It is a folly to assume that doctors, activists or politicians who show sympathy or express agreement with your concerns have Your best interest at heart instead of Theirs. It is also a folly to assume that their idea of self interest is aligned with yours.

Governments: ‘we need more soldiers to kill one another and any non-combatants standing in the way’ in patriotically motivated defence of their local branches of our global banking cartel.

The majority of people are functionally antisocial, insofar as they are unwilling or incapable of constructing consistent arguments to support their claims. Sociality is coextensive with meaning, with the capacity to cooperate to make common sense. The majority is content with asserting their convictions and do not care how those convictions could be derived from common premises. They are concerned only with finding prejudiced support for their own prejudices.

There are two ways of interpreting an arrow in the bullseye of a target: 1) someone accomplished a perfect shot into the target, 2) someone painted the target around the arrow. The fact that the universe is improbably ‘just right’ for the emergence of consciousness assumes (1), but we can alternatively interpret the outcome as (2), as the evidence that the universe was intentionally ‘fitted’ to consciousness, which implies that the universe emerged from or with consciousness, not independently of it. Only this second interpretation avoids the circular logic of positing ‘the world as we know it’ (meaningful only in the mind, a concept) as something that exists independently of the mind, but still as that concept.

A potentially harmful medical intervention is justifiable when someone is sick (only insofar as it remedies the harm of the illness), but not when someone is healthy.

In political systems that are functionally deficient (communism/socialism), political corruption is the means of supplementing the system and making it work on the existential level. It is the inescapable shadow of the system. In political systems that are functionally sufficient (capitalism/democracy), human corruption is integrated into the system itself, normalised, legitimised.

A system that guarantees only that people ought to be treated ‘equally’ is not therefore ethical, just or right. It is possible to treat everyone equally wrongly, unjustly and unethically. In order to be right the system must treat everyone equally right.

In our time every continent, every island, every country has strategic, economic and military significance. The idea that indigenous tribes could be “decolonized”, returned to their natural state on their ancestral land and then left alone by everyone else is preposterous. “Decolonisation” is just a euphemism for colonisation by a new master.

The issue with Bitcoin is rather obvious: why invest in “digital gold” when you can buy real gold, which is also easier to use than Bitcoin. The idea of spending as much of good money on a digital token as the price of one kilogram of gold is mind boggling.

The official reality became Where’s Wally; contrived to look informative to the ignorant and to look contrived to the informed.