About This Blog

Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) was the greatest economist of my time. His greatest works can be accessed here at no charge.

Mises believed that property, freedom and peace are and should be the hallmarks of a satisfying and prosperous society. I agree. Mises proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prospect for general and individual prosperity is maximized, indeed, is only possible, if the principle of private property reigns supreme. What's yours is yours. What's mine is mine. When the line between yours and mine is smudged, the door to conflict opens. Without freedom (individual liberty of action) the principle of private property is neutered and the free market, which is the child of property and freedom and the mother of prosperity and satisfaction, cannot exist. Peace is the goal of a prosperous and satisfying society of free individuals, not peace which is purchased by submission to the enemies of property and freedom, but peace which results from the unyielding defense of these principles against all who challenge them.

In this blog I measure American society against the metrics of property, freedom and peace.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

BREAKING!!! Proof that anti-Clinton Bot Farms Exist in Macedonia!

People ridiculed Hillary Clinton when she said this:
Through content farms [in Macedonia], through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will ... The other side was using content that was just flat-out false, and delivering it in a very personalized way, both sort of above the radar screen and below. And you know, look, I’m not a tech expert by any stretch of the imagination. That really influenced the information that people were relying on. And there have been some studies done since the election that if you look — let’s pick Facebook. If you look at Facebook, the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to, as we now know, the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages. They were connected to the bots that are just out of control. We see now this new information about Trump’s Twitter account being populated by millions of bots.
This "new information" was disclosed this morning on the Drudge Report, so we know it has to be true: "TWITTER BOTS WEAPONIZED FOR POLITICS: The billionaire GOP patron behind Trump's social media bot army."
A GOP donor who once had ties to IBM is the man behind the millions of Twitter bots President Trump counts on as followers who could be employed to target voters with misleading or fake news on social media.

In order for it to work, the scheme relies on the quiet guidance of Robert Mercer, a reclusive Republican mega-donor and staunch Trump supporter, sources told the Daily News...
...While pretty much any one computer scientist with the right motives could help someone in the Trump camp do such a thing — most AI technology at this moment is open source and freely available online if one knows where to look — the proximity of Mercer to the Trump camp, in particular, raises questions.

Long before making his fortune at Renaissance Technologies, his current hedge fund, Mercer, 70, worked at IBM, where his name appeared on several patents and on in many publications and studies about “Brown clustering,” which the computer giant used to create its Watson Artificial Intelligence systems.

Mercer did not respond to questions about his involvement with the Trump campaign.

Mercer, who helped get Breitbart News off the ground years ago with millions of dollars in donations, also invested at least $5 million in a firm called Cambridge Analytica, a small tech operation “that mines online data to reach and influence potential voters” and “uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers,” The New Yorker magazine reported earlier this year.
 Let that sink in for a moment, dear reader: "secret psychological methods"!!!!!

And now for the real BOMBSHELL!!!!!
I've learned from several anonymous sources and a friend of mine on Twitter that Robert Mercer has deep ties to computer hackers who acknowledge that they have heard of Russia, the KGB and Vladimir Putin!

Moreover, anonymous sources close to Mercer have confirmed that Robert Mercer has the same last name as Ilana Mercer, a popular paleoconservative author and columnist in the US who was born in South Africa, who is an immigrant herself (but holds a hard-line position AGAINST illegal immigration ), who was an early Trump supporter AND who has written a book about Trump, titled: The Trump Revolution (cryptically and subversively subtitled: The Donald's Creative Destruction Deconstructed)!!!

Furthermore, Ilana Mercer has not denied the persistent internet allegation that she actually owns a bot farm in Macedonia!! Reportedly, the Senate Intel Committee is preparing a subpoena and an anonymous spokesperson promises that the Committee "will get to the bottom of this whole sordid affair."

Thursday, June 8, 2017

Why Are We Here?

Science may infer how we got here, but scientists can never discover why. "Why" is a matter for philosophy and faith. Although comforting and essential to an individual, I've never thought it really mattered to society. If you wake up as an amnesiac and find yourself stranded with many others in the middle of the Amazon jungle, does the "why" really matter to the problem of how to get along? You make the best of it. You try to survive. You try to coexist with your fellow survivors who have varying and contradictory ideas about "how" and "why" and "what now?" This last is something humans can know if we take the time and put our minds to the problem.

It seems to me in such a situation you can proceed along one of two roads: you can attempt to coerce others to act as you prefer them to act, or you can attempt to learn by reason and logic how individuals MUST act in order for all to survive and thrive. Not surprisingly, after about a billion years of failed attempts we still find ourselves at the same crossroad.

When you're young you indulge dreams that all of mankind can and will travel together along the right and proper road. You believe that "love" or some other mystical, unifying "human" spirit will take us all there. But the older you get you conclude that dreams of universal human concord are chimeras. So you stake out your position on the road you conclude you MUST take for your sake and your family's sake, the road that will allow you to survive not only the elements of nature but also the wrath of those staked out along the other road, those whose purpose it is to force you to travel with them.

So far, the story of man has been the history of this struggle.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

When Scientists Reach a Consensus...



The US is the only industrialized country without universal national healthcare. The implication is that it is foolish for the US to resist the consensus of modern progressive policymakers and mainstream medical practitioners.

We're hearing the same argument now that President Trump has pulled out of the Paris Climate Accords. We are told that a consensus of world climate scientists knows the truth about climate change, a truth the rest of us mere mortals can't comprehend. Those who disagree with this consensus of scientists are scorned as truth "deniers."

In the 1940's and 1950's Americans heard much the same thing. A new medical procedure was being touted as a miracle cure for mental illness. It soon earned the praise of mainstream medical scientists. Western countries eagerly adopted the practice:
The procedure, controversial from its inception, was a mainstream procedure in some Western countries for more than two decades (prescribed for psychiatric and occasionally other conditions) despite general recognition of frequent and serious side effects. While some patients experienced symptomatic improvement with the operation, this was achieved at the cost of creating other impairments, and this balance between benefits and risks contributed to the controversial nature of the procedure.

The originator of the procedure, Antonio Egas Moniz, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.

The procedure began to be...
...touted by some as a miracle cure for mental illness, and its use became widespread; during its heyday in the 1940s and ’50s, the [procedure]...was performed on some 40,000 patients in the United States, and on around 10,000 in Western Europe. The procedure became popular because there was no alternative, and because it was seen to alleviate several social crises: overcrowding in psychiatric institutions, and the increasing cost of caring for mentally ill patients.

The American clinical neurologist Walter Freeman championed the procedure and was largely responsible for bringing it to the United States. However, the procedure required sterile operating rooms, anesthesia and skilled surgeons. As a result, many patients in institutions across the country were denied the benefits of the procedure because their institutions lacked these resources.

Consequently, in 1945 Freeman pioneered a new technique that eliminated these obstacles and made the procedure available to virtually everyone.

Freeman’s new technique could be performed in about 10 minutes. Because it did not require anesthesia, it could be performed outside of the clinical setting, and...patients did not need hospital internment afterwards. Thus, Freeman often performed [the procedure]...in his Washington D.C. office...on anyone who was referred to him. During his career, he would perform almost 3,500 operations.

Freeman's procedure is as follows:

With the patient rendered unconscious by electroshock, an instrument was inserted above the eyeball through the orbit using a hammer. Once inside the brain, the instrument was moved back and forth; this was then repeated on the other side. (The ice-pick lobotomy, named as such because the instrument used resembled the tool with which ice is broken, is therefore also known as the transorbital lobotomy...)


Witnessing an ice-pick lobotomy is not for the squeamish. According to one report "during one filmed screening at a Bristol high school 5 students fainted and had to be dragged out."

If you have a strong stomach, you can watch Freeman performing his procedure at: https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=1f0_1404078269

CAUTION: CONTENT IS GRAPHIC AND MAY BE DISTURBING
Freeman’s surgeries were so brutal to behold that during one filmed screening at a Bristol high school 5 students fainted and had to be dragged out1…care to see for yourself? - See more at: http://www.madscientistblog.ca/walter-freeman-ice-pick-lobotomist/#sthash.nXMY3WZW.dpuf
Freeman’s surgeries were so brutal to behold that during one filmed screening at a Bristol high school 5 students fainted and had to be dragged out1…care to see for yourself? - See more at: http://www.madscientistblog.ca/walter-freeman-ice-pick-lobotomist/#sthash.nXMY3WZW.dpuf