tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88990987972301905262024-03-13T12:26:04.236-07:00Contra NicheAugusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.comBlogger1749125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-55633009106618742082023-04-29T18:32:00.000-07:002023-04-29T18:32:17.352-07:00Having a Blog is No Assurance of QualityGrey Enlightenment making stupid statements about something I know about in his post:<a href="https://greyenlightenment.com/2023/04/29/having-academic-credentials-is-no-assurance-of-quality/">Having academic credentials is no assurance of quality</a><div><br /></div><div>The headline is, of course, absolutely true. So obviously true in this age of dumb ass idiots with various degrees - but who does he decide to pick on? Seth Roberts. Without bothering to do a lick of research either.</div><div><br /></div><blockquote><div><p style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #d1e4dd; box-sizing: inherit; color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px; line-height: var(--wp--typography--line-height, var(--global--line-height-body)); margin-bottom: var(--global--spacing-vertical); margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-width: var(--responsive--aligndefault-width); overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px;">From 2009, Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses the <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BD4oExxQguTgpESdm/the-unfinished-mystery-of-the-shangri-la-diet" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; max-width: var(--global--spacing-measure); text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 3px;">Shangri-La Diet</a>, a type of diet that involves the added consumption of oil:</p></div></blockquote><p>Any serious look into the Shangri-La diet would mean you wouldn't make this statement. Yes, oil was often used. I used walnut oil for the longest time, but I know what it is really about. What is important is that you have some sort of calories introduced into your body without flavor. So it is easy to fill a shot glass with oil, hold your nose and achieve this.</p><p>When I first tried this, Seth was on flax seed oil- but flax seed oil did not work well with my body at the time. Since I actually read what Seth wrote, I knew it wasn't the oil per se- but some calories with no flavor. </p><p>You can think of it as signal versus payload. Calories are the payload. If they get into the body with no signal, perhaps even just an unreliable signal, appetite gets regulated down. Think about processed food- you eat the thing- you taste the thing, and the body receives the calories. In a processed food environment, the signal (the flavor) is an extremely accurate predictor to the body as to how many calories are going to be there. This leads to appetite increasing and more weight gain.</p><p>So, before I found I could tolerate walnut oil, I tried various things. One of the most effective, in my opinion, was to roast chicken breast in the oven, put a nose clip on, eat it, and then rinse my mouth out with water before taking the nose clip off. It was immediately effective, as it was difficult to finish a 4oz portion. But it was also effective over the course of the day. I'd feel full much faster when eating tasty meals that I wanted to eat, and I'd have to stop.</p><p>Now, when this appetite suppression kicked in, paleo was also becoming popular, and here I was suddenly capable of thinking about what I should eat, rather than getting the hungries and cramming whatever down my pie hole. So I added a low carb, paleo approach along with SLD.</p><p>I lost over a hundred pounds and I've mostly kept it off. I say mostly, because after all of this I decided to go into the gym and try to gain muscle. I dieted down below my ideal weight- at least what I think my ideal weight is after some research. </p><p>I also stopped SLD. At the time, walnut oil seemed like a pretty healthy thing, but I'm now a little leery of it. I could try the chicken again, but I'm not a fan of eating cardboard, and although I'm a few pounds heavier than my ideal weight- I am within striking distance. Probably shouldn't have listened to those 'bulking' arguments. </p><p>So, why does it not work for Eliezer Yudkowsky? Well, there is this small possibility it doesn't work for some people. But I've watched people who, after hearing my story, tried it. </p><p>The first potential snag is, do you get it? Are you actively trying to get calories in without tasting anything? If I remember correctly, I was getting 240 calories from walnut oil in the morning, and that was enough for strong appetite suppression throughout the day. But if you are just chugging oil normally, and tasting it, it's not going to work.</p><p>The second snag comes after getting appetite suppression. What are you eating the rest of the day? This also happens with low carb- you can beat these protocols that help you lose weight by poor food choices. And some of these choices are allegedly 'healthy'. Nuts are supposed to be healthy, but since they are mostly fat, you can put many calories down your gullet.</p><p>This is reminding me there's another thing I did- I used Wolfram Alpha make an educated guess about my muscle mass and ate 1g of protein per pound of lean muscle mass. And I was using mostly meat. This may have an appetite suppressing quality all to itself, because if you prioritize eating enough meat to reach that goal- well, you don't feel very hungry. </p><p>So, I can say the Shangri-la Diet created strong appetite suppression in me. I can also say it is the height of superficiality to call it an 'oil diet.' Some people would just put a nose-clip on and eat a normal meal, and I certainly found it to work very well with chicken. And I can say there are probably thousands if not millions of academics who deserve a nasty blog post being done about them. Seth Roberts is not one of those academics. Frankly, even if SLD doesn't work for you, his story is still worth looking into. He lost his appetite in Paris, not due to oil, but because he drank some sodas- flavors he was not familiar with. It stood out to him because he was intent on eating a lot of stuff in Paris, and found he couldn't. But he also had the intellect to correlate what he was experiencing with some of the research he had read.</p><p>So, he came up with a hypothesis and it worked for a lot of us. He actually came up with many hypotheses- SLD was just the one most popularized. He was one of the few good academics. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div style="text-align: center;"><div><br /></div><blockquote style="background-color: #121212; box-sizing: border-box; color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.88); font-family: Merriweather, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; margin-bottom: 1.5rem; margin-left: 1.5rem; margin-top: 1.5rem; text-align: start;"></blockquote></div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-70662323401971359682023-02-20T18:01:00.000-08:002023-02-20T18:01:53.161-08:00The False Goddess of Rebellion<p> Today I saw a book for little girls- something like Bedtime Stories for Rebellious Girls. It occurred to me this is a subplot- or sub-identity (as in identity politics) meant to attenuate or destroy a woman's capacity to operate in a generative fashion.</p><p>Briefly, the entire point of these 'identities' that they try to brainwash people with is to keep the current cancerous bureaucracy on top. They pretend there's some other 'oppressor' - i.e. not the blindingly obvious incompetent/evil bureaucrats who are currently in charge and driving Western civilization into the ground. They are extra happy when low IQ people fall for their crap, because we have yet another fight between groups of people not in power, while those in power pretend to be 'professionals' and go around assigning blame, or privilege, and redistribute a huge chunk of resources to themselves while claiming to help whoever is perceived as the biggest victim in the current year.</p><p>But the rebel is inevitably defined by who she rebels against. If there is nothing to rebel against, well, you might have to stop thinking about rebellion and start- I don't know, growing food or something. I mean, we need food, so somebody has to grow the stuff or everybody is going to get really hungry.</p><p>By the same token, there's family, society, ecosystem etc... A lot of important stuff to maintain and grow, especially if you get wind of the fact that the bureaucracy has been reflexively damaging this stuff since the late 1800s. </p><p>What does rebellion get you in a situation where you desperately need to be responsible for and either build or help build real systems that will keep you and your progeny alive? They never seem to rebel against the bureaucratic state, but instead a revisionist version of what came before. A boogeyman that doesn't even exist. The entire project is meant to keep you helping your exploiters alive, well, and in position to keep exploiting you. </p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-61227369556943856892022-10-02T14:44:00.001-07:002022-10-02T14:44:45.917-07:00Smells Like Anti-Christ<p> I'm still a little irked at being told accepting some of this woke stuff would make me a better Christian. There is the first obvious flaw- i.e. race is biblical, so if you are trying to make me a better Christian, please stop trying to get me to not believe things that are in the bible.</p><p>But then there's this:</p><blockquote><span style="color: #202122; font-family: sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px;">There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px;"> Galatians 3:28</span></blockquote><p>The oneness is in Christ. The people who are promulgating wokeness are not in Christ. Even if the individual is nominally Christian, the reality is the people pushing this stuff are pushing it for bureaucratic purposes- i.e. not acting in Christ. Additionally, since these ideas are all easily traced back to Marxist plans for fomenting revolution, we already know this was coming from an atheistic place- possibly even from a worse place.</p><p>This might not be as noticeable as an anti-Christ coming along and proclaiming salvation comes from somewhere other than Christ, but it is extremely similar. Have you wondered why this particular pastiche of issues shows up as a package? </p><p>It has been a century or more since they've started pounding away at our communities. It is only now that they can deceive enough of us to think at least some of their accusations have standing. They feel confident now, to say, for instance, that Christians on Sunday are an example of separateness. This would not have flown in the ancient world, for even in the most cosmopolitan cities, there were ethnic enclaves. </p><p>Additionally, each people had slightly different understanding and modes for worship, purification, etc..., so liturgies sprung up among specific peoples precisely because that's the scale at which there was a shared understanding. Layer on the modern denominations, and a shared understanding with which to enact any sort of public worship is even more fractured. </p><p>Even if a bunch of diverse people showed up and began a church together, they would quickly (in a few generations, but still -in relative terms- quickly) become an ethnicity themselves. We have duties to our families that generally require living close to one another. </p><p>Perhaps the strangest thing of all- in the ancient world, wouldn't diversity be more of a marker for slavery than freedom? If you were free you would live and work with your extended family, but if you were a slave you would have to live in quarters provided by the one who bought you. </p><p>They should seriously back off and stop making me think about these things. It would not have occurred to me they were trying to claim something that can only happen in Christ unless they kept pushing this stuff on me, and then one of them said it might make me a better Christian. Then my brain kicks in and spends too much time on this crap, and I figure out I'm dealing with a mini-me version of the anti-Christ. Shut up, make this crap voluntary, and go have tea with the ladies who like having these conversations.</p><p> </p><blockquote><p> </p></blockquote>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-88425065682142932622022-09-18T12:57:00.002-07:002022-09-18T12:57:58.075-07:00Force a Bubble Economy, Until There's Nothing Left To PopSomething has been bothering me since I heard to real-estate podcasters call themselves locusts on their show- even if a town or a city miraculously came down with a good administration, would it do any good in the long run?<div><br /></div><div>Consider the positive side- your town is attracting people, so rents go up and this attracts the above-mentioned locusts. They no longer just invest in their own backyard. They follow trends, identify markets across the U.S., and are happy to do all this stuff long distance. </div><div><br /></div><div>If your town is attracting people, that may mean you've figured out how to run it a little better than most, but here comes the real estate bubble. How do you keep the growth to an appropriate level?</div><div><br /></div><div>Most cities don't do the proper research to proper up-keep. They'll push for the flashy new development because it looks good, but they don't try and match it with what the expected tax results will be.</div><div><br /></div><div>This because officials are like kids taking cookies out of the jar- not Grandma, who owns the jar and likes to keep it full. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since they don't have a long term ownership interest, the temptation is to spend today with disregard for tomorrow. Maybe they worry a little bit as to whether or not they'll be around when their pensions inevitably get cut, but it doesn't not appear to be a big enough worry to stop the madness.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's the negative side too, as we have noticed recently with Jackson, Mississippi. Much has been made of it being an 80% black city, with various sides conveniently using that statistic to back up their biases.</div><div><br /></div><div>But what that number represents is those that basically couldn't get out. It wasn't just white flight- pretty much anyone with the means got out. They are the ones left holding the bag.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, those who run the government are in the habit of doing what has been going on since the end of WWII. They show no sign of wising up, and realizing the error of their ways. Since the exploitative behavior started so long ago, the current generation of officials could think that this is just what they are supposed to do- within certain parameters, of course. If they really did just turn off the water to milk the federal government for a billion dollars- well, that would be going pretty far.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I have no doubt that they've turned their police department into a revenue generating operation, and are making their poor suffer. That's what most places have done to keep the court industry running.</div><div><br /></div><div>Should Jackson officials suddenly achieve enlightenment, they would want to act a lot like Singapore- think about how to attract talent and keep it there. Despite being black, they would almost immediately be called white supremacists. Protests about 'gentrification' would no doubt happen, and then there would be howling if anyone got wind of the rest of the reforms necessary to attract people with means to such a city.</div><div><br /></div><div>As always, there are things that could be done, yet nearly every avenue via which to do it seems to get shut down. They'd probably be calling Jane Jacobs far right if she was alive right now.</div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-62910418883543997022022-09-10T12:44:00.000-07:002022-09-10T12:44:20.421-07:00The Self-Defeating Social Construct ArtistsAllegedly, various things are social constructs, but what, pray tell are the things that we are told we should replace them with?<div><br /></div><div>Social constructs! In fact they are more reliant on a society than the original constructs. A complex society, one big enough to give you your pills, your surgeries, and constant reinforcement of your new identity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Blackness is now defined as an identity, but not one based on race, because, according to these soothsayers, race doesn't really exist. Nevermind the bible, genetics, and various medical issues we may suffer if we don't pay any attention to race. </div><div><br /></div><div>But doesn't that make it more of a social construct, not less? Now, the identity is constructed almost entirely via interactions with other people, with nothing one can reference as solidly 'self'.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, of course, reality keeps leaking in, as, obviously, white people who identify as black are generally not accepted as black- unless they do a really good job with melanotan II, other cosmetic changes, and are good at faking their backgrounds.</div><div><br /></div><div>It takes real social pressure for a lot of this stuff to even occur to people, and saner minds know it's probably a good idea for people not to know about it. This is why we are having such fights around schools these days. Your children could grow up not knowing about all this stuff, and have a normal life, but now we've got pronoun evangelists in the schools bent on making sure every kid is exposed to this nonsense.</div><div><br /></div><div>The new lie must be promulgated, even if it eats into the old one, as feminists are finding out. The transgender can achieve whatever it was feminists were fighting for by mere declaration. Trounce them in sports. Berate them in lesbian hook-up apps for not wanting to hook up with them. Get them kicked out of a Pride parade. </div><div><br /></div><div>Is there no way we can stop having this 'conversation'? Probably not. I think the bureaucrats saw how Occupy Wall Street fell apart, and they've decided to push this junk as hard as they can. It's easier to control us that way.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-45323303727844704762022-09-02T13:02:00.000-07:002022-09-02T13:02:21.334-07:00Missing the Forest for the Trees<p> <a href="https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/09/01/elite-overproduction-not-that-big-of-a-deal-yet/">Grey Enlightment doesn't understand elite overproduction,</a> so I'll show where his analysis is flawed:</p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, Segoe UI, Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, Helvetica Neue, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: #d1e4dd; font-size: 20px;">1. The word ‘overproduction’ suggests an imbalance or surplus of college grads, but the ever-widening college wage premium suggests otherwise. Proponents of elite overproduction theory have to reconcile the data showing college grads have much higher earnings, with the notion of oversupply, which is inherently contradictory.</span></span></p></blockquote><p>This isn't at all surprising, nor is it contradictory. We live in a bureaucracy. The bureaucracy allocates funds to it's own ends. We do not have a free market in which a price signal could be normal. Think about how they hand out incentives for 'green' technology, which in turn make it appear these technologies are fully functional. But we don't have the sort of electrical grid that can handle everyone getting electric cars- we will end up with a broken grid, and a lot of people unable to drive anywhere.</p><p>The overproduction of elites is similar, with regard to his point. There would be a gap in earnings anyway, though not as large as it is now.</p><blockquote><p> </p><span style="background-color: #d1e4dd; color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px;">2. Most college grads do not aspire to highly-visible elite roles. Some of most popular majors are psychology, nursing, business, medicine/pre-med, accounting, engineering, and ‘sports psychology’. These are actionable, good-paying careers, but not necessarily elite-track professions. If you want to be elite, you probably want to get a humanities, law, economics, or Classics degree. As I said before, elites generally deal with abstractions or words, not people or things (the only possible exceptions being business elites or political elites), which is why law school tends to be the favored path for aspiring elites. They don’t want to be doing rectal exams or having to read expense reports.</span></blockquote><p>The bureaucracy coalesces around people who actually do work. This is perhaps most obvious in the medical industry where most of the money we've been spending since the Clinton years has been going into huge bureaucracies. Most people are going to look for honest work. They are not going to call a bureaucrat an elite, because they are technically not elites- they are usurpers. But since the modern bureaucratic state was so successful in destroying the nobility, they do exist now as the elite under the current system. Few people are going to see this until it directly hurts them- like when doctors tried to get good information out about COVID that contradicted the bureaucratic plan. We usually just grumble about paperwork and go along with the program with the thought that it's just the way it is.</p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: #d1e4dd; color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px;">3. Elite overproduction, if it exists, is not societally destabilizing. It just means an angier, more cynical educated class, but it will not lead to unrest or the breakdown or society. Even with increased credentialization over the past 40 years, strong GDP growth, falling crime rates since the early 90s (although there was a spike in 2020-2021), record corporate profits, and record high US dollar, suggests that having a large educated class hasn’t yet had deleterious effects from a macro economic or social stability perspective.</span></p></blockquote><p>Here it would be advantageous to actually read Peter Turchin, because he's not talking about some mere hypothesis about the current year. He points out elite overproduction has happened before. It has not happened at this scale though. Just think about the comparison of creating elites through a royal family versus elites via a bureaucracy. Families grow at a much slower rate. Even the bureaucratic state was growing much slower in previous iterations when there was some sanity.</p><p>But now that it has gone off the rails, what we see are our institutions failing us, making excuses for not doing what they should be doing, and claiming ever more authority despite losing credibility for not doing the things we gave them authority for in the first place. </p><p>This is where the social destabilization comes in. Your city can't provide water because they wasted your money on other things, rather than keeping the infrastructure up. Ideally you could fire them all and find folks who know what they are doing, but no- the reason the infrastructure is screwed up is racism or climate change. They proceed to demand more of you because they need to fight racism or climate change. The infrastructure still needs to be fixed- the whole city needs to be put on a sustainable path, but they will then take the money and create more bureaucracy meant to combat racism and climate change. The infrastructure will continue to degrade, and the bureaucracy will make sure to create the impression that racism and climate change exist and are pressing problems. </p><p>This is an emergent property of complex systems- the bureaucracy defends itself, appearing intelligent in a perverse way, because you'd think the average bureaucrat (being human) would see this could end badly, perhaps even see that it could end for him personally in a very bad way, yet they continue to pursue these activities. In large part, it's due to comfort and the fact that their pensions are tied up with the existing system. </p><p>Under these conditions, violence breaks out, and society destabilizes. Instead of letting Unite the Right speak in Charlottsville- which would result in us laughing at them if they were just a bunch of racists- they let Antifa take over the streets and then pushed the Unite the Right people into them. Then they proceeded to spend hours letting craziness take over their streets- a sign they were obviously hoping for/fomenting violence. I believe there was one (very leftist) journalist who still wants to know why the first responders were stopped from providing care to the one victim, who got hit by a car, but died of a heart attack.</p><p>As you may be able to tell, I think they were hoping for blood shed. They were probably sad that they only one got one death, considering what the ensuing media/marketing circus was afterward.</p><p>Most of what has appeared on TV since then have similar suspicious qualities. Whatever the feelings of the people involved, there's a scripted quality. One demographic comes away with the idea they are being hunted by the police. Another demographic comes away with the message that we need to militarize the police more, apparently never worrying that the military gear might be used against them.</p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: #d1e4dd; color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px;">4. The ability of political elites to impart drastic change is possibly overstated. Democratic elites seem to have have mixed success at policy. ‘Defund the police’ was DOA, same for the ‘George Floyd Justice in Policing Act,’ which got zero Republican votes. AOC is regarded as one of the </span><a href="https://nypost.com/2021/04/03/aoc-was-one-of-least-effective-members-of-congress-study/" style="background-color: #d1e4dd; box-sizing: inherit; cursor: pointer; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px; max-width: var(--global--spacing-measure); text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 3px;">least</a><span style="background-color: #d1e4dd; color: #28303d; font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; font-size: 20px;"> effective congresspeople. It was Manchin who stole the show. A case can be made that elites were more effective generations ago, such as during the Civil Rights era, compared to today, before they became overproduced. More elites means more competition within elites, like conservative vs. liberal elites.</span></p></blockquote><p>They are all a part of the same bureaucracy. The competition is invalid because the bureaucracy filters good people out. You can't move up in the hierarchy with out accepting lies as 'training'. You are going to get people dumb enough to believe it, or sociopaths who don't believe it but impose it anyway. The conservatives don't even have an ideology- they are just nostalgic. All they do is occasionally improve the economic situation, which makes things a little better for us, but also allows the bureaucracy to continue. They entire left/right charade in the mainstream can be consider a type of internal stabilization for the bureaucracy. </p><p> Grey Enlightenment continued on with more examples, but frankly, it feels like elite overproduction is just something he saw on a blog somewhere, and he never really bothered to figure out what it was. Additionally, the blind spot most people have, where they don't think about bureaucracy much at all, seems present here. I suppose this is why the bureaucrats have been so successful with the term 'systematic racism'. It shuts down real discussion about the system because it blames every failure on racism. </p><p>Violence and social destabilization under these conditions can occur anywhere. There does not need to be a bureaucracy involved. The conditions are already here- the electrical grid, the water supply, roads, food, brainwashed people who think you are doing or thinking something wrong- it doesn't take much to put us into a flashpoint situation. But if you aren't aware of how the bureaucracy caused these conditions, they'll just keep happening over and over. They prefer us to be out here, squabbling with each other, rather than correctly identifying who is responsible and figuring out some way of removing them from power.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-53195436440092138332022-09-01T08:59:00.000-07:002022-09-01T08:59:17.901-07:00Clean Out Institutions By Holding Them To Their PurposeBriefly, the bureaucrats gain power via institutions. Institutions have a stated purpose often found in a charter or founding documents. As the bureaucracy grows, it begins to violate the original purpose. They hold onto their authority and paychecks for as long as they can, but at some point, even the water stops running, as folks in Mississippi are learning.<div><br /></div><div>We may very well have to let things fail. In some cases we may have to destroy it ourselves. But it's difficult to get voters or customers on the same page. We could simply remove funding in certain cases- or just leave and try to start over somewhere else.</div><div><br /></div><div>But it's worth noting we'd have to build new institutions, and we'd have to prevent the nonsense that has happened from happening again.</div><div><br /></div><div>So wherever possible, it seems helpful to fix some institutions. This is not easy. </div><div><br /></div><div>Basically, you have to make any deviation from the purpose criminal. Well, it is criminal, in many cases. With the deplatforming issues we've seen in the last few years- that's only allowed because it's wanted by people in power. I think it violates the entire premise (and probably the law as well) of how those companies were structured. It certainly violates the promise they gave the public.</div><div><br /></div><div>But even in other institutions- it has purpose X. Someone shows up and starts talking about diversity, inclusion, equity, helping the homeless, etc... Pretty soon, you have little to no X, and it's going to get worse until there's no X at all. </div><div><br /></div><div>We won't get any of the stated good intentions either. It is, after all, contrary to the policy of bureaucratic growth, to actually fix a problem. </div><div><br /></div><div>In many ways, what we actually need is an owner. An owner knows what he wanted to do in the first place and is quick to notice when money gets allocated to things that are not what he wanted to do. He would then, of course, be quick to get the criminal brought up on charges.</div><div><br /></div><div>I believe I first though of this back when ESPN started destroying itself. It seemed obvious to me their original purpose was pretty clear, and would be written down somewhere. While their descent into hell may not be expressly forbidden by the founding documents, it was very obvious that it was taking away from actually doing the job they had formed to do. </div><div><br /></div><div>ESPN is corporate- people have ownership of stock, but it's obviously not truly owned. No one could stop the nonsense, as the decision makers are bureaucrats. So a state or federal government would have had to step in, which again, in our society doesn't happen because those are bureaucrats too. </div><div><br /></div><div>In any case, if we want to fix any of these institutions, it needs to become obvious deviations from the purpose will not be tolerated. This would also be the quickest way to sift through the mess, should you suddenly find yourself with enough power to put a particular region back together again.</div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-63176496174915594892022-08-27T15:14:00.001-07:002022-08-27T15:15:21.506-07:00Task-BasedOne of the ways to end a lot of bureaucratic foolishness is to change to a task-based work place, rather than what most of us have- where we are stuck with time and some type of position description that bureaucrats can ignore or aggravate you with, depending on their inclination.<div><br /></div><div>There are, of course, tasks that are very time sensitive- if you are going to open at 9am, you have to be there at 9am, opening the doors. Often this requires being there even earlier for preparations prior to opening.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other cases, the time is determined by deliveries or couriers who will pick up whatever it is you are working on. It is usually relatively easy to determine what tasks to do first, based on what is going out first. And, if you are good- you are good, and you don't necessarily need to be there for 40hrs to get the stuff done. </div><div><br /></div><div>What tends to happen now is that if you are good, you may well find yourself doing 3 peoples jobs for some idiotic bureaucracy that refuses to fill positions or handle sick/unable employees' situations properly. And that same bureaucracy may be punishing you, telling you you are racist, etc- while not paying you the three paychecks they ought to be paying you.</div><div><br /></div><div>But with a task-based focus, the workplace would look a lot different. Who did what is easier to figure out, since you have to log in to this or that system in order to get the stuff done. </div><div><br /></div><div>I would anticipate certain bureaucrats would try to game the system- by trying to get certain 'tasks' identified as really important and/or more lucrative than normal tasks. First, I hope any institution that attempts a task-based focus would have already addressed the evils of bureaucracy and kicked bad actors out. Second, you'll find these 'tasks' not directly germane to the purpose of the institution.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is one of the reasons HR is so rife with nonsensical people- they pretend this is somehow outside the ken of normal people- yet it is painfully obvious you could get a better outcome by getting your engineers to interview engineers, your doctors to interview other doctors, and your library people to interview prospective library people. Why? They tend to have their own culture/language in a sense. You can have two engineers from very different ethnic, religious, and even socio-economic backgrounds, but when they come together (assuming they both know their stuff) they can talk to each other about the stuff that they can't talk about to their loved ones, their fellow ethnics, their fellow religious believers.</div><div><br /></div><div>And what two engineers from different backgrounds would talk about is very likely to be relevant to the reason you are hiring an engineer in the first place. So, many of the duties of HR are tasks that could easily be done (better than HR) by other staff. In a workplace focused on tasks, staff would want to do interviews (and other HR stuff) because that would likely increase their pay. Do more tasks=higher pay. </div><div><br /></div><div>Another arena, related to HR, is training. Training in a bureaucratic organization is currently abysmal. Most of it is an insult to one's intelligence- some of it is an insult to morality. First, Clarence Thomas should sue everyone who uses his name in vain in any of these sexual harassment trainings. Second, there's no standard of behavior- everything has gotten to the point where nothing you did or didn't do matters- what matters is whatever the accusers says. Third, even with something really mundane, like how to use the fire extinguishers- there's a brief explanation about how to use them (easily forgotten) and then the insanity of today's world, in which they basically tell you you are better off from a liability standpoint to never pick up a fire extinguisher and extinguish a fire. </div><div><br /></div><div>Seriously- they were basically telling me I should leave the building (and potentially co-workers) to burn rather than incur the risk of being sued.</div><div><br /></div><div>And anyone who drives a vehicle for one of these organizations runs a risk too- the second anything happens, go pee in a cup. In theory these things apply to everyone, but in practice the bureaucrat could very easily spend all his days high as a kite, while the average worker is at risk from accidental exposure to somebody's CBD lotion.</div><div><br /></div><div>But if the work-place is task-based, the training is demand driven. You want to know how to do the tasks so you can do them if they come up, or if there's time to do them. In fact, the training itself would likely be dissociated from an 'expert' trainer, and instead the institution would be paying that one guy they've been depending on for the last twenty years to do 'that one thing' how to do 'that one thing'.</div><div><br /></div><div>This would solve yet another issue in these large institutions- the loss of knowledge. Oh, boy does this happen. Too often you end up with one old fart who still remembers how to do X, but you piss of old fart because, I don't know, HR seems hell bent on pissing off old farts- like they get extra perks for upsetting the old man who is just toddling around the place still because he doesn't want to retire and die suddenly. I don't want to say it's just the old folks either; you often end up with stuff nearly everyone can do, but a decade or two later, you find there's one guy who is doing it, and nobody else knows how, even though it would make sense from the institutional perspective if at least twenty people (in different places) knew it.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyway, the old fart finally gets sick of the place and quits, or the not so old doer of that one task keels over from a heart attack because he is afraid of his own shadow- and suddenly nobody knows anything. They currently solve this by hiring more people- none of whom know how to do anything. And then they find some way of outsourcing the problem, which almost never works out as well as keeping the original old fart around.</div><div><br /></div><div>But in a task-based workplace, learning that institutional knowledge would be extremely important to the newer employees, because it would be how you learn to complete more tasks, and consequently, get more compensation.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-83866551480099406052022-08-23T14:16:00.000-07:002022-08-23T14:16:10.897-07:00Our Institutions Suffer From A Lack Of Owners<p> A good way to analyze an institution is to think about what it was like (or what it would be like) when it was owned by one person. Of course, you can do this with other things, like ice cream. Families and small businesses made ice cream with real ingredients- it took large corporations to come up with gums, fillers, questionable oil, etc...</p><p>Libraries, schools, hospitals, governments- all our institutions suffer with similar issues. When these institutions were private and owned/funded by individuals or families, those owners required a certain level of quality and scope that kept the institution functioning as it was intended, through time.</p><p>Unfortunately, the bureaucracy does none of these things. A bureaucrat has access to the resources of the institution as long as he is there, so he won't think very much further than his retirement. Indeed, many of these 'professionals' can make their CVs look good at the expense of the institution, in the hopes of moving on to some other unsuspecting institution. The multimillion dollar project the director presided over may look wonderful on paper when he goes on to interview at another place, but it's really a tragic mistake the institution will have to suffer from for years.</p><p>The owner has a longer time preference- one focused on the original purpose of the institution, and then creating the conditions through which the institution can continue to persist through time. This is actually one of the key aspects of leadership, but instead of teaching this, they'll teach garbage ultimately designed to favor cheap charisma and/or demagoguery. We are taught to think that the characteristics of an exploiter are leadership. They try to make us fear and suspect anyone who does display real leadership capability. </p><p>We arrive at a point where a product like healthcare is just as adulterated and bad for you as some soy-based soft serve they want to foist off on you as ice cream. It's just not what it was. Hospitals used to have enough beds to weather something like COVID- now they don't and the primary reason is that the resources used to keep those beds available are now going to a gigantic bureaucracy we never needed. In Canada, it has gotten even worse- they are pushing euthanasia on people. It has become more convenient to kill patients rather than treat patients. </p><p>'We the people' largely fails, especially if it is expressed as any sort of ownership strategy. </p><p><br /></p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-50884111906502425062022-08-20T09:45:00.001-07:002022-08-20T10:33:20.787-07:00Size as a Constraint to BureaucracyResearch that has largely been ignored- investigations into the appropriate size of particular institutions.<div><br /></div><div>In general, but usually on the business side, we hear appeals to 'economies of scale', but back when I was in college, the anti-Walmart crowd was out protesting while advocating for policies that would actually make businesses bigger and damage small businesses. I also saw that old economic equation that's supposed to show you how big the business needs to get: marginal revenue must equal marginal cost.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, even back then I could see any government related cost- i.e. taxes, regulation, etc... would feed into the marginal cost side of that equation and result in bigger corporations than would otherwise exist. But it turned out to be even worse than that, as every real world assessment of real businesses show they don't run up against this higher marginal cost.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thus businesses generally max out their capacity. This does not, however, mean they would just grow. They have whatever real capital goods they have in their particular factory or whatever and they want to maximize that. For really small businesses, sometimes you'll even see people 'maximizing' based on their own lives, which includes a lot of non-business concerns, like spending time with family. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, if you are at one particular level, and you are thinking about scaling up, you have to think about increasing your real capital goods and/or labor, which would usually mean tying up a lot of assets to build that next factory. </div><div><br /></div><div>So businesses would generally be smaller than they are now. Scaling up would take time, and in many cases, the people running the business wouldn't even want the bother of scaling up.</div><div><br /></div><div>But we live in a world of cheap credit and an extremely high ROI on getting cozy with the government. I think this is the real driver for our extremely large corporations. Get large enough to play the lobbying game in D.C., and suddenly you are on a completely different level.</div><div><br /></div><div>What about the government or non-profit arena? One huge issue is that status seems to be determined by the number of 'professionals' under you. Another is that the jurisdiction you are getting your tax funds from does not necessarily relate to the proper size of the institution you are running.</div><div><br /></div><div>I first noticed this from some research on schools long ago- I'm pretty sure I blogged about it before, but I can't find it. Anyway, the research suggested a school district should be one school serving 400 students. Meanwhile, many counties in America run multiple schools, often with way more students than 400 in each school. </div><div><br /></div><div>If the student count is too high, the students won't be able to get the education they need. Additionally, since they are running so many schools, the administrative overhead appears, and here comes all the 'professionals'. A huge chunk of these people don't interact with the students at all, but put more and more regulations on the students and teachers- essentially increasing the problems they are supposedly meant to handle. After all, the equity, diversity, and inclusion 'professional' will need her department to grow. It would be absolutely tragic to the 'professional' if the students started being successful and everyone felt their 'expertise' wasn't needed any more.</div><div><br /></div><div>From my own experience, I am increasingly sure library systems need to be run in a similar (small) manner. One library, nobody 'above' the director of that library. I am not sure of the max size of a particular site, but one could presume it could be larger than 400 patrons, because they would not show up at the same time, and the patron's use of the library is self-directed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Since these systems are set up at the county level, I could see what would essentially amount to a logistics department, helping the individual schools and libraries cooperate. This is almost necessary in the library world, especially if you want to interface with other libraries for things like interlibrary loans. But you would have to be very careful to keep it in check. To use a medical analogy- cancers often generate things like new blood vessels around them. The body needs blood vessels- needs nutrients moving around the system, but the cancer is creating blood vessels to take and grow at the expense of the host. In a similar manner, bureaucracy often cleaves itself to logistical systems. They often say things like, 'this is more efficient' or whatever, but you'll see initiatives not relevant to the institution's purpose become more important than the logistics necessary to get the primary purposes done. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, there's also the Dunbar number, which came from anthropological analysis of tribe size. About 150 was (and is) the number of people a person could reasonably expect to know and interact with in a way that would allow a sort of consensus based self-governance. Size has also been researched with regard to democracies, republics, etc... This has all been ignored and we generally see these institutions operating at sizes far larger than is optimal, which usually results in them being easily exploited by those who have power.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think some of these people must have been progressive (at least as the term was defined at the time) and even today, you'd think some on the left- should they really be concerned with access- would be for regulating the size of these institutions. Of course, the right would like it, because reforming the size would root out a lot of the so-called deep state types. But I suspect it will be ignored because the parasites have become so successful at getting us to argue with each other rather than take note of how they are destroying our institutions and subverting them to their own ends.</div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-75423669723889774862022-08-14T07:37:00.000-07:002022-08-14T07:37:48.823-07:00How Ideology is used by the Bureaucracy<p> Remember Occupy Wall Street? Initially, it seemed to have broad support, but then they started pushing non-left people out, creating assemblies, squabbling about identity politics, and generally went nowhere while the powers that be pushed them out.</p><p>I think it was David Graeber- I was reading something that was quite enthusiastic about those assemblies and all the 'democracy' the activists were trying to do. Apparently he couldn't see the fact that this nonsense alienated most of Americans and ultimately sapped the energy even of the very people who did it. </p><p>So we can figure giving everyone a 'voice' in 'democracy' really means destroying the capability of said 'democracy' to get anything the people want done. Bureaucratic rule/malfeasance can just continue on while the 'democracy' crumbles under the weight of 37 genders, racial conflicts, and long sermons about who this land was allegedly stolen from along time ago.</p><p>So the first use is distraction. Derail the people from getting the parasites off our backs.</p><p>The second use is justification. Everyone knows theft is bad, which is why we have various forms of ideology that justify it based on past injustice. Incidentally, ideology is not enough here- bureaucracies also need to grow the economy to make the theft less dire for the masses. The bureaucrat must redistribute something, after all- if he can't it becomes obvious he is the dangerous one.</p><p>Since this is not a conspiracy theory, but an emergent phenomenon of a complex system, what tends to happen is the left (often composed of people who believe their own bullshit) pushes the parts of ideology too far and topples the economy to the point where people might begin to notice the bureaucracy is a problem.</p><p>It is now time for the third use- consolidation. This is done by conservatives. If we look closely, we see this is not an ideology per se- it is nostalgia. Conservatives remember a time when things were 'better' but at the same time many of them get paid by the bureaucracy, so they can't destroy the bureaucracy.</p><p>So, they tend to temporarily fix some of the problems so that the economy can grow again. But they seldom stop anything. As an example- all the processes of 'transitioning' a child are clearly child abuse, yet the most you will get from conservatives is the proposal of new laws. What's wrong with the old laws? Do you actually need new laws to fight a mere narrative- one that's been shown to be false even among the adults who go through this procedure? It does not help in any shape or fashion- it doesn't stop suicide or destructive behavior and it definitely harms people.</p><p>But conservatives tend to leave these things- unconstitutional things. FBI is in the news, and it's telling that DeSantis is damaging his election chances by saying a raid is not a raid. Clearly, he is intending to be a conservative bureaucrat and keep this important piece of machinery around for the bureaucracy to use. Trump may say he is a conservative, but he was a New York democrat for most of his life, and he is considered anathema by the bureaucracy because he might tell them they are fired. </p><p>The fourth use is obfuscation. Bureaucracy is not just in the government- it is corporate too. Many 'free market' reforms merely shift focus from one bureaucracy to another, and they are usually very tightly linked. They co-operate as one more often than they fight with each other. If anarcho-capitalists suddenly took over the world, bureaucracy would be rife in these insurance companies the ancaps seems to be so fond of, and we would end up with the same sort of poor governance we get now. </p><p>That's why we need to see the bureaucracy, and not pretend it is the same as the institution that it is in.</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-50284459309336067212022-08-06T11:36:00.000-07:002022-08-06T11:36:17.646-07:00Bureaucrats can't de-escalate<p> We are seeing too many examples of this in America, where our 'experts' totally ignored the situation in Ukraine, pretend like the Russian attempts at a diplomatic resolution never happened, etc... We have seen Nancy fly into Taiwan. Meanwhile, same government is continuing various vax mandates and poorly administering the military, which is leading to a point where we won't be able to deal with the results of their rash behavior. </p><p>But you would think they'd have some sense of personal self-preservation, particularly if they weren't in these more egotistical arenas- like if they were a librarian.</p><p>I recently heard about some lady with people after her about a book that they think is teaching inappropriate things to children. Now, in reality, this book, even if it isn't as bad as the mob says, probably can be summarily dropped from the shelves, because it is very likely not very good. The public library today bases its collection around propaganda and popular entertainment. They want to be seen as pushing whatever is the good little bureaucratic line, and they hope their circulation stats will go up forever. They do not seem capable of understanding that these concepts wreck the institution as we drift ever further away from what a library is meant to be.</p><p>But anyway, this lady is hysterical, supposedly, because she's got some on-line mob type action against her, and if we were to assume this book's existence on the shelf should be defended- well, it can easily be done, especially now, when we can put up the complaint and the response on-line. </p><p>This should be done in a way so that parents particularly concerned about this type of stuff feel you have given them the ability stop their kids reading that book. And it should also be done in a manner extremely accepting of the idea that you have a need to be accountable to the people. They are paying your bills after all, so the complaint should be carefully regarded even if it comes from a stark raving lunatic. </p><p> This lady- and bureaucrats like her should have a sense of self-preservation. But bureaucrats have increasingly begun to violate the very purpose of their institutions, violate human rights, and in many cases break laws- although perhaps not intentionally because of the generations of mis-education. What happens when there is constant lawlessness from a particular group? Eventually someone goes into vigilante mode. Unfortunately, I think the bureaucracy as a whole tends to like this, because then the bureaucracy can advocate for more power. </p><p>You can see the most extreme form of this crazy thinking from recent protesters who block roads and then scare drivers who are trying to use those roads. How exactly did basic self preservation get removed from their consciousness? I feel like it must be a societal-status based thing- essentially preservation of ego at the cost of one's life. </p><p><br /></p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-26436401391113815672022-05-16T08:26:00.000-07:002022-05-16T08:26:03.863-07:00The Feminine Form of Fascism<p> I remember being at a wedding reception where some young woman was talking about the special school she was working at. She had this example of what the lady the school was on about that went something like this:</p><p>When closing the door, boys often slam the door, but they don't actually want to slam the door. The boy's actions and his will are at odds with each other. </p><p>Since the first word I would have said if I had said something was bullshit, and this was a Christian setting, I think I failed to get much out of my mouth. Meanwhile, some dude sort of half-heartedly threw out the concept of agency, but I don't think any of this registered with the woman.</p><p>If you are not, or have never been a boy- slamming a door is often quite satisfying. Not only that, in many cases closing a door with enough emphasis such that you hear an audible click serves as a way to know that, yes, you have actually succeeded in shutting the door.</p><p>Moms have been trying to get kids not to slam doors since the existence of doors, and this is probably a good thing, since the baby may be sleeping, or your door manufacture is just not building a robust enough product for regular door slamming. </p><p>But what the young lady was describing goes beyond the behavior, into a sort of feminist fascism, where whatever the mom wants (and/or the educator) is supposedly the will of the of the child too.</p><p>I think this sort of thinking shows up in bureaucracies everywhere too, and is assumed in many situations among adults- but since adults can articulate what they want, well you end up with crap like what Trudeau did with the Canadian truckers. They dehumanize you since their definition of a human includes only people who agree with them.</p><p>These people are dangerous- both the powerful and the school teachers. </p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-86431080433300160232022-02-28T11:14:00.001-08:002022-03-01T09:31:49.224-08:00The One Real Argument for Freedom<p> We have to accept a particular reality- in much of the world, an American arguing for freedom is seen as a self-serving bastard. The State Department is much to blame here, since they bring up freedom- or the lack of it- whenever they want to interfere with other nations.</p><p>There's also this whole arena of Western 'freedom' which is pushed. Sexual deviancy, drug abuse, making up the latest identity and then browbeating everyone who doesn't want to be bothered by it- all this stuff has been labelled as 'freedom', yet it's pretty obvious it is not. People end up with poorer, sadder lives because of it, and it wrecks families, institutions, even nations.</p><p>But at the core of any sane argument for freedom, which for governments would probably translate as having as few laws as possible is this:</p><p>Iteration.</p><p>That's it really, although, obviously, you'd want to include re-iteration, because that's the whole point. As much as possible, let people work through their own problems, and keep trying to improve. Improvement often comes incrementally over time. As far as possible, it's best not to weigh the person down with extra penalties or problems, because it's too easy to discourage improvement- especially if the marginal return on the latest attempt at improvement is completely overshadowed by whatever penalty the government visits upon the person.</p><p>I'm sure many want something more idealistic, hyperbolic- whatever- but look, the CCP isn't going to buy your fairy tales, and maybe you really want to convince them of something rather than just trying to make them look bad. </p><p>This is more like an engineering argument. Perhaps best understood by people trying to create something. Now, our government seems to be hell bent on destroying everything, but I don't think every nation is that way. Some people are actually trying to do some decent governing, and they may well be the sort of nations that the media yell the loudest about. </p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-43504599122344570202021-12-02T13:29:00.000-08:002021-12-02T13:29:28.595-08:00The Plot Has Been Infected<p> The Blade of the Immortal is a movie about a Samurai who can't die. He ends up killing some people, including his sister's husband. His sister goes crazy, so instead of committing seppuku, he runs away with her and tries to keep her alive. But she gets killed by some bounty hunters after him. He manages to kill them, but is terribly wounded himself and expects to die, but some mysterious old woman infects him with blood worms that knit his body back together.</p><p>Now, what I think would happen under such circumstances and what happened in the movie diverge considerably. </p><p>If he got married and had children, there would, of course, be sadness at the death of loved ones- but there would always be loved ones living. Always another generation- more descendants to shepherd through life.</p><p>The movie wasn't like that at all. Instead he was living in a shack outside of town and wasn't doing much in the way of human interaction until the mysterious old lady told a girl who looked like his sister to go hire him as a bodyguard. A lot of crazy fight scenes ensue. And his will to live is basically revived in the sense that he is determined to live for the girl and keep her from harm.</p><p>It was a fun movie, but the missing pieces, and many of the assumptions just remind me of what's been stolen from us. We live in a bureaucratic age. If we save money, central banks allow the value of what we save leak away from us, so we are screwed unless we come up with some sophisticated plan. The effects of this broken, modern world led to many of the assumptions made in the movie. </p><p>I think the impulse to build something that would last through the generations would become very strong in anyone who knew they were going to live for a very long time- potentially forever. When an old man plants a tree, he can only imagine what it will be like when it is fully grown. Wouldn't the impulse become stronger if you knew you'd likely be there to see it?</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-10550500904309489062021-11-10T10:58:00.000-08:002021-11-10T10:58:06.130-08:00Kenosha reminds me of a pattern<p>I am noticing this Kenosha thing as a sort of evidentiary process against the notion that we just go online and get fooled, start conspiracy theories, or whatever the delusional say nowadays.</p><p>Despite Twitter being onboard with the narrative program, here I am seeing folks tweet directly about the trial as they watch it. Meanwhile, the mainstream throws out a bunch of lies that are easily contradicted by the trail itself. </p><p>I don't even need to watch it myself. I could. I could follow links people post. </p><p>Generally though, I don't. I know I don't have to. This is a very obvious pattern. </p><p>It's difficult to deal with people who don't see the pattern, especially if they happen to have some power over your life. They may be liars, sociopaths, or they may be nice people still deluded by this stuff. Regardless, they are threats. They want us to assent to the lie. They make decisions based on these lies, and these decisions are extremely unfair- often criminal. </p><p>Nor can they recognize you are justifiably angry. Logic doesn't work with them. Perhaps the best advice I have heard is to treat them a little like a mentally ill family member. But I forget sometimes. I assume people would be happier knowing the truth, that perhaps some simple logic would help them not make really stupid mistakes.</p><p>But that all comes to naught, and tends to put me more on edge, because now they have identified me as not of their kind. </p><p>Sure, I guess some of the folks on Twitter are just not following the same sorts of people I'm following. But you'd think they'd have seen a mainstream lie get destroyed in about 12 minutes by now- even if it's something relatively non-political. Even before social media, one of the chief indications of either poor or false information came from pilots about stories involving aircraft. The pilots know stuff the journalists don't know, and they would often find inaccuracies. The argument about whether or not it just meant the journalist didn't know what he was doing or if there was some sort of cover-up going on in a particular case is moot. The point is, when the pilots spoke up, we knew the original story was wrong.</p><p>Facts, statistics, how things work versus the movie version of how they work, various research papers (and the people smart enough to blog coherently about them)- none of this is conspiracy theory. Emergent phenomenon- especially behavior coming from bureaucracies- well it's not even a theory, it is an observation. </p><p>As you might guess, I am getting quite tired of this. </p><p><br /></p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-44719663060342195802021-09-28T09:19:00.001-07:002021-09-28T11:26:35.357-07:00Could We Fix A Small City?<p> I've long had ideas for small communities- ones that would hopeful grow to a small city size. One of them is that teenagers benefit greatly by farming- not just the daily chores, but learning the planning necessary to plant, harvest, and produce a usable product.</p><p>This fits right in with another little project small communities should have- food stores. Communities can't be completely self-sufficient, but as we can see right now as various supply chain issues empty store shelves, it is nice to have some local supply on hand when things happen.</p><p>So, I figured a small community would want enough calories (protein, fat, carbs, alcohol) on hand to get through some amount of time- five years is what the commies like to plan for. Meanwhile, there are various products- especially wine and cheese- that tend to increase in value from 'ageing'. These sort of products are good to look at for this kind of project, because remember- we are not trying for pure self-sufficiency. We are trying to be resilient, so we want a store of food we can eat, but if we don't need to eat them, and they turn into high value products we can sell- great.</p><p>This morning, for the first time, I started to wonder if this idea could be grafted into an existing city. Surely more and more people are worrying about the empty grocery shelves. Additionally, more and more institutions that we usually depend are making absolute fools of themselves, so to whatever extent we can stop funding them we should.</p><p>There usually are some local farms and producers around, and they could ramp up to some extent. More can be encouraged. The expenses and infrastructure to make the final products, as well as the storage, could be shared and centralized. </p><p>We would, of course, have to figure out how not to be derailed by the woke. </p><p>One possible way of dealing with this is to take advantage of the fact that the people the woke don't like generally tend to plan ahead themselves- thus they may not need whatever is reserved for them during times of distress. But should they not need it, they should be credited with the value of the finished, 'aged' products. </p><p>The entire leftist project depends on these various supply chains that they are destroying. They can't really help it, since the bureaucratic class has this cancerous tendency to refuse any restraint to their growth. As the supply chains shut down, their ability to screw things up will begin to wane, much like tumors start to weaken if they lose access to the blood supply. They will then want to flail around and find your blood supply, but the chances are high that we can fend them off at that point. </p><p>It would be nice to reach the point where we can just put criminals and people who advocate for criminality via false moralizations in jail, and we may get there if we can introduce some sort of order that people would come to find important and perhaps vital to their life.</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-70101497548082725452021-09-22T11:34:00.002-07:002021-09-22T11:34:57.558-07:00Training TargetsThere's an issue people have when working out- they need a clear goal- otherwise they can get pulled around by various things that they hear and not really get anywhere. <div><br /></div><div>I've noticed this tendency myself, as I read or listen to a variety of different people. </div><div><br /></div><div>But I've also come to see there are commonalities, trade-offs- certain parameters everyone needs to reach, which would lend itself well to developing targets for the general population.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first place I started to get this idea was with some interviews <a href="https://superhumanradio.net/">Carl Lanore</a> did with some ex-military guys a few years back. Basically, these guys went to Afghanistan, and would try to get jacked when not doing missions. When they did do missions, they would suffer under the excess muscle they had. They were running up against one of these trade offs. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, when they looked into training other people who wanted to get into peak condition for these types of operations, they found some research pointing to where the trade off was. This seems to be mainly from statistical analysis from a bunch of athletes.</div><div><br /></div><div>For my height, for instance, based on these statistics, my target weight is supposed to be 198lb. And this would include what is likely 30lb of muscle that the normal population wouldn't have. But no one goes into the gym (especially not at my height) thinking 198lb is the target. It seems much too low.</div><div><br /></div><div>Additionally, there's interesting research on various things- like the strength differences between the hamstrings and quads, for instance, that could also help us have a picture of what an individual needs to work on. There's the purely aesthetic stuff based off the golden ratio too- proportionality- a principle that could save a few instagram models. </div><div><br /></div><div>Finally, having recently been experimenting with Doug Brignole's methods of training, I realized there are ways of drastically reducing the chances of injury while actually loading the muscle you are trying to train much more effectively.</div><div><br /></div><div>All of this gives me a sense that there is something here, which may be difficult to market, but would no doubt be extremely effective. For the average human, hit that target and then maintain it over time. For athletes, even ones that move past that target, well they still need to keep the body balanced, don't they? Julien Pineau became famous, in part, for pointing out how poor lat development was contributing to the injuries Crossfit athletes were having. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, once someone reaches this target (and has the right body composition) then, obviously, if they wanted to make the trade-off, so be it. Bodybuilders, powerlifters- all want to be bigger. Long distance runners may want to be smaller, or at least emphasize leg development over upper body. </div><div><br /></div><div>But for most of us, it's daily life and the trials we may encounter within it that we want to be prepared for. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-87019942212721193732021-08-04T11:27:00.001-07:002021-08-04T11:27:40.499-07:00It's the Bureaucracy, Not The CapitalismCapitalists, it seems to me, seldom believe in capitalism as any sort of ideology. Even if the origin stories about companies coming out of garages are true, once they are big, they get into the lobbying business. Arguably, they have to do it, whether they want to or not- once the bureaucrats smell profit, you either play the game or they come and screw you.<div><br /></div><div>Socialists, on the other hand, believe in socialism. They believe in it so much that when something doesn't work, they blame the rest of us. </div><div><br /></div><div>So, it's annoying when I hear people blame capitalism for, well, whatever. It isn't the capitalism, it's the bureaucracy- the same bureaucracy that tries to implement socialism. </div><div><br /></div><div>I doubt politics is ever going to work at all, but one of the big issues is that the non-left refuses to admit to reality. It's pointless to meet a progressive talking point with words like 'freedom' or 'free markets'. We already don't have it- and they carefully advertise and shape public opinion to the point where they are likely to get what they want.</div><div><br /></div><div>But there's one way to short circuit this stuff- figure out what the left is marketing to the public- and then provide it with one very important change- take the bureaucracy out of it, or if possible, nuke a few existing bureaucracies.</div><div><br /></div><div>One example would be nuking the fed and giving everyone a 'universal basic income.' Create the currency, send it to the people rather than creating all these moral hazards at the top of the financial food chain. Banks would actually have to cater to people again, and financial institutions wouldn't be able to run around, buying up single family homes. So, obviously, one aspect to this is to think critically about the concept, and find a way to target the outcomes we want rather than whatever it is the left wants.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another example is cancelling student debt- but why the hell should the taxpayer pay for it? We've all noticed these graduates don't know anything real and have had their heads filled with garbage. Higher education is, therefore, fraud. You make those who committed fraud pay. Include damages- don't just cancel the debt, but have some chunk of money there for the taking, so that odiously elitist barista with her communist English degree will come in and admit (at least on paper) that she was defrauded, that she actually doesn't know anything. This would destroy the bureaucratic parasites in these universities, and force said barista to disavow her position in the bureaucratic class. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, if you have fewer bureaucrats, socialism becomes less dangerous, because you have to have someone somewhere with some nominal authority to act on the principles of an ideology. With capitalism- you just need anyone willing to save up some money and buy a capital good or two to go into production. And if that capitalist looks around and sees there's no bureaucrat to bribe or scheme with, well, he might just stick to capitalism rather than get up to these shenanigans people seem to blame capitalism for.</div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-80321402920712887122021-08-02T08:43:00.000-07:002021-08-02T08:43:18.934-07:00Donald Trump Junior Inadvertently Gives The Left An Idea.<p>Donald Trump Jr <a href="https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1421213631413424131">tweeted</a> this one day:</p><blockquote><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1419; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 23px; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someone should introduce a bill mandating that you have to show your vaccination card to vote and watch everyone on the Left’s brain malfunction and explode.</span></p></blockquote><p>And the <a href="https://twitter.com/DonaldJTrumpJr/status/1421587498426413057">next day</a> :</p><blockquote><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;">I make a joke about an obviously crazy idea to highlight the hypocrisy of the left, but these authoritarian libs are so unhinged and braindead, that they of course think </span><span class="r-18u37iz" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: horizontal; background-color: white; color: #0f1419; flex-direction: row; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 23px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a class="css-4rbku5 css-18t94o4 css-901oao css-16my406 r-1n1174f r-1loqt21 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/VaxToVote?src=hashtag_click" role="link" style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1b95e0; cursor: pointer; display: inline; font: inherit; list-style: none; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; text-align: inherit; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: inherit;">#VaxToVote</a></span><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: white; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #0f1419; display: inline; font-family: TwitterChirp, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 23px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a good idea. You can't make this shit up!</span></p></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>We can't make it up, but we can predict it, if we ignore the left's moralizing and assume they are seeking power. Why would they be happy with a vax to vote scheme? It would mean the only people who could vote are people who accepted the narrative- therefore it would mean they would very likely be able to continue to subvert elections with abandon. In fact, it may be preferable to the current immigration fiasco, since many leftist strongholds are suffering from the side effects of unchecked migration. </p><p>Some leftist politician may very well grab this vax to vote idea and try to make it law. It provides them with power. They don't care about the immigrants, nor do they care about health- these are merely moral pretexts wherein they attempt to justify their power grab. </p><p>If anyone really cares about a thing, they tend to research it deeply, and ultimately drop out of politics to pursue doing something about the thing directly- by which I mean, for instance, environmentalists getting into regenerative farming- not the terrorist 'direct action' crap.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-52627589949161597242021-07-23T12:20:00.002-07:002021-07-23T12:20:32.159-07:00A Lamp, Switch, and Awareness<p>I knocked my little lamp by my bed off it's perch while it was still dark this morning. So I reach down to the floor and proceeded to run my hands over its base, looking for the little switch. I had a firm picture of the switch in my mind, and became puzzled because I didn't find it. </p><p>And then I remembered that I just woke up, and as crazy as it might seem, that might mean that I was utterly and completely wrong about where the switch would be. I found that completely different switch, that little rod like thingy that sticks out just below where the bulb is, clicked it on, and immediately remembered that this little lamp had always been that way.</p><p>Dreams can be deceptive. I don't even remember having any sort of dream including the lamp, or the nature of its switch. I know I had been dreaming just before, but there was nothing with enough emotional weight to lead to me to pay enough attention. Attention, awareness- if I had had enough of it in the dream state, I would have awoken with story I could tell.</p><p>In a sense, I think whatever makes up dreams may be happening all the time, but we can only focus on certain things at certain times. When I am awake, it's the realities of being human in this world. Reality reinforces memory.</p><p>But if you find yourself having trouble going to sleep- especially if you think you are having too many repetitive thoughts- try seeing with your eyes closed. Obviously, you can't see anything because your eyes are closed, but the mere act of trying to observe whatever may show up in your visual field tends to quiet your mind- and you will 'see' things- fragments of dreams.</p><p>It helps me get to sleep faster. I think there is a similar situation in meditation wherein, having successfully disengaged from your usual thoughts, you start to become aware of all these other thoughts, many of which don't seem to have anything to do with you. It's as if there's just an ocean of thoughts out there, and maybe none of them really come from us. Maybe we just observe them, and make a mistake when we start to identify with them. I would not, after all, condemn my lamp to switch re-assignment surgery. </p><p>I wonder about the nature of awareness. Obviously, we need to pay enough attention to reality in order to continue living and observing, but it is the observing that seems interesting, assuming we have a wide enough net to catch the interesting things.</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-82407037720202166932021-06-24T09:38:00.000-07:002021-06-24T09:38:13.074-07:00What could be next on the COVID front?It's summer, and we tend to get fewer of these sorts of diseases during the summer, but the world continues with these vaccine programs, despite plenty of deaths, side effects, and concerns.<div><br /></div><div>Like the spike protein the vaccines are meant to generate being toxic all by itself, heart inflammation in various people, etc... </div><div><br /></div><div>There are troubling long term implications with all this stuff. When the truth of all this stuff comes out- it's tough to know. I don't even know what the truth is myself. I can only say this was kind of dumb, even if it sort of passes.</div><div><br /></div><div>But this fall/winter will be a big test of a more basic problem. There was a reason no one brought out a coronavirus vaccine before- pathogenic priming.</div><div><br /></div><div>They've never released a coronavirus vaccine before because in animal trails the animals that got the shot would suffer horribly and/or die when they came into contact with the live virus again.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is what we may be in for this fall/winter- except this time its people.</div><div><br /></div><div>Again, I don't know. Perhaps these vaccines are different enough from the older attempts at coronavirus vaccines, and it doesn't happen. But I tend to view the current narrative on variants skeptically. Variants happen, but generally they mean less lethality. To have medical professionals running around and participating with the media to scare the people about variants suggests to me they want a boogeyman around in case vaccinated people start dropping dead. </div>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-3972279035805448572021-04-26T16:38:00.000-07:002021-04-26T16:38:42.645-07:00Three Things I Have Been Pondering.<p> Here are a few things I have been pondering.</p><p>1.<span> Surveillance levels in these bail-free/Soros DA cities must be very high. Imagine being a cop in one of these places where you can literally see some guy stab someone to death, but then he gets out. Your higher ups are just throwing these criminals back on the street. It may be tough to operate directly against the D.A. and other administrators willing to throw you under the bus, but the criminals are violent- thus there's both an impetus for some form of vigilantism and some plausible deniability. Either the police themselves, or friends of police could target the violent criminals, and if the violent criminals die in what looks like violent criminal behavior, it would be tough to track that back to the cops.</span></p><p><span>But, as far as I can tell, there's no indication that this is happening. No remarks in the press. Anyone show up on the police blotter a couple of times and then show up in the morgue? If so, no one is making these connections. So, what I suspect is the cops are being spied on, to the point where any breath of this type of thing is shut down.</span></p><p><span>2. Recently, India's supposed COVID19 emergency is being touted in the news. It is doubtful this is actually a per capita/people actually dying thing in the sense that you probably can't prove they are doing worse than any other country currently experiencing the same seasons when you correct for population size. But the weird thing to me is this lack of oxygen supply. The media is also suggesting a perplexing lack of other things- perplexing because they already make a lot of the world's medical supplies- including vaccines- so why would they have a sudden supply problem that they need America's help with? We don't make much any more. </span></p><p>I also know you can make oxygen through electrolysis. It's a little dangerous because you pass a current through the water. You get hydrogen and oxygen, and if I remember right you can sequester one or the other based on which electrode the bubbles are coming from. They are both flammable, obviously, but if you were in serious need of oxygen to save people, wouldn't you try something rather than wait and let people die? I recently saw some twitter clip where an oxygen tank in Baghdad exploded in a hospital, taking out a lot of people. It seems to me less dangerous to try electrolysis since the gases wouldn't be under pressure like that tank was.</p><p>3. I watch Japanese stuff in an attempt to learn Japanese. Especially if we look at the sort of stuff the globalists are trying to disrupt their society with, I suspect they are going with a 'one too many shit tests' type of thing. Sure, there are things I just won't watch, but I end up watching dramas heavy on romance because they tend to rely heavily on dialogue. And I've seen them just push beyond where things are acceptable- think divorce and/or giving back a ring at a point where a relationship, marriage, or even a pregnancy already exists. Sure, I suspect the story-line generally ends up with the couple back together and happier than ever, because it feeds into women wanting the man to go above and beyond and love them despite all this stuff. </p><p>But it's fundamentally past the point where it's plausibly something a guy should put up with. Usually, it's not as bad as the garbage you find in Western films- though I do turn things off, so I can't claim to know everything. Still, though the Japanese are smart, I have no doubt there are likely impressionable young women who amp it up a little bit too much, lose their real match, and then end up playing that miserable game in the big city, where they are always imagining Mr. Big is going to come along and make everything alright- but the best they will ever have is in their rearview mirror.</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-80963139200249271592021-04-16T18:41:00.001-07:002021-04-16T18:41:14.457-07:00Dynasty as Adaptation<p> Recently there was a comment from Jackie Chan about leaving his money to some charity instead of his kid. Many also trotted those silly arguments, allegedly based on statistics, that most lose inter-generational wealth by the third generation, so why not separate your hypothetically foolish grandchild from his money now- by not letting him have it?</p><p>This is looking at the wrong end of the question. If 70% lose the money, that doesn't mean it isn't worth it to try, because it means 30% adapt, and over time that means a lot of adaptation. Remember, people generally try to marry into successful families, so the benefits spread a lot farther across the society.</p><p>This sort of adaptation is also useful for picking leaders. A family making it into the fourth generation with their fortunes intact at such terrible odds suggests the family may have developed the sort of talents necessary to keep a nation intact. It certainly beats what we've seen lately.</p><p>The mindset against dynasty is a mindset of bureaucracy. Even among those who do managed to preserve something now, the bureaucratic mindset is still strong. You have to create a charity, a trust, create various business structures, and all of these require the proper care and feeding of specific bureaucracies. The feedback loop to the elites is one of brainwashing- this is why they trot over to Davos and listen to absolute fools while nodding their heads in agreement. Real elites would arrest, try, and punish these criminals.</p><p>I noticed a side effect of bureaucratization as I learned a little about commercial real estate. Starbucks, Home Depo, Fedex- a lot of these businesses don't own their own real estate, even if the building is specifically made for them. They go in for these long term leases, while the actual buildings are owned by real estate investors of various types. While I don't necessarily think it's too terrible, I can immediately see how this can be damaging to society. It's isn't just the chain business atomizing your town, it's the real estate investors too. There simply can't be a holistic view taken- the kind a king or local lord could take a particular place. Instead you have multiple businesses who are usually not particularly interested in keep the society together, running these discrete business units based on their particular numbers. This keeps a lot of lawyers, not to mention other bureaucrats, busy. Real estate is a really old business, and they seem quite good at figuring out how to parasite off of such old things.</p><p>They weren't quite as good at figuring out the internet, so the internet was good for a while. We can hope this new trend of turning platform businesses into tools of censorship and control has started to happen too early- that they started this crap too early because they were too hungry for power. But its another example and a very telling one, since their current actions are often at odds with the very meaning of the platforms. Early adopters were sharing all sorts of stuff they don't want us sharing today, but that was the point of it. I mean, how boring is it that so many 'conversations' are now about race? </p><p>Jackie might have particular concerns. I think his son got into trouble a time or two. But the charity will, a- perpetuate bureaucracy and b- likely not serve whatever intention Jackie may have when he chooses one to contribute to. There's progressive mission creep that usually takes them off course, if they aren't completely wrongheaded already, and their primary mission always ends up being making themselves permanent, and increasing their numbers. The way to be seen as powerful is to create a lot of 'professional' positions just under you while the basic work gets done by people generally disregarded as particularly important. </p><p>The social good of a a decent city to live in, for instance, can't fare well without people who can think well enough to shepherd it through time, past the lifetimes of any one person in it. Bureaucracy leads to breakdown, theft of whatever value past generations put into a city. They'll talk about smart cities, but not fill pot holes, get rid of the homeless, or stop this crazy media from lying to incite violence. We need the sort of people who do make it to that fourth generation, because they help us have a better quality of life- just a valuable as a genetic adaptation.</p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8899098797230190526.post-62070338549417070642021-04-08T08:35:00.004-07:002021-04-08T08:37:49.495-07:00When Mom Hates on a TV character<p><br /></p><p>I am a bit irritated because yesterday my mom texted me to tell me that Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo had been remade both in Chinese and Korean, and she again expressed her dislike of the lead male character. I had watched some of the episodes at her house- I am trying to learn Japanese. Now. this is a silly romantic comedy and there have been a few versions of it in Japan, so we can tell, just from the popularity of it that women find something attractive about this lead male character. Not that I particularly care to defend the show, but Mom keeps turning to this 'being respectful of women' thing.</p><p><br /></p><p>But no one wants to be treated the way my Mom treats my Dad. No one would want to watch a show based on it either. In fact, this male lead who infuriates her is like her, except in reverse. </p><p><br /></p><p>The Japanese story is this- a girl named Kotoko falls for Naoki, the smartest guy in her school. It's somewhat silly, and everything is taken to extremes, so she's barely passing- he can read anything once and remember it forever. She tries to give him a love letter, but he rejects her and is very rude. Then a meteor falls on her house, and it turns out her father and his father are old buddies- so suddenly the two families are living in one house together.</p><p><br /></p><p>So the main story line is Naoki slowly coming to love Kotoko. Kotoko's love for him is a given from the start. And Naoki is an asshole from the start. But his character develops. </p><p><br /></p><p>Meanwhile, I don't think my mom even notices when she's mean to my dad. It's so habitual she's likely blind to it. She must have started out nice, or Dad would have avoided marrying her instead of spending his old age watching TV alone in order to avoid her now. </p><p><br /></p><p>I have noticed a few things, like there's this whole idea that being too nice means you are no good in Japan- at least in a few different shows I've seen that. And I don't think that's too hard for some American women to understand- there are silver tongued devils out there willing to lie and seduce. There are also the much hated gammas out there. </p><p><br /></p><p>Additionally, I notice this politeness versus manliness thing going on in Japan, though technically I wonder if politeness is the best word, because you can say some pretty awful stuff while using polite speech in Japanese. But 'male' ways of expressing yourself in Japanese often violate the polite speech rules.</p><p><br /></p><p>So I can understand why they've got this whole sub-genre of shows where the male lead is a jerk. It shows he's a real man, and often shows he's honest too. And his character develops in the appropriate direction.</p><p><br /></p>Augusthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08758314961163692341noreply@blogger.com0