Author Archives: thezman

February Grab Bag

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Maybe it is just me, but there seems to be an edge to everything of late, like everyone is a little madder about things than normal. I feel it in myself, which is why I have decided to decouple from the news entirely next week. I suspect it has something to do with the Jusse Smollett story. Not in a direct way, as no one is surprised by the result. Well, the media is pretending to be surprised, but no one else. This is one of those events where there is the above the waterline story and a below the waterline story.

The above the waterline part is the fact that everyone knew it was a hoax and the people in charge bothered to acknowledge it. Usually, these hoaxes get broomed and the only people following them are the weirdos who cater to the woke Dirt People. Without Steve Sailer, no one would know about Haven Monahan. Heck, most people still do not get the reference, or they have forgotten it, along with the whole story. That is how good the media is at controlling the minds of most Americans. Propaganda works.

The below the waterline story is that Smollett is going to get away with it. Some BoomerCons will wave around this petty charge as vindication, like they are doing with Trump’s fake wall declaration, but people on our side know better. If it had been two white guys attacking a black, they would be facing life in prison. This clown, who cost the city millions and perpetuated this blood libel against whites, will end up with probation and a boost in his career. Notice he has not been fired from his job yet.

A growing anger is the price for people becoming aware of what is happening to them, but it makes for a tense environment. A lot of CivNats are slowly realizing they have been conned, duped by people they trusted. This is not America, at least not the America with laws, rules, and equal justice. We are a lot closer to where the Russians were 40 years ago than where America was 40 years ago. That is both scary and infuriating, but that is inevitable as our people wake up from the American Dream.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

A Rambling Post About Sportsball

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If you have ever followed sportsball, the one thing you have surely noticed is that some franchises never win, while others win a lot. In America, the New York Yankees are the example of perennial winners. In English soccer, Manchester United is the club that is the example of consistent excellence. The opposite is true as well. In America, the organization best known for futility is the Cleveland Browns. It is not just that they never win anything. They find hilarious ways to lose and embarrass themselves.

The question is why? In the case of baseball, market size has always been assumed to be the main driver. With unlimited budgets for payroll and player development, the teams with deep pockets could dominate. The Yankees operate in New York. The Dodgers are in Los Angeles. Over the years, the correlation between winning and market size has been strong enough for most people to assume that is the reason. Of course, the Mets and Cubs stand out as stark exceptions, so there is more to it.

In other sports, like English soccer, the market share answer does not apply. Manchester is the thirst largest metropolitan area, behind Birmingham and London, but it is a fifth the size of London and much poorer. The dominance of Manchester is a lot like the success of the Green Bay Packers in American football. Not quite to that extreme, but Man U has had much more success than the Packers. While having a big market helps in all sports, the rules and some other factors often neutralize the advantages.

One area where this “something” else is easier to notice is in how teams hire their front office people. The reason the Cleveland Browns, for example, lose all the time is they hire stupid people to run their club. The New England Patriots, in contrast, hired a cerebral coach, paid him well and staffed their front office with smart people. They also make sure the culture of the organizations rewards the smart and punishes the stupid. When these people leave for better jobs, they often fail in their new organizations.

While it seems obvious, the reason franchises have sustained success, or failure is due mostly to their organizational IQ. This is most obvious in baseball. The Oakland A’s are credited with being the first team to employ statistics in player evaluation. Moneyball, as it is called, seeks to find the best value in the market for talent, but also the most useful players in the market. The stat-geeks have re-evaluated the stats in baseball and created new metrics to measure a player’s contribution to winning games.

What the Oakland A’s learned is they could get players that were 90% as good as the big stars, for 30% of the investment. That is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is a useful way of thinking of it. They understood that a player who walks a lot is more valuable than a guy who strikes out a lot but also hits for a high average. The former is on-base more often, so he contributes more runs than the latter. Hitting home runs is a good way to get a big contract and sell tickets, but getting on base is what counts most.

Now, all of the big clubs have armies of stat-geeks doing the moneyball thing. The Boston Red Sox have the godfather of stat geeks, Bill James, on their payroll. The use of stats has become so pervasive, it is changing the game. Managers no longer make decisions during games. Instead, they consult probability charts and select from the options the front office created before the game. It is an odd form of computer chess. Instead of humans controlling the robot pieces, it is the robots controlling the human pieces.

The fact is, winning is about avoiding error. Since the Greeks this has been understood, so why is this not a universal part of all sport? The owner of the Cleveland Browns is probably a smart guy. He is rich enough to own a sportsball team, so he may not be a genius, but he is pretty smart. Why does he not hire a team of behavior scientists to study winning and create personality models for the various jobs within the organization? He could hire people to model how the Patriots run their organization.

It does not have to be a sci-fi version of this stuff to work. The team of analysts could come up with the five facts common to all failed coaches in the Browns organization and then compare that to the least successful coaches in the game. Odds are, they will find some commonalities. Knowing what does not work, they could simply avoid hiring coaches with any of those qualities. That would not guarantee success, but maybe it eliminates embarrassing, catastrophic failure. Better is better.

Sports organizations are systems, so the tools used in system analysis should apply to sports teams, corporations, political movements and so forth. American business employs continuous improvement techniques to fine tune daily operations. Some are more committed than others and some things work better than others, but fixing small things tends to have the greatest impact on performance. This is true in most systems. Fixing a simple error in a line of code can greatly increase system performance.

Despite this well-known reality, human organizations are the least likely to embrace empirical techniques. Politics is the most obvious. If the parties simply require an IQ test for party membership, they would save themselves a lot of trouble. Sports franchises tinker around with this stuff, but they have never embraced it. Even big corporations seem to drift from a focus on incremental improvement in various types of magic. Google is now a cult of sorts, which is how they make blunders like this one.

The point of this post, if there is one, is that there is something that prevents otherwise smart people, like sportsball owners, from using well known techniques to improve their organizations. The result is a repetition of unforced errors. Sportsball owners are hyper-competitive, yet they are often allergic to considering concepts and tactics that work in other organizations. It is only after an innovator proves it can work that we see the rest jump on board and start aping what worked for them.

An even stranger thing about sportsball teams is that this institutional blundering attracts owners prone to the same sort of blundering. These bad franchises come up for sale and the new owners turn out to be as accident-prone as the previous ones. In fact, whole cities seem to attract losers in this area. Again, Cleveland is a great example. All of their sportsball teams are terrible and the owners are some of the worst in sport. Maybe there really is something in the water there that causes this.

Anyway, it is something reformers and rebels should probably consider when plotting how to attack the Death Star of modern culture. Maybe that silly plot device from Star Wars has a grain of truth to it. The bad guys left the back door to the Death Star open, because in the end, they were the Cleveland Browns of space villains. Perhaps all villains leave a window open at some point. Maybe size makes organizations stupid and then exploitable to those with subversion on their mind.

Spooky Stuff

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One of the things that make dystopian science fiction fun for the audience is the understanding that it will never happen. It could happen, but only a long time in the future, when everyone seeing the warning is dead. Worst case, the “boot stomping the face” stuff happens when you are ready to kick the bucket, so you’ll live to see it, but never really have to experience it. This adds a campfire quality to it, allowing the creator to lay it on a bit thick to make his points. Horror movies often work the same way.

The same is true about doom and gloom in public commentary. The market predictor guy on TV, who thinks the market is about to tank, is not getting much traction if he claims a mild downturn is coming. If he warns that fire will rain down from the sky and Lucifer will rise from his pit somewhere on Wall Street, then people pay attention. The people consuming such content do so with an understanding that it is not really going to be that bad, but it is kind of fun pretending it will be as you stock up on MRE’s.

You see this with the bogeyman of AI and his posse called automation. Any day now, so the story goes, the algorithms will come alive, enslave the population, and replace every job with a robot. What usually follows, depending upon your inclination, is either the libertarian fantasy of a world where everyone smokes weed and plays hacky-sack or the dystopian sci-fi vision of a world like The Matrix or The Terminator. Most people assume it will not happen, but it is fun to pretend it will happen.

Of course, the one thing that rarely gets mentioned is that the future is never the nightmare people imagine. We know this because we are currently living in the nightmarish future imagined in the past. Orwell’s 1984 was nothing like our 1984. In fact, our 1984 was a lot better than Orwell’s 1948. London was still in rubble at the point. Food was still limited, and general living standards were poor. Relative to life in 1984 London, life in 1948 was about as bad as Orwell imagined forty years or so on the future.

Probably the most relevant test case we have for this is 20th century Marxism. China and Russia underwent massive social experiments attempting to usher in the Marxist future of a worker’s paradise. At times, life was pretty awful for people in both countries. The purges of Stalin and the Cultural Revolution of Mao were dystopian nightmares for the people. Yet, most buggered their way through it. Their present was not our future. Instead, our future and theirs were our present, which is not so bad.

Still, the example of China and Russia show that even though things tend to work out for humanity in the long run, the short run can be quite terrible. It means were probably better off worrying about what is right in front of us, rather than what lies far down the road. A good example is what comes from behavioral science and genetics. The former is about establishing statistical patterns of human behavior in order to model it. The latter is about finding genes to explain the features of life, including human life.

On the behavioral side, China’s social credit system is a great example of the spooky future stuff happening in the present. The same tools China is using are now being applied to social media and public discourse in the West. The British cop sent out to investigate an offensive tweet is applying the same techniques China is using when they throttle internet access of dissidents. It is a combination of shame and reduced access, intended to alter the behavior of people viewed as disruptive.

The Twitter cops are not just people sitting around reading tweets. The social media giants are using techniques from behavioral science to narrow the focus to those most likely to be a problem. China’s social credit system works the same way. It is not predictive in the narrow sense, but more of a profile. When the cumulative score of someone’s activity reaches a certain point, they gets closer examination. The social media giants use this same approach to throttle users with the so-called shadow ban.

On the genetics side of the dystopian present, this will become increasingly common as the science gets better and cheaper. Future parents will soon have a chance to increase their child’s cognitive score, so to speak, rather than leave it to chance. What parent would not want their child to be smart or tall or handsome? If science can increase the odds of that happening, people will embrace it. If science could tell you which fertilized egg was most likely to be the best, which would you choose?

Of course, Stephen Hsu cannot guarantee your child will be a genius. In fact, he cannot guarantee anything as no such guarantee is enforceable. His clients will not know if his technique worked until their child is well along in development and no one is going to enforce a return policy for children. That said, it is not about guarantees. It is about probability. What these techniques offer are better odds of getting the best genetic mix from the parents. It is like moving closer to the target at the shooting range.

If that’s not enough, genetic research is slowing moving toward a time when minor corrections after the fact are possible. It is unlikely, highly unlikely, that science will ever be able to rewrite the code of a living human, but they are starting to tinker. These techniques will no doubt be applied to artificial insemination, in combination with what Stephen Hsu is offering. Pick the best embryo, make a few tweaks and the odds of your child being a combination of the best his parents contributed goes way up.

None of this is part of some dystopian future. It is spooky stuff happening right now. The most worrisome is probably the stuff coming from behavior science, as it allows for that dystopian future, where the authorities act as puppet masters. The genetics stuff is less spooky and less worrisome for now. Still, the point is we have plenty of monsters walking around in the present. If we want to be worried or have a reason to put away some more MRE’s, you just have to spend time on Twitter or talk to Stephen Hsu.

The End Of Atheism

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If you are over the age of 40, perhaps a bit older, you have lived long enough to see a great fad get going, peak and then fade away completely. Lots of fads run their course in a few months, obviously, but social movements tend to build slowly and then stick around for a while, before disappearing down the memory hole. One of those fads is atheism, which had a good run in the 80’s and 90’s. It started to peter out in the 90’s, had a brief revival in the aughts, but now seems to be headed to oblivion.

The so-called “new atheists” are not ready to throw in the towel on their reason to exist, as it were, but that’s to be expected. Harris and Dennett moved all their chips into the middle of the table with the atheism stuff. It got them the attention they desired, so as a gambler will wear a diamond pinky ring to recall his one big score, these guys still proudly wear their atheism. All of them have moved onto other things, but they will expound upon their hatred of religion if the crowd demands it.

Of course, anytime the word “new” gets attached to something old, it means that old thing is now dead. It also means that old thing had some serious internal defect that eventually killed it. The “new right” made an appearance when it was clear Conservative Inc. was just a ruthless money racket. The previous iteration of “new right” appeared in the 70’s when everyone agreed the old right was dead. The reason “new atheism” got going is everyone agreed that regular old atheism was creepy and weird.

The central defect of atheism, old and new, is it is an entirely negative western identity and entirely dependent on Christianity. Specifically, it requires people of some status to defend Christianity and the Christian belief in the supernatural. Atheism has always been the oxpecker of mass movements. Everything about it relies on its host both tolerating it and thriving on its own. It is why atheism has had its spasms of success when Christianity in America has had a revival, as in the 80’s and the 2000’s.

Atheists will deny this, of course. They will argue, as Dennett often does, that the steep decline of Christianity is proof their arguments were superior. The reason they no longer talk about their thing is they won and their enemy is dead. The fact that there are plenty of Muslims and crackpot feminist airheads around spouting magical oogily-boogily never seems to get their attention for some reason. The only guy to venture into this area was Dawkins, but the Prog quickly reminded him who pays his bills.

That has always been the tell with atheism. Belief in something as insane as male privilege or implicit whiteness should get their attention. After all, these are not just beliefs in the supernatural, they are primitive beliefs in the supernatural. Men of the classical period had more plausible and complex beliefs than people like Amy Harmon. She is a click away from demanding human sacrifice. Yet, the new atheists were never much interest in those magical beliefs. They were too busy hounding the last Christians.

That is another tell. Atheism has always been a popular pose on the Left, because it was a useful signal. The bad whites loved their boom sticks and sky gods. The good whites rejected all those crazy beliefs. It is why atheists tended to focus on the mainstream of Christianity, like Catholics and mainline Protestant churches. Mormons were always an easy target. They avoided the Jews and black Baptists. Sure, once in while a zinger against the tribe would be tossed in, but the enemy was always white Christians.

The decline on atheism is a good example of the perils of negative identity. When you define yourself as being in opposition to someone or something, you inevitably become a slave to it. Your very existence depends on it. As the main Christian churches collapse in scandal and bizarre attempts to move Left, the enemies for atheists to attack are getting more difficult to find. Attacking Christians is like beating up a puppy. Only the severely mentally disturbed think Christians have any power today.

The other thing working against atheism is it has been mostly male. That is an interesting thing, given that the American Atheists was created by a woman in the 60’s. Then again, Madalyn Murray O’Hair was just a cat’s paw for the usual suspects. Her role was to be the point the spear in the war to decouple Christianity from American civic and cultural life. Since then, atheism has been a male thing. Given the declining status of males on the Left, particularly white males, it is no surprise that atheism is dying.

Given the state of affairs in the West and the crippling decline in the Christian churches, it is hard to see atheism having another revival. Christianity appears to morph into a private, bespoke thing in order to survive outside the Progressive orthodoxy. That makes it a worthless enemy for atheists. You can never know, of course, but it looks like public Christianity is done for. That means atheism is done for as well, unless it moves onto Judaism or Progressivism and that will never be allowed.

The Sophists

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The word “sophist” has an entirely negative connotation today, owing mostly to Plato, who had Socrates debate the sophists in his dialogue Gorgias. In that dialogue, Socrates revealed the flaws of the sophistic oratory popular in Athens. The art of persuasion was popular with the Greeks of that age, as it was the key to success in politics and law. Socrates argued that rhetoric without philosophy is just an effort to persuade for personal gain. Worse, it could justify falsehood over truth.

In ancient Greece, however, to be a sophist was something different than what we think today. They were teachers, often highly esteemed. They were hired by the wealthy to educate their children and prepare them for a public life. They also had a great deal of influence on the development of the law and political theory. Despite this, what has come down to us is a generally negative view of the sophists.  That is because we have little of their writing, but we have a lot from their critics like Plato and Aristotle.

Despite this incomplete record, we can get some sense of what the sophists were about by looking around the current age for people we could describe as philosophers for hire. We do not have men walking the streets in a himation, offering to persuade us of something for a fee, but we do have plenty of public intellectuals. The ones we see on television are not really philosophers for hire, as they work in universities, think tanks and media companies. They are not hiring themselves out on-demand.

We do have people on-line, however, who make a living selling books, videos, and public appearances, in order to support themselves. Stefan Molyneux is probably the best example, as he actually calls himself a philosopher. He’s also written a book on persuasion. Scott Adams is another guy, who has carved out a career on-line, where he offers arguments you can use on friends and family. Coincidentally, he has written a book on persuasion too. Amusingly, he claims to be a hypnotist, not a philosopher.

Molyneux and Adams are a good starting place as both are explicit in their goals, and they are both heavily invested in the personal presentation. Molyneux stands in front of a camera and talks to you as if you are two guys at a party. It is intended to relax the viewer and make him receptive. Similarly, Adams does his act from his kitchen table. The desired effect is that the viewer feels like he is sitting across from his old buddy Scott Adams, talking about the issues of the day. Relaxed people are more persuadable.

The other thing you see with both is they put that camera right up on their face, so the viewer is then up close and personal. This makes it possible to communicate with facial expressions, rather than just words. Adams puts the camera so close to his face at times it is a bit uncomfortable. His dentist does not get that close. Molyneux is more subtle and polished than Adams, owing to his theater training. He did a video touring his new studio and the sophisticated tools he uses to achieve the desired effect.

In fact, Molyneux’s performance cannot work without his exaggerated facial expressions to complement the audio. This recent video he did, addressing criticism of his book, is incomprehensible without Molyneux’s exaggerated facial tics. If you just listen to it, it sounds like gibberish. Adams is a little less reliant on the facial cues, but as you see in this recent video, he needs them to make it work. Notice the ridiculously large coffee mug he uses in the welcoming phase of his performance.

The use of props and exaggerated facial expressions is not new. Jon Stewart got rich using exaggerated irony face on Comedy Central. Without the over-the-top clown face stuff, his jokes do not work. His faces are cues to the audience.  You laugh, because you are smart and get the joke. The joke is always about how the people outside the hive are dumb and mean, unlike the people inside laughing at Jon Stewart doing exaggerated irony face, while watching clips of the bad people.

This is something Plato observed. Sophistry is a form of flattery. The sophist first establishes himself as a wise man. He then convinces you of something through his clever rhetoric. Once you agree, you become a wise man too. It is why some people reading this will react negatively to what they view as criticism of their favorite guy. The teacher becomes a projection of the student’s sense of self, therefore, any focus on or criticism of the teacher is viewed as a personal affront to the student.

What this tells us is the sophists of ancient Athens were probably very charismatic people, who had very loyal followings. Socrates could easily be hated, because his criticism of the sophists was, in effect, a criticism of Athens. It also might explain why they left little behind in the way of writing. Their presentation was mostly visual. Writing it down not only would have made it easy to analyze, but it would also not have made much sense. The scribe taking notes could not capture the facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice.

Tone of voice is another aspect we can examine. The guy Molyneux addresses in that video is someone calling himself Rationality Rules. Again, a big part of his presentation is the visual. He stands in front of a camera doing the hipster douche bag act. You will also note the over-the-top sense of urgency in his voice. He is almost pleading with the viewer to listen to him. Up-talking, emotive tones and so forth are highly effective on the millennials, so it is a persuasive tactic that compliments the rhetoric.

A fellow calling himself The Alternative Hypothesis combines the visual and the audio to create a sense of urgency. Instead of standing in front of the camera, like the other sophists on YouTube, he weaves in clips from movies and still shots from cool paintings, to complement his audio. It is extremely clever and quite effective. Seeing an excited Kevin Branagh, playing Henry V as the narrator lowers the boom on JF Gariepy, is both flattering, exhilarating and convincing. It is a very clever presentation.

Again, what we can learn about the sophists of ancient Greece, by observing their modern analogs, is that the old guys were probably quite charming. A guy like Molyneux is impossible to hate, even if you hate what he says. It is how he can be a race realist on Twitter and speak in public. The videos from The Alternative Hypothesis are a lot of fun and they are informative. Scott Adams makes people laugh with his observations and cartoons. Odds are the ancient sophists were every bit as likable and charming.

Of course, there is that old charge of speciousness and dishonestly, with regards to the sophists of ancient Athens. Any comparison between our moderns and the ancients has to address it. Our modern sophists are prone to logical fallacies, and they can be quite prickly about criticisms. We know the ancients were prone to logical fallacies and they did help condemn Socrates, so that is a useful comparison. It suggests our moderns are just as prone to placing rhetoric ahead of truth as the sophists of ancient Greece.

It also suggests that the range of quality among the ancient sophists was quite broad, and they had their good days and bad days. Scott Adams is unlikely to argue that Molyneux should drink hemlock. The Alternative Hypothesis is not going to argue that it is an advantage of his profession that a man can be considered above specialists without having to learn anything of substance. For many of our modern sophists, the truth is important, so it is fair to assume the same was true in ancient Greece.

Still, there is the nagging issue of persuasion versus truth. The one thing we know about the sophists is they thought all knowledge is opinion. Therefore, if everyone believes X to be true, then X is true. That means there can be no rational or irrational arguments, because human beliefs are situational. It is simply what people believe at any moment in time. This is why persuasion was so important to the sophists. To be correct was simply a process whereby you convinced your fellows you have the correct opinion.

This is probably a symptom of democracy and another insight we can draw by comparing our modern sophists with those of ancient Greece. In a democracy, there is no arbiter of truth other than fifty percent plus one. In a monarchy, the king is the truth, so there is no need for debate, outside of his advisers. In a theocracy, dogma is the truth, and the clergy are those who apply it to policy. What little debate required is not about the truth, but about the application of truth. Again, there is no need to persuade.

In a democracy the truth is what the majority says it is. There is no central authority to arbitrate and there is no written text that cannot be debated. The law itself becomes a source of dispute and contention in order to bring the dispute to the people for a vote between opposing opinions. Similarly, the marketplace is about winning market share by convincing customers you have the best product. There is no right product or service, just arguments and competition between them to win the crowd.

This is a good time to mention something the Persian King Cyrus the Great observed about the Greeks. Herodotus describes Cyrus’s meeting with the Spartan envoy Lacrines, who warns the Persian king against destroying a Greek city. Cyrus’s replied that he feared no people who cheated one another on the Agora. In other words, at the heart of the marketplace is a lie. The seller tries to deceive the buyer, and the buyer tries to deceive the seller. The same can be said for debate in a democracy.

This suggests sophistry is a naturally occurring product of democracy. Sophistry is to a democracy what marketing is to the free market. When there is a product to be sold, a pitch man arrives to sell it. As soon as there is the first vote, a debater arrives to plead the case, on behalf of the highest bidder. If cheating is the true currency of the market, sophistry and deception are the currency of every democracy. There is no truth in the marketplace and there is no truth in public debate. There are only equilibria.

Finally, one unmistakable feature of itinerant YouTube philosophers is they have very thin skin, taking all criticism as an offense to their honor. A big part of the YouTube philosopher world is these guys doing videos attacking one another and responding to these attacks. Part of it is attention seeking. Most likely, the ancients relied on the same tactic to get noticed. People like drama and the best sort of drama is when two people get into a heated dispute in public. Again, it is safe to assume this was true in Athens.

Another part of it though is the fact that status within the sophist community is determined by how one’s persuasion game is judged. If other sophists are picking you apart, you have to defend yourself, as they are literally trying to harm you. Criticizing the argument is the same as criticizing the man. When rhetoric is the coin of the realm, someone appearing to diminish your rhetoric game is stealing money from your pocket. It is why a Molyneux feels the need to respond to a two-year-old video ripping his book.

Spengler observed that there is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end of every Culture. The one at the beginning is the flowering of that culture that comes from the work of those who built it. The one at the end is more like a funeral march for the death of those who made the culture possible. The sophist flourished in the golden age of Greece. It was the full becoming of Greek culture. Perhaps we are experiencing something similar. Our explosion of sophistry is our denouement as well.

Revolt of the Machines

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One of the great unanswered questions in science is how the first building blocks of life arose from the primordial soup of early earth. It is believed that before even the simplest of life forms existed, earth was something like a thin stew that was getting thicker as more complex chemicals formed. At some point, and no one knows how, the first DNA molecules formed. The prevailing theory is that the first genetic molecule was a primitive form of RNA, which evolved into more complex RNA and then DNA.

No one knows how this could happen only that it happened. The proof of which is all around us, including in the mirror. Life exists and it is based in DNA. Further, RNA is created from DNA to put that information to work, like controlling the creation of proteins and performing other chemical functions. How DNA became the code of life, while RNA, its predecessor, became its tool, is a great mystery in science. It is the question J.F. Gariepy tackles in his book The Revolutionary Phenotype.

Gariepy or “JF” as he is known by his fans, is an enigmatic YouTube personality, known for his willingness to talk with anyone. He has had everyone from science deniers to holocaust deniers on his show, as well as lots of normal people. His YouTube career is recent, as until 2017 he was a neurobiologist and post-doctoral researcher at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. In this book, he endeavors to explain the origin of life 4 billion years ago and predict the end of DNA-based life on earth.

One of the challenges facing writers of science books for a general audience is that they must first simplify the presentation. It is not that the audience is dumb, but that they are unfamiliar with the jargon and unfamiliar with the way people in science communicate information through mathematics. A book full of complex proofs and splatter charts is not going to be popular with most readers. Gariepy gets past this first obstacle by sticking with a straightforward narrative format that is easy to follow.

The second challenge for science writers is to follow the old rule about essay writing that kids learn in school. The book should always be like a woman’s swimsuit; big enough to cover the important parts, but small enough to keep it interesting. This is probably a good rule for all writing in this age. Thanks to the internet and cable television, everyone’s attention span has collapsed. Gariepy gets past this hurdle, as the book is just 138 pages and written in a brisk style that makes for easy reading.

The question is, of course, does Gariepy deliver on his promise to explain the origin of life and how it will end. The answer is an unequivocal maybe. On the positive side, he does a very good job of explaining one possible narrative for how primitive RNA evolved into RNA and then DNA. He offers up an interesting theory as to how DNA came to be the master and RNA the slave, which is an important event in the history of life. The presentation here is a nice primer for the general reader on the basics of genetic theory.

What really works here is his use of simple concepts that he stacks together to explain more complex ideas. For example, describing the relationship between your genes and your body as something like the relationship between a machine operator and the machine, is useful in understanding why our bodies will evolve over time. Our body is there to serve our genes, so any innovation that is better for our DNA is adopted, while changes that are not useful are discarded. Our body is a vehicle for DNA.

The negative here is that the language and analogies do not always work. Using the office printer to explain how gene mutation works is clever but calling it a trickster printer will give the American reader the wrong impression. The same is true for his use of the phrase “fool replicator.” This is probably a language issue, as Gariepy is French. The word trickster and fool have different connotations to French speakers than they do to English speakers, especially Americans, who think tricksters and fools are immoral.

Another complaint about the book, and one of the trade-offs with brevity, is it assumes the reader has recently read Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins. In fact, it is probably a good idea to read The Selfish Gene before reading this book, as Gariepy refers to it extensively in the first third of the book. Again, this is the trade-off that comes from brevity and summarizing the material for a general audience. In this case, it is a minor complaint, and it does not ruin the book or invalidate his arguments.

The final complaint about the book is that he spends 80% of the text explaining the transition from simple RNA molecules to the complex DNA-based life. That is about 100 pages, which is a great short primer on a difficult to understand subject. The rest of the book is a dash to the finish line, explaining how the rise of artificial intelligence spells the end of DNA-based life. There is a strong impression that this part was rushed in order to get the book done and ready for sale. The book sort of ends with a thud.

Without giving too much away, Gariepy argues that RNA used DNA as sort of a bank vault for its code base. When it needed to copy itself, it did so from that copy stored in the DNA molecule. Eventually, the DNA molecule was able to replicate itself, without help from its RNA master. This set off a battle between RNA and DNA, which DNA won, turning RNA into its servant. This same process is about to happen with artificial intelligence, as AI becomes self-aware and able to self-replicate.

That sounds like the premise of a lot of science fiction stories, but it is both an interesting entry point to understanding artificial intelligence and the dynamic between environment, humans, and man’s ability to alter his environment. There is enough there for another book and maybe that is the plan, but Gariepy only gives it about twenty pages, and it felt very rushed. Given his YouTube audience, most of his readers are more interested in how life ends, rather than how it begins. They will undoubtedly feel a bit cheated.

Overall, the first half of the promise, to tell the story of how life began, works pretty well for the intended audience. It is not a research paper or a bold new hypothesis to explain the origin of life. It is more of a summary of current thinking in a style that the general reader can follow and understand. The second promise could have worked, but it needed a fuller treatment than what Gariepy delivers. Otherwise, it is a book worth reading, if you have an interest in evolutionary biology or the origins of life on earth.

The Tribal Circus

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Like a lot of people, I am struggling to remain positive this week, after Trump once again blundered into making things worse on the immigration front. I think it is fair to wonder if he was not a Manchurian candidate all along. Hired by the usual suspects to pose as a populist, he was supposed to discredit anti-immigration arguments in the primary by presenting them poorly. Instead, voters were willing to look past his ham-fisted presentation, in order to make one last effort to avoid tipping into the abyss.

Now in office, the usual suspects have flipped some other switches in his programming so that he engineers these colossal legislative defeats. That is a joke, I think, but you have to wonder what Trump would do different if he was actually trying to sabotage his own presidency. He is now everything we expected from Jeb Bush, except for two judges that may be OK. I guess you can call the new NAFTA a win, but that is not the great departure from the prior regime that Trump has claimed. It is more tinkering than repeal.

Still, it is easy to gobble black pills, but that is not very useful. Trump was never the solution to the problems facing us. At best he was just going to be a wrecker, who discredited the prevailing political orthodoxy, so we should always set our expectations accordingly. It is also important to remember that the orthodoxy is not just the civic nationalist face we tend to see. The creature behind that Republican mask is the Progressive side of the orthodoxy, which is the Grendel in our saga.

That is the focus on this week’s show. In order to keep it light, I am taking a long look at the Democrat primary that is shaping up. We forget that the party actually wielding power, regardless of who is in office, is the Democrat party. They set the agenda, and they control the Republican Party. The health of the Democrats is a good indication of just how effective the current vaccines are to the poz they are trying to spread. This podcast is a rundown of the Democrat tribes and the characters vying to be the new chief.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Tribes
  • 07:00: The Vibrant
  • 17:00: The Festive
  • 27:00: The Angry
  • 37:00: The Mysterious
  • 47:00: The Legacies
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes Page, Google Play Link, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

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Hanging Alone

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The great social blogger Heartiste did a post a week or so ago on the four types of loneliness. It was a take-off on a Twitter exchange on the subject. The original Twitter exchange listed loneliness for a woman, loneliness for brotherhood and loneliness for a lord, as in God, as the three forms of male loneliness. Heartiste adds a fourth, which he calls the loneliness a man feels for the man he has yet to become. This form of loneliness seems to be correlated to the distance one is from their true self.

One interesting thing about this list is it tracks closely with John Derbyshire’s description of the normal modes of thought. There is no form of loneliness that corresponds with the desire for revenge, but perhaps personal thought could be broadened to include more than revenge fantasies. If so, then it works out well. The list from the Heartiste post then corresponds to personal, social, religious, and magical thinking. The implication of that correspondence is that loneliness, or fear of it, is an integral part of man.

Some would argue that the keystone to male loneliness is the personal. A man who gets married and has a family, will never be alone. He will never be forgotten, because some of him will carry on in his children. This raises his social standing and makes for more meaningful relationships with his fellow men. The miracle of family life inevitably leads to a fuller, richer spiritual life. That seems plausible, except that divorces rates and the number of unmarried males suggests a different causal relationship.

Of course, the more spiritually minded would start with the need to have a relationship with the universe. Maybe this is in the form of some esoteric spirituality, or the more concrete relationship man finds in Christianity. This connection to the universe, the relationship to God, provides the foundation for personal relationships, brotherhood, and fulfillment of potential. As with personal loneliness, the facts on the ground suggest this is not the correct causal relationship. The pews are empty for a reason.

Heartiste, it appears, makes his first mover the loneliness a man feels for the man he has yet to become. He describes this as “Thwarted passion, a decision to avoid a risky venture, procrastination…these things will deprive a man of the ideal he always strives toward, and in the depths of that deprivation he will feel lonely for the company, and the mentorship, of his idealized self.” If you are all the man you imagine yourself to be, you will have all the women you want, all the brotherhood you want and the love of the universe.

The benefit of thinking of it this way is that it makes the fulfillment of your true self as the glue that binds the other forms of thought to one another as co-equals. There is a romantic quality, where this fulfillment of the true self completes a man in a perfection of the personal, spiritual, and social. The flaw though, is that a homicidal sociopath reaching his full potential is a very different thing than what Heartiste has in mind. The ring cycle can just as easily end in horror as a romantic sense of fulfillment.

The final combination starts with brotherhood. The man who has established fulfilling relationships with other men, will inevitably share the spiritual life of his peers. He will believe what they believe and feel that the universe cares for him, as it cares for his brothers. An assumption here is that the only way for a man to find brotherhood is if he has completed himself in the personal domain by finding a woman. This golden triangle, so to speak, is what unchains a man to reach his full potential as a man.

Up until recently, western society was held together, to a great degree, by the voluntary associations we call brotherhood. It may have been organizations for former soldiers, fraternal organization or social clubs organized around a particularly male activity, like hunting or sporting. What we now think of as male loneliness and the degradation of male roles, corresponds with the collapse of brotherhood. The war on sexism was always a war on brotherhood, which in turn was a war on the bones of society.

The argument against this is that brotherhood does not necessarily free a man to reach his potential as a man. Anyone who has been in the service or played team sports knows that talent is often sacrificed for the goals of the group. Organizations always take on a life of their own, putting the group ahead of its constituents. At the same time, organizations tend to devolve into politics, resulting in factionalism, which inevitably reduces the effectiveness of the group and the individuals within the group.

That is not brotherhood though. That is simply organization, which is different from brotherhood. In fact, in order to forge the bonds of brotherhood a man has to voluntarily sacrifice something of his self. It is this sacrifice, often a sacrifice of blood and sweat, life and labor, that makes brotherhood possible. The man who willingly gives his life for his brothers, so his brothers may live, is a man making the ultimate sacrifice. There is a reason such men are held in the highest honor by his brothers.

Of course, this assertion suggests a universal. In order to have personal, spiritual, and social fulfillment, man must first find brotherhood. It is the pivot point upon which the balance of a man’s life rests. The collapse of the male domain in western societies, has then brought down with it the personal, the spiritual and the social. In order to avoid hanging alone, in the loneliness of modern despair, men will need to rebuild the structures that allow for brotherhood and most important, make the sacrifice it demands.

Old Movies

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When I was a kid, we did not have cable, mostly because it did not exist, at least as we understand it. Cable TV existed as far back as the 1950’s, but it was not common, and the selection was no different from over the air offerings. It has been a long time, but I recall we had two network channels we could reliably receive over the air and two or three minor channels. UHF channels were local and played mostly re-runs of old shows and some local broadcasting. VHF channels had the national network offerings.

From the vantage point of the 1970’s, “old” TV shows were mostly things from the 1960’s, but old movies from the 40’s and 50’s were common too. In other words, if you wanted to peak back in time to the previous eras of American culture, you could reliably go back a decade and selectively go back a few decades. Bad old TV shows like Get Smart and Star Trek would go into syndication, but bad old movies were just forgotten. The old movies that were shown on TV were usually the good ones that people liked.

What that meant is if you wanted to know what it was like to live in 1945, you had to ask someone who was alive in 1945. You could get a little taste from watching old movies on a Saturday afternoon, but that was a stylish version. To really get a feel for the age before color movies and television, you had to rely on the fading memories of grandma and grandpa. Of course, this was true for all human history until recently. It is why old people are good at telling stories about the old days. They are built for it.

Today it is different. I watched The Thomas Crown Affair the other night off the Kodi machine. This was the 1968 version with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. There was a remake of this in 1999 with Pierce Bronson. I had seen the remake a few times, but I never saw the original. In fact, I did not know there was an original. That is a bit of interesting cultural data right there. Just about every movie produced over the last twenty-five years is either a remake or made from a children’s comic book.

What I found remarkable about the movie is something I notice whenever I watch old movies and that is the maturity. A movie about the cat and mouse between a male and female today will have at least half an hour of rutting and humping, along with some explosions and lots of vulgar language. The modern presentation of male-female relations is so crude, that porn makers of the past would have been offended. In the old days, the film maker and audience expected a more sophisticated portrayal of sexual relations.

That is the other thing that turns up in old movies and television. Hollywood made assumptions about the cultural awareness of the audience we do not see now.  In the Thomas Crown Affair, there is a long scene around a chess game. It was supposed to be a stand in for the sexual tension between McQueen and Dunaway. It is a bit ham-handed, but vastly more sophisticated than anything you would see today. One reason is the typical viewer today knows nothing about chess, so it would be lost on them.

Part of that is due to Hollywood relying on international audiences to make money. You cannot expect to make money in China or India when your film is full of essential references to Anglo-Saxon cultural items. When you make films for the universal culture, you make movies for a culture that does not exist. That means the goal is to remove cultural references, rather than rely on them to tell a story. There can be no subtlety and nuance without common cultural reference points understood by the audience.

The main thing that jumps out in old movies is the respect people had for themselves. The reason Steve McQueen was a star was because he played a role that was something men could aspire too. He would never have played a homosexual junkie or some other type of degenerate. People knew these sorts of people existed, but they expected them to be on the fringe of their lives and therefore on the fringe of their stories. Watch old movies and you see references to degeneracy, but it is always oblique.

Again, this goes to that respect for the audience. Just as the audience did not require thirty minutes of sex scenes to know the male and female were intimate, the audience did not have to see the gritty details of degeneracy to know it existed. The old movies assumed the viewers were adults who knew about the reality of life. Today’s film makers have to assume the viewers are retarded and need everything explained. Movies in late empire America are made for the recently arrived, provincial barbarians.

Finally, the thing that makes watching old movies worth the time is they offer a window into that long-forgotten country of our ancestors. Unlike when I was a kid, young people do not have to rely on old people telling them stories of the old days. Today, you can watch anything and everything ever made by Hollywood, even the bad stuff. Young people can watch YouTube clips from that country where humor was still legal. Most of it is crap, just as today, but it reveals what it was like in the bad old days.

More important, watching those old movies and TV shows, you cannot help but notice the early signs of poz being introduced. The stuff from the 1970’s is much more degenerate than the stuff from the 1960’s. In the 1980’s, the dumbing down becomes obvious as the makers started courting non-white audiences. It is a good way to see how where we are now did not happen overnight. It was a long, deliberate war waged with patience and purpose. The fight for freedom will be long and require patience too.

Technology And Social Trust

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People working in criminal law have been saying for years that Hollywood’s portrayal of forensic evidence has made it more difficult to prosecute criminals. They call it the “CSI Effect” named after a TV police drama. It is where jurors demand comprehensive forensic evidence, which effectively raises the burden of proof in criminal cases. Instead of eyewitness testimony placing a suspect at the crime scene, jurors now expect physical evidence and testimony from an expert on the use of DNA to identify the suspect.

There is no data to support this observation, but it is something that gets said a lot on TV, so everyone believes it. The increased expectation of what science can do has effectively raised the standard of proof. Another way to look at this is better technology has lowered the standard of trust. It used to be that people could trust themselves to judge the testimony of a witness. They could count on citizens being honest to them. Now, they want physical proof before taking the word of anyone in criminal court.

Of course, now that people in the legal system think this phenomenon is true, they operate on the assumption that no one will take anyone’s word for anything. That means the state invests in high tech forensic labs and pays a lot of experts to testify to jurors in criminal trials about the physical evidence. On the other side, the defense thinks simply being innocent is not enough, so they require experts and private labs to both provide an objective denial of guilt, as well as a counter to the state’s battery of experts.

It is a great example of how new technology can have unexpected results when introduced into a complex system like the criminal justice system. The underlying assumption of our system is that regular citizens can weigh the evidence and decide the guilt or innocence of the accused. Now the assumption is no one can weigh the evidence, other than specially trained experts. Technology has conjured into reality the idea of the fair witness from Stranger in a Strange Land.

The courtroom is not the only place where technology is causing us to lose faith in our senses. The advent of the hyperlink has made it so that any controversial assertion on-line is assumed to be false if it does not have a link to an authoritative source. In every on-line community you see demands for links to authoritative sources, whenever there is a dispute over something. These appeals to a neutral authority correspond to a decline in the lack of trust between people. It is not true unless you have a link.

Something similar may be happening in the news. Take the Jussie Smollett incident in Chicago. Exactly no one believed him, because there was no video and no corroboration from a neutral technology source, like a cell phone camera. As soon as the cops revealed they could not find confirmation on their surveillance cameras, everyone just assumed it must be a hoax. There were plenty of doubters to begin with, given the number of prior hoaxes, but even the gullible are now expecting proof from technology.

The proliferation of cameras and now listening devices on public streets means it is increasingly difficult to do anything without being seen. Even if that is not true, it is assumed to be true. That means if there is no video, it did not happen. It also means if there is no video, there is no investigation, as the cops will soon figure out that it is waste of time to investigate crimes unless you can get video. The criminal mastermind of the future will be the guy who figures out how to avoid being identified by CCTV.

Another way the proliferation of technology changes social trust is seen on the college campus. In order to avoid being accused of rape, males now tape their interactions with coeds. They may have a buddy record audio so they can prove the encounter was consensual. Young people are growing up to expect everything to be recorded and not to trust anyone unless they can see video or hear audio. People mock the idea of getting consent in writing, but that is probably better than everyone taping their encounters.

The other side of this coin is the casual way in which people allow themselves to be recorded by others. Every internet drama seems to involve one party publishing chats, videos, or audio of another party. Super villain Jeff Bezos is an obvious example. He broke the cardinal rule of super villains. Never write when you can speak. Never speak when you can nod. Most important, never send pics of your wiener to people. He was cavalier about being recorded and now is the world’s silliest supervillain.

The result of all this is two things. One is the total lack of privacy. The only place that will be safe for anyone to imagine bad things is in their own head. When the internet of things is quietly spying in every home, car and public place, there will no longer be the concept of privacy. Imagine a land where there are no walls and no clothes. Everyone walks around naked and in full view of everyone else. It sounds crazy, but people adapt. The citizens of the future custodial state will get used to a word without privacy.

The other thing is no one will take anyone’s word for anything. This will include people in authority. If you cannot trust your own senses, you are unlikely to trust the senses of some guy on television claiming to be your leader. Civic duty will have to be replaced with some form of coercion. Perhaps nudge technology will reach a point where the nudged will think they are acting of their own free will. Maybe the people in charge will fit everyone with a Wi-Fi enabled technology collar that ties them into the internet of things.

It is assumed that technological advances always improve the material world. It certainly seems that way. It is possible, however, that the trade-off for technological advance is the decline in social trust, maybe even a decline in empathy. In order for these new technologies to thrive, people have to abandon their ability to share the feelings of others and maybe even abandon their sense of self. The future will be a world of indifferent automatons, living in glass houses, under the eye of the state.