Monthly Archives: September 2018

The Seekers

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The book, When Prophecy Fails, is a classic work of social psychology written in the 1950’s based on a study of a UFO cult called the Seekers. This group was led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed that aliens spoke through her to warn of a coming apocalypse. She employed something called “automatic writing” to channel the messages from the people of the planet Clarion. Through her, they were telling humanity that the world would end on December 21, 1954.

The study documented the believers and how they coped with the fact the word did not end on December 21, 1954. What they found is that instead of the group realizing they had been duped by a lunatic, they quickly developed an explanation for why the great event had not occurred and came to believe that with the same degree of intensity they had believed the original prophesy. In the case of the Seekers, within hours they were telling the world that their faith had convinced God to spare the world.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind. We tend to assume cults have a charismatic figure at the top, but that’s not always the case. Hassidic Jews are not led by a charismatic leader, unless you consider the Rabbi a cult leader. In fact, that may not be a bad comparison, in that Rabbis come and go, temporarily holding the position of sect leader, but not really a cult figure. Progressives swap out their chief lunatic as well. Look at their list of three initial heroes.

In the summer before the 2016 election, the left was sure Hillary Clinton would be anointed as their new leader. They were so sure of it, people quitting their jobs so they could prepare to move to Washington and serve the new ruler. Then disaster struck and the prophecy failed. Like the Seekers, they waited all night for a miracle, but there was no miracle. Also like the Seekers, they cooked up an elaborate explanation, rather than accept the result. Russian collusion is a coping mechanism.

It does not stop there with the left. They have a new prophecy that they are sure will come true on the first Tuesday of this November. They believe the magical blue wave will cleanse the the land of sinners, who defend the evil Donald Trump, by concealing the Russian hacking scandal. It’s why fiction writer Bob Woodward released his book this week and why the NYTimes ran the fictional op-ed. These are intended to be evidence at the trial of Donald Trump, when he is impeached.

It’s also why Elizabeth Warren was out demanding they invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump now. After all, if it is inevitable, why wait for the election? As far as she and the other hormonal crazies in the cult are concerned, the impeachment and removal of Trump is written in stone. True believers always succumb to the Tinker Bell Effect, because they believe so intensely, they inevitably begin to see everything as confirmation of their deeply held beliefs.

You’ll also note that these periods of extreme mania come and go. When Trump fired Comey, the Left was apoplectic for a week. Comey himself was out there casting himself in the role of martyr for the cause. Then it passed and no one talks about him anymore, outside of grand jury rooms. When Trump met with Putin, there was another week of fevered lunacy in the media. This week’s spasm coincided with the Kavanaugh hearings and next week, all of this will be forgotten.

What’s happening is the left is responding to disconfirmation in the same way the Seekers handled it. Rather than reevaluate their positions or beliefs considering obvious reality, they escalate their intensity to pull the faithful together. Firing Comey showed Trump was not about to resign, as the left believed. When he met with Putin, it annulled their Boris and Natasha fantasy. Now that Kavanaugh is obviously going to be confirmed, it undermines those beliefs.

Another aspect of the Seekers is relevant here. Dorothy Martin came out of the same cult that gave birth to Scientology. She later went on to reinvent herself as Sister Thedra and start a new cult called the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Progressives have similarly morphed into different things over the years. You’ll also note that spiritual cults tend to be led by women or have a lot of high-profile females.  The same thing is happening with the progressives.

All of this is amusing but imagine a country with a powerful army and nuclear weapons being run by nutters like Elizabeth Warren. Imagine a situation room that looks like the editorial board of the Huffington Post. There are no obvious remedies to having the ruling class succumb to mass insanity. The public can accept that their rulers are corrupt or evil. It’s hard to accept that they are insane. The proof of that probably comes too late as the loonies have already pulled the roof down us.

Nacirema

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Over the long holiday weekend, I had the misfortune of being in the company of a classic ConservaCon type. The only thing he was missing was the tricorn hat and over-sized copy of the Constitution. No matter what the topic, he somehow circled back to some version of “we need to get back to our constitutional principles.” It is the abracadabra phrase of these people. If we just say it enough times, poof!, we’re in the 18th century again, with better hygiene. It really is annoying, even if it is understandable.

On the way home I started thinking about the rights that actually exist in the Bill of Rights and how much of them we actually have now. I though it might make a good topic for the podcast, so that’s what I’m doing this week. It is one of those topics where after some thinking about it, you end up sounding like a radical civil rights lawyer. Well, like what radical civil rights lawyers used to sound like when we still had something resembling a constitutional republic and stable demographics. Funny how that worked out.

Something I did not discuss this week, but occurred to me while editing, is that our side needs a William Kunstler. He was the old publicity hound, who represented the radicals of the 60’s and 70’s. It was not so much that he was a great attorney, but that he knew how to work the press in favor of unpopular clients. Those old radicals knew how to normalize the defense of villains, thus making them less villainous, but also making it more difficult to railroad the inconvenient. He raised the cost of what passed for virtue signaling.

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’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Our Rights
  • 07:00: Freedom of Religion (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Speech & Assembly
  • 27:00: Gun Rights (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Privacy (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Taking the Fifth (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Music)

Direct Download

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Google Play Link

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Weak Leading The Crazy

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The fake news phenomenon is not new. It’s been a part of the business since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer invented it in the United States. They are the two credited with inventing yellow journalism and using it to get the U.S. to declare war on Spain at the end of the 19th century. It probably goes back further, but it was these two who figured out how to make it work. It’s not an accident that the two men who created fake news have journalism awards named after them.

More recently, the gold standard of fake news is the fake human interest story. This is where the fake reporter finds some fake people to profile. Sometimes the people are real, but their story is fictionalized and their quotes invented. Mike Barnacle had a long career at the Boston Globe writing fake human interest stories. He was eventually found out and fired, but people always knew he was a faker. He’s now a regular on MSNBC as a fake guest.

Another variation on this is the Stephen Glass example. He was a write for the New Republic, who wrote eye-catching first-person stories about outlandish things supposedly happening in Washington. Of course, his subjects were almost always conservatives acting in a way that titillated the left. For example, he did a piece on CPAC in which he described conservatives carrying on like a Roman orgy. He was eventually found out and fired.

Despite that rather famous event, progressive publications have done little to address the wholesale fraud that goes on in the business. All sources are now “unnamed sources” by which they mean imaginary. Even sports writers do this. It’s so egregious, it must be assumed that everyone knows it is all fake. When someone reports on something that only two people could know, and neither is named in the story, the report must be fake.

This week we may be seeing fake news merge with mass hysteria to set off a panic among the Cloud People. First we have Bob Woodward out with his latest collection of ghost stories. Woodward is the guy who used former CIA director Bill Casey as a source, while Casey was in a coma. His Watergate writing was similarly full of things too good to be true. There is a great book on that topic and all else related to Watergate called Silent Coup.

Anyway, Woodward has a book out on Trump in which he strokes every single fear and hatred of the loons. Perhaps sensing it was too obvious or hoping to piggyback on the release, the New York Times has an op-ed up that is supposedly written by a White House insider. Reading the thing, it feels as if it was written by a couple of clever college boys pulling a prank. Judging from the reaction, even liberals suspect it is fake or at least too fake.

Of course, all of this is a coordinated effort by the mass media to damage Trump in the run up to the midterm elections. We know this is a coordinated effort because they did their organizing in public view. Someone should tell the media that the point is to scare the public, not scare yourselves. All these whoppers they are producing read like the stuff pink pussy hat wearing gals tell one another after too many gulps of chardonnay at their female empowerment club.

All of this is amusing, but it is also revealing. The mass media tells us that there is no reason for the Dirt People to bother voting this fall. The blue wave is coming in November, and the House will soon be stuffed with exotic brown people, sporting funny names and a long list of grievances against whitey. Yet, they are in a full panic, carrying on as if they expect the opposite. The grotesque theater that was the McCain funeral is another example that suggests these people are nuts.

Another amusing aspect to this is the loonies will no doubt have their panties in a twist when the truth is revealed. If it is a real person in the White House, the media will suddenly be outraged by the doxing of this brave hero. Meanwhile, Darren Beattie will remain unemployed. If it turns out the writer is Jayson Blair, the whole thing will be thrown down the memory hole along with all the other hoaxes. Regardless, they will consider the contents to be gospel for the next six years.

Journalism has always been about shaping public opinion. It has always been fake news, which is why their top awards go to fakers It worked for a long time because the guys who used to run the media were smart, and they hired smart people. They also had a feel for their audience. Today, the typical journalist is a hormonal girl, with a head full of feminist nonsense. Alternatively, it is a foppish male with no useful skills and no useful experience in the world.

Compounding it is the management class of these news organizations have never done real reporting. Many came out of politics, never having covered a fire or reported on a court case. They don’t know the basics of the news business, so they are easily fooled by their obsequious underlings. The result is the typical news organization is the weak leading the crazy. In an age where facts are easily verified, fake news needs to be smart, but instead it is stupid.

It’s Complicated

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Anyone who has been through a change in software platforms for their company knows that it starts out as a lot of fun, but then turns into drudgery. Initially, thoughts of all the new stuff and better programs makes it feel like Christmas. Then the reality of going through every single business process of the company hits home. You end up re-thinking vast chunks of the company’s business processes, much of which is terribly dull, even though it is essential. It is the only way to get it right and take advantage of the new system.

What you learn from such an ordeal is that the company software system is the repository of the company rules that define how it exists. Over time, the rules changed and evolved, and the software was changed to evolve with the company. There were upgrades and modifications. If the software is old enough, there were modifications to modifications and many hands doing the work, many of whom are long gone. More important, many of the processes were created for reasons no one remembers. It’s just the way it is done.

The people who like to argue that complex systems cannot evolve from simple systems have never worked with business software. All complex business software started as simple software. Over decades, it evolved into highly complex systems that even the creators don’t fully understand. Usually, in the case of enterprise systems, there are teams who specialize in one aspect of the system. They have created interfaces that the rest of the system uses to pass data or call functions related to that area of the system.

The reason that systems tend toward increasing complexity is that the world is not a fixed place. Even small changes can require significant changes in how a company does business. In a government regulated industry like food or chemicals, the government is always updating the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). That means regular changes to the forms that are printed or the data that must be captured. That, of course, means regular changes to the company software system. Over time, those changes add up.

Now, the people maintaining and modifying the software are not rewriting large swaths of it every time there is a change. They make small changes, the bare minimum, to keep costs down and get the change done quickly. That means they take shortcuts, hybridizing other functions and applying patches to existing code. It does not take long before this gets out of hand and even small changes require lots of thinking and planning.

It is good way to think about all human organization. The company that started out as two people, but grew to one hundred people, is at least a thousand times more complex than when it started. Obviously, the small town that grew into a city seems infinitely more complex than when it started. Even your social circle can suddenly feel wildly complex if your circle of friends expands to include people outside your initial peer group. Complexity grows at a rate faster than the growth the organization. That’s an iron rule of life.

The people working in artificial intelligence are running into this same problem. Replicating even the most mundane human task requires millions of lines of complex code. What we take for granted as humans is quite complex. For the same reason no one person can understand the complexity of their small town, the creators of AI cannot understand the complexity of their creations. Algorithms to handle one small task get unwieldy in hurry once they are interfaced with other algorithms to handle other small tasks.

This is why the robot future is a lot further away than the futurists want to believe. The cost of labor to automate a warehouse is a grain of sand on the beach, compared to the cost and complexity of automating a highway. Just as important, the cost of maintaining it is orders of magnitude higher. As every business owner knows, just because something can be automated, the cost of doing so often outweighs the savings. Put another way, just because something can be done does not mean there is a reason to do it.

Putting aside the cost of complexity, systems often become so complex that they become unpredictable. Even in business systems, which are simple compared to the software for driving a car, the complexity can reach a point where no one truly knows what will happen if some change is implemented. The result is a whole new process for performing quality control, to make sure the changes do not have some unexpected and unwanted downstream result. There are now certifications for software quality control professionals.

This is often why legacy systems are replaced. It’s not the technology, although that is often a handy excuse. It’s that the old system has so many patches and mods that no one knows how it works anymore. New changes result is weird outcomes and costly follow-up changes. As is true with everything in life, things sometimes get so complicated that the best answer is to start over. It is why men leave their families and why people change careers. It’s also why the people stand aside and let the revolutionaries topple the rulers.

That’s what a revolution is, when you think about it. It’s a lot like the decision to buy a new software system for the company. It’s not that what comes next will be better. It’s that the status quo is so complicated and unpleasant, anything must be better. Of course, just a new software never turns out as expected, revolutions always turn out to be a lot more unpleasant than anyone imagined. Instead of firing the initial consultants, the revolution eats its own, by killing off the first group of revolutionary leaders.

Even so, it is something to think about as the West struggles to reform itself. The web of pirates, grifters, reformers and patriots within the ruling classes of the West has reached a point where no one understands what’s happening. That’s why official Washington remains in a state of emergency over Trump. It’s why the European ruling class is worried that they may be too lazy to fight their own people. Everyone knows that the system is not working, but no one has any idea how to fix and everyone is afraid to touch it.

It might be time for a new system.