News of the Week (November 2nd, 2025)

Posted on November 2, 2025 by The Political Hat

 

News of the Week for November 2nd, 2025


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Happy Halloween! (2025)

Posted on October 31, 2025 by The Political Hat

     Here is the silent classic version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1920.

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Quick Takes – Killing The Mentally Ill: Death Is The Cure; Killing When The Family Desires Death; Killing When They Don’t

Posted on October 30, 2025 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Eradicating dementia and other mental problems is easy if you there aren’t any dementia patients left alive.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

Death, Rx

     Apparently there is a surefire way to stop the suffering of dementia: Kill the patient.

“But averting late-stage dementia is difficult to accomplish under U.S. laws and policies. Four well-established end-of-life options include: (1) traditional advance directives, (2) voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), (3) medical aid in dying (MAID) in Switzerland, and (4) inert gas asphyxiation. These four options work for patients dying from cancer, heart disease, stroke, or COPD. But they remain a clumsy fit for patients with dementia. These options suffer significant limitations in achieving the goals of patients seeking to avoid living into late-stage dementia.

“Therefore, we must expand right to die options. Under settled legal and bioethical principles of anti-paternalism and informed consent, laws should permit adults with capacity to end their lives under conditions that they determine intolerable.   The primary objective of this Chapter is to outline and describe seven additional end-of-life options. These alternatives are not yet widely recognized or understood.”

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Esoteric Plain Speak Of Marxism

Posted on October 28, 2025 by The Political Hat

     Marxist and Post-Marxist thought is often crouched in esoteric language. This is not surprising as it is based in an almost mystical line of thought in an almost magical framework. Using the language of Marxism, then, begs the question it asks, which is why it is important to describe it outside of its own loaded language. “Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost” explains the esotericism of Marxist and Post-Marxist though in plain speak, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.

Here is a “plain speak” of the esotericism you see in Marx & post-Marxism. This whole 🧵is doing it.

Once, there was a primordial state of unity consciousness. Divine sparks flowed freely without husks or hierarchies. This unity was instinctive and embryonic, like the Garden before the Fall.

Then, the rupture! The rupture arc begins when humanity reaches in too soon, grasping prematurely for knowledge or power without full vessel strength. This echoes the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis, where the grasp causes contraction and shattering. From this cosmic and historical fall, the false power center of the dominant order emerges. It fractures the whole into marginalized and alienated fragments, imposing profane hierarchies that veil the divine light.

The rupture manifests through many forms of disruption, not limited to one event like primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation serves as a key modern example of initial dispossession, where resources, lands, and relations are seized to create inequalities. Broader ruptures include any structural violence, from ancient exiles to ongoing enclosures of class, race, gender, or ecology. From these, a false center crystallizes as the hegemonic core. This hegemonic core pretends to be natural and inevitable while sustaining itself through extraction and illusion.

Marginalization displaces people, ideas, and potentials to the periphery, treating them as excess or threat through exclusionary borders.

Alienation follows as estrangement severs individuals from their labor, communities, and essence, breeding isolation and transactional bonds.

Reification and commodity fetishism, termed kelipot in Kabbalah, harden living relations into inert things. Institutions and ideologies act as autonomous forces, trapping divine sparks of vitality, creativity, and justice in obscuring husks. This perpetuates alienation by making social dynamics seem like unavoidable laws. Hegemony and ideology maintain the false center by manufacturing consent through narratives, media, and culture. They erase the rupture’s origins and suppress dissent until sparks of truth, resistance, or unmet needs start to circulate and demand elevation.

It’s important to note that this is not Gnosticism. Unlike Gnosticism, which rejects the material world as inherently evil and irredeemable, this framework sees matter and history as fractured yet holy, containing redeemable sparks that humans can restore through active partnership with the divine.

The Elect awaken as those who gain clarity through suffering, insight, or revelation. They form a vanguard collective, not a hierarchical elite, acting as helpers to God in the redemptive drama. In the esoteric tradition at the point of Luria, they aid the divine self-repair after the Shevirah by gathering scattered sparks and mending the Godhead. This partnership makes them co-creators in the repair of the world (tikkun). They map the ruptures by tracing lines of disruption and marginalization. You will commonly see this as “doing the work.” They sift and elevate authentic sparks from the margins, converting traumas into moral charge for collective fuel. They forge a shared vessel through networks, assemblies, and theories that amplify these sparks without reification. They articulate a vision of reparation based on relational wholeness, equity, reciprocity, and ecological harmony.

Within theory, this important change of passive to active repair occurred between Hegel (passive) → Moses Hess (active)→ Marx (active) and perhaps the best single paper is Moses Hess’ 1843 work.

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Wetware Mini-Brains: From Computers To Catgirls

Posted on October 27, 2025 by The Political Hat

     An old trope in science fiction B-movies has been the “brain in a jar”. But this isn’t so fictional these days with lab-grown braincells and even computers utilizing neurons for calculations. This new “wetware” is being used to replace silicone in artificial intelligence.

“Inside a lab in the picturesque Swiss town of Vevey, a scientist gives tiny clumps of human brain cells the nutrient-rich fluid they need to stay alive.

“It is vital these mini-brains remain healthy, because they are serving as rudimentary computer processors — and unlike your laptop, once they die, they cannot be rebooted.

“This new field of research, called biocomputing or ‘wetware’, aims to harness the evolutionarily honed yet still mysterious computing power of the human brain.”

     But will such brains gain consciousness?

“All the scientists AFP spoke to dismissed the idea that these tiny balls of cells in petri dishes were at risk of developing anything resembling consciousness.

“…

“However much about our brains, including how they create consciousness, remains a mystery.

“That is why Ward-Cherrier hopes that — beyond computer processing — biocomputing will ultimately reveal more about how our brains work.

“Back in the lab, Jordan opens the door of what looks like a big fridge containing 16 brain organoids in a tangle of tubes.

“Lines suddenly start spiking on the screen next to the incubator, indicating significant neural activity.

“The brain cells have no known way of sensing that their door has been opened, and the scientists have spent years trying to figure why this happens.”

     This means but one thing: The ability to create sentient bioroid catgirls in the lab is coming closer to reality.

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News of the Week (October 26th, 2025)

Posted on October 26, 2025 by The Political Hat

 

News of the Week for October 26th, 2025


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Firing Line Friday: A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the New Anti-Terror Bill Is Good for Americans

Posted on October 24, 2025 by The Political Hat

     In the hopes of encouraging a more civil, and illuminating, discourse, here is another episode of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line”.

     The question of whether certain measures are necessary for safety to protect out liberties or an attack on the same is nothing new. A formal debate thirty years ago over whether a proposed anti-terror bill is good for Americans was debated by William F. Buckley, Jr., Arlen Specter, Ira Glasser, Victoria Toensing, Steven Emerson, David Cole, Anthony Lewis, James J. Zogby, with moderator Michael E. Kinsley.

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Quick Takes – Nature Rights: Indigenous Ways Of Knowing At Harvard; Democrats In Wisconsin; Gaia The Corporatist

Posted on October 23, 2025 by The Political Hat

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: The more “rights” for Mother Nature, the fewer for you.

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Who needs science when you have indigenous ways of knowing? Not at Harvard you don’t.

“As part of Harvard Climate Action Week 2025, the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights convened a panel titled Human Resources: Indigenous Leadership in Protecting Water as a Fundamental Right. The discussion, moderated by Faculty Director Mathias Risse, brought together three inspiring Indigenous leaders: Bryan BainBridge, CEO of the Great Lakes Intertribal Council Inc.; Charitie Ropati, water engineer and climate adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General; and Dr. Kelsey Leonard, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of the Environment at the University of Waterloo. Together, they explored how Indigenous knowledge, law, and lived practice shape the fight for water security in an era of climate disruption.

“Risse opened the session by situating water within the human rights framework. ‘You need a stable climate and a healthy environment for any kind of human rights to be exercisable,’ he said. He reminded the audience that the right to safe drinking water, recognized by the UN in 2010, and the more recent acknowledgment of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment represent important progress. Yet he also noted the limits of these frameworks, which often treat the environment as something external to humanity, existing for human use. Indigenous perspectives, he emphasized, challenge this division by recognizing water ‘among our relations, among the greater nature into which we are all embedded.’

“…

“[J]ustice must extend beyond human beings. “Justice is not something solely for humans, but justice for all living beings,” she said. Leonard described the growing global movement to recognize the inherent rights of rivers and waters—an approach already embraced by Indigenous legal systems for millennia. Examples include the Menominee River (recognized by the Menominee Nation), the Whanganui River in New Zealand, and the Klamath River in California. Such recognition, she argued, allows ecosystems not only to survive but to thrive.”

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Queering The European Union

Posted on October 22, 2025 by The Political Hat

     Perhaps becoming more like Europe and embracing their modern degeneration of “Western Civilization” may not be such a good idea if you aren’t down with elevating “LGBTIQ+” people to “more equal than others” status. Case in point is the European Commission’s “LGBTIQ+ equality strategy 2026 – 2030”.

“The strategy aims to mobilise a collective commitment across all levels of governance to safeguard fun-damental rights and the values of equality and non-discrimination, enshrined in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and binding on all Member States as primary EU law. It also sets a framework that requires active engagement and cooperation from the European Parliament, Council, Member States, and civil society, to ensure its successful implementation.

“Implementation   of this strategy   will follow a   dual approach of   targeted measures and   strengthened equality mainstreaming across different policy areas. This strategy, as its predecessor, will use intersec-tionality as a cross-cutting principle. It will address how the combination of sexual orientation, gender iden-tity/expression and sex characteristics with other personal characteristics or identities, such as sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability and age, contributes to unique experiences of discrimination. In this way, it complements existing and upcoming EU initiatives to promote equality for all(8). Furthermore, the strategy takes into account how geographic isolation can further compound these situations of vulnerability.”

     Let’s look at some of these “strategic objectives”.

“Trans, non-binary and intersex people also continue to face severe violations of their bodily autonomy: some EU Member States still impose surgical or medical intervention requirements for legal gender recogni-tion.

“…

“To help Member   States ban conversion   practices, the Commission   will publish a   study analysing the nature, prevalence and impact of these practices on LGBTIQ+ people. To facilitate coordinated action, the Commission will also promote structured dialogue on the topic, in particular through the expert group on LGBTIQ+ equality, under the High-Level Group on non-discrimination, equality, and diversity.”

     This is basically California’s ban “conversion therapy” while also declaring self-mutilation to be a human right.

“In 2021, the Commission proposed that the Council decides to include hate speech and hate crime in the list of ‘EU crimes’ under Article 83(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Such Council Decision would provide the legal basis for secondary legislation that harmonises criminal law definitions of hate offences on grounds not currently provided for under relevant EU law.

Given the absence of progress on such a Council Decision, the Commission is considering a legislative ini-tiative based on the existing areas of crime covered by Article 83(1) of TFEU to harmonise the definition of hate offences committed online. A comprehensive definition of hate offences at EU level was also one of the key recommendations adopted by those participating in the 2024 European Citizens Panel on tackling hatred in society. The Commission is committed to following up these recommendations.”

     Restrictions on free speech to the point of criminalization and targeted action? No stranger to the Europeans!

“LGBTIQ+ youth often face multiple forms of   discrimination, experience prejudice,   hate crimes and   are particularly vulnerable   to sexual abuse”

     Yup, they’re goin’ after the kids.

“It encourages Member States to ensure that all children, in all their diversity, can enjoy the same rights of access to and benefit from protection across all of their territories. All children are to be protected, supported and empowered by promoting inclusive, coordinated and systemic approaches within national child protection systems and responding to the specific vulnerabilities.”

     Remember, these children are being given the same “right” to bodily mutilate themselves as adults.   It also gives them the same right to sexual freedom and expression as adults.

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The Eschaton Is Always But One Immanentization Away

Posted on October 21, 2025 by The Political Hat

     There is a utopian mirror-universe version of Hobbes that channels Rousseau. The default is utopia and we’d have it if only evil forces were gone.   When this utopia isn’t achieved, blame must be placed just as the Soviets did with “wreckers” and Kulaks (or Nazis with Jews). James Lindsay notes as much, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.

Why totalitarianism always produces mass murders:

The belief in any totalitarian system is that there is some “enemy” that holds back society. Once that enemy is destroyed and purged, society will flourish, or so the cult belief goes.

That doesn’t happen, though, because the “enemy” isn’t actually the cause of the problem, and purging the “enemy” doesn’t build society.

The power, by then vested in the totalitarian state, still operating on the belief that the “enemy” is the problem, always insists that the lack of prosperity is due to the “enemy” remaining, but in hiding.

That hidden “enemy” must then be found and purged. This also fixes nothing and usually starts making things much worse, and the cycle repeats until collapse.

It only works this way every time.

     This also leads to the justification where the purge or punishment justifies itself. If you are the “good” and they are the “evil”, then it is their “evil” that causes you to defend yourself and your goodness. It doesn’t matter if you can point to any actual reason or brook any defense they may pose. That you crushed them is the only proof you need that you are justified.   The punishment is its own justification.

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