I. How the Kakistocracy Became a Quackistocracy Corruption is a germ’s best friend Paul Krugman, Feb 17, 2026

Childhood vaccination is one of public policy’s greatest success stories. People who view the 1950s through rose-colored glasses, seeing them as an era of American greatness, miss many ways in which life was much worse then than now, ranging from gross racism and sexism to high poverty rates among the elderly.

One often-overlooked feature of the “good old days” was that many children contracted, and some died from, infectious diseases that have now been almost eliminated — or had been almost eliminated, until today’s right-wing anti-vaccine agitators set the stage for their comeback.

In many ways, the Trump administration’s hostility to vaccines is similar to its hostility to clean energy.

Both policy swerves will kill Americans. If Trumpists succeed in forcing the U.S. to burn more coal, thousands will die from air pollution.

Only a year into the Trump 47 administration, there is already a resurgence in almost conquered diseases due to the anti-vax MAGA crusade.

Both of these sudden policy reversals are economically destructive: A 2024 report from the Centers for Disease Control estimated that each dollar spent on childhood vaccination has saved approximately $11 in societal costs.

Moreover, the Trumpists aren’t content with just cutting off federal funding — they’re determined to stop anyone else from doing the right thing.

The Trump administration has imposed a blockade on privately funded wind and solar projects, while RFK Jr.’s allies are pushing to prevent states from implementing childhood vaccine mandates.

And the damage from the assault on vaccines continues to widen. Last week the Food and Drug Administration refused to review Moderna’s new mRNA-based flu vaccine.

They didn’t reject it based on evidence; they wouldn’t even look at it, in line with RFK Jr.’s evidence-free, dogmatic assertion that mRNA technology, which gave us Covid vaccines, is useless and harmful. Pharmaceutical companies, understandably, are retreating from vaccine development.

The motivations behind the crusade against clean energy and the crusade against vaccines are also similar. The conspiracy-theorizing hostility to science and expertise in general that underpins both movements also predisposes people to become right-wing extremists, which means that their movements are now in power. The headline on a 2023 article in The Guardian captured this perfectly: “ ‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie’: Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline.”

Last but by no means least, in both cases it’s crucial to follow the money.

It may seem strange to think of the wellness industry as a corrupt and corrupting force comparable to the fossil-fuel sector. But wellness is big business. McKinsey estimates that U.S. spending on wellness is running at around $500 billion a year, while spending on nutritional supplements alone was close to $70 billion last year.

And sellers of nutritional supplements, unlike companies selling pharmaceuticals, are effectively allowed to make false, outlandish claims about what their products do. Here’s how the National Institutes of Health summarized the law:

Dietary supplement labels may include certain types of health-related claims. Manufacturers are permitted to say, for example, that a supplement promotes health or supports a body part or function (like heart health or the immune system). These claims must be followed by the words, “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

In other words, it’s OK to peddle snake oil with false medical claims as long as you mumble some content-freeboilerplate.

And where do the snake-oil salesmen peddle their wares? Largely on right-wing media. After all, that’s where they can find customers who have the right mix of anti-intellectualism and disdain for experts. And the snake-oil purveyors are, in turn, a key part of the extreme right’s financial ecosystem.

I wrote about this almost five years ago. The relationship between quack medicine and right-wing extremism has a long history. As the historian Rick Perlstein has documented, extremists have been marketing medical snake oil, and snake oil purveyors have been financially supporting extremism, since the days when misinformation had to be disseminated through paper newsletters. This mutually beneficial relationship continued through the eras of talk radio, cable TV, and now podcasts.

But now we have entered a new era. As many observers have noted, the Trump administration is a kakistocracy: rule by the worst. A history of personal corruption is no longer a bar to high office — it’s practically a requirement.

Under Trump 47, people who have enriched themselves by peddling medical misinformation are no longer just influencing policymakers. They have become policymakers. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who appears to have made millions in salary and book royalties thanks to his anti-vaccine screeds, is now the secretary of health and human services. Dr. Oz is running Medicare and Medicaid.

In short, the kakistocracy is also a quackistocracy.

And the reign of the quacks will condemn thousands, perhaps millions of Americans — many of them children — to gratuitous illness and in some cases death.

In addition to attempts to send America’s medicines back into the dark ages by promoting quack cures and stopping real cures, the right wing has tried to destroy healthcare insurance for millions.

The Affordable Care Act is all but gone, so more millions of Americans will do without healthcare — and die. And then, incredibly, it gets even worse.

EPA Rollback End of an Era For Autos. US becomes outlier, no ‘emission standards of any meaning’ left By Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times

The momentous end to the federal government’s legal authority to fight climate change makes it official. The United States will essentially have no laws on the books that enforce how efficient America’s passenger cars and trucks should be.

That’s the practical result of the Trump administration’s yearlong parade of regulatory rollbacks, capped Thursday by its killing of the “endangerment finding,” the scientific determination that required the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases because of the threat to human health.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” said Margo Oge, who served as the EPA’s top vehicle emissions regulator under three presidents and has since advised both automakers and environmental groups.

“Nothing. Zero,” she added. “Not many countries have zero.”

Transportation is the largest single source of greenhouse gases in the United States.

Car buyers could still vote with their wallets, demanding more fuel-efficient cars.

California has vowed to sue to maintain stricter standards.

And the Department of Transportation still regulates fuel economy under rules meant to conserve oil.

But last year, the Trump administration proposed weakening the fuel economy standards to largely irrelevant levels. The Republican-controlled Congress also set civil penalties for violations at $0, essentially making them voluntary for automakers. In addition, Congress last year blocked California’s clean-car rules.

The bottom line is that the U.S. is set to stand apart from most of the world’s industrialized nations, which have mandatory fuel-economy or greenhouse-gas tailpipe-emissions rules. 

The Biden administration sought to tighten emissions limits to encourage automakers to sell more nonpolluting electric vehicles. The Trump administration’s elimination of the endangerment finding is expected to face fierce legal challenges from environmental groups and others.

The endangerment finding was a 2009 scientific conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to Americans’ health and welfare. It provided the foundation for federal regulations that limit carbon dioxide, methane, and other pollutants, including those from cars.

If the EPA’s decision holds, it could increase the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10% over the next 30 years, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary driver of global climate change, which in turn intensifies heat waves, drought, hurricanes, and floods while melting glaciers and causing sea levels to rise.

It’s unclear whether the U.S. automotive industry will ultimately benefit from the elimination of emissions and fuel-efficiency regulations. The move could leave American automakers even more dominated by gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, experts said, as China and other nations continue to shift toward cleaner electric cars.

That could leave them at a competitive disadvantage in the coming years. “Our automakers are not going to survive,” Oge predicted.

President Donald Trump has swung back and forth on his opinion of electric vehicles. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he said electric cars would “kill” America’s auto industry. But he appeared to at least temporarily soften his stance at the urging of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and his one-time close adviser. In March, Trump said he would buy a Tesla.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse government for America’s future than the current, ultra-right-wing, Trumpian group of ignorant, dishonest, anti-truth, anti-science savages.

And did I mention the cruel, economy-damaging, inhuman Trumpian Nazi deportation strategy that is destroying the lives of millions of good, honest families, while impeding America’seconomic growth?

And what about punishing our best schools, like Harvard, for insisting on teaching the truth about slavery, bigotry, and sexism in America?

The right-wing bookburners are on the loose there, too, missing only white sheets and hoods.

The crucial question is whether Americans are smart enough to remove these traitors in the upcoming elections, or if we will continue our decline into third-world nation status, ala Russia.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

CONSCIOUSNESS

Regular readers of this blog know I have written many times about consciousness, the most recent post being, “If you can’t measure it, is it science? One more word on consciousness.”

I fundamentally reject the idea that consciousness is an undefinable, intuitive concept that we cannot observe through our senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell—yet we assume it exists simply because we feel it does. Perhaps the article mentioned above should be titled, “If you can’t define it, is it really science?”

In the October 25, 2025 issue of New Scientist magazine article titled “A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications,” Robert Lawrence Kuhn provides dozens of different definitions, as a very tiny step above having no definitions at all.

Kuhn’s article discusses how philosopher David Chalmers famously defined the central challenge of explaining consciousness—accounting for “qualia,” the richly experienced interior aspects of perception and cognitive awareness—by introducing the memorable phrase, “the hard problem.”

It’s considered a “hard problem” because no one fully understands its nature, origin, existence, or how to measure it — a genuinely challenging issue, and perhaps a misguided one as well. This perspective makes an unfounded assumption that consciousness is solely a function of the brain, typically a human brain, which elevates humans to a godlike status above all other creatures and entities.

Isn’t it interesting that humans often consider themselves superior, despite the fact that many living entities, as well as non-living ones, possess remarkable abilities that we do not? For example, the ocean quahog can live for up to 500 years, glass sponges can survive for thousands of years, and the immortal jellyfish can potentially live indefinitely.

The bar-tailed godwit flies from Alaska to New Zealand or Australia, 800 miles without landing. The arctic tern migrates between the Arctic and Antarctic each year.

They navigate using magnetic sensing, the sun, stars, and landmarks as a compass, wind and atmospheric pressure cues, and possibly smell. Can you do that?

A bloodhound can smell a teaspoon of sugar dissolved in two Olympic swimming pools and detect where someone walked hours or days earlier. Polar bears can smell seals through 3 feet of snow. Sharks detect chemical gradients over long distances and combine olfactory cues with electrical sensing of prey.

Male moths can detect single molecules of female pheromones. Given their powerful sensing abilities, is it likely that these animals do not possess qualia, the subjective, first-person experience of sensations?

Qualia come in various forms: Physicalism asserts that qualia are entirely brain processes. Dualism posits that qualia are non-physical. Illusionism argues that qualia feel real but are cognitive illusions. Panpsychism suggests that qualia exist to some extent everywhere. The list goes on.

It’s not to suggest that qualia are essential for consciousness. Rather, they serve as a means for us to distinguish ourselves from “lower” entities. For example, when we observe a spider weaving a new web, amidst unfamiliar objects, moved by wind and rain, we may wonder if it could perform such a task without its own qualia.

Those who argue that qualia are essential to consciousness often reference the famous thought experiment known as “Mary the color scientist.”

In this scenario, Mary knows everything there is to know about the physics of color but has spent he r entire life in a black-and-white room. When she finally sees red for the first time, does she gain new knowledge? If she does, this suggests that qualia exist independently of physical knowledge.

This raises the question: if qualia are tied to emotions, does that mean other creatures do not experience emotions? And what are emotions if not coordinated brain–body response patterns triggered by internal or external stimuli that help an organism evaluate situations and guide behavior (i.e., the consciousness all entities have)

Every discussion of consciousness must devolve to three questions: 

1. Is this conscious?
2. Why or why not?
3. If it is conscious, how conscious is it? That is, how is consciousness measured?

Then we provide a list to which we apply the three questions above.

1. An awake, adult human
2. A sleeping human
3. An “unconscious” human
4. A  newborn human
5. A human fetus
6. A brain-dead living human
7. A corpse
8. A chimpanzee
9. A dog
10. A bee
11. An ant
12. A tree
13. A bacterium
14. A virus
15. An atom
16. A rock
17. A flame
18. A cloud
19. The earth
20. The universe 

How would you answer the three questions for each item on the list?

When you try to apply various definitions of consciousness to that list, you may find yourself feeling completely confused as you struggle to justify your choices. However, this becomes much simpler if you accept the following definition: Consciousness is… (Before I offer the answer, please read on.)

Philosopher Philip Goff seems to agree with my view that consciousness is a real, measurable physical phenomenon, although I may have extended the idea further than he has. Below are excerpts from his article in Scientific American Magazine:

Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about “panpsychism” By Gareth Cook, March 2020 Issue

One of science’s most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from?

Actually, I suggest that the question is, “What is consciousness?” 

In her Scientific American article, Allison Parshall quotes Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in England:

“There’s still disagreement about how to define [consciousness], whether it exists or not, whether a science of consciousness is really possible or not, whether we’ll be able to say anything about consciousness in unusual situations like [artificial intelligence],” Seth says. 

Parshall appears to believe that consciousness occurs solely in the brain, likely the human brain, and is somehow connected to a concept called “sentience.”

In his most recent book, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher Philip Goff considers a radical perspective: What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but instead is a quality inherent to all matter?

It is a theory known as panpsychism. He answered questions from former longtime Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cook: Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?

Goff: In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence it exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history.

According to panpsychism, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious.

Here is where he gets into a bit of trouble, because he immediately contradicts himself:

The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience, and the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.

Electrons and quarks have some degree of consciousness (I agree), but not everything is conscious? Seems odd.

I should clarify that by “consciousness,” I don’t mean self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. I simply mean “experience”: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience.

“Consciousness is the rate at which an entity converts all stimuli—both external (light, sound, chemicals) and internal (hunger pangs, pain signals, homeostatic alerts)—into responses per unit of time.”

The shorthand version is: Consciousness is the response to stimuli. Since everything responds to stimuli, everything, from a quark to the entire universe, is conscious by a measurable amount.

Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so, mice less so again. As we move to simpler forms of life, we find simpler forms of experience.

Perhaps at some point the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having unimaginably simple forms of experience.

Consciousness never disappears because the response to stimuli never does.

Just as he is grasping the solution, Goff hesitates and begins to discuss “intrinsic nature,” a vague concept that we sense but cannot quite identify, much less measure.

What does panpsychism seek to bring to physics?

Philosophers of science have realized that physical science, for all its richness, is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter, what it does. Physics tells us, for example, that matter has mass and charge.

These properties are completely defined in terms of behavior—things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration.

But those are exactly what demonstrate consciousness, even awareness, of the stimuli.

Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is in and of itself.

Do you foresee a scenario in which panpsychism can be tested?

You can’t look inside an electron to see whether or not it is conscious, just as you can’t look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists only because we are conscious.

We have now drifted into the realm of the supernatural and spiritual. We know consciousness exists because all things respond to stimuli and must therefore be aware of those stimuli.

Neuroscientists correlate certain kinds of brain activity with certain kinds of experience. We now know which kinds of brain activity are associated with feelings of hunger, pleasure, pain, and so on.

This is really important information, but what we ultimately want from a science of consciousness is an explanation of those correlations.

Why is a particular feeling correlated with a particular pattern of brain activity? As soon as you start to answer this question, you move beyond what can be, strictly speaking, tested, simply because consciousness is unobservable. We have to turn to philosophy.

Consciousness is observable. By providing stimuli, one can observe the response. Goff, having understood this truth, has now taken defeat from the jaws of victory and joined the ranks of dreamers.

Science gives us correlations between brain activity and experience. We then have to find the philosophical theory that best explains those correlations. In my view, the only theory that holds up to scrutiny is panpsychism.

Agreed, so long as one doesn’t surrender to mysticism. 

As we said in a previous post, consciousness is a real, physical thing that can be measured:

1. Entity: Any Bound System: A human, worm, tree, thermostat, stone or colony of ants—all are “entities.” Each has a boundary (skin, bark, casing) inside of which stimuli are converted into internal changes.

2. Stimulus Translation = Information Inflow: Every interaction (light, chemical gradient, pressure wave) is translated inside and/or on that boundary into a change in the system’s state. We quantify that translation as bits of information entering the system.

3. Internal Processing = Information Transformation: Once inside, that information is processed (neurons fire, cells shift biochemistry, circuits reroute, temperature or electrical charge changes). This step can also be measured in bits, i.e., how many bits are combined, compared, or stored.

4. Response = Information Outflow / Action: The system responds by changing — moving, secreting chemicals, growing roots, or updating an internal variable. That response itself can be translated back into bits (for instance, the choice among different motor programs, metabolic pathways, or output signals).                                       Stronger stimulus —> Stronger response—> More response bits. 

The Consciousness Measure: Total response bits per second by the entity: For example, a human, having trillions of neural and body-wide events, might provide trillions of response bits.

A worm might provide millions of response bits. A tree, with liquid responses, growth decisions, and chemical signaling, might provide millions of response bits, and a stone, with thermal fluctuations, physical erosion, and quantum state changes, might provide thousands of response bits.

Thus, we have a measure of consciousness that doesn’t rely on a “brain” or neural tissue, just on measurable state changes. You can add up all forms of processing and responses in any system. Entities can be ranked by their raw information-processing speed.

Consciousness can be measured, compared, and ranked, not in vague or romantic terms, and not as art,  but as science.

And that brings us to free will. What is it, and does it even exist?

FREE WILL 

We discuss free will here, “The fallacy of free will,” here. “Everyday Illusions and Their Relationship to Free Will,”  An interesting take on “Free Will vs Will Power”, and ” For those who still believe in free will, and “Read about the strange relationship between opposites: Consciousness and free will,” and “More about non-existent free will.” And elsewhere.

We have concluded that “free will”, like consciousness, is an illusion we create to give ourselves purpose and control over a universe that seems to work against our continued existence.

Research shows that gut microbes produce or affect the availability of neuroactive chemicals (e.g., serotonin, GABA, dopamine) that influence mood and emotional states. Studies have found correlations between microbiome composition and personality traits such as sociability or neuroticism.

Experimentally altering the gut microbiome can affect social decision-making in economic games, suggesting a causal influence on behavior.

Functional connections exist in animals in which gut bacteria transfer can alter anxiety-like behaviors, and early studies in humans have shown changes in emotional brain responses after altering gut bacteria.

Does that sound like free will? And that’s just gut bacteria. Throw in all the sensory effects — sounds, touch, taste, temperature, pain, odors, sickness, sleep, companionship and then add all our history, very little of which we control. 

Functional connections in animals demonstrate that changes in gut bacteria can alter anxiety-like behaviors. Additionally, early studies in humans have indicated that modifying gut bacteria leads to changes in emotional brain responses.

Many articles on this topic talk about how the microbiome affects mood, cognition, personality, and even social decisions or beliefs:

The secret signals our organs send to repair tissues and slow ageing

Your organs are constantly talking to each other in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Tapping into these communication networks is opening up radical new ways to boost health. 

By Claire Ainsworth, 2 February 2026, New Scientist Magazine.

Biologist Chunyi Li, noticed something odd that happened when deer regrew their antlers each year. This regrowth coincided with healthier-looking animals that healed their wounds faster and had less scarring, leading him to suspect that the regenerating antlers somehow promoted regeneration in the rest of the body.

Li’s hunch was confirmed last year when he and his colleagues at Changchun Sci-Tech University in Jilin, China, found that growing antlers release signals that prompt other parts of the body to shift into regenerative wound-healing mode – evidence of a previously hidden communication network that connects distant organs.

Different parts of your body communicate with each other, listen to one another, and take action based on their interactions. This seems to align with the definition of consciousness. 

When I think about free will, I reflect on how our actions are shaped by everything we’ve experienced throughout our lives. This includes the influence of various chemicals, our past decisions, illnesses, pain, emotions, and countless experiences—billions and trillions of stimuli and memories, whether accurate or not.

I envision a tall, thin, and unstable tower of historical influences, with my decision today representing the very top. Every stone added or removed from this tower impacts the tip; every emotion, belief, and action is influenced by it.

You, your organs, your dog, ChatGPT, and I all have two things in common.

1. We all transform stimuli—external (light, sound, chemicals) and internal (hunger pangs, pain signals, homeostatic alerts)—into responses and therefore are conscious.
2. Everything we do, believe, or feel is based on structure, programming, and/or input over which we have no control, and therefore, we have no free will.

Those two points are true of every entity in the universe, and the universe itself.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell

Search #monetarysovereignty

Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell;

MUCK RACK: https://muckrack.com/rodger-malcolm-mitchell;

https://www.academia.edu/

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A Government’s Sole Purpose is to Improve and Protect The People’s Lives.

REIGNTY

Having put Trump’s name on every street, building, and concert hall, the MAGAs have become desperate to find new ways to suck up to their hero. They have requested design suggestions for airport bathrooms. Here are a few of the suggestions, with more pouring in each day:

“THE PALATIAL”

“THE SIMPLE AND TASTEFUL”

“THE SPLASHY”

“THE BANKER”

“THE BIG BROTHER”

“THE RIGHT BEHIND” SITTER

“THE DOWN HERE” SITTER

WAIT. HOW DID THIS GET IN THERE?