Vocabulary is a clue too.

It occurred to me that there are things I definitely did not know before, but I do know.

Gain of function.

Ionophores.

PCR cycles.

Obviously, not an exhaustive list, but an illustrative one because these are things that show up in scientific literature and relate to a certain current event.

Is there any evidence that the worshippers of 'SCIENCE!" ever increase their vocabulary?  

Of course, they do seem to make up new words or take old words and given them new meaning.  

Intersectional.

Racism.

Bigotry.

Herd Immunity.

Gender.

Also a non-exhaustive list.  They've done this so much we could even list things like love and hate.  

But it's an interesting thing to note- an expansive vocabulary almost accidentally achieved via an attempt to understand the world, and a willingness to read some of this stuff that could be called science-

Versus a shrinking vocabulary further obfuscated by intentionally attempting to change the language to take away the ability to point out clear errors in thinking.  We must have 'progress' after all, regardless of how absolutely unlike progress it seems.

Censorship As A Growth Problem

 I have various interests, many of which lead me to think about appropriate growth.  Cities, communities, and the less and less interesting world of evangelism, where it's obvious those still ardent harbor the same attitudes to growth that helped the 2008 mortgage crisis limp into existence.  Growth is the never ending clarion call for many organizations, especially governments, because they can theoretically grow their way out of all the problems they are causing us.  

But too much growth, too fast, and you find yourself in bad situations.  An algae bloom is a sudden explosion of growth, but it quickly dies back.  It's not good for us, and it isn't good for the algae.

We can look at this social media censorship problem in two ways- one is that they basically lied to us and they were intending to do this kind of thing all along- in which case they should have been more honest.  By being more honest they would have grown more slowly, only adding people aligned to their politics and/or having some of us non-aligned people join under a clearer understanding of how the game was going to be played there.

There's some evidence this isn't the case, since, as they began designing algorithms, they realized conflict generates more interaction and keeps us on their websites for much longer than when we see the stuff we agree with.  They kind of need us there, to make the vegan socialist wine drinking cat ladies pound on their keyboards all through the night.

So, the second way to look at it is that as they grew too fast in their attempt to be a platform, a bunch of people not of their culture walked into their domain and took over the place-  The difference between some sort of sustainable immigration and invasion.  With some sort of workable immigration policy, people come in more slowly and learn the culture at a human pace, which usually means a much slower pace, with a lot of  people already inculcated into the culture to serve as role models.  This is not the sort of thing people do well with a few lectures, or direct knowledge transfer; you need a lot of time and a massive number of interactions to so that the new guy slowly forms the habits of the culture. 

Invasion means the original culture is vanquished.  The newcomers set new cultural norms.

But in either case, excessive growth is the problem (for the company) and these exercises in censorship is a symptom.  This symptom is a problem for everybody else, and may eventually be a problem for the company- since it will probably lead to legal troubles.  

This leads me to wonder about the health of the companies that seem so dominant now, and the current business model of sacrificing profit to achieve market share.  

The Rorschach President

 The President's recent illness and recovery, not to mention his actions, are a sort of Rorschach test.  There's a very easy delineation too- either you are mostly still human, or you've crammed whatever humanity you have left into the cog shaped space the bureaucracy has made for you, and you go absolutely crazy because President Trump acts like a human president and not like a cog president.

Trump seems to be mostly human.  He says he had to do whatever it is he did- either the supposed risks he took that resulted infection, or the aggressive treatment with not yet approved drugs- because he has to lead.  This is the same human impulse that had kings and generals in antiquity leading from the front on the battlefield.  There is a human hierarchy, a natural one.

But there is also this bureaucratic hierarchy.  Now, obviously, modern war is much different from ancient war, so some of the reasons for not leading from the front anymore seem quite logical.  But there's also that aspect of the bureaucratic machine- where in we are all cogs, or gears, or whatever, of the machine, but some parts of the machine are more vital for the machine to run than others.  And the machine is what's most important.

Those who have completely adopted bureaucrat morality are those who are going nuts right now.  

And I see a non-trivial number of non-mainstream people doing it, in addition to all the usual suspects.  

I see this as a disqualification because, if you think/support the bureaucracy, you will -de facto- fail.  It is broken, it lives by theft, and -under the cover of various ideologies- it has killed immense numbers of people.  We need to start down a long road of discovering the natural human hierarchy.  

Stealing The Wrong Answers: Chinese Policies Seem Too Focused On The Past

 The Myth of the Twentieth Century guys mentioned near the end of the podcast a story about a group of Chinese nationals coming over to America and making extensive efforts to steal seed and perhaps map out corn fields in the Midwest.

I think this is, as has often been the case, another example of China fighting an old fight.  

Certainly, genetically alter crops are a sort of innovation, but we already have plenty of evidence that our over-dependence on them- and on corn, soy beans, etc...  is not good.

Government interference in agriculture keeps us stuck on a path we've been on since the World wars, yet all indications point to a need to end heavily monocropping and move into restoring biomes.  The genetically altered, heavily subsidized crops are ultimately a dead end.  We can certainly reach parity in production, and probably increase over all production with a larger number of crops- and the North American grasslands can produce a massive amount of beef and other ruminant animals.  Plenty of food, and we get to repair our ecosystems too.

Now, maybe China is studying this to help it become a dead end faster.  It wouldn't make much sense for them to attack our food supply though- we have been the bread basket for Communists since there were Communists.  The Chinese communists seem to have figured out how not to do some of the dumbest things various commies have done, but it's still a huge country with a lot of mouth to feed.  It is most likely these surveys of Midwestern farms are an attempt to copy, not destroy.  They still have enough disruptions in their own food supply for them to want American supplies available.

This is like spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out how to make the old VHS videotapes while there's plenty of better tech lying around.  

The Public Health Travesty

    Perhaps the time has finally come for them to stop it with the pandemic nonsense.  They just touted that various steroids help with COVID-19. They showcase Dexamethasone, which I had seen mentioned earlier in a Japanese youtube video.  I still don't know enough Japanese to be able to find it again, but the point is, clearly some folks knew about it earlier.

And there is another video I will not be able to find- a doctor talking about budensonide- he got banned by various social media sites- but basically, when people came to him he asked himself what would he usually prescribe for these respiratory symptoms, and thus gave them budensonide.

Now, after hearing this I went and dug into one of my cabinets.  At some point- maybe 10yrs or so ago, I had some sort of respiratory thing going on.  I was given two medications by a doctor- Ventolin and Pulmicort.  Pulmicort turns out to be a brand name for this budensonide.  It came in a weird deliver system because it is fine powder you inhale, so the product is shaped like a bullet with a dial at one end so you get the right measured amount and then suck this stuff into your lungs.  I didn't like this idea very much.  I was much more comfortable with the Ventolin.

So this budensonide sat in my cabinet for years and is probably no good anymore.

Why do I mention all this?

If we had zero press on this virus more people would be alive, because doctors would have stuck to what they know.  But since we had the sky is falling pandemic nonsense, most doctors followed CDC guidelines, which is to do nothing until someone needs hospitalization.  Now, these previous protocols did regularly treat coronaviruses, because that's a large family of viruses, not just one single monster nobody knows anything about.  

But they emphasized testing, and emphasized staying home and isolating from anyone for 14 days.  And if you got bad enough, they emphasized those damn ventilators, which increased your risk of dying dramatically.  It may be great news they are finally admitting we have treatments, but it's absolutely horrible when you realize we would have been better off if no one knew anything about this disease.

Public health fails again.  

Defending Free Speech Is Often A Poor Strategy

Another day, another story about a social media company suspending, blocking, deplatforming- whatever- someone because they allegedly violated terms of service. 

 The standard response to be indignant and sputter about free speech.

 LEE KUAN YEW was in a similar situation as Trump is now. LKY went directly for stronger libel and slander laws to stop the media from constantly dragging him and his administration through the mud.

Now, naturally, those disposed to yell free speech in the first place tend to not be inclined to do such a thing. They like free speech, and tend to be fair- they want their enemies to have the same freedom of speech. 

 But we need to think in terms of what social media is doing now (not to mention the horrible lying the more mainstream media has been doing, but that's more directly answered by LKY's approach). 

When a so-called 'platform' company determines you have violated their terms of service, that company is implying something. Recently Twitter said something about Trump or his campaign spreading misinformation about the coronavirus. This statement, at the very least, implies Trump or his campaign lied.  

There have been other sorts statements companies have made, which, for instance, implies violence. 

And then there's every goofy decision- whether it's banning Alex Jones or shutting down random twitter accounts dedicated to frog memes. 

Every TOS decision is beyond accusatory- it is framed as a statement of fact. And too often, it is not a statement of fact, but rather a lie. Lies must be addressed.

The right tends to ignore the lie and argue the principle of free speech. The lie then becomes part of a background of 'facts'. Those that do not pay close attention may begin to think the lie is true. 

Meanwhile, these organizations continue doing exactly what they are doing, over and over, regardless of the freedom of speech arguments. If, however, each of these decisions by social media companies were a financial hazard- well, they'd either stop quickly or go out of business due to exorbitant legal costs.

Metastasis: The Goal Is Always More, Even If It Kills The Host

In many senses, it seems we have protests without a coherent goal, but from a systems perspective we know what will be promoted. Men remotely capable of being police officers will be police officers in some sense, but there will be yet another layer of bureaucrats overlaid on already existing processes. Many of these will be women who learned some power point in college and have some pathetic degree, which ensures they know little to nothing. They will hamper whatever is left of the police force, and it will be very likely the sort of people would want to be police officers (remotely competent) will leave in frustration and go elsewhere.

If, however, we stopped some of the worst practices in this country, we would be stopping the 'progress' the left has imagined it has had, while returning sanity to our lives. At some point, the Minneapolis power structure decided it was a good idea to get their police force trained by Israelis in the fine art of kneeling on someone's neck as a restraint technique. And, pertinent too, they did this rather recently- in an age where cell phones with video cameras in them were known things.

Would a city liable for property damage allow such training? I think not. It is a fundamental thing to understand- either the bureaucrats are held liable, or they run rampant. And so they have. The city is not liable, as it once was, back before all this revolting 'progress.' And now the police force isn't even required to protect and serve. No, they are now basically enforcers- revenue generators for the city, ultimately.

But I don't think police particularly view themselves in this way. I think many continue to try to protect and serve. But they are given orders, and despite whatever leeway they may have in interpreting them, those orders- not the feelings of a particular officer- are what usually puts them at odds with the people. If you have a quota of tickets you've got to hand out, you have to make that quota, even if they refuse to tell you the specific number. They'll just keep telling you you have it wrong until you get the right number.

There can't be, in any sense, a situation in which ten more voices, some of which will no doubt contradict each other, and many of which will no doubt derive their livelihoods from the actions of the police, court system, city hall, etc...- no way, in which more of this cancer will solve the problem. The craziness of the bureaucracy will be more pronounced, and the quality of the police force will be reduced.

Already, if you pay attention to whatever bureaucratic rules you have to follow, especially after COVID- isn't it technically impossible to work? Are you asked questions about your health? Do you gloss over that coughing fit you had because you know why it happened? Or your breathing problems because you know it's the mask they make you wear and not a virus. What if we stopped providing the bureaucrats the benefit of our ability to discern reality and just scrupulously reported? We'd get nothing done.

When does this actually become a problem for the bureaucrats? Don't they need us to get stuff done? It doesn't seem like it. It seems like they get rewarded as things go to shit because the political answer always seems to be more of them for everyone one of us.