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Jan. 25, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:08
69 Emails of the Week - Jan 25, 2006
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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
I'm podcasting from work during my lunch break.
It is Wednesday, January the 25th 2006 1238 p.m.
25th, 2006, 12.38pm.
So it's time for emails of the week.
So thanks to everyone who wrote in, of course, and I appreciate every piece of correction and question.
It stimulates lots of great discussion, at least in my head, which I occasionally spill over into my podcast.
So this is, and again, if you do send me an email, unless you actually tell me that I can use your name, I will call you funny names.
So, this gentleman named Spam Hammer sent me an email which says, Steph, while I'm working my way through all your past shows as fast as I can, to which I can only reply, hey, you know, if you can catch up to the rate at which I crank these things out like cans of tuna, I appreciate it, they really are the best on the net.
I am about 20 years older than you, and you are making a distinct change in my thinking, even though I have considered myself a libertarian for the past Twenty years or so.
Your shows are most entertaining and informative, and I look forward to each one.
Well, that's very kind.
Thank you so much.
A couple of picky notes, however.
I'm pretty sure it was the main that was blown up in Havana Harbor to start the Spanish-American War.
Absolutely correct.
Double-checked it.
Thank you so much for the correction.
I can't remember what I called it, but I'm fairly sure it wasn't the main.
One does not normally flaunt the law.
It's flouted.
And I think that's true.
Actually, what I meant to say was I flirted with the law because, you know, my fetish around women in cop uniforms.
Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that right now.
But thank you very much.
Flaunt the law.
Absolutely true.
There are many conspiracy theories around, and I agree with you on all the phony reasons that were given to the American public as reasons for going to war, save one.
Putting aside for the moment as to whether we should have hit Afghanistan after 9-11, I do believe Lazy media?
Yeah, but who isn't?
In this day and age, I think it's almost impossible for the government to keep a secret.
Lazy media?
Yeah, but who isn't?
In this day and age, I think it's almost impossible for the government to keep a secret.
And there are plenty of journalists out there who would like nothing better than to make a name for themselves by breaking the big story.
Maybe it was not an accident that the movie of the week last week was Enemy of the State.
So now that our freedoms are being taken away at an increasing rate, what do you intend to do?
Me?
I am learning Spanish.
Excellent, excellent comment.
Now I certainly, of course, have no firm or fixed opinion on what happened on 9-11.
I've mentioned some of these anomalies before, which are out there.
I'll sort of mention them now just to talk about the debate that we're having.
It's not really a debate, but the sort of differences of opinion that we're having about What may or may not have happened on 9-11, and the reason that I don't have any strong opinions about it is it's neither possible to deduce what happened logically, nor is it possible to reconstruct the events, and all the evidence has either been destroyed or is out of reach of anyone who could have any interest in sharing it.
So here is some from a website called 911research.wtc.net.
I'll just read a couple of these, not all of them, but here are some of the The highlights of anomalies of the September 11th attack.
So for those who are interested in pursuing it further, it's well worth having a look at.
Again, I don't think it's a very important issue, other than, of course, for the survivors of those who were murdered that day, because they have to try and find some justice for those who were killed.
But for those of us who were in the movement, I mean, my sympathies obviously go out to these people with, you know, enormous and heartfelt sentiments.
But for the rest of us in the movement towards trying to get a free society, focusing on 9-11 I don't think is productive at all.
I think it's counterproductive because we can't prove anything and it's too strange for people to hear about and it's not something that they can participate in as a debate because it requires a lot of technical knowledge.
So I say focus on the argument for morality and focus on getting people to deal with state power that's a little closer to their home and a little more provable like, you know, taxation and regulation and so on.
So, with apologies to those who have run the website, and I hope you don't mind me reading a little bit of it, here are some of the anomalies of the September 11th attack.
So, on the run-up to the attack, put options were where stock trades were bet on the fall in share values for the two airlines whose planes were used in the attack.
So the put options purchases on UA and American Airlines stock rose to six times normal levels in the days preceding the attack.
Well, I mean, that of course would be entirely consistent with, you know, somebody knew that there was an attack going on and so on.
Avoidance of the airlines at the World Trade Center of the Pentagon.
Government officials and executives avoided the targets of the attack.
Pentagon officials cancelled travel plans on September 10th.
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was told not to fly on September 11th.
Salman Rushdie apparently was prohibited by Scotland Yard from flying on September 11th.
Two employees of Odigo, the instant messaging service, received email warnings of the attack two hours before the first assault.
Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, cancelled plans to address Israeli groups in New York City on September 11th.
In the hijacking scenario, there's lots of things that you could say are somewhat anomalous, I guess you could say.
So, in the attack plan, by flying from remote airports and going far out of their way, the attack planners did expose their plan to almost certain ruin, had the air defense system operated normally.
The originating airport for flights 11 and 175 was Boston Logan instead of any of the several airports near New York City.
This created about 40 minutes of exposure to interception for each flight.
Right, so as you may or may not know, you know, anytime an aircraft goes off course, the air defense system is supposed to leap into action and you're supposed to send up planes to track it and so on.
And none of that happened, of course, on 9-11.
Flight 77 flew to the Midwest before turning around to return to Washington DC.
It was airborne an hour and 23 minutes before allegedly attacking the Pentagon.
That would provide ample opportunity for interception, even if the air defense system were 95% disabled.
Flight 93 flew to the Midwest before turning around to fly towards Washington.
Had it reached the capital, it would have been airborne over an hour and a half.
The odds of escaping interception with that plan would be infinitesimal under standard operating procedures.
Right?
So I'm sure you get what this means.
They're saying that If you had a plan, you would have to take into account the fact that the air defense system within the U.S.
would leap up and sort of shoot you down or force you down.
And so, given that they were in the air this long, they must have had some... I mean, this is the theory, right?
That they would have had some knowledge ahead of time that the air defense system was going to be disabled or not activated.
The behavior of the villains, the behavior of the alleged hijackers, is kind of inconsistent with the skill and discipline for this kind of attack.
So, Muhammad Atta allegedly barely caught Flight 11, which was sort of a key flight in the event that he was supposedly planning for years.
The alleged hijackers partied at Topless Bars and drank alcohol, despite being portrayed as fundamentalist Muslims.
That's, I mean, I don't find that particularly compelling.
I mean, the Saudi princes are fundamentalist Muslims, supposedly, and, you know, they go and, you know, have their yachts and prostitutes and all of that.
And, of course, the hijackers are expecting, if this is the case, right, that they're going to fly, float straight into heaven.
After the attack, so they can, you know, sin all they want, I guess you could say.
So, there's no hard evidence that any of the alleged hijackers were on any of the doomed flights, and substantial evidence that some weren't involved.
There's no video of any of the 19 hijackers at any of the three originating airports of the four flights.
None of it has been made public, except for a video allegedly showing hijackers of Flight 77.
None of the alleged hijackers' names have appeared on the airline's passenger list.
At least six of the alleged hijackers have turned up alive since the attack, and of course that seems rather compelling to me.
None of the four flight crews radioed air traffic control about hijackings in process.
None of the four flight crews punched in the four-digit hijacking code.
No public evidence indicates that the remains of any of the hijackers was identified at any of the crash sites.
None of the contents of any of the black boxes have been made public.
The only four and a half minutes of phone call from Flight 11 attendant Betty Ong, made public, describes a stabbing but does not provide any details indicating that Arab hijackers were on board.
The success with which hijackers allegedly took over four jets with knives and then piloted the jets to small targets is simply miraculous.
None of the four flight crews were able to stop the alleged hijackers in spite of several of the pilots being Vietnam veterans.
None of the alleged hijackers were good pilots, yet the three buildings were hit with phenomenal precision.
So that's sort of what they say in terms of the odds, right?
There's no proof there, but the odds and, of course, the people who were accused of being hijackers have, to my knowledge, to my understanding, turned up alive.
And that, of course, does leave some fairly significant holes in the theory.
So, lack of military response.
This is fairly significant, of course, because there's an air force defense system in the U.S.
that's supposed to be very quickly Getting planes up to intercept air and domestic flights.
The intercept times are supposed to be between 10 and 20 minutes historically.
However, the airlines commandeered on 9-11 roamed the skies for about an hour without interference.
So, there were failures to report.
According to NORAD's timetable, the FAA reported errant airliners after inexplicable delays.
The FAA took 18 minutes to report Flight 11's loss of communication and deviation from its flight plan.
It took almost 40 minutes to report Flight 77's deviation from its flight plan.
Failures to scramble.
The interceptors were only scrambled from distant bases after long delays.
Despite the fact that flights 11 and 75 were headed for New York City, no interceptors were scrambled from nearby LaGuardia or from Langley, Virginia.
Despite NORADs having received formal notification of the first hijacking at 8.38, no interceptors were scrambled from Andrews to protect the nearby Pentagon until after it was hit at 9.37.
So you have an hour.
Where they don't even bother scrambling any planes, despite the fact that they know there are a bunch of hijacked planes in the air, or they're supposed to know this, which are not in a good... it's not a good situation, right?
And of course, once in the air, the fighters flew at only a tiny fraction of their top speed, which sort of assured that they would fail to intercept the airliners, right?
So you had two F-15s scrambled from Otis AFB.
They chased Flight 11.
They were only going 450 miles an hour, which is like a quarter of their top speed.
The two F-16s from Langley flew even slower at 410 miles an hour, which is just a little over 25% of their top speed.
Nearby fighters on routine patrol duty were not redeployed to intercept the airlines, nor were fighters that belatedly reached Manhattan sent to defend the capital.
So that's sort of important too, right?
So you even have fighters up in the air that weren't redeployed, and the fighters that were sent to intercept the airlines flew very slowly and from distant bases and so on.
Again, all of this is anomalous and can be speculated about, but of course without any hard proof it does remain just speculation.
So the building collapse is of course a very central part of the controversy around 9-11.
This is building 7, right?
The building was never hit by an aircraft and it sort of imploded late on the day of 9-11.
It experienced total collapse, just supposedly because of fires, but of course no steel-framed building before or since has ever collapsed, even partially due to fires.
It was an over-engineered, 47-story steel-framed skyscraper, standing over 350 feet from the nearest Twin Tower.
Only small fires burned on September 11th, and then it collapsed in a nearly perfectly vertical fall, leaving the buildings only 60 feet on either side, virtually unscathed.
It collapsed into a tiny little pile of mostly pulverized remains, and of course no steel frame building has ever pulverized itself to that degree.
It contained a $23 million emergency command center, but of course you'd think that when 9-11 was going on that would be a good place to use as an emergency command center, but Giuliani evacuated his team to a makeshift command center as soon as the September 11th attacks started.
The emergency command center was destroyed along with the rest of the building, even though it was constructed as a bomb-hardened shelter, right?
So a building collapse shouldn't destroy the command center.
The remains of Building 7 were rapidly removed and the steel was recycled with no on-site examination.
That's not particularly sensible, right?
I mean, you want to try and examine and find out the The reasons why a building collapsed, right?
I mean, you don't want to just destroy all the evidence and then nobody can sort of figure out what happened.
Now, the Twin Towers exploded into dust and shattered steel, kind of inconsistent with the known behavior of steel structures outside of an explosive demolition, right?
You can blow up a building and have it collapse sort of perfectly in the way the Twin Towers did, But, you know, that's not just sort of the melting of the steel structure and so on.
The South Tower was struck 17 minutes after the North Tower, and in a less damaging manner, and it had less severe fires, but it collapsed almost half an hour before the North Tower.
The South Tower's core structure was largely undamaged by the off-center jet impact, unlike the North Tower, yet it did collapse sooner.
The firefighters reached the crash zone of the South Tower, and sort of the radio transmissions they calmly described controllable fires.
Both towers started to disintegrate at regions above and below the crash zones in the first seconds of their falls.
Both towers, of course, fell straight down through themselves following the path of maximum resistance, a behavior never before observed in the spontaneous collapse of any type of vertical structure.
It would sort of lean to one side or another, that would sort of make sense.
The collapses of both towers exhibited features never otherwise seen except in controlled demolition.
So you had sudden onset accompanied by thunderous bangs, visible explosions ringing the perimeters, energetic ejections of dust at regular intervals, and of course copious production of dust.
Both towers exploded outward and were shredded and pulverized, a pattern of destruction much more destructive than normal controlled demolitions, yet this result was supposedly produced without the added energy of explosives.
So, I mean, there's lots of things to ponder over there.
And, you know, the theory also is that the heat of the fires in the building never reached the temperature at which steel would melt.
And you can't do that with jet fuel, no matter how you try and stoke it.
The Pentagon attack is very strange, of course, and there's lots of anomalies there as well.
I mean, the Pentagon, which is like the heart of the military establishment, was hit after ample warning, without being protected by any defensive action.
The 937 strike on the Pentagon was well over an hour after the first signs of a hijacking, and 34 minutes after the South Tower strike confirmed that an attack was underway.
The Pentagon is within 11 miles of the Andrews Air Force Base, which apparently had two combat-ready fighter wings, not fighter planes, fighter wings, on 9-11.
The attack plane was monitored on radar as it approached the capital.
Now this pilot, Hany Hanjour, I think his name is, This is the Flight 77 pilot.
I mean, if you look at any of the video or the tracks of how he was supposed to go into the plane, it does look a little miraculous, right?
The spiral dive that he used to approach the Pentagon is such an extreme maneuver that experienced air traffic controllers thought it was a military jet.
The treetop final approach skimmed objects in the yard and crashed the plane into the first floor of the building.
Experienced pilots have wondered if any human pilot could have executed this A maneuver this is a guy who was considered incompetent by his flight school instructors and was denied rental of a single-engine plane and here he's got, you know, this incredible corkscrew 270-degree switch maneuver with, you know, a 400-foot commercial airliner.
It doesn't seem too likely.
The evidence vacuum in the Pentagon is pretty significant.
Video recordings from adjacent businesses are seized by the FBI shortly after the attack, never been seen since.
Only five frames of video have been released by this Pentagon and then only as an unofficial leak.
From all the security cameras that monitor its periphery, these frames do show signs of forgery.
Investigators were not allowed access to the crash site until well into October.
And, you know, you can see the line of people clearing up the crash site and so on, which, you know, seems a little odd.
You'd want to find out as much as possible about what happened in the crash.
A photographed scrap of aircraft debris that has markings similar to an American Airlines 757 flight corresponds to the forward portion of the starboard right side of the plane, yet the scrap was far to the left of the plane's path.
Eyewitnesses reported the smell of cordite, which is an explosive, I guess.
Several eyewitnesses reported that the jetliner exploded before reaching the facade of the Pentagon, and you can see this in the 9-11 shots as well, like into the Twin Towers, that there's a flash that occurs, which is conceivably an igniting flash, to ensure that the explosions happen.
An igniting flash occurs on the noses of the planes before they go into the towers.
So, there's lots of... just sort of briefly to go over.
The death toll is very low, right?
I mean, you had 16% occupancy up to 47% occupancy.
The World Trade Center, I mean, if you wanted to, you know, get the World Trade Center badly, You would attack it after people had arrived, after 9, 9.30, and you would try and hit it as low as possible, so that you trap as many people up above.
They had half the occupancy at that point, so that didn't really make as much sense.
There's a building, the Pentagon has 20,000 people in its building, and 125 people were killed.
It's a tiny, tiny percentage.
The portion of the Pentagon that was attacked, the West Block, was in the process of being renovated, so almost nobody was there.
And, of course, no high-level Pentagon officials were killed in the attack.
The war games that were going on... I mean, there were several war game exercises being conducted on 9-11.
There was this Operation Northern Vigilance.
It reployed all the Northeastern sector air defense resources to Northern Canada and Alaska.
Operations Vigilant Warrior and Vigilant Guardian, which simulated hijackings and involved live radar, quote, injects, may have confused military and civilian personnel monitoring aircraft.
The National Reconnaissance Office, which monitors satellites and airborne objects, was evacuated while the attack unfolded because it was conducting a plane-into-tower crash drill.
So this is all kind of significant, right?
That you've got all these exercises and so on go on, which is naturally confusing, right?
If you have radar injects where you're injecting a false radar blip into a system to track response times, it's going to be very confusing if something actually does go on, right?
So, rules change.
There's something interesting that happened, too.
In June 1st, 2001, there was an order that was stripped commanders in the field of autonomy in responding to hijacking, so it had to go to the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy.
The FAA banned firearm possession by commercial pilots two months before the attack.
Again, it's all coincidence, but you know, it adds up to an interesting question, an interesting set of questions.
So the government response, you know, this is sort of, I think, kind of interesting around when you look at something like this, this incredible, you know, it's the worst failure in history of the military to protect American civilians.
Like no consequences, no honest investigations, right?
So no one is held to account for the numerous and unprecedented failures in air defense.
General Myers confirmed as chairman on September the 13th in spite of being unable to provide any meaningful answers to questions regarding the air defense failures.
General Richard Eberhardt, commander of NORAD, was promoted to head the newly created NORTHCOM.
NORAD's press release contradicted early statements by high-ranking officials that no interceptors had been scrambled on 9-11.
NORAD's vague timeline raises far more questions than it answers, but officials have never been required to give a full account.
The building collapse inquiry.
I mean, the total collapse of World Trade Center 1 and 2 and the Building 7 is the three largest engineering failures in history, according to the official story.
So how did they get investigated?
Well, FEMA was given the sole authority to investigate the collapse, even though it's not an investigative agency.
And FEMA had just been moved, actually, to Manhattan just before the attack, because there was this bio-warfare exercise that was supposed to be happening.
The investigative team assembled by FEMA consisted of unpaid volunteers.
They were not given any access to Ground Zero.
They were not provided with blueprints of the buildings.
FEMA's report states that the cause of the collapse remain unknown at this time.
Of course, by the time the report is released, the steel has been entirely disposed of.
The fact that Building 7 was supposed to fail in a way that contradicts a hundred years of engineering experience makes it the largest and least understood structural failure in history.
The 9-11 Commission report failed to even mention the existence of Building 7.
The 9-11 Commission report denied the existence of the Twin Towers' core structures.
And the NIST's report on the collapse of the Twin Towers purports to provide a probable collapse sequence for each tower, but truncates its timelines before the collapses even begin.
So there's lots of stuff that's going on in around 9-11 where you're going to get a lot of anomalies, right?
A lot of stuff that just doesn't add up.
I mean, I've absolutely no doubt that we're not told any of the truth about 9-11, but, you know, the issue is that we never will find out the truth about 9-11, or if we do, it'll be so long gone that, you know, it'll be just like a, wow, isn't that weird kind of thing, rather than doing anything to actually control the state.
So again, my heart And soul goes out to the people who lost loved ones in the attacks.
And, you know, I think it's important that they pursue the case, but I don't think it's something that we can use as part of our conversations with people, because, you know, we don't have the evidence.
It sounds kind of crazy.
I'm not saying it is, right?
It sounds crazy to people who are outside the movement, and I think it alienates more people than it's going to help.
So, let's move on to another email.
Now, I did have some questions from people about my phrase, negative economics, and I'll just sort of mention it briefly.
I'll go into maybe a more detailed podcast about it another time.
But negative economics, for me, is there's a difference between two people who negotiate with each other for mutual benefit.
So, you know, you have a pop can, you have a can of pop, I have a dollar, and we exchange it because you want the dollar more than you want the can of pop.
And I want the can of pop more than I want my dollar, so we're both better off.
That's positive economics.
Negative economics is, you know, I sort of go and threaten to burn down your store unless you pay me sort of, quote, protection money, right?
So you're still buying a value from me, but it's nothing you would enter into voluntarily.
And I talk about this in particular the way that children are inflicted with religious teachings to the point where they feel, you know, guilty and incompetent and bad.
for their whole lives, and they have to continue to pay this drug dealer called the priest, who is going to give them forgiveness in exchange for money, which they can then continue paying until the day they die.
That's sort of negative economics, where you inflict a pain, and then you pay, or you threaten to inflict a pain, and then the person pays you to alleviate it.
That's not at all the acquisition of a positive in that sense.
I mean, I guess you could say that the term negative economics is another way of saying evil, but, you know, we can get into that another time.
So when I mentioned, of course, religious teaching, the person who'd asked me this question wrote back and said, well, but, you know, some people, of course, children are coerced into religion through emotional or physical bullying, but adults are not.
And, of course, I would simply say that no adult becomes religious without a significant history of this kind of emotional manipulation in his or her past, right?
I mean, you don't just sort of wander into becoming religious.
If you're a healthy human being, because it's a sickly independent state of mind, anti-rational, anti-happiness kind of state of mind.
And so you simply aren't drawn to that kind of stuff unless you have had a history of this kind of emotional manipulation or abuse in your past.
So that's just a matter of other kinds of negative economics.
The first negative economics that most of us face when we're children is the withdrawal of parental love.
want you to do, or I'm going to, you know, punish you physically, or I'm going to withdraw emotionally, or I'm going to be cold, or I'm going to be bullying, or I'm going to be negative, or critical, or hostile, or all this kind of stuff.
I mean, that's the first negative economics.
So we comply with our parents' bullying in order to maintain the material goods that we need in order to survive, right?
I mean, it's the same reason you would obey a prison guard, right?
Because you kind of need that food that, you know, in an arbitrary situation where you have no recourse to.
Uh, external agencies to mediate between you and the prison guard, right?
Because I mean, when you're a child, you have no, no one outside is going to come in and negotiate between you and your parents in the way that you can complain even if you're a prisoner in prison.
And so we, you know, most of us are sort of forced to obey our parents' irrational prejudices and bigotries in order to, you know, receive parental affection and love and not even so much that, right?
Because you can't get love with bullying, but to at least receive parental comfort and food and shelter and so on.
So that's really where negative economics starts and everything else that occurs after that is simply it preys on that initial violation of that kind of stuff.
So let's have a look at another email.
Now this is a bit of a technical one from a gentleman who asked about the nature of man.
So he says, reading a piece on Reason.com, I was wondering about what Would that which makes a human being human be?
This question is valid if we take into consideration that the question of human rights seems to come intertwined with the definition of the human.
For instance, one of the arguments for slavery was that slaves were not humans or that they were inferior creatures.
Secondly, today the debate about abortion is just as much about the rights of the woman as the criteria of humanity.
Or, pushing this argument a bit, if all the parts of what we recognize as a person are replaced by mechanical parts with identical functionality, including the brain, then would that collection of mechanical parts become that person?
My criteria for humanity would not necessarily be a biological human, meaning a something that is capable of using reason.
But the shortfall is that young children or mentally handicapped do not seem to satisfy it.
Also, if young children and the mentally handicapped can be categorized as humans, then can we do the same for creatures in nature such as great apes or dolphins that can show intelligence and sentience to the level of the mentioned?
So can we be satisfied with just a set of tests, sufficient criterias, such as rationality, or the inclusion in the species, homo sapiens, or is there definitions out there that could be both necessary and sufficient in separating that which is human from that which is not?
Thank you, and I hope to hear more from you.
Well, I appreciate the question.
I think it's an interesting one.
It's an interesting technical question, completely useless as far as politics go, or, you know, sort of the imminent crises that we're facing in our society.
But nonetheless, you know, we all can have our hobbies, and maybe this is something that would be interesting for people to debate.
I sort of, as you probably know from earlier podcasts of mine, the criteria of a proof or categorization.
within the realm of morality and all things related to organic life does not require definition or abstraction or absolutism to the degree that the physical sciences such as physics and chemistry do.
So, as I said before, a horse could be born with five legs but you still know it's a horse and you don't throw away the whole science of biology because there are mutations.
So there are grey areas, absolutely, and we know the extremes, and in the grey areas there is some interesting sort of technical questions, but they're pretty irrelevant to life as a whole, right?
I mean, it's obviously important for a parent to figure out, you know, if they have a mentally handicapped child, to figure out the degree to which that child is capable of acting in a rational manner and so on.
But for society as a whole, it's almost completely irrelevant.
So, I mean, I'm not to say that, you know, because it's irrelevant it's not important.
I mean, there's some aspect of that, at least in my book.
But I think that this is a kind of approach to truth that you're just trying to slice and dice things far too much, to far too fine a degree.
You simply can't come up with an absolute line that says somebody with an IQ of 75 is X and somebody with an IQ of 74.9 is Y. It's completely impossible.
So what you want to do, of course, is recognize that the vast majority of human beings fall into a bell curve right in the middle of intelligence, and there are a few You know, super geniuses on one side and there are a few, you know, very deficient mentally people on the other side.
But the 99.9% of people fall into a recognizable range of intelligence that is perfectly consistent with what we would call the definition of a human being.
And of course there are two definitions of human beings, right?
The one is biological and the other one is philosophical.
The biological one is, you know, the DNA, the one head, two arms, two feet, and that would have a criteria.
called being a human being that would not include some sort of alien, silicon-based, rock-like life form, which we then would not classify as a human being from a biological standpoint.
From a sort of philosophical or human rights standpoint, we define a human being as a rational animal, an animal capable of reasoning and deferring gratification and weighing short-term gain, long-term pain, and so on.
And that's how we have morality, right?
Because human beings can choose to do X, Y, or Z, and therefore they're responsible for those choices, and therefore we have such a thing as morality and personal responsibility.
Now there are, of course, and that would include this sort of non-biologically human creatures that would have the capacity for this kind of reasoning.
As far as the great apes and dolphins go, no.
They do not have the intelligence that would categorize them as human in any way, shape, or form.
You can't have a social contract.
You can't have a contract with an animal because an animal has, as far as we can see it, pretty much no free will, no capacity to reason, no capacity to significantly balance short-term gains from long-term pains, therefore no moral responsibility, and so on.
And I know dolphins can be taught tricks, and that chickens will stop pecking if the At the bell, if the bell stops giving them food and apes, you know, can, I don't know, tie knots or something.
But, you know, this is nothing that is even remotely related to what a human level of intelligence would be where there's such a thing as moral responsibility.
So, you know, I think that to this gentleman who wrote in, interesting question.
I wouldn't spend a lot of time on it.
There is, you know, probably I don't know, what, 50,000 people in the world who you'd worry about out of sort of six billion with this kind of criteria?
And this is not a particularly important aspect of philosophy at the moment.
I think that it's wonderful if we could get to have a society that's free enough and developed enough and rational enough and moral enough where this became an important topic.
But we are probably a couple hundred years away from that at best, so I would say perhaps focus a little bit more on imminent political disasters and getting people to understand the values of freedom.
And, you know, then, you know, we can, all of us, we can bequeath this question of what is the human to our grandchildren and hope they have a great time and that's the greatest thing that they have to worry about.
Now, another gentleman has written to me and he says, "I have lived in the same town in Vermont throughout my public education.
When I was in kindergarten, the school I attended was run by the town with property tax money.
In the second grade, my town joined other towns to form a school district.
In fourth grade, the funding was almost completely turned over to the state of Vermont under a law called Act 60 in order to, quote, provide equal access to education to all Vermont students regardless of where they reside.
At this point, I think the only thing schools were allowed to do to raise money separate from state funding was to hold bake sales.
I believe that a substantial amount of school funding is now controlled by the federal government because teachers are always whining about having to conform to, quote, no-child-left-behind standards.
I think this also happened with welfare.
I know that the town I live in used to have a few poor houses that were run by the community Now people there, or here, get their welfare checks from the Feds.
Why is it that money, power, and responsibility keeps going up the ladder of government?
Is it possible for the government to purposely dissolve itself?
Could this be done within its own framework, or is an outside force necessary?
Or do we simply wait for the government to get too big to support itself, like an obese and glutinous goose trying to fly?
I think that's a wonderful, wonderful phrase.
Why is it that money, power, and responsibility keeps going up the ladder of government?
Well, for a number of reasons, which might be worth a podcast.
First and foremost, it's because you want to get further and further away from the responsibility, the cause and effect.
The more you can dilute the cause and effect, then the more you can obscure the failures of your programs.
If you have a local charity agency in your town that's doing a bad job, everybody knows what the cause is.
But if you have someone in Washington doing a bad job, and that results in a problem for your town, Your chance to do anything about it is, you know, almost none, and it's almost impossible even to figure out where the responsibility is in that matter.
So, you know, that's particularly why it occurs.
People want to just get more and more money for doing less and less in the government, right?
Because they're trying to maximize their own economic advantage, and all of that is warped and distorted by the violent source of their income.
And so you want a dissolution of responsibility, you want to get further and further away from the people that you're actually supposed to be trying to, sort of, quote, help.
And I think last but not least, you keep getting more and more budget when you're in the government, because that's what you aim to do.
And so what are you going to do?
Well, you just have to keep piling more and more bureaucrats on top of more and more bureaucrats.
So there's a natural tendency for water to flow uphill, in a sense, in the government, for more and more power to centralize itself further and further away from localized communities, for the reasons that I've mentioned above.
Is it possible for the government to purposely dissolve itself?
No.
It's absolutely impossible for the government to purposely dissolve itself.
There's absolutely no possibility that everybody in the government is going to wake up and put themselves out of a job and destroy their careers and everything they've spent their whole lives working towards and go out and get jobs in the private sector.
There's simply no chance of that happening.
It's never happened in history.
It's never going to happen.
Economic self-interest is pretty much an iron law.
And there's just no possibility, so I wouldn't worry about that, or wait for that to happen at all.
An outside force is necessary?
Well, I guess you could say so, insofar as the Visigoths destroyed Rome, and the German mercenaries destroyed Rome.
But of course, all that happens is you get one government replaced by another, so an outside force doesn't do anything other than, you know, change your masters.
Do we simply wait for the government to get too big to support itself?
No.
I don't mean to sound negative to every suggestion, but you simply do not wait for the government to get too big to support itself.
What you do, if you're interested in expanding the cause of freedom, And, you know, providing a better world for our children is that you get out there and you talk to as many people as possible.
And if you don't like talking to them, feel free to refer them to, you know, my blog or podcast or somebody else whose opinions you find valuable and logical.
You get out there and you talk to people as much as possible.
And you put up with these stony stares and the resentment and all of that because the world is in a terribly bad shape.
And we do have to do something if we're interested in this, and we have the capacity to do it, and it's enjoyable for us.
We have the responsibility to get out there and talk to people so that they understand what's coming, why it's coming, what's gone wrong, and how we're going to fix it when it comes.
So simply waiting for the government to collapse will, for sure, result in a far worse system taking its place, as you can just ask the Germans in the 1920s.
So don't wait.
Don't imagine the government's going to reform itself.
You know, get out there and talk to people and write a blog and write articles.
It's really easy now that there's an internet.
So, you know, get out there and talk to people because, you know, we are a bunch of doctors running around in a sense saying there's a plague that's coming along and nobody even knows that they're sick.
Actually, the plague is already here, right?
Nobody even knows that they're sick.
So it's a very difficult conversation to have and a very challenging communication to have with people.
But you want to get your words out there, get into people's ears, so that when the government does collapse, they'll have some idea as to why.
Because the people who predicted it and described the causes most consistently will have the most chance of having a voice in what comes next.
And so that's my particular suggestion in that area.
So I hope this has been helpful.
I always enjoy getting these emails, so please keep them coming.
It's always my payment, if you like.
for doing these podcasts is to engage in productive discussions with people who've listened to and who've read stuff that I have to say.
As always, I absolutely and thoroughly and totally and completely thank you for listening and for keeping this conversation alive, and I think that, you know, we really can be very proud every morning that we look in the mirror that we are doing our part to try and save the world from, you know, some pretty corrupt ideas that have been floating around since the dawn of time, and whose time, in my view, has absolutely come.
Thanks so much again.
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