As you probably know, I am highly allergic to theology and regard most of it as varying degrees of human philosophy dressed up as Divine revelation. The obvious holes in most dogma are the result of the same sort of amphiboly and ambiguity that render Enlightenment philosophy intrinsically flawed, and assuming one possible interpretation is the only one in obvious contravention of the observable facts. So, in the interest of maintaining the peace with other Christians, I keep my critiques to myself, particularly because I have no answers to replace those flawed dogmas.
If I had to summarize my Christian dogma, I would say that I am of the Glass Darkly School.
That being said, it is not possible to construct a metaphysics, as I am presently doing for the Veriphysics philosophical system, without addressing things like Truth, God, and Logos. So, if these matters are of interest to you, you may wish to peruse the outline that is being assembled at Veriphysics.
I would, however, caution the midwits that in this context, citing historical authorities and dogmas accomplishes nothing. If you wish to offer criticism, it has to be within the system itself; what Tertullian or Aquinas or Voltaire or the Pope said is of zero import for the purposes of this exercise.
What do air power advocates, American tax protestors, religious conservatives, and NATO strategists all have in common? The foolish idea that with just a little external assistance, the people will rise up and overthrow their government:
It’s remarkable that military planners even entertain these ridiculous notions that never, ever, work. The idea has been around since the 1920s when it was first conceived by an Italian general named Giulio Douhet. It will probably not escape your attention that despite having first access to this strategery, Italy has not won any wars since the publication of The Command of the Air in 1921. Nor has ever it worked anywhere from Germany to Vietnam to Gaza.
Contra the air power theory, bombing tends to cause the people to support the regime in charge and turn to it for protection. It doesn’t ever make them want to surrender to the people bombing them or accede to their wishes.
And in preemptive answer to the obvious rebuttal, Russia isn’t bombing civilian targets in Kiev to turn the Ukrainian people against Zelensky and the Kiev regime. It’s a) payback for Ukraine’s attacks on civilians and b) a warning to the Kiev regime’s NATO supporters.
The "climate project," while foremost a transfer of power, is also a transfer of wealth—from ordinary consumers and taxpayers toward governments, corporations, financiers and the political class.
Almost everyone in the journalistic world is still trying to wrap their heads around the Jason Arday debacle. Meanwhile, much of the media—including Fox News, the BBC, The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Atlantic, The Daily Mail, and others—has seized the opportunity to weigh in with its own brand of “analysis” on the situation. The issue is not that these outlets should refrain from reporting on it. The more fundamental problem is the striking inconsistency with which many of them approach similar controversies when a Jewish figure is involved. In such cases, the same outlets often appear to treat the matter with considerably less enthusiasm, scrutiny, or attention.
Let’s take this slowly. We’ll begin with the troubling case of what happened to Norman Finkelstein after he demonstrated that Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarized material and promoted what Finkelstein characterized as fabrications and fraudulent claims in books such as The Case for Israel. But before turning to the Dershowitz controversy, it is worth examining the academic fraud of Joan Peters (born Joan Friedman), who died in 2015 and whose work was admired by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Joan Peters, Plagiarism and the Fabrication of History
Norman Finkelstein’s break with the prevailing academic group-think—particularly on Israel and, later, what he calls the “Holocaust industry”—began during his doctoral studies, when he first encountered Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. The book had been endorsed by prominent Jewish writers and historians, including Saul Bellow, Barbara Tuchman, Daniel Pipes, and Lucy Dawidowicz.[1] Dawidowicz herself praised Peters for having “dug beneath a half-century’s accumulation of propaganda” and brought “into the light the historical truth about the Middle East.”[2]
Finkelstein subjected Peters’s claims to close scrutiny and examined the serious historical documentation underlying her citations. His findings were startling. As he later wrote, “It quickly became obvious that Joan Peters had concocted—and, more revealingly, that the American intellectual establishment had lent its name to—a threadbare hoax. As it happened, documenting the fraud…proved by far the easiest task as compared to publicizing my findings.”[3] Later Finkelstein noted that the book
“is among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict. In a field littered with crass propaganda, forgeries, and fakes, this is no mean distinction. But Peters’s book has thoroughly earned it. The fraud in Peters’s book is so pervasive and systematic that it is hard to pluck out a single thread without getting entangled in the whole unraveling fabric. To begin with, the fraud falls into two categories. First, the evidence that Peters adduces to document massive Arab immigration into Palestine is almost entirely falsified. Second, the conclusions that Peters draws from her demographic study of Palestine’s indigenous Arab population are not borne out by the data she presents. To confound the reader further, Peters resorts to plagiarism.”[4]
Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act.
Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!
Among its various provisions, part of the legislation authorized the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. Seems like a nice idea in principle… but in practice it’s been a disaster.
The Congressional Budget Office released the results late last month: the Medicare drug provisions that were supposed to generate $129 billion in savings will now add $700 billion to the deficit.
The wicked love to tell you what they do. Prepare yourselves and your organizations accordingly. In this case, a proud SJW boasts about how her evil niece successfully infiltrated and subverted a company called ULINE.
The annex doesn’t sort attacks by sect, but it doesn’t need to. The identity of the top perpetrator groups tells the story on its own. Year after year across 2004–2023, the most active and lethal groups are Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda and its affiliates, al-Shabaab, the TTP. On the order of nine in ten attacks in the reporting trace back to Sunni extremist actors operating out of the Salafi-jihadist tradition. None of them answer to Tehran. Most regard Shia Muslims — Iran very much included — as heretics, and target them accordingly. ISIS has spent years at open war with Iran and its allies.
A separate French dataset, compiled by FONDAPOL over a longer 1979–April 2024 window, lands in the same place. The five deadliest Islamist groups over that period account for better than 80 percent of all victims of Islamist terrorism — and every one of the five is Sunni: the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, and al-Qaeda.
Where are the Iran-linked groups in all this? Largely absent from the top of the tables. Hezbollah and the Iran-aligned militias tend not to appear, in part because their operations are directed mainly at military forces rather than civilians, which places them outside the working definition of terrorism the reports use. The Houthis are the main Shia-linked group to surface in recent editions, and only as a small share of the total.
Tamiflu, if you get influenza, right? That dog**** was run as a "front line, ought to do it" treatment for the last 20 years.
Uh, you better read this. The trial was halted in critically-ill patients because the treatment arm led to MORE deaths rather than fewer ones. It didn't just "not work", it actually had negative results with the primary negative result being very objective: The person DIED.
That's right -- at best it was ineffective (the CI did cross 1, so it might be, although it just barely touched 1) and the excursion on the other side was extreme.
This was a randomized trial, had a decent sample size and a well-defined and objective (you're dead!) end-point.
It wasn't close either; the odds of the treatment being harmful were close to 98% and the difference in death rates from all causes was roughly 40% higher.
The safety monitoring board responsible for medical ethics stopped the trial when this pattern emerged. Note that this obviously was always the case but gee, wasn't this all the rage when on-patent and thus extremely expensive, yet said to be "front and center" in reducing risk if you got the flu. Now we find out, TWO DECADES LATER, that it kills instead of helps.
A good friend here in Dallas who was highly supportive of my dissident work during the COVID-19 pandemic disagrees with my criticism of President Trump for starting and continuing the war on Iran.
I am not troubled that we disagree about this subject, and I am confident that our friendship will be just fine. However, our disagreement prompted me to ponder the impasse between those who oppose foreign wars and those who support them.
War—that is, the business of killing people and destroying their property and exposing one’s own people and property to the risk of being killed and destroyed—has long been a divisive subject among the philosophically inclined.
I say for the philosophically inclined, because it seems that most people are easily swayed by war propaganda to support war. Because only 0.4% of the American population serves in the active duty military, most Americans perceive themselves to be very far (and safe) from the business of waging war. Their minds therefore have free rein to imagine this business however they wish to imagine it.
I am confident that most people would instantly reevaluate their advocacy of foreign wars if they and their children were obliged to participate in fighting them. As General William Tecumseh Sherman put it:
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation.
The burning of Atlanta, Nov. 1864
I regard friends, associates, and readers as being entirely free to support America’s foreign wars. However, by the same token, I declare my individual freedom of conscience—enshrined by the First Amendment and recognized by the Supreme Court as a core principle of the Free Speech Clause—to criticize these wars.
I did not arrive at my posture of staunchly opposing foreign wars lightly. My position is the result of decades of studying military history and analyzing the costs and results of America’s foreign wars since 1945.
I also believe that the burden of proof for justifying foreign wars is not on those who oppose them, but on those who advocate them.
War propaganda grossly oversimplifies the causes of conflict and reduces the adversary to a comic book bad guy, dehumanizing him and totally disregarding the historical events and circumstances that produced his feelings of enmity.
I often receive scolding emails from people who know nothing about Iran, its people, or its history apart from things they have heard from American and Israeli propagandists. Many of these people call themselves “conservatives” and have frequently expressed disgust at the decadence and immorality of popular American culture and the dishonesty of the US government, especially during the COVID-19.
On the other hand, people like me who oppose the US government’s foreign wars can draw on a long moral and legal tradition on which the US Republic was founded. This tradition regards war as an extreme measure—one to be undertaken only after every reasonable avenue of peaceful conflict resolution has been exhausted.
History has shown the war rarely results in desirable outcomes, but usually begets more war. As Jefferson put it, “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”
This view is rooted in the Western just war tradition, adapted and institutionalized by the American Founders in both the nation’s founding documents and its constitutional design.
The just war tradition, going back to Augustine and Aquinas, holds that resorting to arms is morally permissible only under strict conditions. Among the most exacting of these is the criterion of last resort: force may be used solely when all other means of resolving conflict—diplomacy, negotiation, arbitration, economic pressure, or legal appeal—have been attempted in good faith.
This moral framework shaped colonial and early republican thought. Puritan writers claimed that the justice of any war must be “notoriously evident,” and Revolutionary leaders framed their cause in just-war terms. The Declaration of Independence follows the logic of last resort: it catalogs a “long train of abuses,” records repeated petitions for redress, and only then concludes that the colonists were compelled “to dissolve the political bands” and take up arms in defense of their rights.
I’ve yet to see a single coherent argument—drawing on our moral and legal traditions—that justifies the US against Iran, which began when the nuclear-armed forces of Israel and the US attacked Iran on the grounds that Iran was seeking to develop a nuclear weapon.
