Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Future Of Virtual Society

Posted on by

At the dawn of the internet revolution, it was common for big-brained public intellectuals to talk about what it meant for the nature of society. As is always the case, they confused what they wanted to happen with what would happen. That usually meant some form of “as information is democratized, more people will have access to information and therefore come to agree with me on everything.” The internet would bring about the glorious egalitarian future.

Most of the predictions about the impact of the internet turned out to be wrong, but the internet has changed society. In fact, it has changed people by changing the selection pressures within society. For example, the phenomenon of the digital grifter is something that could not exist in the past. These people certainly existed in some form, but the digital age rewards their behavior, while the analog age did not, so they now flourish, while in the past they were suppressed.

That is how to think about it. Virtual reality is not reality. Life on-line exaggerates certain features by removing constraints or offering incentives. The solitary nature of on-line life removes the social signals that people rely upon to figure out what they can say and what they should not say. When you are on-line, you are by yourself in the physical realm, even though you are interacting with others in the virtual realm. Those people, however, are mere avatars of people.

Of course, things that get the user attention are rewarded with likes, clicks and views, so this encourages more of that behavior. It does not take long before the weak minded are consumed with attention seeking. Twitter is full of hollow people who amplify the current thing as a way to get attention. In the hours after every cable news actor was sporting a Ukraine pin and chanting “keev”, the internet personality was pulling down her Covid stuff and putting up Ukraine stuff.

Years ago, Dave Chappell did a skit where the internet was a real place. What made the skit amusing, in addition to Chappelle’s delivery, was the fact that the internet is such an absurd place compared to reality. Imagine walking through a store and everyone in the store is doing whatever they can to get your attention. Imagine the day after the war started, everything at the store is in Ukraine colors and all of the employees are chanting “keev” at the top of their lungs.

Another novelty that the digital age has brought is the clout chaser. This is a person who spends his days scanning the internet looking for the next thing so he can seem like the first person to get on it. These people front-run trends in order to present themselves as trendsetters. They will often glom onto a person, positively or negatively,  who has a big following on-line. This lets them free-ride off that person to gain attention and followers for themselves.

This is not something that could exist in the analog age. Famous people had flunkies, but the flunky was never going to use their association with the famous person to make himself famous independent of the famous person. Mike Cernovich could never have become a thing in the analog age by stalking famous people. On Twitter he was able to build a huge following mostly by front running trends he had no role in creating and glomming onto big Twitter accounts.

Another version of this is the manufactured influencer. If you watch YouTube, you will have noticed that Lex Fridman was always in your suggestions. You could only watch woodworking videos, but YouTube would suggest to you a Fridman video. The reason is the people backing him paid YouTube to do it. A similar thing is now happening with Jordan Peterson, who signed up with the Ben Shapiro operation. They are now paying to have Peterson promoted on YouTube.

They did the same thing with Ben Shapiro. The people behind the Daily Wire made a Mortimer and Randolph Duke type of bet to see if they could make this obscure hobbit man into a star. How they did it was social media. They paid to have Ben Shapiro pushed heavy to middle-class whites on Facebook. He was what they hoped young people were really thinking. It worked. This helium voiced nobody is now a household name and a major influencer of old white conservatives.

Tim Pool is another version of this phenomenon. Spend some time watching his YouTube channel and ask yourself why he has a huge audience. There are hundreds of people doing some version of the same act. The answer is he has the backing of an influencer production company. Richard Hanania is the most recent example of the manufactured influencer. The guy suddenly appears on-line and before long all the other influencers are mentioning him.

This deranging of the public culture to now has mostly been about rewarding qualities and people that existed but were suppressed in the analog age. What we see with the Zoomers is a whole generation of people raised in this culture. This post in the New York Times, of all places, is a good read on the subject. Those born around the turn of the century are the first generation raised on the internet. This is their normal as they never knew a world without the internet.

One result of this cohort being raised on-line is they lack the normal social skills that have defined human life for ten thousand years. People have noted that in real life, this cohort is shy, awkward and quite weird. On the other hand, they are the exact opposite as their on-line persona. Meet Nick Fuentes and you are not all that impressed as his social skills are non-existent. Turn on a mic or pull out a camera and he goes from shrinking violet to boisterous and confident.

This is why this generation was not upset by the lockdowns. They did not complain about Zoom school because that was better than having to be around those talking meat sacks on campus. They prefer life on-line to life outside. They have grown up with the chat room as their playground. Instead of playing games with their friends in the physical realm, they played games on-line. Their peer group was the collection of avatars and personalities in the chat.

Everyone has their opinion on this stuff, but the important question that no one seems to be considering is if society is possible under these conditions. China’s heavy-handed censorship is viewed as a defense of the regime, but it could simply be a way to tamp down the negative selection pressures of the internet. American censorship is driven mostly by ethnic paranoia, which is another negative quality that is being amplified by the forces of the digital age.

It could very well be that the newly diverse Western societies cannot hold up under the selection pressure of the internet. The digital age amplifies the differences, which amplifies the natural reaction to those differences. This has the effect of bringing diverse civilizational outlooks into virtue contact. The result is hostility. The West may be forced to choose between the glories of diversity or the virtual public square. The answer may be a segregated internet in order to keep the peace.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Artificial Stupidity

Posted on by

Over the last few months, the internet has been buzzing about artificial intelligence, largely due to the release of ChatGPT. Lots of people have been having fun with it and lots of bad people have been making it do bad things. Even more people, those who fashion themselves as big-brained thought leaders, have been telling us what this means for the future of humanity. Of course, everyone selling a product is quickly adding the letters “AI” to their marketing kit.

The ChatGPT is an interesting project, but as the bad people referenced above have shown, it is still a work in progress. Even so, it does reveal two things that are important in the much larger discussion of artificial intelligence. One is that there has been some progress is creating what feels like intelligence. A bit of software that feels like it could be a human making small talk is a big step. That big step, however, is relative to where things were to this point.

This is a barely perceptible move forward, relative to where things need to be in order to start discussing anything close to artificial intelligence. In fact, you would need a much more powerful algorithm to detect the progress than what we currently possess, in order to quantify the progress. The main reason for that is we are not entirely sure if we can define human intelligence at the moment. In fact, we cannot even agree on where to start with such a project.

Now, HBD types and psychometrists might bristle at that, but crude methods to quantify aspects of intelligence are not the same as understanding the nature of it. We can sit two children down, give them a battery of intelligence tests and make some mostly accurate predictions about their life outcomes. We have enough data now to make statistically significant observations about relative intelligence. That is not the same as understanding the nature of human intelligence.

The reason for this is we do not understand human consciousness, of which intelligence is just one aspect. In fact, the human sciences are struggling to come up with a definition of consciousness. The physical sciences operate under the assumption that collections of non-conscious agents can come together somehow and create consciousness, but that is probably wrong. There is a good chance that it puts the cart before the horse.

That is, conscious agents are what cause non-conscious agents. What we think of as space-time and the objects within it are the result of human consciousness. This is the basis of Donald Hoffman’s book The Case Against Reality, in which he explains why much of what we assume to be true about the universe is probably wrong. For those who prefer an audio version of his work, here is a good interview of Hoffman by the ubiquitous YouTuber Lex Fridman.

Hoffman’s approach rests on two things that seem to be true. One is that nature does not reward accuracy in our perceptions, but rather the fitness of our perceptions, which Hoffman stated as Fitness Beats Truth. The short version is that evolution only cares about that which impacts fitness. As a result, a strategy that seeks only to improve fitness will, over time, dominate a strategy that seeks to create a more accurate perception of the world.

There is a lot of math involved in Hoffman’s presentation, but there is a much simpler way to think of it. We see in the marketplace for goods and services that the most popular product is never the ideal product. The Windows desktop won the computer wars not because it was the platonic ideal of the personal computer, but because it was good enough and cheap enough to win the fitness game relative to the other options, some of which were technically better.

The game of life works the same way. That which makes it easier for a living thing to replicate itself gets rewarded. That which inhibits replication gets punished. That is it and nothing more. If human perception evolved to improve our fitness, then it means it did not evolve to give us a more accurate perceptions of reality. That does not mean we live in a dream world. It just means that we cannot assume that our perception of non-contextual reality is accurate or even real.

The other thing Hoffman points out in his book is that theoretical physics has run into a very big problem. That problem is local realism. This is the principle of locality which states a thing is changed only if it is touched. The second half states that properties of objects are real and exist in our physical universe independent of our minds. This is the foundation of physics and it may not be true. Experiments have challenged locality and realism, suggesting one or both are false.

This brings us back to the artificial intelligence problem. The likelihood of us creating intelligence, much less conscious intelligence, even by accident is so low as to not be considered a serious topic of discussion. As Hoffman explains in his book, we are not close to understanding the nature of consciousness. We are not even sure the world we assume to be objective reality is more than an interface. It could literally be a figment of our collective imagination.

Like discussion of space aliens floating balloons over North America, talk of artificial intelligence is a nice distraction. We seem have a need to believe that such things are possible and perhaps discoverable in our time. In reality, they lie well outside our ability to grasp, other than the fictional. Intelligence is an aspect of consciousness and most likely that is not the result of non-conscious agents. That means intelligence is not simply clever math operating on non-conscious agents.

If a non-human intelligence were to visit our local concept of space-time from its place on the N-dimensional manifold that is reality, it would point out that our fancy new AI is not much more than a relatively faster calculator. From its perspective, it would be comically simplistic compared to our own consciousness. AI and the pursuit of it is a fun distraction, but it is not the dawn of super-intelligent robots enslaving humanity. We can do that without the aid of a clever chatbot.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Managerial Morality

Posted on by

Note: There is a new post up on both Substack and SubscribeStar. It appears there are lots of people on Substack who would never sign up for SubscibeStar and plenty of people on SubscribeStar who have no interest in moving to Substack. Green door content will be posted on both so pick your poison.

In the classic comedy, The Jerk, there is a scene in which the main character, played by Steve Martin, is in court. He is being sued because the invention that made him rich is supposedly causing everyone to go cross-eyed. He invented a thing to go on the bridge of glasses that prevents them from falling forward when you look down. In the scene, Martin looks around and sees that everyone in the court, including the judge and the jury, are cross-eyed like the people suing him.

This is what Elon Musk is going to face in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor when his case against Twitter goes to trial. That assumes it ever gets to a trial, as there is a good chance his lawyers see the writing on the wall long before that point and there is some sort of settlement. The Twitter legal team features a former chief judge from the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. No doubt there are others with connections to the small club that is the Delaware bench.

Like the Steve Martin character in that movie, Musk is about to learn that the laws and procedures do not matter. What matters is who decides. Every judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor was put there by a politician. Those politicians were selected for their loyalty to a system that many deny exists. That system is the managerial system that governs America. You do not get into office with a chance to wield real power unless you are trusted by the system.

System is probably not the best word for what we are seeing. It is more like a mindset, a set of shared beliefs. The judge in the Twitter case, Kathaleen McCormick, will look out at the players and see that Musk is not her sort. He is not the type of person she thinks should be a winner in this world. She thinks this because everyone she knows thinks this about Musk. She may not be able to say why she thinks Musk is a threat to our democracy, but she is sure of it.

It was not always this way for Musk. He was once the darling of the managerial class, celebrated in popular culture as a modern day Thomas Edison. He was serving Gaia with his electric cars and hyper loops. His battery plants would magically allow us to stop raping Mother Earth for fossil fuels. His reward would be to one day travel the stars in his rocket ships. Musk was the way to the glorious future. When he spoke out against Twitter, he suddenly transformed into the terrible past.

This is what stumps people about managerialism. There was no official pronouncement from the leader of the managers. The supreme leader of managerialism did not read out a fatwa against Elon Musk. There is not even an anonymous memo circulating that says Musk is now on the proscribed list. It is a thing that just happened. One day, people with power were showering Musk with your money. Then all of a sudden, they all agreed that Musk was a threat to our democracy.

Another example of the managerial mindset is in this story about the law firm that won the recent gun case in the Supreme Court. The two lawyers who won the case were met with a termination letter after their victory. The law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, represents the most important people in the most important matters. There is a revolving door between Kirkland & Ellis and the Department of Justice. Former AG Bill Bar was a Kirkland man, as were many on his team.

Why is Kirkland & Ellis dropping second amendment cases? No one has made an official announcement on the issue. The attorneys who won the gun case stated that they were told the firm was dropping their gun clients. No one came to the partners of Kirkland & Ellis and made them an offer they could not refuse. They simply decided that their conscience could no longer allow them to handle these cases. Then they were celebrated for it by their friends down at the club.

This is the first domino. All of the other big forms will drop second amendment litigation because they will all be struck by the same crisis of conscience. Much the same has happened in the insurance industry. Insurers refused to do business with the National Rifle Association. Many banks have also joined the boycott. Again, there was no memo sent out from the secret lair in the hollowed out volcano. No one is forcing these big players to do this. They just think it is right.

It is one of things the paleos got wrong about managerialism. Perhaps wrong is too strong a word for it. More like they did not anticipate it. Burnham, a former communist, focused on the material aspects. He never addressed the culture of managerialism that was evolving along with the managerial system. Later paleos started to approach this topic, but they never fully embraced the idea that this class that rules over American society has reached class consciousness.

That class consciousness is not simply an awareness of their position with regards to economic and cultural relations. It is a moral community now. To be in the managerial class requires accepting a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong. Good people accept climate change. Bad people are deniers. Good people think guns are bad, while the bad people talk about their second amendment rights. The good people saw Trump as a threat to our democracy. The bad people voted for him.

This is what Musk faces in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. He may have the facts on his side with regards to the fake accounts. He may have the law on his side with regards to the terms of the deal. He has all the money in the world, which should count for a lot. None of that may matter as the people making the decision have all decided that he is a bad guy. Like every issue for the managerial class, Musk is now a moral signifier. Where you stand on him is where you stand on everything.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Questioning Reality

Posted on by

There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields.

Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge has to actually work as predicted or the engineers suffer a heavy price. Engineering is not science, but it relies upon the sciences to produce practical things. Those practical things must hold up to reality, which controls what comes out of engineering as accepted theory. In other words, everything in engineering gets tested against reality.

The academy, on the other hand, never has to face reality this way. Even in the hard sciences, reality avoidance is common. Theoretical physics has entered a world that is beyond the ability to test. Math is still math, but much of what is done is purely speculative or requires unproven assumptions. In the soft sciences, the rules have collapsed entirely and most of what comes out is narrative framing. The “science” is limited to providing cover for current fads.

Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god. He creates a model of the world based on what he would like it to be rather than as a reflection of the bit of reality he is trying to understand. Of course, model makers often have a boss who needs to be pleased. That boss could be in a corner office or the boss could be an angry mob of blue-haired harpies patrolling campus.

The point is you can make models do anything. The model maker is like a script writer in that he can make the rules do what he needs to reach his desired end. Bad script writers use clunky plot devices to solve problems for their characters. Bad model makers create a set of rules and data selection methods to close the gap between theory and reality. Since the model will never be tested against reality in the soft sciences, bad model makers can quickly become stars.

Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences? Is it simply the natural product of multiculturalism, which needs narratives to hold it together, due to the lack of natural social bonds found in homogenous societies?

You can model this many ways, depending upon how you as the model maker feel about these topics. The last bit is a clue to the problem. The rise of narratives in social discourse tracks with the rise in diversity. Read anything from a century ago and it is free of the narrative structures we find common today. A story about an athlete was mostly the facts about his life. He was not cast as a character in a drama about social justice or the fight against exploitation.

The ubiquity of narratives gets lost in the flood of them. There is a real war going in Europe and the political class speaks of nothing but narratives. They have meetings followed by press conferences to inform the public on the status of their latest narratives and the battle of narratives surrounding the war. Meanwhile, the Russian army slowly grinds down the Ukrainian army. The same can be said of the energy crisis, which is ignored in favor of narratives about climate change.

You get the sense that the people talking about their narratives and messaging, a subset of narrative framing, think that if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story. Put another way, if they can model reality with a set of rules and assumption in such a way that only their preferred conclusions are possible, then reality will have no choice but to comply. Like the model makers, the narrative creators have become gods in their creations.

This does not answer the question of causality, but it is clear that the problem of modeling in the sciences has a related problem in the public realm. In elite society, the focus is no longer on the things that are true, like the axioms of mathematics, but rather on the things that are true within the context of accepted rules, like the equity in the distribution of advanced degrees in the sciences. One is true whether you believe it or not, while the other is only true if you accept the assumptions.

A century ago, smart people understood this difference. Models of realty had to account for those things that are axioms of the universe. Over that time a steady shift has gone on where objective reality is excluded from the discussion of the narrative and at the same time, the narrative challenges objective reality. Put another way and getting back to the Briggs post, models are no longer tested against reality, but reality is being tested against the models.

This helps explain why supposedly serious academics sit in front of congressional committees and claim to not know the definition of a woman. They are not simply clinging to fashionable politics. At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality, in this case biological sex. Just as the model makers can feel like a god, the narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.

There is a lot here that deserves further examination, but it is clear that the crisis in science correlates with the crisis in the West. The causality is not clear, but what is clear is that what passes for the smart fraction is no longer willing or able to accept that there are things that are true regardless of opinion. They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Death Of Twitter

Posted on by

Note: My Taki post is on different topic from today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. It is also on Substack for paying members there. Going forward, I will post the pay-per-view material on both sites. Some people prefer Substack and other people prefer Subscribestar. There was also a rare Saturday post, which was going to be a Taki post but I changed my mind.

The Elon Musk versus Twitter drama is now heading to the litigation phase, as Musk has decided to pull out of the purchase agreement. The usual idiots have taken to social media to offer their hot takes on the issue. Critics of Musk think he made the great blunder they have been predicting. The far-left thinks this is a victory, when in fact it is the death knell for the platform. It is this fact that led Musk to pull out of the deal and take the issue into the litigation phase.

The basics of the dispute are simple. Twitter claims Musk is the breaching party and they intend to force him to abide by the agreement. They argue that they have given him everything he has asked. That means they will go into a Delaware court and ask a judge to compel compliance. Musk will tell the same court that Twitter is in breach of contract for falling to disclose information about their user base, which they are required to do as part of the sale.

No one really knows if the court can actually force Musk to go through with the purchase agreement and buy Twitter. In contract disputes, courts rarely compel one party to perform against their will. Instead, a monetary judgment is levied against the breaching party. In most cases, a settlement is reached before the court has a chance to decide the issue. In contract cases, litigation is a part of the process of negotiating the final settlement of the dispute.

In most contracts, especially complex ones like this, there is a liquidating damages clause that spells out the cost of breaking the agreement. In this particular case, we know there is a liquidating damages clause. Both parties agreed to a billion dollar fee if they break the agreement. There are conditions and the interpretation of those conditions will be part of the litigation. Musk has not offered to pay the billion and Twitter is not asking to be paid the billion so far.

All of this will make for good drama, but it obscures the fact that Twitter is a dead man walking, regardless of the outcome. That reality was made clear when Twitter agreed to the Musk offer. They were under no obligation to accept his offer. The board could have refused the deal. Management initially tried to add a poison pill in order to make it difficult for Musk to buy shares but relented after consulting with the board and the largest shareholders. They wanted this deal.

Musk said he made his best and final offer. He was a large share holder and had access to their public filings but also access to their management. In other words, he knew the peak value of the company and made a premium offer. Twitter had been saying their target price was $70 per share, but they quickly accepted the offer from Musk at $54 per share. In other words, everyone concerned knew that the $54 price was the best Twitter would ever get from anyone.

For its part, the market never bought the $70 claim or the $54 offer. The stock ticked up on news of the offer, but then traded down to below its prior level as news of the agreement got into the public domain. The day before Musk cancelled the deal, you could buy shared of Twitter at 60% of what Musk agreed to pay. The fact that no one was doing this says that insiders smelled problems. They knew Musk would never follow through on the $54 offer.

One reason for the skepticism is that Twitter does not make money and is unlikely to ever make money. The platform is useless for advertising so its only source of income is selling user data. There are plenty of players in that market. The big fish are Google and Apple, who control the mobile market. Since most Twitter users operate on their mobile device, Twitter data is mostly phone data. In reality, Twitter is just a derivative data stream that is rooted in the mobile data streams.

The bigger issue for Twitter and all social media is the barrier to entry has collapsed and disaggregation is upon us. Gab has proven this. They not only have a stable platform that is better than Twitter, but it was done on a shoestring by one committed guy, in the face of massive resistance by the usual suspects. The future is bespoke platforms of like-minded users. People are looking to be free from the blue-check harpies who have ruined the large social media platforms.

Those who have been on-line since the early days saw this coming. It is part of a natural cycle on-line. The first bulletin boards were big central places. They gave way to small places of like-minded people. Usenet splintered into a million sub-channels once it was possible to do so. The first message board communities were much like the big social media sites, but then over-zealous mods ruined them and the sites splintered into a million small communities.

This is why Twitter remains eager to sell to Musk. They have an inside view of what is happening and they know his offer is the best offer. In fact, they know half his offer is the best offer, which is why they will seek to cut a deal. Twitter is basically worthless as they own little in the way of unique infrastructure and their core product is now a commodity anyone can create. Their main offer is access to emotionally unstable people who want to lecture the rest of us.

Elon Musk may be a monorail salesman, but he is an extremely talented one who has worked the most sophisticated marks in the world. He is also the richest man on earth which means he owns the best legal talent on earth. He did not choose to enter the litigation phase because it is a sure loser. He understands that Twitter will have to disclose things in court that they would prefer to keep private. The fact that he is boasting about this on Twitter is a clue to his thinking.

Many assume this is just a way for Musk to lower the price, but he may be using this phase to bleed the company into bankruptcy. His people looked at the user data and probably saw that Twitter is past its peak. Like centralized internet platforms before it, Twitter is about to die from a thousand cuts. If anyone can put up a similar site for people of the same mind, then what is the point of Twitter? Musk can wait out the answer to that question in a Delaware court.

The fact is, Twitter should never have existed in the first place. It was just a novel implementation of the same old idea that has been with us since the dawn of the internet age. The dream of the virtual agora where the demos can debate the issues of the day and find a consensus has been tried many times. In every case, the demos discovered they did not like it and moved back into their own private warrens and subcultures to be free of the masses.

Familiarity breeds contempt and what the big socials have done is make everyone familiar with everyone else. The solution is what was there all along. The various communities build fences between themselves and the others. That way they do not have to be reminded of their unpleasantness. They can also pretend that those people on the other side are good people who mean well. Good fences not only make good neighbors they make human society possible.

This is why Twitter and the other big socials are doomed. Twitter is the most ridiculous and silly, so it will be the first to go. Facebook sees the writing on the wall, which is why they are betting on their virtual realty scheme. Sites like Instagram are just public bulletin boards that offer little interaction, so maybe they stagger on, but the days of big social media platforms are ending. The looming death of Twitter is just the first big step into the inevitable demise of the concept.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Virtual Theater Returns

Posted on by

Note: I have decided to join the grifter community, please like and subscribe. In order to do that I am now offering merchandise! I have teamed up with a bunch of libertarians to start selling some branded items. I am starting small but will be adding new things to keep the grift going. Suggestions for pithy slogans are encouraged. The deal is you buy something, I get a few bucks and they get a few bucks profit. No one gets rich selling shirts, but every little bit helps. Please shop here.

One of the great truths of American politics is that for the last few generations one side has been motivated by dreams of destroying their enemies, while the other side dreams of befriending the enemy. The people we call the Left in America are the former case and this is their primary definition. Their ideology changes, but the one constant is their desire to clear the field of their enemies. The other side is the Right, which exists to find some sort of accommodation with their friends on the Left.

This impulse to seek a compromise is why American politics has followed a familiar pattern since the Civil War. The Left proposes some novelty and the Right resists, always trying to reason with them. In the end they always cave. As Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “it (conservatism) demurs to each aggression of the progressive party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.”

In the main, this is a good way to describe the political dynamic, but this relationship has had a strange effect on people. The selection pressure for both camps has molded generations of Americans. On the Left, of course, the pressure had been in favor of a feminine histrionics. On the Right, the pressure has been in favor of those who are sure there is some right answer to every trouble. They just need the right guy to say the right words so the kingdom of heaven will open.

We are seeing this with the Twitter story. In the early days of the internet, there was little moderation as no one wanted it. Early adopters liked that it was a place where they could experience heterodox opinion. This openness drove technological innovation and helped make the internet a part of civic life. This is why the Left felt it needed to take control of it. They saw the internet as another institution that they must control in their war on normal society.

As the harpies gained control of Twitter, the so-called conservatives demurred to each new aggression, making angry noises while acquiescing. They supported free speech but demanded the end of anonymity. They supported free speech, but not hate speech, whatever that means. Every “defense” of principle included an important concession to the other side, in the hope of finding a middle ground. Conservative principles are always just a retreat from those principles.

Now we have Elon Musk buying Twitter. Musk has claimed to be a free speech absolutist who is buying the company to open it up again. He has closed on the company and will take it private. It is unclear as to what he intends to do with it in terms of censorship, but he clearly wants his fans to think he will throw open the doors of the platform so it can be what it was ten years ago. Time will tell if he is willing to do what is required to make that happen, but that is the dream.

Here we see those conservative attributes that have been carefully evolved over the last century or so. The first of which is the savior complex. Conservative people have been sure that what they need is a great man who not only has the ability to make conservative arguments, but the courage to do so. The same enthusiasm that put Trump in the White House is what will flood Twitter with new signups. Elon Musk is here to save us from the Twitter mobs.

Another attribute, the most destructive, in fact, is the conservative desire to mix it up with the Left. The reason Twitter exists is otherwise normal people are compelled to interact with people who hate them and want them dead. To be a conservative is to lie awake at night dreaming of left-wing approval. The right argument from the right guy will cause lefty to throw down his arms and embrace you as a brother. Twitter exists so conservatives can beg the Left for forgiveness.

This is obviously true, but conservatives cannot accept it. Gab has been up and running since 2016 and it offers what conservatives claim they want in a platform. Even better, it is free from the deranged lunatics that have ruined other platforms. Conservatives dismiss it because they say it is an echo chamber, by which they mean it lacks the people they claim to hate. They avoid alternatives to Twitter because they want to beg lefty for forgiveness and those platforms do not provide it.

The other conservative quality on display with the Twitter story is the desire to win the approval of the mobs. The same lack of self-worth that drives the conservative to beg lefty for attention is there in their love of the mob. Conservatives are sure if they can get a clear shot on stage, the crowd will reward them with flowers and applause. In a prior age, they would crawl on their belly to be on left-wing television or land a speaking gig at a university. Now they just want to be on Twitter.

Back in the old days, conservatives would argue that they had to be on far-left television shows in order to reach an audience. Today they claim they have to be on far-left internet platforms in order to reach an audience. In Dabney’s time, northern conservatives said they needed to speak with progressive newspapers in order to reach the broader audience. In reality, what the conservative wants is the approval of the Left and there is no limit in how far he will degrade himself to get it.

Twitter is American politics at is most basic. Since Gettysburg, politics in American has been a theater show. The Left hustles everyone inside the theater and puts on a show about a victim or a villain. Sometimes they combine the two. The crowd is told about the plight of some victim group and is supposed to sympathize. Maybe they are warned about some villain, which is always the same villain. Old Scratch takes many forms and the producers of American theater use all of them.

At some point conservatives are brought onto the stage. They shuffle out in their comfort fit slacks and polo shirts. Their job is to dismiss the warnings about the villain or tell the victim to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” The crowd is supposed to boo and hiss, but that does not always happen. Often the villain is so ridiculous that the crowd just laughs about it. Other times the victim is too creepy and weird for the crowd to muster anything other than contempt.

Often, the Left brings out their secret weapon, the Hitler costume. The spotlight focuses on the right of the stage and there it is. Then the Left asks if anyone in the crowd will play that role. Sure enough, an idiot runs up, puts on the costume and does the Hitler act. The crowd then starts throwing cabbages and tomatoes at Richard Spencer as he prances around on stage. The conservatives freak out, run behind lefty looking for safety and the curtain falls. The show is over.

This was Twitter from its inception through the 2020 election. The problem is the producers went bonkers and burned down the theater. In that meeting with the board of directors, everyone realized they needed to rebuild the theater. Despite some moaning from the blue checks, the truth is they want the conservatives back in the theater as much as they want to perform for them. The privatization of Twitter is going to be the rebuilding of the virtual stage of political theater.

Time will tell with regards to Musk and Twitter. He will quickly learn that he must obey the rules of Apple and Google with regards to speech. Maybe he has had some sort of conversion and he will go to war over it. Most likely he will compromise in order to get their approval. This will titivate the conservatives, who will see in his capitulation the stamp of approval for their capitulation. Twitter will go from a woke site to a woke site full of conservatives begging the woke for acceptance.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Evolution of War

Posted on by

Comments: I know the spam filter has become annoying to some. I am working on an alternative to what I am using. In the interim I have made a few changes and will keep tinkering with the current system. Thank you for your patience.

The first men to go to war with men from another tribe no doubt went to that first battle with the weapons they used to hunt. We have no record of that first battle, but we can safely assume it involved spears, clubs and probably rocks. It is possible that the throwing rock was developed just for these battles, as the thrown rock is much more effective against men than animals. The throwing rock is probably the first weapon developed just for killing other men.

One day a group of men decided to raid the territory of another tribe and they were met with a terrifying new weapon, the bow and arrow. Again, we have no idea when this happened, but logic says there was a first time use for the bow in war. A group sorted out how to launch a small version of their spear at an animal. This was much safer than getting up close and personal. The next logical step was to use this cool new weapon against invaders from another tribe.

Maybe it was the sling or maybe it was the bow, but most likely it was the fear of projectile weapons that led to the shield and the use of it. Shields are useful against spears, but they limit offensive ability. Again, we will never know, but most likely there was a first battle where the shield was used. The guys with bows were stunned to see this new terrifying weapon. Instead of raining death down on their enemy, their enemy was able to advance under the cover of their shields.

We are seeing this playout in Ukraine. The Russians are probably the world’s best at tank strategy. They have a lot of them and they have always been at the top in terms of tank technology. Russia is a land power, so it makes sense that they are the best with the dominant weapons of land warfare. In the Second World War it was the T-34 that beat back the Nazis and drove them back to Berlin. It remains the most popular tank in the world, despite being 80-years old.

The terrifying counter is the anti-tank weapon. The concept is pretty simple. You launch a missile at a tank that can penetrate its armor. The trick is either in hitting the tank from beyond its range or getting close enough to hit it from a blind spot. This is where the modern anti-tank weapons have become so important. The Javelin system allows a team of two to get close, fire from cover and take out a tank. The weapon is cheap and it can be used by the dumbest infantrymen.

The effects of this weapon are clear in Ukraine. Instead of leading with their armor, the Russians have been forced to use artillery and cruise missiles to soften up the line of contact and then use infantry to clear the way for tanks. This has not made the tank obsolete, but it has forced a change in its use. It now has to be deployed initially as a stand-off weapon, like an artillery piece. Instead of being the tip of the spear for ground forces, it is now a follow on weapon.

As an aside, this is a good example of the knock-on effect. Since the anti-tank weapon neutralizes the tank, the counter is the use of artillery. In the second Chechen war and now in Ukraine, the Russians are relying on their massive artillery advantage, which is turning the defensive positions into rubble. In other words, the Ukrainians will still lose and they will have their cities reduced to dust. The anti-tank weapon is making war bloodier and costlier to the civilian population.

The West thinks this is all good news, but there is bad news for the Global American Empire in Ukraine. For starters, the Russians have had the chance to test their S-400 surface-to-air missile system against serious opposition. It turns out to be as lethal as advertised, able to take out aircraft from over 250-miles away. It is cheap, mobile and easy to deploy in a wide range of conditions. It is to American air power what the Javelin missile system is to Russian tank warfare.

The American way of war is to gain air superiority and then pound the enemy from the sky until their mobility and communications are broken. Then the ground forces come in to attack the weakened enemy positions. The S-400 suddenly turns those 100-million dollar aerial weapons platforms into expensive target practice. Since these systems are cheap and getting cheaper, they will proliferate. It is why America threatens every country that buys them with sanctions.

That is not the only bad news. The Russians have been testing what the media is calling a hypersonic missile. The Kh-47M2 Kinzhal air-to-surface system is probably not a hypersonic weapon, given the technical issues involved with the technology, but that does not matter. It is fast enough, lethal enough and cheap enough to pose a serious problem for a sea power like America. The ability to strike a relatively small target from over a thousand miles away is a game changer.

The reason this is important is it means those carriers America relies upon to project air power will quickly become expensive target practice. Some have argued that this has already happened with land-based anti-ship weapons, but that is disputed. This new system ends the debate. If America wants to deploy carriers to protect Taiwan, they will soon need to find a way to make them invisible. Otherwise, they are billion dollar monuments to man’s innovative nature.

Of course, these innovations that are neutralizing the strengths of great power militaries are not new. The grinding deadlock of the Great War was due, in part, to the ability of all sides to neutralize offensive weapons, other than artillery. Both sides were left to pound one another from extensive trench systems. In this age, it means both sides are left with stand-off systems like missiles. It also makes the use of nuclear weapons more attractive as a way to break the deadlock.

This being the modern age, the trenches will be virtual. America launched the equivalent of a race to the sea by breaking all promises and declaring financial war on the Russian economy. The Russians have responded but have yet to launch their best financial weapons. China and India are now joining the fight, America has announced sanctions on China in response. Instead of trench war, this century’s great war will mean barriers to trade and capital.

Instead of reducing Europe to a moonscape, it will bring about a global depression that will set off unknown consequences. The world will have a food shortage this year due to the halt of agricultural products from Russia. Energy prices are rising, which will amplify the inflation pressure. Like the Great War, we are about to enter a test of wills where all sides try to bring the other to the breaking point economically. Washington is betting you can starve longer than Russians or Chinese.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Electric Boogaloo

Posted on by

In the history of motoring, no owner of a sports car has ever said, “This car would be perfect if it sounded like a washing machine instead of a sports car.” In fact, a common complaint from sports car enthusiasts over the decades is that their favorite model does not have a sexy enough exhaust note. A big part of owning a sports car, even a budget model, is the sound it makes when driving. Watch a car show or YouTube car channel and exhaust sound is always mentioned.

Even if you are not into sports cars, the sound of the engine revving is something everyone associates with a sports car. The sound of the car shifting gears, the echo of the exhaust in a narrow canyon, is a big part of the experience. Similarly, driving enthusiasts prefer manual gearboxes to automatics, even though they will tell you that computer controlled automatic transmissions are far superior. The manual gearbox allows the driver to feel like he is part of the machine.

With that in mind, the world’s premiere sports car makers are promising to take all of that away in the coming years. They say they will stop building internal combustion engines and go completely electric. Most have already abandoned manual gearboxes and the rest promise to do so shortly. The supercar makers are investing all of their time in electric motors and self-driving technology. Their goal is to make the elite sports car into something close to an autonomous vehicle

That means the sports car driving experience will soon be like sitting in front of your laptop to the sound of kitchen appliances. Car shows will have soft looking men and women climbing into futuristic vehicles then sitting there in silence as the vehicle goes about the business of being a car. Presumably, the sports models will come with a VR system so the driver can pretend to be driving an actual sports car or maybe it will just have a screen to see what it used to be like.

The question is why? Again, no one can find a Ferrari owner saying he wishes his supercar sounded more like the kitchen juicer. No one has ever daydreamed about driving his blender through the countryside. People into motoring do it for how it makes them feel and it makes them feel alive. It reminds them that life is for living, not ticking boxes on a spreadsheet dreamed up by a sadist with a graduate degree. That’s the thrill of driving a fast car to your limit.

Granted, there is a group of people who claim to be sports car enthusiasts who think electric sports cars are a great idea. They like telling people that electric cars have a flat torque curve, meaning they can accelerate faster than a normal car. BMW has made a lot of money selling them Z-series sports cars, the ones that look like a clown’s shoe, because these are people who are dead inside. Their enthusiasm for sports cars is superficial and performative.

Of course, there is the environmental angle. The Gaia worshippers claim that electric cars are better for Mother Earth. These are the people who tote their groceries home from the market in grimy canvas sacks. These are the people who wear ornamental face gear thinking it wards off evil spirits. The people who have made a childish fear of the bogeyman into both a science and a religion love electric cars. They also think everyone should live in pods and ride the bus.

Putting aside their superstitions, electric cars are not eco-friendly or a more efficient use of natural resources. Electric comes from power stations. The most common powerplant fuels are coal, natural gas, and uranium. In the United States, only 20% of electricity comes from so-called renewables like solar. These “good” sources of electric like solar are a blight on nature and environmentally toxic. The long term costs far outweigh the costs of conventional energy production systems.

Then there is the practicality of electric cars. Fueling a normal car takes a few minutes while charging an EV takes hours. Again, no one is sitting around saying, “I’d like to spend hours at a roadside station talking with people who tend to loiter at rest stops while my electric car is being charged.” Then there is the fact that you have to install a charging station in your home. Imagine buying a car and being told you have to install a filling station in your backyard in order to use it.

In other words, the natural demand for electric cars was zero and remains low even with the push to manufacture demand. There is a novelty factor, for sure, but if no one had bothered to push the production of electric cars, they would not exist. Tesla exists as a way for Elon Musk to hoover up billions in government money, not because he found an unexploited niche in the automobile market. What he found was a clever way to become a rent seeker and the P.T. Barnum of the technological age.

It would be easy to go through all of the arguments in favor of electric cars and show them to be ridiculous or plain wrong. That is not the point. The point is despite the obvious, Western elites are hell bent on forcing us into electric cars. Those super car makers are not marketing to the hoi polloi. They cater to the global elite and they think the global elite believes in the miracle of electric cars. They are catering to their audience and their audience is our ruling class.

The point of this exercise is not to argue against electric cars, but to point out that practicality and self-interest are not what motivates the ruling class. All of them mouth the platitudes of Gaia worship because that is the prevailing orthodoxy. It is a way for them to signal their adherence to the faith. The local officials installing charging stations at the local school, yet ignoring the broken pipes and boarded up windows, are not thinking practically or responding to the demands of the people.

The electric car grift is useful in thinking about how partisanship in a liberal democracy becomes ideology then something closer to theology. The old partisan divide of the last century, good whites versus bad whites, has become a basket of beliefs untethered from practical reality. That basket of beliefs now forms a religion that bounds and defines the ruling class. The managerial class now has its own religion to control and define the members.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Real Supply Chain Crisis

Posted on by

Note: Behind the green door is a long post on the Star Trek franchise. I have been watching these off and on for a couple of years and have some thoughts on how the series evolved foreshadowing today’s events.

A popular plot in science fiction shows is that the human stars of the show discover technology from an ancient race. In trying to figure out how it works, they set off a reaction that puts them at risk. They realize they have to figure out the ancient alien technology in order to save the day. Usually, the moral of the story is that humans are infants in the universe. They may have conquered interstellar travel, but they are nowhere near ready to handle the complex stuff.

It is a popular storyline in science fiction shows because it allows the writers to cook up exotic technology without thinking about how it works. The technology can operate like magic to make the plot happen. It also lets the writers do some finger wagging at the enemies of Hollywood. The white cast members are humbled to learn that they are not at the top of the humanoid hierarchy. Mostly it is just an easy way to grind out a script for a television series like the Stargate franchise.

This concept is not without some parallels in this world. There were people in the early Middle Ages confronted with the same issue. They inherited things like aqueducts from the Romans but lacked the social capital to keep them going. The ancient Greeks assumed the Mycenean ruins were built by a race of giants. They could look at the ruins and imagine what they were at their peak, but they had no idea how they were built or who had built them. It was beyond their knowledge.

America may be entering a similar period. One of the growing complaints in the dreaded private sector is the lack of talent. The mass media notices the labor shortage in things like retail and hospitality, but the real scarcity is upstream. Finding people with the cognitive ability and work ethic to fill important roles is not easy. Often the choice is one or the other. The person has the talent but is unreliable or they are reliable but maybe a click below what the position demands.

The main driver is demographics. The Baby Boomer swan song is upon us, and it is showing up in the payroll registers of American companies. The first wave Boomers are in the prime retirement range. Covid has led many to clock out early. The second wave is in their early sixties, so they are planning to wrap things up. Generation-X is a much smaller cohort, and the Millennials are not ready for prime time. The talent – work ethic dichotomy is very obvious with Millennials.

Of course, it is with Millennials where the glories of diversity appear. They are the second least white generation. The Zoomers are mostly nonwhite. That talent – work ethic dichotomy is exacerbated by “the tax”. The cost, in terms of human capital, in hiring the younger generation is much higher, which means the talent for other things is decreased even further. Basically the private sector is facing a smart fraction problem that promises to get much worse in the near future.

This talent shortage is showing up in strange places. College football coaches are not considered super-smart guys, but it is a challenging job. They run what amounts to a mid-sized business with hundreds of employees. They also have to master the complexity of a game that has reached its peak in complexity. Here is an example of one part of a college football playbook. Finding men with the required skillset to run a college football program is becoming increasingly difficult.

The solution in sports like football is to simplify things. This is the new trend in the game to reflect the demographic reality. Instead of complex passing plays the offense just gives the ball to a fast guy and lets him run around with it. One of the top young quarterbacks in the NFL is Lamar Jackson. He scored a 13 on the Wonderlic test, which is what you would expect from a janitor. Lamar is not working a Rubik’s cube in his off hours nor is he studying a complex offensive system.

The dreaded private sector is going the same way. Automation is the way to reduce the need for talent. Using robots is one way to do this in manufacturing. Another way is software systems to atomize and control the required tasks. In the office, software is doing more of the analysis and decision making. Dispatchers, for example, are being replaced by software that routes field personnel. Those people in the field have mobile devices that fill in the blanks of their knowledge.

Part of what is driving the ruling class is the belief that technology can replace those retiring white Baby Boomers. The dream of the multicultural paradise, free of white power structures, assumes the robots will take over from the white people. No one thinks much about who is going to code, operate and maintain the AI. That is the fatal flaw in the plan. There will never be a time when the machines become self-sufficient and anything but super-racist.

The fact is, there is no escaping the ramifications of the cognitive decline. We have created a society that requires an average IQ of about 97. The distribution of smarts provided sufficient talent at each layer of society. The smart fraction was large enough to carry the rest. Now that IQ has dipped below that threshold, we are starting to see problems like the supply chain issues. This is just the beginning of a systemic collapse brought on by the lack of social capital.

That is the real supply chain crisis. Each generation is supposed to build on the next but starting in the middle of the last century this system started to break. The Baby Boomers did not create enough replacements. Worse yet, they did not train them to take up their positions. The waves of immigration have watered down the system further, creating shortages that will only get worse. Soon, Americans will be like those humans in the sci-fi shows, unable to operate ancient technology.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Corruption Of The Soul

Posted on by

One way to measure the health of a society is to look at how the ruling elite of that society protects the things that are important to the society. Just as the management of a company cannot micromanage every aspect of the firm, the ruling class cannot make sure every rule and custom is strictly enforced. It has to focus its energy on the big items that make the society possible. From there this attitude will flow down to the lower levels who will enforce the smaller rules.

What the ruling elite of a society does by enforcing the big rules, especially those that manage the affairs of the ruling class, is set the tone. A disciplined ruling class reinforces the idea that the rules matter, and they must be respected. This attitude becomes a habit of mind for the people. On the other hand, a ruling class that has no respect for its own rules helps foster a culture of cheating. If it is okay for the bosses to cheat, then only a sucker follows the rules.

The easy example of this is the Roman Republic. When the families at the top of the social order strictly abided by the rules that governed patricians, the plebeians followed their lead in the minor things. The republican virtue that was necessary for their society was a habit of mind. Once the people at the top stopped enforcing their rules, the rest of the culture followed. Caesar was simply the logical end point of a process of decay that began long before he crossed the Rubicon.

In this age, things like the rule of law, the orderly transition of power and the respect for rational inquiry are the big items of society. Liberal democracies are supposed to be rule-based societies that seek to progress by advances in knowledge. That is done by allowing people to investigate the natural world looking for better solutions to the problems of life. These investigations are to follow a set of rules and ethics that reflect the general morality. Progress is orderly and open.

Recent events make plain that the rule of law has broken down across all levels of American society. The rich always have advantages in the law, but now they operate under a different set of rules entirely. America is now ruled by a pirate class that is free to do what they like to the people. Similarly, the orderly transition of power through the mechanism of elections has become a farce. No one involved has any respect for the rules of democracy and no one can trust the results.

Those seem like things that could be fixed once the geezers at the top of the political system are replaced by a new class of people. There is no guarantee, and the odds are not great, but it seems to most people that there is some hope of fixing these problems through a renewal of the liberal democratic spirit. On the other hand, the respect for rational inquiry and debate appears to be hopelessly lost. We are rapidly reaching a point where dissent is explicitly forbidden in America.

That in itself could be lumped in with the other bits of the system that need reform, but the corruption has gone beyond suppression. It is becoming clear that the culture of mendacity that plagues the political class has become the norm within the realms of science and medicine. A culture of rule breaking at the top of society has fostered a culture of dishonestly within the academic community. Even in the hard sciences the willingness to cheat and lie has become quite common.

A good recent example is the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Everything about her career and the company she created was a fraud. This was plainly obvious to many, but they remained quiet as there is no reward for enforcing the rules. Breaking the rules can make you very rich, so lots of people break the rules. The fact that the state is struggling to put this woman in a cage speaks to the legal corruption. The fact that she exists speaks to the corruption in the academy.

She is not alone. The chief executive of biotech firm Athira Pharma was forced out of her position when she admitted to faking her research. When she was a graduate student, she falsified her findings in a number of studies. Those studies set her up for funding to start the company. They were also used to obtain patents. Despite the fact she is a fraud and her company a sham, she only had to resign, and the company will continue on as if nothing important happened.

The elephant in the room on this topic is Covid. The idea of science has been so corrupted that it is now warping the language. Because the vaccines do not actually work as promised, the language is being changed to fit the crime. It used to be that vaccines provided immunity from infection by a specific virus. Now immunity means a sense of happiness that comes from compliance. You may still die from Covid, or you could become immortal. Who can tell anymore?

Science and its practical application have been the gift from the gods that has allowed man to move beyond his primitive existence. In modern societies it is the thing that is supposed to provide the limits on excess and steadily improve daily life. It is fair to say that trust in scientific and technological progress is the bedrock of modernity. It is the thing that we all trust to keep society anchored to reality. It should be the thing the ruling class protects at all costs, but that is no longer true.

In a world where you cannot trust the important things, the little things become nothing but a matter of opinion or convenience. If the people at the top have no respect for the rule of law, then the people at the bottom will have no reason to follow the law other than fear of punishment. The culture will become one where evading the spirit of the rules is the natural habit of mind. This corruption of the soul of society will corrupt the soul of the people, as we are witnessing today.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.