Steve Bull's Blog, page 129
February 9, 2023
‘Sciencism’ Is Religious Fundamentalism by Another Name
“I know only one thing: that I know nothing.”
-Socrates
I’ve been reading “The Science Delusion” by Rupert Sheldrake, a timely treatise on fallible humans’ hubris.
It ought to be required reading for all public school children, so that they may understand how little the authorities actually know about life on Earth, how it works, and what it means (if anything.)
Knowledge is provisional. It’s multi-pronged. It’s contingent on the observer. And it’s complicated.
Exhibit A is the infamous double-slit experiment of quantum mechanics fame, which defies the laws of physics previously considered absolute fact.
The double-slit dilemma stretches the limits of my understanding of physics. I understand it shows light behaving like a wave and a particle at the same time, and the same particle on dual paths simultaneously. These are substantial things for physicists to have been wrong about for hundreds of years.
What discovery tomorrow will similarly undermine basic tenants of 2023 scientific knowledge?
This is the problem with orthodoxy of any kind. It’s a major flaw in conservative thinking in general. By “conservative,” I don’t mean the right-wing political ideology but the unwillingness to embrace new ideas in favor of old ones for no other reason than they are already established.
Whereas the high priest class once dominated the social hierarchy, sciencism is the trendy new religion of the intellectual elite – equally dogmatic in its epistemological approach to studying the natural world.
God died (metaphorically) unceremoniously about 200 years ago. But because there’s good evidence humans actually require someone or something to revere and to center culture around as a source of meaning, the bearded, robed God of the Bible was replaced with technocratic Science, and scientists, as the object of worship in industrialized society.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
They’re Not Worried About “Russian Influence”, They’re Worried About Dissent

Listen to a reading of this article:
Being labeled a Russian propagandist all day every day for criticizing US foreign policy is really weird, but one advantage it comes with is a useful perspective on what people have really been talking about all these years when they warn of the dangers of “Russian propaganda”.
I know I’m not a Russian propagandist. I’m not paid by Russia, I have no connections to Russia, and until I started this political commentary gig in 2016 I thought very little about Russia. My opinions about the western empire sometimes turn up on Russian media because I let anyone use my work who wants to, but that was always something they did on their own without my submitting it to them and without any payment or solicitation of any kind. I’m literally just some random westerner sharing political opinions on the internet; those opinions just happen to disagree with the US empire and its stories about itself and its behavior.
Yet for years I’ve watched people pointing at me as an example of what “Russian propaganda” looks like. This has helped inform my understanding of all the panic about “Russian influence” that’s been circulating these last six years, and given me some insight into how seriously it should be taken.
That’s one reason why I wasn’t surprised by Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Twitter Files revelations about Hamilton 68, an information op run by DC swamp monsters and backed by imperialist think tanks which generated hundreds if not thousands of completely bogus mainstream news reports about online Russian influence over the years.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Alexander Vindman and the Road to World War III
Retired U.S. Army LTC Alexander Vindman, who gained fame for helping Democrats impeach President Donald Trump for a phone call Trump had with Ukrainian officials in July 2019, is urging the Biden administration and its Western allies to swiftly and dramatically increase military aid and supplies to Ukraine to help the Ukrainian armed forces credibly threaten to take back Crimea, which Russian forces seized in 2014. He lays out a Ukrainian military campaign–armed and funded by the United States and its NATO allies–that he claims will cause Russian President Vladimir Putin to negotiate a Russian withdrawal from Crimea and reduce the risk of a wider war. Vindman is reminiscent of those European statesmen and generals before and during World War I who thought that mobilizing for war would somehow prevent it and, if not, would result in a swift victory.
Writing on the Foreign Affairs website, Vindman notes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a video appeal at the meeting of the World Economic Forum, saying: “Crimea is our land, our territory,” and requesting Western nations to “give us your weapons” so that Ukraine can retake “what is ours.” In his article, Vindman urges Washington and NATO to “give Ukraine the weapons and assistance it needs to win quickly and decisively in all occupied territories north of Crimea–and to credibly threaten to take the peninsula militarily.” Vindman suggests that a credible threat to militarily retake Crimea will be sufficient to bring Putin to the negotiating table and end the war on terms favorable to Ukraine.
Vindman has been one of the most vociferous war hawks when it comes to U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Farm Convoy Of Tractors Hit Paris Streets To Protest Pesticide Ban
Adding to the days of strikes and mass street demonstrations about French President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular plan to raise the retirement age, farmers have flooded the streets of Paris for an entirely different reason.
French farmers drove hundreds of tractors, if not more, into Paris on Wednesday to protest against a ban on pesticide use.
Ag website Agriland said the protest comes after a recent EU court ruling overturned a French rule that allowed sugar beet growers to use neonicotinoids, an insecticide. Farmers were livid by the EU courts because neonicotinoids are critical for sugar beet production. Agriland said at least 800 large farm tractors flooded Paris streets around Les Invalides.
“The protest has the backing of the country’s leading farm organization, the FNSEA, as well as organizations representing the sugar beet producing sector,” Agriland said.
Well before the EU court ruling, French sugar-beet yields were expected to slide by 5-7% for the next growing season, according to Bloomberg, citing Francois Thaury, an analyst at Paris-based adviser Agritel. Thaury said losses could not top 10%.
Meanwhile, in separate mass protests, hundreds of thousands of people nationwide took to the streets against Macron’s plans to raise the retirement age.
Protests come as Macron’s popularity has hit its lowest level. Spring is ahead, and that could mean additional protests as temperatures rise.
February 8, 2023
What Is Anarcho-Tyranny and Are We Living in It?
Question: How does one best explain the brutal crackdown on COVID-19 protesters worldwide for the sake of Public Health while, at the same time, Black Lives Matter was permitted to run hog-wild on America’s streets?
How are elected Democrat leaders allowed to literally incite race riots while those same leaders pearl-clutch about January 6 in never-ending televised witch trials?
Answer: Anarcho-tyranny
The term anarcho-tyranny, on its face, is an oxymoron, a glaring contradiction. Indeed, it’s the biggest possible contradiction of political system descriptors, as anarchy and tyranny occupy diametrically opposite ends of the government force continuum.
So it’s obvious nonsense, right? Well, if we lived in a politically coherent environment, governed by rule of law, it would be. But in a Kafkaesque world of arbitrary exercise of government power, it becomes much more descriptive.
Samuel Francis first coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” in a 1994 essay titled Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A., summarized as:
“A concept where the state is more interested in controlling citizens so that they don’t oppose managerial class, rather than tending to real criminals. Laws are argued to be enforced selectively depending on what is beneficial to the ruling elite.”
It essentially describes a situation in which the government has the necessary tools and capabilities to wield oppressive power over its subjects, and does so to further its own interests.
On the other hand, the government actors themselves — and, importantly, their footsoldiers (like Antifa and BLM in the modern American context) — act with impunity, immune from legal consequences.
Exhibit A: the recent hullabaloo over classified documents. When Trump was discovered to have stashed them in his private residence, the full weight of the state fell upon his estate in the dead of night.
“Why [would] anyone be that irresponsible?” an exasperated Biden quipped, his sentiments echoed over and over and over in corporate media.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Congress is Set to Expose What May be the Largest Censorship System in U.S. History
Below is my column in the Hill on the first hearings this week to be held by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. It could be one of the most consequential investigations for free speech in decades if it pulls back the curtain on government censorship programs. After the historic release of the Twitter Files by Elon Musk, questions remain on any similar coordination with other social media companies with federal agencies like the FBI to target views considered “disinformation” or “misinformation.”
Here is the column:
This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the FBI and the possible “weaponization” of government agencies. A variety of such controversies have contributed to plunging public trust in government and the FBI in particular.
The role of the FBI in prior scandals will remain a point of heated debate in Congress. However, members of both parties should be able to agree on the need to investigate one of the most serious allegations: Censorship by surrogate.
Many of the allegations of FBI bias are worthy of investigation. Some of those allegations are problems of personnel who can be removed. But a far more menacing problem has emerged in recent months with the release of information from Twitter.
The “Twitter files” revealed an FBI operation to monitor and censor social media content — an effort so overwhelming and intrusive that Twitter staff at one point complained internally that “they are probing & pushing everywhere.” The reports have indicated that dozens of FBI employees worked on the identification and removal of material on a wide range of subjects and that Twitter largely carried out their requests.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now

The U.S. Navy’s Diving and Salvage Center can be found in a location as obscure as its name—down what was once a country lane in rural Panama City, a now-booming resort city in the southwestern panhandle of Florida, 70 miles south of the Alabama border. The center’s complex is as nondescript as its location—a drab concrete post-World War II structure that has the look of a vocational high school on the west side of Chicago. A coin-operated laundromat and a dance school are across what is now a four-lane road.
The center has been training highly skilled deep-water divers for decades who, once assigned to American military units worldwide, are capable of technical diving to do the good—using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordinance—as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks on crucial shipping canals. The Panama City center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was the perfect place to recruit the best, and most taciturn, graduates of the diving school who successfully did last summer what they had been authorized to do 260 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea.
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
It Sucks Being Stuck in a Failing Civilization

Industrial civilization is slowly failing and it kind a sucks being stuck with it. Over the past couple of weeks and months I’ve been increasingly posting about the failure of western civilization, but let’s not forget that the West is but a part of global civilization suffering from the same ailments bringing the entire system down. The coming end of global western dominance happens to coincide with the rapidly approaching limits to material growth and the mounting environmental challenges caused by our reckless abandon. Climate change, energy crises, resource scarcity and overshooting all natural limits and boundaries will all complicate things beyond our ruling class’ ability to manage. Expect some wild times ahead.
The whole idea of industrial civilization and unending technological progress has started with a belief that we can keep extracting minerals from underground forever (if not, then we will find substitutes). Take a look around in your room: all of your objects, together with the power feeding them, has come from somewhere underground. Plastics, made from oil pumped up from below the surface. Metal, made from mineral ores. Cement, gypsum, ceramics: all made from earth itself — not to mention the immense heat (well above 1000°C) needed to transform them into their current form. All coming from fossil fuels and minerals from beneath our feet.
Do you have solar panels on your roof? Well, those are made from minerals too. Some of them are so rare, like Indium or Gallium, that world production would need to increase several hundredfold to build out solar panels in the necessary quantity in order to “halt” climate change…
…click on the above link to read the rest…
$58 billion day of reckoning looms for 3M over toxic ‘forever chemicals’
The Wall Street giant is bracing for a landmark legal trial in the United States beginning in June over its use of the family of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl chemicals, known as PFAS. In Australia, the chemicals have contaminated at least 90 sites and officials have acknowledged PFAS has contaminated the blood of up to 98 per cent of the world’s population.

Dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not break down in the environment and stay for years in the human bloodstream, PFAS was formerly the key ingredient in 3M’s popular fabric protector Scotchgard because of its unique ability to repel grease, oil and water.
Scientific studies linking the chemicals to cancer and a slew of other health effects have given rise to mounting public health concerns for governments internationally.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
February 6, 2023
Green spin
Concern over the steep rise in the price of electricity this winter has paved the way for rehashing the old misinformation about the relative cost of generation. So it is that Carbon Tracker – a non-profit which seeks to focus financial investment on non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) – reports that electricity bills are far higher than they might have been because they are based on expensive gas generation. As Andy Verity at the BBC explains:
“The way electricity prices are set has pushed UK household bills up by £7.2bn over two years… Under existing rules, energy suppliers pay the highest price for wholesale electricity no matter how it is made.
“Gas-fired power stations are the most expensive way to generate electricity, but only make about 40% of all electricity used by UK homes. That means homes pay over the odds for power generated any other way…”
Taken at face value, this is broadly correct. But there is a great deal which needs unpacking here. Most notably, the way in which “green” energy policy has had a negative impact on the wholesale gas market. Because, while Verity points to the post-lockdown shortages and energy self-sanctioning (he misspells it “Russia’s war in Ukraine”) as the cause of the recent price spikes, these are only proximate triggers. The deeper cause was environmental policy which drove energy companies out of long-term gas supply deals in favour of the – far more volatile – spot market. In effect, having been told by the state that your industry is being phased out, why bother with long-term investment? One result was the closure of the massive Rough storage facility in the North Sea – which the state is now pledged to reopen – which would have provided the buffer to iron out most of the upward spike in gas prices in 2021.
…click on the above link to read the rest…