The Great Decentralization

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Braden on a wall, outside Las Vegas

In crazy times like now, some small cohort of people not swept up in the mania are scratching their heads, and saying “why is this happening?” We have a time in human history where wars (though they still exist) are few, technology is still making large advances (at least in certain sectors) and people are faced with unimaginable abundance. I look at my own experience with something as common as hard liquor as proof (no pun intended.) 40 years ago, buying a bottle of cognac was an unheard-of feat, and if you wanted selection, there were only a handful of stores in the country where you could find anything other than the primary brands of Hennessy or Courvoisier. Now, you can walk into almost any well-stocked liquor store and find dozens of brands. And don’t even go near the bourbon aisle. Hundreds of producers’ products line the shelves.

This explosion of selection directly maps to diversification in the information space. Whiskey is simple, of course — the financial incentive sprung up as people learned more about it, and as people indeed learned more about it, they started applying variations in taste, cocktails, and the proliferation of insights from the Internet to the problem. Such a supply is maintained only within the context of the information ecosystem that is created. If you have no insight or knowledge, you likely won’t lay out the money for a brand with no recognition. And it’s not long until that more complex ecosystem collapses, leaving you with just the bottom shelf in the liquor store.

All ecosystems are maintained under similar pretexts. Human societies are no different. Different societies have solved different versions of this problem of maintaining information complexity throughout time. I wrote earlier about how one of the first societies to run up against information complexity demands — China — managed this through the development of a professional class, primarily filled with autists, and screened by a complicated test on Chinese poetry, that allowed some modest social mobility. Anyone could take the test — but few would pass.

To reiterate — societies are maintained through quantity of reliable and valid information, with appropriate levels of information complexity, that when grounded in reality, allows that information to propagate across the society and be accepted as truth. Some level of validation of information by all participating members in a society is also necessary. Though not everyone in a given society can be responsible for knowing all truths, at least some of those truths must be verifiable, and tangible.

And herein lies the rub. Increasingly complex human societies (we are in one in the USA) require increasingly complex relational dynamics as well. It’s a closed loop — increasingly complex relational dynamics produce that information that the society needs to hold itself together. If those relational modes do not exist, no society, with a certain population quantity and density, can expect to hold together.

The memetic physics will tear it apart. Confusion will literally be its epitaph. Brainworms, or more specifically prions, is caused by cannibalism. It’s called Kuru. Here you go.

In a complex society, high levels of knowledge sophistication are demanded by the differentiated peoples in a given society. High levels of knowledge sophistication imply a fractal structure inside that knowledge, purely from the overlap of different circumstances that characterize any given member of that society. This knowledge inherently needs to be generated in two ways.

The first is by institutions in that society. The problem comes in with the structure of these institutions, and their robustness in the face of uncertainty. There is no way that all institutions can get all things correctly. But the problem exists that such institutions believe that they can. And if they have no fundamental epistemic humility, then far too often, the institutions will get things WRONG — and that destroys the faith that the larger body politic has in those institutions.

Further, institutions, due to their emergent hierarchical dynamics, as well as resource needs, will always be prone to capture by the powers-that-be. If the baseline guiding principles of a society are not egalitarian, with a commitment to upward social mobility and welfare of ALL its citizens, it won’t be long until these institutions are weaponized to advance the interests of elites inside a given society. I’ve written extensively about this. There is no better example than the COVID times, when elites ordered wholesale destruction of parts of the economy, and moved into servitude other parts, because of their paranoia of getting a virus that early on established itself as no threat (other than a bad flu) to the vast majority of the population.

This was dramatically reinforced by an entirely co-opted other caste — the various mainline journalistic institutions of our time — who sided with the elites in the various prescribed interventions. The various journalists and institutions piled award upon award against people who both committed crimes against humanity (like Tony Fauci) as well as the journalists who lionized them (e.g. Ed Yong.). Most of these people on the downstream side of the beneficiary equation still hold on to their power and privilege today. Elites may eat their own, but they never completely abandon them unless they’re on the dinner table. (See the discussion on Kuru above.)

We are now living in the after-times of these two historic institutional collapses — medicine, and journalism. The result for society is that we no longer have the information structure for easy recovery.

The second has to lie in development and appropriate development of agency, and its corollary in connection, empathy among its members. No society can completely rely on institutions, that can, and have been captured at various times by elites for various reasons, both nefarious as well as self-protective.

But in the last thirty years, especially, we’ve seen across-the-spectrum decay of both mission and execution of educating young people to the role of citizens that will both maintain the status quo of our country, as well as advance its interests and destiny. This lack of development will lead to follow-on consequences in time. We’ll have, percentage-wise, a larger and larger group of people who will inherit a large, complex machine, but will not know, nor understand the complexity consequences of pulling its various levers. The USA’s current population is somewhere in the neighborhood of 320 million people — its information quantity and complexity needs are immense. We are failing in so many ways, when we look to the basic literacy AND psychosocial maturity to run such an enterprise.

What the memetics tell us is that if we cannot generate the next class of people to inherit, tinker, and improve the current societal structures, then we will proceed down the social complexity ladder – the Great Decentralization. The Great Decentralization means that society must index itself to smaller scales, of people, space, and prosperity in order to be able to function coherently. The responsible government organs must scale down, in order to function at all — because the information flow into those organs cannot support a larger functioning scale. If you want a global society, it has to be composed of enough citizens who can operate at that scale. And so on down the track. We obviously do not have that at the current time. And that means society will downshift to generate political organs that operate without such corruption that makes homeostasis possible. National government doesn’t work? Step down to state government. State government doesn’t work? You get the idea.

The problem arises when you end up in a place where supra-scale informal organizations (like cartels) gain enough power and organizational control that they are competing with formal government bodies. This has already happened in Mexico, which by any definition is a failed state. It’s arguably happened in regions of the US along the Mexican border.

And psychopaths will drive that process. You don’t need to be a complex society to use a jet engine — but you definitely need one if you want to create one in the first place. So clever psychopaths will figure out how to disrupt those complex relational patterns to get us down where we’re feeling the pain. Short version — inspirational leaders take us up the complexity ladder. Psychopaths take us down.

What does ‘downwards’ really mean? We sit close to the apex of what a Performance-based/Legalistic society can be. Downwards means following the v-Memes — more Legalism, more Authoritarianism, and most importantly, especially for the two ends of the demographic age distribution, more Tribalism. The problem with this is that our wealth is NOT, as often condemned by our own corrupt intelligentsia, the result of colonial exploitation. It’s the result of innovation and hard work, by that group of individuals aged 20-60, which relies on advanced relational modes in order to keep going. These are the modes of independent relational development discussed ad nauseam on this blog. People must be able to meet other people (the whole freedom of association thing) and make their own decisions about whether to trust them or not. That trust, besides creating things like friendships, also vastly accelerates economic engines. Deals may have contracts, but if the contract is written up after the handshake, the ability to radically increase monetary tempo presents itself.

And when that collapses, first we lose the ability to support an elevated standard of living, which includes societal and social cohesion for people in this country. But worse — as we move back down the scale to overt Tribalism, we not only lose the standard of living. We lose the ability to support the people here in the first place.

The way societies re-equilibrate after such social decay is mass death. A great recent example of this is the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Short version — after the two sides killed off 10-15% of the population, and drove out another 20%, peace returned, and now Rwanda is stable. It is hard for people to wrap their heads around loss of 30% of the population of the country. Such large numbers, contrary to belief, do not scale well inside the heads of most people. The short version is this — it is a full-on massacre.

All this sets the stage for smaller governance structures, inside smaller populations of humans. The Internet has scrambled much of this through the Death of Geography. Now, more than ever, it is easier to fall into a variety of tribes NOT based on geography, but instead, built on memetic foundations. You can find who you agree with far more easily. But that is not in the interest of the psychosocial development of our own country. Finding people who you instantly agree with doesn’t force relational growth. And with the Left’s declaration of being a law unto themselves, now if you are a compromiser, you end up in the ‘outcast’ category. That elevates the Immiseration class, and overall unhappiness is never in the interest of productivity.

The last presidential election was a huge moment in the Great Decentralization, in that a voter received an opportunity to choose one of two paths towards how this might happen. One the one side was the Democratic candidate, who promised “more of the same”. But what was more of the same? As we are now finding out, the secret coalition that drove much of Democratic politics in the last four years was centered around federal budgets diverted to serving the NGO-DEI-Industrial Complex, driven on the surface by LGBTQ activists and various absurdist social issues, like trans-ing children (which further disqualified the institutional veracity of the medical community) as well as funding the dumping of illegal aliens into the US. During the Biden years, through illegal immigration, population increased somewhere between 8%-10%. No real attempt was made regarding fiscal responsibility, or even any understandable larger economic policy for the country. In short, the Democratic path toward decentralization was going to be collapse and anarchy. And somehow, the elites in this country, virtue signaling all the way, were going to come out on top of all of it.

On the other side was the loosely held coalition of MAGA, true centrists, and cast-offs from the political Left that had gotten to the point of not being able to stomach the various unhinged dogmas generated by the radical Left of the Democratic Party. This coalition had at its front Donald Trump, a moderate Republican, whose claim to fame was abrasive authenticity. Trump declared his path to decentralization as one focused on removal and shrinkage of the larger federal government, as well as removal of the 10% of the illegally imported population, demographically targeted to win elections in swing states that were augmented during the Biden years, in order to change seat allocation in the House of Representatives.

As I chose whom to vote for, foremost in my mind at this fork in the road, I was, and am still concerned about environmental issues and young people — my two primary political foci. I came to the conclusion that a Harris/Walz administration would be far worse for both. Regarding environmental issues, a Harris/Walz ticket would likely spawn a new Cabinet office dedicated to manipulation of the public over Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), with tons of money being diverted from the government into Degrowth philosophies. And that would harm the second primary concern of my politics — the future of young people.

Lest ye think I was naive, I knew that the Republican Party would still engage in their own historic excesses, of handing out favors to its mainline political supporters. But that’s a devil, policy-wise that I did know, and knew how to fight.

What has surprised me about the Great Decentralization is two-fold. First is the uncovering of the vast NGO-funded mechanisms that were already extant in the federal government that I was unaware of. The short version was that the federal government had already handed off, through some version of direct aid or block grants, vast governmental real estate to the states, under the aegis of charity and social services. With most of the standard federal oversight mechanisms removed, these funds immediately became captured, both legally and illegally, by supporters of the Left. The Somali daycare scandal is a hallmark, though I believe we will discover much more fraud throughout the social welfare system as time goes by.

The second has been the emergence of the anarchist/chaos-bent Left, whose response to being defunded on all fronts has led to chaotic violence in the name of First Amendment protest, and high-profile societal disruption. The Minnesota insurgency against ICE is a premier example, though as this piece is being written, evidence is coming to light that there have been multiple conspiratorial networks, based on the same organizational structures, being erected across the United States.

All is not yet lost. It’s important to remember and realize that even the ICE protests in Minneapolis are geographically limited, and their presence is causing tremendous economic harm to local constituents. Such harm serves as a deterrent for other municipalities with disruptive entities to double down on promoting the chaos, as Minnesota elected officials have done. And while it looks like the anti-ICE actions have potential for being nationally contagious (figuring out the racket is always the first challenge of conspirators) as time goes on, it seems increasingly unlikely, save as screaming about it as a potential election issue. Talk is, as it always is, cheap. And far better than facing a RICO rap, which I expect we’ll see coming down the pike for individuals like MN Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, who actively participated in the Signal network for tracking and doxxing ICE agents.

The Great Decentralization, however, will continue. There is (outside my ridiculous blog) poor understanding of the social physics, or even acknowledgement that such social physics even exist. And until we can talk about root cause — which directly gets to the issue of psychosocial developmental issues across society, such as how to build identity and responsibility for larger society inside its citizenry, we are stuck on the lowest energy path for a society.

And that ain’t pretty.

The Memetics of Alex Pretti’s Shooting

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Sandhill Crane Migration — Othello, WA

One of the craziest things to happen in the past week is the shooting of Alex Pretti, a protester/obstructionist in the current insurrection occurring around ICE operations in Minneapolis, MN. The actual micro-facts of exactly how Pretti ended up getting shot by ICE agents are in dispute, which are where arguments occur nowadays.

But we can learn a lot about where our country’s memetics are by listening to the arguments around his killing. We know for example:

  1. He had a pistol — a 9 mm Sig Sauer.
  2. He had been involved in prior protests, and apparently had broken a rib.
  3. He had a concealed carry permit for his handgun.
  4. He was reacting to a woman in an altercation with ICE agents.
  5. He was part of a Signal app text network that sent individuals to ICE arrest scenarios.
  6. He’s dead.

What follows is more fascinating than just his death. What is interesting to me is HOW people discuss it.

The biggest element is his legality in carrying a gun into such a situation. The lower complexity discussion centers around whether he had a Second Amendment right to carry a pistol in that situation. I believe he absolutely did. Various people have argued that he didn’t have his papers on him. OK. Another correct, but ungrounded, low responsibility argument. Having papers stuffed in his pocket would not have prevented him from getting shot.

But what is completely ignored is whether he SHOULD have carried a gun.

When someone argues he had the right, what they’re really telling you is that the person speaking understands relationships as externally defined. He had the right to carry the gun. Society gave him that right. But what it doesn’t consider is his level of personal agency and independent responsibility in carrying it. It was lethally stupid to decontextualize his decision making into some kind of absolute right. And now he’s dead.

When I was involved in a lengthy Civil Disobedience campaign regarding protection of native wildlands in Idaho, we had a rule for the encampment I helped construct. NO GUNS. We had that rule because it was a good rule — that guns and the chaos inherent in protest, civil or illegal, don’t mix. And that guns far too often give law enforcement a reason to shoot you. And while the legal part may grind on, if you’re on the receiving end of a bullet, you’re still likely to be dead. Activists involved in the campaign did all sorts of crazy stuff — from living in trees, to extended blockades of roads. But NO activists were killed.

And the cops had guns. You better believe it. As the campaign dragged on, US Forest Service law enforcement even upped their training/recruitment, and produced essentially Special Forces, trained to go into the forest after activists, who were pulling all sorts of shenanigans to slow down logging activities. These guys had machine guns, the whole bit. Yet not one activist was shot in the whole crazy shitshow that were the latter years of the Cove-Mallard campaign.

The reason that we did not carry guns was because we were GROUNDED in reality. It wasn’t that hard to figure out someone would get shot in the context of the largely peaceful protests (there was vandalism, make no mistake about it.). But we were independently thoughtful. And the structure of the campaign promoted agency. Anyone wanting to do “night work” was people the rest of us did NOT want to hear about. People organized themselves into Affinity Groups of 2-3 people, and no one wanted to hear about anyone’s plans, unless it was a formal public action that was intended to be a demonstration, for media consumption. In fact, the way our brains were wired at the time, if SOMEONE wanted to hear, that probably meant they were a fed. And we had a few.

What Alex Pretti’s shooting shows, more than anything else, is not how ICE has changed. It shows the principles I’ve discussed in this piece — that the Left has become ungrounded from the actual reality of their actions. If you’re rushing a cop, and you are wearing a weapon, and you DON’T get shot, that’s a miracle. What is fascinating is to see how the Left is papering over the shooting, somehow trying to re-write rules of engagement with law enforcement, that now cops must delay action in an altercation if they see someone with a gun. The only thing that LEOs will do in that situation is exactly what they did to Alex Pretti. Unload a clip into him.

Attempting to have the system take revenge on itself is a more than cynical maneuver by leadership to create martyrs.

I’ve got some bad news. Ain’t gonna happen. And Pretti paid the price.

Memetic Conflict and Perceived Moral Order

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments
North Fork Clearwater, Idaho, Drone Shot

One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.

The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.

Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.

Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.

This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.

This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.

The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.

And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.

Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.

This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?

Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.

Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.

And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)

But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.

Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.

And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.

And that means someone is going to get severely burned.

Brave New Memetic World

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

With my little buddy, somewhere in the Arabian Desert

“You can’t fix stupid.” Ron White

One of the most disturbing videos I’ve seen in the last couple of days (and that’s saying something) is this press conference involving a potentially second generation Somali woman, Nasra Ahmed (she’s 23) who apparently got wrestled by ICE after spitting on some agents during a detainment and banged her head. She was being used as a prop in a press conference, by an ensemble of civic leaders who, of course, want ICE gone. It’s become obvious that Minneapolis/St. Paul has evolved into a hub of public corruption, and apparently the various NGO and political leadership have some belief that everything will just return to normal, and the illicit federal dollars will just start flowing again if the current federal Republican administration will just go away, taking ICE with them.

All this is pretty sordid, of course. But what the video shows is not that. What the video shows is a group of leaders, along with their prop, that are obviously functioning low on the complexity scale across all their behaviors. They don’t really appear to be all there — especially the young woman. And while it’s easy to chalk this up to nerves (her interlocutors definitely want this to be the case, and when they realize she’s atom-bombing on the big stage, get out the shepherd’s crook) there’s something else afoot. They are not processing data at anything necessary to be a compelling force in society. Ahmed’s story is monotonous and repetitive. And her handlers are not much better.

ChatGPT says that Ahmed is likely born in the US, and her accent likely indicates she was raised in this country. Her father, also the father to six more siblings, is likely married to his cousin, and is definitely an immigrant. The problem is that these people would be considered hopelessly stupid. Various aggregations of Somali IQs indicate the average is 78. And while this might be OK back in their Somali homeland, it is problematic when navigating in, or integrating into a complex society like the US. They aren’t mentally handicapped per se (or whatever the politically correct term is.). And our expectations of them are to be able to navigate all our complex systems — like filing taxes, or purchasing a home. Good luck. None of these things are simple. And across the board, even in the last 40 years, our culture has been shot out of a cannon as far as information complexity. It’s all been done for all sorts of ostensible reasons of fairness, justice and whatnot. But even simple tasks now are not simple.

And we are both importing, as well as creating through the decline in educating our own children, a whole sub-caste of people who just cannot keep up.

We have current measures like IQ, or even SAT scores, that are brandished like some means of accurately sorting who goes where. But academia has really not shown any interest in really diving deep into the epistemological roots of knowledge, or how they are functionally used. The amount of interest in work like mine, in the limit, approaches zero. But I’m not the only one working in knowledge complexity. I often cite the Grand Old Man of epistemology, Michael Lamport Commons, and his model for hierarchical complexity (MHC) as a more agnostic form of understanding which thoughts are harder thoughts for human brains to think. One of the more interesting, which comes more naturally to intellectuals, is cross-paradigmatic reasoning (e.g. a giraffe is like a penguin… etc.). But this mode is almost inaccessible to more and more people. They don’t even understand why you would draw such an analogy. Or even what an analogy is in the first place. This is difficult for most advanced cultures to accept — surely, everyone uses analogies. But analogies are difficult in the neural sphere. I’ve been fortunate to be in enough classroom situations, and have students NOT get it, that I know this is far from a sure thing with undeveloped audiences. Not the analogy itself — but the IDEA of a dissimilar comparison.

One of my buddies I’ve been working with, Dr. Joseph Biello, is a mathematician and atmospheric scientist at UC Davis. While I do not teach any introductory classes, Joe still has to shoulder the burden of teaching introductory calculus every other year or so. He remarks on how slippage in intellectual capacity is haunting his efforts. And what he talks about is the variability — the range of ability of students. It’s not just having the background classes (everyone’s go-to explanation when trying to explain why students suffer in math.). It’s that the range of kids in our classes is becoming so extreme, we cannot, through tutoring or other extraordinary efforts, lift those kids into passing Calc 1.

There’s something else going on — and that something might be called Structural Memetic Reach. They cannot think the thoughts necessary to pass Calculus 1, because the fragmentation of thought, and their ability to process rule-following algorithms, cannot permit it. They are memetic inferiors to the kids who can pass and actually even understand the material in the class. It’s a DIFFERENT problem. And trust me — we, in academia, are not discussing this in any meaningful framework that would matter. Most go back to the notion of remedial work, and poor teaching.

But the reality is that it’s more like mathematical dyslexia. The symbol set we’ve used to define the principles of Calculus, which really is more about understanding how to relate different rates than anything else, for those that know nothing, or are intimidated by the notion of calculus, appear in a hopeless jumble above the students. They simply cannot make these things into anything resembling a coherent narrative, because that level of complex narrative structure, that requires first mapping some words to symbols, and those symbols to sequences, and then those sequences to an algorithm/rule, don’t reside in enough connected circuits in their heads. You’re not going to teach these kids Calculus, any more than you would hope to teach a monkey calculus. The circuits are just not there. And no — the kids are NOT monkeys. But we are starting to see divisions in cognitive complexity that sort the haves versus the have-nots.

(I should note — calculus itself is kind of a hot-button term for lots of the math-phobic, who may be limited in their mathematical ability. But I happen to think there’s also a lot of bad math instruction out there too. )

In earlier times, this complexity problem sorted itself out through representative scales of human societies. In the 1800s, if you wanted to be a true internationalista, you had to board a sailing ship. You were a microscopic part of any given population. And even 50 years ago, you had to get on a jet if you wanted to evolve your worldview. But with the globalization of the Internet, the forces driving complexification are literally everywhere. That dumps on our head the problem that folks with the hardware for complexity can access knowledge and become higher level thinkers. But if you don’t have the requisite background or hardware, you’re really screwed. You are going to be shunted into a lower caste whether you like it or not.

Relational modalities, as I’ve written extensively about on this blog, are going to matter. Coming from a high trust society, even one in decline like the US, is still an enormous advantage with regards to cognitive ability. But if you start in a tribal society, it’s going to be almost impossible to bootstrap yourself into higher modes of thought complexity. It’s not just work ethic, or tribal taboos. You don’t even know what you’re missing, because those modes are literally above your head.

And this is going to drive conflict. Lower complexity societies live in a world where violence is part of life. What happens when a lower complexity cohort abuts a higher complexity cohort? Does anyone think this is going to work out swimmingly? Civilization, and especially Western civilization is a real thing. It’s a way for lots of people to live next to each other, with enough complex systems, so everyone has enough and people don’t kill each other, while persisting through knowledge transfer to younger generations so they can assume future roles necessary to keep the whole machine rolling. When we fail to understand the core elements of complexity in our civilization, and openly attack it because of some nonsense moral value, we are shaping our own demise.

In the near future, there is going to be a cacophony out of academia that this baseline of thought doesn’t exist (the idiot post-modern nonsense), that anyone can be educated, and all we need is a little more time. As universities lose enrollment, the wishful thinking that education can cure all ills — all we need to do is tweak the software — is going to come on fast and hard. Higher education is a major industry in this country, and one that caters to the export market. But aside from creating a pleasant respite for four years for those that have the money, there is going to be a growing caste of people who simply can’t do Calculus, or other complex thought, for hardware-based reasons. And there aren’t enough smart people in universities either who can meaningfully confront this problem. When it comes to teaching, I always laugh when I hear people say the problem is that people just need to take some courses in the College of Education. I’ve met vanishingly few people in those Colleges willing to even talk about this. And they never ask me to come lecture. Note to audience — as we sort through all this, it can’t just be intellectuals at the table. Intellectual communities are prone to psychopathic takeover. After they figure out how to rate and rank, they inevitably want to kill all those in some arbitrary outgroup.

We’ve just started to run into the brutality of a Brave New World, a la Huxley, but along information complexity lines. And it’s not going to get better. What we are going to do with those that have true ability, vs. those that do not, will decide our fate as a species. If there’s a distant anthropological analogy, it’s more akin to what Homo sapiens sapiens probably did to Homo Neanderthalensis – kill them all off. It’s my fervent hope that we recognize this in advance of the crux.

Addendum — I’ve done a lot of work on knowledge complexity. Here’s a graphic that can help you understand a little. IQ does not dent this, primarily being a measure of sophistication — not evolution.

Quickie Post — Using Images to Psychopathically Relocate Debate

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Welsh Countryside

One of the more pathologically interesting recent trends in journalism — it’s been going on for about the last 30 years — is creating new nominally ethical, but actually classic double-bind rules about what pictures, depicting people involved, that should be shown in stories. Pictures of any sort are very interesting from a neurogenic perspective, because they enter through one of most evolved pieces of hardware in the brain — the visual cortex. And because our evolutionary history is such that we “see” something, and then act on it, there are ingrained patterns in the visual cortex about risk evaluation to our persons that inherently happen there, or adjacent.

I can’t remember when it started exactly, but the shift seemed to occur with covering murders or school shootings. The ostensibly virtuous crowd said “we shouldn’t put the picture of the shooter up! We should honor the victims!” And while on the surface, that seems nice, it’s a diabolical hack on how the brain works. The brain WANTS to recognize threats. And when you put up a picture of slaughtered schoolchildren, all you do is provide traumatic pattern-matching for parents, while at the same time, avoiding any real information transmission to the larger body politic on where the problem actually is.

Certainly this is done with random murders. Like it or not, the vast majority of murders are committed by black males in their teens and twenties. But you can see how this might go against the agendas of those looking to cover up this chronic problem, which sadly affects individuals in the black community more than anyone.

Worse, you start shifting the larger meta-meaning of pictures in general. If the only pictures that are shown, over time, are victims, the brain can be trained to then believe anyone having their photo taken in a violent situation is a victim. Context is established merely through publication.

Recently, in the contested street violence in Minneapolis, MN, over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the media has been portraying various protestors, especially in static photo form, as victims. But if you watch any of the plethora of videos, you’ll not see peaceful protests, nor protestors. What you WILL see is a selection of people (primarily middle-aged white women) behaving like monkeys laced with methamphetamine, screaming at the top of their lungs, at ICE agents attempting to arrest illegal immigrants. This particular cadre of illegal immigrants is not law-abiding. There is a current amnesty policy for these immigrants that if they self-deport, they will be given a free plane ticket and $3000 for their troubles. That means you can expect the ones that refuse the deal to also be fugitives, and will run like hell when the noose closes.

And they do, which then interjects screaming meth monkey protestors in with the Running Man. The ICE agents are actually in the middle of the mess. And if you know much about any arrest scenario, it is never gentle. Chris Rock, the famous comedian, has said “if you run from the police, expect to get an ass-whooping.” The fact that the middle-aged female meth monkey contingent are surprised by any of this shows how insulated they are from reality.

Here’s where the psychopathy of the press comes in. The press is all down with Collapse Narratives — promoting stories that will generate societal collapse — so the recent inversion of photographic meaning suits their purposes to a T. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran this picture on their front page.

Now consider past programming. Your instantaneous reaction is this person must be a victim, and experiencing violence for no other reason than ICE is evil. That is the result of the endless conditioning discussed above. And here’s the ambiguity — I don’t know the exact environmental conditions at the time of this photo. But the fact that the photographer can get in so close to an arrest scenario guarantees that ICE is actually remarkably restrained. And if this guy ended up getting this treatment, I guarantee he was going full “meth monkey” before ICE tossed him to the ground and immobilized him.

Lots of psychopathic things are going on just in this scenario. Abuse of the definition of what a 1st Amendment right to protest is one of them. But the whole thing is not as emergent as it seems. Photographers AND movement activists manipulate circumstances to win public opinion. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell even discussed the history in the Civil Rights movement that had psychopathic staging generated by activist Wyatt Walker , which generated the famous photos of children being attacked by dogs in 1963 Birmingham.

The bottom line is the same, of course. Psychopathic manipulation using reversed core psychology is everywhere in our media markets. The goal of all of this is to make you believe that things are what you think you see, where your native instincts provide the context. But it’s that preying on your hardware that’s going on. And it’s almost always to get you to act against your interests. Like an anglerfish dangling its bait in front of your hapless face, the goal is to swallow you whole.

Psychopaths, Innumeracy, and Greenland

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Winter day above the Clearwater River

One of the largest problems facing society in the current complexity crisis is the chronic persistence of innumeracy. If we remember that expanded relational sense actually relies on understandings of time and space, then innumeracy is a root cause. You can’t have a sense of history if you have no anchoring in what it means to live 50 years ago — let alone 1000 years ago. And our understanding of spatial scales is also tied to innumeracy. One of my favorite tells of being American is identification with the state in which you reside. If you’re talking to anyone outside the US, unless you’re in California, Texas or New York, you’re going to get a bemused blank stare. Certainly not going to help you understand where Vietnam is.

And in a world increasingly dominated by numbers, that’s a problem. Because you’re supposed to ‘get’ this locational sense. And that means when you don’t, people are going to think you’re an idiot. A classic emperor’s new clothes deal — folks oughta know better. But they just don’t.

Of course, understanding any number is key on establishing context — which may include even more numbers, or transforms of numbers. And when that’s the case, you have to add either algorithms, or best guesses, or maybe even shared perceptions. It gets complicated quickly. Or rather, complex. And what does that mean? The minute things get too scrambled, we scurry around looking for an authority to tell us what this means.

Which is where the problem arises. The minute you go looking for that authority, you are now playing in the field of psychopathy. Psychopaths are the ones that are more than happy to take your perceptions — maybe in your conscious mind — and turn them into emotions. And once that happens, you’re open to manipulation. The psychopath doesn’t even have to understand the numbers, nor their meaning, themselves. One of the aspects of beauty of the new world of AI and LLMs is we are seeing you don’t really need any understanding of anything to train your own personal LLM inside your head in spitting out an actionable response that will move a token around on the game board. You just have to have run that program through enough training data to know you’re going to get the outcome you want. One of my favorite scenes, in one of my favorite movies, ‘The Dark Knight” (with Heath Ledger’s Joker) is in the hospital, where Two-Face accuses him of having a plan. “Do I look like a guy with a plan? I’m just a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.”

So that’s what psychopaths do. And it’s wickedly effective in a society that refuses to slow down and think.

One of my favorite uses of innumeracy as a weapon of terror is the current kerfuffle over Greenland. If you go out on the street, and ask folks how many people live in Greenland, you’re likely to get puzzled looks from most folks. Most people have no idea how many people live anywhere, let alone Greenland. Don’t believe me? Go ask folks how many people live in Germany.

But some brave souls will guess. 1 million? 10 million?

The actual answer is 56 thousand, give or take. (FWIW — this is the population size of the isolated area I live in.) And if they’re tuned into the news at all, they’ve likely heard that Donald Trump is currently machinating to take control of Greenland. 51st state or whatever. The real reason, besides some degree of personal ego, is that, if you look at a polar projection map of Greenland, you’ll see it is extremely strategically located for missile and sea defense. We actually own the only military base on Greenland — Pituffik Space Base, where we have a bunch of enormous ballistic missile early warning systems (BMEWS) that look across the polar region to see if Russia is attempting to annihilate us. Greenland is important in the context of creating Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan for missile defense.

Now here’s where the innumeracy and confusion comes in. Headlines regularly blare “US will go to war with Europe over Greenland!” or “The European Union sends troops to Greenland to defend against US aggression or threats of seizure!” Troops are obviously an amalgam mental model inside media market heads — and the transformation algorithm is to take some idea of the situation and move it into people’s limbic/emotional regions, so they can, well, basically, hate Donald Trump.

The number of troops from European partners sent to Greenland? At the time, less than 50. And Greenland, with only a couple of small towns on it (and some more abandoned US military facilities) wouldn’t have much of a place to host them. Maybe they could get located at the facility at Pituffik. But that would be quite odd — welcoming a defending force inside the only military facility of the nation who supposedly wants to take control of the island.

Now here’s the rub. MAYBE psychopaths have realized the ludicrousness of all the actual numbers, and are constructing that mental model that will get people to hate Trump even more (a TDS viral accelerator, as it were.). But maybe not. Maybe it’s actually just a great angle for a relational disruption and chaos strategy across the board, for a non-event that is really a non-event. No one’s asking what a takeover of Greenland by the US military would do on anything but paper — which is actually the critical aspect of it. Declaration of Greenland being a US protectorate would be critical in telling Russia and China that weird stuff is not going to be tolerated. And it also likely will put other threats to bed preemptively.

Like China and Russia drilling for oil! Or mining for rare earth minerals. That must be the real reason for Trump’s obsession! And with Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Greenland is really going to be green Real Soon Now.

And now we can see the exploitation of innumeracy once again. If you go out, once again, and ask folks how long it’s going to take to melt all the ice on Greenland, you’ll hear answers like ’20 years’. Or ’50 years’. Because we’re approaching the point of Global Boiling!

But once you jump off the Great Dichotomy — that the planet is going to become uninhabitable in 50 years — the numbers really don’t add up. Our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 1000-10,000 years to melt all of Greenland’s ice. Big error bars (not that this matters) but basically we don’t know. And I could say a whole bunch of math-y stuff how all this is based on some linear model, and so on. Blah, blah, blah.

“But it doesn’t matter!” screams the psychopathic contingent. “Over 100 GIGATONS of ice a year melt off of Greenland!” Whenever you hear gigatons, you better be scared. No mention of the context for any of this — Greenland ice volume (note wikipedia measures volume, but loss rates are in mass, to confuse people)

2.9 million cubic kilometers = 2.9  x 10^15 cubic meters = 2.9 x 10^18 kg  (more or less). And reality is lost in the fact that 100 GT is really not very much at all.

And no one has any interest in popping down a level to what it would take to actually mine sites in Greenland. Greenland has 1 mine for anorthosite — a material that can be used for high temp construction material, and also a potential for titanium. Mining someplace like Greenland is hellishly hard — you gotta really want what’s under the ground — and the odds of it being accessible without a ton of ice on it is just not realistic at all. I’ve worked with a company in Labrador with my students. It was just a fun thought exercise on what do you do with all that snow you’ve got to deal with.

But psychopaths are not going to have a problem exploiting any of the ignorance around actually producing results from mining. Nor do they need to know the veracity of any potential claims. When your goal is chaos, that’s what you gear your training data for.

Does that mean there are no psychopaths with a conscious plan of manipulation on any of the basics of Greenland? Of course not. There might be a couple of smarties out there who have figured out what the public doesn’t know. But the minute the gigaton numbers come marching out, you don’t really need much. The psychopathic LLM kicks into overdrive, looks for hot spots (war! money! monomaniacal Trump!) and rapidly creates contemporaneous messages to support the bullshit. Chaos is the point, after all. There will be no epiphanies after the chaos campaign falls apart. It will just be on to the next point that might work.

And no one’s talking about how an ounce of prevention might be worth a pound of cure. That’s the whole metacognition thing — knowing what you don’t know. We’re just downstream of yanking Maduro out of Venezuela because of decades of neglect about dealing with a regime that allowed Hezbollah to produce long-range drones in our backyard, give a controlling interest in oil to China, and participate in poisoning our citizens with fentanyl and cocaine. Maybe a little preemptive, judicious action in another hot spot of potential global contention against real adversaries – what X mutual, @vtchakarova Velina Tchakarova calls the DragonBear (Russia and China together) might not be so stupid. In fact, it might be really smart.

But the psychopaths come out, with their magic blanket of fear. And here we are.

If there’s a remedy for any of this, just remember. The math isn’t complicated. But you gotta get your thought process to slow down, and say “huh” a lot. That dissipates that innumeracy cloud faster than any statistics class. Repeat after me: “that don’t make NO sense!”

P.S. I wrote another piece on innumeracy and COVID here. It’s quite good. COVID was driven by psychopathic manipulation of innumeracy. And it ain’t gonna get fixed just by taking another statistics course. I did go out and do a casual ‘man on the street’ sampling on what people believed the death rate from COVID was — most people said ~ 10%. Actual rate, just for your edification, was ~.05%. Typical respiratory winter numbers.

H/T to pal Joe Biello, who I work on climate issues with. Thanks, Joe!

Venezuela and The Return of National Interest

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Tool Cabinet, 2026. In case you’re wondering, I use ~ 5 of these for 95% of my woodworking.

I am writing this on Sunday, January 4, functionally the day after US Delta Force troops seized the head of the Venezuelan government, Nicholas Maduro, from the Presidential Palace in Caracas. To call it audacious would be an understatement. A coordinated force, launched primarily from an offshore fleet, mobilized helicopters, a slew of different aircraft types, including a B1-B!, and successfully evaded detection by Chinese radar long enough to destroy the entire Chinese armament Venezuela had imported. It is unclear, at least to me, the extent that the Iranians had constructed drone factories inside Venezuela, but I suspect these were hit as well. Talk about a bad investment.

If you had to pick a scenario to illustrate the complexity crisis in memetics, you couldn’t pick a more profound example. The Left immediately condemned snatching Maduro, a mass murderer by anyone’s yardstick, under the worn-out aegis of colonialism, while Venezuelans themselves were dancing in the street. Immediately, the anti-colonial propaganda machine spun up the usual condemnations of the invasion, saying it was oil for Trump’s buddies as the primary reason for the war — a claim they have been pre-bunking for a while, in an attempt to discredit the sinking of drug running boats and submersibles out of the Venezuelan ports as being in the interest of the United States. As their lede goes, there can be no legitimate external or internal action to preserve the United States — as the most hegemonic, evil state in history, we’ve gotta go down.

Fortunately, not everyone in the current government agrees with them. The information flows in the country, increasingly complicated, and not supportable by the sophistication of the previous bureaucracy, was going to simplify and decentralize. Those are the memetic physics, and you cannot run from that. But the how of that transition matters a great deal to those of us that live here. MAGA has attempted to be turned into a slur by the Democrats — but for those of us that live here, and are not planning on exiting to a Riviera, Mexican, French or otherwise, has widespread support as a guiding principle. That doesn’t mean that the lumpenproletariat has any clue what actions this actually entails, other than not giving away a ton of foreign aid to other countries. But certainly, allowing Russia and China to build up a military force on the other side of the Gulf of America isn’t such a hot idea. That is definitely not in the national interest.

And so a realignment of the Venezuela junta, that spent a good hunk of time publicly declaring its hatred for America, was really inevitable. Those in power, and in the know, who do NOT want to leverage collapse to add to their personal family fortunes, were sooner or later going to be all in. It’s one thing to have a socialist/communist government in our hemisphere down at the tail of South America. It’s quite another to have one on your doorstep.

What’s amazing is that Venezuela, as a failed narco-state, is such an obvious one. Here’s a hint how you can tell. Any failed state will be accompanied by refugee outflows of the middle and upper classes before the peasantry starts hoofing it for the border. If you can get out, you get out. I got a window into that last year when I visited Costa Rica. Conversations with locals indicated that Venezuelan teachers, doctors and whatnot were showing up quite a while ago. What WAS interesting was that in places like El Salvador, who experienced their mass migration before President Nayeb Bukele took office, the Venezuelans merely showed up into empty slots that were waiting for them. So maybe, just maybe, the signal that should have been heeded was lost on the rest of the world — the bourgeoisie simply were too busy re-settling in their new environs.

But any country hemorrhaging its people is a failed state. People don’t leave until they have to. The semi-official number of people fleeing is in the neighborhood of 8 million, out of a country of approximately 28 million. That’s gotta be up there with Cambodia at the end of the US Vietnam period.

It should be said that any narco-state does not have the interests of the U.S. at heart. The drug war has metastasized into a full-on tool of internal destruction inside the U.S. Once again, numbers are hard to come by (amazingly). But at least 1/2 million Americans have died in the last ten years. What is even more tragic is the number of children — I deep-dove this figure and came up with about 5000 in the last ten years. That means 500 kids/year are dying from fentanyl poisoning. Because drug overdose is often self-administered, the old mental models get spun up in varying ways about the responsibility for the deaths. But kids are kids — and even if they’re 17, they mostly get a break regarding total accountability for their actions.

Why are we so stuck in the current situation? We’ve got the mass death at our door. But we simply cannot change our mental models on what non-kinetic warfare really looks like. In a best case scenario, we should sort allies from adversaries on whether they are cracking down on production of fentanyl and associated chemicals inside their borders. Yet the fentanyl still streams from China, as well as Venezuela, and especially Mexico. If you cannot control production of chemicals inside your own country, if you’re not registered as a failed state, you’re damn close. Or if not a failed state, a true adversary.

And at a minimum, those states and their justifications are the last thing we should be listening to. It’s a war, folks, like it or not. You pay attention to your adversaries. But you don’t suck up their propaganda.

Understanding the Venezuela crisis also requires shattering of old models of how we perceive how we operate in our own hemisphere. Whether we exercised the Monroe Doctrine or not, we believed it to be true. But that’s not what has been happening Everyone from non-state actors like Hezbollah, to the usual suspects of Russia and China, have been operating in Venezuela. And their actions are profoundly not in our interests. But the American public can’t even conceive that Lebanese terrorists could be running around in our literal backyard. It never comes up in any discussions I read. And the fact that it took Trump drawing that hard line against them is more a sign of past managerial neglect towards the American empire than anything else. Once you get your government filled with enough globalists and collapse advocates, this kind of thing was inevitable. We are the world. Indeed.

And the connections between Iran and Venezuela are indisputable. Iranian drones were being manufactured in Venezuela. Do people really think that they were going to be used against Trinidad? But it’s all so fantastic, and requires a knowledge of geography elusive to the modern American, we end up back with the notion that it’s another war for oil. Look folks, oil is fungible — and what that means is that oil from Texas looks like oil from Venezuela like oil from Saudi Arabia, once you mess around a little with the chemistry and sulfur content. The per-barrel price is the only thing that dictates who gets it. But who gets the money FROM it does change. And that’s the North Star of how to understand any oil-related crisis.

What’s more interesting is tracking the stuff that is scarce. This piece by Tracy ShuChart (on Substack) is a must-read for all Illuminati wannabes. Venezuela turns out to be a much bigger play than oil. And as China attempts to use its various rare earth surpluses as a political tool to bring the US to heel — not too much, because if we stop buying their junk, their own middle class will revolt — Venezuela shows up there, conveniently, as a potential proxy supplier. If we had a news media that had some sense (we don’t — they are mostly composed of traitorous, whining fools) these folks would be getting out a global map and the red yarn to tie together the network China is using to corner the market on all the stuff, like tantalum and coltan, that makes all our new spooky devices actually work. So if you were China, why wouldn’t you reach out to an ally with no scruples, who could in combo form, kill off your adversary’s children with fentanyl, while destroying their supply chain for all their high tech? And why wouldn’t you help that same partner stock up on suicide bombers, still smarting from all the US action in the Middle East? It’s one helluva play — but if it went off, the chaos generated would be spectacular.

And the United States Lefty corps will be there to pre-bunk everything, and keep us in a state of paralytic senescence. We deserved it after all. Black Lives Mattered — until they became inconvenient as well.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s that any functional state needs a national interest. And that national interest needs to be grounded and real. And the US is allowed to have one.It gets back to the whole Collapse Narrative thing I’ve been writing about. The short form for the cheap seats in the back — you can always tell a Collapse Narrative by its lack of anything other than babbling moral principles. It’s not that principles don’t matter. But if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

One of the most preposterous Collapse Narratives is that by snatching Maduro, somehow China and Russia are emboldened in their own personal territorial quests. “If they did that, we can do what WE want.” So far, Russia and China have proved to be far more rational, self-interested actors than that. They ain’t out there for world peace, folks. And any nation that would help create the chemicals for fentanyl production is no real friend of ours. When they see us grab Maduro, they know the marble game is for keeps. And only seditious traitors like Mark Kelley, the Senator from Arizona, are going to try to spin it differently. China and Russia aren’t going to feel like the door is more open for their own territorial adventurism. They’re going to know that if we say something is important to us, we mean it. That’s the way functional hegemons work. And ALL nation-states are their own little hedgehogs. Don’t fool yourself.

None of this means that the runway to a bright future for Venezuela is free and clear. Left in place are the various junta members that helped Maduro do the bad stuff he did. But they are a bunch of rats — that’s what happens to your soul when you justify killing your own people. Trump has announced that we’re going to run Venezuela (Marco Rubio must be rubbing his brow), and I’m sure part of that message was that he was gonna kill them if they didn’t do what he asked them to do. Sometimes, the way you approach societal evolution is to have your leadership order it. And then hope that it takes. To a far lesser degree, it’s what I do in my own classes in design.

But success in Venezuela is going to be hinged on one thing — remigration of its professional class. Our job has to be giving Venezuelans enough hope for a new society that those people will come back. Because societies fundamentally run on information and information complexity. But in order to have information complexity, you’ve got to first have information.

I’m saying a prayer for Venezuela. And crossing my fingers as well. We could use a little luck about now.

And don’t forget — sometimes you go the Great Game. But sometimes, the Great Game comes to you.

Why Won’t the Left Support the Iranian Revolution?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Stradivarius, Florence, Italy

Why won’t the Left in the United States support the current citizen’s revolution in Iran? If we want to understand why, we have to realize that all these actions occur in The Matrix, as well as on the top level.

A brief update. Approximately a week ago, across Iran, massive public demonstrations have been held against the mullahs and the Islamic Republic. The deeper history locates the start in Iran’s Kurdistan, in the town of Saqqez, centered on the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, after detention by Iran’s morality police in Tehran in 2022. The protests have bubbled along for awhile, but exploded last week across Iran. Though the collapsing economy certainly primed the pump, the treatment of women by the Islamic Republic’s mullahs have driven the moral compass on efforts to overthrow the current regime.

As I’ve written in this piece, Iran is not a ‘downstream tribal’ nation like Saudi Arabia. The population is split into multiple cultural and memetic groups, which range from tribal peasants to modern-day Performance-based liberals. Iran has some of the trappings of a Performance-based Communitarian society, in that its defense programs are likely the most advanced of any Third-World-esque outlaw nation. You don’t invent nuclear weapons nor sophisticated drones without the ability to have advanced social organization. And advanced social organization requires people to possess their own minds — agency.

In the wake of the bombings of the nuclear weapon Fordow and Natanz sites, less reported were other casualties of Israel’s and Iran’s 12 Day War (June 13-June 25, 2025) and Israel’s destruction of key centers of the Islamic Republic’s military ‘civilian suppression’ units. The Thar Allah Corps, Delman Corps, Special Unit in Khavoran, and the Imam Hassan Alborz Corps were four firebases stationed around Tehran to attack the local populace in the case of unrest and uprising. Because of their consolidation during the war — all members reporting in — Israel launched major attacks and basically killed the mullahs’ population suppression shock troops, creating prime conditions for a revolution. As this is being written, the mullahs are attempting to import Arab jihadis from Iraq and Syria to fill in these roles. It is not clear whether they will succeed (I expect Israeli intervention in any kind of mass airlift) but my guess is they will not.

It is important to understand, at least a little, why Islamic regimes are inherently anachronistic and incapable of long-term persistence. Iran long ago left being a Tribal v-Meme society (look at the long history of empires in its cultural record) and was, during the latter part of the 20th century, moving into the meme set of a Legalistic/Performance-based democracy. But this evolutionary progression simply got too far ahead of its leadership — Reza Shah was historically an autocrat and elite, and armed with Savak, a feared secret police, as well as a large peasant caste that was mired back in the Middle Ages. The result was that the regime collapsed, with some help, as well as disinterest from Western forces, and the mullahs took over. Organization and social evolution will always carry the day.

The problem with the level of psychosocial development of any hard core Islamic republic is that Islam, in its core beliefs, is stuck in Tribal/Authoritarian hegemony. Mental models are unchanged literally across centuries. And that means they’re primed to be taken over by psychopaths — which is what happened. Ceilinged out in complicated legalism, the individual has no agency in the face of the mullahs. And there is no allowance for individuals to develop in empathy past what the mullahs will allow. And Islam is very clear about maintaining second-class citizenry for those that don’t fall under the mullahs’ aegis. Don’t believe? Read about Jizya here — the dominant Somali mindset in the current set of fraud scandals in Minnesota.

All this might last for a long time in a pre-modern world (and did.). But influences from the outside are irresistible in the world of the Internet. When the signs of 21st century prosperity are only a click away, and one also gains the ability to broadcast your own plight to that world outside the mullah’s hegemony, regardless what happens with this revolt, the mullahs are living on borrowed time. Ask not who the Death of Geography comes for.

That doesn’t mean that blood will not be spilled. The various military organs of the Islamic State may be more than decimated — but they are not completely gone. And they have far more guns than the urban populations they are up against. A key noted element is whether the Army will refuse to shoot their own civilians, and turn toward the monarchists. We’ll see. I think the Army will turn — because the regime is driving the economy into the ground, and in the end, armies run on money.

So why, then, does the Left seem at best indifferent towards the mass protests in Iran? There is no memetic resonance between the conformance-demanding Left and the desire by the urban Iranian populace for more agency. In fact, it’s anathema. The Sophisticated Left — the Left that has some background knowledge on global affairs — keeps attempting to stand up organizations and agencies similar to what the mullahs have already created. Disinformation policing, messaging rigidity, moral condemnation of non-believers, and funding of special castes are the core of Leftist philosophy. All that’s left to differentiate is a call to prayer five times a day. The v-Meme matching between the punitive legalism and endless categorization of most of the Left in the Western world, and the destructive prescriptions of the mullahs meta-matches. Sure — they disagree on the top level (e.g. ‘treatment’ for homosexuality in Iran involves real conversion therapy — castration, though on second thought, maybe they’re not that physically far apart) but these are minor details. The deep structure of knowledge lines up, regarding who gets to dictate what people think, and who must be punished if their thought just doesn’t line up with the orthodoxy.

The last thing the Left wants to do is amplify the message of more agency. Much has been made about how various young people in the U.S. flocked to the Palestinian protests, and the assumption made was that those young people must have deeply understood the issue. Give me a break. The Palestinian protests were a social relief valve for young people deprived of 3 years of their social development by COVID restrictions. Protest movements were always a great way to get laid, and if you think no one was having sex in those tent cities, you don’t spend much time around post-adolescent adults.

For those that actually know what’s going on, the messages out of Iran are even more powerful against the Left. Iranians as a whole are exhausted with their government’s endless military adventurism across Iraq, Syria and Palestine. They’re the ones under Israel’s bombs, and what the urban class wants is NOT hyperinflation (the Rial, the Iranian currency has undergone something like 1000x inflation in the last 20 years) but some return to a modest prosperity that those of their educational caste have grown to expect. Iranians are very good at secret societies — this comes from literal 1000s of years of dealing with invaders. But by current global world trade standards, no one economy can exist today without trading with its neighbors. This notwithstanding the modest stream of supplies passing through Dubai, and on its way to Bandar al Abbas on the other side of the Persian Gulf.

And as I wrote in this piece, memetically the Left is profoundly wed to collapse. This made them natural allies with Hamas and their suicidal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. But the current zeitgeist of the Iranian resistance is far more akin to MAGA — more of a ‘Make Iran Great Again’ mindset. People are literally yelling in the street they don’t care about Israel OR Palestine.

The current figurehead of the Iranian resistance is Shah Reza Pahlavi II — who before he was exiled in 1979, used to fly an F-14 in the Iranian Air Force. Information is sparse on him, honestly. I have a bias against any Pahlavi– they have a notorious reputation in my own family toward killing my family members. But I’m going to hold out hope that if the Revolution is successful, that we will see a receding monarchy after order is established. I’m pretty sundered from the remainder of my relatives in Iran, but I can tell you that all the engineering scholars in the US have no desire to go back. And they are not going to get caught in a group of immigrants condemning America. They know what’s at stake.

This is an ever-evolving situation. I’m going to pray for the Iranian people. No one in the world has a corps of first-class Immiserators like the IRCG and the Islamic regime, and the Iranian people have suffered enough. They serve as a cautionary note if we let our own AWFULs get out of control. And I’d argue that it is the Iranian people’s time. They deserve to be free.

But as we know all too well, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.

Psychopathic Manipulation — A Case Study

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Sunset, along US 95 in the Owyhee Mountains, Idaho

As I write this, a huge breaking wave is coming on to politics across blue states in the US. Nick Shirley, a 23 year old Youtube Influencer, posted a 42 minute video profiling nonexistent day care centers ostensibly run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, MN. The video is great in that it is so facile — Nick and an activist named David merely matched disbursement records with visits to the actual day care sites, and witnessed no activity. The link is below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8AulCA1aOQ

Estimates of the fraud run into the tens of billions of dollars. But how does this happen? We’ll talk about a different, deep historic timeline — food and clean water charities around both the US and the world. And nope — this is not some “fact finding” kind of piece. My goal is to describe the dynamics of how people get taken in by psychopaths.

Consider the controversy around the current SNAP program in the United States. SNAP, hooked with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card, is how people enrolled in government food aid, can buy food from all sorts of food providers, and is just a renaming of the food stamp program. Eligibility is not hard to prove — almost anyone with a little bit of determination can get food aid. When I have students in financial distress, I often send them to sign up for the program.

But the program goes way back — to the Great Depression. Originally, food aid was founded in 1934 as a tool to help farmers get rid of agricultural surplus, but then evolved into the Food Stamp program that reached some form of functional maturity during the Great Society years of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 shifted from surplus reduction to hunger prevention. And though that shift did occur, it still leaned into agricultural surplus. My grandmother, who had been poor most of her life (she was a character) would always be first in line when the semi truck of excess “government cheese” showed up in town. It was actually really good.

In 2008, food stamps were rebranded through the SNAP act, and the paper stamps were replaced with electronic debit cards. The program was expanded once again during the COVID years of 2020-2022, and included emergency allotments, as well as online grocery purchases.

The point of these programs was to eradicate hunger — and now one gets into the arena of manipulation. We are still bombarded constantly with charities talking about hunger relief. At some level, one can at least believe the story of hunger overseas — we aren’t there, though studies have shown that the majority force of hunger around the world is war. But in the United States, we still hold food drives and such. How does hunger still occur?

Or does it?

If you are advocating for any program, clearly one of the easiest is hunger eradication. Hunger, and especially, the IDEA of hunger has been a standard memetic cudgel as long as authoritarian governments have been in existence. And as the history shows, it is one of the oldest government programs in continuous existence. If someone confronts you on your charity, no one wants to be the one arguing FOR hunger. In fact, the strength of the virtue of the mental model associated with hunger is so powerful, there’s few humans in the United States who will argue for any reduction in these programs.

And the minute you have that level of mental model solidity, you have a tool for program growth — as well as an attractant for psychopaths looking to run a grift using hunger as the primary issue. Recent attempts by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. to even reduce the items allowable to be purchased using EBT cards – namely soda pop and candy- have caused a firestorm. As of January 1, 2026, only 18 states will eliminate purchases of these items with SNAP benefits.

Further, in our day of decentralized media, the reduction in purchase range by SNAP has spawned hundreds of videos of people complaining about the changes. Obese people are on social media, complaining how their reduction of benefits will mean they can no longer get their nails done, or buy other luxuries. Reduction in SNAP benefits and the effects on other items purchased have not been formally studied — but dips in the luxury tennis shoe market indicate potential linkages.

And grocers are concerned — these are the legitimate ones — that reductions in SNAP benefits will cut into their profits. None of them want to comment on any of this — Walmart’s SNAP sales are around 1/4 of its grocery sales. But individuals abusing SNAP benefits as a crime is hard to prove.

More easy to look at another program in the current spotlight for fraud associated with food aid programs — the Feeding our Future program in Minnesota. Same memetic structure.

Federal prosecutors allege that between 2020–2022, FOF and affiliated operators:

  • Claimed to serve tens of thousands of children per day at hundreds of sites that did not exist or barely operated.
  • Submitted fabricated meal counts, invoices, and attendance logs.
  • Used shell companies to launder reimbursement money.
  • Spent funds on luxury homes, cars, jewelry, travel, and overseas transfers.

The thing that is interesting about this is how poorly covered by the media AND government it is. Psychopathic manipulation of taboos — in this case, anything with helping ostensibly alleviating hunger– is off-limits. There’s a record of scant media coverage on all of these going back decades. Yet only in the current political turmoil do we actually get a sense that these types of things that spawn massive corruption are in play. And in the case of Feeding our Future, it’s chock-a-block full of Somali operators on the front end. Who, of course, happen to be Black. So now you have both the immigrant AND racial angle. Hunger, immigrants, Blacks. A psychopathic model trifecta.

How can we understand this from a systems perspective? Psychopaths co-opt a mental model about a societal problem (often one buried deep within the human psyche) , launch a dollar harvesting/diversion scheme around that scheme, and then, if the scheme is discovered, use both the dominant mechanism as a “narcissistic shield” or “moral racket” (if we’re not allowed to continue doing this, children will starve!) as well as a rear-guard action (You are all racists because the people perpetrating the scheme are black!)

Clean Water Around the World

One of the most vexing problems I’ve struggled with in deciding to help various student groups over the years is the ‘clean water’ problem. And inevitably, requests for donations also show up in my mailbox — arguing for this scheme or that for bringing drinking water to the unwashed masses. Often these schemes are in esoteric locations, often in Africa to places I’ve never been. I’ve spent significant time in 40+ countries, and not just in conference hotels. So I have some reasonable perspective on what life is like in the various parts of the Third World and Fourth World that most people would never go in their lifetimes.

What I’ve seen is that people all over the world, even in the poorest places, always seem to be able to afford three things — cell phone minutes (I have yet to visit a place where cell phones are not ubiquitous, and I’ve been to some crazy places) , sugary or savory snacks in small packages, and bottled water. I have a modest reluctance to pronounce this, but I’m increasingly skeptical that there is a drinking water problem anywhere outside a war zone. I have yet to visit a true Stone Age venue, where there are no small kiosks selling these things.

And if you focus in on water, this is, like it or not, the de facto solution for drinking water around the world. No mother is going to take water out of some sand trap contraption that engineers specializing in Third World development and give it to her baby. It just ain’t happening, unless there is some major crisis.

And once again, outside of war zones, various NGOs have swarmed over all those sub-Saharan countries, with various well-drilling and water production schemes. Nothing is new under the sun. My own university had a revolving door with Malawi and a series of classic dysfunctional development schemes there. My favorite was drilling a well for a cabbage grower. Various development agents came in, and drilled a well. Initially, the cabbage grower was elated. Instead of growing 10 cabbages a year, he could now grow 100! The development folks left, and came back the next year.

How had he fared? He was weeping. “Last year, I had 10 cabbages, but all got sold. Now I have 100 cabbages. But I have no way to get them market, and most of them are now rotting. And I did make a little more money, but I started drinking. My two wives told me that they would not live with an alcoholic, so they left me.”

There was a similar story about people in Malawi growing rice. Except people in Malawi don’t grow rice. Rice requires flooded paddies. But flooded paddies then create mosquitoes. And mosquitoes create malaria. And so on.

The point of all this is now we have another perfect psychopathic mental model that can be used by outside forces to run yet another Long Con. You have an issue everyone is familiar with, that has been around forever. You are asked for money — who could refuse money for clean water for kids? You cannot protest — you will be condemned for a lack of virtue. Meanwhile, maybe no wells get drilled. Mothers are still feeding their kids bottled water. And you are threatened with a moral racket, or narcissistic shield if you even question.

The pattern is clear.

Alternatives

Give locally, and know the people you live with. Grounding validity is always the answer. I give no more to organizations with fungible accounting categories.

Train Dreams

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Grave Peak, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, North Idaho

One of the most amazing books-on-tape I listened to recently is Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Following the story of a life of a literal nobody — this was Johnson’s forte — Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West, he writes in unsparing style about Grainier’s life from his perspective. The events that happened, both good and bad, are raw, and unscripted. The basic plot — an orphaned man living in the Inland Northwest, outside of Bonner’s Ferry Idaho — is never broken by much comfort, at least for very long. Living here myself, and sitting here watching the December rain fall outside, it was an act of constant endurance, without a pile jacket or Gore-Tex raincoat in sight. Johnson, besides being an elegiac writer, also embodies Robert Heinlein’s concept of a fair witness. – an unsparing, but non-critical analyst of a situation.

The book reading is stunning, and if you have time, I highly recommend you listen to it. It is disorienting in a strange, immersive way, and showcases Johnson as one of the premier writers of the last 50 years, at least. Johnson doesn’t attempt any intentional emotional manipulation of the reader. Instead, there is just the narrator telling his ghost story from his point of view. The story centers around losing his wife and child in a fire, and I won’t say more than that.

At the same time I had the book recommended to me by an X pal (Amanda Fortini, also a writer, and wife of yet another X pal, Walter Kirn) a movie made from the plot of the book was also released. While the movie is not terrible — the cinematography is evocative, and if you’re familiar with the landscape, as I am (I live adjacent) they do a fine job of capturing what it means to be set in the wild landscapes of the Inland Northwest — an area crossing over from eastern Washington to Northern Idaho.

But instead of scrupulously adhering to Johnson’s book, the movie struck me as a psy-op designed to manipulate the viewer on the issues of our day – not the issues of the 1920s. In the book, for example, a Chinaman caught stealing from the company store is attempted to be executed by a mob, but manages to escape. In the movie, he commits no crime (of course) but is summarily executed, and becomes a ghost that haunts Robert. And Grainier, after the fire, instead of being befriended by a drunk Indian with a bad habit of laying on railroad tracks, as happened in the books, is instead lifted up by a prosperous local native merchant. Magic realism is one thing. But this is so preposterous as to defy belief, especially when one considers the dominant time period being set in the early 1920s. Finally, Grainier isn’t even allowed the elevation of his enlightenment through meditation. Instead, he is lifted up by a woman. White men really cannot save themselves.

I actually enjoyed the movie as much as I’ve enjoyed any movie made in the last five years. And I find myself pondering whether I’m hallucinating these things. But that’s the thing about a good psy-op, especially one aimed at sophisticated audiences. When they had a black vigilante kill a white preacher in the movie, an absolute plot insertion with no match in the book, I was pretty sure I was being had. But the scenery was nice — I love my backyard, having dedicated an enormous amount of my life to saving it from destruction, and the movie turned into at least a watchable movie.

Maybe that has to pass for “good enough” in a time period with a collapsing film industry. But it’s still a shame. Ordinary people — even drunk Indians — can walk through life with a certain dignity that does not ascribe to Hollywood’s current morality plays. And people deserve to understand exactly how difficult life was for all the actors on the last frontier of the lower 48 states.

Where’s a cinematic fair witness when you need one?