Are They Trying to Lose?

 The recent confirmation of American troops in Taiwan has me thinking USG is trying to lose.  Our government has not done the things that one would have presumably needed to do in order to protect Taiwan- it would have taken multiple decades and one look at the map would tell you it may have still not worked.  If we weren't the empire that wants to pretend it isn't an empire, we would have just used Taiwan as a staging ground for invading the mainland, possibly the only real way to keep whatever promises we threw out there. 

But that was decades ago.  Now we already have plenty of  military simulations on how we would fail miserably if we tried to protect Taiwan.  It's been known to the military strategist types for years.

China has maintained it wanted to reunite with Taiwan peacefully, and has- so far- not done anything to make me question that statement- within the context, of course, that I fully expect them to invade should they feel all peaceful means are exhausted.  

So the decision to put U.S. military there is highly questionable. The constant mention of China in the media was questionable too, although less so now since it now seems plausible that the USG is actively attempting to create this conflict.

The delusion bubble in D.C. may just be that strong, but to those of outside, this just looks like somebody is fond of losing, and is drunkenly spending all our assets to add another loss to their collection.

Having a Blog is No Assurance of Quality

Grey Enlightenment making stupid statements about something I know about in his post:Having academic credentials is no assurance of quality

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.

From 2009, Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses the Shangri-La Diet, a type of diet that involves the added consumption of oil:

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.  

The False Goddess of Rebellion

 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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.  

Smells Like Anti-Christ

 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.

But then there's this:

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.  Galatians 3:28

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.

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?  

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. 

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.  

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.  

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. 

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.

 

 

Force a Bubble Economy, Until There's Nothing Left To Pop

Something 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?

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.  

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?

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.

This because officials are like kids taking cookies out of the jar- not Grandma, who owns the jar and likes to keep it full.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Self-Defeating Social Construct Artists

Allegedly, various things are social constructs, but what, pray tell are the things that we are told we should replace them with?

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.  

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.  

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'.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

Missing the Forest for the Trees

 Grey Enlightment doesn't understand elite overproduction, so I'll show where his analysis is flawed:

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.  

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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 least 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.

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. 

 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.  

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.