works at the expense of human’s fertility and longevity. (We must compare to veganism, not vegetarianism, if this is a moral issue … which incidentally it’s not. see #2)
This is not a moral issue.
1. An animal cannot be held responsible for its actions.
2. An animal cannot provide restitution after harming a person, or their property.
3. This is why you cannot extend the NAP to an animal.
4. A wild animal walks into traffic, and causes an accident. Can you call the animal’s insurance company and file a claim? Of course not. Can you expect the animal to make someone whole? Ever? No. A person loses their life as a result of the animal initiated accident. Who should be responsible? Anyone? No one. This is why you cannot extend the NAP to an animal.
Feelings emphasized here. If you feel like animals should be left alone, we can all respect that. Just don’t expect anyone else to follow it, see #4. What you want or feel about what other people do holds no moral obligation over anyone else. It’s no different from me feeling like men should open the door for women. It’s personal preference, not a moral issue per se. A man/woman can do whatever s/he wants. Likewise, a human can too, whether they hunt animals for food, sport, hygiene, spite, or any other reason.
Incentives.

What if you gave incentives to people so they had a reason to do what you asked, and benefit themselves at the same time? As a vegan telling non-vegans they should extend the NAP to animals (which they can’t, because animals can’t be held responsible and can’t reciprocate), why should anyone do anything for you? As a libertarian, would you demand anything from another person? Or would you grant them the freedom to explore their humanity while granting other humans the same freedom? Why would you ask them to jeopardize their minds, bodies, longevity for a cause that has no personal benefit to them and no moral conviction? How is this any different from tyrants (people in the state) saying people should follow the tyrant’s orders and give up their time, property, or their own bodies, just because those tyrants say so? Not even for money. Wouldn’t better incentives go a longer way? Here are some ways you could incentivize veganism.
1. Win-win. Try to understand why people eat meat and animal products, and provide to those people (at a cost of course, but equal or less than the cost they pay for animal options) a reason to switch to a vegan solution. Provide vegan foods that support the same health, vitality and fertility animal foods do, for example. Provide ‘vegan’ options that allow people to follow the NAP and still hunt if they do it for sport or enjoyment (video games)?
2. Social. Make veganism popular and start a social movement. Your followers would know you are vegan and imitate you by being vegan themselves.
3. Ostracism. Make your entire community a vegan one, and refuse to do business or form friendships or intimate relationships with any non-vegans.
4. Put your money where your mouth is.
  1. Buy land where animals live and protect them from human predators. Other libertarians, out of respect for your property rights, would not trespass on your land or harm your animals. You might encourage others to follow suit. You would give your cause legitimacy, and elevate it above the moral pronouncements of tyrants. Again, telling you what you can’t put in your body or what you must put in your body is no different from telling you if you can hunt an animal or not.
  2. Pay people to be vegan — if you are wildly successful in other areas, just pay people to do what you want them to …

In my opinion, these are all excellent options that support other vegans, make vegans the partners of non-vegans and not their enemies, and elevate veganism from a popular virtue-signal into a legitimate movement.

The Civil Rights Movement, In Current Context

Someone posted on FB, defending the violent looting and pillaging that is happening in American cities right now. He compared MLK’s protest tactics, such as blocking a major road or a highway, to the violence that is happening right now. And for me a rant ensued. Here is that rant.

The civil rights movement ended in affirmative action, an expansion of the welfare state, followed by the drug war, and how did it turn out for blacks? They got to vote, got greater illegitimate children, got more broken families and welfare mothers, got gangsta rap and ghettos, got more aborted black babies than ever, got an infestation of gangs and drugs in their communities and lost their best chance of truly integrating into American society.

Oh but blacks got affirmative action and welfare benefits and college assistance programs. GTFO. Before all this crap black people were just like the other immigrants, they were quietly doing what they needed to do and they were close knit and taking care of themselves. You don’t hear Mexicans or Chinese or Japanese (who were outwardly, visibly oppressed during WWII) whining because the media isn’t meddling with them. They are living their lives and taking care of themselves.

Blacks are literally the only race it’s sensitive to be racist around. Every other race gets made fun of in the media. That’s by design. Don’t think this race tension is anything other than manipulation. Anyone who thinks what MLK did was admirable needs to look at both sides. The black community is worse off. 60 years after the civil rights movement began and the media is still able to pretend there is an honest race war going on. [Facebook User] you’re either brainwashed or a troll. And if you think blacks need more sympathy and more help you hate blacks.

This is a good topic for a series.

LondonReal 5/1/2020 Review: Dr. Andrew Kaufman – Unmasking the Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Summary, the corporate and government response to Covid19 is excessive. The overall death rates don’t bear it out. Depending on where you look, death rates are largely normal overall, or are actually lower. The response was inconsistent. For example, Walmart, Target, and Costco, with large facilities that draw large numbers of people and have them in the same space for an extended period of time, where, given the large numbers of people, it is difficult to control people’s movements. For all of this, those places stayed open and small restaurants and bars and other establishments were ordered to close. The media is exaggerating the severity and the CDC is issuing guidance that goes against reasonable and established medical protocol, apparently in an attempt to inflate the numbers. Virology theory is wrong. Ironically, one of the first vaccines, smallpox, got its beginnings taking infected pus or other excretions and putting them in an open wound on whom the doctor intended to vaccinate. The man that developed the smallpox vaccine tested on his son, and he ended up paralyzed. Researchers have never been able to isolate a virus, any virus(?), certainly not sars-cov-2. At least not correctly. People are getting censored for mentioning 5g and coronavirus in the same posting. Uh-oh…

Also, have compassion for the people who are not as open minded as you are. We were all taught to not only respect authority but defer to it. And to basically not start thinking for ourselves before we ask someone in authority to tell us what the truth is. And in a situation absent an appropriate authority we do not believe we are capable of discovering the truth on our own, nor are we capable of making an educated guess about it. It’s important to remember firstly that people have their own authority to make up their own minds, and we must respect that. And in respecting it, we acknowledge they might not always agree with us, or want to hear us either (my words here).

My thoughts. In the dialog Dr. Kaufman mentions Koch’s Postulates. This is part of the criteria he uses to show the virology behind the Covid19 test is inadequate. He says those involved did not follow the proper protocol to isolate pathogens in order to properly test for the virus. I also heard on The Propaganda Report podcast about Koch’s Postulates, basically rules which parasites and bacteria follow, for isolating the pathogen and probably other stuff I’m forgetting. Virology doesn’t follow these rules, of course. Kaufman’s approach to virology is interesting, but his analysis was at a scope that is far more theoretical than common sense. So he talks about things that one would need access to a lab or would need to trust a researcher’s writing to accept, and then from those things he draws his conclusions. This is a challenge because I am a completely open minded person, and generally if someone questions something I’ve believed to be true for a long time, my ears perk up. Why are you questioning this…what do you know?? So Kaufman had my full attention, here.

But the host also didn’t ask good enough questions. He didn’t ask about things like herpes, or HPV, or influenza. I’m only about an hour and 15 minutes in, at this point in my commentary. To be a bit more balanced, his Covid19 analysis is good. Not new, but good, and his questioning of how they’re testing for it and not following the proper protocol, basically, that’s all good info. Also new, for someone like me. The things he says about 5G are also really useful, I need to listen again and get the references so I can find the source material. Particularly when he says there’s evidence smart meters cause problems, and the evidence 5G causes bone marrow not to work properly, leading to low red and white blood counts. Although, I have the same conclusion on his 5G statements. There’s no way I can know this just by hearing it from him, that it’s correct. I would have to read the source material to confirm he’s interpreting it correctly. This is important, since for one thing, I’ve personally lived with some form of wireless technology, for about 20 years now, and have not observed any known ill effects.

Personal experience aside, at this point people need to find a way to do their own studies. We’re pretty close to the tipping point, for example, where if you live near 5G you might be harming your health. So you need to decide now, whether you’re going to build your home differently (use concrete, or lead, or other RF blocking structures), possibly think about reinforcing your vehicles, reinforced clothing, etc. Assuming the 5G stuff is correct. More on virology, around the 1:40 mark. My recollection here is sketchy: He says exosomes are functional structures that cells produce or something like that, and that the process of taking infected fluids, adding antibiotics, and combining that with animal cells (like a kidney from a rhesus monkey or something), causes the animal cells to create exosomes, and often the testers recognize the exosomes as the actual virus. He also points out that prominent virology researchers admit that exosomes and viruses are similar and can often not be distinguished. So all of that makes sense and is good stuff. Again, not something I can verify on my own, with my own brain, I’ll have to rely on someone else for some of the pieces of this. That part I’m less excited about. The best arguments, in my opinion, are self-reinforcing. By the virtue of logic and usually simple premises that rest on established causal relationships people can point to from personal experience, it is an easy task to put forward something novel yet counter narrative and counter intuitive, at the same time, because of the natural flow established by the parts of the argument.

An example of this, for me, is the twin towers collapsing on 9/11. All the official explanations seem really, really, stupid, when you look at the facts of the building’s structure, and how fast it came down. Those are just basic intuitive things that people have ‘experienced’ in that they’ve seen video before of buildings being brought down by explosives because they were being deliberately demolished. And we don’t need to rely on the opinion of a researcher to know that what we’re seeing in the prior videos is the same as the ones from 9/11. So a parallel like that or 5, would have been good to really bring home the idea that virology is still an unproven theory. Well, he did bring home one solid point, which was, well, maybe two, actually three. It turns out that the CDC is primarily funded, privately, by the CDC Foundation. According to Dr. Kaufman. And that this foundation is funded mainly through corporate interests, in the same industry, naturally. So there is a huge conflict of interest. I just totally jumped topics, but bear with me. The German version of the CDC, it turns out, was named after Dr. Koch of the Koch’s Postulates reference above. The Robert Koch Institute was the name, IIRC. In Germany, again, IIRC, a man had a court battle after funding a $100,000 prize, to anyone who could provide evidence of the virus that causes measles. One person rose to the challenge, failed, and sued, and lost in a German court. Kaufman says the court brought in experts to evaluate the testimony and under their scrutiny, the plaintiff’s case did not hold up and the challenge prize remains unclaimed. A court concluded that thus far, no one has successfully presented evidence of a measles virus to the sponsor of this prize.

The host of this show has the interesting approach, and I think it may be an act, of acting like a normie, constantly, as he talks to the guy. He kept saying things like “something’s not right” and going back to those feelings. In his introduction he says he’s been podcasting for eight years, if I’m not mistaken. So you’ve had a show for eight years, and you act like you’re new to this stuff…except we know you’re not. Likely not. Especially given that he’s livestreamed with David Icke before, and is doing it again soon. I am not a normie and haven’t been for a long time. I give something of a pass to anyone around or under the age of 25. For me, I started waking up at about 24-25, and I remember the things I believed before that point. I voted at one point. I supported war, at one point. Believed it was the right thing. But there’s a second perspective here, with the approach the host takes. He acts like he’s just connecting normal people to people with an eyes-open take on everything. Now, he is, but he’s also asking questions and making comments, as any good host would. And in that he’s playing a role and helping steer the conversation. He should be asking about what comes next. Instead he’s having a conversation about alarming topics, and his replies to things are more or less to say “something’s not right” or just to change the subject. That’s where he loses me. Especially when he’s then grateful to his guest for having the courage to stand up and say the things he’s saying. It’s tough to criticize people on your own side. Overall, it’s a good, informative show, and you should check it out. Really, this is coming from a good place.

But the normie thing does not work for me. Maybe he puts on an act, for his audience. And I can appreciate people who are like that, but I’m not. Damn right, something’s not right. Something’s all fucked up. We live in a beautiful world. Genuinely. We live on a beautiful planet, with wonders and terrors, but with open arms and full bounty to every man and woman who wants to live well and be happy. We live in a paradise. And yet, there are people determined to convince us all that the world is a terrible, treacherous place, and it’s full of people who are not nearly as caring or as responsible or as intelligent or as honest and hardworking as you are. Take your pick of any combination of, or all of those. Believe what you read and watch and listen to in the media and you’ll think you are indeed a rare and precious person. And on some level, you are. You are irreplaceable. Every one of us is unique and irreplaceable. But we’re not alone in how much we care about others, how intelligent and prudent and honest and loving and just genuinely compassionate and beautiful creatures we are. There are so many of us out there. And it’s time for us to connect and support each other. We — the humans of this planet — are here for you.

Those of you who would think otherwise, think twice. Have a little faith, and project a bit. And know that people out there are just as good people as you are yourself. Too many ideas about the world come from the media. It takes a certain self-awareness to see how much of one’s perspective comes from other people. I hope people will have the self awareness to see this, and to listen to themselves and each other more than the media.

Overall, a good episode. For normies and the informed, alike. Check it out. You can find it here.

Watching TV and Living, For Real

I was watching a TV episode, and a guy was killed by a group of vampires, in a jacuzzi. The vampires were female, and of course he thought they were just women who were interested in him. One minute he thought he was going to get some action, and the next minute they attack him, he tries to get away, and they tear him apart. The water turns red with his blood, they pan out, up high, then they move on to another scene.

It’s a horrible scene to think of. And even though they didn’t show every detail, but I still ended up feeling bad for the guy, and bothered by the scene. I took a breath and had a “…man, what did I just watch,” moment.

What is it like when each of us watches something disturbing on TV? I’m sure some of us just stop watching and move on. Some of us tell ourselves it wasn’t real. Which it wasn’t.

But does that desensitize us a little bit to what we just witnessed? Does it put us in a situation where we care a little less about the pain and well-being of others? About others happiness and pleasure? About their frustration and their fear?

Does TV make us a little less empathetic to others? Everytime we process something and we have to tell ourselves it isn’t real, does it make it less potent when it really happens?

Or does it make it more potent, more immediate, and extreme? What if watching TV makes the outside world seem intimidating?

Are people more real, more intense, and more lively in person, because we watch television? Or are they less interesting? It depends on how television affects you, and how respond to repeated contact with something.

Some people turn off to the things they see, both the negative, and the positive ones. Some people are emotionally open to the things they see, and their understanding deepens, the more they experience. These people reflect on their lives, and they grow. They are more than just spectators.

They live their lives, and don’t just experience them. What if life, versus mere experience, is the difference between reflection, and growth… versus stagnation, which is a process of entropy. Both are processes of change, but growth is supportive, and moves us forward. The other, stagnation, is about moving backward.

What type of life do you want to live?

Abundance

This is a big topic, so I won’t do it justice in one post. But it is important, so let’s go. There’s a basic example I got from somewhere that illustrates this idea succinctly. Here it is: If you had a bottle of water, and I had a dollar, and we traded, what that means, is you wanted the dollar, more than you wanted the bottle of water, and likewise, I wanted the bottle of water, more than I wanted the dollar. But the most important idea here, is profit. And why is profit important? Because it happens on both sides of the transaction.

This is a huge concept that did not become clear to me until I heard this example several times. The fact is, if I were out on a road trip, or in the middle of the desert, or at an amusement park, or even just down the street at the store, chances are, if I felt the need to part with a dollar to buy a bottle of water, it’s because the dollar is a better deal, right then, at that place and time, than it would be for me to go home and drink the water. Or go someplace else where they’re giving the water away for free, or for me to think about it ahead of time, and pack the water in a bag, etc.

And because I don’t have to pack water in a bag and bring it with me, I am free to walk around with my dollar, and buy water, if that’s what I want to do. But more importantly, I can do something else with my time, instead of thinking about packing a bottle of water and lugging it around to wherever I might end up going.

This is why people don’t make their own clothes, for the most part. This is also why people don’t build their own cars and trucks, or make their own luggage, and dishes, and furniture. People are just starting to, in the West, it would seem, at least the average city dweller … they are just starting to grow their own food, in their apartments, and yards. I have neighbors who have their own chickens. It’s a good idea, and it has its benefits, but it has its costs, too. That’s one more thing a person has to do, equipment they have to buy, and time they end up spending making sure the product they are producing, is the way they want it, their equipment is maintained, etc.

This is all fine and good, but I digress. When I can just show up and buy something, I get my time back, and I can use that time to write this post, for example. I didn’t have to spend time building my own laptop, and I didn’t spend time mining ore to then melt down into my own jewelry, nor did I spend time growing plants or developing synthetic fibers for my clothes. All of that time savings I got from not doing any of those things came from the money I paid someone else to do them for me, instead. And the payment that person received was of course the profit.

And the time was my profit, which is so very important, because it’s the reason why in society today, we can successfully or cripplingly, depending on how you look at it, we can have 40% … 40 or 50%, I can’t remember, of the people employed in the US, work for some form of government. That basically means nearly half of the people working are paid with stolen goods (taxes).

And despite that, the other people, those who work to have that money stolen from them are able to do so and provide for their families, most of them, anyway, some can’t and end up on welfare themselves, or worse. Anyway, it’s a modern miracle we are so efficient that we’re able to provide for ourselves, produce such wonderful innovations, and on top of it all, support the parasites at both the top and bottom of society.

The state destroys abundance. The state interferes and turns win-win into win-lose. We can see this, when we think about robbery. If I make $100 a day, and a robber comes by, once a week, and takes $100 from me, let’s say I end up with $400 a week. So I lose $100 a week to the robber.

What if I need exactly $400 to feed my family, save for a rainy day, and otherwise scrape by and cover my expenses and obligations? Well, then I never make any progress. But worse yet, I don’t help anyone else, either.

The robber takes my profit, basically, and someone could argue I still have my rainy day fund, but let’s put that to the side. The $100 is stolen from me, and assuming I can’t do anything about it but pay the $100, that’s $100 I can’t spend doing things I love and enjoy. That means, maybe for my family to go out and relax, we need two incomes. Which means we’re busier and spend less time together. Which means we probably don’t end up relaxing as much. It means we are more stressed and enjoy life less.

What if we were big into charity? Well then, that’s $100 we can’t give away to help other people, either. No matter what we had planned, we can’t do anything with it. If we planned to spend that $100 a week having fun, we can’t, it won’t enrich our lives, because it’s stolen, gone, and with that money gone, and nothing I can do about it, I still need balance in my life. If this was a regular guy robbing me, once a week, I could probably do something about it. I could move, change up my habits so I don’t get robbed, maybe call the police as a last resort, (hahaha) etc.

But we all know who this robber is, right? It’s the state. The taxman. And you can’t run from this guy. So it’s worse. You have to give up your money, which means you can’t do anything about it except either find a loophole or make less, or maybe there are other things you can do, which we’ll discuss in other posts…

But if the taxman is robbing me every week, then I’m losing out, and so is everyone else, so it’s not likely I’ll, if I’m your “average Joe,” it’s not likely I’ll do anything about this. But I still need to feel like the work I do every day is meaningful, and useful, and if I’m not making enough money to enjoy life, how can I do that? I can’t, so I’ll be frustrated that I don’t make enough money, I’ll probably blame my employer for that. Or I’ll blame society, or maybe I’ll blame the rich? Does any of this sound familiar?

Believing your employer is stingy and doesn’t pay you enough (maybe they don’t) or
Believing society is just corrupt, i.e., the world is full of flawed humans, and very few of us are actually good people or
Believing the rich are greedy and corrupt and everyone with a fortune either inherited it or got it by exploiting someone else

I’ve heard all those arguments before. But none of them explain the simple exchange between a buyer (person with a dollar) and a seller (person with a bottle of water) and how the seller gets taxed. When you’re an employee, you get taxed. When you’re taxed, you feel like you’re short changed, and you are! You’re on the losing end of a win-lose transaction. You get win-win when you work and get paid. Someone gets time, and/or services, and you get money in exchange (which allows you time or goods or services too, when you spend that money) … and just before you get your money, someone else walks in, takes part of the money, and gives you nothing in return.

Some people might argue ‘but the roads,’ or ‘but you went to school for free’ but really, have you driven on the roads? Have you had enough potholes and traffic? Want your money back? Or do you ride the bus or train? Also have you gone to school? Most elementary and high schools in the US are funded by property taxes, federal funds (from inflation and income taxes) and other money. So most people’s school was funded by money paid by poor people living in apartments and people living in homes, whether they had children in school or not. And to top it off, these people did not have a choice if they did have children in school. They had to uproot their family and move, or plan to move some place with a good school district if they wanted to send their children to a good school. Or, get this, they had to still pay the property taxes, which were being stolen from them anyway, and then on top of it, pay again to send their children to a better school, because the public school was not adequate, did not teach their children what they want them to learn, etc. So after having funded the government school involuntarily they still have to pay another school to teach them what they want their children to learn. That’s not fair.

Could you imagine going to a restaurant, and being told what you could eat, not having any choice in the matter, and being told you had to pay, and if you didn’t like it, what you could do, was leave your money on the table and pay, then go next door to a pricier restaurant, and pay more money and get what you want? And even there, the second restaurant answers to the first, so you probably still don’t get exactly what you want, and get some of what you want, and some of what you don’t.

Arent’t we all glad the government doesn’t control restaurants?

I digress. Abundance is not found in any of these scenarios. OMG this is a rambly post. It’s so easy to get on this platform and ramble. Enough.

Recap. Abundance is about one thing, fundamentally, it’s about the fact that whenever we’re voluntarily associated with one another, we’re making each other’s lives better. If you and I are friends, we each voluntarily choose to talk to each other and spend time together. That friendship makes us both happier people, stronger, we’re better because we are friends. That’s what abundance is, that’s what “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” means. The amazing thing about this idea, is it is the very underpinning of economics! When two people enter into an economic relationship, even if it’s just a one-time buy sell transaction, the buyer decided they’d be better off if they made the purchase, and the seller decided they’d be better off if they made the sale. And the buyer gets time, and benefits from the good/service purchased, and the seller gets money to cover their costs, and profit to benefit them from their investment in the good/service they sold. That’s abundance, because both sides profit.

It’s not enough to talk about profit on both sides of a transaction, without talking about the opposite, in this discussion, which is a win-lose transaction where one side gets a benefit and the other side gets nothing in return. This happens when force or fraud is used in the transaction. I didn’t cover fraud above, but force or the threat of force accompanies all taxation, all fines, and most monetary transfers to governments.

This means things like, unfair prices on services, even if a service is still rendered, like school, for example, which is why people still send their children to private schools, and why people go to college in increasing numbers, and take longer to graduate, and … the cost of college goes up every year as well, though this is due to more than one factor, one of the factors here, is that high schools increasingly put out unqualified students who are supposedly ‘ready’ for college. It’s ironic, too, because of the money governments take and borrow to spend on schooling, and yet they still do a terrible job at it.

Fraud is something I will cover in a future post. The short of it is if a seller misrepresents a good/service the buyer ends up paying more for it, thinking they are getting one thing, then finding out they are getting another thing, a thing they would have paid less for, if the seller was honest. In that situation the seller makes off with the buyer’s profit, since they still have to invest time and energy to get what they originally wanted, and can’t necessarily get their money back. This is what happens when a student goes to a government high school, and then spends a couple of semesters in college relearning the same subjects so they build their skills up to the college level.

Some people will blame the student’s parents for this … yet another conversation.

There are also iterative downstream societal consequences. When you take a lose-win or win-lose interaction and replay it over and over through time, it makes a dent in the surrounding society. Just like the fact that the police aren’t good at catching criminals, combined with the media’s overemphasis on violent crime, leads to people restraining their social interaction, their friendliness, and how much they mix with strangers (also known as stranger danger, creepiness, etc.) because people are generally afraid of becoming victims. Well we have solutions to that, but we’ll get to them in another post. For example, if people could pay for private security, or properly defend themselves against criminals, without also fearing an attack from the government (i.e. gun control), they could relax and be friendly, knowing they could protect themselves and their loved ones.

Still much more to this topic … but this is a good introduction.