High Flung Dreams

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I was thinking of Phantom’s post yesterday, and it occurred to me it never fails: when people create big, overarching dreams, they fail to take in account some small detail of mundane reality.

Usually too, what they purport to “solve” either is a problem that doesn’t exist, or one that was already being solved when they stomped in to impose their shiny idea.

Socialism-Communism, Environmentalism, Centralized Public Education and probably a million others “grand unified solutions” are usually solutions looking for a problem.

Someone woke up one day and came up with this entire system in their head like “How to abolish private property and make everyone absolutely equal will bring about paradise.” Or “Wouldn’t it be great if the Earth could be perfect, like if there were no humans” and then went poking around looking for a reason to impose their shiny, beautiful just-so-story-with-attached-system on the rest of us.

In the case of environmentalism, those of us who are old enough remember d*mn well that when the Earth was freezing — which switched seamlessly to boiling, with no space in between — the solution was exactly the same: Let some jackwagons who have no comprehension of engineering, or energy, or frankly where food comes from engineer the entire life of everyone on Earth, banishing things that work like fossil fuels, so that we can live in harmony with nature. Or go extinct. Honestly, more and more I think that’s what’s at the back of the green nutbars’ heads. Their contempt and hatred for us is barely disguised. And by us I mean the entire human race. Sure, they pretend it’s only those who oppose them, but dig deeper and they hate everything that walks (even occasionally) on two legs, including but not limited to great apes. (Or even so-so apes.)

Which is why their “solutions” increasingly seem to involve the destruction of all life on Earth. Honestly, I think it’s because they have a vague idea none of it works like their beautiful shiny system and that pisses them off because the system is beautiful and perfect, and d*mn it, why won’t it work?

They’d rather have their system than reality, and therefore they’re willing to destroy reality to pretend their system is perfect.

The same, of course, applies to never-sufficiently-damned Karl, the angry inkblot, Marx. His solution was so beautiful and perfect. Everyone would just “naturally” give up on property or even competitiveness over sex, and it would all be perfect and paradise. (If this sounds to you like “I wanna be rich and sleep with every woman who won’t have the ability to tell me no” this only makes Marx like every communist ever.)

He came up with this entire system, then tacked it on to “current day injustices” which even at the time he wrote were already in the process of being addressed/mitigated. And which, anyway, would have gone away much faster without his poking around and intervening.

As for centralized education: since it’s been a federal matter here, has it got better?

What if I told you it’s exactly the same in every country that centralized education?

Education and more importantly learning was improving everywhere, creating a vast and productive middle class. And then the governments took them over. It’s been in decline ever since, and heading back to pre-history where people can’t read, or not functionally.

But on paper it works really well. It’s a perfect system, with everyone entitled to education, and becoming a better and more functional person thereby.

And that’s the hallmark of all these systems (and there are a ton more, big and small– correction, they all bet big –) They work marvelously on paper.

Except the megalomaniac cretins who designed them don’t actually know anything about the systems they’re trying to replace.

We have people who want to stop oil extraction, who don’t realize all plastics, lubrication and a good deal of food processing go away, which means their magical windmills won’t work either, even they could get them fabricated without oil, which they damn well can’t.

We have people who want to “smash capitalism” who think the government can provide them a living while they write bad poetry and never think of where the food they eat comes from.

The other thing — and why they get big — is that these perfect systems are never limited to the one thing, even if they suck at the one thing. They have to expand to include everything.

Like, “green energy” — I have no beef with if they just limited themselves to creating alternative forms of energy and telling us how great it is. But no, it has to grow to include everything, from whether people have to eat bugs to how you grow your garden, to the houses you are allowed to have, to the left’s obsession with choo choo trains, to– ad infinitum.

Because these perfect systems depend not only on “If only everyone” — which has never worked in the history of ever — but also “if only everything.” And since they don’t know where everything comes from, what everything does, let alone what everything IS, they dream big, unaware that “if only everything” has also never happened, and if it did it would kill them deader than their sense of reality.

Intellectuals, the creators of these “in the air” “systems of everything” are the most dangerous things on Earth.

They’re just smart enough to create these mental constructions and fall helplessly in love with them, completely unaware of the fact that their monstrous creations can never life in reality.

We need to get better at spotting “systems of everything” and telling the idiots “no” before the death and destruction starts.

And we must — must — make everything as small, as local and as MERITOCRATIC as possible, so we’re less in the power of idiots running around with systems of everything, and no idea of what’s under their feet.

174 thoughts on “High Flung Dreams”

  1. It’s the belief of children, in a big way.

    Children believe that with the help of Great Big Sky Daddy (or Mommy)-whatever form it takes-everything can be perfect.

    The catch is that the “perfect” is built on a whole lot of various imperfections and nobody wants to admit to that, because it tarnishes that absolute perfection. And when children don’t get their way, they throw temper tantrums.

    That’s bad for a child and the people around them. But, when you’re an “adult”…you can do so much more damage.

    Liked by 2 people

      1. The Reader notes that these days the entire mental health field is nothing but magical thinking. We’d be better off drilling holes in skulls to let out the evil spirits.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Yeah. That would be an entirely different column. Magical thinking is expected and normal with young children and can be expected to disappear as they grow. When it doesn’t, you get the state of the field today.

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          1. Hubby’s first calling was math, teaching it. He changed trajectories after his first teaching practicum. He is good with groups of kids (see scouts and sports coach). Just not with the teaching system. To be fair, any job that requires getting along and fitting in, is so not a job for hubby. His job, if both clients hated you, you were a star (naturally their were clients who appreciated fairness, but still). OTOH I hated that job. It was 100% judgement (within the rules). I don’t do well with my judgement being questioned. Coding took care of that. Coding still involves judgement, but there is no questioning results (as far as going along to get alone, not so much, but never ran into that at my level, or was in a situation where them getting along with me was more important, I do not take advantage). Hubby could care less about anyone judging.

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          2. My calling had a split personality. Military history…and Aerospace Engineering. Flight test in specific. I was very much a child of Apollo. Wound up in the flight test profession for 40+ years…some high points, some hard times.

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    2. When I was a child,

      I spake as a child,

      I understood as a child,

      I thought as a child:

      but when I became a man,

      I put away childish things.

      1 Corinthians 13:11

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Sorry, meme I was working on. Apparently I don’t know how to upload pictures from Libre Office. :-(

        So, insert pictures of Greta, David Hogg doing his Fascist salute, and some other random temporarily notable child ‘celebrity’ spouting Communist nonsense as appropriate.

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        1. You are not the only one. WP does not have an embedded photo option for comments that I know of (but then I use the WP cheats exposed by those here, so there might be something). Anything public on the internet can be embedded or linked, usual. I’ve seen some posters who put photos, etc., on google docs and make the photo public. I post to FB, make the post public, then post. But that has it’s downsides too.

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    2. That’s an insult to auditors like this one:

      https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/17/bidens-ftc-punished-twitter-for-seceding-from-the-censorship-complex/

      “The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency.”

      I admit to being pleasantly surprised that E&Y didn’t fold.

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      1. Auditing firms are presumably keenly aware that an appearance of impartiality is one of the reasons why they have customers. Government getting heavy-handed threatens that.

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      2. It’s a Pratchett reference, to the creatures who think life is too messy and everything would be better if the universe were reduced to rocks moving in perfect curves.

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  3. The catch is that these “dreamers” think that all the gears and cogs are magically independent and if they take one out, gold plate it and put it back it will be wonderful! Oops.

    The whole system needs to still keep running while the foolish dreamer takes out the gear and so it’s semi broke as it works through that issue. Then when said fool puts the “improved” gear back in – it all goes ka-blowie as the gold plate put the gear out of spec and caused the others to have issues and again, the system is broke but still has to run. The final phase it always – we didn’t do it right! This time we will plate it with gold and silver so it works! Again, oops. They just can’t help themselves – Shiny!

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      1. Somebody was probably paid a whole lot of money to compose that poster, too.

        If they did it on purpose, it’s a work of sheer genius — a scathing denouncement of Big Education.

        Sadly, I suspect it’s the opposite. The artist is simply too stupid to realize What’s Wrong With This Picture.
        ———————————
        They’re the Experts! They only sound stupid to you because you’re not as Educated as they are.

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        1. I have a couple of t-shirts from the local science fairs.

          One of them brags about being “As cool as zero degrees Kelvin.” Kelvin, of course, is not measured in degrees. Yes, it’s a minor point–but it’s still wrong. And the people in charge of the science fair went ahead and printed it up without putting any thought into it.

          The other shirt strongly implies that the “H20” shorthand for water means that there are two oxygens for every hydrogen. Again, none of the science teachers in charge of the fair caught it, or if they did, didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

          We’re doomed.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Plenty of trying to remove the parents, now, though. To make it work again?
          No, they have no idea it’s broken. They’re just in the way.

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      3. OUCH!

        You don’t even need to be a mechanical engineer. The introductory general engineering courses suffice.

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  4. “Or go extinct. Honestly, more and more I think that’s what’s at the back of the green nutbars’ heads. Their contempt and hatred for us is barely disguised. And by us I mean the entire human race.”

    Yes, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Founded by one of those ’70s enviromental wackos. Here’s their Wikipedia page, as I don’t want to drive traffic to their website

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Movement

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  5. Oh Sarah, of course it’ll all work, bear(ing) with me now (Sorry couldn’t resist.), we don’t need no stinking petroleum, when we’re powered 100% by hot, and cold air and all are well fed on bugs.

    We’ll oil our windmills with whale oil!

    Only oil from whales who’ve died a natural death after a long productive, fulfilling life, of course. We will, also of course, used only focused solar heat to melt the blubber in the pots,again, of course.

    Ah the joy of the managed future, sitting, enjoying the set sun, on the communal unmowed lawn, reading the latest YOU WILL DO rules by the light of our approved one watt bulb, listening to a neighbor’s beautiful music made by banging two rocks together. Oh Joy! It just can’t get any better than this!

    Pass the crickets, please.

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  6. As the joke says: “I want to move to Theory. Everything works, in Theory.”
    But the Left lacks a sense of humor…

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Like the scene in, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when they find the island where dreams come true….all the dreams. They leave just as fast as they can.

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        1. Or in ‘Bruce Almighty’ when he got frustrated and mass-granted all the millions of prayers. The best part was, everybody won the lottery — which split the jackpot so many ways they each got 12 cents. :-P

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  7. In Part III of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gives the academics of Laputa a good sound kicking that still holds up today:

    What I . . . thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong Disposition I observed in them towards News and Politics, perpetually inquiring into Public Affairs, giving their judgements in Matters of State, and passionately disputing every Inch of a Party Opinion. I have, indeed, observed the same Disposition among most of the Mathematicians I have known in Europe, though I could never discover the least Analogy between the two Sciences; unless those People suppose, that, because the smallest Circle hath as many Degrees as the largest, therefore the Regulation and Management of the World require no more Abilities, than the Handling and Turning of a Globe.

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  8. “Intellectuals, the creators of these “in the air” “systems of everything” are the most dangerous things on Earth.”

    like the Internet Of Things That Are Easily Hacked?

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      2. Depends. Have you got the DIRECTRIX, with it’s 700-ft-diameter tactical tank and two or three Second-Stage Lensmen to handle the operational-to-tactical translation? A ship that not coincidentally is not only heavily protected itself but is deep within the Grand Fleet’s formation?

        If not, start studying the Battle of Jutland and the controversies around command of the Grand Fleet on 31 May 1916.

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        1. The Directrix issued commands to the fleet. The individual ship commanders we not forced to obey them. In Picard, Starfleet’s ships were basically drones for the central operator (or the Queen Borg hacking in with her malware zombiefied personnel.)

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          1. [Facepalm]

            This is why I don’t watch -any- of the Star Trek crap anymore. It would take a Hollywood Writer to come up with something that lame as a plot device. Seriously, it makes me scream.

            When you watch a TV show or read a book, the artist should not be actively trying to make you dumber and more depressed.

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            1. They definitely didn’t consider the whole purpose of a DRONE is that there aren’t any living people on it, so if it gets destroyed, you only lose the equipment, not lives.

              Sometimes I’m amazed I watched the entire season without throwing something through the screen.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. David Burge on Twitter was describing, “Hijacked,” on Apple TV, where the plot depends on the hijackers getting into the cockpit by threatening to tell the pilot’s wife he’s cheating on her with a stewardess. That’s equally awful. (As I think there’s a reason we don’t watch much TV).

              Liked by 1 person

            3. I stopped watching TNG when life (AKA, studying for an MSEE) got in the way. Stayed on ST hiatus until Enterprise, and I watched that for their take on the “history” of Treknology. Didn’t much care for the Xindi story arc, though the Alien Nazi trope was an unintentionally fitting cap to a lackluster season…

              (FWIW, Scott Bakula’s Captain Archer seems much the same character as the one he played in NCIS-Nawleans. Never saw Quantum Leap, but I wonder…)

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          2. Doc Smith had it pretty well figured out. Including the fact that if the enemy went to highly distributed control (as they did at the Battle of Klovia), your centralized control system could be made significantly less effective.

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        2. It was all Beatty’s fault.

          My Paternal grandfather was a Lieutenant Engineer on HMS Hardy at Jutland.

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      1. And yet people STILL KEEP BUYING internet attached Ring doorbells and security cameras, which they keep all over their houses, Amazon Alexa which -by design- listens 24/7 and phones home, Tesla cars which can literally be driven remotely by the factory Seriously, your freaking Tesla can be driven remotely -by design-. I can’t even imagine setting foot in a thing like that, or having it in my driveway unless on jack-stands. (Drive away NOW, !@#%^&!!!)

        Yes, there is a bandaid over my laptop camera.

        Even if you (stupidly) assume Good Intentions on the part of the manufacturer (and every single person in their extended supply chain /cough [corrupted device drivers] cough/) you MUST assume that eventually some skeevy geek will find or make a way to take over those devices. If for no other reason than that there is an entire sub-culture of skeevy geeks who subvert hardware for fun and profit.

        Sorry, you pushed my Ring doorbell button.

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        1. Ring is arguably going to be the most secure by virtue of having been gobbled by Amazon before they became retarded and thus had due diligence performed.

          All those ultra-cheap security cameras? Yeah there is a reason they are cheaper than their BOM and assembly cost. That’s what happens when something is subsidized by the PLA.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. I like super-cheap Chinese security cameras when they are hard-wired and run by a server that I configured, one which has no internet connection. Because leveraging the PLA’s money to my personal benefit is a win-win-win.

            Never forget, there is nothing made by Man that can’t be modified by another man with a pair of wire cutters. You just need to know where to snip. >:D

            Liked by 1 person

            1. It is also worth noting because I see so many people failing to understand it: surveillance is not inherently bad. Everything we think of as surveillance being bad is government surveillance.

              And there is a political push going on against private surveillance because it keeps catching protected classes doing protected class things.

              Liked by 2 people

              1. We need to replace our current security system (circa 2006). The sensors are falling off the windows (and getting cracked by cats and dog playing with them). What I want to do is replace with video and motion sensors in public areas, window sensors on bedrooms and on two doors (front and slider, garage would be served by video/motion sensor). I do NOT want the video linked to the internet. The alarms, to our phones, which has to be linked to internet. Video can be saved locally. We probably don’t need alarms, now … dog takes care of that. But when we travel, she goes with us, so son needs something.

                2006 we didn’t have alarms or a dog. We got lucky. We just lost stuff, and no identity stuff, not the truck (truck in driveway and keys hanging on the fridge), and no firearms (already had the canoe accident). Lucky because near as we could work out the timing, our 16 year old son, on his short school day, would have walked in on the robbery, or at least on the robbers running away as they heard him pull up to the front of the house. (Good news/bad news. Would have identified them. But they had also hit cop houses which is never good. We don’t know they wouldn’t have been violent. Just as glad son did not end up confronting or seeing them.)

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                1. My pregnant cousin and her husband walked in on a burglar. I hope he’s still in prison in Colorado. It would have been her mother’s first grandchild.
                  But he’s in prison because a neighbor’s backyard camera recorded him running off.

                  Liked by 1 person

            2. Forgot a point…..

              There is a problem with self-hosting and not connected to the internet: all of the recordings WILL be mysteriously damaged beyond recovery and/or disappear without trace if you ever become the target of a police raid.

              Liked by 2 people

          1. One of those eye lens cleaners. they are shaped like a Vee, the pads go right over the camera.

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        4. I was in the market for a video security system (preferably one that could be deployed fairly quickly), saw that the regional small club store had Ring, and kept looking. I picked up the NightOwl system that really wants to run on the Botnet of Things, but is willing to run stand alone.

          Since that was the day that my old iPhone suffered terminal battery inflation, I did the setup fully offline. The replacement arrived and is now operational, and I’ll see if I can control it without Botnet capability. (I don’t need long distance remote viewing; if it’s willing to send pics via BlueTooth, fine, otherwise my desktop monitor can switch to the NightOwl’s output.)

          I see that a lot of trail cameras (for critters two and four footed) are capable of cell phone usage. Nope. Not gonna. I can read an SDD card.

          (It’s not paranoia; our next door neighbors got broken into mid-morning last week. Seems somebody saw them leave and took advantage. Bad actor surveillance isn’t always done by gummint people…)

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  9. Socialism works great. But only if you do it without people. It stops working when you add real human beings to it.

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    3. If you put a truly honest, competent economist in charge of a socialist economy —

      — the first thing he’d do is fire himself. Admit that nobody could possibly do that job successfully.

      Unfortunately there are far too many dishonest, incompetent poseurs that want the job. Right now we’ve got a Treasury Secretary I wouldn’t trust to run a hot-dog stand.

      As one of my characters with cyber-enhanced intelligence puts it: “We know we’re not smart enough to micromanage the lives of three hundred and twenty million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”

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    4. The 12 Disciples backed up by God couldn’t do it…… and that experiment has been run.

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      1. Yep. They started out with a communal system, and wound up with Paul doing fundraising drives for the saints in Jerusalem.

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          1. He stated that he could have lived off the Christian church, but choose not to, as an example.

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      1. I’ve heard that attributed to Richard Dawkins, the militant atheist, but that is wrong. He was a zoologist, but never specialized in insects.

        Googling: It’s E. O. Wilson, who was an entomologist at Harvard. He studied ant microevolution, and went on from there to sociobiology.

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  10. There’s also the small group that comes up with a solution to a problem that does exist; but they’re blind to the half dozen worse problems that solution causes. And if they’re not blind, then they’re actively causing those additional problems for self-serving purposes NOT to the advantage of everyone else.

    Most of the time, banning something just plain doesn’t work. And the banning will create a black market that you can never stamp out.
    Most of the time, coming up with a better anything pretty much sells itself, and the other things get relegated to the dust bin of history (with one held for a sample in the Smithsonian (as long as it’s sufficiently woke.))

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      1. Oh Himself Almighty. Let’s wipe out 50% of all insect life in the U.S. And destroy 25% of all birds eggs at the same time. That would bring the famine they’ve been working on so much sooner.

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        1. Which is why NON-backwoods would be a Good Idea. Carefully applied, minimalist use would be a Good Idea. DDT-coated screens would be great. Random willy-nilly application, Bad Idea.

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        2. Rachel Carson lied about the egg thing. And a lot of other things. Just sayin’.

          It is in fact very tough to find honest, reliable science regarding DDT at this point in history, the little greenie gremlins have been busy. You’d have to re-do all the testing yourself.

          If I were running an enterprising African nation, that might be something worth looking into.

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          1. I don’t use DDT, but if I did, I’d be using it the same way I do Roundup. Surgical precision application; only the ‘weed’ in question, and only in the target area.

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            1. DDT is not an herbicide, but an insecticide, so the application is a bit different.
              Now 2,4,5-T has some Serious Issues. Or rather one, but it’s a doozy indeed.

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              1. The other half (2,4-D) of Agent Orange works (mostly) against thistles, though it really wants a spot sprayer. I add a wetting agent and blue marking dye so I don’t keep spraying the same plants over and over.

                Rumor has it that thistles consider Roundup to be a tasty fertilizer, so the property has been Monsanto-free since we moved here.

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                1. I use Roundup on the poison ivy and bittersweet, otherwise they’d take over, worse than kudzu. Also use it on stumps and stems after cutting the growth along the power lines.

                  Actually painting the screens with DDT might stop the no-see-ums from sneaking in.

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                  1. We use “midge screening” for that purpose. Klamath Lake gets swarms of them every summer (drive a white truck by the lake in midge season and it will have a green front. We won’t mention the effects of some motorcyclists. :) ).

                    Home Depot sells “small insect” screening, looks like the same mesh as what we get.

                    Liked by 1 person

            2. Mosquitos have a much wider distribution than weeds. Yes, you can set up a barrier at doors and windows of your house —- if you never leave it. If you want to do anything outdoors in an area, you’ll end up treating the area.

              The ideal is Precision Targeting. As we’ve been discussing, Ideal is not Reality.

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          3. DDT does cause egg breakage in raptors (hawks, eagles, vultures), but ONLY in raptors. It’s a combination of getting the highest dose by being on the top of the food chain, and being particularly vulnerable. Rachel Carson’s first mistake was hasty overgeneralization.

            Then she went nuts.

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            1. The worst effect of indiscriminate use of DDT turned out to be that insects may become resistant to DDT. Use it on window screens, mosquito netting, and any cracks in the walls that an insect might crawl through. Perhaps you can apply it to the ponds where Anopheles mosquito larvae grow up. Just don’t broadcast it over miles of crop fields. There are more specific insecticides for that, and we need to save the effectiveness of DDT for where other insecticides won’t do the job.

              About the mosquito-pond application: Scientists found another way to take care of that over 50 years before the Germans invented the first pesticide (and used it to kill Jews…) Pour a little oil on the water. This traps the mosquitos when they try to emerge from the water. It still works. However, before you annihilate all the mosquitos in a pond, consider that most of them are other species that bite once in a lifetime at most, do not transfer diseases, and are a vital part of the food chain for fish, birds. and frogs.

              Now I’m wondering why they haven’t developed an insecticide that is specific to Anopheles mosquitos that spread malaria and the other genus that spreads yellow fever, and doesn’t harm anything else?

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  11. The other thing — and why they get big — is that these perfect systems are never limited to the one thing, even if they suck at the one thing. They have to expand to include everything.

    Close, but not quite. They get big, and encompass everything, because they suck and don’t work.

    Rational people try things until they find something that works at a small scale, and scale it up. These geniuses are Just So Convinced that their idea will work that, when it doesn’t, it’s the fault of the kulaks, or the Jooos, or the bitter clingers, or whomever the convenient scapegoat group of the moment is, and so everybody Must Be Forced to do the same thing. Because the Beautiful Idea can never be wrong, it can only be ruined by wrongbad people.

    This is why the more socialism is tried, the bigger the mass graves are, where the more laissez-faire free trade is tried, the more poverty disappears and miserable people have to invent bullshit reasons to be miserable, like transgenderism.

    To be sure, there are people who hate humanity and want the mass graves, preferably filled with everybody (excepting themselves and their slaves, of course). But there are others who are so detached from reality that they really believe the Big Dream can be made to work, because they’ve been so insulated from reality that they never got smacked by it. As to ratios of which are the would-be genocides, and which are just ignorant and stubborn, who knows?

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    1. ” . . . whomever the convenient scapegoat group of the moment is . . .”

      As has been proclaimed before in these pages, “Ultra-MAGA assemble!!!”

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  12. Apologies to Sarah in advance. I know this is off-topic but I figure a bunch of authors may be able to help.

    I’ve used WebMD as a reference for medical stuff for years.

    I just went to look something up and it said the disorder I was researching is more common in “those assigned male at birth.”

    Science cannot be social consensus driven or it’s no longer science. Medicine even more so.

    Does anyone know of an online medical reference that hasn’t bought into the madness?

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    1. On-line? No. I’m afraid that more and more you’re going to have to find older, dead tree sources to find truth. Hopefully pre-Woke. I have a hardcover AMA Family Medical Guide, copyright 1982, which is a pretty trustworthy source, albeit it doesn’t have newer diseases, conditions, or treatments. I’m certain I have a copy of DSM-III stashed away somewhere, but I haven’t seen it in a couple of years. Both are fairly reliable, and mostly clean of the ideological rot.

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    2. PubMed. You get the actual studies, so you can judge for yourself it they’re legit or not.

      Look up Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine for a giggle, you’ll see some studies that are so obviously fake you’ll laugh. Like the guy who was prescribing two GRAMS of HCQ to patients in California.

      Look up guns on WebMD for more socialist science consensus. That’s usually a pretty good canary in the coal mine. Or gas stoves, another canary.

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      1. Why are the medical bureaucracies obsessed with guns? Those are mechanical devices, not germs or genetic disorders. I don’t expect the police to deal with diseases or injuries.

        The medical bureaucracies have shown themselves to be incapable of managing the job they’re supposed to be doing, without involving themselves in matters that do not concern them.
        ———————————
        A good Zombie Apocalypse novel is at least as believable as anything we’ve heard out of the ‘Publick Health Authoriteez’ over the last three years.

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        1. Because they are A) arrogant and B) ignorant of the subject.

          Physicians really are the top 5% of smart people. They are the cream of the crop. They are selected that way and brutally thinned during their education and training to keep it that way. That means they are -extremely- expert in their narrow field of specialization. They really do know every damn thing, and I say that as someone who is not a doctor but has been around a lot of them. If you’re talking medicine, they -know-.

          So naturally they think they know every damn thing about everything else in life. Arrogance.

          But about guns, they do NOT know. The number of doctors I’ve met who thought the whole cartridge comes out of the gun, brass and all, is shocking. They know nothing about hunting or self defense either

          Guns kill people, so guns should be banned, just like heroin and cigarettes and gas stoves and ICE automobiles. Simple.

          Medical bureaucrats are a big, big step down from front-line doctors. They’re the ones who get by on schmoozing and influence peddling. They promote the gun scam for exactly the same reason they promoted Trans scam, the vaxx scam and the lockdown scam. Because that’s the way the wind is blowing.

          Politics. You know what it takes to change one of those people’s minds? A major change in the realities of funding, political influence and the schmoozing environment. Because that’s their universe.

          You cut their budgets, fire all their Friends In High Places and shut down their golf course, that will get their attention. Nothing else will, because they don’t care about anything else. “Oh, the vaxx -wasn’t- safe? Oh well. The lockdowns killed people? Whatever. We’re doing monkeypox and gun control now. WuFlu is so 2020.”

          Liked by 1 person

  13. Some of us know what communism and all these other -isms offer is slavery and death.

    And we won’t comply.

    Sure, they may hurt the earthsuit; but the wannabee dictators are gonna have their hands full dealing with their backstabbing “friends” and decide leaving us alone is cheaper.

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  14. “There is no shortage of idiots that believe they can create a Perfect World. They just need to eliminate all those imperfect people who don’t fit in it.”

    “How can imperfect people create a Perfect World? How could imperfect people live in a Perfect World?”

    Besides, if somebody did manage to create a Perfect World, it would have to be frozen in time or something. If the world was Perfect, then by definition any change would destroy its Perfection. Nobody could ever be allowed to do anything.

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    2. “A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny. I said earlier that Dickens is not in the accepted sense a revolutionary writer. But it is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as ‘revolutionary’ — and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charted street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old — generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.” George Orwell

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  15. One of the great realizations of classical economics and classical libertarian thinking is that “planners” and “experts” do not and cannot deliver on what they claim they will. And the reason is that economic systems are vastly too complex with far too many variables, never mind issues like millions of instances of free will, for any “plan” to be able to predict anything.
    I forgot who made this really clear; Von Mises, Hayek, or Hazlitt, I think, but which one and where I don’t remember.

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    1. I’m sure that with just the right mix of laws and taxes everything will be perfect.

      If the gun laws are just right there will be no murder.

      If the taxes are the correct level we can find every poor person and also save the climate.

      Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

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      2. The late Yuri Maltsev, who served as an economic advisor to Gorbachev before he defected to the US, claimed that Soviet economists thought Mises should have a statue dedicated to him in front of the Kremlin, for predicting how and why socialism must fail in 1920, and getting it exactly right.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Thanks Jason. I didn’t remember that title but yes, that’s in my ebook library so that probably was the one. Perhaps it was also mentioned in Hazlitt’s “Economics in one lesson” — which as the title suggests is nice and short, and also very good.

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        1. Hazlitt doesn’t really go there (it’s implied, but not covered in a systematic way), since he was mainly updating Bastiat’s arguments in What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen.

          Mises’s insight was that prices gather information that no one central planner ever could, let alone in the same quick timeframe that prices do. Hazlitt gives all kinds of reasons central planning works badly (rent controls, for one), but doesn’t really go into prices as information signals.

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          1. Yes, that’s a great summary. I remember my delight when I realized von Mises’s core observation was that economics and prices are psychological constructs. In fact, that was rather obvious in retrospect — after all, a free exchange requires that each party value what is received more highly than what is given. In other words, “absolute value” is a mistaken notion.

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            1. Thanks. Though I will point out that what killed the theory of absolute value (and solved the problem of water and diamonds) was the theory of marginal value, arrived at by three different men in the early 1870s, including Carl Menger, mentor to Mises’s mentor Bohm-Bawerk.

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      4. There’s an interesting mathematical “tight proof” of this that I read years ago. I have it around here someplace. maybe I’ll be able to find it. It might have been in the Review of Austrian Economics, but my memory for that sort of stuff is shot.

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          1. I actually agree with you, but one had to make the blindingly obvious into math before it can be SCIENCE and one is compelled to believe SCIENCE.

            That said, it was an interesting proof in that it was not just applied calculus.

            Damn, I’m going to have to find it now.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. OK. I found it. I forgot that it was on the inter webs and that I didn’t have to go through my paper archives. THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS VOL. 9, NO. 2 (SUMMER 2006) CANTOR’S DIAGONAL ARGUMENT: AN EXTENSION TO THE SOCIALIST CALCULATION DEBATE by Robert Murphy. There’s another paper on the edges of my memory, but this is good enough.

              Notwithstanding Ian’s practical argument below, they live in theory land where it is “in principal” possible to list prices for things that haven’t been invented yet at any arbitrary time. Crazy talk sure, but that’s the way they think. Anyone who ever argued “possible worlds” with a philosopher will get it.

              Still, the practical argument will now be answered by “AI and the cloud”. I know it’s BS and you know it’s BS, but it’s already happening. Hence the Conclusion

              “The standard view of the socialist calculation debate is that Mises and Hayek at best demonstrated the practical impossibility of socialist economy, but that the mathematical solution of economists such as Dickinson showed that “in principle” planners could achieve a rational use of resources without private ownership of the means of production. In the present paper I hoped to show that this view is incorrect, because (if seriously implemented) a socialist plan- ning board would need to publish a list containing an uncountably infinite number of prices. As Cantor’s diagonal argument from set theory shows, it is demonstrably impossible to construct such a list. Therefore, socialist econ- omy is truly impossible, in every sense of the word.“

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    3. And the reason is that economic systems are vastly too complex with far too many variables, never mind issues like millions of instances of free will, for any “plan” to be able to predict anything.

      You are vastly understating the case: a perfect planner in infinite intelligence and data sources still can’t do it, because the economic information you need to do the planning doesn’t exist until it is elicited by someone being presented with economic choices.

      The planner can’t reveal the preferences without creating a perfect simulation of a market.

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      1. And for a fictional use, Stirling had his main character in, Island in the Sea of Time, reflect that there were too many variables in an economy for any mind to understand.

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        1. Also in Island of Time, originally a lot of grumbling about “socialism” initially. On the surface, yes. Survival of everyone at risk. But the government got out of everything but defense, oversight of public hygiene, and international (which included original population on mainland when the island got displaced) politics as soon as they could. When someone complained to someone in the government about how someone else was handling something, the reply was “government is out of that” with an aside of “thankfully”.

          In the opposite universe, covered in Dies the Fire, the McKenzie’s are accused of socialism. Not really. Lived close for protection, and sharing of common chores (mixing of herds, reduced number of shepherds needed, sharing in defense watching, etc., freed up people to do other needed items that could be bartered according to wants and needs) in the Duns, but everyone had their space, their property. As explicitly stated when building a new Dun, nothing was free. Generosity, paying forward as expected for help either in the past, or expected in the future, was part. The distinction was made clear.

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  16. Given the way our political class and oligarchs act, i am still expecting them to speak in a double-toned voice while their eyes glow briefly. They certainly have the same arrogance and sense of entitlement and think of the populace with the same contempt.

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      1. You give them too much credit. They’re just assholes. Stupid ones.

        For a giggle sometime take a look at old photos of Hitler and his cabinet when they conquered Paris. What a gaggle of idiots. Sure, they did a lot of damage, but they were still idiots.

        Liked by 1 person

        2. “Idiots” who amassed enough power to murder millions in a systematic campaign of genocide. There is absolutely nothing to giggle about.

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          1. Line from a book I read (loosely paraphrased): “There are no Nazis in the modern US. Those pathetic skinheads going by the name couldn’t organize a bake sale, let alone the conquest of most of Europe.”

            They were evil (although not as evil as the communists, at least not so far as results are concerned), but don’t sell their ability short.

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            1. “…but don’t sell their ability short.”

              Hitler ordered the Me 163 to use 30mm cannon basically because they were cooler. Shot down 16 airplanes with it during the whole war, wasted the whole program, killed a bunch of his own guys for nothing. Did the same with the Me 262. Because he was -stupid-.

              Hitler went ahead with the Eastern Front even though he knew they didn’t have the logistics for it, and he sent his army to Russia with no winter coats. Because he was -stupid-.

              #LetsGoBrandon chose to evacuate his army out of Afghanistan from Kabul airfield instead of Bagram air base. There’s a pattern, right?

              Idiots can run a country and a war. Run it into the ground, anyway. Hitler, Goering, Speer, the whole lot of them were posturing buffoons. All you need to do is watch a little candid clip of them screwing around before a parade to see it, the same as a 30 second clip of #LetsGoBrandon tells you everything you need to know about the US government.

              Or you can watch them bluster their way through the Nuremberg Trials. Its pathetic! They were idiots.

              Liked by 1 person

        3. Why are there neo-Nazis? The Nazis LOST. We kicked their asses all the way back to Berlin and brought the city down around their ears. Most of their Great Leaders took poison or shot themselves, like most deranged murderers do when they lose. Why would anybody want to be like them?

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  18. There’s a thing in the markets called “priced to perfection.” If everything works out perfectly then Everyone makes a lot of money. Nothing ever works out perfectly so people usually lose a lot of money. Still, it’s a great sound bite and people want to believe,, even though they’ve always lost money in the past. maybe it’ll be different this time.

    I think that’s the thing, people desperately want to believe that someone, somewhere knows what’s going on.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yep, even if they believe the Great Amorphous “They,” are evil incarnate, they take comfort in the idea that it’s all part of a Great Plan. (Besides, if the Evil Overlords are so powerful you can’t fight them, that excuses them from having to try).
      Mind you, I believe it is all part of a Great Plan, but it’s not a human plan.

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  19. Off topic. Did anyone else catch glimpses of the House Committee on Censorship? At least two things happened.

    First, they censored RFK Jr., by not allowing him to speak. He was able to compare the demorats as being McCarthyists, but on that, not a whole lot said by him. Republicans didn’t quite just watch the verbal volley back and forth, but it was close.

    Second, the demorats wanted to shutdown the public forum and take it behind doors (specific procedure for doing this, don’t know what it is called). Essentially censoring the Committee on Censorship.

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    1. Not at all off topic. This is what has been going on the last fifty years or so. The Left has been very good at controlling the scope of allowable discussion…and slowly shifting it ever Leftward.

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    2. The irony of RFK Jr., of all people, being censored. I wonder if that will make him rethink his position that all of his political opponents ought to be jailed, or if he’s Leftist enough to be immune from learning that sort of lesson.

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      1. if he’s Leftist enough to be immune from learning that sort of lesson.
        …………….

        IF? Nope. Pretty sure that ship has sailed off into the ether. RFK, Jr. is 100% immune from learning that lesson. Just find the whole thing popcorn worthy. I just wonder “Who is next?” Because there is going to be someone. “Joe & Hoe” (actually seen a posted sign) are already on the chopping block. The squad, there have been sign, seem to be headed that way (they might get themselves off, for awhile). The left eats its own.

        Liked by 1 person

    1. Guess what the Province of Ontario just announced they’re going to do? Build nuclear reactors at Darlington, and try out the smaller “modular” reactors too. Just like Saskatchewan.

      Because Ontario is getting pretty empty of industrial production right now, and farming is following it. You can’t really make a buck growing stuff or making stuff in Ontario right now. Not to mention the Federal government of Canada is actively doing war on farming.

      Electricity is -stupendously- expensive thanks to the crash building program for windmills, and the electrical grid is teetering on the edge of disaster every day. We don’t even know the real price of it, they keep fiddling with the numbers to conceal what’s been done.

      Also I expect the car manufacturers very quietly threatened to leave if they didn’t smarten up. Toyota, Ford and GM don’t -have- to make cars in Canada, right? They’re foreign-owned companies, they can just walk away and there is not a single damn thing Canada can do about it.

      So the Conservative government of Ontario, which is desperate to divert public attention from the way Fat Dougie and the rest went Full Nazi in 2020 (and are still at Full Nazi, by the way), has finally figured out that making electricity cheaper and more reliable will probably make them some friends. Also that new nuclear will have plenty of places for them to skim and do buddy-buddy deals.

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  21. I think the most wonderful thing about people is when you give them lots of freedom they find lots of solutions to problems that I didn’t know existed. It’s so wonderful. The things private citizens put in low earth orbit. Access to satellite data for the average citizen. They think of things to do with them that I never could. The left are soulless creeps. Never wanting to be delighted by a wonderful surprise.

    I’ve become very cynical in my old age. I always suspect projection. Which means that the left are into some very bad stuff. I mean the accusations from the left are truly frightening if the left has truly committed those sins.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. I should add, I am NOT saying you incapable of joy. More likely is that you do indeed do such things, but don’t notice your own acts of Unauthorized Invention.

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      1. Didn’t take your comment that way at all, I mostly have too much on my plate, and am too caught up in the devastation that the sexual revolution has had in my life. (There is absolutely no dating options for 45 year old devote Catholic virgins, who love science fiction and fantasy and want to homeschool and homestead, and yes this has been who I am since I was 18. I have had to face the difficult truth, that a man is not equally yoked to me unless he is at least genuinely regretful for any premarital sex he has had, and will sincerely teach any sons we have to wait for their wife. It is pretty much in Himself’s ballpark to ever find or be found by a husband, although Himself always waits to the last minute or beyond so people see that it’s a miracle.)

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        1. You might have to be flexible on homesteading. And location in general. If you can, rummage around the flight test community.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. You got that right. I have finally reached the point where I can freely admit that I don’t have a clue about dating. I’m in favor of the theory, just — don’t know how to put it into practice. :-D

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  22. Centralized education has been doing exactly what it has been designed to do. It has meant to dumb us down, make us more dependent, slow inovation, and increase market predictability. Those that have preached centralized education have not been the least bit shy about this intended outcome. You can read all about it, no joke, in the Journals of education.

    Environmentalism has been designed to increase governmental power. Those that support this haven’t been any more shy about this than centralized education supporters have been.

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    1. Prussian model of education was intended to create soldiers that don’t question orders, and assembly line workers that mindlessly do their tasks.

      Theses were the selling points for why it was imported to the USA.

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  23. I spent time 10 years ago in the belly of the beast. I went back to do a Master’s degree…I was burning out writing software, and I wanted to try special education.

    I got proficient enough at telling professors what they wanted to hear to pull down a 3.65, fought against the admin types in favor of the kids during my student teaching, flatly refused to enter such a horrible profession set up to fail, paid off my modest student loan in a year, and in a few hours will sit down once again to continue writing code. Because of course. My only regret is that I never had a chance to anonymously hang anti-union posters in the gym.

    Also, Ms. Hoyt, you are my model and hero, politically and linguistically. I know native English speakers that can’t hold a candle to your facility with English. I have always wanted to learn Spanish, and I find myself watching Telemundo regularly lately (“Vencinos” is the most hilarious show I have seen lately, and I am not even really conversational quite yet). I will not stop until I speak Spanish as easily as you do English. So probably never.

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    1. If it makes you feel better, I can’t speak or write Spanish, though I understand it. Portuguese is close enough and different enough it messes me up.
      Italian I picked up with relative facility except I stutter when speaking it. (Apparently it wrote into a damaged area of the brain.)
      Your trajectory is par for the course. I give thanks every day I noped out of my first two college ideas: Journalism and clinical psych. (Though the last might have meant that I could give Jordan Peterson covering fire for his work.)
      You ARE needed in special ed. Or people like you are needed.
      Both kids fell in it on “Profoundly gifted” end, and younger son was “Twice Special” because of sensory issues.
      In practical fact, if I had let them be put in special ed, they’d have been destroyed. It’s worse for the gifted.
      So, yeah, it’s needed. But it’s also impossible to work within the current system. Do what you can from outside. Snatch brands from the fire. Mentor. Talk to parents. Make friends, as hard as it is.
      Because the system is broken, but we must save the kids.

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      1. My aunt. She fought worked special ed from the outside, as a parent. Two children. Both physically disadvantaged, but extremely bright. Cousin one died of her birth defects at age 13. Cousin two, she is now helping him and wife, as a grandparent with their children with special needs, both physical and sensory. Grandchildren are just now starting to head off to college. Aunt started out as an aide in the classroom, first as a volunteer for her daughter’s class (daughter didn’t need full time aid), then eventually paid. She then went to college for teaching, and taught for 15 years. (Would have liked to be a mole on that teaching practicum, and later admin types; their response “yes, mam”. She was 50 when she started teaching. She is also someone who can talk rings around anyone, just like her mother. I guaranty anything they tried to pull was counter documented inches deep.)

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      2. Number two son started out in Edumacation. He stopped because he just couldn’t deal with the stupid girls. It’s a real pity because he would have been a superb teacher in a RC boys HS and those boys Need teachers like him.

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    2. I was thinking of saying that. You beat me to it. Good. (For TurquoiseThyme, WPDE!)

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  24. “And since they don’t know where everything comes from, what everything does, let alone what everything IS, they dream big, unaware that “if only everything” has also never happened, and if it did it would kill them deader than their sense of reality.”

    These fools blather about “ecosystems” to defend starving people for the snail darter, without realizing or caring that everything is part of an ecosystem, and that if they break that system, things will die.

    Or they simply hate people, and having them die is the goal. Them first.

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    1. The mastermind of most of this stuff hates creation, because he wasn’t allowed to control it.

      Evil will always want to control everything good. If it can’t be controlled, evil will try to destroy it.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. They are blissfully unaware that when people can’t feed their children, they don’t give a damn for the ecosystem. When things get really bad, the future can go hang if their family can go to bed with full bellies today. The worst ecological disaster in the modern age is the Sea of Azov, and it’s entirely due to Communism and the poverty it caused.

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  25. I’m sipping my morning coffee, reading through the comment section and, as always, enjoying and learning something new every time.

    Recently I read that some WEF demon or another stated that we’ll have global digital id whether we “like it or not.” And that would be a hard no, possessed person who has sold their soul. I’ll take mine with me to heaven, thank you. Perhaps with an honor guard too.

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  27. Intellectuals, the creators of these “in the air” “systems of everything” are the most dangerous things on Earth.

    I like Thomas Sowell’s definition of an Intellectual: An intellectual is someone who makes their living producing not goods or services, but ideas, where the value of the ideas is determined not by “real world” results but by the approval of other intellectuals. (Note that the intellectuals themselves are also surrounded by an “intelligentsia” who don’t produce the ideas but rather disseminate and fawn over them.)

    Basically, it’s one big circle j…

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  28. “They’re just smart enough to create these mental constructions and fall helplessly in love with them, completely unaware of the fact that their monstrous creations can never life in reality.”

    Ah yes, the Big Idea. Interesting that this would instantly occur to Sarah after my pun-laden discourse on bearings.

    Because the first thing you think of is all the OTHER places where things break that our mighty Social Planners and Big Idea people either never knew or simply don’t care. The Metric System is a case in point. Its a scam started by a bunch of intellectuals in France to sell a Big Idea to a bunch of horrific thugs who just happened to be running the French government. Windmills are another case of the same thing, they don’t deliver on their promise for a large number of very obvious reasons, but our current horrific thugs build them anyway to keep promoting their current global warming scam.

    There is a REASON why all this central command and control does not, and in principle cannot, work. The reason is that no single person can make a pencil.

    https://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl.html?chapter_num=2#book-reader

    That’s the original “I, Pencil” article, written in 1958 by Leonard E. Read. Powerful, because it screams “The Emperor has no clothes!” at centralized command and control. Or any other economic/religious/social Big Idea that functions by making everybody line up and go along with the gag.

    They don’t and can’t work. Ever. They -never- deliver the promise they make.

    But they are very, very good at concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few psychopaths that get off on that sort of thing. And that is why we keep seeing them created.

    At this point I will observe, for no particular reason, that while the Almighty made Man, Samuel Colt made Men equal.

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    1. One of the USA’s great military strengths has always been that if a handful of privates are left on their own, eventually they’ll do something. It might not be right, but on the average what you can think of to do is far better than what most nations teach privates to do: sit around waiting for an officer to find you and tell you what to do. (We teach that too, but not successfully.)

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