On Paradigms, Politics, & Preet Bharara

The thrust of the news between now and Christmas is something I already know. It may be a good time to talk some “philosophy of science”.

We learn in high school science classes that scientific progress comes brick-by-brick. We learn that scientists form hypotheses, devise experiments to test them, collect data, form conclusions, wash-rinse-repeat. Their conclusions are bricks that get added to the wall of science, a wall that gets built higher and higher over time with each generation of scientists.

That is not how science really advances, argued Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Using historical examples, he showed that the model I just laid out describes how science works sometimes, for some periods. Yet the real rhythm of science, Kuhn said, is different: on occasion results come along that do not fit into the brick wall that everyone else has built. These anomalies do not fit the reigning paradigm (a word Kuhn popularized), and so they get set aside. Such anomolous bricks accumulate. Then one day a new thinker shows up and says, If I knock down the brick wall as it stands, I can take all the old bricks plus these anomalous bricks and build a new wall which uses all the bricks.

I can think of a great example (though I forget if it was used in Kuhn’s book). In 1895 the Chairman of the Harvard Physics Department was discouraging new graduate students from studying physics, on the grounds that all of physics had been figured out. There were just two anomalies no one could explain: the problem of black-body radiation, and the photoelectric effect. Over the next decade Max Plank and Albert Einstein explained them, in the process giving us the foundations of quantum mechanics and Relativity, respectively. The “brick wall” on which physicists had labored since Newton turned out to provide good answers on scales in which scientists lived and thought about, but at different scales (subatomic and cosmological) that paradigm fails in favor of those two new paradigms.

Soon our society will enter such a moment not regarding not physics, but politics. Party Line narratives are about to be exploded in favor of a new paradigm brought about by the greatest political scandal in US history.

It is going to be interesting to see how the Establishment and MSM adjust. Some will foolishly flog a failed paradigm beyond what the public sees as reasonable (we may be at that point now with an impeachment-about-nothing impeachment going on, and the main event has not even happened: the revelation of the true reason some people have a conniption about Trump asking Ukraine to investigate certain corrupt matters, a conniption so extreme they would gin up this pantomime play of a US presidential impeachment). Such MSM will keep doing what they are doing now, relying on suggestibility and intellectually dishonest framing, but it will wear thin for all but the most doltish of viewers. Eventually, those who stay flogging the current Party Line will be like those old Borscht Belt Comedians, still trying to make it pay with jokes that went out of fashion in the 1960’s.

But there are others who will act with intellectual integrity. They will realize that the evidence which is being revealed shatters their worldview, and it is time to develop  a new one. They who do this have my respect.

Let me pass early commendations to former US Attorney Preet Bharara. On Friday CNN’s Wolf Blitzer had Preet Bharara on as a guest. During their interview, breaking news provided an anomaly to Mr. Bharara, who gave a small but classy demonstration of how to do what I am describing (see at around 2:10).

I predict that what you see in this tape is but that first drop of rain from a typhoon. Message to MSM: the quicker you learn to do what Mr. Bharara does here (it is called “intellectual honesty”), the better your odds of making it through this tempest. Those who think they can beat this one by deflections, or sideshows, or buckets of chicken, are going to look increasingly hapless.

Respect to Professor Nancy Cartwright, a renowned figure in the field of Philosophy of Science, under whom I had the honor of studying at Stanford.

I left 1,500 colleagues and 40,000 shareholders at Overstock in order to come public. Please do me a favor and help them out by doing your Christmas shopping at Overstock.com.

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  1. Hannity watchers have known about the FISA fraud for over two years. It will be fun to watch the stunned ‘deer in the headlights’ looks on the faces of MSM talking heads. You know, just like on election night 2016.

  2. we shop at OSTK all the time anyway been supporting this company with friends and family purchases which have always been perfect.

    Will Never invest in stock market

  3. Whenever I hear people talking about politics it seems that the conversations are intellectually lazy. I think the book Thinking Fast , Thinking Slow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow describe this. Thinking fast is your immediate reaction to your environment using your experience. Thinking slow is a more deliberative process requiring the consideration of new facts. Hopefully, there will be more than enough rain drops for people to get them to consider the totality of facts and apply some intellectual honesty. If enough do, we will survive the current mess we call politics.

  4. The entire impeachment circus side-show idea was concocted by Pelosi & Schiff out of desperation. If you know anything about how to read body language, Nancy Pelosi’s body language is that of a person who is desperately trying to hide the fact that they are terrified of something.

    What they are terrified of, is the fact that they know John Durham has been talking to informants in the Ukraine for months as part of his overall investigation into what I refer to as the Russian Snipe hunt, and its origins in the Ukraine. Thanks to their partisan pet spooks inside the FBI/CIA they know that Durham is in the process of uncovering all of the bodies that are buried there.

    So out of sheer desperation they conjured up a phony Ukraine “whistleblower” named Eric in order to create some sort of plausible deniability, and get out in front of the coming revelations when John Durham starts impaneling grand juries and indicting the perpetrators.

    But their primary problem is that unlike Bob Mueller, John Durham doesn’t deal in hearsay, he deals with hard verifiable evidence. The FBI lawyer story is just the tip of a massive iceberg.

    It is definitely, the “greatest political scandal in US history”. Which will eventually result in a thorough housecleaning of the US intel agencies.

  5. Bharara is still being obtuse. The FBI got a FISA Title-1 warrant on someone associated with a political campaign (the same warrant you deploy on terrorists), meaning within two hops you can deploy any form of surveillance (wiretap, bugs, electronic surveillance, physical surveillance, etc). That submission has got to be beyond dispute. It is not surprising that the FBI would fudge these applications because of the benefits that type of warrant would bestow. Carter Page was obviously not the ‘target’.

    Its amazing that they have been deploying all these tools on candidate and president Trump for years and nothing. Do you think any politician could survive the scrutiny he has undergone (19 Lawyers, 40 FBI, 2,800 Subpoenas, 500 Search Warrants, 500 Witnesses – and that is just the Mueller probe – not before or after)?

    People have to start somewhere but come on – Bharara knew what was going on.

    1. Good points. Also, Wolf seems genuinely shocked (“my god, this somehow seems to lend credence to what Fox has been saying?”, my paraphrase). Either he’s pretending to be taken aback or he’s been genuinely brainwashed within that echo chamber / reality distortion field that is CNN. I lean towards the former. These guys knows what’s going on, and that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

  6. All here should read Martin Armstrong’s March 13 2017 blog post about this gentleman. And btw, if prince Andrew’s excessive blinking in his recent pr disaster was evidence of his “insincerity”, what are we to make of this video clip?

  7. This is highly speculative, I know, but I expect the Mother of all False Flag operations. Cataclysmic, on a scale on the order of 9/11 or worse. NYT and Popular Mechanics, both deep state assets, have been pushing UFOs and alien anti gravity tech lately. It’s almost as if we’re being primed for the alien invasion scenario. Werner Von Braun Warner against exactly this FF on his deathbed.

    They’ll do anything to deflect.

  8. Dear Patrick, I have been a keen follower of your travails since 2005 when you opened my eyes upon the nefarious naked shorting activities in our financial markets via Deep Capture and I sincerely thank you for your herculean efforts in exposing this obvious criminal activity. With regard to your recent revelations, you have indicated that you have had a somewhat friendly relationship with some FBI agents at a high level and I’m not sure if you may have addressed this issue that has been nagging me all these years. While you were communicating with these agents was there ever a time that you discussed the obvious brazen illegal activities in the ongoing manipulation of OSTK’s share price that has gone on for so long and if so, why has there never been an investigation launched into what is clearly criminal fraud that is taking place? Anything you can share with us would be greatly appreciated. As you may sense, I’m really bugged about this.

    1. Sure. I will tell you. I was told that the FBI had recommended criminal charges against Goldman, and had drafted the criminal complaint. It just needed the DOJ signature. And high up, I was told, that signature had been refused.

      As I recall, shortly thereafter (maybe just a week?) AG Holder appeared before congress and used the expression, “too big too jail.”

  9. One of the commenters at CTH posted a superb (if dense) analysis, which basically implies that when the IG report on FISA etc. comes out (supposedly now on Dec. 9), it will be immediately apparent whether or not IG Horowitz did a genuine investigation or a whitewash:

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/11/28/did-u-s-attorney-john-durham-interview-patrick-byrne-if-so-how-does-doj-fbi-reconcile-running-russian-operative-into-trump-campaign-in-2015/comment-page-2/#comment-7610756

    “We will know the FISA Report is a whitewash if Byrne and Butina are not addressed by disclosing whether Republican presidential candidates other than Trump were surveilled. For [NSA Director] Rogers to conduct his audit and for [Judge] Colyer to conclude therefrom that 85% of the 11/1/15 through 4/18/16 searches were unauthorized, the database has to have some type of access/search history — whether who or what or when or all three — and for Colyer to conclude that the same person was searched multiple times suggests that its access/search history is qualitative, not just quantitative. This should also be the case due to the need to regulate statutory two hop authority under Title 1. If you cannot audit access/search history through one or two hops, you cannot know whether the accessor/searcher stopped at two hops for enforcement purposes. Under such circumstances, the database is subject to abuse beyond our wildest dreams, given it is left to the good faith of those accessing/searching to regulate themselves without any potential oversight.”

    “If this is the case, then Horowitz should tell us (as should have Colyer before him). If it is not, then “Horowitz should describe the access/search history of the FISA application for Carter Page, as well as the 3 renewals. He should describe the extent of the electronic surveillance on Page — text, cell, email, internet, GPS, financial and travel — then identify all those surveilled on the first and second hops, including specifically those affiliated with the Trump campaign or family, including Candidate Trump, both primary and general, President-elect Trump, and President Trump.”

    “The meeting between President-elect Trump and Admiral Rogers had to have communicated actual NSA database surveillance, whether authorized by the FISA court or not, for Trump to react by moving his transition team from Trump Tower and for cabinet members in the intelligence community to urge the ouster of Rogers to President Obama in response. We just don’t know how much Rogers told Trump. As head of the NSA, Rogers was in a position to monitor database access and search history even outside the confines of the audit, so theoretically he could have monitored every access/search conducted under the Page FISA application and renewals, and provided continuous updates to President Trump through their expiration. But if the small group knew he had that capacity, knew he was watching them, then why seek the renewals in the first place?
    To cut through the intrigue, Horowitz should disclose whether the audit revealed electronic FISA database surveillance on candidates other than Trump. If the access/search history for the subcontractors reveals surveillance of Cruz or Rubio, in the same timeframe as Byrne was running Butina through their campaigns, then that is clearly political espionage, using “Russian influence or collusion” as a pretext.”

    “If all of these issues are observable by a poor lurker from what Sundance has been addressing for the last 3 years, Horowitz should be able to see them from his investigation. If he does not address them, we have a whitewash.”

  10. (we may be at that point now with an impeachment-about-nothing impeachment going on, and the main event has not even happened: the revelation of the true reason some people have a conniption about Trump asking Ukraine to investigate certain corrupt matters, a conniption so extreme they would gin up this pantomime play of a US presidential impeachment)

    Are you talking about how the Obama waged a 1953 Iran style takeover of Ukraine. Incerted a juanta government that appointed IHOR KOLOMOISKY (if you haven’t googled or better yet looked him up on youtube you have no idea about Ukraine) as a governor of one of Ukraine’s. The same Kolomoisky that took control of Burisma in 2011 and asked Hunter and Archer, a former senior adviser for John Kerry, close friend and business partner of John Kerry’s stepson, to join the board. Somehow the US Congress voted to send billions of dollars of aid to Ukraine and Ihor’s bank just happened to send 5.5 billion out of Ukraine to unknown accounts. Mix in the SS storm troopers, the mass murder of non violent protesters and the fact that the current president of Ukraine was a comedy star on the TV channel that Kolomoisky owns and you have a pressure pot ready to burst.

    Don’t get me wrong, Trump is a money launder, rapist and possible a pedophile but what he did in Ukraine is not impeachable and the entire “circus” is only to hide what went on there.

    As central as Kolomoisky is to everything that has happened in Ukraine over the last 8 years why have we not heard his name all over the news?

  11. Inching closer, and closer to Byrne claims.

    Similarly, with respect to Volker’s newly revealed revelation on The Godless State of America, I had written something poignant days ago to yaHooligans, but of course it was censored and not allowed to remain. Volker wrote:

    https://www.ft.com/content/2389d7ec-1b3c-11ea-97df-cc63de1d73f4

    Today, threats facing that model have grown more ominous, and our ability to withstand them feels less certain. Increasingly, by design or not, there appears to be a movement to undermine Americans’ faith in our government and its policies and institutions. We’ve moved well beyond former president Ronald Reagan’s credo that “government is the problem”, with its aim of reversing decades of federal expansion.

    “Today we see something very different and far more sinister. Nihilistic forces are dismantling policies to protect our air, water, and climate. And they seek to discredit the pillars of our democracy: voting rights and fair elections, the rule of law, the free press, the separation of powers, the belief in science, and the concept of truth itself.

    Without them, the American example that my mother so cherished will revert to the kind of tyranny that once seemed to be on its way to extinction — though, sadly, it remains ensconced in some less fortunate parts of the world.”

    But back to the main event, and Byrne somehow being vindicated before this chapter in U.S. history is finished being written:

    https://thegreggjarrett.com/ig-horowitz-hearing-exposes-deliberate-fbi-misconduct-in-investigating-trump-campaign/

    Official: Durham’s reaction to IG report means ‘he’s got the goods on somebody’

  12. Patrick, have a good holiday season.

    A small comment about Biden and the Ukraine. Why does it seem that Biden is so worried about what an investigation may have found in the Ukraine? If he did nothing wrong, let them look. Seems like he is trying very hard to hide something. I’m tired of the politicians keeping secrets, but that I guess is part of their profession.
    Could it be that Trumps asking for an investigation was really a National Security issue and not political?

  13. Hello Patrick. Ousmane, do you remember? First in Switzerland at a train station. Last in Midvale.
    I love reading you. And as usual, every time I do, I learn a lot.
    Come to Guinea, West Africa.
    God bless you

    1. Hello Ousmane! I do remember you. Train station in Switzerland, January 1 or 2, 2013. I had a big red suitcase with me. I remember that day well, actually.

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