The shortest path to a clear conscience is a poor memory. Witness hippies, who fail to this day to see their role in the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands.
Corrollary: the shortest path to a useful moral sense is a large volume of knowledge and practical experience.
The task of the TSA–as stated, since I believe other purposes have been added–is to sift potential threats from law abiding citizens. As I mentioned in I think the previous post, the only way to ensure that no “signal”–a terrorist with the intention and physical ability to commandeer or destroy a plane in flight–gets through is to treat everyone like criminals. There is no logical limit to this, if we have no idea what the actual signal is.
Put another way, it is quite possible we would have few to no incidents every year if we did NO security screening. We don’t screen buses, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen trains, yet none have been blown up. We don’t screen subway passengers. Yet, in that confined space, a well constructed bomb could kill nearly as many people as destroying a plane in flight.
Some 32,000 people died last year in traffic accidents, or about 93 a day if memory serves. None died in terrorist attacks on our airliners. Nor the year before that. Nor the year before that, nor. . . to 2001, which was an exceptional year, both looking to previous years, and since.
The statistical chance of each of dying at some point is 100%. The question is how far short of our otherwise maximal life expectancy this will happen.
I literally believe that it would not be that big a deal if an airliner or two got hijacked or blown up, for the simple reason that we are already accepting 32,000 annual deaths as the cost of the freedom to drive. Is adding a few hundred to that, in the grand scheme of things, really that big a deal?
Nukes are huge threat. Crashing jets, not so much. We know now that if they get commandeered, we need to shoot them down. Commandeering them quickly, now, is very difficult simply because the cockpit is locked.
The net is that as far as I can tell, the actual signal is at or close to zero. The efforts to detect it–with massive abrogations of basic freedoms–are nowhere near proportionate to the actual threat. The threat is being used to curtail rights; the screenings are not, therefore, primarily being used to catch would-be terrorists, but to condition Americans to accept increasingly intrusive Federal government.
Now, I have argued and continue to believe, in the abstract, that the only sensible explanation for the collapse of Tower 7 on 9/11–which most people have not even heard of–is that more agents were involved than those in the airplanes. I make that case here (and in the link embedded in the front). This in turn implies that the entire set of events of 9/11 included participants who have not been identified.
We are seeing the TSA act in increasingly paramilitary ways. They have formed what they call “Viper” teams, which in effect takes the worst elements of airport “security” on the road, such that they can perform physical searches of random people who have done nothing but buy a bus ticket. Presumably at some point they will want the authority to stop us in the mall or grocery store, all for threats which have taken no lives in ten years.
I am increasingly persuaded that the most paranoid takes on 9/11 may have been in broad stroke accurate, in that the fear of terrorism that was invoked is being used to erode our fundamental freedom. TSA’s mandate of nudity or molestation is a blatent and utterly indefensible violation of the Fourth Amendment, whose essence is that if you have done nothing suspicious, you are to be left alone. It would be more effective from a crime fighting perspective to spend all day stopping and searching random people, but that is effectively a Fascist State, quite literally. It is being enacted under our noses.
But let me put on my rose colored glasses, and look at this in the most benign way possible. What people have to understand is that government agencies take on lives of their own. In the private sector, competition forces companies to improve quality and cut costs. The motivation is the desire for profit, and to avoid business failure.
In the public sector, however, “profit” is calculated entirely differently. It is figuring out ways to get more people on your payroll, and how to get them paid more money. People making careers out of it learn to figure out ways to create problems that may or may not exist, so that they can justify higher and higher allocations of our tax dollars.
In the private sector, sustained incompetence leads to bankruptcy. In the public sector, there is no cost to incompetence, since the only punishments are political, and which can be managed entirely externally to actually effectively accomplishing your stated mission. Everyone involved has every reason to increase the size and scope of the mission, and ZERO–make that NEGATIVE–incentives to economize, unless and until the legislators and executives get after them.
To be clear, there is no cost to the people who spend other peoples money of spending that money. They actually benefit more, the more they spend. Add to this the patently farcical claim that government jobs are sustainable and good for the economy, and you have a huge problem.
The TSA obviously benefits by increasing the scope of its mission. Since they have not stopped any terrorist attacks in ten years, plainly either they need to be downsized, or lighten up on security, but even absent the consideration of more sinister motives, they have every reason to grow every year until Congress stops approving the funding. To grow, obviously they have to move into new “market segments”, new allocations of labor, and that too–combined with utter and complete Constitutional ignorance, failure of the basic process of perceiving long term consequences, and excessive machismo–would also explain the VIPER squads.
This certainly does not apply to all of them, but some cops really get off on uniforms, and with taking away people’s rights. I think we can with safety assume the Obama Administration is looking for and hiring those sorts of people preferentially.
If you watch that video, what these jackasses did was literally make an entire busload of people take part in what amounted to a training exercise. This included patting down and searching the baggage of people they had no cause to suspect had committed a crime, and who had not authorized this search in advance.
That should make everyone with a heartbeat and a shred of common sense very nervous. These are Federal agents, doing things even the FBI can’t get away with, and who ultimately report not to Congress but to the President.
Personally, I think the TSA and DHS should be disbanded. As Reagan said, though, approximately, there is nothing closer to eternal life than a federal agency. That, for the reasons I mentioned. Too many careers and incomes become dependent on sustaining the thing, and they are always spending someone else’s money.
I woke up this morning remembering vaguely having written something about Lady Gaga, and fearing I had gone a post too far. I read it this morning, and it isn’t too awful, even if sentimemental in the way people who have thoroughly “relaxed” get. Me, at any rate. I was going to delete it, but think I’ll just leave it.
I worked out my ex post facto rationalization, though, and thought it worth sharing.
Experience flows into all of us, all of our conscious, waking hours, which includes our dream time. On this base of experience, we inflict patterns. I say inflict, since reality is what it is, the waters flow according to gravity, and these processes need no commentary. What we need, though, are maps, to get from Point A to Point B, reliably, if possible.
Now, some patterns are simply wrong. Socialism as a means of raising the living conditions of the poor does not work. As a means of aggregating power, it does work. But that is not the stated goal, for most.
What we call stupidity is simply a persistent inability to develop accurate patterns–or to understand those granted by education or experience–to move reliably from A to B.
Yet, this word “stupidity” refers to an average, a persisting statistical tendency.
In Signal Theory, you have always some mixture of noise and signal. The only way to eliminate all noise is to eliminate all signal, and the only way to perceive all signals is to allow all noise.
To the point here, stupidity is a necessary element in proper perception. You have to be willing to be stupid at times in order to be intelligent. You have to take educated guesses, and be wrong sometimes, in order to learn at your maximal rate.
As I have pointed out several times, you can’t “be” intelligent. Nor can you “be” stupid. Not all the time, on all topics.
We see from time to time the word “paranoid”. In common usage, what does this mean? Wrong. It is stupidity combined with fear. Yet, as one studies human history, the patterns of oppression are ubiquitous. Patterns of the desire for oppression are, today, ubiquitous among those educating our children. This is simple fact.
Virtually no faculty member of any university in the country would feel shame among their colleagues announcing a sympathy for class warfare and the coerced “redistribution of wealth” (which of course in practice means “eviscerating our collective wealth production capability”), by any means necessary. I myself have seen a tenured professor announce openly that he was a Marxist. He was able to be confident that nobody would accuse him of being the Fascist that this sympathy plainly implies.
Few thoughts with my first cup of coffee.
Can I, without being accused of playing for the “other team”, admit I think Lady Gaga has more singing talent than Madonna?
To be clear, I am not a huge fan. I just see this early–20-somthing girl filling stadiums. I don’t own any of her albums, and am at this moment listening to Big and Rich. Wait, make that Miranda Lambert. If Blske Shelton doesn’t work out, I’m definitely available. Ah, Martina McBride in a tear-jerker, “Concrete Angel”.
Hell: whiskey. What do you do with admiration? People who go out and risk themselves? How do you produce, logically, whatever the hell Lady Gaga’s real name is? She was twelve and shy once, wasn’t she?
Let me just say, then retire for the evening, that I love deeply all who give what they have, plus more. If you give all you have, and something is left, you have grown, haven’t you?
I talked in a previous post about how tough I am. This is in large measure a lie. I’m not tough: I keep going, often after momentary failures brought on in part by a lack of sustained discipline. I know truly tough people, and I could not keep up with them over the long haul.
Apparently like most kids that age (roughly 5-11) I used to like Wolverine, in the X-men. But the way I remember him is he was usually the first into many fights, and the first to get his clock cleaned. The other X-men did more of the actual work. His main attribute was often that he survived things others couldn’t. He couldn’t fly, he couldn’t jump, he couldn’t project anything. He just kept going, and he could cut things with his claws. (as I think about it, with changing attitudes towards extreme violence, this role may have changed a bit; I always remember his claws being out, but never killing anyone). This is kind of how I think about myself.
The attribute I grant myself–and I share this because it may be more generally useful for someone out there–is the capacity to hold extreme emotions, and extreme thoughts in close proximity and generating imaginative insightes from their interaction. This is a painful process, holding everything in place. I visualize it as a sort of X-ray, where you have to project it from more than one angle to get a three dimensional view.
Reason happens within a field. It is never enough by itself. Biologically, our rationality is, in my understanding, a subset of our larger neurological complex. To follow lines well, you have to embed them within a field of trained emotion.
This is a subtle insight–and I’m not completely sure this isn’t BS–but I thought the words worth typing.
A world with neither prices nor values. Note this puts them even farther down the scale than Wilde’s cynic.
I am going to call that a bon mot. I can do that: it’s my blog.
Environmentalists argue constantly that it’s hard to understand complex biophysical systems. They are “complex”, in the formal sense of that word.
Economic systems are the same, as I argue constantly. Small effects can have large impacts. Minimum wages reduce employment among those most in need of it. Price caps cause rationing.
An idea that just occurred to me, though, is that there is a social concomitant to my argument that Keynesian economics is a formal system for price derangement. Specifically, I would like to posit that moral relativism is a Value Derangement Enterprise.
In Keynesian economics, it is hard to know to estimate value because the future is uncertain, and it is hard to sift the economic noise caused by govermental intrusion in the economy, from actual free market signals; which is to say fake prices from real prices, and the unproductive use of capital, from the productive use of it.
In classical Liberalism–which I will point as I do from time time means roughly what Leftists call Conservatism, and what the proper object of Libertarianism would be, if their thinking was not so woolly–people wander around thinking “I am Right”, but recognize the political and legal need to recognize the rights of others. In contrast, Leftists wander around thinking “I am wrong”, and believe strongly that everyone else is wrong too, and therefore those who think they are right need to be eliminated or tamed.
Now, obviously, they are among the most self righteous sanctimonious human being on the planet. Many of them make Christian Fundamentalists look like anything-goes hippies. So when I use the work “right”, what I intend is “possessed of a stable moral sense, and a loyalty to specific people and places”.
Take the claim that homosexuality is wrong. In a truly Liberal society, there is nothing at all wrong with people believing that. It is just wrong for them to interfere with the material and legal freedoms of people on that basis. In a truly Liberal society, one group can wander around thinking “sinner”, and the other can wander around thinking “asshole”. This is perfectly fine.
But the Leftist enterprise, being based on what it is NOT, rather than what it IS, is intrinsically leveling and self destructive. Granted: you are not homophobic, racist, nationalistic, classist, imperialist, ungreen (should be call those who question environmental alarmist “Browns”? I’ll accept that moniker), etc. You get the idea. Cause de jour, then cause de jure.
And this “negativeering” is always based on a lie. They are anti-church. They are anti-traditional marriage. There is concrete content to their beliefs, but like some atheists, they pretend that the burden of proof rests with anyone who believes anything other than what they do.
The end result of this is a society with no attributes at all, outside of what those in authority impose. The French Revolutionaries tried to rename the months, and create new “festivals”. Such festivals were presumably grim affairs after a time, somewhat reminiscent of what one would imagine as the experience of celebrating the birthday of someone who molested you.
The point I am trying to make is that what we might term the “No operator”–you can’t be that, you can’t believe that, nor that, nor that–works to make it impossible to gauge right from wrong, and this bears a structural similarity to operation of Keynesism in the economic sphere. It is hugely destructive but in a gradual way.
We need to recapture the meaning of the word “tolerance”, which necessarily includes tolerating people who believe different things.
The word “right” has many meanings. One of them is the sense of being correct. Perhaps we could define tolerance as “the acceptance of the right to many ‘rights'”.
That might be clever. I’m not sure. Need to finish my beer and walk the dogs.
That’s a new riff on the old Jerry-Wright-inspired theme, eh?
The phrase popped in my head, but I had intended to post on this rough topic anyway. What is the value of hope? What are its pluses and minuses?
We assume hope is useful, but what if the condition is objectively hopeless–as for example for a Soviet dissident in the Gulag Archipelago?
I have spoken before of the value of learning to breath underwater, and wanted to add an another analogy. Many years ago I read somewhere about the Australian SAS selection process, which is different from any of which I have read. In most Special Operations selection processes, you have a defined period of “hell”, which ends roughly on schedule. Usually you go 4-5 days with little or no sleep, and considerable physical stress.
In the SAS Selection, though, they told them several times, after days of arduous work, that it was over. In the case I remember, a truck came to pick them up from the desert somewhere, then drove off just as they were to get in. As I recall thinking at the time, the process seemed to be geared to select people who were able to operate without hope, who just went on and on no matter what.
As an interesting, to me, historical note, I was reading the memoirs of a VC commander and he said they feared the Aussies more than anyone. He said the Americans–SEAL’s and Army SF–would set an ambush, then call in air strikes. Once the air strike was over, they were safe. With the Aussies, however, they would engage them in close over and over, and killed a lot more of them, since their fire was obviously more accurate. They could see their targets.
The value of hope is that it fills you with energy; it gives you pleasing images that comfort you in distress. No matter how bad your present reality, you can look forward to something better.
The detriment to repeatedly dashed specific hopes–and yes I am allowing myself some vague autobiography here–is they turn easily to cynicism, anger, and hopelessness of the sort that causes a collapse of effort.
My confidence in myself is that I know I can endure damn near anything. I do often. Hell: been there, done that. I allow myself images. I try to see positive futures for myself, those I care about, and the world as a whole; but I don’t expect them. Hoping too much is like leaning forward too far–you are prone to falling over.
The last post got me to thinking “what is a working economy?” In my view, it is one in which we have full employment, and people can meet their basic needs, and many advanced needs, doing primarily work they actually want to do, and not much of that. I think we should be able to live well on 15-20 hours of work a week. Imagine that the purchasing value of the dollar grew 15% annually for the next thirty years, at steady wage rates. It could be done, if we eradicated the Federal Reserve and rationalized our banking system. Our monetary policy needs to be that we have none. We create money, once, then forget about it for the next 1,000 years.
But in my imaginative universe, there would be people who wanted to farm “old school”, maybe even with horses and plows, for the satisfaction of the work. Some would use tractors. For maximal efficiency, though, farming could likely largely be automated. I imagine large farm factories, with robotic plowing, fertilizing, weeding and harvesting.
This in turn got me to thinking about artificial intelligence. With ample cause, we do not fear the robots at Ford. Automated attendants, and automated checkouts at grocery stores are no danger.
What should inspire fear in us are what might be termed “functionally aggregated” robots, which do many different things. As long as things are physically confined along a literal or figurative groove, then AI is no danger.
It seems to me, then, that some system of grading AI could be established, in which the potential danger is rated according to the number of tasks that robot can do. The closer they get to functional,physical freedom, the more hazard they present.
“If it’s dumb, but it works, it isn’t dumb.” My uncle.
Corrollary: If it’s brilliant, but it doesn’t work, it isn’t brilliant.
I was trying to solve a physical problem–a wiring problem to be exact–last night, and having troubles. There is an orthodox way to solve the problem, but required a tool I didn’t have. I kept failing, then a little lightbulb went off and I noticed a consistent pattern that nobody told me to look for. I treated it as a valid, and POOF the problem disappeared.
There is always some track people tell you to follow, but there is always more information available, that is hidden to all but the attentive. If the pattern is consistent, then it exists, and if it is useful then use it. No other justification is needed.