Speaking of theory goggles
Speaking of theory goggles, I'm trying to break out of an overly Ockhamish theory that I slipped into recently. A couple months ago I started assuming that the "virus" was an unnecessary entity. The torture and war techniques are NOT methods of controlling an epidemic.

This doesn't fit the observations. Public Death Officers and Bioterror warriors enjoy using a real microbe.

I need to return to my earlier Parkinson assumption: Mecher's gang picked out a real virus and did everything possible to extend and expand the virus forever. Strengthen the virus, eliminate immunity. This is an actual virus but it isn't an actual epidemic. Distancing and gags and lockdowns are not UNRELATED, they are INVERSELY RELATED to a virus. They are exactly what you do if you want to maintain an epidemic forever. This idea fits the visible facts. In the sane states that gave up muzzling a year ago, the virus has naturally faded out because human immune systems have been handling it naturally. In the demonic states where muzzles and distancing have obstructed immunity, cases are still running at the same level as a year ago.

I've been reading a book on the 2001 biowar rehearsal using anthrax. The book was printed in 2014, before the Trump lunacy and well before the "virus" war. So its facts and conclusions couldn't have been cherrypicked to match later facts.

Same Bush, same Bioterror Department, same methods. Anthrax was picked because Fort Detrick knew how to weaponize it. Anthrax was sent to journalists who had a habit of telling the truth, and to senators who were slow to approve the Iraq war.

Insiders, not just government officials, knew about the plan before it was implemented. The book notes a column by Maureen Dowd a few days before the "attacks" were published. She mentioned that all the NYC rich ladies were carrying Cipro in their haute-couture purses and using it.

CBS was preparing a thriller series in the summer of 2001 that featured an al-Qaeda attack on NYC followed by an anthrax epidemic.

The purpose of 9/11 and the anthrax "attack" was to generate war fever toward Iraq.

Some of the current fact-gatherers are making the same assumption about generating war fever toward China. It's a plausible parallel. We haven't started the war yet, but it took two years after 9/11 to get the Iraq war underway. So the parallel isn't testable yet.

It's also interesting that all of the NAMED deaths from the current "virus" are public opponents of Deepstate. Some supporters or insiders have allegedly acquired the alleged "virus" but didn't get sick. Is a weaponized version sent to the annoying opponents, just as weaponized anthrax was sent to annoying opponents? There's no way of knowing, since the "tests" are known to be false, and the real "data", if it exists, is all medically secret.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, endless hell, Parkinson

  ¶ 6:52 AM

  They were already doing it!
I've been wondering why the Cancelled profs and scholars didn't get together and form a new university devoted to non-cancellation.

Turns out they've been working on it for a year, and waited until it was solid to announce it publicly.

Now it's solid. The Univ of Austin includes ALL the famous Cancelled profs plus quite a few others who have been disgusted by the wokesters.

Some of the recent quits like Boghossian knew where they were going.

Looks like they're immediately aiming to train leaders and entrepreneurs. Physical subjects are several years down the timeline, and not definite yet.

The president is moving directly from the presidency of St Johns College in Maryland, so he knows the job. Presidents of small colleges have exactly ONE job: bringing in money. In the article announcing the founding, he gets right down to dollars and cents...

At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.

The priority at most other institutions is simply to avoid financial collapse. They are in a desperate contest to attract a dwindling number of students, who are less and less capable of paying skyrocketing tuition. Over the last three decades, the cost of a degree from a four-year private college has nearly doubled; the cost of a degree from a public university has nearly tripled. The nation’s students owe $1.7 trillion in loans.

And to what end? Nearly 40% of those who pursue a college degree do not attain one. We should let that sink in. Higher education fails 4 in 10 of its students. A system that so brazenly extracts so much from so many without delivering on its basic promises is overdue for a reckoning.

ON THE FUCKING DOT. This is the main problem, vastly larger and older than the Wokesters. Entirely aside from politics, tenure has steered academia into narrower and narrower bands of subspecialties, with less and less substantial learning and more bizarre delusional theories. Only a few professions actually benefit from the process, and even those professions would be better off with less orthodoxy.

I see three inadequate points in their FAQ.

1. They're seeking accreditation, which is a powerful force toward orthodoxy. The accrediting agencies expect maximum Wokitude.

2. I don't see a commitment to avoid tenure. After tenure gets up and running, there's no escape from ever-narrowing orthodoxy.

3. I don't see a Trinity House motivation loop. If they simply invite the right kind of students, the wrong kind of students WILL get in and ruin the setup. Stings and APs have plenty of Deepstate money, and know how to manipulate the system.

Maintaining an unorthodox purpose against the headwinds of Parkinson bureaucracy and accrediting agencies requires a more specific feedback loop of money for value. Trinity House, working for safe navigation, has been funded by ships safely reaching port, and it has maintained its purpose for 500 years. Funding for this university needs to depend on students safely reaching the port of independent thinking. How? I don't know, but I'm sure the TWO-WAY OBLIGATION is necessary.

Later, after looking at more details... there are some pure Deepstaters in the founding crowd, like Peter Singer and Larry Summers and Strossen of ACLU. The whole thing could be just another fake front.

Labels: Equipoise, Parkinson, Trinity House

  ¶ 5:28 AM

  Edmund Berkeley on Parkinson
From an article in Computers and Automation, Sept 73, p 6 of the PDF.

He's discussing Establishments in the broadest sense.

From my study of and experience with establishments, I believe the following natural laws apply:

• Because an establishment develops to perform a function, usually at the outset it performs the function very well, and so it derives a great deal of its strength from its belief in the "obvious" importance and worthwhileness of its function.

• As an establishment ages over the years, it tends to become more and more blind and bureaucratic in its behavior.

• An establishment develops fashions, fads, and mythology such as the "national security" blanket; the "peace with honor" hoax; etc.

• An establishment will not willingly tolerate truth that puts it in an unfavorable light.

• An establishment is a kind of system, and therefore should be made subject to all the laws for the proper functioning of systems, INCLUDING FEEDBACK CONTROL.

In other words, for nearly all the years that an establishment is in existence, the correction and modification of that establishment by applying truth to it is vitally necessary.

Here is another reason why those persons who are now ca!led "computer professionals" need to concern themselves with truth, in great variety and on many levels. Information processing is really important only if you are dealing with the truth.

Unfortunately it didn't happen. The total transition from analog to digital removed feedback from the technical understanding of the profession. Share Value removed feedback from the economic side of the business. Epstein removed facts and truth.

The economic end would probably be easiest to fix, by restoring profit to business and restoring the profit MOTIVE to establishments and governments. Ideally an establishment should gain money by SOLVING problems, not by UNSOLVING problems. I've been discussing this fix in the Trinity House theme.

Labels: Parkinson, Trinity House

  ¶ 11:43 PM

  Constants and Variables 168, Lowenstein edition
Since I just bashed Unz, let's balance it with praise for ONE of the columnists. Barrett appears (at the moment anyway) to be a relatively true beacon. He hasn't showed the Pied Piper colors YET.

His latest audio clip is an interview with a pair of high-status hippies, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. Unlike most high-status hippies, Paul and Elizabeth didn't join Deepstate. They continued working on the side of truth.

They see more or less the same things I'm seeing, from a different angle. I see these monstrosities from a scientist/engineer temperament. Paul and Elizabeth (and Barrett as well) see the trends from a historian/journalist temperament.

The story starts with a point of intersection between the two angles, a 'controlled experiment' that shows the distinction between high-status and low-status hippies. The constant in the experiment is Allard Lowenstein.

Paul Fitzgerald met Allard Lowenstein while involved in the 1980 Teddy Kennedy campaign. Lowenstein recognized him as a distant relative of the Kennedys, and confided in him that the truth about the assassinations would eventually come out. (Of course it hasn't yet.)

I met Lowenstein in Jamestown NY while I was campaigning for Gene McCarthy in 1968. A group of Bobby Kennedy campaigners was also working in Jamestown. Lowenstein gathered up both crews and gave us a pep talk. So I got a handshake from Lowenstein.

High status vs low-status.

Paul and Elizabeth discuss four important themes at length in the interview.

1. The Fairness Doctrine WORKED, and we need to bring it back.

2. Medieval mode. We're back in 1300.

3. Endless wars and staged "threats".

4. Psychopaths are in charge, and psychopaths have a burning need to OBLITERATE EVERYTHING. Each demon wants to be the SOLE OCCUPANT OF THE UNIVERSE.

In each case, Paul and Elizabeth treat these subjects from a historical and theological angle, while I treat them from neurology and the predestined course of the universe. Both angles are needed for a complete picture.

Labels: 2000=1000, Constants and Variables, endless hell, Parkinson

  ¶ 12:27 PM

  Increasing grasp of Parkinson
Sometimes I feel alone in maintaining reality.

The commenters on this video give me encouragement. Saagar and Krystal are missing the point. They say that the NGO was supposed to be serving the homeless, and they're outraged that the executive of the NGO is taking all the money.

A thousand commenters get it right, and express the reality clearly and articulately.

Parkinson.

We run unending Wars On X, SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to UNSOLVE the problem, and SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED to give money and power to the executives. The money is NOT supposed to go to the homeless. The money is NOT supposed to solve problems. The money is supposed to enrich the executives. Period.

Everyone knows the truth. Nobody believes the official line.

Even among the 'alternative' types, paid speakers intentionally miss the basic nature of bureaucracy and evil. Most of them start from the idiotic assumptions that people are identical and "democracy" and "checks and balances" exist. When an event proves reality, the paid speakers blame the other party or the other ideology.

The unpaid commenters understand reality better. Because we're unpaid, we're able to see the truth.

Labels: From rights to duties, Parkinson

  ¶ 12:00 PM

  Rentalization and Anslinger
Wolfstreet is continuing to track the bizarre exponential increase of house prices. One of his commenters catches the real purpose:



Neofeudal one-way obligation. Bloomberg and Buffett and Bezos don't pay taxes. Unlike old-fashioned local landlords, they don't have any obligation to the renter or the city or the county.

Wolf's magnificent graphs make it clear that real estate is no longer local local local. The national median asking price is around 300k, which seems to be a strong norm.

Checking in this neighborhood, Zillow shows only two houses for sale, both around 300k. Both are familiar; I see them on my daily walks. Both are nicely kept 60s ranchers. I haven't seen any other signs, not even FSBO. Before the "virus" there were usually 10 houses for sale, with prices ranging from 80k to 240k.

= = = = =

Since 2008 the speculators have been gathering up massive numbers of houses, so the supply is rapidly approaching zero. The same speculators are in charge of the "virus", which has mysteriously and coincidentally restricted supply of all the necessary components as well. So there's no new construction to add new supply of housing.

This is a replication of the Anslinger technique. In 1938 the Federal alcohol enforcement agency was suffering from lack of Prohibition. Its head Harry Anslinger saw that repeal had made it difficult to create new problems by writing laws, so he prohibited marijuana by restricting the supply of legality. You were still perfectly free to buy and sell pot, provided you paid the tax and pasted the tax stamps on each package. But WHOOPSIE! Through some mysterious accidental oversight, ATF had never gotten around to printing any tax stamps, so you couldn't buy and sell pot.

Now you're perfectly free to buy a new house, except that there are no houses available and no chance of increasing the supply. It's not a "prohibition" or a "monopoly", it's just an accidental situation that accidentally happened as part of the natural flow of commerce. Or so they say.

Labels: 2000=1000, Parkinson

  ¶ 11:17 PM

  Up to a point
Humans want to solve problems. When a problem is important, we devote more attention to it, and try to solve it faster to minimize damage.

Trial and error is especially costly, so we've developed a variety of methods to avoid the trials. We learn from other people's experience via books and teachers. We remember our own experience via worklogs.

Bureaucrats work the opposite way because the cost function is reversed. Bureaucrats try hard to UNsolve every problem, and spend an eternity on "failed" efforts in the "wrong" direction, because SOLVING a problem is costly. A solved problem or a finished job means cuts in budget and power.

Here's an interesting neuroscience experiment that shows the desire to avoid error happens at the deepest brainstem level. It's not an overlaid function or 'social construct'.

Learning from error is often a slow process. In machine learning, the learning rate depends on a loss function that specifies a cost for error. Here, we hypothesized that during motor learning, error carries an implicit cost for the brain because the act of correcting for error consumes time and energy. Thus, if this implicit cost could be increased, it may robustly alter how the brain learns from error.

To vary the implicit cost of error, we designed a task that combined saccade adaptation with motion discrimination: movement errors resulted in corrective saccades, but those corrections took time away from acquiring information in the discrimination task.

We then modulated error cost using coherence of the discrimination task and found that when error cost was large, pupil diameter increased and the brain learned more from error. However, when error cost was small, the pupil constricted and the brain learned less from the same error. Thus, during sensorimotor adaptation, the act of correcting for error carries an implicit cost for the brain. Modulating this cost affects how much the brain learns from error.

Learning to follow dots is an unfamiliar task, and the cost was also unfamiliar. No chance of contamination from the conceptual level.

In this particular experiment the distractor was a face of a pretty girl. Not a Woke image of an Individual Experiencing Non-binary Colour And Gendour. A pretty white girl. Researchers might know how to talk Wokish to get the grant, but they also know what real people really want.

A more familiar task would be driving down the street and noticing a pretty girl on the sidewalk. Steering involves a complex interplay of visual and kinesthetic feedback loops. When traffic is clear, the cost of inattention is low, so we don't improve our precision. When the road is icy, the cost of inattention is high, so we focus much harder on the road and ignore the girl.

Trainers have been using this technique for centuries. Learn the basics in a simple situation, then stretch and improve the learning by occasional forced failures and distractions.

BUT: When high-cost and brand-new distractors of all types come at you fast and hard, there's no time for learning and no way to use textbooks or worklogs as a guide. You try to focus and try to get your job done in a minimal way. At some point you simply burn out and give up. This is how psychopaths destroy humans.

Labels: Experiential education, Jail mode, Parkinson

  ¶ 12:52 AM

  Another wrong metaphor
Via Evolution News:

Our friend Brian Keating, the world-renowned physicist at UC San Diego, interviewed Ben Shapiro for Dr. Keating’s podcast, “Into the Impossible.” Shapiro introduces a new and helpful word — or at least a word that was new to me — “ultracrepidarianism.”

It means “noting or pertaining to a person who criticizes, judges, or gives advice outside the area of his or her expertise.” This is essentially the larger category of error to which a more familiar word, scientism, belongs. Scientism is what happens when scientists (or doctors, one might add) “give advice outside their area of expertise.” It’s an invitation to authoritarianism, trampling democracy because Science (or Whatever) Says, which is why Shapiro brings it up.

No, experts are NOT talking about subjects they don't know.

EXPERTS ARE MISUSING THEIR KNOWLEDGE TO GIVE INTENTIONALLY WRONG ADVICE.

Fauci is a real expert. Before 2020 he was giving correct advice, following real medicine and real public health. In March 2020 he flipped the entire profession backwards. All of the CDC/Fauci advice is PRECISELY WRONG by the standards of medicine.

The underlying pattern is our perpetual and endless WarOns.

Parkinson tells us that bureaucracies create and maintain problems. An ever-increasing problem means an ever-increasing budget. An ended war or a solved problem means that the budget must be cut or the agency deleted.

1920 gave us the War On Alcohol, which created more alcohol and more drunkards. 1950 gave us the War On Commies, which created more commies by direct FBI action and by rebellion. 1965 brought the War On Poverty, which slammed urban blacks down from their relative prosperity and highly skilled jobs into helpless poverty. 1975 started the War On Carbon, which has given us more coal power and more floods and more air pollution. 1980 brought the War On Drugs (after an earlier half-start in the '60s.) The War On Drugs distributed crack in the ghettoes and oxycontin in Appalachia. 2001, of course, was the War On Islamic Terror, with CIA and FBI working together to turn alienated Muslims into "terrorists". And now we have the War On Virus, which takes every conceivable step to eliminate immunity and maintain an epidemic forever.

Simple rule: War On X makes more X.

In each of these WarOns, real experts were bribed or blackmailed into using their expertise AGAINST their normal goals. In our foreign WarOns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military carefully avoids taking any steps that could end the war. A nonexpert might accidentally cause peace. In the War On Virus, Public Health Demons know everything about viruses and immunity, and use their expert knowledge to STOP immunity and maintain the virus forever.

Shapiro thinks that experts are acting outside of their knowledge. NO. When you are giving INEXPERT advice, you might accidentally solve a problem by common sense and intuition. Only a true expert knows how to UNSOLVE a problem or UNCURE a disease.

= = = = =

Later: If guilds still functioned properly, WarOns would be harder to accomplish. These experts are BETRAYING their guild, CORRUPTING the intellectual property of the guild, DESTROYING the value of the painfully developed skills and talents of the guild. Soldiers are supposed to win a winnable war, not design and implement an unwinnable war. Scientists are supposed to solve problems, not UNsolve problems. Doctors are supposed to cure diseases, not UNcure diseases. Police are supposed to ARREST gangsters, not AID gangsters.

In each case we have turned the definition backwards. We now say that a cop who arrests criminals is betraying his badge. We say that a doctor who tries to arrest a virus with Ivermectin instead of aiding the virus with muzzles and lockdowns is betraying medicine. We say that a soldier who refuses to fight a pointless unwinnable war is deserting.

Labels: Parkinson, skill-estate, UNENDING HELL

  ¶ 5:17 AM

  Paid vs unpaid interactivity
Interactive learning can be active or passive, paid or unpaid.

I've been trying to think of a way to slip payment into courseware, mixing entertainment and reward into the learning experience, but I haven't found it yet.

Most textbooks don't even offer intrinsic pleasure. "Proof left as exercise for reader" doesn't get there at all.

Schools reward learning only with status (grades), which grows up into the tenure system that also runs mainly on status (rank).

Apprenticeships and business-based training schools are closer to the learn-to-earn setup, with guaranteed JOBS on graduation.

= = = = =

I've been noticing and enjoying both types of interactivity in old radio, which led me to think about the same distinction in education.



Four examples of unpaid interactivity:

MacHarrie's Guess What and Mel Blanc's Are you a genius were formatted as self-scoring tests, with no payment beyond the intrinsic satisfaction of thinking and learning.

Blackstone's magic show was on the line between paid and unpaid. Each episode featured instructions for a parlor trick. If you listened carefully and practiced the trick, you'd be rewarded with enjoyment at parties and the chance to win real bets with friends.

Dick Tracy had an elaborate scheme of clubs and codes. You were supposed to decode a message in each episode to 'help' Tracy escape the clutches of fiendish villains. I didn't see any direct payment, but you could send for badges and insignia to reward your club members for superior performance. Using status, as in school.

= = = = =

Two contrasting examples of paid interactivity:

The big national quiz Truth or Consequences was too much like Powerball. The prizes were astronomical** and the odds were astronomical. The questions were NOT educational.

The Chicago-based Calling All Detectives was a far more practical and winnable lottery. Much more like actual work, pay for value. Each local station called a listener every day, asking a question about a detail of today's episode. Especially in smaller markets, your odds of winning were 'imaginable'. The prize was also realistic. On WGN, the originating station, Sealy Mattresses offered a new mattress. Everyone can use a new mattress, and it's a prize worth EARNING.

= = = = =

I went in search of a trade journal with templates for such lotteries. I started by looking at Broadcast magazine from the same month as the best Detectives episodes.

Immediately I found the opposite! At that exact moment the FCC was making a big push to HALT such lotteries, which explains why I hadn't heard them in more recent shows.

Broadcast Magazine said:

The FCC is embarrassed because it stubbed its bureaucratic toe on its proposed giveaway ban. It has made a hasty and strategic retreat. But the war isn't over. There appears to be no question now that the FCC lacks jurisdiction over lotteries and gift enterprises, per se. Congress, without fanfare last June, repealed the lottery section of the Communications Act, along with the section dealing with obscene, profane and indecent language. It transferred jurisdiction to the Department of Justice, under the revised Criminal Code, which becomes operative Sept. 1. Why the FCC's highly-placed lawyers muffed this one becomes a matter of administrative concern for the FCC itself.

But broadcasters shouldn't delude themselves. What the FCC cannot do directly it probably can achieve in other ways. The FCC is the licensing body. It can take judicial notice of violations of any statutes. It determines the qualifications of licensees. It may be a longer, more tortuous course, but it's there.

Any broadcasting designed to "buy" the radio audience, by requiring it to listen in hope of reward rather than for the quality of entertainment should be avoided. Voluntary adherence to that precept will do it. In one fell swoop, it will achieve everything the reputable broadcaster has sought for a quarter century. It will make good programming the yardstick. It will disarm the Government's crusade toward greater program controls. It will quell the Congressional clamor for tightening up of the law. It will end the free rides of manufacturers who give things away like mad for the air credits. It will create new business for radio.

Note the realistic grasp of Parkinson. Bureaucracies don't use laws. They do what they want to do. The response is also realistic. Lobbying is pointless. Just obey and hope to bore the demons.

We aren't allowed to think realistically now. We are required to blame The Horrible Other Party for the permanent laws of power. If only we can elect more of My Wonderful Party, all problems will magically disappear.

But the magazine was STUPIDLY WRONG when it called giveaways disreputable. These PAID LEARNING EXPERIENCES were deeply educational. Each of these surviving programs contained serious and accurate representations of geography and history and science. Even if the subject matter was typical soap opera, the MENTAL EXERCISE of strategic listening would be good for your brain. Blanc and MacHarrie urged you to listen with paper and pencil in hand, invoking MUSCLE MEMORY.

Whether you earned the mattress or not, you were earning learning. And that's a vastly better prize than a mattress.


= = = = =

** Astronomical: At one point the Truth or Consequences prize was: A new house, new furniture and appliances, a complete wardrobe every year for life, a complete set of jewelry, a new Buick convertible, a yacht, and an AIRPLANE. For most listeners, the Buick and the clothing would be a net gain, but the rest would throw you into bankruptcy. (New house = maintenance, insurance and property taxes every year, not covered by the prize.)

Labels: Entertainment, Experiential education, Parkinson

  ¶ 11:17 PM

  Finally reading Machiavelli
I've been recommending Machiavelli for a long time. I've been hammering repeatedly that "civics" classes and political thinkers shouldn't waste time on bizarre mythical delusions like constitutions and laws and elections. Instead they should use and modernize sources of hardass reality like Machiavelli and Parkinson.

I've read Parkinson deeply and repeatedly, but I've never read Machiavelli aside from citing some already cited familiar pieces.

Finally settled down to read the Prince. I skipped his specific personal advice to specific real princes, and stuck with the general parts.

Unsurprisingly, he's absolutely realistic and objective. He wastes no time on ideologies and laws and organization charts.

I was surprised by the SCIENTIFIC METHOD of the book. Machiavelli starts by tossing out the constants like ideology and religion and systems. Then he separates out all the real variables of PERSONALITY and runs a separate 'experiment' on each variable. What happens when a prince is more lenient or more strict with the people? More lenient or more strict with the courtiers? More generous or more stingy with the people? More generous or more stingy with the courtiers? More aggressive or more businesslike with foreign nations?

He forms a verbal graph or transfer function for each variable on its own.

The concluding chapter hasn't been overquoted, so maybe it's worth a quote. In this chapter he treats the biggest variable of all, the rotations and variations of the universe, aka Fortune.

It is unknown to me how many believe that worldly events are so governed by fortune and by God, that men cannot by their prudence change them, and that on the contrary there is no remedy whatever, and for this they may judge it to be useless to toil much about them, but let things be ruled by chance.

This opinion has been more believed in our day, from the great changes that have been seen, and are daily seen, beyond every human conjecture. [SOUNDS FUCKING FAMILIAR, DOESN'T IT?]

When I think about them at times, I am partly inclined to share this opinion. Nevertheless, that our freewill may not be altogether extinguished, I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or a little less to be governed by us. I would compare her to an impetuous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, ruins trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other; every one flies before it, and everything yields to its fury without being able to oppose it.

And yet when it is quiet, men can make provision against it by dams and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous.

It happens similarly with fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and turns her fury where she knows that no dams or barriers have been made to hold her.

But limiting myself more to particular cases, I would point out how one sees a certain prince today fortunate and tomorrow ruined, without seeing that he has changed in character. I believe this arises in the first place from the causes that we have already discussed at length; that is to say, because the prince who bases himself entirely on fortune is ruined when fortune varies.

I also believe that he is happy whose mode of proceeding accords with the needs of the times, and similarly he is unfortunate whose mode of proceeding is opposed to the times. For one sees that in those things which lead them to the aim that each one has in view, namely, glory and riches, men proceed in various ways; one with circumspection, another with impetuosity, one by violence, another by cunning, one with patience, another with the reverse; and each by these diverse ways may arrive at his aim. One sees also two cautious men, one of whom succeeds in his designs, and the other not, and in the same way two men succeed equally by different methods, one being cautious, the other impetuous, which arises only from the nature of the times, which does or does not conform to their method of proceeding.

HARDASS and perfectly accurate.

Expressed in my peculiar language: When you've built enough dams and stored enough material and human capital, you're free to act more impetuously. When you tear down dams and grain elevators, when you operate on debt and JIT, the floods of fortune will always be in control, and you won't be free to improvise or think or create.

Thinking of balances and bridges, it would be interesting to see a counterpoise book written as advice for peasants. Separate out the same variables and graph the same transfer functions for the opposite side of the balance. When the prince is generous with the peasants, how should the peasants behave to maximize the generosity and encourage the prince? When the prince is murderous, how should the peasants minimize the damage and discourage the prince? Machiavelli sometimes describes how the peasants typically respond to the ruler's behavior, but he's not on our side.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Equipoise, Parkinson, storage

  ¶ 6:56 AM

  Sometimes history doesn't just rhyme
Well, it appears that we are actually OUT of Afghanistan.

This is a positive event whether it was deliberate or not. I was assuming that Biden would do the usual fake pullout "justifying" a massive new war. So far there's no evidence of the latter. We're just OUT.

Every exception to Parkinson is a good thing. Every breakdown in perpetual idiocy is welcome.

Orlov undoubtedly appreciates this specific event. He pointed out that the Soviet failure in Afghanistan precipitated the final death of the USSR. Now the US failure in the SAME Afghanistan is helping our collapse. Not a metaphor, not a rhyme. The same failure in the same place for the same stupid reason.

The media on "both" "sides" are decrying this good event. The R side is predictable, since everything done by D is bad in R's eyes and vice versa. The D criticism is more interesting. They're quoting Bush Junior verbatim, repeating his original idiotic justification for the war, warning that the "terrorists will follow us home."

= = = = =

I want to add a couple of earlier rhymes that aren't generally recognized.

In 1918 we invaded and occupied part of Russia. We were propping up the Mensheviks. When we pulled out, the Bolsheviks immediately won BECAUSE THE MENSHEVIKS WERE SEEN AS FOREIGN OCCUPIERS.

In 1946 we occupied part of China. We were propping up Chiang. When we pulled out, Mao immediately won BECAUSE CHIANG WAS SEEN AS A FOREIGN OCCUPIER.

The same happened in Vietnam.

Now the same has happened in Afghanistan. We invaded and occupied and propped up our own puppet. When we pulled out, the Taliban immediately won BECAUSE OUR PUPPET WAS A FOREIGN OCCUPIER.

103 years of miserable infinitely stupid infinitely deadly poetry.

And I need to add an external rhyme that may be relevant. Bush Junior is coming back into popularity on "both" "sides" of the media. The very same Bush Junior who LAUNCHED THE VIRUS HOLOCAUST IN 2005. Are we seeing a behind-the-scenes coup?

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, infinite STUPID, Parkinson

  ¶ 4:47 AM

  Three Parkinson workarounds
One major problem, maybe the deepest problem and source of most other problems, is the Parkinson loop. Governments and corporations seek only GROWTH, not SERVICE or SOLVING.

When an institution has a healthy negative feedback loop to its customers or citizens, it works to gain more customers and to make the customers richer and better. Seeking profit forces a business to treat its customers and employees well. Loyalty is the key to profit.

Henry Ford, who was NOT a nice altruistic man, expressed this loop clearly. He wanted his employees to be able to buy Fords. So he treated them well, paid them well, and tried to improve their lives. In return they stayed on the job, improved their skills, and performed more efficiently. Loyalty for loyalty, respect for respect.

Now corporations seek GROWTH, so they move fast and break things to maximize SHARE VALUE.

Parkinson is most obvious in bureaucracies, which create problems in order to justify more power and budget to create more problems.

= = = = =

How do we break out of Parkinson? I've discussed two ways extensively.

= = = = =

A strong leader who genuinely wants to solve problems and improve the company or country can break up the structures that maintain the death loop.

FDR knew exactly what he was doing. He was facing the three legs of Deepstate: Banks, Intel agencies, and Activists.

1. On his first day in office he started breaking and constraining the banks.

2. He then repealed Prohibition, which removed the Parkinson loop from FBI and ATF. Those agancies could no longer build gangs to provide "problems" that would be aggravated by building more gangs.

3. He then started to solve the overall economic problem, which relieved the stresses that were driving millions of working-class men into fascist and socialist activism.

= = = = =

I've also discussed an unusual and perhaps unique exception to Parkinson. Trinity House was founded by Henry VIII and still operates with its original purpose intact. In 500 years it never lost track of its PROBLEM-SOLVING goal, never descended into pure growth-loop.

Trinity House succeeds because its income depends strictly and precisely on SOLVING one particular problem. Its purpose is to keep ships safe. It maintains lighthouses and radio beacons, and it has sponsored research in fog warnings, radio communication, and optics. Trinity House is funded by a tax on every commercial ship that docks in Britain. If ships are failing to reach port, its funding decreases. So it runs on a pure and simple profit loop, like a non-stock business.

= = = = =

Yesterday I noticed a third workaround while thinking about Brahe's work.

Tycho thus fits firmly into the tradition of Follies that serve science. Follies fade quickly after the rich owner dies, but the contributions to the work of other scholars remain and grow.

An institution that fades can't undergo the Parkinson process. Unlike bureaucracies and foundations, it can't turn to crime and corruption. The product grows without interference from the now-corrupt institution.

This is Nature's way of avoiding Parkinson. A person or a company or a bureaucracy dies when its purpose is done. The influence, if carefully cultivated by heirs and successors, can remain and grow, seeding more service and solving.

We've been blocking two of those natural deaths. We no longer allow a major company to go bankrupt when it loses its connection to customers. We maintain the loop by bailing out the worst and most destructive companies. And we never repeal a bad law or dissolve a bad agency. We just keep pumping more money into the evil monsters.

And we partially block the function of personal death by keeping old monsters in office long after they should have retired. Within an institution, retirement breaks the personal blackmail loop of a demon. Younger executives take his place, starting fresh on blackmail. Occasionally one of the new executives may even turn out to be a problem-solver like FDR or Putin.

Labels: Parkinson

  ¶ 8:03 AM

  Astrometeorology 7, Brahe's Star Castle
In the 1500s Europeans were starting to pull away from Rome's monopoly on power and thought. Tycho Brahe was a rich aristocrat who became fascinated by Arab and Persian astronomy. He shared the Islamic motive of learning how the universe ticks (literally) so we could predict and align our activities better with the universe. His aristocratic rank enabled him to get a commission from King Frederick of Denmark to build an official observatory, initially to improve timekeeping.

From David King's history:

He became interested in astronomy after observing a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the cause, he thought, of the great plague in 1563. He found that planetary tables were in error by several days, and there and then decided to make their improvement his prime concern.

In 1576 Tycho started building his Star Castle, following Islamic architecture and Islamic instruments as seen at Maragha, but with improved and enlarged instruments for better accuracy.







The function of the domes is unclear. King says they housed some of the instruments, guarding against wind and weather.... but the drawings from Tycho's book seem to show solid roofs, not retractable or glass roofs. Two of the circles have semi-open 'gratings' over them, which would probably be sufficient. The big dome has a semi-open chamber at the top, but the ribs would block practical use.

The floor plan of the underground part is clear. An adit on the left led downstairs to the rectangular middle part, which served as a residence for the technician. Passages from the middle led to the observation chambers, which might have housed instruments.



I've included several of the instruments aboveground for visibility.

First, the default structure was just a rotatable globe with some kind of mounting on top. The globe was protected by a cone when not in use. Experimental instruments could be mounted on the globe and rotated to various angles. An astronomical breadboard.



There were several armillary spheres, mainly for calculation and visualization, not for sighting.



The Islamic instruments had alidades instead of lenses. Tycho continued the practice, and improved the accuracy with a vernier marking on top, anticipating the tick marks in later sidereal time instruments.

One of the Maragha instruments:



Tycho's version of a simple altitude sight:



This machine had a fine worm-gear crank to adjust with greater precision:



The Quadrant Magnus, with both altitude and azimuth adjustments:



Quadrant in use, sighting a star through the alidade:



The Sextant had three axes of adjustment, altitude and azimuth and a separate rotation of the alidade.



The Sextant in use:



An equatorial instrument pivoted on a 23 degree axis, anticipating the more complex equatorials of the 1800s. It had two independent alidades, for use in opposite directions.



Polistra thinks this instrument would have been hard to use!



What happened to the Star Castle? Again from David King:

Tycho had an imperious and fiery disposition which made him many enemies among the nobles of Denmark, especially those who envied him his large estate and high salary. After his benefactor's death, these individuals naturally counselled the young King Christian against his father's astronomer, already in some disfavour for having ill-treated one of his tenants.** After the coronation of King Christian in 1596, Tycho found his allowances gradually curtailed, even to the pension, so that he felt, as never before, that both he and his work were unwanted.

Eventually, his troubles became so acute that he was happy to leave Hveen, taking with him servants, students, instruments, and printing-press. After a short stay in Copenhagen, he left Denmark for ever, seeking safe domicile in Rostock, Wandsbeck, and Wittenburg until, worn out in body and spirit, he settled in Prague.

The castle's decay was hastened by his successors, who appear to have pulled down some parts in order to provide building material for new dwelling-houses. By 1652, there was scarcely any trace of the original buildings.

Tycho thus fits firmly into the tradition of Follies that serve science. Follies fade quickly after the rich owner dies, but the contributions to the work of other scholars remain and grow.

An institution that fades can't undergo the Parkinson process. Unlike bureaucracies and foundations, it can't turn to crime and corruption. The product grows without interference from the now-corrupt institution.

= = = = =

** Footnote: Can you imagine a modern aristocrat receiving disfavor for ill-treating one of his tenants? Now it's the other way around. Aristocrats lose Share Value when they accidentally treat their tenants and employees decently. Only ill-treatment is allowed.

= = = = =

Keeping track of the links so far:

Intro: Opening the doors again

2: James Ferguson

3: From Ferguson to Kepler

4: Maragha and astrolabes

5: Qibla

6: Back to Europe

7: Brahe's star castle (this item)

Labels: 2000=1000, Entertainment, Equipoise, Metrology, Parkinson

  ¶ 2:09 PM

  Afghanistan weirdness
Biden fakely pulled out some of our troops so we could justify sending more troops back in. This was drably predictable. Parkinson. Create a problem so we can waste more money creating it again.

We never leave a country after we invade it. We always occupy forever. Leaving is unthinkable because leaving ends the flow of money to the Pentagon and mercenaries. Parkinson.

The media response to this predictable move is NOT predictable. I don't watch regular media, but Quora typically gives a good echo. Quora bots are flooding the zone with messages favoring a hard and heavy return to Afghanistan to obliterate the Taliban. A verbatim repeat of Bush's idiotic message in 2001. If we don't wipe out the terrorists, the terrorists will follow us home.

In Persuasion, Jonathan Rauch defends our 20-year occupation and says it was worth the effort. Rauch has been a clear and objective observer of politics for a LONG time. He has been uniquely correct about many important trends. But he's missing the point on this one.

I'm VASTLY less wise than Rauch. I take entirely too long to figure out political crap. But this particular piece of crap was obvious even to my dull mind, four years before I got rid of the whole anti-Islam poison.

Later: I've been narrowing down my input too much. Mental OCD, trying to ward off all hints of tyranny. Broadening the horizon and looking at some comments on other videos about Afghanistan, it's clear that the vast majority of people understand the futility and stupidity of the war. Many of them are seeing it in Parkinson terms. Experts who try to defend the war are given no slack.

Later again: Now I'm seeing some Quora questions that openly idolize Bush by name. Makes me think these are generated by an organization serving the Bush family. In other words, CIA.

Labels: Bemusement, Parkinson

  ¶ 8:10 PM

  It's just Parkinson
Quora question:

Who are some people who the world thought were crazy, but were right all along?

Answers cite Wegener's idea of continental drift, saying "Revolutionary ideas are rarely accepted".

I hadn't stopped to think about it before. This answer is mostly backwards. Not entirely.

Drift is the opposite of crazy and revolutionary. It's OBVIOUS. Anyone can see it. Wegener was dismissed because geologists wanted NON-OBVIOUS theories.

Most of the time common sense is dismissed. The obvious is dismissed. Crazy and revolutionary and murderous ideas are REQUIRED.

A similar change in a closely related subject is Schiaparelli's OBSERVATION of rivers on Mars. For hundreds of years official science laughed at the claim. We KNOW that Mars doesn't have water, so it can't have rivers. How do we KNOW Mars doesn't have water? Because we KNOW that Schiaparelli was wrong.

A similar pattern happened in speech, with "competing" theories about the function of the larynx. The old idea was OBVIOUS, and the old idea was right. The larynx is like an oboe or saxophone. A column of air resonates, allowing a double reed to open and close with the variations of pressure. Bell described it clearly.

But this wasn't good enough for the scientists. They assumed that the larynx produced vibrations by direct muscular action, like a tapping finger.

The latter was OBVIOUSLY wrong, and you don't need fancy instruments to see why it was wrong. The larynx vibrates from 60 to 600 cycles in singing, and 150 to 300 cycles in normal speech. You can't even reach 20 cycles with a tapping finger, and 600 is OBVIOUSLY impossible. Muscles just don't move that fast.

Despite its OBVIOUS wrongness, the textbooks and teachers in the '70s were still treating both theories as competing and equally likely.

= = = = =

I'm tempted to cite Michelet on the psychopathic innovators yet again, but this problem is much simpler and more crassly Parkinsonian.

There's no profit in proving the obvious.

Proving a crazy idea takes HARD WORK and UNLIMITED WORK. The best part of proving a crazy idea is that you CAN'T GET THERE. So the budgets and authority must INCREASE FOREVER. It's a self-feeding pump.



= = = = =

Semi-relevant: Another Quora question mentions this quote:

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

I hadn't heard this before. Concise and comprehensive. Parkinson in one sentence. Google credits it to Ernest Benn, a British political writer contemporary with Parkinson.

Labels: Answered better than asked, Parkinson, SES

  ¶ 10:19 PM

  Amazingly good idea!
99% of Quora questions are pointless bots. Here's an extreme exception:

CDC is fueling anti-vaxxers by their new mask policies. Should the Biden administration abolish CDC and transfer the pandemic response to Pfizer?

YES! YES! YES!

Ordinarily letting one industry's profit determine policy is unwise, but in this specific case it would achieve the desired goal. Vax is real public health. Lockdowns and muzzles are the EXACT OPPOSITE of real public health.

CDC doesn't WANT to reach herd immunity or full vax, because CDC's goal is torture and riots and screeching superhell and total hyperobliteration of more than all universes. Maintaining a scapegoat group makes total war easy when it's time to pull the trigger.

Abolishing CDC and executing all of its employees, plus all the "bioterror" monsters, plus all the Public Death Officers in all states and counties and countries, is the ONLY CURE for the REAL PANDEMIC OF HOLOCAUSTS.

More broadly, leaving aside the demonic purpose of CDC, this is just good old Parkinson. A bureaucracy never solves a problem. A bureaucracy always UNsolves the problem to justify ever-increasing budget and power. A profit-driven company wants to sell its product to EVERYONE. Two or three competing companies will sell to everyone even faster.

Labels: asked better than ever asked before, infinite GOOD, Parkinson

  ¶ 12:28 AM

  If this is how it happens, fine.
The "lab leak" false flag has become the standard line.

At first I thought it made sense, in Jan 2020 before the entire world joined the insanity.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

The CDC (Centers for Dissident Control) and WHO have a long record of overstating "epidemics" for Parkinson reasons. Bigger panic = bigger budget.

If I had to make a hypothesis, I'd say Wuhan was brewing some kind of rebellion, and China's government decided it was time to shut the province down. Note this headline.

USA found the panic convenient as another way to sanction China.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

I had the Parkinson history right, but I couldn't see the problem with the new theory yet. The controlled experiment in holocaustery started in March, and quickly disproved the theory.

Now we're back to the same point after 15 months of blaming and killing everyone else. In the meantime, our actions removed the possibility that a real virus was causing a real epidemic anywhere. There may be a virus corresponding to the brand name, but it didn't cause an epidemic. The ENTITY of a virus is contradictory and unnecessary, just as the ENTITY of "Commie agents" in the '50s or "Radical Islamic Terrorists" in 2001.

It's witchcraft every time. The ENTITY in each case probably existed, just as real witches existed. The actions attributed to the ENTITY are impossible, and the actions "needed" to "control" the ENTITY are nonsensical. In each case the "controls" only made life difficult or impossible for ordinary people. The latest case is by far the most deadly.

Now the fake focus is back on China again, which seems to be the chosen path for backing out of the hunt after the desired damage is done.

Okay. Fine. I'm tired and used up, no appetite for further argument. If this is what it takes to STOP THE MURDER, then fine.

The end of the holocaust is a lot less organized and precise than the start. Europe and South America and Canada are still killing hard and fast. A few US governors are still joyously expanding the murder, while even Calif and Wash have reluctantly declared a partial temporary ceasefire.

This pattern often happens at the end of big wars. There are always countries or regiments or commanders who are having too much fun, who aren't ready to give up the slaughter when the bigger players stop the music.

Labels: endless hell, Parkinson

  ¶ 10:52 PM

  Question worth thinking about
Seen on Quora, a rare good question.

How can we infer an increase/decrease in the global skepticism of science?

We know that vast numbers of people stopped trusting Public Health, especially when Public Health and all corporations declared in unison that RIOTS CURE EPIDEMICS.

But how can we get a commercial and quantifiable metric for this distrust?

When people stop trusting a car brand, sales go down. When people stop trusting the Episcopal Church, tithing goes down. When people stop trusting a TV network or newspaper, the clicks and advertisers and subscribers drop. All are measurable decreases in revenue.

There aren't any mass-consumption science magazines or science shows. All the magazines are basically aimed at insiders. Subscribers are part of the secret-keeping priesthood. They're not ordinary churchgoers or customers who can lose trust. They're helping to generate the distrust. They know it's a hoax because they're building the hoax.

So there's no measure equivalent to tithing or subscriptions, no way to quantify trust by outsiders.

Labels: Asked and worth asking again, Metrology, Parkinson

  ¶ 3:01 PM

  Reprint on Don't Be There
Reprinting this item from 2018 to maintain my own resolve.

= = = = = START REPRINT:

Puppet show. APs versus APs. Both dangling from Deepstate strings. One set is called "Patriot Prayer Puppets", other side is called "Antifa Puppets".

The script says Antifa wins, so Antifa wins.

The lower-level participants are unaware of the scripting. They believe they're "moving the world" or some such shit. The only thing they're doing is strengthening Deepstate. Deepstate uses CONFLICT to justify more spying, more tyranny, more extermination. Parkinson, Parkinson, Parkinson. PAY ATTENTION.

At this moment the Antifa participants are accidentally more honest, since they are OPENLY defending CIA, NSA, Goldman, and Military. They doublethink that they are "resisting" something or other by openly supporting CIA, NSA, Goldman, and Military. Perhaps one or two of them will realize the doubleness and give up, but I doubt it.

If you want to "change the world", there's absolutely no ACTIVE way to do it. The best you can do is AVOID strengthening Deepstate. All you can do is STAY THE FUCK AWAY from these atrocious fake puppet shows. Don't invite "controversial" speakers, don't join protests, don't join movements. Speak the truth when possible, do your duty.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

Survive. Be medieval. Be useful.

Labels: 2000=1000, From rights to duties, Natural law = Sharia law, Parkinson

  ¶ 2:08 AM

  Salute to Benjn Pike Jr part 3: Spectacles
[Following from part 1 and part 2.]



Benjⁿ Pike J^r was mainly an optical manufacturer. In this section I'll focus on the optical side of his 1848 catalog, which contained spectacles with sliding parts and spectacles with sliding parts.

= = = = =

First the product you expect from an optician: eyeglasses. These had sliding bows, common at that time, so you could adjust each side for comfort or focus.

A lost feature. Why was it lost? Deskilling. Offshoring. Every branch of medicine and life has been yanking functions and skills away from normal people and reserving the functions for specialists or foreigners. Only professional opticians are allowed to adjust glasses, and after adjustment there are no user-serviceable parts.



= = = = =

The other type of spectacle with sliding parts shows the interface of science AND education AND entertainment.

The Magic Lantern.

I had thought the magic lantern was just a slide projector with light furnished by flame instead of electricity. The machine was partly similar, but the ACTUAL USE of the magic lantern before 1900 was interactive and animated, unlike both slides and cinema.

The key to a good magic lantern spectacle was in the slideRs, which were NOT the same thing as slides.

Closeup view of a lantern with a typical slideR mechanism:



The lamp (alcohol or whale oil) was focused by the mirror in back. The tiny cranks drove a miniature conveyor belt, making it possible to move one slider back and forth, or move one smaller slider across a bigger one.

Here the fixed slider is Polistra's home, and the movable slider is HappySun moving across the horizon.



Another way of animating was the dissolver, a pair of lanterns with a mechanism to gradually hide one and display the other. I'm trying to do a ticking pendulum here, but the dissolver doesn't work well in the Poser digital setup because Poser doesn't have real lenses and doesn't merge the images properly.



Sliding and dissolving animations were highly developed in 1850. Many other variations were available, including miniature silhouette figures that danced when you turned the crank. These were about 3 inches high, packing a lot of mechanism into a small space.



Some were intended solely for amusement:



We know what French means, don't we? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Others were more educational:



Cinema later redeveloped similar techniques, BUT they weren't interactive, weren't user-serviceable. Hollywood editors performed the dissolves and animation, then packaged them as unchangeable and uncontrollable sequences. In the 1950s every school had a slide projector for stiff unchanging slides, and a filmstrip projector with a similar rack-type mechanism used only for advancing to the next rigid picture.



The mechanism was the same, only the techniques and the magic were gone.

A similar process of centralization and deskilling happened in the digital era. The early PCs, especially Amiga, had plenty of DIY animation available. Windows EXEs could perform similar tricks, and I used those tricks in my early courseware to create interactive experiments. After everything moved online, the tricks were much harder to accomplish. I had to remake my "live" interactive animations as uncontrollable sequences of frames, just like the change from slideRs to slides.

In fairness, slider and dissolver techniques are available in SVG controlled by JS, but they're not used for animation. Dissolvers are only used by paywalls to show you a fading-out version of the page before you pay. User-controlled sliders remain in one specialized vestigial situation: Then vs Now pictures of cityscapes.

= = = = =

The Scientific Lantern is the real interface point of magic and entertainment and science. Magic shows and science shows were the same thing. Serious scientists like Faraday enjoyed creating stage spectacles to illustrate the devices and principles they were developing.

This Scientific Lantern has the lamp as above, but instead of sliders it has a big space between lamp and lens where you could mount various kinds of experiments and displays.



Here the target is a conductivity cell, which would be part of a full experimental setup like this:



The bubbles and reactions in the cell would be visible to the audience.

The platform in the Scientific Lantern could also hold an aquarium or terrarium with critters, preferably transparent or translucent critters.



= = = = =

Along with the loss of interactivity, there's a MUCH BIGGER moral to this story. When science was a form of entertainment, everyone could see and ENJOY the actual process of observation and experimentation. When science had user-serviceable parts, everyone could participate in science.

In 1946 science merged with Deepstate and became a tool of surveillance and genocide. We are no longer allowed to see how science works. We no longer get to hear or participate in open descriptions and discussions. Nothing leaks out, nothing is ever displayed or revealed.

We only get to experience the massively evil and demonic ACTIONS of science when it imprisons and binds and gags and kills us by the millions.

ENTERTAINMENT IS THE OPPOSITE OF SECRETS.

ENTERTAINMENT IS THE OPPOSITE OF GENOCIDE.

LAUGHTER IS THE OPPOSITE OF DEATH.

Labels: Entertainment, Parkinson, skill-estate

  ¶ 12:15 AM