Socrates & War | Armstrong Economics

QUESTION: Marty, Socrates has been targeting the first week of January and the month of January as a panic cycle in war. How did you ever create a computer that can predict such events well in advance?

MK

ANSWER: Look. I have stated many times, this was never my intent. Some of humanity’s most important breakthroughs happened completely by accident—the kind of discoveries where someone spills something, leaves a mess, or makes a mistake and ends up changing the world.

Probably the most famous was the discovery of Penicillin. Alexander Fleming went on vacation in 1928 and left a dirty petri dish in the lab sink. When he returned, bacteria had grown everywhere except where mold had formed. That observation revolutionized medicine and has saved countless millions of lives.

Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity in 1896 when he opened a drawer. He’d left uranium on top of a photographic plate with wooden crosses between them during overcast weather, and when he developed the plates, the crosses appeared—the uranium was exposing them without sunlight.  This accidental finding earned him half a Nobel Prize and led to Marie Curie’s groundbreaking work.

Some accidents were downright messy. Spencer Silver at 3M was trying to create a super-strong adhesive in 1968 but accidentally made a weak one that could be easily removed—it seemed like a failure until someone realized it was perfect for Post-it Notes

The list goes on an on. But while this maybe a discovery of great importance, it has also been my curse. They have done everything to me from trying to kill me to throwing me in civil contempt without any explanation completely against everything in the Constitution denied a trial under the pretense it was “civil” and not “criminal.”

Socrates was my inspiration. I paid my respects to the jail cell of Athens where they imprisoned Socrates to also standing by his convictions. His fearlessness in the face of death is one of the most powerful themes in the Apology. His reasoning is remarkable.

Socrates argued that when performing an action, the only relevant question is whether one is acting justly or not—considerations of life and death are selfish and unimportant next to considerations of justice. He compared his philosophical calling to a soldier’s duty: just as a good soldier shouldn’t abandon his post in battle even at the risk of death, he couldn’t abandon his post as a truth-seeker.

His central argument was that fear of death is just another kind of false wisdom, of claiming to know the unknowable. Since no one actually knows what death is, fearing it presumes knowledge we don’t have. Socrates then offered what’s essentially a win-win scenario. Death is either a state of nothingness—like a peaceful, restful sleep. How many of us have such a wonderful night not to be awakened by a dream. Or it’s a migration of the soul where he could meet all our great friends and figures from the past to engage in a conversation about wisdom. Either way, he saw no reason to fear it.

When the jury offered to let him go if he’d just stop philosophizing, Socrates refused, saying he would rather die than give up participating in philosophical inquiry, claiming that the unexamined life is not worth living.

This was my inspiration. Once you lose the fear of death, there is nothing left for them threaten you with. When they threatened my family, I wrote to Dorthy Heyl of the SEC and threatened to commit suicide to save my family, but I promised I would not go as quietly as they forced Stephen Schiffer is a previous SEC case taking his lawyers away and their threats led him to comit suicide.

My philosophy was forged by their ruthless corruption. Federal prosecutors used threats against Michael Milken’s family members to pressure him into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit. They inverted insider trading from a director selling stock ahead of declaring bankruptcy to the fraud being the public did not have the same information to profit from. As I wrote, there is no such crime defined by Congress. This is a bureaucratic rule when laws are supposed to be created by the PEOPLE, not rule by bureaucrats.

We live in tyranny. There is no rule of law. Judges do as order by the government which is why the conviction rate is federal cases is virtually 99% whereas Adolf Hitler’s conviction rate in the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), a political tribunal, had devastating statistics between 1937 and 1945. The court heard over 14,000 cases and condemned over 5,000 people to death. That’s roughly a 36% death sentence rate overall, though the numbers grew far worse as the war progressed. Hitler’s conviction rate in general was 54%. The American justice system has outdone Hitler.

They demanded the source code even in writing. That had nothing to do with anything but political prosecution. If I turned that over, then what? Even my lawyers told me it did not matter what I turned over, they would NEVER release me. When they want something, you have no rights. The only reason they were forced to release me was when the Supreme Court ordered them to respond.