The Ukrainian Government is Now Mass Texting Protestors with Warning Messages

Earlier today, I highlighted the ingenious use of mirrors by Ukrainian protestors to utilize non-violent, creative tactics to make powerful political statements. With violence escalating in the past 24 hours, it appears the Ukrainian government is now breaking out technological Big Brother by sending mass text messages to protestors warning them that they are being … Read more

A Chinese Rebellion – How Activists are Stamping QR Codes on Currency to Fight Censorship

One of the most productive trends I have witnessed in 2014 to-date, consists of the increasingly creative ways that activists around the world are fighting back against the status quo (Bitcoin stole the show in this regard last year). The first example of this emerged from within the Ukraine, where protestors are holding up mirrors … Read more

Banks are Running Scared – Wells Fargo Bans Staff from P2P Loans

It’s extremely amusing to observe the welfare baby, bailout dependent, “Too Big to Jail,” parasitic legacy banking system squirm in the face of advancements in peer-to-peer financial technologies; whether they be Bitcoin, P2P lending or crowdfunding. It is becoming increasingly clear that humanity would do much better without this gigantic cancerous tumor on our backs, and we finally have the tools to move on. 

In fact, the largest bank in the U.S. is so concerned about peer-to-peer lending, it has banned its staff from participating.

We find out from CNBC that:

Wells Fargo has banned its employees from lending their own money through peer-to-peer loan platforms, in a sign of growing tensions between new “P2P” lenders and the largest U.S. bank by market value.

“Ethics administrators” at Wells Fargo decided to forbid staff from P2P lending after concluding “that for-profit peer-to-peer lending is a competitive activity that poses a conflict of interest.”

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Brave New World Revisited…Key Excerpts and My Summary

Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old formselections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the restwill remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorialbut Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit. 

– Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, published 1958

It’s always felt a bit bizarre and, indeed slightly embarrassing, that of all the books I have read in my days, Aldous Huxley’s 1932 classic Brave New World was not amongst them. Not only is the book frequently mentioned to make political and social statements about contemporary times, the novel’s concept always caught my interest. I just never got around reading it. Until late last year.

I loved this book and was very pleasantly surprised. I was prepared for a more fearful and overwhelmingly dark and twisted experience. While there were obvious elements of that, it was a much more enjoyable read than I anticipated. Indeed, it was a very human book, as ironic as that might sound. As much as the “Controllers” in Brave New World were indeed in control, the human spirit still managed to bubble to the surface. To the point that the controllers had to designate certain islands for the iconoclasts which inevitably emerged from within the “Alpha” class. All of the drugs, brainwashing and conditioning couldn’t totally break the human spirit. As such, it was a much more hopeful and nuanced novel than I expected it to be. If you haven’t read it, I suggest making it your next book. If you have read it, read it again.

However, this post isn’t about Brave New World. While that book is indeed a creative warning, it is still fiction and a work of art more than anything else. Twenty six years after its publication, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he takes stock of the post World War II period. His analysis is grave. He saw the world progressing toward his nightmare much faster than he anticipated. Brave New World Revisited is a brilliant work of non-fiction and filled with almost incomprehensibly prescient musings. It also provides a great deal of advice to future generations. Advice which we must immediately heed.

Of all the solutions Huxley focuses on in Brave New World Revisited, from proper education, to a simple acknowledgment of humanity as a moderately gregarious animal not prone to over-organization; the most profound, and I think useful recommendation, is for us to decentralize. This has been a theme of mine and many other writers for some time now. Fortunately, through things like 3D-Printing, Bitcoin and other decentralized crypto-currencies, open source software, crowd funding, social media, etc, the world is moving from centralization to radical decentralization. People will be more connected than ever, but power will be more decentralized. We need to continue to push rapidly in this direction and a whole new incredible world will emerge. Indeed, it is being born as I write this.

Several years ago after reading Hayek’s Road to Serfdom I wrote a lengthy post highlighting key excerpts for those who were interested, but didn’t have the time or inclination to read the whole thing. Due to that post’s popularity and effectiveness, I have attempted to do the same with Brave New World Revisited. I hope this inspires you all to read the entire thing. Enjoy.

From Chapter 2: Quantity, Quality, Morality

And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ’s and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.

My Thoughts: Yes, indeed we are learning the answer to this right now. Just look around you.

From Chapter 3: Over-Organization

Under a dictatorship the Big Business, made possible by advancing technology and the consequent ruin of Little Business, is controlled by the State-that is to say, by a small group of party leaders and the soldiers, policemen and civil servants who carry out their orders. In a capitalist democracy such as the United States, it is controlled by what Professor C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite. This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country’s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to but its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communications, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody.

My Thoughts: If you talk as Huxley writes above in “polite society” you will be labeled a conspiracy theorist or kook.

From Chapter 3: Over-Organization

It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. Here the theoretical reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totalitarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess. The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.

Organization is indispensable; for liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating community of freely cooperating individuals. But, though indispensable, organization can also be fatal. Too much organization transforms men and women into automata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility of freedom. As usual, the only safe course is in the middle, between the extremes of laissez-faire at the one end of the scale and of total control at the other.

My Thoughts: Huxley accurately notes that the “will to order” is a natural part of the human psyche. There are disciplines where the “will to order” is actually useful and necessary to human progress; however, he warns that in the social sphere it is deadly and usually ends with totalitarianism.

From Chapter 3: Over-Organization

City life is anonymous and, as it were, abstract. People are related to one another, not as total personalities, but as the embodiment of economic functions or, when they are not at work, as irresponsible seekers of entertainment. Subjected to this kind of life, individuals tend to feel lonely and insignificant. Their existence ceases to have any point or meaning.

My Thoughts: Huxley clearly sees the sprawling metropolis as incongruent with human nature and freedom. It is a theme he consistently returns to throughout the book.

From Chapter 3: Over-Organization

Biologically speaking, man is a moderately gregarious, not a completely social animal—a creature more like a wolf, let us say, or an elephant, than like a bee or an ant. In their original form human societies bore no resemblance to the hive or the ant heap; they were merely packs. Civilization is, among other things, the process by which primitive packs are transformed into an analogue, crude and mechanical, of the social insects’ organic communities. At the present time the pressures of over-population and technological change are accelerating this process. The termitary has come to seem a realizable and even, in some eyes, a desirable ideal. Needless to say, the ideal will never in fact be realized. A great gulf separates the social insect from the not too gregarious, big-brained mammal; and even though the mammal should do his best to imitate the insect, the gulf would remain. However hard they try, men cannot create a social organism, they can only create an organization. In the process of trying to create an organism they will merely create a totalitarian despotism.

My Thoughts: A simply brilliant and incredibly important warning.

From Chapter 3: Over-Organization

The impersonal forces of overpopulation and over-oragnization, and the social engineers who are trying to direct these forces, are pushing us in the direction of a new medieval system. This revival will be made more acceptable than the original by such Brave-New—Worldian amenities as infant conditioning, sleep-teachings and drug-induced euphoria; but, for the majority of men and women, it will still be a kind of servitude.

My Thoughts: Yep, he predicted our current neo-feudalistic state in 1958.

From Chapter 4: Propaganda in a Democratic Society

Given a fair chance, human beings can govern themselves, and govern themselves better, though perhaps with less mechanical efficiency, than they can be governed by “authorities independent of their will.” Given a fair chance, I repeat; for the fair chance is an indispensable prerequisite. No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work.

My Thoughts: Would’ve been nice if we thought about that before we invaded Iraq (of course, the problem is our goal was never to bring Democracy to Iraq in the first place).

From Chapter 4: Propaganda in a Democratic Society

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democraciesthe development of a vast mass communications industry concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainmentfrom poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concepts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio television and the cinema.

My Thoughts: This brings me to a short story I’d like to share. I was on a plane as I read this and I put down my book for a second to look around me. I had an aisle seat, and so was at a good vantage point from which to take stock of the plane. I was actually stunned to notice that there was not a single other person reading a book anywhere around me. I actually enjoy the lack of Wifi on flights as it forces me to engage in some old school book reading. To my surprise no one else seemed to see it that way. Horrifyingly, the only people that weren’t dozing off or watching television were still on their smart phones. Even worse, at least five of them seemed to be playing the same game! It looked like some sort of Tetris game with jewels. So despite the lack of Wifi, humanity’s ability for mindless entertainment and distraction prevailed. Wifi or no Wifi, these folks were going to be on their “smart”phones one way or the other.

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Linux Powered Smart Rifles With Networked Tracking Scopes Have Arrived

Technological advancement is moving ahead so fast it is impossible to keep up. Pretty soon it doesn’t look like humans are going to be responsible for much of anything at all if we continue at this pace.

The latest military “advancement” is a Linux powered rifle that basically only requires the human soldier to mark a target and then a computer can “engage and assist.” Basically it sounds a lot like a drone rifle. Insane.

More from Geeky Gadgets:

It has been reported this week that the United States military has started investing funds into next-generation firearms in the form of “smart rifles” that will be powered by Linux and equipped with a Networked Tracking Scope.

A soldier equipped with a smart rifle and its new Networked Tracking Scope would simply need to tag a target viewable on a screen, which is found on the gun’s scope to allows the computer to engage and assist.

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Video of the Day – Milton Friedman Predicts the Rise of Bitcoin in 1999

Back in the late 90’s, when Paul Krugman was busy predicting the ultimate irrelevance of the internet, another Nobel Prize winning economist was forecasting the advent of peer-to-peer electronic currencies. I have to say it is remarkable that Milton Friedman was able to provide greater insight into Bitcoin ten years before it was invented, than … Read more

Computer Security Expert Claims he Hacked the ObamaCare Website in 4 Minutes

The hits just keep on coming for ObamaCare. It was less than two weeks ago that I highlighted the potential premium rate death spiral that ObamaCare faces due to the fact that only old and sick people are signing up for the program. Now it seems there are further security related concerns plaguing the site, as cyber-security expert David Kennedy recently claimed that “gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes.”

It’s actually hard to be this incompetent if you tried. More from the Washington Times:

The man who appeared before Congress last week to explain the security pitfalls of HealthCare.gov took to Fox News on Sunday to explain just how easy it was to penetrate the website.

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Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Back in June 2013, I was suddenly inspired to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s thoughtful, powerful and provocative “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It struck such a chord with me that I decided to write a post on it, in which I highlighted key excerpts.

Today, January 20th, is Martin Luther King Day for those of us in these United States. With the Republic at such a crossroads, one filled with peril, but also with tremendous opportunity; it would serve us all well to heed the words this great man wrote so many years ago, during another troubled and dynamic time in our history. As such, I am reposting my piece from last summer below.

Martin Luther King: “Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal”

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Even if you have read Martin Luther King’s celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I insist you read it again. For those that have never read it, the inspired prose may very well change your life.  The letter’s message is eternal and extraordinarily relevant in the current global struggle of the 99.9% against the criminality, corruption and oppression of a very small, but very powerful 0.01%.  One of the key tactics this tiny minority uses is to claim that their immoral deeds are “legal.”  He spends much of his time in the letter outlining the distinction between “just laws” and an “unjust laws,” and one of the key points he makes that we should all keep close to our hearts and minds in these trying times is:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.

I also think it’s important to recognize that many of his contemporaries referred to his tactics as “extremist,” very similar to how the term “terrorist” is used currently to demonize public dissent in America.  Below are some of the excepts I found most powerful:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

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Inaugural Interview with Hard Assets Alliance – India’s War on Gold, Bitcoin in China and More…

This past week I sat down with Andy Duncan of the Hard Assets Alliance for an inaugural podcast and we discussed a variety of timely topics. From India’s “war on gold,” the emergence of new political parties around the world and, of course, Bitcoin. This is the first interview in which I discuss my view … Read more

Want to Buy the FBI’s Bitcoins? Here’s How…

Yesterday, Forbes reported that a judge had signed off on a forfeiture order for 30,000 bitcoins seized from the Silk Road by the feds. This means that the coins are likely to be sold in the near future. So the question on everyone’s mind is how and where will they be sold. Forbes explains that: There … Read more