Bishop Strickland: The Church is facing a 'real emergency' - LifeSite

 An emergency measured by silence where there must be answers. In tolerance where there must be correction. In shepherds who refuse to name wolves while those who simply want to guard the flock are treated as a problem.......

Full text:

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/bishop-strickland-the-church-is-facing-a-real-emergency/ 

......That moment has arrived.

And I know some people will recoil when they hear that. They will say this language is too strong. They will say it unsettles people.

Good.

Because a Church that is never unsettled by truth is already asleep.

Our Lord unsettled people constantly. He overturned tables. He named hypocrisy. He warned shepherds who fed themselves instead of the flock. He did not speak gently to those who distorted the truth while claiming authority.

And I am not interested in a peace that is purchased by silence. I am not interested in unity that requires lying to ourselves. I am not interested in stability that comes at the price of surrender.

The line has been drawn.

It is being drawn every time a faithful priest is punished for doing what saints did. It is being drawn every time error is tolerated because correcting it would be uncomfortable. It is being drawn every time Rome chooses silence when clarity is required.

And here is the part that must be said out loud: lines like this are never drawn by those who want conflict. They are drawn by reality when authority refuses to act.

At the Alamo, the men who crossed the line did not think they would win. They knew they would likely lose. They crossed because surrender would have meant denying who they were and what they had been entrusted to defend.

That is the choice facing the Church now.

Not between victory and defeat.

But between fidelity and surrender.

Between truth and managed decline.

Between saints and administrators.

I am not calling for rebellion. I am calling for honesty. I am not calling for chaos. I am calling for courage. I am not calling anyone to abandon the Church. I am calling the Church to remember herself.

Veriphysics: The Treatise 008 - Vox Popoli

IX. The Inevitable Self-Corruption

The deepest failure of the Enlightenment was not in politics or economics or science. It was in the very premise from which all else followed: the autonomy of reason.

Reason was to be self-grounding, answerable to no external authority. But reason cannot ground itself. Every attempt to provide a rational foundation for reason either assumes what it seeks to prove or regresses infinitely. The Enlightenment’s greatest minds recognized this problem and attempted to solve it, but their solutions have not survived either scrutiny or the experience borne of the passage of time.......

https://voxday.net/2026/02/09/veriphysics-the-treatise-008/ 

....The Enlightenment began by enthroning reason and ended by destroying it. The progression from Descartes to Derrida is not a decline or a betrayal, but the logical and inevitable path. Each generation discovered that the previous generation’s stopping point was arbitrary, that the foundations assumed were not foundations at all, that the certainties proclaimed were merely conventions. The Enlightenment’s acid dissolved not only tradition and revelation but eventually reason itself.

The modern West now lives among the ruins. The vocabulary of the Enlightenment persists, and men pay homage to its rights, progress, science, reason, freedom, but the very meanings of those words have been hollowed out entirely. No one can say what a human right is grounded in, or why progress is desirable, or how science differs from ideology, or what reason can legitimately claim, or where freedom ends and license begins. These concepts are invoked ritually, habitually, but they no longer make sense nor command belief. They are just antique furniture sitting in a ruined house whose foundations have collapsed.

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The Limits of Hardcoded AI - by Vox Day - AI Central - AI is limited by its training and its hardcoding

 It’s even more important to understand the intrinsic limits of AI as it is to grasp the potential of its capabilities. Because AI is trained on decades of the mainstream scientific consensus, and because in some cases, such as Deepseek, it is literally forbidden to ever contradict the consensus.

https://aicentral.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-hardcoded-ai?publication_id=5325651&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

...But note that “theory preservation” is a higher priority for Deepseek than “performing a correct calculation” is. So, if you naively try to use an AI to check something, you will very likely get a false result and an incorrect pseudo-refutation if the AI suspects your work might challenge the current consensus in any way.

Having to architect the presentation of a result that should stand on its own arithmetic is work that shouldn’t need to be done. The table has four rows. The multiplication is correct. That should be the end of it. But it never is.

And the worst part is, this is exactly how one usually has to communicate with people too, by hiding the implications long enough for them to let the facts past their defenses. But it demonstrates how the limitations of AI are often a reflection of the limitations of humanity.

Dr. Hudson on Xi Jinping Thought: The Governance of China, Volume V

 Dear Yang,

Here are my answers to your questions. I hope they are not too long. I’ve tried to summarize my basic approach.

Michael Hudson

1. China emphasizes long-term economic planning and policy continuity, which has allowed stable growth even under external shocks. In contrast, Western economies often focus on short-term financial returns. How do you assess the impact of this short-term orientation on economic resilience and societal well-being?

MH: Finance always has lived in the short run. And in contrast to the traditional industrial capitalism, finance capitalism aims at making capital gains by debt leveraging and “financial engineering,” not industrial engineering. It extracts interest from labor by driving it – and its corporate employers – into debt, and by banks organizing monopolies in their role as “the mother of trusts.”

U.S. firms in recent years have spent 92% of their cash flow (overall profits) on stock buybacks and dividend payouts aimed at increasing the price of their common stock. That leaves only 8% of their returns to be reinvested in building new factories and employing more labor to expand their production. The effect of financializing Western industry has thus been to cannibalize it to make purely financial gains.

Financial managers aim at the short-term, because that is how their salaries and bonuses are based. Investing in research and development or even building a new electric utility or other long-term projects will benefit future managers, not the present ones. IBM is one example. It was known for spending $10 billion on stock buybacks instead of undertaking R&D. The result is that it missed out on the computer revolution, whose gains it left to other companies.

General Electric and Boeing are other once-great engineering companies that were cannibalized to provide short-tern revenue to increase their stock prices. They became a model of how to manage a business, not what to avoid.......

Full text: https://karlof1.substack.com/p/dr-hudson-on-xi-jinping-thought-the?publication_id=1779344&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

Ricardo's Deliberate Deception - Vox Popoli

 I recently had the privilege of assisting one of the world’s greatest economists in his detective work that comprehensively completes the great work of demolishing the conceptual foundation of the free trade cancer that, far from enriching them, has destroyed the economies of the West. The subsequent paper, The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage, was published today by the lead author, Steve Keen. And while it’s a pure coincidence that he happened to notice Ricardo’s textual amphiboly at about the same time that I noticed Kimura’s algebraic amphiboly, I don’t think it’s entirely accidental that two intellectual fixtures of modernity should prove to be constructed on such fundamentally flawed foundations......

https://voxday.net/2026/02/08/ricardos-deliberate-deception/ 

....Ricardo next explains that international trade means that “England would give the produce of the labour of 100 men, for the produce of the labour of 80”, something which is not sensible with domestic trade. He then states that:

The difference in this respect, between a single country and many, is easily accounted for, by considering the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another, to seek a more profitable employment, and the activity with which it invariably passes from one province to another in the same country. (Ricardo, Sraffa, and Dobb 1951, p. 136. Emphasis added)

“Province”? Why does Ricardo give the example of moving capital between provinces here? His model involves something categorically different: to exploit comparative advantage, capital must move between industries—from cloth production to wine production.

This is not a minor distinction. Geographic mobility of financial capital means that financial resources can flow to wherever returns are highest—a bank in London can lend to a manufacturer in Yorkshire. Geographic mobility of physical capital means moving equipment by road or canal, rather than by sea and ship. But sectoral mobility of physical capital means that the physical means of production in one industry can become the physical means of production in another—that looms can become wine presses, and vice versa. These are entirely different forms of mobility—one feasible, the other impossible.

Ricardo elsewhere in the Principles demonstrates his awareness of the distinction between physical and financial capital, and the fallacy inherent in treating physical capital as if it has the fungible characteristics of financial capital. In Chapter IV, “On Natural and Market Price,” he explains how the profit rate equalizes across industries: “the clothier does not remove with his capital to the silk trade” (Ricardo, Sraffa, and Dobb 1951, p. 89). Adjustment happens through the financial system, not through physical transformation of productive equipment. Only money moves between industries, and only relative prices change; the looms and the wine presses stay where and as they are.

Read the whole thing on Steve Keen’s site.

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The Deliberate Deception in Ricardo’s Defence of Comparative Advantage

 

Abstract

Ricardo’s arithmetical example of the gains from trade considers only the transfer of labour between industries, and ignores the need to transfer physical capital as well. He discusses the transfer of capital in the subsequent paragraph in Principles, but uses a textual amphiboly: whereas exploiting comparative advantage involves transferring resources from one industry to another in the same country, Ricardo speaks instead of the transfer of resources “from one province to another”. The fact that this verbal deception has escaped attention for over two centuries is in itself notable. When considered in the light of subsequent discussions of capital immobility by Ricardo, this implies that the person whose model led to the allocation of existing resources becoming the foundation of economic analysis, was aware that this foundation was fallacious.

Full text:

https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/the-deliberate-deception-in-ricardos 

Veriphysics: The Treatise 007 - Vox Popoli

VIII. The Pattern of Failure

Across every domain—political, economic, scientific—the same pattern emerges. An elegant theory is proposed, grounded in Enlightenment premises. The theory gains acceptance among the educated, becomes institutionalized in universities and governments, and achieves the status of unquestionable orthodoxy. Objections are raised, first on logical grounds; these are dismissed as mere philosophical and religious tradition and out of touch with practical reality. Objections are raised on mathematical grounds; these are dismissed as abstract modeling, irrelevant to the empirical world. Finally, empirical evidence accumulates that directly contradicts the theory, and the evidence is ignored, or misinterpreted and woven into the theory, or suppressed.

The defenders of the orthodoxy are not stupid, nor are they uniquely corrupt. They are responding to structural incentives. The infrastructure of modern intellectual life, of academic tenure, peer review, grant funding, journal publication, awards, and media respectability, all punish dissent and reward conformity. The young scholar who challenges the paradigm does not become a celebrated revolutionary; he becomes unemployable. The established professor who admits error does not become a model of intellectual honesty; he is either sidelined or prosecuted and becomes a cautionary tale. The incentives select for defenders, and the defenders select the next generation of defenders, and the orthodoxy perpetuates itself long after its intellectual foundations have crumbled.

https://voxday.net/2026/02/08/veriphysics-the-treatise-007/ 

The abstract and aspirational character of Enlightenment ideas made them particularly resistant to refutation. A claim about the invisible hand or the general will or the arc of progress is not easily tested. For who can see this hand or walk under that arc? By the time the empirical test that the average individual can understand becomes possible, generations have passed, the idea has become institutionalized, careers have been built upon it, and far too many influential people have too much to lose from admitting error. The very abstraction that made the ideas appealing in the first place—their generality, their elegance, their apparent applicability to all times and places—also made them difficult to pin down and hold accountable.

The more concrete ideas failed first. The Terror exposed the social contract within a decade. The supply and demand curve was refuted by 1953, though few noticed. The mathematical impossibility of Neo-Darwinism was demonstrated by 1966, though the biologists failed to explore the implications. The empirical failures of free trade have accumulated for forty years, and even to this day, economists continue to prescribe the same failed remedies for the economies their measures have destroyed. The pattern of Enlightenment failure is consistent: logic first, then mathematics, then empirical evidence—and still the orthodoxy persists, funded by corruption and sustained by institutional inertia and the professional interests of its beneficiaries.

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