Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • What Is A Reasonable Rate Of Progress To Expect In A Given System?

    Thanks (Michael) for asking me to answer this (very smart) question.

    —”Is there something akin to a Law of Progress for systems of people or even the individual? Closer to linear or exponential, incremental or rapid?”—

    I assume we mean economic growth rather than progress. Or at least, that we should separate growth from progress so that we understand their causes, and then can reflect on those causes.

    In the professional vernacular (economics, and political economy) growth refers to productivity, and progress refers to upward economic class rotation.

    Productivity refers to an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per hour worked, (per head of the population) over a period of time – and therefore increases in consumption over time. But it does not differentiate between ‘good productivity’ (innovation and market expansion), fake productivity (results of immigration), fraudulent productivity (rents on transport) and ‘bad productivity’ (spending down assets).

    Progress provides discounts on consumption that we interpret as increase in income. In other words, when we are more productive we make better use of our time, in producing goods, services, (and now information), that people want.

    Money or money substitutes, (or any trade or barter good) represent (really) a store of time saved. That is why it has value – why any good has value. So money is in fact an exceptional measure of productivity.

    Progress is (often) the result of increases in productivity. Most increase in productivity occurs from discovery of means of harnessing energy. (fire, kiln, crucible, coal, steam, fluid hydrocarbons, electricity, gears, relays, transistors, software), and discounts on energy expenditure (pack animals, riding horses, Everything else that occurs in every era

    And uncomfortably, the best productivity return – and the one we never think of – is genetic (eugenic reproduction, or upward redistribution of reproduction). Progress is offset by underclass reproduction (malthusian limits), underclass immigration, or upper class under-reproduction. This is because every person at the bottom is six times as costly as each person at the top is over-productive.

    In fact, the unstated but obvious failure to increase american incomes after the mid 1960s is due to inflation and immigration. For most of european modernity we have been liberating dead capital (The Church) and distributing it to under utilized capital (european middle classes). But since 1965, we have been using debt to redistribute debt to underclass immigration. And as far as I know this is the entire reason for our condition. Inflation and Immigration creating a false economy.

    For all of human history, most people lived on what we call about a dollar a day today. Trade in the first enlightenment prior to the bronze age collapse (prior to 1177bc), and trade during the ancient enlightenment, prior to the Abrahamic and Plague collapse (300–700 ad), then trade after the enlightenment, and prior to the late 20th century (which appears to be either an inflection point or collapse), appears to have produced a great leap in each era which defeated for a time, the fertility of Malthusian underclasses.

    So, yes, is there a law of productivity. Sort of. As a rule of thumb, a person can produce about twenty percent more than he can consume, if he works at it. During periods under which we have captured a new form of energy, or a new discount on energy consumption, we can increase this. Otherwise the only means of increasing productivity is to increase the quality of the population (as did europe and china/korea/japan) because by doing so, a people decrease frictions on cooperation, and frictions on cooperation can easily fall into (almost universal) equilibrium with productivity – which is the condition of nearly all of human history.

    So, armed with that understanding, China is going through what europe did, and what all post enlightenment peoples did, in the modern(steel), ancient(iron), and early bronze ages – and from what I understand, the late paleo (copper) age expansions.

    Why is china different from brazil? Homogeneity of genetics and culture, A highly nationalist military, and a vast store of underutilized human capital. None of which brazil has to work with.

    All but very short term opportunities, all of human economic activity is just another extension of the laws of the physical universe. Energy and Time vs Entropy. Or stated more simply; all evolutionary systems grow continuously or they die. And if they grow, they will grow by punctuated equilibriums. (which Michael mentions as ‘graduated then suddenly’.

    At present we are having a bit of a debate as to whether we have captured all the low hanging fruit of the capture of hydrocarbon, steam, and electrical energy. And given declining rates of innovation, it appears so. (Information technology eradicates frictions like nothing before it, but does not produce new energy). We are closing in on if not having past, our ability to harness enough energy to advance physics. We have ‘finished’ chemistry. We have just begun biochemistry. And we are scratching the surface of sentience (which is the same problem of three different scales.)

    As far as I know the debates over keynesian economics vs the business cycle, and the fallacy of infinite growth (‘technology is our savior’), and the fallacy of are over. As far as I know we are beyond the unmanaged carrying capacity of the planet (which I think is something on the order of 1B people, if not 500M). So given malthusian underclass rates of reproduction, and given the near exhaustion of the political and economic change of the enlightenment and industrial revolution, and given the peak in everything we can see, it certainly appears that productivity will decline everywhere to or under the rate of inflation. Because there is no more underutilized human capital.

    If you understand this, then all economic, social, and political behavior today, and in all of history is quite simple.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-reasonable-rate-of-progress-to-expect-in-a-given-system

  • What Type Of Abnormal Abilities Do You Have When You Have An Extremely High Iq?

    We process much more information. That’s the major difference. In general you want a big round head, a lot of neural density, and the lowest possible friction of transmission (white matter).

    In addition to processing more information we often identify increasingly subtle (more remote) patterns.

    And because of this we can work longer at learning – and some of us (I am certainly one of them) feel anxiety, depression, or pain if we are not learning. So not only can we learn more faster, but we can learn more because we can learn more hours per day.

    The more information we have, the more remote the patterns we see, the more we rely on that information and the less on intuition, norm, tradition, and the opinions and ideas of others.

    Additionally, some people have better short term memories and can hold larger static models. ( Hawking is a great example, but so are many others). I do not have this particular ability and I find that it is what differentiates me from the people who are above me.

    Additionally some people have superior verbal abilities and can describe what they think of more accessibly. (Noam Chomsky is smarter than I am, in both short term memory and verbal ability, and rarely loses his place no matter how convoluted the conversational route. )

    Some of us have more discipline, more conscientiousness, and skepticism and we’re possibly more autistic (which is the result of high neuronal density anyway), and we simply make fewer errors than others. This is very rare.

    We mature at different rates. Some of us have exceptional abilities in childhood and have nervous breakdowns when we reach young adulthood. (This is a subject I study now and then.) Others mature normally. Others of us mature more slowly.

    Normies are quite frustrating really. I had the great fortune to have a very old professor of contract law, who told me my sophomore year that “The world is not meant for us. It is meant for them. We are prisoners of their world. And the best we can do is help them through it.” And I found that advice to be profoundly useful in ending the the feeling that normies run the world, like children at a birthday party running with scissors. 😉

    https://www.quora.com/What-type-of-abnormal-abilities-do-you-have-when-you-have-an-extremely-high-IQ

  • How Will Iq Skeptics And Social Justice Advocates React If Genome Wide Association Studies Find Strong Genetic Correlations That Explain Much Of The Average Iq Variation Between Population Groups And Between Individuals?

    THE STATE OF THE SCIENCE

    The evidence exists, however, the causes are more obvious: 1) the size of the underclasses. and 2) neotonic(pedomorphic) evolution – meaning the retention of childhood features, and 3) transfer of female verbal acuity to males because of pedomorphic evolution.

    Cold Climates, Agrarianism, Manorialism, and the raw Capital Costs of Tools (metals) needed to survive in those conditions, in addition to the aggressive hanging of the underclasses for more than a thousand years, allowed both upward redistribution of calories and reproduction, and the downward population of labor by the middle genetic classes.

    So by the time of the industrial revolution (if not the literacy revolution) europe (and west asia) had vast stores of underutilized human capital. However, both had to break free of the church and the bureaucracy which had made the vast majority of capital “dead” (static) and in support of rent seeking (church bureaucracy and chinese imperial bureaucracy).

    For the rest of the world, they have been unsuccessful at one or both of two factors: either (a) decimating the underclasses, and (b) developing deflationary grammars (methods) in the sequence math, logics, reason, empirical law (tort), and science.

    West europeans and east asians and ashkenazi were able to limit the size of their underclasses and to force upward redistribution of reproduction. East asians have the highest Neoteny, West Europeans, and then Ashkenazi. And less visible testosterone levels to equal more visible morphology(features).

    This is the primary difference between the races and subraces: Degree of neoteny, and distribution of male and female traits (brain structures) between the genders. Strangely enough, in the Ashkenazi they have nearly reversed it. Which is why they have such exceptional verbal (if not spatial) skills.

    So that’s the state of the science as I understand it.

    in other words, the greatest material differences are driven by the size of the underclasses, and therefore the median distribution in the gene pool, and therefore the language, norms, traditions, and institutions necessary or the persistence of such a gene pool with such a distribution.

    All of this is very simple. The marxist-postmodernist-feminist attempt at the second dark age – this time of pseudoscience – just made us lose a century and a half to their deceptions.

    https://www.quora.com/How-will-IQ-skeptics-and-social-justice-advocates-react-if-genome-wide-association-studies-find-strong-genetic-correlations-that-explain-much-of-the-average-IQ-variation-between-population-groups-and-between

  • What Is A Reasonable Rate Of Progress To Expect In A Given System?

    Thanks (Michael) for asking me to answer this (very smart) question.

    —”Is there something akin to a Law of Progress for systems of people or even the individual? Closer to linear or exponential, incremental or rapid?”—

    I assume we mean economic growth rather than progress. Or at least, that we should separate growth from progress so that we understand their causes, and then can reflect on those causes.

    In the professional vernacular (economics, and political economy) growth refers to productivity, and progress refers to upward economic class rotation.

    Productivity refers to an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per hour worked, (per head of the population) over a period of time – and therefore increases in consumption over time. But it does not differentiate between ‘good productivity’ (innovation and market expansion), fake productivity (results of immigration), fraudulent productivity (rents on transport) and ‘bad productivity’ (spending down assets).

    Progress provides discounts on consumption that we interpret as increase in income. In other words, when we are more productive we make better use of our time, in producing goods, services, (and now information), that people want.

    Money or money substitutes, (or any trade or barter good) represent (really) a store of time saved. That is why it has value – why any good has value. So money is in fact an exceptional measure of productivity.

    Progress is (often) the result of increases in productivity. Most increase in productivity occurs from discovery of means of harnessing energy. (fire, kiln, crucible, coal, steam, fluid hydrocarbons, electricity, gears, relays, transistors, software), and discounts on energy expenditure (pack animals, riding horses, Everything else that occurs in every era

    And uncomfortably, the best productivity return – and the one we never think of – is genetic (eugenic reproduction, or upward redistribution of reproduction). Progress is offset by underclass reproduction (malthusian limits), underclass immigration, or upper class under-reproduction. This is because every person at the bottom is six times as costly as each person at the top is over-productive.

    In fact, the unstated but obvious failure to increase american incomes after the mid 1960s is due to inflation and immigration. For most of european modernity we have been liberating dead capital (The Church) and distributing it to under utilized capital (european middle classes). But since 1965, we have been using debt to redistribute debt to underclass immigration. And as far as I know this is the entire reason for our condition. Inflation and Immigration creating a false economy.

    For all of human history, most people lived on what we call about a dollar a day today. Trade in the first enlightenment prior to the bronze age collapse (prior to 1177bc), and trade during the ancient enlightenment, prior to the Abrahamic and Plague collapse (300–700 ad), then trade after the enlightenment, and prior to the late 20th century (which appears to be either an inflection point or collapse), appears to have produced a great leap in each era which defeated for a time, the fertility of Malthusian underclasses.

    So, yes, is there a law of productivity. Sort of. As a rule of thumb, a person can produce about twenty percent more than he can consume, if he works at it. During periods under which we have captured a new form of energy, or a new discount on energy consumption, we can increase this. Otherwise the only means of increasing productivity is to increase the quality of the population (as did europe and china/korea/japan) because by doing so, a people decrease frictions on cooperation, and frictions on cooperation can easily fall into (almost universal) equilibrium with productivity – which is the condition of nearly all of human history.

    So, armed with that understanding, China is going through what europe did, and what all post enlightenment peoples did, in the modern(steel), ancient(iron), and early bronze ages – and from what I understand, the late paleo (copper) age expansions.

    Why is china different from brazil? Homogeneity of genetics and culture, A highly nationalist military, and a vast store of underutilized human capital. None of which brazil has to work with.

    All but very short term opportunities, all of human economic activity is just another extension of the laws of the physical universe. Energy and Time vs Entropy. Or stated more simply; all evolutionary systems grow continuously or they die. And if they grow, they will grow by punctuated equilibriums. (which Michael mentions as ‘graduated then suddenly’.

    At present we are having a bit of a debate as to whether we have captured all the low hanging fruit of the capture of hydrocarbon, steam, and electrical energy. And given declining rates of innovation, it appears so. (Information technology eradicates frictions like nothing before it, but does not produce new energy). We are closing in on if not having past, our ability to harness enough energy to advance physics. We have ‘finished’ chemistry. We have just begun biochemistry. And we are scratching the surface of sentience (which is the same problem of three different scales.)

    As far as I know the debates over keynesian economics vs the business cycle, and the fallacy of infinite growth (‘technology is our savior’), and the fallacy of are over. As far as I know we are beyond the unmanaged carrying capacity of the planet (which I think is something on the order of 1B people, if not 500M). So given malthusian underclass rates of reproduction, and given the near exhaustion of the political and economic change of the enlightenment and industrial revolution, and given the peak in everything we can see, it certainly appears that productivity will decline everywhere to or under the rate of inflation. Because there is no more underutilized human capital.

    If you understand this, then all economic, social, and political behavior today, and in all of history is quite simple.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev, Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-reasonable-rate-of-progress-to-expect-in-a-given-system

  • If Italians Are Not White According To The Usa Racial Standards, Why Are They Considered Europeans?

    Misleading or Confusing Question. But worth answering.

    This is one of those ethnic questions that’s misleading. Because it confuses the modern state of italy, with the italian peninsula, which is french, swiss german, german, austrian, northern italian (germanic), and southern italian (mediterranean and greek).

    Southern italians (especially from Naples south) are of greek and anatolian origins. Northern Italians whether very early (Etru) , Italian (Ital), or later ‘invaders) Germanic) are all of Danubian (Germanic) origins. People of Sardinia are the remainders of the earliest europeans. People of Sicily are a blend of pretty much everyone in the ancient world, because Sicily was an extremely important port for transporting goods around the mediterranean using the sailing technology available in the ancient world.

    General Rule of Thumb:

    If you work at it a bit you can pretty easily identify almost anyone’s tribal origins.

    Black hair and ‘swarthy” complexion and body hair = South route around the black sea = Anatolian/Eastern-Mediterranean/ Indo-Iranian. Or as I am often corrected “West Eurasians” (or middle easterners)

    Brown, Red, Blonde hair, very white complexion = Northern route around the Black Sea. Northern route people still exist in at least three if not four variations: atlantics, germanics (central europe), nordics, and northern and eastern slavs. The history of southern slavs is extremely complicated and I end up offending someone if I talk about it. But by and large they vary from very old peoples who started metalsmithing in what is today Bulgaria, to the remains of the steppe people who migrated there during the last major migration periods. The problem is that the spanish are largely from Atlantic and Celts and often have dark hair but are from the same lineage (R1b) – just less inbred with later versions of europeans.

    Something ‘very different’ happened around the black sea either before or after the deluge. we don’t know what but it caused repeated waves of expansion with the latest being the Yamna (horse) people what gave europe her ancient culture = although pre-yamna, yamna, germanic, christian, and modern values still exist if you understand which originated which set of ideas.

    But europeans, in general, regardless of earlier (southern), or later (multiple waves of northern), origins, evolve from what we (incorrectly) call ‘Caucuses’, but is apparently poland-ukraine-southern russia, with the caucuses the line of demarcation between the european, indo-iranian, and (now extinct) people that invaded india.

    The word Aryan is correct (Yamna expansion), but impolitic in the current century, and “White” is a poor substitute for Ethnic Europeans.

    We are, after all, all from the exceptional grazing and farmland between the north sea in poland, the black sea in ukraine, and the north of the caspian in southern russia.

    Europeans originated along the north sea, baltic sea, black sea, and caspian sea, and their russo finnic ancestors the arctic sea.

    It’s just that trade in the mediterranean was much more profitable for anyone – until the atlantic and now pacific came along.

    Some of us find it ironic that Poland is probably origin of the european diaspora. 😉

    Italy empirically (by all measures) consists of two very different countries – north and south. Just like Belgium has french and germanic under the same state. Just as americans have nine different cultures under the same state.

    The reason different countries do not separate is that it is economically disadvantagous to one party or both parties.

    For example, catalonia (wealthy and culturally and genetically different) vs spain (poor), and north italy vs south italy, and west ukraine vs east ukraine. and the northern states vs the southern states vs the plains states, vs the coastal west (ecotopia). Or canada vs quebec.

    All of these countries would be better off alone, but the industrial revolution and fiat credit made it difficult for small counteries to engage in defense.

    Today, a handful of nuclear weapons and an armed populace (switzerland) cna preserve independence (sovereignty) against any and everyone.

    Therefore:
    Italian = State (government)
    North italian and South Italian Countries (natural cultural and territorial differences)
    Italian Culture = Generally referring to language and diet and festivals
    Italy = a territory ranging from the alps to the tip of the peninsula.
    Ethnicity = European, vs Germanic vs Greek, vs Mediterranean are Ethnic Groups. Germanic = a prehistoric culture and myth of the home and hearth.
    Christianity = an old world mythology and literature of politics.
    Modernity = The enlightenment restoration of our ancient judicial, empirical, stoic and Aristotelian traditions.
    Three or four races. A handful of subraces. Thirty or so minor subraces. A few hundred super-tribes.

    Humans are endlessly fascinating. 😉

    https://www.quora.com/If-Italians-are-not-white-according-to-the-USA-racial-standards-why-are-they-considered-Europeans

  • If Italians Are Not White According To The Usa Racial Standards, Why Are They Considered Europeans?

    Misleading or Confusing Question. But worth answering.

    This is one of those ethnic questions that’s misleading. Because it confuses the modern state of italy, with the italian peninsula, which is french, swiss german, german, austrian, northern italian (germanic), and southern italian (mediterranean and greek).

    Southern italians (especially from Naples south) are of greek and anatolian origins. Northern Italians whether very early (Etru) , Italian (Ital), or later ‘invaders) Germanic) are all of Danubian (Germanic) origins. People of Sardinia are the remainders of the earliest europeans. People of Sicily are a blend of pretty much everyone in the ancient world, because Sicily was an extremely important port for transporting goods around the mediterranean using the sailing technology available in the ancient world.

    General Rule of Thumb:

    If you work at it a bit you can pretty easily identify almost anyone’s tribal origins.

    Black hair and ‘swarthy” complexion and body hair = South route around the black sea = Anatolian/Eastern-Mediterranean/ Indo-Iranian. Or as I am often corrected “West Eurasians” (or middle easterners)

    Brown, Red, Blonde hair, very white complexion = Northern route around the Black Sea. Northern route people still exist in at least three if not four variations: atlantics, germanics (central europe), nordics, and northern and eastern slavs. The history of southern slavs is extremely complicated and I end up offending someone if I talk about it. But by and large they vary from very old peoples who started metalsmithing in what is today Bulgaria, to the remains of the steppe people who migrated there during the last major migration periods. The problem is that the spanish are largely from Atlantic and Celts and often have dark hair but are from the same lineage (R1b) – just less inbred with later versions of europeans.

    Something ‘very different’ happened around the black sea either before or after the deluge. we don’t know what but it caused repeated waves of expansion with the latest being the Yamna (horse) people what gave europe her ancient culture = although pre-yamna, yamna, germanic, christian, and modern values still exist if you understand which originated which set of ideas.

    But europeans, in general, regardless of earlier (southern), or later (multiple waves of northern), origins, evolve from what we (incorrectly) call ‘Caucuses’, but is apparently poland-ukraine-southern russia, with the caucuses the line of demarcation between the european, indo-iranian, and (now extinct) people that invaded india.

    The word Aryan is correct (Yamna expansion), but impolitic in the current century, and “White” is a poor substitute for Ethnic Europeans.

    We are, after all, all from the exceptional grazing and farmland between the north sea in poland, the black sea in ukraine, and the north of the caspian in southern russia.

    Europeans originated along the north sea, baltic sea, black sea, and caspian sea, and their russo finnic ancestors the arctic sea.

    It’s just that trade in the mediterranean was much more profitable for anyone – until the atlantic and now pacific came along.

    Some of us find it ironic that Poland is probably origin of the european diaspora. 😉

    Italy empirically (by all measures) consists of two very different countries – north and south. Just like Belgium has french and germanic under the same state. Just as americans have nine different cultures under the same state.

    The reason different countries do not separate is that it is economically disadvantagous to one party or both parties.

    For example, catalonia (wealthy and culturally and genetically different) vs spain (poor), and north italy vs south italy, and west ukraine vs east ukraine. and the northern states vs the southern states vs the plains states, vs the coastal west (ecotopia). Or canada vs quebec.

    All of these countries would be better off alone, but the industrial revolution and fiat credit made it difficult for small counteries to engage in defense.

    Today, a handful of nuclear weapons and an armed populace (switzerland) cna preserve independence (sovereignty) against any and everyone.

    Therefore:
    Italian = State (government)
    North italian and South Italian Countries (natural cultural and territorial differences)
    Italian Culture = Generally referring to language and diet and festivals
    Italy = a territory ranging from the alps to the tip of the peninsula.
    Ethnicity = European, vs Germanic vs Greek, vs Mediterranean are Ethnic Groups. Germanic = a prehistoric culture and myth of the home and hearth.
    Christianity = an old world mythology and literature of politics.
    Modernity = The enlightenment restoration of our ancient judicial, empirical, stoic and Aristotelian traditions.
    Three or four races. A handful of subraces. Thirty or so minor subraces. A few hundred super-tribes.

    Humans are endlessly fascinating. 😉

    https://www.quora.com/If-Italians-are-not-white-according-to-the-USA-racial-standards-why-are-they-considered-Europeans

  • Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass m

    Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications. A few of the most high-profile examples, out of many others, include: Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves. Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s one in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion. Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, California, in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine. Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Oregon, and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin. In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania. In Paducah, Kentucky, in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school’s lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin. In 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac. In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors. Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh’s description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done,” Danysh said. “This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.” John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty. Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug. Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues. One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them. “I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.” Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders. Paxil-TWPaxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others. The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label – the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time. Never lost a lawsuit Pharmaceutical manufacturers are understandably nervous about publicity connecting their highly lucrative drugs to murderous violence, which may be why we rarely if ever hear any confirmation to those first-day reports from grief-stricken relatives who confide to journalists that the perpetrator was taking psychiatric drugs. After all, who are by far the biggest sponsors of TV news? Pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t want any free publicity of this sort. The truth is, to avoid costly settlements and public relations catastrophes – such as when GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay millions of dollars to the family of 60-year-old Donald Schell who murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage shortly after starting on Paxil – drug companies’ legal teams have quietly and skillfully settled hundreds of cases out-of-court, shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to plaintiffs. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fought scores of legal claims against Prozac in this way, settling for cash before the complaint could go to court while stipulating that the settlement remain secret – and then claiming it had never lost a Prozac lawsuit. Which brings us back to the key question: When are we going to get official confirmation as to whether Nikolas Cruz, like so many other mass shooters, had been taking psychiatric drugs?

  • Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass m

    Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications. A few of the most high-profile examples, out of many others, include: Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves. Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s one in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion. Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, California, in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine. Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Oregon, and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin. In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania. In Paducah, Kentucky, in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school’s lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin. In 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac. In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors. Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh’s description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done,” Danysh said. “This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.” John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty. Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug. Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues. One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them. “I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.” Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders. Paxil-TWPaxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others. The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others. Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label – the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time. Never lost a lawsuit Pharmaceutical manufacturers are understandably nervous about publicity connecting their highly lucrative drugs to murderous violence, which may be why we rarely if ever hear any confirmation to those first-day reports from grief-stricken relatives who confide to journalists that the perpetrator was taking psychiatric drugs. After all, who are by far the biggest sponsors of TV news? Pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t want any free publicity of this sort. The truth is, to avoid costly settlements and public relations catastrophes – such as when GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay millions of dollars to the family of 60-year-old Donald Schell who murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage shortly after starting on Paxil – drug companies’ legal teams have quietly and skillfully settled hundreds of cases out-of-court, shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to plaintiffs. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fought scores of legal claims against Prozac in this way, settling for cash before the complaint could go to court while stipulating that the settlement remain secret – and then claiming it had never lost a Prozac lawsuit. Which brings us back to the key question: When are we going to get official confirmation as to whether Nikolas Cruz, like so many other mass shooters, had been taking psychiatric drugs?

  • Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass m

    Fact: A disturbing number of perpetrators of school shootings and similar mass murders in our modern era were either on – or just recently coming off of – psychiatric medications. A few of the most high-profile examples, out of many others, include:

    Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox – like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of antidepressant drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999 during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves. Luvox manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox – that’s one in 25 – developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.

    Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, California, in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban “semiautomatic assault weapons” in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptyline, an antidepressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.

    Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Oregon, and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.

    In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, Illinois, killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the antidepressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.

    In Paducah, Kentucky, in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school’s lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.

    In 2005, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, living on Minnesota’s Red Lake Indian Reservation, shot and killed nine people and wounded five others before killing himself. Weise had been taking Prozac.

    In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Kentucky, killing nine. Prozac-maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.

    Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danysh’s description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: “I didn’t realize I did it until after it was done,” Danysh said. “This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun.”

    John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.

    Andrea Yates, in one of the most heartrending crimes in modern history, drowned all five of her children – aged 7 years down to 6 months – in a bathtub. Insisting inner voices commanded her to kill her children, she had become increasingly psychotic over the course of several years. At her 2006 murder re-trial (after a 2002 guilty verdict was overturned on appeal), Yates’ longtime friend Debbie Holmes testified: “She asked me if I thought Satan could read her mind and if I believed in demon possession.” And Dr. George Ringholz, after evaluating Yates for two days, recounted an experience she had after the birth of her first child: “What she described was feeling a presence … Satan … telling her to take a knife and stab her son Noah,” Ringholz said, adding that Yates’ delusion at the time of the bathtub murders was not only that she had to kill her children to save them, but that Satan had entered her and that she had to be executed in order to kill Satan.Yates had been taking the antidepressant Effexor. In November 2005, more than four years after Yates drowned her children, Effexor manufacturer Wyeth Pharmaceuticals quietly added “homicidal ideation” to the drug’s list of “rare adverse events.” The Medical Accountability Network, a private nonprofit focused on medical ethics issues, publicly criticized Wyeth, saying Effexor’s “homicidal ideation” risk wasn’t well publicized and that Wyeth failed to send letters to doctors or issue warning labels announcing the change.And what exactly does “rare” mean in the phrase “rare adverse events”? The FDA defines it as occurring in less than one in 1,000 people. But since that same year 19.2 million prescriptions for Effexor were filled in the U.S., statistically that means thousands of Americans might experience “homicidal ideation” – murderous thoughts – as a result of taking just this one brand of antidepressant drug. Effexor is Wyeth’s best-selling drug, by the way, which in one recent year brought in over $3 billion in sales, accounting for almost a fifth of the company’s annual revenues.

    One more case is instructive, that of 12-year-old Christopher Pittman, who struggled in court to explain why he murdered his grandparents, who had provided the only love and stability he’d ever known in his turbulent life. “When I was lying in my bed that night,” he testified, “I couldn’t sleep because my voice in my head kept echoing through my mind telling me to kill them.” Christopher had been angry with his grandfather, who had disciplined him earlier that day for hurting another student during a fight on the school bus. So later that night, he shot both of his grandparents in the head with a .410 shotgun as they slept and then burned down their South Carolina home, where he had lived with them. “I got up, got the gun, and I went upstairs and I pulled the trigger,” he recalled. “Through the whole thing, it was like watching your favorite TV show. You know what is going to happen, but you can’t do anything to stop it.” Pittman’s lawyers would later argue that the boy had been a victim of “involuntary intoxication,” since his doctors had him taking the antidepressants Paxil and Zoloft just prior to the murders.

    Paxil-TWPaxil’s known “adverse drug reactions” – according to the drug’s FDA-approved label – include “mania,” “insomnia,” “anxiety,” “agitation,” “confusion,” “amnesia,” “depression,” “paranoid reaction,” “psychosis,” “hostility,” “delirium,” “hallucinations,” “abnormal thinking,” “depersonalization” and “lack of emotion,” among others. The preceding examples are only a few of the best-known offenders who had been taking prescribed psychiatric drugs before committing their violent crimes – there are many others.

    Whether we like to admit it or not, it is undeniable that when certain people living on the edge of sanity take psychiatric medications, those drugs can – and occasionally do – push them over the edge into violent madness. Remember, every single SSRI antidepressant sold in the United States of America today, no matter what brand or manufacturer, bears a “black box” FDA warning label – the government’s most serious drug warning – of “increased risks of suicidal thinking and behavior, known as suicidality, in young adults ages 18 to 24.” Common sense tells us that where there are suicidal thoughts – especially in a very, very angry person – homicidal thoughts may not be far behind. Indeed, the mass shooters we are describing often take their own lives when the police show up, having planned their suicide ahead of time.

    Never lost a lawsuit

    Pharmaceutical manufacturers are understandably nervous about publicity connecting their highly lucrative drugs to murderous violence, which may be why we rarely if ever hear any confirmation to those first-day reports from grief-stricken relatives who confide to journalists that the perpetrator was taking psychiatric drugs. After all, who are by far the biggest sponsors of TV news? Pharmaceutical companies, and they don’t want any free publicity of this sort.

    The truth is, to avoid costly settlements and public relations catastrophes – such as when GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to pay millions of dollars to the family of 60-year-old Donald Schell who murdered his wife, daughter and granddaughter in a fit of rage shortly after starting on Paxil – drug companies’ legal teams have quietly and skillfully settled hundreds of cases out-of-court, shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to plaintiffs. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly fought scores of legal claims against Prozac in this way, settling for cash before the complaint could go to court while stipulating that the settlement remain secret – and then claiming it had never lost a Prozac lawsuit.

    Which brings us back to the key question: When are we going to get official confirmation as to whether Nikolas Cruz, like so many other mass shooters, had been taking psychiatric drugs?

    Source date (UTC): 2018-02-16 15:42:00 UTC

  • The Struggle Between Science And Myth

    Mythical decidability is more influential at the bottom and scientific more at the top. —“And it is the view, or, at least Curt’s view, because I do not know your views, that Abrahamism has been harmful to Europe. I suppose the palingenetic undercurrent here is that a new history of European greatness must be crafted independently of Ahraminic influences.”— This is what I struggle with. While (a) the propertarian program is quite simple: truth produces trust and prosperity (b) one encounters a cavalcade of JUSTIFICATIONARY historical narratives to make excuses for fictionalisms. So how does one combat a justificationary narrative that claims to be empirical, without an equal empirical narrative. European excellence and east asian excellence are simply facts as far as I can tell. But as I’ve stated repeatedly, they are facts that are the product of geographical advantage and insulation from the competition in the ‘center’. But we cannot choose those things. We can choose between truth and fiction. We can choose the next era’s narrative. But – the age old question – how do you teach people during a time of transition that novel truth is better than traditional fictionalism without a history or mythology to contain it? Unconscious decidability (is necessary the larger the population grows). The grammar of story (analogy, mythology) is the broadest grammar and semantics available to us. Is the tragedy of achilles (the aristocratic warrior masculine hero defending property over the chaos of reality) or the tragedy of jesus (the underclass priestly feminine hero in reaction to the control of property by the aristocracy) a better monopoly myth, or are they faces of the “Janus” of the eternal competition between the strategies of the sexes? And then how does each limit the other? Are these the faces last archetypes, and is competition as calculation (compromise by trade) the ultimate archetype instead? (which is my view). Or is the individual actor (Achilles, Jesus) a problem in itself, and are FAMILIES the superior archetypal narrative that provides us with unconscious decidability? In my view families rather than the individual serve as the instrument of policy, while law serves as the instrument of individual limitation. So I prefer a hierarchical pagan world (saints and kings) for the simple reason that it avoids the problems of monopoly. Now, add to the problem, that every group has an evolutionary strategy, and uses it to work together whether moral or not. Every group has a ‘superiority’ wing. And must for it to survive competition with other group. Science has advanced, and social science not, for the simple reason that juridical (scientific) truth would punish the underclasses, women and the priests, to the benefit of the burgers, engineers, and the warriors. and we are in an era (democracy) where gossip – the weapon of women and priests, is powerful – powerful enough to bring about another dark age. For no other reason than that we have not yet suppressed falsehood in information as we have in goods and services. Anyway. I feel caught between Law and Truth on one hand and Myth and HIstory on the other, and it always seems like transcendence between stages requires both.