If there is one thing that I’d enjoin you to remove from your mind, for the sake of humanity, please, if this idea that people are widgets who can be molded, twisted, packaged, arranged, engineered!
The proximal cause of this post is Paul Ehrlich’s death, but that’s only part of it. I might or might not, later, write a post about Ehrlich, the man who was always wrong and an actual contender for History’s Greatest Monsters, easily edging out Carter’s considerable credentials and bidding fair to compete (if in a different way) with people like Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Heck, he bids fair, just in lives distorted, maimed and never born to compete with Karl Marx himself. (And as a very minor footnote scared the screaming bejeezus out of me when I was a little kid, reading him.)
However, the cause of this post was a comment on an x post about Ehrlich. This man was well intentioned, I think, and trying to say “whoa, Ehrlich went way too far.”
But this what I mean by “Marxist rats in people’s heads.” This man needs a few glue traps in there to capture the rats.
Of course, I went after it hammer and tongues, in my gentle, persuasive (cough) way. That is, I started jumping up and down and metaphorically speaking throwing shoes at his head.
But on the serious side, look at all the words there. “Sensible population approach” “Nations should determine” “Sustainable population level” “Encourage/discourage”.
This man might disapprove of Ehrlich, but he’s going down the exact same pathway to hell.
The problem with Ehrlich wasn’t Ehrlich. Yes, he was a complete amoral lunatic who only didn’t encourage sterelizing agents in drinking water because that would sterilize other species too, not just human, but humanity has had plenty of immoral lunatics and immoral people, and lunatic people, including a lot of them with ineradicable self-hatred and an overarching messianic complex that have not done the damage Ehrlich managed, and in fact who, in the end did more harm than good. At least I knew one of them, who worked a decent trade, had a wife and family and was a kind father and a fun grandfather. It was only when he got to speaking about how most people in the world were a waste of space and how the world would be so much better if you eliminated 2/3 of them that you saw the madness peek out of his eyes. The difference is he didn’t have the power to sell his toxic ideas, and the credentials and ability to make entire governments either believe them or act on them because they believed it made them seem “smart and progressive.”
Now we can’t eliminate people who write persuasively — take that dagger off my back, thank you, it stings — but what actually allowed Ehrlich to do harm was this idea — which the poor man (I’m convinced he has not idea how toxic he sounds) above echoes so exactly: the idea that governments CAN AND SHOULD determine how the people of the nation should live: how many people should be born, how many die, what’s “sustainable”, what they can eat, what they can’t, how much they should exercise, what type of work they should do, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum and ad vomitus.
Without this bizarre idea that a handful of people at the top should determine all this stuff; that the smart and “enlightened” should decide when the rest of us can wipe our asses, and how many ply the toilet paper should be, Ehrlich would have been just another harmless madman, foaming at the mouth and screaming into the void — or perhaps the college classroom, which comes much to the same — without influencing mass media, the culture, and outright governments like India, China, and a bunch of countries in poor, benighted Africa.
I do understand the temptation — lead us not into — of thinking you’re smart and better read and more enlightened than the rest which fed both Ehrlich and those who fell for his load of week-old, rancid maltusian fish. I get it because I think I and most of those reading this blog fell into that trap when we were teens. We read a lot, and we were smarter than our classmates (Which, unfortunately wasn’t very hard) so we thought we should have more say in how people lived than the run of the mill kid still reading picture books in fifth grade.
Then we grew up. And in growing up we came to realize that though — by and large, and with exceptions — we could run circles and figure eights around most people in the fields we were really good at, even with half a brain tied behind our backs, there were things that were utterly impossible for us that other people did easily. And I’m not talking about the bane of my existence in middle school, aka, “dribble a basketball” but things that are needed for every day life. I’m complete and utter drawers at assembling any structure more complex than ikea furniture. Do not under any circumstances let me lose with any process that is primarily visual (I’m okay if I can handle the pieces of something, but just icons on a screen? ick) like a bunch of programming systems. And I had to invent ways to figure out what pieces of wood I needed to cut that didn’t involve measurements, because 543 and 453 and for that matter 345 become the same thing in my head, once I walk away from my notes. (The way I figured leaned into mom’s trade of making clothes patterns. I use massive sheets of newsprint and cut a shape of the piece I need, then tape that to the wood, and cut. Yes, it’s stupid but it works.) Meanwhile people who found “See Spot run” a challenging read could do all of the stuff that bedeviled me (including dribbling a basketball. Sigh) with trivial ease.
More importantly in the process of growing up I figured a lot of “my people” came up with absolutely bizarre and perverse theories from all that reading, and were wholly unamenable to argument once it was in their head. And I found — and you guys probably found too — that I actually got along with a lot of people who didn’t really enjoy fiction reading, or abstract theory, but whose hobby might be building cool engines, or building interesting furniture, or even things like gardening or cooking. I could relate to them on that plane, and often found more in common with them than with the people who were more like me.
Because, HEAR ME OUT: People are not widgets. They aren’t even easily classifiable into types. Heck, Dan and I are obviously the “same time of person” and can usually figure out the reasoning the other followed to get where he got. Except he can think in math and doesn’t switch digits, and scares the living daylights out of me when he and younger son sit down and start discussing their ideas for a time machine. I’m fairly sure they do it only to annoy me, but seriously I wouldn’t be surprised if I came downstairs some fine morning, and they told me they had built a time machine — in the basement, of COURSE — and had brought Master Shakespeare forward so I can meet him.
That’s the other thing, she grumbles ceiling-ward, younger son! He is the one whose thought processes are more like mine, but what he chooses to think about might as well be alien. And he came from inside me. I know, I was there. It hurt.
But he’s like me, and yet utterly different. Like his father, and yet utterly different. Second verse, same as the first, brothers and sisters, sing from the top of the hymnal: PEOPLE ARE NOT WIDGETS.
Eugenics is inherently evil and counterproductive, whether you’re religious or not, because you can’t weed people out. You just can’t. Genius birth morons (and vice versa) and geniuses have places in which they are utter morons, while morons are genius of its kind. Even if you set out to sterelize everyone who has some supposedly wholly harmful characteristic, like say a high cancer tendency, or depression, you might find out you’d eliminated a most of your creative people. (I have theories, I do.) BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE NO WIDGETS.
Social engineering is just as evil. Start with that post above: Who determines what population is “sustainable”? Sustainable according to whom? And for whom?
Sustainable so people don’t outstrip resources, which was Ehrlich’s insanity? But what are the resources? Do you know? Because Malthus, that horrible man, has been wrong all along the line. More humans means more creativity (law of averages) which means an ability to create ways to feed all of us, which yes, in theory leads to more humans, but in reality doesn’t seem to. So, again, sustainable according to whom?
The government might seem like a good idea — at one point in defending his comment this guy told me we needed honest politicians. But he’s wrong. We’d need demi-gods for this — but even if we had very smart, honest and kind leaders, the platonic ideal of civil servants, say, WHERE WOULD THEY GET THE KNOWLEDGE. How would they know what population was sustainable? Forget knowing when the population will throw a genius that changes the game, how can they tell what the game is or what the pieces are? I swear the illusion that the government has accurate counts of everything is one of the crazies delusions begat by the 20th century. Never has this been true, and never will it be true. Let’s say someone goes out to determine how much edible foodstuff there is in a small village: they’ll come back with a count that doesn’t even vaguely approach reality. Because some people will inflate what they have for social purposes; some people will undercount out of sheer paranoia; some people will lie without meaning to, because they were distracted and just spit out a number. And some people will lie because they made mistakes on what they had (Take the five items for a greatly discounted price that our grocery store runs. We tend to buy things like detergent then, because well… it’s cheaper. The other day, late at night, I was in a panic because I’d run out of dishwashing soap and the store was already closed. I’d looked everywhere… Except husband had moved two large packages into a different area of the basement… But if you’d asked, I’d have said “We’re out” and lied unintentionally.)
This is why (among many other reasons) communist governments fail. Because the people at the top can’t get an accurate count of anything including people in general. And they’re even worse at predicting what will be needed. Which is why the furthest a government interferes in the economy, the more likely immiseration and collapse. This is known as “the knowledge problem.” People at the top can’t KNOW what millions of people need, can do, or even are up to. It’s impossible. (I believe, for instance, lying to government busybodies is one of the beatitudes. Well, it is one of the beatitudes in USAianism. Because I say so. So there.)
The whole idea that governments not only can but SHOULD “social engineer” people is arrant nonsense. It is also evil, because while you can’t engineer people to the desired results, you can accidentally send them down some very weird paths. You can’t create homo sovieticus, who lives for the state and is utterly selfless, but you can create vast classes of people who have no idea how to survive without government handouts, or who would murder their neighbors for a snickers. More to the point, you can’t stop people drinking alcohol, but you can empower the mob because they’re the ones trafficking in the now illegal alcohol.
Because people are not widgets. They have decision power and agency, and if you herd them one way, they might not be able to go against you, but they will find other things to do that is not what you wanted.
For instance, the lockdowns were designed to steal the election for Biden and to convince us of how great this totally managed society was where the government could ban misinformation and force you to own nothing and be happy. This was the beginning of the reign of a thousand years… Or it would reelect Donald Trump who is now forewarned and forearmed and better able to be burr on the left’s posterior, of course. But they never saw that possibility coming because for them people are widgets, and therefore would just do as the plan said.
They also never foresaw that a vast contingent of people would not want to go back to the office afterwards, because they found they were more productive from home. Or that an even vaster contingent would see what Junior was learning at school and bring the kids home to learn. Oops.
Yes, the left thinks it scored early hits with social engineering. Mostly with racial integration. They forget that the races always wanted to integrate. It’s a basic humanity thing. Humans like strange. It’s why there were segregation laws.
They did score some hits with sending women into the workforce and making men less “aggressive.” Within my lifetime at that. They managed this through unrelenting propaganda, some of which is still messing up even my thinking, and I’m good at seeing the poison. The problem is that telling people that being wives and mothers was a betrayal, or letting down the side, and portraying women who wanted children as stupid was not enough. No. They had to portray family life as hell. They had to propagandize women and men to think they’re on opposite camps. They had to, in fact, destroy basic humanity to get there.
And even then, most women are in the work force due to a combination of high taxes (as is, in my family, I work mostly to pay our taxes, I think — gives a baleful eye to the tax papers… at least at my darkest moments, I’m convinced of that) and poor financial math ability. (Most women working entry level jobs are, if they were brutally honest about work clothes, fuel, second car, etc, costing the family money.) Or, of course, because they’re single because the left has propagandized people away from dating, let alone marrying.
You can call that a success. I call it short sighted. Since yes, it’s brought us to where we’re facing a demographic cliff. Which means in the next generation, even if women stay in the work force, there simply won’t be enough humans to do the necessary work.
No, I don’t know how many people there are. But I do know I see more elderly than kids, and that isles with kid stuff in the stores have shrank and shrank and shrank in my lifetime.
And that’s a problem. Because the fewer people you have, the more likely we won’t have that one rare genius who solves the problems that will need solved. And for that matter the more likely a virus will render us extinct. Not to mention that not reproducing is also a way of going extinct. (Not with a bang — definitely NOT with a bang. Or any bang — but with a whimper.)
It is imperative we take the stupid idea that humans are things that can be “engineered” out of our minds. It is important to eradicate the idea that a precious few have the knowledge to HERD and CULL humanity as though they were sheep.
Because humans aren’t sheep. Though they’re closer to sheep (no, really. Have you ever DEALT with sheep) than to obedient widgets who do as told every time and don’t come up with creative, insane, bizarre ways to obey your orders while utterly subverting them.
There are no special few, honest or dishonest, who know everything needed to deal with humans (or even sheep) except in very small groups (we call those families) that they know very very well. Other than that, mostly, governments should do as little as possible.
And every government office should have a plaque that says: People are not widgets. Don’t forget this. If you do the penalty is death. For someone.
According To Hoyt 
Amen Sister Sarah!!!!!
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The only place to reply so here goes.
Hammer and TONGS!! Not tongues, Spellcheckers going wild again.
Paul Ehrlich dead? How could they tell and reduce the surplus population though personally I suspect The Magic Bullet. Avoid the Philadelphia & Western if I were you for an obscure trolley railfans joke as in stay away from Norristown
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Are you sure? Don’t let our hostess let her tongue loose at you. Just, don’t. A hammer would be kinder.
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And then for a second, I had a vision of Sarah as a cat, busily licking the guy she’d been talking about clean.
VBEG!
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LOL
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Not the spell checker. As I warned it was the fact I had a fever. My spelling and typos are always weird, but soemtimes gifted.
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And men are not potatoes!
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Speak for yourself. I’m more potato shaped every year. And I don’t like it.
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People often look at me funny when I tell them I am in shape, until I remind them round is a shape after all. snark
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As many taters as I have et, and considering my mother’s common saying “you are what you eat,” I suspect there might be some exceptions. Purely theoretical, of course.
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Same Same
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But if men are not potatoes, then why are the Irish called “Patties”? Answer me that!
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There are lots of different kinds of patties. I personally like either a beef patty with bacon, or a pat of butter.
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“Paddies,” after “Padreig,” the name that is Latinized to Patrick. Though, I kid you not, the contemporary pronunciation is something like “Porrig.”
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Being a native speaker of English, and having learned French in childhood, you’d think I would be nonchalant about spellings not matching pronunciations. But Celtic (Irish, and Welsh) spelling/pronunciation conventions defeat me.
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Hear, hear, brother Sarah.
You are so very correct.
This is something where I have a lot of experience knowledge, from being massively and profoundly incorrect.
(I was wondering how I would fill out a list of top ten ‘study nothing like this scholar’, and yesterday the only two names I had were Kaczynski and Erlich. Today, well, Hitler is also noteable. Being an autodidact is not a bad thing, but he had that same problem of applying widget type models to humans, and being very high on his own theories. (Kaczynski might have stayed functional if he had kept to mathematics, and to his own ideas, but reading those early models in the social sciences drove him nuts, because he didn’t come with the correct mental safeguards.))
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Lysenko?
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I can always tell when you’re riled up. The typos accumulate. :) I especially loved “hammer and tongues”, now maybe that was an intentional metaphor, but it was genius either from the conscious or subconscious.
My eye opening moment to the craziness of rule by experts was when I was an undergrad. I took a class on comparative governments. That helped me understand both the US and most of the rest of the world because the parliamentary system was a total mystery to me before that. But the real eye opener was how the USSR planned their economy. They had a spreadsheet at least 100 rows by 100 columns. Columns represented industries and rows represented needed resources. They decided how much of some product they needed to produce, calculated how much of each resource that industry consumed (coal, iron, etc.) to create their outputs. Then they told the producers of the raw materials exactly how much they needed to produce to supply the others for their outputs and told all 10,000 cells to meet their quotas exactly.
Reductio ad absurdum. It doesn’t take a genius or even someone mildly adept at math to understand the impossibility of making a spreadsheet of real world things where each of 10,000 cells has to come to an exact value while all are dependent on the others. We should have shipped Jenga games to the USSR. Maybe then, even they would have understood the absurdity of it all.
As for Ehrlich and all his followers who want me and half of who I know to die, I say the same thing I say to those who tell me to go to Hell. “You first!” If you want to limit CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, quit breathing.
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But even in killing or dying you release Co2, living things on earth are carbon based, so long as they live they absorb carbon, dead, more carbon in environment, but something else grows in its place using that carbon, but that carbon doesn’t disappear it’s a cycle just like water or oxygen.
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Shh, don’t tell them and ruin my mic drop line. :)
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Elon could solve that issue. Seal them in airtight capsules and launch them on a slow orbit to the Sun. Problem solved.
Now, the question is, do we have to wait until they quit consuming oxygen to do so?
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That’s the major reason I figured out the whole climate thing was a scam back when I was a kid in the 80s/90s. Elementary school SCIENCE taught us that plants require CO2 to survive and produce oxygen. So…the loonies want to reduce our carbon emissions to zero? How does that make sense? (Though I am certain a non-negligible number of them would consider eradicating human life on earth by making our atmosphere no longer breathable via this method a feature, not a bug. Of course, they also fail to account for the fact that humans aren’t the only thing on the planet that need to breath our atmospheric mix…)
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The current CO2 levels are near the extreme low end of what plants need to grow. Plants struggle below 250 ppm CO2, and some species just plain die. We can see this in satellite images — since the recent increases in CO2 ‘pollution’ worldwide green plant cover has increased by more than 15%. Deserts are shrinking.
Greenhouses add CO2 to their air to make their plants grow better; double or more the current atmospheric CO2 level. Plants also use less water when CO2 concentration is higher.
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I tried to add a little common sense with this essay https://frank-hood.com/2022/09/24/to-warm-or-not-to-warm/ Futile, I know.
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You might also add that when CO2 increases, plants grow faster and bigger, more plants grow, and all that growth uses up CO2. The more CO2 increases, the more work it takes to increase it further. If 5 billion tons of CO2 ‘pollution’ a year raise the level from 350 ppm to 400 ppm, 10 billion tons a year might only raise it to 420 ppm.
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“Politics perverts science. Scientists are rewarded not for finding and reporting the truth, but for telling those in charge of doling out the money whatever they want to hear. Play the approved tune and you get government grants, you get consulting fees, you get published. Make the wrong waves, and you don’t. Such conditions do not produce good science, or good scientists.”
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Just like prophets in the Old Testament. Jeremiah didn’t get invited to a lot of parties.
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–
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Also, way back before a comet carbonized the dinosaurs and a lot of swamps, the earth had higher CO2, than now, to feed all those large plants that were feeding the plant eating large dinosaurs.
I’ve decided that anytime someone brings up CO2 and global warming to ask: “You want to starve plants? What’s wrong with you?”
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Good one!
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I remember being bemused when CO2 was suddenly defined as a “pollutant” and the EPA started demanding CO2 reductions.
Then I wondered how long it would be before they decided oxygen was a “pollutant”… Heck, O3 is actually poisonous.
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Surprised they haven’t, declare O2 as a pollutant. After all it is such a *minor component of the Nitrogen mix atmosphere we breathe, 20% O2 VS 79% N. The other 1% being “everything else”.
Along with *Dihydrogen Oxide.
(*) JIC – sarcasm.
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I was quite amused this morning to read a review of Science Under Siege, authored by such shining exemplars of “science” as Michael (Hockey Stick) Mann and Peter (Wet Market) Hotez.
I’d like to express my appreciation properly for their wonderful words, but that would get me jailed…
Found the link to the review. No way in H E double hockeysticks am I linking to the book. (https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-scientists-who-declared-war-on)
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“Scientism Under Siege”
Sigh. They’re probably hoping they’ve created a modern-day Malleus Maleficarum for skeptics of their Received Wisdom From the Sainted Expert Class (= our truth-defining selves).
No, you just think it’s under siege now. Just wait. “The truth is out there” is more than a TV line.
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Just going to leave for others the fun of looking up the estimated CO2 concentration during the “dinosaur era” — hint, it was much higher than today’s (which is “destroying the planet” of course), and therefore correspondingly even higher than the pre-industrial so-called benchmark.
Obviously our planet was not destroyed (but also see later K-T impact etc. etc. etc.).
As far as “global warming” is concerned, compare it to “global cooling” with shorter growing seasons and thus possible famines, wildlife populations at the “cold edge” being pushed directly towards extinction, etc. If we had to “pick one” (and we probably don’t, climate is just long-term weather and mostly does what it pleases) — objectively global warming looks like the way to go.
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Oh NOES! SAVE THE DESERTS!!! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
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They’re making up arguments to get around that. For example, several years ago I read an article claiming that carbon from industries is the equivalent of “junk food” for plants. Nonsense on the surface of it (CO2 is CO2). But the claim was advanced at least once in a publication meant to be readable by the public.
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Today it’s less riled up, and mildly feverish and VERY exhausted. The cold did a u turn and came back harder than ever. better today than yesterday, still hard to work.
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):
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Got meds, feel like hammered exhaustion, but improving.
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I’m way better than I was last night and about to go to bed and bore the virus into going away. Hopefully.
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Thumbs up Same with this bug. Hopefully!
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Heck, I find the idea that you can reduce the economic activity to a 100×100 spreadsheet absurd, even IF you could somehow get all 10,000 cells to come out the way you want them to. It will turn out that there was a 10,001st cell that contained some resource so trivial that no one thought to mention that will throw all of your calculations into chaos!
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In one Agatha Christie book, Poirot meets a modern intellectual who pontificates on the subject of what must be done to save the world, including killing all the useless and strictly regulating who was allowed to have children. He asks Poirot to imagine what the world would be like if, for a generation, “Only the intelligent were allowed to breed.”
Poirot responds that he is imagining it, and he’s seeing a world with “a large increase in the population of the mental wards.”
Dame Christie fell for far too many of the faddish beliefs of her day, but she didn’t fall for this one.
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I keep coming back to Mary Douglas’s Cultural Theory of Risk. Those who insist on treating people like widgets are acting mostly out of fear of change and disorder.
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Intellectually lazy, their mad schemes only works if everyone is a widget and not a human being.
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Quite possibly.
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“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” – Mencken
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Ah, yes, “Decreae the surplus population!” without stopping to question which population is surplus. That predates Marx, but has the same error at its base.
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A theoretical argument can be made that scholarship may be less fundamental than agricultural and security work are. :P
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The word’s root is schole (with that phlegmy CH as in Bach) that indicated ideas along the lines of “leisure” and “idleness” and “loitering” — i.e. plenty of time to read and BS with the other layabouts while hoi polloi did the dirty work. So, yeah.
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Turns out, “Kill the enemies’ children so ours will live.” Is a very short step to “Kill all children so WE can live.”
Always choose life. Always.
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Stipulated that P Ehrlich is at the bottom of the barrel of humanity. Where does Rachel Carson fit? One notch above, or does she get her own barrel of DDT?
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Hm. Ehrlich just wished endlessly in public for most people to be killed.
He never campaigned successfully for a specific, life saving, worldwide fatal disease preventing, cheap, really pretty safe thing to be banned, leading directly to millions of deaths, yet still lionized by the watermelon movement, with no less than three currently afloat environmental research ships named after him – search for “RV Rachel Carson” – so I think Rachel beats out Paul in that infernal competition.
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*Waggles hand* Agree to disagree. The damage Rachel Carson did can be fixed given enough time and will. The mental and cultural damage done by Ehrlich is going to take generations to root out, and we may never get it all.
OTOH to be perfectly fair Carson was not used to psychologically hammer me and my siblings – along the lines of “I was selfish and had you kids, but you must never have children, it’s wrong for the planet” – so I have some bias.
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Rachel’s efforts led directly to millions of people around the world becoming unalive due to malaria. Harder to fix that one…
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I hold that actual morons, by definition, can’t help it. They were brought into their state by forces they could not control. The “jskool grads” on the other hand, worked long and hard to reach their level of ignorance and inability to understand reality.
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Fair. I hereby publicly apologize for impugning morons by equating jskool grads to them.
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metaphorically speaking throwing shoes at his head.
I thought we had moved on to throwing chinchillas.
Always choose life. Always.
Today is not the day for me to embrace that concept. I’m on the verge of advocating the death penalty for everything.
Today’s example that has pushed me in that direction: It took 30 minutes to activate my HSA card. How about instead you send me a card that works and if anyone steals it, you take a cubic centimeter of flesh – one by one – for each dollar fraudulently charged? Or be efficient and shoot the person. Somehow, I think credit card fraud would drastically diminish.
Why does my life need to be more difficult and complex because OTHER PEOPLE cause problems? The difficultly should fall upon the perpetrator, not the not-even-a-victim.
Examples of this are legion.
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Chinchillas are messages of hope to people we like
Chanclas are Clue by Four equivalents that can be applied to friends when needed, but also to other as needed.
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Thieves of all shapes, sizes, and manners are why we can’t have nice things.
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And on “people are not widgets”, the “interchangable work units” theory of workplace management taught in business schools was the bane of my time in cubical land, especially in those periods when the business cycle rollercoaster was in the “yet another layoff” mode. Zapping the people doing the things with formalized printed-on-the-managers-mandatory-layoff-script “it’s not you, your job has just been eliminated ” and then insisting those things still has to be done with the surviving staff, all of who, had their own things to do, was bogged down-standard. Any attempt to insist that the things could not now all be done with fewer doers resulted in that line manager getting the hook in the next round.
Lesson learned: Just Lie About The Things.
Which in the end is why companies fall to dust.
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(Heh. The spelling clanker really didn’t like “bog-standard”.)
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Which is why I do not let the spelling clanker actually correct. It can whine. But it can’t auto-replace. Spelling clanker, doesn’t like clanker either. I told it to ignore it.
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I was spell checking a story (dyslexic) and I wrote “he unholstered his gun. the drunk little elf that runs spell check insisted I meant upholstered instead. So I was having visions of weapons covered in quilted fabric, with ribbons and bows.
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What happens to me a lot is the spell checker flags a word, but the list it recommends is “Nope. Definitely not one of those.” Which means going to google search. Usually can find correct word and spelling, despite my mangled spelling. Otherwise, it is, sigh, rewrite to use different words. Or “forget this”.
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Leading to “No.”* Silent “Not my problem because I don’t work there (anymore). Should have thought about that before you let my job go.” Granted, usually because let go earlier than others due to impending company implosion, or because purchasing entity “already had enough people filling my role”. Ah, but did they understand the systems I dealt with? (Nope.) I figured it out without help. They should be able to too. I’ve come to realize that is not necessarily a common ability. Still not my problem.
(*) Full disclosure. Wasn’t that blunt. Amounted to the same thing. I was polite. Honest.
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Six months after I left, some savant in Upper Management got the great idea to lay off the entire client facing (account management) team, since they were unnecessary and did nothing. Naturally, when the clients started calling the CEO directly they discovered that there was a problem with their plan.
Not a single one of the team was willing to come back. I got a panicked call from a former manager asking me to come back.
Nope.
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Reality always wins. No exceptions.
“And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.”
(Also known as, the dangdest thing, just when I was getting my old donkey trained up right to work on no feed at all, the ungrateful brute up and died on me. Now I gotta start all over with another.)
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Well said! People are certainly not controllable widgets though those on the left seem determined to treat them as such. And while some people can be led like sheep sometimes anyone who’s ever had to deal with sheep knows they are capable of wandering off into places and things you never thought of! People will do as they choose, Americans probably more so than most!
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Isn’t there a Biblical parable about that?
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What governments can do to their consistent populations, well, the things are few.
They can tax them unto oblivion.
They can create criminals from law abiding and patriotic citizens.
They can create a byzantine mire of rules and obligations, some with merit, many without, to create the above criminals.
They can institute institutions that protect and preserve.
They can hire, train, and equip soldiers to defend and attack as needed.
By and large, what they do accomplish, and have for nigh on generations untold? Collect and concentrate wealth to themselves. Power, of a fashion, as well.
There is a certain kind of power in being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. In rewarding laziness, maleducation, base greed and envy they create divisions whilst calling it “diversity.” They invent -isms for their low effort, lowly indoctrinated fellow followers. They create more dependents upon public largess ad nauseum.
Having secured a class which relies on them alone for their needs- and they have many, many needs- locks in their needed support. Only, this strategy is of limited success. The naturally lazy do not get up to vote easily. They might cast incensing invective on Xitter or some such, but that’s not much of consequence now is it?
Thus the need for ever more and more fraud to prop up the scheme. Everybody knows, and knew even fat back as my youth that politics was for the habitual liars who had nonetheless enough personal charisma to con a vote to two. We expected the graft, and boy howdy did we ever get it but hard and fast.
It is tempting upon dealing with masses of people to indeed treat them as widgets. We do not often question the motives of the idiot what cut us off in traffic or whatever. But for laws? Which we have a plethora- a seriously excessive overabundance of, dare I say. Already we can see that there are laws for thee and not for me. Effectively, which is the only way that matters here.
Returning faith in limited governments will be a hard task and a big ask. Yet the solid foundations are already there. The Constitution. The words of our Founding Fathers. Governments- the people in them- want to grow. The Constitution is a fence around that growth. Making sweeping change is what men of power desire, even when it’s not good for them.
Sweeping change rarely takes into account the individual’s liberty and sovereignty. Yet that latter is what this country was built upon. What so many of us cherish and treasure as we seek out and strive. If the law proposed cannot protect each individual’s own freedoms then why does it even exist? The honest reasons are not pretty, though the tarnished “justifications” are a forest of lies and half-truths fit to swallow us all.
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<i>We do not often question the motives of the idiot what cut us off in traffic or whatever.</i>
We don’t? We certainly question the reproductive habits of the idiot’s forbears.
But perhaps I’ve said too much.
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We are none of us worthy to be gods.
But that is what the wannabe utopians most desire — the power of life and death over the unanointed masses. To determine whether or not people are born, and kill them off when they are no longer useful. In between, to regulate and regiment every aspect of their existence.
———————————
Whenever power is concentrated into a few hands it is turned to evil. Power must be distributed as widely as possible; it can never be entrusted to kings, politicians, commissars or bureaucrats.
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Time travel is impossible. I read the proof.
IF: Time Travel is possible, the technique will be patented.
Someone WILL use TT to travel backward to patent TT before anyone else.
US Patent # 1 is not for Time Travel.
THEREFORE: TT is not possible.
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That’s the subject of a fun little game by Cheapass Games (now out of business, but they were fun when I was just out of college and shoveling all my money at student loans: you could buy a decent game for $3-$5, and they would provide just the game board and rules while you were expected to already have dice, pawns, and such). It’s called “U.S. Patent Number 1”. Each of you play as the inventor of a time machine, originating from different points in history, all trying to get to the U.S. Patent Office on its opening day in order to patent your time machine “before” anyone else. There are various shenanigans you can pull on each other to delay each other (insofar as “delaying” the possessor of a time machine is possible). It’s been years and years since I played it, but the box and rules are still on my board-game shelf somewhere.
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I think they have a mini-resurrection in that some of the owners will sell you printable PDFs of the games they had. It’s not a full game company anymore, but that’s one way to make money off the long tail.
Their game design was awesome in that anyone could win up until the last minute. Not like Monopoly, which ends up being one person boring the socks off of everyone else.
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Can’t help but notice the not-quite-spoken assumption that the US government and its patent system are relevant to time travelers. Or at least thought relevant by the inventors. Which may say more about those inventors than the US government.
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The theory I once heard someone explain was that if you invented a time machine, you would change history to put yourself in charge (or whatever you would prefer)), and then change it so that time machines couldn’t be invented so that your changes to history couldn’t be undone.
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Ah but there is always the time police to account for, and of course time loops where the changes you made exist only in that loop, but the time line goes on.
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I think it was Larry Niven’s idea that inventing a time machine would allow the past to be changed until, eventually, one of the changes would prevent the time machine’s invention.
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I don’t remember which book of his contains that idea, but it was one of Niven’s ideas about time travel.
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Keith Laumer’s “Dinosaur Beach” is a really good example of that.
I only rarely saw copies when bookstores were still a thing, though isfdb shows it has been reprinted several times.
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From your mouth to G-d’s ears.
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Always choose life does NOT mean exclude Life In Prison where you have time to consider and repent of the error of your ways.
Eternity may not be long enough for some to ponder these errors.
From firey pits full of demonic horrors.
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Apparently, one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine was deliberately inflated reporting of crop yields by local government officials.
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Yep. Because Mao’s Great Plan could not fail – the local officials would be executed if it did. So they lied.
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they were executed anyway
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Yes… and no…
First, Mao had Theories(tm) about farming (likely influenced by Lysenko, as Mao was a fan of Stalin), and expounded those theories to the officials in charge of farming. For obvious reasons, those officials took those theories as gospel truth, and used those theories to plan how the collective farms would plant their crops. Mao also set crop target numbers that he felt were appropriate for the improvements in harvest sizes that his theories would produce. Since Mao’s theories were expected to produce larger harvests, the target numbers were larger than what they had been in past years.
Second, the theories, of course, were nonsense, and the harvests were poor. But the officials didn’t want to look incompetent, so they inflated the harvest numbers. And the various officials wanted to look better than their fellow officials, so each level of the bureaucracy inflated the numbers even further until the numbers reached Mao.
Third, at this time the PRC and the USSR had split. Mao wanted to build the prestige of the PRC among many of the smaller and/or poorer countries in the world, so he was literally giving away food from China. This meant that there was significantly less food available to the Chinese to use than would otherwise have been the case.
Fourth, the numbers used to determine how much food to give to the Chinese population, and how much to send abroad, were based off of the numbers provided by the bureaucrats. And as we know, those numbers were vastly overinflated.
However, it didn’t take the top-level party officials long to realize that something was wrong, and that a famine had started. Word did reach Beijing that lots of people were starving. This was when Mao could have acted to resolve the issue. If he had done so, the famine could have been nipped in the bud after the first year, or the second at the latest. But instead it lasted for three years (1959-1961). That’s how long it took the *entirety* of the rest of the senior officials of the CCP to work up enough outrage and anger over what was happening (most of them liked to at least tell themselves that they were helping the peasants; obvious evidence of the peasantry starving to death threatened to put the lie to that belief) to quite literally threaten Mao with a full-scale revolt of the entire leadership over the famine. This would have cost Mao the leadership of the country in a humiliating fashion, so he finally agreed to reverse course on his farming theories.
But he didn’t forget.
Five years later, the Cultural Revolution started. That was when Mao punished all of the members of the politburo who had turned against him during the famine.
After Deng Xiaoping assumed leadership of the PRC, he “reevaluated” Mao’s leadership. The CCP couldn’t disown Mao, as too many Chinese citizens still all but worshipped Mao. So the CCP declared that Mao had been “70% correct” (about everything). The famine was acknowledged, but blamed on intentional misreporting by the officials in charge of reporting the harvest numbers. Mao’s own role in the fiasco was quietly swept under the rug.
Final note – Xi appears to be trying to set himself up as a new Mao.
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Apparently, one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine was deliberately inflated reporting of crop yields by local government officials.
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Apparently, one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine was deliberately inflated reporting of crop yields by local government officials.
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My late mother was a great fan of Ehrlich. Went all-in for his “people will need to support themselves against famine” and went for homesteading – without ever putting in the time, effort and thought to actually make it work.
She’s also the one who told me – when I was a young, very uncoordinated teen – that my confirmation was so bad, if I were one of her goats, she’d have culled me.
She was not joking.
I’m still less than coordinated, but at least I outlived her.
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(AKA you think you hate Ehrlich enough? Trust me, you don’t.)
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In Erich Hartmann’s memoirs (he was the top ace of all time with hundreds of victories) he tells about the one time he met Hitler. He didn’t get to talk long with Hitler, but from the things Hitler said, Hartmann knew that he was being systematically lied to. A big part of what set off the explosion in the movie Downfall that people love to parody was Hitler finally finding out how much of the “information” he was operating on was total moonshine.
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Wasn’t just Hitler.
After the disaster at Midway, the IJN leadership intentionally withheld telling the Emperor about it for several months. Survivors from the ships that were lost during the operation were sequestered during that time, and kept out of contact with the outside world. And it wasn’t the last time the IJN did something like that.
I would imagine that they weren’t the only government department doing that.
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Say, oh I don’t the Census Bureaus? sarc…
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Census? Surely you must be joking brother. After all, there is still the Dept of State. We could go on….
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you did notice the sarc at the end? I was trying to imply the census was made up as well, everyone in every nation, probably poorly on my part..
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It gives away that they think that people exist for governmental ends, not vice versa.
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If you want to read how Ehrlich’s proposals were imposed on China, read Mo Yan’s novel Frog… about forced abortion in China. Quite horrifying, but even though it won a Nobel Prize for literature, it is unknown in the west.
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If we’re all widgets then why do Hollywood stars get paid so much money, shouldn’t they be demanding to be paid the same as every other actor?
And right there their delusions fall apart…
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