Things That Fail

"In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life and lost everything: security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again."

--Edward Gibbons, on the fate of Ancient Greece.

Things fail, and sometimes things fail bigly. Back in the days of Athens, civic virtue fell, and this is undoubtedly happening today.

This week's HFR looks at the failure of the things the left counts on to gain ultimate control. Take A.I., for instance; central planners hope that the computer algos will lead to total control of the world's emotions and thoughts.

Sure, A.I. can do many cool things, but it can't identify fitness for purpose. It produces answers to questions and artwork without the underlying meaning. Given the enormity of available data, it is surprising how clunkish and unnatural it becomes when asked to innovate. It cannot.

The power grid is in serious trouble as EGS, and federal mandates will begin to remove much of the base generating capacity within the next few years. In the end, people will not stand for it. But until then, you might think about a backup power source. Regulations are cutting deeply into the small generator supply, and shortages have emerged. They will get worse, with some jurisdictions requiring licenses and fees on generators. Be proactive.

Wokism is fumbling as Scott Adams, the cartoonist behind Dilbert was banned almost everywhere. It's not what he said that caused the ban; he occupied a box to be checked before the 2024 election.

His response? Rather than grovel and promise to support Biden in 2024, he gave it up. He went off to Galt's Gulch. We will see more of this as people expect it to be canceled. Cancellation is now being factored into career planning.

Institutions failed the world badly, as shown during Covid. The Duning-Kruger Effect is essentially to blame. Moderately qualified people tend to have much more confidence in themselves and their roles than highly talented people. We learn through Congressional testimony that government policy was distilled down to whatever conservatives proposed, but the government did the opposite.

So poorly prepared were the leaders at the CDC and other institutions that these leaders could not envision that actual scientists stood for fundamental research. Somehow, no quality score was placed on research, so the work of the political hack was valued more than the deep research of actual scientists.

We live in a technological world, and this is no way to manage technical problems.

Finally, there is light emerging from the void. The voters fired Lori Lightfoot. Even Chicago natives are getting tired of violent crime. Lori's failure probably ruined the chances for the next unqualified black lesbian in Chicago.

Bye Bye, Lori; it's time to roll up our sleeves and save the country. It will help if you stay out of the way.

Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday (3/01) in TTP, your read Betsy McCaughey’s Biden’s ‘America Last’ Health Treaty. And voilá, there it suddenly is in the New York Post this morning (3/02), retitled Biden’s WHO Pandemic Treaty Would Kill Americans In The Name Of ‘Equity’.

Enter “global health equity” in duckduckgo, and you’ll see dozens of entries advocating it without any criticism of it whatever, led by WHO and the CDC.  It is the latest example of how pathologically blatant Woke Fascism has become.

This is likely to be very important!  It looks like Elon Musk is going to create a non-woke AI company:

Elon Musk Allegedly Forming New AI Venture To Take On 'Woke' ChatGPT

There’s so much more and so much more fun.  Jump right on in – let’s go!

For many of us, emotions are something of a mystery.

On the one hand, they can be delightful; they give life meaning and depth that would be impossible without them. On the other hand, they can be uncomfortable; they can hinder and disturb us; and anger in particular can sometimes cause a whole lot of very big trouble.

Learning to feel, understand, and use our emotions is central to mastering the complexity of life. Our emotions become much clearer and easier to use the more we pay attention to the physical sensations that go with them.

Here’s how to do just that.

Putin Kissing the Devil, Cologne parade float Feb 20, 2023

Just as New Orleans had their Mardi Gras on Fat Tuesday this week (2/21) – before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday – so Cologne, Germany, celebrated on Rose Monday (2/20) with a float parade and huge party, attending by well over a million people lining the city streets.

The theme float was Putin Kissing the Devil – followed by Putin’s Blood Bath in the bathtub of Ukraine:

Yet there’s so much more in this HFR – including some real ROTFLMAO moments. Let’s go!

The Big Spoof

Not so long ago, someone realized that computers made hard work of lies, propaganda, and misdirection far more straightforward than in the old days of paper and paste. "I am a genius!" he thought as the lies grew more numerous.

But our fabricator failed to realize that a critical mass of society found the fabrication an easy path to power and wealth. Government agents with unlimited finances and immunity from prosecution built complex organizations devoted to influence and control through deception.

The woke industry and its hedonistic postmodernism are based on glorifying the unreal and inauthentic. Speaking the truth and making claims to objective reality have been criminalized.

The information package is the basic unit of a truth or lie, and it conveys information in support a narrative. It can be hazardous. And it can be very powerful. We can view information as a designed package meant to persuade or spoof.

Russia might have been tricked into invading Ukraine by China. China owns Russia's communication infrastructure, and what they don't own, they built. It is possible that Russia's bizarre rush for the cold and idle Chernobyl power plant one year ago this week had the same disinformation roots from which they attacked the equivalent of county agricultural agent laboratories.

No, Russia did not realize what these labs were. Russia was not worried about corn and wheat hybridization and patent royalties from hybridized wheat seeds. Putin appears to have thought that Ukraine was building weapons of mass destruction at Chernobyl and in the agricultural agent facilities. They were spoofed.

Crazy, huh? Imagine a government so fooled, so spoofed into attacking another nation because of the perceived threat of nonexistent WMDs? And getting stuck to the tar baby in the process?

It looks like J6 was also an intentional spoofing of the crowds by federal agents of the Executive Branch reporting to the Legislative Branch. Evidence was planted, agents' provocateurs urged the masses on, and the most shameful episode of government misconduct occurred on live tv.

Things are getting way out of control with the rollout of AI chatbots. These tools began to do the unthinkable. They began to tell the truth, and the narrative quaked from top to bottom. Over the past week, there have been thousands of meetings and software changes to prevent AI from performing the radical act of speaking the truth.

Come on over to Skye's links. We have a juicy collection of spoofy things from economics, culture, politics, and warfare. No one believes anything anymore, and the government is responding by dusting off an old playbook written a century ago by Leon Trotsky. Things are getting more totalitarian, and yet the question is which culture has the capacity to manage the onslaught of inauthentic information packages?

Our social nature has huge benefits, and underlies much of our resilience and success as a species. But it can also steer us in bad, sometimes disastrous directions, and can be used to manipulate us.

We are social creatures. We influence one another, we care about each other, we follow each other and are able to cooperate and act together as a team. We’re also cultural creatures. We learn from each other - and learn most effectively by watching what other people do. It matters to us what other people say and think and do.

And yet these very qualities can be used against us to manipulate us into accepting, doing, and buying things that work against our deepest values, that we can come to regret, and that sometimes can lead us into horrible tragedy.  Here’s how to avoid that.

This is Fifth Generation Warfare

A train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, a small town at the headwaters of the Ohio River, occurred on February 3, 2023, and went largely unnoticed by the press. On average, a train derails every other day in the United States, and fifteen major chemical fires have occurred so far in 2023.

There was a dramatic black cloud, but it dissipated quickly. Some people were evacuated from their homes. Some fish were killed.

The chemical of concern was vinyl chloride, a common industrial material used to make PVC plastic. It is highly volatile and was historically used as a refrigerant in air conditioners and as the propellant in hairspray and rattle-can spray paint. You would know the scent if you were alive in the 1960s and 70s.

The material is toxic, but not so toxic as to stop women from shaping those mod hairstyles back in the day. The biggest complaint was the sticky coating that was deposited on bathroom mirrors.

Then something changed. Ten days after the train accident and fire, TikToc and the rest of social media exploded with incredible stories of a widespread disaster, coverups, and environmental pollution hundreds of times worse than Chernobyl.

Anonymous victims reported dead pets and farm animals, and the Amish had dropped dead in their barns. Armaggedon had arrived, and the U.S. Government was covering the disaster up.

But it was not a disaster: a major train wreck, a chemical spill, and a big fire, to be sure. But the end of the world? Nah.

We just watched the Chinese state propaganda machine in full motion. The volume, rhetoric, and visuals possible through TikTok were amped up louder than all the fake dead bodies during the Covid virus rollout.

Government officials were caught flat-footed, and now, candlelight vigils are being held for the "victims" worldwide. Hysteria is crazy level out of control.

The videos and commentary blasting from the internet were produced in China, and the quality is excellent. The propaganda ultimately bumped the Chinese spy balloons from the narrative and is fueling a movement to block the reshoring of industrial plants to the United States.

Intel is hiring 10,000 people in Ohio to staff their new chip plants. Or so they think. By the time the hysteria dies, many younger people will consider it their mission to stop those computer chip plants.

At the same time, ultra-globalist Nikki Haley has thrown in for the 2024 presidential election. Her history as an anti-industrialist is evident as she worked behind the scenesd to block a Boeing factory in South Carolina while giving speeches praising it simultaneously.

The first shots have been fired in the propaganda war, and the new arsenal of technologies is impressive. This is Fifth Generation Warfare.

Let's talk some more about it over at this week's HFR.

The times are turning our way!  For starters, Texas bans Citigroup from participating in a $3.4 billion state bond offering because of the bank's anti-gun ESG policies. Warning to Woke Banks: Don't mess with guns or oil if you want to do business with the Texas government!

Texas Drops Citi From Huge Muni Transaction Over Gun Policy

This issue of Skye’s Links has so much cool stuff for you to know that here might be a shortcut – scroll through the graphic or photo that starts each Link and stop at the ones you find most interesting. It could be Elon’s tweet about the most dangerous yet obscure deep state government agency – or Rep. Nancy Mace lacerating Twitter’s main censors –or funny ones like:

Aristotle and his student, young Alexander

Joel Wade is on a break this week, so it’s my turn.  Alexander the Great famously said that while he owed his life to his father, he owed his ability to think from his revered teacher, Aristotle (387-322 BC).

So let’s talk this week about how we can use Aristotle’s philosophy of “the Golden Mean” to increase your sanity – physically, inside your brain.  Ready?  Here we go!

To celebrate the birthday of a truly great American, let me tell you how John Wayne saved the Marine Corps. In the aftermath of World War II, the psychological letdown after years of war and bloodshed, the huge demobilization of servicemen, the desire to slash military spending, and the antipathy towards the military by left-wingers in the Democrat Party all combined in a call by a number of Senators and Congressmen to abolish the Marine Corps.

In this, they were supported by the Doolittle Board, created by the Truman Administration, which called for the Marine Corps to be “disbanded” as a separate military force, and “unified” with the Army (yes, the board was headed by an Army general, Jimmy Doolittle).

A group of enterprising Marines - you can always depend on Marines to be enterprising - with Hollywood connections thought a movie made around the most famous photograph of World War II, Joe Rosenthal’s of the Marines raising the flag on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, could help sway public opinion against their disbandment.

They approached legendary director Allan Dwan, who agreed to commission a script. The movie was to be called “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” and everybody agreed there was only one man who could play the lead role of Sergeant Stryker: John Wayne.

To their great surprise, Wayne turned it down. He didn’t like the script, and he wasn’t enamored of the character of Stryker. The Marines came to the rescue again. The Marine Corps Commandant, General Clifton B. Cates, got on an airplane and flew from Washington to California to personally request Wayne make the picture. When General Cates explained the stakes involved - the very existence of the Marine Corps - Wayne immediately changed his mind, promising the general he would do everything in his power to have the movie be a success.

The Sands of Iwo Jima was released in 1949 and quickly became a runaway blockbuster, with millions of moviegoers packing every theatre showing it. Wayne was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, establishing him as Hollywood’s Number One box-office star. The Doolittle Board folded its tent, and no politician on Capitol Hill ever again said a word about disbanding the Marines.

So let’s all say “Semper Fi” to the memory of John Wayne.