to many think it can not happen to them..

Another year, another gardening thread for the back yard gardeners among us.

I'm already slacking this year. I staked out and broke up the perimeter of a larger garden spot, incorporating both of last year's gardens within it, plus about that much ground again, but I reckon I bit off more than I can chew by hand, Preparation is way behind, and may not get accomplished at all this year. I really ought to invest in a rotor-tiller.

I got a bit disheartened by last year's piss poor results. For instance, out of all my corn, what I got doesn't even fill a ziplock baggie, cobs and all... and none of the ears were full. Some ended up looking more like teosinte than corn. Instead of husks on those ears as we would expect, each individual kernel has it's own husk, and the ears were only 2 or 3 inches long in total. Not a very promising result.

Last year's beans in total amounted to a condiment cup full of dried beans, not even enough for a single serving.

I got a grand total of 18 cayenne peppers, but they were plenty hot. Life is full of trade-offs, i reckon. I got a total of TWO green peppers, both only about the size of a golf ball. Plenty of tomatoes, but again all of them were only about the size of a golf ball.

So.

I'm a bit disappointed, and not very motivated to break up the ground if that's all I get out of it. Especially not to go to all the trouble of breaking it up by hand with a Garden Weasel gadget.

I never got hold of any of the corn I was planning for this year - Hickory King corn. I had decided on that because it makes good hominy, and is better for making grits, corn meal, and masa flour. But, never having managed to get my furry mitts on any seed for it, it's not likely to be in the offing. I've also not gotten any seed for pole beans, which i had figured on planting in with the corn. I DID get some butternut squash seed, though.

All I've started so far is tobacco (Midewiwin Rustica variety from around the Great Lakes), basil, thyme, and some local catnip. I gathered the catnip seed from plants still growing where I grew up. My intent was to hybridize the catnip that has acclimated to the local climate for generations with some fresh outsider catnip that I got started last year. last year's catnip survived the winter and is sprouting out again.

I sewed those herbs on Saturday night/ Sunday morning (23/24 March) right around midnight, in tiny little greenhouse starters that Grace got for me last year. About mid-day on Tuesday the 26th, I noticed the tobacco and basil already sprouting, just a couple days after planting it. No progress yet on the catnip or thyme, but I recall from last year that the thyme took almost a month to start sprouting, and I'm using the same seed that I used last year to start it.

The tobacco seed was starting to get old. It's from a 2020 crop, but it's the only pure-bred seed I have of that variety, so it's what I had to use. I figured since it was getting on in years, I'd double-up on the amount of seed used to insure enough sprouts. that might have been a mistake - the planters for the tobacco have a full green carpet in them today, sprouting pretty thickly. Still, I reckon that will give me enough to plant out, even after I cull the weaker plants.

Coming back from last year's plantings are the catnip previously mentioned, as well as a couple of sage plants. Some onions, although the tops are pretty puny still compared to what they were. The rosemary bush died over the winter apparently, so I'll have to start fresh again this year it appears. All of the peppermint died over the winter, but that's no big loss, considering that it was looking pretty weird for peppermint anyhow.

I had two plants "volunteer" in some of the soil I had, which looked a lot like blueberry plants. I planted them out on either side of my walkway last fall. I'm not sure if they survived the winter or not. All of the leaves turned red, and finally fell off in late January or early February, and the plants are still naked. I don't know if they'll come back or not. I checked the stems yesterday, and they're still tough and pliable, not brittle like I would expect if they were dead, so we'll see.

Last year's thyme barely survived the fall, much less the winter. That's why I started a fresh batch this year. Two sage plants survived the winter, and I'm debating whether to add a couple more this year or not. If those two take off this year, then no more will be needed - we had an ancient sage plant where i grew up that produced for 30 years that I know of, all from one bush. I have no idea how much older than that it was, because no one could recall who planted it, or when. it was already an established bush when we moved in there.

I got some cucumber seeds and some seeds from a giant sort of alleged jalapeno pepper last fall that one of my cousins grew, and I might give them a go this year. Maybe some tiny "cherry" tomatoes I got seed for last fall, too. As small as the "full sized" tomatoes I grew last year were, I'm almost scared to try the cherry tomatoes before I get a magnifying glass so I can tell when they're ripe...

In regard to the alleged jalapeno peppers, I say "alleged" because that's what I was told they were, but I've never seen actual jalapenos that big, nor have I ever eaten any that hot. So, I dunno what they really are, and am just using the name as it was given to me.

I also planted some ginseng berries that I got out of the woods on the hill above my house. I planted those last fall, in the shade of the giant beech tree in my front yard. Since I planted them last fall, it will be next spring before they sprout, if they DO sprout. it takes 18 months for ginseng to sprout from seed. If any of it sprouts, I can watch it from my front porch, meaning anyone trying to poach it is in for a ass-full of lead that I can deliver from the comfort of my rocking chair on the front porch. It's all about the convenience some times.

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David was coming to the end of his life and growing more feeble (1 Kings ch1).  
 
Obviously the issue of succession to the throne would have to be confronted. Once again, polygamy would be a major complicating factor. The later Ottoman empire illustrates the problem, showing how polygamy tends to produce too many possible candidates for the throne. Being born from different mothers reduces the sense of kinship among the sons and heightens the sense of rivalry. In fact the competition for the throne becomes an anxious necessity, if they know that the winner of the race is likely to kill his brothers afterwards. 
 
Thus there is no security in the status of “eldest son”. Even their father’s preference may be diverted to a son of his favourite wife. It will be helpful if the candidate is popular among the people, but he needs to find allies in the military leadership, the religious leadership, and the royal household. The household is important partly because those close to the monarch will be the first to know about his death, priceless information which they may be able to keep to themselves until they have perfected their own arrangements. 
 
At first glance, the obvious heir to David’s throne was Adonijah, the fourth of his Hebron sons and probably the eldest surviving son. “His father had never at any time displeased him by asking; Why have you done thus and so?” (v4) He was aware of David’s decline, and exalted himself, saying “I will be king”. He prepared for himself chariots and horsemen and fifty men to run before him.  
 
At the same time, there was also a “son of the favourite wife”. David had already sworn an oath to Bathsheba, that her son Solomon would reign after him. Unfortunately the child was still too young to be a plausible war-leader, which may be one of the reasons why the decision had not been announced publicly. I’m sure Adonijah would have guessed the secret, though. 
 
Adonijah had secured the support of two leading figures. Joab, as commander of the host, and Abiathar, as priest-custodian of the ark, might be seen as the heads of their respective 
“departments”. Yet this combination was not as strong as it looked. Adonijah’s party did not include Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, captain of the king’s bodyguard. Nor did it include the rest of David’s “mighty men”. Where, then, was Abishai, Joab’s elder brother, once “commander of the thirty”? Probably retired or dead, having been active since the very beginning of the reign. It’s likely that the
“thirty” had disappeared altogether. Joab and 
Abishai together had controlled the court. Without Abishai, and in the absence of the host (which had not been called out for war), Joab was an old commander with immense prestige and no soldiers. 
 

I would think the Mullahs are not happy over this announcement ! Muslims and their ilk the world over are ????????

An there are people who will still vote for this senile forked tongued devil ! https://www.wnd.com/2024/03/watch-biden-...ed-bridge/

Quote:

• [/url]
  

Joe Biden took to a podium right away on Tuesday after word of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore.
There a critical support structure had been hit and knocked down by an out-of-control container ship.
ADVERTISEMENT

And Biden told how he had commuted many times by car and train across that very bridge.
Except, according to a report in the [url=https://thepostmillennial.com/biden-claims-he-took-the-train-over-francis-scott-key-bridge-many-many-times-there-are-no-rail-lines]Post Millennial, the bridge "did not have any rail lines."

Be careful what you click on in your YouTube feed, you may end up being investigated for watching a damn video.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/courts-have-o...tube-users

Quote:Federal authorities have reportedly ordered Google to provide information about viewers of select YouTube videos, including their names, addresses, and phone numbers, as well as provide information about video viewers who weren't signed into YouTube while watching.

The requests are raising alarms for privacy experts who say the requests are unconstitutional and are “transforming search warrants into digital dragnets” by potentially targeting individuals who are not associated with a crime based simply on what they may have watched online.
Specifically, authorities have reportedly asked for information about individuals who watched certain videos on the site between Jan. 1-8, 2023 as part of an investigation into “elonmuskwhm.” The authorities also requested the user activity for those accounts.
According to Forbes, the investigation into elonmuskwhm is focused on that individual selling Bitcoin for cash, which is a violation of money laundering laws. The sale also constitutes an unlicensed money-transferring business. As part of the investigation, undercover agents reportedly sent links of YouTube tutorials that covered mapping via drones and augmented reality software to elonmuskwhm, and then asked Google to provide details on who had viewed the videos. The videos received more than 30,000 views.
According to documents viewed by Forbes, a court granted the government’s request for the information; however, it asked Google to not publicize the request.
In the court order, the authorities commented: “There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators.”

I so hope he gets a party in prison.... If they even convict him that is.

Physical Castration should be an option. He was also going to rape a baby he was adopting and appears to have already gotten all his nieces and nephews. 


https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/ada...rnography/

Quote:Chicago veterinarian, dog show judge charged with child porn; FBI says he boasted of drugging and abusing multiple kids


A Chicago area veterinarian who has judged national dog shows was arrested Friday on child pornography charges, and accused of chatting about planning to sexually assault his newborn son, federal prosecutors announced on Monday.

Adam Stafford King, a veterinary ophthalmologist from Elburn, is charged with one count of knowingly distributing child pornography. He is a staff ophthalmologist at MedVet Chicago, a veterinary clinic in Avondale.
King is also a Havenese dog breeder and dog show judge who frequently travels to dog shows around the country, and had been scheduled to serve as a judge for the 2024 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

According to the charges against him, the FBI began investigating King in October, as part of a child pornography investigation in New York. Agents learned a subject in the New York case had been chatting with King using the dating app Scruff and the messaging app Telegram, and King had sent that person several videos of child pornography.



After that person was arrested, FBI agents posed as him online, and continued to chat with him. During those chats, King used the handle @pervchiguy, and wrote that he prefers children under age 10. In one message, King wrote "0-9 [years old] my fav…B[oy] and g[irl], though prefer b[oy]," according to the charges.


King also allegedly sent the person in New York several videos of child pornography, including at least three different videos of men sexually assaulting preteen boys.


During their chats, King also claimed he had drugged and sexually abused his nieces and nephews.


King allegedly wrote "I generally use Benadryl," noting that it provides a "wide safety margin," and is "easy," claiming, "it generally takes 30-45 min[utes]," and "I usually double an adult dose," according to the charges.


King also allegedly claimed that he and his husband were expecting the birth of a child by a surrogate on March 29, and that he planned to sexually assault the child after it is born. He also allegedly sent the person in New York an ultrasound image of the unborn child, and a photo of a baby outfit he and his husband got for Christmas.


"I do love the idea of inviting a buddy over when I have my boy … just has to be someone I can trust obviously," King allegedly wrote in a message.


According to the charges, when the FBI executed a search warrant at King's home on March 5, they found him in the shower with his cell phone, despite announcing their presence in the home several times.


During the search of his home and a forensic search of his iPhone, the FBI also found images of child pornography, the ultrasound image he had shared, and the baby outfit he had shown off.


King was arrested on Friday, days before he was scheduled to fly to California to visit the surrogate mother ahead of his son's expected birth later this week.


King is well-known in the dog-showing community, and has also been featured on podcasts.
"Because he's so well-known, especially in the Midwest - that's why it's such a shock," said Jessica Deardorff, who also shows dogs.


Deardorff has never met King, but knows of his work as an ophthalmologist and a judge.
Deardorff said she has previously called the American Kennel Club for stronger safeguards throughout the industry – specifically for children.


"You can't keep ignoring it. This isn't the good old boys club anymore," she said. "Like, you can't sweep things under the rug."


At King's initial court appearance on Friday, prosecutors asked him to be held in custody without bond, according to court records. A detention hearing has been scheduled for Tuesday.
The American Kennel Club said late Monday that King has been stripped of all his judging privileges.  
Nobody came to the door late Monday when CBS 2 stopped by King's rural home in Elburn. CBS 2 reached out to MedVet and King's attorney, who both had no comment.  

Mary (or rather Miriam, after the sister of Moses) has always been a popular name amongst the Jews. A number of women of that name are found in the New Testament.
 
The specific information about Mary Magdalen is very limited.
We may guess that her surname is “place of origin”, probably deriving from Magdala, a fishing town on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
We know (Luke ch8 v2) that she was one of the women who accompanied Jesus in his travels along with his other disciples, and that seven demons had been driven out of her.
We know from the Easter narratives that she was one of the small group of women who sought to attend Jesus after his burial, and we have the story of John ch20 about her encounter with him after his Resurrection.
 
However, a few other stories in the gospels have had an great effect on the way that she’s been perceived, even though they don’t mention her by name.
 
Matthew has an “anointing in Bethany” story (ch26 vv6-13). While he is eating at the house of Simon the leper, an unidentified woman pours oil on his head. The disciples complain that the ointment could have been sold to provide for the poor, but Jesus declares that she is preparing him for his burial. No other motive is suggested. The implication is that this is an acted-out prophecy.
 
Luke has his own anointing story (ch7 vv36-50), but the setting is in the middle of the Galilee mission. The most recent place-name mentioned is Nain. The women is identified as a sinner and she is weeping. Not just from repentance and a sense of guilt, let it be understood. She is weeping with gratitude, superimposed upon the repentance, because she already knows that her sins have been forgiven, though her faith. That is clear from the remarks of Jesus, who says the magnitude of her sin can be measured by the magnitude of her grateful love. She anoints his feet, in humility, instead of his head. Before the anointing she must dry the feet with her hair, because her tears are making them wet.
 
Luke also has the story (ch10 vv38-41) of the reception of Jesus at the home of the sisters Mary and Martha. The village is not named, but Jesus has already “set his face” (ch9 v51) for the eight-chapter journey towards Jerusalem. There is no suggestion that either of them is the woman in the anointing story.
 
We come now to the story of John ch12 vv1-8, which complicates matters greatly. In his version of events, the household of Mary and Martha is combined with the household of Lazarus in Bethany, who is their brother. The event that takes place that night is Matthew’s Bethany anointing, on the whole. That is, the woman who anoints him is identified as Mary. Judas is the disciple who complains about the waste. John’s version of the reply Jesus made is a little odd; “Let her keep it for my burial”. How can she keep it, when she has already used it? Perhaps the simplest answer is to refer it to her previous decision NOT to sell the oil. “It was right that she should keep it and not sell it, so that she could use it for this purpose today.” On that interpretation, John agrees with Matthew in treating the act as “anointing in advance”.
 
John complicates things further by adding detail from the anointing in Luke. The act is transferred from the head to the feet of Jesus, and Mary wipes them with her hair even though it is not necessary. She has not been weeping, so the feet are not wet. Nevertheless, there is no suggestion of the “repentance for sin” motive. He does not identify Mary of Bethany with the sinner. Nor does he identify Mary Magdalene with either of them.
 
No, church tradition, interpreting the New Testament, has been responsible for dragging the name of Mary Magdalene into these events. The quest for ways of harmonising the gospels would naturally lead to the assumption that all three anointing stories were the same story at heart, which would have the effect of identifying Mary of Bethany as a reformed sinner. Apparently it was Pope Gregory the Great who first identified Mary Magdalene as the sinful anointing woman and more specifically identified her sin as fornication. He depended heavily on the assumed connection between fornication and being possessed by demons, which doesn’t have direct Biblical backing. Perhaps also “keep it for my burial” encouraged the idea that Mary of Bethany must have been one of the women around the tomb.
 
I had it in my head that Mary Magdalene spent the Middle Ages as patron saint of prostitutes, but this role seems to have been informal rather than official. Certainly the Oxford English Dictionary defines “Magdalen” as “a reformed prostitute”. Her name was given to communities of nuns formed from reformed prostitutes and other institutions designed to shelter them. All because Pope Gregory decided to simplify the Biblical character list and give her name to somebody else.

Long intriguing thread...

Quote:Last year, Ed Pierson was supposed to fly from Seattle to New Jersey on Alaska Airlines. He boarded his flight, but then he had an urgent discussion with the flight attendant, explaining that as a former senior Boeing engineer, he'd specifically requested that flight because the aircraft wasn't a 737 Max:

‘I want to get off the plane.’ The passengers refusing to fly on Boeing’s 737 Max

But for operational reasons, Boeing had switched out the equipment on the flight and there he was on a 737 Max, about to travel cross-continent, and he didn't feel safe doing so. He demanded to be let off the flight. His bags were offloaded and he walked back up the jetbridge after telling the spooked flight attendant, "I can’t go into detail right now, but I wasn’t planning on flying the Max, and I want to get off the plane."

Boeing, of course, is a flying disaster that was years in the making. Its planes have been falling out of the sky since 2019. Floods of whistleblowers have come forward to say its aircraft are unsafe. Pierson's not the only Boeing employee to state – both on and off the record – that he wouldn't fly on a specific model of Boeing aircraft, or, in some cases any recent Boeing aircraft:

Boeing, Spirit and Jetblue, a monopoly horror-story

And yet, for years, Boeing's regulators have allowed the company to keep turning out planes that keep turning out lemons. This is a pretty frightening situation, to say the least. I'm not an aerospace engineer, I'm not an aircraft safety inspector, but every time I book a flight, I have to make a decision about whether to trust Boeing's assurances that I can safely board one of its planes without dying.

In an ideal world, I wouldn't even have to think about this. I'd be able to trust that publicly accountable regulators were on the job, making sure that airplanes were airworthy. "Caveat emptor" is no way to run a civilian aviation system.

But even though I don't have the specialized expertise needed to assess the airworthiness of Boeing planes, I do have the much more general expertise needed to assess the trustworthiness of Boeing's regulator. The FAA has spent years deferring to Boeing, allowing it to self-certify that its aircraft were safe. Even when these assurances led to the death of hundreds of people, the FAA continued to allow Boeing to mark its own homework:




What's more, the FAA boss who presided over those hundreds of deaths was an ex-Boeing lobbyist, whom Trump subsequently appointed to run Boeing's oversight. He's not the only ex-insider who ended up a regulator, and there's plenty of ex-regulators now on Boeing's payroll:

Boeing Debacle Shows Need to Investigate Trump-era Corruption

You don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that companies have conflicts of interest when it comes to certifying their own products. "Market forces" aren't going to keep Boeing from shipping defective products, because the company's top brass are more worried about cashing out with this quarter's massive stock buybacks than they are about their successors' ability to manage the PR storm or Congressional hearings after their greed kills hundreds and hundreds of people.

You also don't have to be an aviation expert to understand that these conflicts persist even when a Boeing insider leaves the company to work for its regulators, or vice-versa. A regulator who anticipates a giant signing bonus from Boeing after their term in office, or a an ex-Boeing exec who holds millions in Boeing stock has an irreconcilable conflict of interest that will make it very hard – perhaps impossible – for them to hold the company to account when it trades safety for profit.

It's not just Boeing customers who feel justifiably anxious about trusting a system with such obvious conflicts of interest: Boeing's own executives, lobbyists and lawyers also refuse to participate in similarly flawed systems of oversight and conflict resolution. If Boeing was sued by its shareholders and the judge was also a pissed off Boeing shareholder, they would demand a recusal. If Boeing was looking for outside counsel to represent it in a liability suit brought by the family of one of its murder victims, they wouldn't hire the firm that was suing them – not even if that firm promised to be fair. If a Boeing executive's spouse sued for divorce, that exec wouldn't use the same lawyer as their soon-to-be-ex.

Sure, it takes specialized knowledge and training to be a lawyer, a judge, or an aircraft safety inspector. But anyone can look at the system those experts work in and spot its glaring defects. In other words, while acquiring expertise is hard, it's much easier to spot weaknesses in the process by which that expertise affects the world around us.

And therein lies the problem: aviation isn't the only technically complex, potentially lethal, and utterly, obviously untrustworthy system we all have to navigate. How about the building safety codes that governed the structure you're in right now? Plenty of people have blithely assumed that structural engineers carefully designed those standards, and that these standards were diligently upheld, only to discover in tragic, ghastly ways that this was wrong:

Turkey earthquake: Why did so many buildings collapse?

There are dozens – hundreds! – of life-or-death, highly technical questions you have to resolve every day just to survive. Should you trust the antilock braking firmware in your car? How about the food hygiene rules in the factories that produced the food in your shopping cart? Or the kitchen that made the pizza that was just delivered? Is your kid's school teaching them well, or will they grow up to be ignoramuses and thus economic roadkill?

Hell, even if I never get into another Boeing aircraft, I live in the approach path for Burbank airport, where Southwest lands 50+ Boeing flights every day. How can I be sure that the next Boeing 737 Max that falls out of the sky won't land on my roof?

This is the epistemological crisis we're living through today. Epistemology is the process by which we know things. The whole point of a transparent, democratically accountable process for expert technical deliberation is to resolve the epistemological challenge of making good choices about all of these life-or-death questions. Even the smartest person among us can't learn to evaluate all those questions, but we can all look at the process by which these questions are answered and draw conclusions about its soundness.

Is the process public? Are the people in charge of it forthright? Do they have conflicts of interest, and, if so, do they sit out any decision that gives even the appearance of impropriety? If new evidence comes to light – like, say, a horrific disaster – is there a way to re-open the process and change the rules?

The actual technical details might be a black box for us, opaque and indecipherable. But the box itself can be easily observed: is it made of sturdy material? Does it have sharp corners and clean lines? Or is it flimsy, irregular and torn? We don't have to know anything about the box's contents to conclude that we don't trust the box.

For example: we may not be experts in chemical engineering or water safety, but we can tell when a regulator is on the ball on these issues. Back in 2019, the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sought comment on its water safety regs. Dow Chemical – the largest corporation in the states's largest industry – filed comments arguing that WV should have lower standards for chemical contamination in its drinking water.

Now, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that there are safe levels of chemical runoff in the water supply. There's a lot of water in the water supply, after all, and "the dose makes the poison." What's more, I use the products whose manufacture results in that chemical waste. I want them to be made safely, but I do want them to be made – for one thing, the next time I have surgery, I want the anesthesiologist to start an IV with fresh, sterile plastic tubing.

And I'm not a chemist, let alone a water chemist. Neither am I a toxicologist. There are aspects of this debate I am totally unqualified to assess. Nevertheless, I think the WV process was a bad one, and here's why:

WVMA statement on human health criteria development

That's Dow's comment to the regulator (as proffered by its mouthpiece, the WV Manufacturers' Association, which it dominates). In that comment, Dow argues that West Virginians safely can absorb more poison than other Americans, because the people of West Virginia are fatter than other Americans, and so they have more tissue and thus a better ratio of poison to person than the typical American. But they don't stop there! They also say that West Virginians don't drink as much water as their out-of-state cousins, preferring to drink beer instead, so even if their water is more toxic, they'll be drinking less of it:

The Real Elitists Who Look Down on Trump Voters

Even without any expertise in toxicology or water chemistry, I can tell that these are bullshit answers. The fact that the WV regulator accepted these comments tells me that they're not a good regulator. I was in WV last year to give a talk, and I didn't drink the tap water.

It's totally reasonable for non-experts to reject the conclusions of experts when the process by which those experts resolve their disagreements is obviously corrupt and irredeemably flawed. But some refusals carry higher costs – both for the refuseniks and the people around them – than my switching to bottled water when I was in Charleston.

Take vaccine denial (or "hesitancy"). Many people greeted the advent of an extremely rapid, high-tech covid vaccine with dread and mistrust. They argued that the pharma industry was dominated by corrupt, greedy corporations that routinely put their profits ahead of the public's safety, and that regulators, in Big Pharma's pocket, let them get away with mass murder.

The thing is, all that is true. Look, I've had five covid vaccinations, but not because I trust the pharma industry. I've had direct experience of how pharma sacrifices safety on greed's altar, and narrowly avoided harm myself. I have had chronic pain problems my whole life, and they've gotten worse every year. When my daughter was on the way, I decided this was going to get in the way of my ability to parent – I wanted to be able to carry her for long stretches! – and so I started aggressively pursuing the pain treatments I'd given up on many years before.

My journey led me to many specialists – physios, dieticians, rehab specialists, neurologists, surgeons – and I tried many, many therapies. Luckily, my wife had private insurance – we were in the UK then – and I could go to just about any doctor that seemed promising. That's how I found myself in the offices of a Harley Street quack, a prominent pain specialist, who had great news for me: it turned out that opioids were way safer than had previously been thought, and I could just take opioids every day and night for the rest of my life without any serious risk of addiction. It would be fine.

This sounded wrong to me. I'd lost several friends to overdoses, and watched others spiral into miserable lives as they struggled with addiction. So I "did my own research." Despite not having a background in chemistry, biology, neurology or pharmacology, I struggled through papers and read commentary and came to the conclusion that opioids weren't safe at all. Rather, corrupt billionaire pharma owners like the Sackler family had colluded with their regulators to risk the lives of millions by pushing falsified research that was finding publication in some of the most respected, peer-reviewed journals in the world.

I became an opioid denier, in other words.

I decided, based on my own research, that the experts were wrong, and that they were wrong for corrupt reasons, and that I couldn't trust their advice.

When anti-vaxxers decried the covid vaccines, they said things that were – in form at least – indistinguishable from the things I'd been saying 15 years earlier, when I decided to ignore my doctor's advice and throw away my medication on the grounds that it would probably harm me.

For me, faith in vaccines didn't come from a broad, newfound trust in the pharmaceutical system: rather, I judged that there was so much scrutiny on these new medications that it would overwhelm even pharma's ability to corruptly continue to sell a medication that they secretly knew to be harmful, as they'd done so many times before:

Timeline: The Rise and Fall of Vioxx

But many of my peers had a different take on anti-vaxxers: for these friends and colleagues, anti-vaxxers were being foolish. Surprisingly, these people I'd long felt myself in broad agreement with began to defend the pharmaceutical system and its regulators. Once they saw that anti-vaxx was a wedge issue championed by right-wing culture war shitheads, they became not just pro-vaccine, but pro-pharma.

There's a name for this phenomenon: "schismogenesis." That's when you decide how you feel about an issue based on who supports it. Think of self-described "progressives" who became cheerleaders for the America's cruel, ruthless and lawless "intelligence community" when it seemed that US spooks were bent on Trump's ouster:

Schismogenesis

The fact that the FBI didn't like Trump didn't make them allies of progressive causes. This was and is the same entity that (among other things) tried to blackmail Martin Luther King, Jr into killing himself:

FBI–King suicide letter

But schismogenesis isn't merely a reactionary way of flip-flopping on issues based on reflexive enmity. It's actually a reasonable epistemological tactic: in a world where there are more issues you need to be clear on than you can possibly inform yourself about, you need some shortcuts. One shortcut – a shortcut that's failing – is to say, "Well, I'll provisionally believe whatever the expert system tells me is true." Another shortcut is, "I will provisionally disbelieve in whatever the people I know to act in bad faith are saying is true." That is, "schismogenesis."

Schismogenesis isn't a great tactic. It would be far better if we had a set of institutions we could all largely trust – if the black boxes where expert debate took place were sturdy, rectilinear and sharp-cornered.

But they're not. They're just not. Our regulatory process sucks. Corporate concentration makes it trivial for cartels to capture their regulators and steer them to conclusions that benefit corporate shareholders even if that means visiting enormous harm – even mass death – on the public:

Regulatory Capture - Beyond Revolving Doors and Against Regulatory Nihilism.

No one hates Big Tech more than I do, but many of my co-belligerents in the war on Big Tech believe that the rise of conspiratorialism can be laid at tech platforms' feet. They say that Big Tech boasts of how good they are at algorithmically manipulating our beliefs, and attribute Qanons, flat earthers, and other outlandish conspiratorial cults to the misuse off those algorithms.

"We built a Big Data mind-control ray" is one of those extraordinary claims that requires extraordinary evidence. But the evidence for Big Tech's persuasion machines is very poor: mostly, it consists of tech platforms' own boasts to potential investors and customers for their advertising products. "We can change peoples' minds" has long been the boast of advertising companies, and it's clear that they can change the minds of customers for advertising.

Think of department store mogul John Wanamaker, who famously said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Today – thanks to commercial surveillance – we know that the true proportion of wasted advertising spending is more like 99.9%. Advertising agencies may be really good at convincing John Wanamaker and his successors, through prolonged, personal, intense selling – but that doesn't mean they're able to sell so efficiently to the rest of us with mass banner ads or spambots:

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

In other words, the fact that Facebook claims it is really good at persuasion doesn't mean that it's true. Just like the AI companies who claim their chatbots can do your job: they are much better at convincing your boss (who is insatiably horny for firing workers) than they are at actually producing an algorithm that can replace you. What's more, their profitability relies far more on convincing a rich, credulous business executive that their product works than it does on actually delivering a working product.

Now, I do think that Facebook and other tech giants play an important role in the rise of conspiratorial beliefs. However, that role isn't using algorithms to persuade people to mistrust our institutions. Rather Big Tech – like other corporate cartels – has so corrupted our regulatory system that they make trusting our institutions irrational.

Think of federal privacy law. The last time the US got a new federal consumer privacy law was in 1988, when Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, a law that prohibits video store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history:

Why the VPPA Protects YouTube and Viacom Employees

It's been a minute. There are very obvious privacy concerns haunting Americans, related to those tech giants, and yet the closest Congress can come to doing something about it is to attempt the forced sale of the sole Chinese tech giant with a US footprint to a US company, to ensure that its rampant privacy violations are conducted by our fellow Americans, and to force Chinese spies to buy their surveillance data on millions of Americans in the lawless, reckless swamp of US data-brokerages:

The House passed a TikTok ban bill. But is the app really a national security threat?

For millions of Americans – especially younger Americans – the failure to pass (or even introduce!) a federal privacy law proves that our institutions can't be trusted. They're right:

TikTok video

Occam's Razor cautions us to seek the simplest explanation for the phenomena we see in the world around us. There's a much simpler explanation for why people believe conspiracy theories they encounter online than the idea that the one time Facebook is telling the truth is when they're boasting about how well their products work – especially given the undeniable fact that everyone else who ever claimed to have perfected mind-control was a fantasist or a liar, from Rasputin to MK-ULTRA to pick-up artists.

Maybe people believe in conspiracy theories because they have hundreds of life-or-death decisions to make every day, and the institutions that are supposed to make that possible keep proving that they can't be trusted. Nevertheless, those decisions have to be made, and so something needs to fill the epistemological void left by the manifest unsoundness of the black box where the decisions get made.

For many people – millions – the thing that fills the black box is conspiracy fantasies. It's true that tech makes finding these conspiracy fantasies easier than ever, and it's true that tech makes forming communities of conspiratorial belief easier, too. But the vulnerability to conspiratorialism that algorithms identify and target people based on isn't a function of Big Data. It's a function of corruption – of life in a world in which real conspiracies (to steal your wages, or let rich people escape the consequences of their crimes, or sacrifice your safety to protect large firms' profits) are everywhere.

Progressives – which is to say, the coalition of liberals and leftists, in which liberals are the senior partners and spokespeople who control the Overton Window – used to identify and decry these conspiracies. But as right wing "populists" declared their opposition to these conspiracies – when Trump damned free trade and the mainstream media as tools of the ruling class – progressives leaned into schismogenesis and declared their vocal support for these old enemies of progress.

This is the crux of Naomi Klein's brilliant 2023 book Doppelganger: that as the progressive coalition started supporting these unworthy and broken institutions, the right spun up "mirror world" versions of their critique, distorted versions that focus on scapegoating vulnerable groups rather than fighting unworthy institutions:

Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger"

This is a long tradition in politics: hundreds of years ago, some leftists branded antisemitism "the socialism of fools." Rather than condemning the system's embrace of the finance sector and its wealthy beneficiaries, anti-semites blame a disfavored group of people – people who are just as likely as anyone to suffer under the system:

Antisemitism is the socialism of fools

It's an ugly, shallow, cartoon version of socialism's measured and comprehensive analysis of how the class system actually works and why it's so harmful to everyone except a tiny elite. Literally cartoonish: the shadow-world version of socialism co-opts and simplifies the iconography of class struggle. And schismogenesis – "if the right likes this, I don't" – sends "progressive" scolds after anyone who dares to criticize finance as the crux of our world's problems as popularizing "antisemetic dog-whistles."

This is the problem with "horseshoe theory" – the idea that the far right and the far left bend all the way around to meet each other:

Incomplete vs. overshoot

When the right criticizes pharma companies, they tell us to "do our own research" (e.g. ignore the systemic problems of people being forced to work under dangerous conditions during a pandemic while individually assessing conflicting claims about vaccine safety, ideally landing on buying "supplements" from a grifter). When the left criticizes pharma, it's to argue for universal access to medicine and vigorous public oversight of pharma companies. These aren't the same thing:

We promised this vaccine waiver 20 years ago

Long before opportunistic right wing politicians realized they could get mileage out of pointing at the terrifying epistemological crisis of trying to make good choices in an age of institutions that can't be trusted, the left was sounding the alarm. Conspiratorialism – the fracturing of our shared reality – is a serious problem, weakening our ability to respond effectively to endless disasters of the polycrisis.

But by blaming the problem of conspiratorialism on the credulity of believers (rather than the deserved disrepute of the institutions they have lost faith in) we adopt the logic of the right: "conspiratorialism is a problem of individuals believing wrong things," rather than "a system that makes wrong explanations credible – and a schismogenic insistence that these institutions are sound and trustworthy."

Forget Iceland or Bali, real travel influencers go to Poyais. It's so exclusive it doesn’t even exist! The story of this fake country starts in 1822 with a man named Gregor MacGregor (real name).

Quote:Gregor MacGregor Creates His Own Country

In 1822 and 1823 hundreds of people departed England and Scotland on voyages to the promising new country of Poyais. Clutching Poyaisian currency and filled with hope for a prosperous future, the would-be settlers were shocked to find that the bustling harbor, elegant capital city, and readily cultivatable land promoted by the country’s dashing governor, Gregor MacGregor, were in fact nothing but a desolate wilderness. Leading to financial ruin and more than 150 deaths, the colonization attempt revealed Poyais to be more con than country, and MacGregor, the Scotsman behind the scheme, to be an equally cunning fraud. How had he pulled it off?



Although he had risen to the rank of general in the war for Venezuela’s independence from Spain, MacGregor had done little to distinguish himself in that struggle. Yet, when he returned to Britain from the Americas, he succeeded in convincing aristocrats in London that he was a war hero. What’s more, he convinced them—and investors there—that an Indigenous ruler in Central America had granted him an eight-million-acre tract of land along the region’s Mosquito Coast and had appointed him cacique, or prince, to govern and develop the country. To corroborate his story, MacGregor presented an array of official-looking documents, land grants, maps, and a flag.

Thus, MacGregor’s success story was not confined to the new country’s parameters. After hearing of his achievements and status abroad, members of the English aristocracy did not hesitate to induct MacGregor into society. Not only did he receive the use of a country estate while visiting England, but Poyais gained credibility as a country.

What was the point of MacGregor’s fake country? Although it may have been an ego booster for him to introduce himself as its prince, he had more at stake than the title and its attendant rewards.

The answer is simple: money. Armed with two loans of £200,000 each—obtained through two bond issues on the London market, the first granted in October 1822 and the second in October 1823—MacGregor could advertise to prospective settlers lots as large as 540 acres, which could be divided into smaller lots for extremely low prices, potentially gaining him hundreds of thousands in profits.

Having reached what was supposed to be the main port of Poyais in 1822 and 1823, the would-be settlers attempted to construct makeshift shelters on the shore as they awaited help. But before a rescue ship from an British colony in what is now Belize arrived, almost three-quarters of the group had succumbed to malnutrition or tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.

Despite the many lives and hundreds of thousands of pounds lost through his scheme, MacGregor was never quite brought to justice. Still under his spell, a number of people, including even some of the surviving colonists, pointed their fingers at the organizers and leaders of the voyages rather than blaming MacGregor. The possibility that he had lied about his title and country seemed inconceivable. Taking advantage of Britain’s hesitation to prosecute him, MacGregor fled to France in 1823.

Once a con man, always a con man: even after the failure of the Poyais venture, MacGregor never really learned his lesson. In France he traced the same footsteps he had made in England: forging documents, obtaining bank loans, and raising a new crop of settlers to people Poyais. Despite enduring a brief period of suspicion, during which the French government jailed but eventually acquitted him, MacGregor continued to make money by promoting Poyais until the late 1830s, when he retired the scheme. By then he had been welcomed back to Venezuela with a pension for his military service there, allowing him to live out the rest of his days as the prince of Poyais.