Moderates United

All difficult things are made worse by being made complex.  In difficulty, simplicity is your friend.

Conversely, it might be stipulated that people who are fond of complexity lead in many if not most cases physically, socially, and emotionally relatively easy lives.  Complexity becomes something they pursue in lieu of effective effort, which is often difficult.

Where I myself fall in all this, I can’t say.  I get enough done to survive, but not enough to call myself effective.  I am in the nature of my occupation solving concrete, real problems regularly, so that counts, I suppose, for something.

I might add that if everything is easier said than done, we must recognize the soothing, calming quality of words, which act as shelters from the storm, but also that they are most often vain, misleading, and substitutes for needed work.

The inarticulate can be wise, and no wisdom can be inferred from beautiful words.  After all, nothing important has not yet been said, so all an erudite person need do is repeat.  Nearly everything you read is derivative.

And I will self comment here that I rarely reference the words of others.  I do, certainly, where warranted, but to the extent of my ability I am discovering or rediscovering things on my own, in my own way.

We all have to walk our own paths.  The door I walk through is barred to you, and vice versa.  You cannot follow in my footsteps.  At best I can perhaps sound a drum in the darkness, reminding you to march, march, march.

This universe is filled with countless golden threads.  You are one of them.  Perhaps we will meet one day, and remember we have always known each other.

Quite often, crying is like opening the windows to a stuffy soul.

I reserve the right to proactively contradict my future self today.

Logically, if we follow Information Theory in asserting that the information value of a given statement or behavior is proportional to to its unexpectedness, we (me, to be clear, but We sounds so much better) might directly that surprise is the most important path or engine of learning.

If nothing in your life is unexpected, you learn nothing.

Curiosity, in turn, might reasonably be summarized as a taste for and pleasure in surprise. “Oh, I didn’t know that. How fascinating!!”

The alternative, of course, and a distressingly common one, is a virtual mania with maintaining the sense that one knows most everything worth knowing. This is usually accompanied by an obsessive need to cram the unexpected into any available box of the expected. To killing surprise. To throttling it in the crib, if it can be born at all.

Einstein–who was certainly in the camp of the curious–invoked this line of thought when he opined that “There are two ways to live life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”

I feel I slightly misquoted him, but that was close.

This means that true openness means you have NO IDEA what is about to happen, because you allowing it, and you are allowing it because you like and profit from surprises.

I sometimes wish I were more disciplined, but I have so much fun, and see so much, going I know not where, and doing I know not what.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/09/13/liberals-conservatives-clash-vatican-over-catholic-church-direction/1272808002/

If your doctor said to you it was vitally necessary for you to eat 20 apples a day for the rest of your life, or you would get cancer, would you simply take him at his word?  Would you dutifully buy 40 apples every other day, and each two an hour for ten hours each day, day in, day out, forever?

Maybe you would.  If so, I hope you don’t vote.

Most of us, though, would start doing some reading.  We would start soliciting alternative opinions.  We would ask what the data is supporting the 20 apple idea.

And what if we came across an alleged consensus of doctors who all said that 20 apples a day was absolutely necessary, but found out that their salaries were 100% paid by the apple industry?  What if you found out they would all be unemployed tomorrow, if the apple growers stopped getting out of them what they needed, if their usefulness were gone?

What if, digging deeper, you started finding all sorts of methodological problems, such as hiding primary data sets or, worse, manifestly MANIPULATING data sets?  What if the supposed consensus turned out to be conscious ploy to create an illusion of agreement that simply was not there?

On the one hand, you have a very arduous, inconvenient, and possibly damaging regime in its own right.  On the other, you have unclear science being sold as certainty, and the cost of doing nothing nearly infinite, since it will cause your death in short order.

Would you still buy into this?

All I am doing is making concrete what is latent.  Most Warmists don’t really GET how vast, how dramatic, the changes would need to be to even attempt to address global warming, and this only in developed nations.  China and India are unlikely to do anything, not until they get their economies on better footing relative to us.  In the United States and Europe, we have gotten vastly better at fuel efficiency, which is an inherently desirable economic goal.  We emit far less CO2 than China and India do.

And what if, in buying off on the apple idea, you were also told that the doctor reserved the right to control EVERYTHING you ate, and whatever other facts of your life he or she thought might be relevant?

The picture gets worse, does it not?

The accuracy of the science is highly relevant.  If it were accurate, I would be the first to support strong measures to address.  But for reasons I have articulated at length on numerous occasions, including my first post on this blog, I think the science is not just bad, but really a FUCK YOU to all people of any sense at all who possess the least bit of accurate information on the topic.  It is not even a good fraud.  It is merely a well funded, well supported, well managed fraud, or at least was until recently.

Thank God Trump is President, for many, many reasons, this being just one more.

And ponder if you will how eager the Left is for Florence to be an absolute fucking disaster, filled with human misery, prolonged misery, endless destruction, and the sorts of delays that accompany ALL major disasters.

They want people dead, hungry and diseased, so they can blame Trump.  Ask yourself how patriotic, how decent, how humane, how moral that is.

Edit: I will add, this rough process is more or less exactly what happened with the “Low Fat” movement.  Complex science was patently OVERsimplified, politicized, generalized, implemented, and failed.  The whole nation got fatter.  Because they were WRONG. 

There is always something to lose.  This is not a complicated proposition, and you need to pay particular attention if the people who say “we have nothing to lose” either stand to GAIN, or at a minimum, to not lose anything THEMSELVES, as for example elites will not suffer from policies designed to bring cheap energy production to a halt the way most of humanity will.

Old School: “He can’t even run his own life.  I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine.”

Now: Dude, I do drugs.  Hey, let’s look at the Daily Cause.  I wonder what I will believe today.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bradley-whitford-calls-susan-sarandon-saying-hillary-clinton-trump-incapable-admitting-wrong-165520977.html

Self evidently, I don’t agree with Sarandon, but at least she has escaped the hive mind.  This tweet, of course, is very, very safe Virtue Signalling, which is synonymous with a public abdication of the responsibility to think independently.  It is staying in synch with a school of fish swinging aimlessly in the ocean.

To be clear, when I say Alan Alda is dead, what I mean is that people who used to call themselves Liberals have now become daily able to mute or remodel their views in congruence with that days propaganda broadcasts.  They can no longer be differentiated from the herd.  They have no individual voices any more.  They are not allowed to: dissidence and non-conformity are punished severely, instantly, and publicly, and no rehabilitation is possible.

The Left is using and displaying Soviet style mind control, in this country, in an alleged Information Age.  It is unbelievable.  But it must be believed, because it is manifestly happening.

I dreamed last night that extraterrestrials offered that cabal of imbeciles who claim to be able to speak for “the People” of Earth 3 choices:

1) Military technology sufficiently advanced to allow for an easy conquest of Earth and the implementation of a stable global government.

2) Endlessly renewable energy, such as Zero Point energy, such that all of our energy problems are solved forever, with of course clean fuel.

3) Emotional “technology” such that we could all learn quickly to live in peace and harmony.

Which would you choose?  To my mind, 3 is so self evidently the superior that there can be no serious debate.  We can solve all our problems of consumption culturally.  We face no existential threats which could not rapidly be eliminated through simple cooperation, civic mindedness, and emotional intelligence.

As a general rule, though, I think people who lack emotional intelligence do not value it, so I think whatever Council may exist–and I think this dream is certainly something which is possible, which I find hard to believe, but which seems to logically extend from claims made by people I would otherwise believe on nearly any topic, like Edgar Mitchell–would find itself debating endless between options 1 and 2. 

Option 1, they would believe, offers “intelligence” to the human race, control.  It allows the superior people to speak directly for inferior people who would otherwise plant and reap the seeds of their own destruction, on many levels, in many ways.

Option 2, of course, speaks to global warming directly, wars for oil indirectly, and would represent a huge advance.  It would not solve the core problems of human overconsumption of the Earth’s resources, but it would also not be quite so violent and draconian.  The sensitive among them would likely favor this option.

To my mind, a core problem we face is that elites really don’t like rubbing elbows with commoners.  They don’t like how we look, how we smell, how we think, how we act.  They need us in order to invoke Noblesse Oblige, itself a thin rationalization for really quite pedestrian ambitions of greed and power.  But they don’t value us, or understand us.

What I would assert, though, is the extent even ordinary people have for calculation, for calibration.  Ponder some terrible event, like 9/11: ordinary people are capable of the extraordinary, at least in this country.  We can self organize.  We can and do form complex orders.

What we need is a new Revelation, a new dispensation, a new organizing order outside of mind numbing, soul dimming Consumerism.

The wreckage of one is always the wreckage of at least two.