If anyone has any questions please send them to [email protected] and I will answer those questions on this page and feature your name on the page if you want your name listed.
I intended to do a video to promote the website where I asked people to submit questions and I was going to hire someone to conduct an interview asking the questions that were submitted. Since I have no traffic on the website I posted an ad offering $5 per question submitted. This had a dual purpose in attracting attention where the prospect of earning money could motivate people to review the content on the site, and the questions would help me gauge people’s impressions and the response to those questions would serve the primary promotional purposes.
The ads posted in two different areas did not generate any substantive responses. There were I’m interested responses, and responses requesting more information which I provided but there were no responses that consisted of questions or the appearance that anyone had reviewed the site. I considered it a failed endeavour and forgot about it. Yesterday I received a response. I’m not positioned to do a video right now but thought I would pay the respondent for his effort by choosing 8 questions and writing my responses to those 8 questions.
Question 1: You Focus a lot on liberty and what its importance is, but do you think the general population is confused or ignorant of the difference between what liberty is along with privileges, and rights?
Answer 1: Rights are essentially a social agreement cemented as the basis for law intent on ensuring individual liberty. At least this is what rights are intended to be but instead of serving as the constraints for what is allowable in government action, including the creation of law, and the issuance of decree (executive orders), they are flexible. This flexibility hinges on the interpretation of rights and law, and that interpretation is a product of a political agenda and bias, typically serving underlying industrial interests that transcends party lines.
Privileges are often confused by the general public as rights, or are called rights to promote causes that fail to acknowledge the underlying causes that produce the symptoms. An example is the assertion that health care is right. Healthcare is a service, essentially a privilege in which those who can afford access to healthcare have the privilege of healthcare access. We can decide collectively to provide health care to those who cannot afford it, but that still doesn’t make it a right, because a right is protection from imposition, not a guarantee to have access to a service.
Any cause that is promoted is eventually co-opted by industry and the solutions proposed ride the social justice pretext to serve the interests of industry. Staying with health care the affordable care act is an example of the previous sentence. Public funds were used to subsidize private profits through a voucher system and a mandate. This meant that private citizens were given public funds to purchase private insurance which created profit for the insurance industry. Secondly, individuals of a certain income level were forced to purchase private insurance of pay a fine. The public option was dropped at the behest of lobbyists and wasn’t ever seriously considered for implementation. While insurance companies made between 15 to 20% in profit from premiums collected, the appearance or regulation was incorporated into the bill stating that no more than 20% of premiums could be kept as profit which was consistent with the industry norm. Some people did receive rebates under this provision but it did not meaningfully reduce premium costs.
The right protecting the liberty of a person to choose to purchase a service or not purchase a service was imposed upon first under the pretext that the privilege to healthcare access was a right. Second, based on the pretext that the growing cost of healthcare was due to the uninsured receiving unpaid emergency treatment. This was a pretext because when uninsured people receive treatment they do not pay for, the hospitals write it off on their taxes. Whether the treatment is paid for, or the treatment is applied towards tax liability, it doesn’t require that the cost of treatment go up to pay for those who were treated and did not pay. In the same vein, the ban on importing low cost generic medication was maintained through the bill which is further dismissive of the idea that the part of the motivation for the bill was to ease the burden of health care costs on Americans.
Today we have the Covid 19 hysteria that is being used as a public safety pretext to impose on the rights of people for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry. The judicial basis for a virus to be considered a threat to public safety where the rights of citizens can be imposed upon to protect the public comes from the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts. The supreme court ruled the public has the right to protect itself against infectious disease that imposes on the safety of its members. The plaintiff in this case refused a smallpox vaccine and the court ruled that he could not be forced to take the vaccine but would have to pay the $5 fine.
Smallpox is a virus that is randomly deadly and randomly intense, with about 30% mortality rate, and the potential to leave people permanently harmed. I would consider it a threat to public safety based on those characteristics.
Covid-19 however, is a virus that poses no danger to about 99% of the population, quantifiably. 94% of people who have died from the virus have serious underlying medical conditions with an average of 2.5 medical conditions present among that 94%. The operative word is serious because among those who have underlying medical conditions from a sample I reviewed 94.5% survived. Uros Seljak of Berkeley gave probably the most accurate and concise explanation of the danger of covid -19 stating if you want to know your chances of dying if infected by covid-19, it’s about the same as your chances of dying in the next 12 months of natural causes. Of those who died without medical conditions, less than 6% are people who were extremely advanced in age above 75 years old and primarily those above 85 years old. Out of 667,000 deaths, 13 of those deaths were people under the age of 39 without medical conditions. 94 were people between the ages 40 to 49 with no underlying medical conditions. 1340 were people aged 50 to 64 with no underlying medical conditions.
In consideration of the idea that a person’s chances of dying of the virus are about the same as their chances of dying of natural causes in the next year, along with some anomalous deaths of people who do not fit that criteria the same as flu, what is the threat to public safety? Each year roughly 1.75 million people die of natural causes which represents about half a percent of the total population. A virus that cannot kill 99% of the population should not be considered a threat to public safety, and in a free society each person has the right to manage their own risk, so long as the risk they take does not create risk for others. Those who choose to take precautions to prevent themselves from the discomfort of experiencing sickness and recovery are not at increased risk by other people choosing not to take precautions.
In this instance benefits to industry, beginning with the media and ending with the pharmaceutical industry, the pretext of a virus posing a threat to public safety is being used to impose on the rights of Americans to choose not to be vaccinated. The public has paid for the research and most of the vaccines, and the representatives of industry have issued a decree to sell another 100 million or so vaccines, or fine companies, which forces companies to fire employees who refuse to be vaccinated. Rights are flexible, and the interpretation of the world and those who benefit from that interpretation can use some rights to take away the rights of others for their advantage.
Where are the courts? The courts are the only thing left in this country. Where is the case quantifying as I’ve done in the Covid-19 Media Project that the virus does not qualify as a threat to public safety.
Liberty is static, it is the great measure of what is happening around us. Every action is either imposing, unimposing, or liberating in the prevention or removal of imposition. Every law, every right, has plus or minus net liberty. Liberty is the capacity for individuals to do as they please.
As far as the general public being confused about rights, privileges, and liberty it but a few things that they are confused about. We live in a generation where words have no meaning. There are words like and people dislike, and they apply the words they like to the things they like and they apply the words that are disliked to things they dislike. It doesn’t if what they are calling something fails to meet the definition of the word so long as it is what they and others want it to be.
Question 2: When it comes to politics in general, do you think that the generation gap along with the change in technology contributes to the confusion people have because it’s all very distracting?
Answer 2: Generationally the gap as far as technology is concerned can be reduced to two primary inventions, the cellphone and the internet. What these two inventions have done is facilitate the ease by which a person can reinforce whatever it is they want to think. While a lot is made of the promotion of deception the problem is actually the demand for deception. People want to reinforce what they believe and so there are entities, media, as well as individuals who supply that demand for profit. The problem rests on people’s value of their beliefs and opinions. People believe that truth is arbitrary and as long as something is believed by enough people it is an acceptable truth they can choose.
This is actually a difficult question to answer because the answer can be extremely complex because we’re not just talking about access to information, or information crafted to mold opinions to produce perspectives that are advantageous to a political party, we’re talking about the relationship between individual users and that information. Where what a person views and the expression of opinions is tracked to provide the user with other information and it can be known how that individual will receive different information based on other people who are similar. If you have a group of people who all like 10 different things, this group liking these 10 different things creates a basis for how this group will respond to something. Before a person sees something, based on what is known about what they like, the category they fall into, it’s already known generally how they will respond to something based on how people similar to them will respond to it. Marketing people know these things, and these things are used in politics and have led to many of the popular misconceptions concerning things like race, gender, and sexuality promoted as a source of disadvantage.
I think the cellphone and the internet facilitates the ease by which people can be manipulated but I also think that it’s a two way street because people want their false perceptions to be reinforced.
The reason this question is difficult is because politics in this country is not legitimate to me. Sure technology creates confusion and serves as a distraction, but in the absence of advancements of technology politics in this country has always been a show for the public to create consent for the advancement of business interests. So while modern generations do have fewer critical thinking skills due in part to the ease and the appearance of legitmacy of opinions through the internet instantly accessible through cell phones, I think previous generations have been as confused as the current.
Question 3: The fact that everyone has their own reality tunel based on imprinted belief systems learned through their peers and family, do you think people even think for themselves? Because people seem to repeat the confusion and misinformation that is sold to the collective.
Answer 3: People choose the information that reinforces their beliefs because that reinforcement feels good and preserves the ability of the things that make them feel good to continue to serve as sources of positive stimulation. To think for yourself means that you have an interest in a subject and want to know what’s true about it. People do not want to know what is true if what is true challenges their beliefs. This is because what a person believes serves as the basis for things that cause them to feel good, where discovering something believed to be true is untrue takes away the ability of a great deal of things to make them feel good.
To say people do not think for themselves implies that others think for them. To some extent this is true because people’s interest in subjects isn’t about the subject itself but about the subject appearing a certain way to maintain their perception. At the same time it isn’t completely a product of others thinking for people, it’s a product of people wanting reinforcement of false ideas, and choosing information, or choosing others to think for them in the maintenance of those ideas.
Question 4: If people don’t really think for themselves as a result of the lack of education and the reinforcement of expected behavior by punishment, can this be overcome without it taking a lifetime to wake up to what’s really happening?
Answer 4: First, education itself can be just as much a barrier to understanding the world as a lack of education. In many respects, the bias in educators makes for a more penetrative propaganda. Anything below a doctorate is essentially downloading information that comes through the slant of the professors who are much more skilled in tactfully using omission, limiting context, and bending facts to create the narrative they are trying to create outside of hard sciences.
The only way for a person to overcome their bias is to understand the value of the truth, and the only way to understand the value of the truth is to understand the morality of liberty. It begins with the human constant, that all people want to do what they want to do at all times. In this all people can do as they please so long as each individual’s liberty does not impose on the liberty of others. Circumstances determine opportunities so individual actions in the consent and participation in systems while directly imposing may be indirectly imposing. I go into it in other places. I’m not going to go into it here beyond what it means for self deception.
A person has to understand that self deception imposes on them and imposes on others. It imposes on the person because what a person does depends on what they like, and what they like depends on what they accept as being true. If a person holds onto false beliefs because it feels good, it means they do what they wouldn’t do because they like things they wouldn’t like. Second, it limits intelligence since people cannot learn things that challenge their beliefs. Third, it imposes on others because communication cannot take place when people cannot accept things that are true and challenge their beliefs.
It can be overcome, but it begins with understanding objective morality. This is what is meant by Truth Over Everything, and Liberty is True. It changes the subconscious mechanism that causes people to avoid challenging information. When a person is exposed to information that challenges their beliefs they experience a negative feeling. This negative feeling is imposed because the acknowledgement and acceptance of what they are being exposed can A: harm their self worth, and B: take away the ability of objects that give them pleasure from producing that pleasure.
It can be overcome without taking a lifetime, and I am trying to be a catalyst for this change, but based on my experience thus far I’m not optimistic. Yesterday I recorded an audio blog that I may or may not publish on the website and one of the recorded observations was the following. A biologist may understand everything about a cow and a cows behavior. But this biologist will never be able to get the cow to understand the cow and his behavior. This is how I feel a lot of the time about myself and this species. Essentially it, is self deception, and it can be overcome but it isn’t likely to be overcome.
Question 5: If all politicians are really in bed together yet acting like they are different can we have any faith in any resolve?
Answer 5: I think in bed together is too strong of a description. The difference between political parties essentially comes down to the prioritization of different industrial interests. Both parties serve the interests of nearly all industries, with some industries being exclusive to one party or the other, but there is a different priority in which industries interests will be served through policy depending on which party is in control of congress and the white house.
What politics really is, is like a family, where one party is one parent, and another party is another parent, and the children are the public. The parents don’t want the children to know what they are really doing but they want the children to choose what one wants to do over the other. The parents lie to children and the children choose the lies they like the best, but neither of the lies is true. The parents know the lies the other is telling the children but they cannot expose the other parents lie without exposing their own lie.
In politics, there is a set of lies promoted by each party intended to create consent for policy that actually serves the interests of industry. They battle back and forth through these lies and the public attaches itself to one set or the other. Or in the case of the independents they attach themselves to lies they’ve selected from each party.
No one should have any faith that politicians are concerned with improving the lives of anyone unless that improvement serves an interest of industry. As long as people accept and legitimize the lies through their support of political candidates nothing is going to change. Politics is a show for the public and a forum for industry to democratically decide policy through political investment.
Question 6: Can issues of dominant importance without resolve continue to plague our society, because the issues seem more important than the solution. As soon as a solution comes another issue replaces it. For example gay marriage has faded after the supreme court found it consitutional….so now it’s about transgender…not much different but still something that goes against traditional beliefs. How much of the population even cares?
Answer 6: There is a big difference between tolerance and promotion and I’ve written about this subject in an article in Understanding Political Functions Through Recent Political History. Personally, if a man wants to wear makeup, womens clothes, and adopt feminine mannerisms I don’t have a problem with that. In fact I don’t have a problem with what anyone does so long as what they do does not impose on the liberty of anyone else. I think this is true for most people.
For activists, the problem is much more important than the solution because the solution means an end to the cause. If there is an end to their cause then they must create a new cause or promote it from a new angle to maintain the financial and social benefits they derive from the cause. Most issues, like the promotion of race, gender, or sexuality as a source disadvantage are manufactured issues. They’re manufactured through misinterpretation and misrepresentation of events and proportion and serve the interests of activists, politicians, the media, and industry as a whole.
As far as traditional beliefs I’m not a respecter of traditional beliefs or contemporary beliefs. I am a respecter of beliefs that are true, and of acts that are unimposing, or acts that prevent or remove imposition.
Question 7: It seems everyone except white people can claim something pertaining to being a victim or disadvantaged, does this belief keep them down more than the reality because how can we know whether or not being a victim gives comfortable excuses that supports the identity that means their failure isn’t their fault?
Answer 7: The assertion of disadvantage where there is no disadvantage aids in maintaining the disadvantage of disadvantaged people. Race is not a source of disadvantage, and in nearly every instance where race is asserted as a source of disadvantage there is underlying class causation. Where there is a greater proportion of black people who begin from economically disadvantaged circumstances due to past systemic racism and this economic disadvantage serves as the causation for every racial disparity. In whole numbers, there are more than twice as many white people living in poverty than there are black people living in poverty. The continued assertion that race is a source of disadvantage prevents the realization of class goals, some of which are described in the American Prosperity Proposals that will improve the lives of all people, including disadvantaged black people. This is how the assertion of disadvantages that do not exist maintain actual disadvantages rooted in class.
Question 8…Can they (minorities) understand your books without judging you for being from a different background or race, (where) you don’t have the capacity to understand their hardships.
Answer 8: It won’t prevent them from understanding my books but it will create an excuse to be dismissive of the content and avoid reading it. Unfortunately the disadvantages I’ve faced beginning life born to a 16 year old mother, poor, moving in with my dad at 8 years old who was on AFDC after hurting his back, spending 6 years incarcerated between the ages of 14 to 24, living a criminal lifestyle earning an income from selling drugs until I was about 31, being the victim of questionable practices by police, being alive today when many people I’ve grown up with are dead, some imprisoned for long periods of time, and my exposure to minorities will make it difficult to disqualify me from understanding the hardships based on my background. These are things I discuss in the Racial Perceptions book as well as in a few articles in Understanding Political Functions Through Recent Political History.
Race will be ineffectively used as a tool to be dismissive of data and insights.