This Week's Calculations

A very long time ago I came up with a number of 22,501 as a sort of upper limit for a local church, by which I meant one area with a bishop.

Now, following on my last calculations, it struck me that an area of forty thousand people, from that productivity angle, is probably a good one to be at, mainly because you have a one in four chance of actually being a productive member of society. When the odds are that good, you can generally delude yourself that you are, even if you aren't- and such a delusion is a good thing. One doesn't firebomb things one feels invested in.

Now, the church figure is based on the dunbar number and a view of confession as somewhat important to the spiritual growth to man- though I must confess confession has not done much for me, though I attribute that to the fact that most of my confessors had been imbued with thoroughly modern ideas, and the idea that there were too many of them, as well. I hypothesize that if you have one decent confessor for your whole life then perhaps there would actually be some spiritual direction and spiritual growth, rather than what happens today where you go to confession merely to list your sins and if you want spiritual direction you go talk to a communist nun- well, until you get wise to the nonsense.

Anyway, the church number is near enough to half of forty thousand, and it might be good to have two bishops in the same realm so as to keep them from getting pretentious, or, if they should get pretentious, let them do so against each other.

I like how the two numbers sort of dovetail. Productivity, a local economy- well, it is tricky because one can't always tell who is who, and principles of economics necessitate a hands off approach. I do, however, think more and more that although the general idea of free trade is well in good in theory, in practice a local economy is likely better because if you actually want to be free, you have to figure out how to keep your actions opaque to the tyrants.

There was a recent case in Kentucky about an off grid family getting torn apart by the CPS. I don't know if it is really as bad as was written, but it did seem to bring home to me again that we don't have mechanisms anymore for making people who don't understand things like the Consitution stop. They get power, they do what they want, and if a court rules against them, they keep doing what they want, but they just change the language of whatever it is they want to do.

In Louisiana, for instance, we have gaming, which looks exactly like gambling except that it can't be gambling because gambling is illegal whereas gaming is not. The situation is even worse in other areas, because how many people are actually capable of even putting on a multi-million dollar defense of themselves- and then there is no guarantee that the courts are going to reaffirm the previous ruling, either. They may accept the new language, especially if the new generation of judges are influenced by the degenerate times much as the CPS and cops must be.

Anyway, there ought to be someone to show up and make them stop, but we can't do that. We can't even put up a show like the progressives do, because we have actual jobs and responsibilities. I suppose we could call up the cultural Marxists and ask to hire their mobs for a couple of days, but they are likely to botch it up.