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Forks in the Timeline and the Future of the West

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 7 Comments

Countryside in Winter, outside Milton-Freewater, OR

One of the more interesting plot lines of stories, along the lines of musing about the Multiverse, is the alternate timeline idea. Of course, “what ifs” along historical perspectives are nothing really new. And as far as literature goes, my intellectual engagement with the idea probably goes back to Michael Moorcock and the Elric series. But more recently, I’m a fan of the TV series Community, which has lots of fun with this particular literary trope. Community is a show about the producer’s idealized community college experience, which seems fantastical in all ways as someone who has worked in academia for most of their lives. There are study groups, engaged individuals, and of course, hot women and men who occasionally sleep with each other. This does not resemble in any way, shape or form, the modern university, which is more akin to a modern gulag, where students stare disinterestedly at professors, work 40 hours/week outside their classes, and the only community-building ritual is football.

But that brings one to the notion of an alternate timeline. Community has lots of shows contained therein where characters step outside of themselves at various branching points, with dramatically different outcomes dependent on varying choices the cast members make in their lives.

And as go the cast members, one can draw parallels to nations. Across Western civilization right now, there are all sorts of nations, making all sorts of timeline choices regarding civilizational outcomes, that are far more likely to yield unpleasant ends, or civil wars, than a make-out session in a car in the community college parking lot.

In the most recent election in the U.S., Kamala Harris, VP under Joe Biden, ran a strong negative campaign based on turning the country more Woke, and lost to Donald Trump, who, with a preselected “dream team” of counter-elites, managed a modest win in the national elections. While Donald Trump, an elite himself, runs as a counter-elite, officially aligning himself with the Republican Party, a firm majority in that party still identifies itself with an elite globalist agenda. Make no mistake.

More importantly, Elon Musk, billionaire and owner of multiple paradigm-busting companies himself, maneuvered himself into a key role, along with fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, as chief advisor to Trump. Even before Trump’s election, Musk had spoken out against many of the Woke issues of the day, such as continued support of the war in Ukraine, Internet censorship, and the elevation of transgender rights. And consistently, both Trump and Musk have spoken out against the key Immiserators in contemporary society, which Harris had passionately embraced.

When Harris lost, it was a profound fork in the timeline for the US. Harris had promised more Internet and social media censorship, under the mask of fighting “disinformation” and “misinformation”, more enforcement of DEI policies, as well as control of AI development. The press had (and still is) lined up behind Harris. Even as I write this, a moribund economy is being billed by the mainstream media as the strongest in the last 20 years. It’s easy to get paranoid and assume that the financial press believes there will be a fall, and that will be blamed on Trump, even though the lag times for any economic policy implementation is at least a year or two. But regardless, Musk and others have been running numerous moments of grounding validity across the political landscape, from buying Twitter (now X) and wading into the various culture war agenda items like transgenderism, and DEI policies that I’ve explained are prime tools of the Immiserators. At least for the present, the United States is on the upward path toward increased personal agency, and less government. As an example, Trump himself announced the creation of the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), eponymously named after a meme based on a Shiba Inu dog. DOGE’s job will be elimination of government regulations — a subject of a post in itself.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, an entire nation is in the middle of a horrific branch in their timeline involving a sex scandal where primarily Pakistani immigrants ran large rape rings targeting white, underage girls in a variety of towns, including Rotherham, Telford, and other towns in the north of England. Authorities from both the local communities, and all the way up to the top ranks of British governance suppressed the scandal on the basis of maintaining racial harmony by not naming or prosecuting the Pakistani perps. The magnitude of the numbers involved is mind-boggling. Some 7000+ rapes were documented through these rape rings even this year, with basically no law enforcement efforts to stop the crimes, as well as plenty of victim-blaming.

Initially, when I heard about these crimes, I was very suspicious of a mass hysteria event, similar to the early ’80s McMartin pre-school trials in the U.S. In that situation, children had been interviewed for ostensibly repressed memories of devil worship inside of daycare centers. All of it turned out to be false, and you can read about it at this link. Instead, what the rape rings are shaping up to be is a civilization-ending event. Musk is tweeting about it on X even as I write this, and the British high command is condemning him for bringing up the unpleasantness. Apparently, the behavior has been historic, and tracks with surges in immigration in Britain — even dating back to the early 2000s.

Both these events — Trump’s ascendancy, as well as Britain’s collapse, would be worthy of a book. But what they show in the context of this blog is how during times of Elite Overproduction, which manifests itself in multiple ways, where the number of chairs available for both elites and their children shrink, and the number of elites themselves grow, there is profound societal pressure on immiserating the larger populace. As I wrote in a previous piece, in the US, the trans issue quickly gained ground as an elite signaling device, and luxury belief that elites could communicate with each other that they deserved to win the game of Musical Chairs.

The fact they were creating a more oppressive, authoritarian social environment for the larger population they believed to be in their favor. But fortunately, the votes and the governance system was in place in the U.S. that hopefully this will stop peacefully. We were simply not that far gone. While the immiseration of the populace was indeed real, what was also true was that the actual grounding of the entire trans issue involved a minute number of people. The number of trans male->female athletes, while high profile, were/are still relatively small. It’s wrong and vexatious, but it’s not civilization-ending if a man posing as a woman wins a bicycle race. And DEI has been noxious, but once again, not civilization-ending.

Nothing gives that impression of the rape rings in Great Britain. There have been massive numbers of British girls raped in a systematic fashion, by primarily Pakistani immigrants. Incredible system failure, under the guise of Woke policies and ostensible racial harmony, has been covered up. And Musk, and the entire X platform, has given voices to both the advocates for the victims, as well, incredibly enough, to the proponents of the coverup. Predictable elites have called the non-prosecution of these heinous crimes a “noble cause” and any notion that the people responsible, such as Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, should be held to account as immodest and unfair. As I write this, the British press is in alignment against Musk, protecting obvious Immiserators. It can be argued that Britain, for all of its history, has a far more comprehensive culture of elites getting away with literal murder. So it’s no surprise that Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and even King Charles, have lined up with fellow elites to defend the mass immiseration scheme. The problem with all authoritarian regimes, de facto or official, is that the people under them can only take so much. Then, psychopathic revolution becomes the stock in trade. Talk about a grounding validity moment.

The other key element to note here is that both large scandals, in both the US and Great Britain, are at their core sex scandals involving sexual abuse of minors. Transgender surgery on youth is the one thing that has profoundly fired up the larger population, as well as access of grown men to women’s spaces so that sexual violence can more easily occur. In Great Britain, the massive size of the rape ring scandal, once again directed at children, is emergent out of elite desires for immiseration in this latest regime of Elite Overproduction. As I’ve written before, sexual abuse of children is psychopathic in nature. But worse, it has the growth effect of producing even more psychopaths. And those relational disruptors go on to create broader psychosocial devolution across societies. You want to destroy the collective conscience of a culture? Rape a significant number of its young people. That train is never late. And it arrives at the station hosting the Tribal/Magical v-Meme. Which is no way to run a large, multi-cultural contemporary society.

This plays into larger psychosocial trends in the collective psyche of all of Western society. We are at a point where we have not kept up the agency-driven developmental needs of our societies. As such, we see elites establish elite coding to sort their kids into the winners’ circle, and everyone else into the loser’s category. How we reverse this, and prompt what in the short term will likely manifest itself as decentralization is an open question. But at the U.S. has some breathing room.

In the U.K., it’s going to be decentralization, followed by relational devolution. Stay tuned.

Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment and Elite Overproduction

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cold Desert Rain, US 95 north of Winnemucca

One of the better pieces I’ve read recently is this one: titled Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, by David Samuels in Tablet Magazine. Samuels is obviously an Old Dog, and describes in detail the head game that the combo of David Axelrod, a communication specialist and marketing guru, and Barack Obama played on the American people — especially the American tech. elite, that led to the incredibly destructive political climate of the last 16 years.

The short version of Samuels’ thesis is that Obama, with Axelrod’s help, took Axelrod’s strategy utilizing permission structures,(the linked piece is pretty good!) that Axelrod had successfully used in various Chicago races (Harold Washington’s mayoral success is highlighted) to get white folks to vote for black candidates, often against their own interests. They did this by creating a false morality inside people’s value structures to make them believe that morally it was a greater good to vote against both their own interests, and their own grounded intuition. The closest analogy I can come up with essentially Obama’s and Axelrod strategy was the equivalent of unleashing an HIV virus on the natural belief immune systems that any cohort develops, that insures long-term cultural continuity. Once convinced that moral posturing and virtue signaling was somehow in their long-term interest. And it worked — something like 80% of white folks voted for Washington in the mayoral contest, as opposed to only 35% of African-Americans.

The problem with completely disconnecting any group of humans from what I call grounding validity — making sure what you believe has some actual, observable data to back it up– is that it has unintended consequences. My favorite go-to of an entire civilizational collapse due to a lack of it is the parable of the Aztecs, who obsessed on raiding neighboring tribes for human sacrificial tribute to make sure the Sun would rise by cutting out their hearts on the Pyramid of the Sun. Once you believe that level of bullshit, your civilization is uniquely fragile. And 500 badass Spaniards, led by Hernan Cortes, and accompanied by his translator and personal consort Malinche, proved the point. The consequences for ungrounding are wildly tragic. My fun statistic is that 95% of the Aztec genome is carried on the X chromosome. Which mean those conquistadores killed all the men and literally raped all the women.

What is great about this piece is it is obviously written by a pro, who can describe the ins and outs of how they actually did it, as well as the consequences of it coming undone. My analogy of why when these systems fail, they fail rapidly, is that ungrounded systems are prone to what we call signal drift — the difference between a signal with appropriate ground, and whatever the rest of systems and society decide to make up as true. This seems to have a pernicious effect on human brains. When you practice unreality, your brain gets worse and worse detecting reality. It simply doesn’t practice it. And what THAT means is that it is far easier for a cult (or national) leader to seize control and program people with whatever beliefs they want. Like 50 year old men wearing a wig have a right to enter women’s spaces. Or if you want to get into a women’s prison, and you’re a man, just tell the guard you’re a woman. But I digress.

The other thing that happens when you practice unreality, is that your belief system for navigating the actual world is prone, just like an electrical circuit, to arcing when it has to ground itself against actual reality. Arcing is inherently destructive (it’s how we weld metal) and there are sparks. I think it’s a worthy analogy — and we’re witnessing it right now in the aftermath of the Trump election. Samuels makes the point in the piece (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) that Kamala Harris was perhaps the worst presidential candidate in the last 100 years, and the permission structuring around attempting to force people to vote for her using racial and misogynistic guilt (she’s a woman! She’s African-American even though she’s not!) just couldn’t work. It was so unbelievable that enough of the electorate couldn’t just party line NPC it in. And she lost to a candidate who was widely reviled, and the entire press corps had fallen into lockstep of chronically attacking. The result was truly a silent revolution. Because of social shaming, you couldn’t even admit that you might consider voting for Trump without public ostracism. I voted for Trump myself, and still can’t bring up that issue with the majority of liberal friends I still hold. That’s majorly fucked up.

Where Samuels’ analogy falls apart, though, is that these types of outcomes and conflicts are literally occurring across Western civilization. The tendency that Samuels exhibits is to attribute the temporary success of Obama’s campaign to an amalgamation of old and new cunning, and particular individuals. If that were the case, though, we would not be seeing similar types of conflicts across a spectrum of countries, with different outcomes across a variety of countries. One might rack up conservative victories in Hungary/Orban and Italy/Meloni to nations that are in the process of re-grounding toward more appropriate national self-interest. As well, one might consider nations like France, Britain and Canada still in flux.

What is far more likely the overriding dynamic is that we are seeing Turchin’s Elite Overproduction in action across the globalist landscape. Elite Overproduction comes once every 150 years or so (do read Turchin’s book linked here) and happens when there just are too many elites’ kids, and not enough spots for them to assume the same social position as their parents. Why does that matter? If you look out across the political landscape, what we’re actually witnessing is emergent behavior, with the tools of elite manipulation being pulled out of the last century’s toolbox, and finally having the appropriate environmental conditions that they proved to be useful. And it’s U.S. – agnostic. Obama and Axelrod may be clever. But they are just men of their time.

Further, this also gives potential insights into how wider wars get started through Elite Overproduction. When you have too many people competing for too few chairs, then what’s not to like about a Crusade to seize Jerusalem back from the Turks? And the worst conditions for this kind of social virus are when you have an In-group and Out-group that hit the same point of Elite Overproduction at the same time. Then everyone’s raring to go.

If there’s a bigger lesson here, it’s that you’ve got to ground your kids — especially the elite ones — in reality. Or there’s a proclivity for elites to make up self-serving fantasies, and use lots of fancy words to project a preferred image of reality that has nothing to do with it. In our case, I feel like we got lucky by having a robust enough electoral system to elect Donald Trump, and his A-team level staff of advisors. Because the current crop of elites were converging on burning it all down. Or make us vulnerable to a modern day Cortes burning the ships at Veracruz.

P.S. — one thing that is interesting about Samuels’ take on all this is it links Turchin’s book, End Times, that I’ve written about with Rob Henderson’s Troubled — in particular his concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ — with the actual modality — permission structures — that’s a how-to for generating political anarchy. But the circumstances have to be right. Otherwise, the virality you need just ain’t there.

P.P.S. I’ve also recently been taken by Mike Benz. His Joe Rogan podcast lays it out. Another post-mortem way worth listening to.

The Immiserators

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 10 Comments

If you try to immiserate Cecilia, she’ll let you know what she thinks of that.

I’m writing this on the eve of our Nov. 2024 election. It took me a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out what’s going on in the US, as well as around the world. One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time pondering (too much, actually) is how, after the end of the Cold War, when we were literally on the edge of blowing the planet up, we ended up, instead of seeing a flourishing and evolution of the human spirit, we ended up being probably as miserable in society and culture as any time in my lifetime.

Let me give a little background. For those that don’t know, I live in a small college town (Pullman, WA) adjacent to yet another small college town, just six miles away (Moscow, ID). Both towns are simultaneously adjacent to some of the most magnificent mountains, wild rivers and forests in the Lower 48, which most of the residents have no inkling exist at all. You have to drive a little ways to get to them (2.5 hrs) but a sizable hunk of folks that have any interest in that kind of thing will get in the car and literally drive seven or so hours to a National Park for their yearly fix. That’s how insular they are.

People fantasize about retiring in a small college town — the theatre! An almost pro- sports experience! Concerts! Young people! But they don’t realize that the two communities, while great places to visit, are, at best mediocre places to live. It’s the reason they don’t really grow. And they’re not particularly cheap, either, for small town living. The residents running the show are a mix of locals from the conjoint farm community (we live in the most productive wheat country in the world) some strong church affiliates, as well as some professors.

But there’s no question what runs the culture. It’s the university, and the people associated with it. And as university culture either rises or falls, so do the fortunes of the culture. You may have noted that universities are on the wane in our society — declining demographics certainly play a part. But Woke politics have become so obnoxious, it’s intolerable for anyone who is remotely “normal” in today’s contemporary culture.

What does “normal” even mean any more? It used to mean a reasonable level of independently generated relationships (friends) with institutions to live your life and raise your kids with. I do realize that this hardly exists anywhere any more, especially if you compare it with where I grew up — a dysfunctional steel town on the Ohio River. But it’s saying something that there was a much more profound sense of community in a town in economic freefall than there is in a cosseted island of privilege, funded solely by outside revenue.

People think about retiring here because they come here to become educated, and that produces a lot of memories. They return here because of those memories are powerful, and they want to watch football, get drunk with old friends, and tailgate. It’s a powerful tribal alignment. In a time when the Immiserators (we’ll get to a more precise definition of them in a moment) have destroyed anyone’s desire to affiliate with state or nation, folks migrate to the university to recover that sense of community. But then, after the game, they leave. And leave this community, dominated by the ethos of the current academy, which is relationally disruptive, and inherently elitist, to its own devices. Which is not in the community’s favor.

One of the interesting things about being a professor for my entire career (north of 37 years) is that I’ve seen exactly every different stereotype of what the rest of the world think a professor is. I’m a Renaissance Man with a potty mouth — I write, I craft, play musical instruments, and talk about politics as well as engineering. Blah, blah, blah. People say “hey — you’re what we always thought a professor should be!” Because they know, from their own experience, what professors actually are. If you think, in the modern academy, you can succeed by NOT being neurodivergent in some form or another, I’ve got news for you. You’ve got to have some form of OCD to study flea anuses, or squirrel penises (I had a friend that actually did that, and was wildly successful – he was/is a decent human being, so don’t get carried away with that) for your entire life. But you have to be different.

And inside that difference, the majority become anti-rational. They might apply logic or complicated methods in their research. But when it comes to human relations, they sit in a rigid, hierarchical system that heavily penalizes any developmental nonconformity — such as actually evolving as a human being. University towns are filled with functional adult toddlers with some form of oppositional defiant disorder. It might move the science of squirrel penises forward. But it’s hell to live here.

Before we move forward, let’s define what an ‘Immiserator’ is. An Immiserator is any individual whose primary (or even secondary) function in life is to make other people miserable and deprive them of joy. There are lots of tools in the toolbox to do that, but the primary one is rules. Any time an exception happens, that can produce any kind of negative outcome, a rule must be propagated. (Big Hat Tip to Peter Turchin and his book, ‘End Times’ — credit where credit is due.)

And those rules must be enforced. The joy is in the enforcement! At least for the Immiserator. You may be miserable, and the exception may never occur again. But rules allow immiseration to be applied across-the-board. Everyone gets to be miserable! Which is, of course, the point.

Immiseration is a primary tool of relational disruption. No one wants to talk to anyone when they’re miserable. They might say the wrong thing, or blow up. That would lead to more enforcement of more rules, and more emotional flow to the Immiserators. So people start shutting down. That doesn’t really suit the Immiserators either — if everyone is quiet then there’s no one to punish. So instead of just letting people re-form social networks outside the Immiserators, they want to send you to talk therapy. Or Healing Circles. Or other such icks.

As we’ve seen in the last 10 years, Immiserators are very often female. Immiseration profoundly fits inside the foundational elements of women’s personae of Nurture and Social Control. When Nurture is minimized, then that energy has to go somewhere, and Social Control is where it goes. Whole societies are built on this. Who enforces the Taliban’s anti-woman edicts? It’s the Taliban grandmothers. Who are at war over the increasingly confusing rules governing access to young women’s uterine real estate? Middle-aged white women.

But if you think men are off the hook, you’re also wrong. Men pivot around the dyad of Protect and Provide. We see this on the Right side of the political spectrum. Increasingly hostile edicts for Protect also provide immiseration – we can get back to the extreme example of the Taliban preventing young girls from attending school. And Provide, at some level in recession because of failing differences in M/F incomes and job positions (note — women get more college degrees, more promotions, and lots of other stuff) still has the ability to hold hostage and immiserate people dependent on that good old Do-Re-Mi.

But back to my university town. In my town(s) we have a local newspaper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. For over 20 years, I’ve written for the newspaper as an op-ed columnist. It was a biweekly gig, paying the handsome sum of $25/column, which NEVER changed over the time . But I was happy to write. I figured it was my charitable donation to news in the area. I’m an educated man, with broad, international experience. By sharing my insights, I’d improve the information level of my community. I did try to write about local issues, as well as the larger ones more in my expertise.

Sometime in the last 15 years, the newspaper made a decision to go every day with op-eds from people like me. Well, at least ‘like me’ in the community. This was relatively innocuous, until the community (especially the folks in Moscow) decided to double down on religious persecution of a fundamentalist, Full Bible Church in their community. Their pastor, Doug Wilson, has even appeared on the Tucker Carlson show. The paper’s op-ed columnists would regularly scream and wail about Doug, and his congregation, which interestingly enough, are maybe a little older than the college kids, but far younger than the liberal/progressive elite that believed they ran the community. Doug is indeed an asshole, and he DID make it easy. We have (believe it or not) about 6 mega-churches in our combined towns, population of 65K. Doug is that nail sticking out begging to be hammered down by the Immiserators. He may or may not have had it coming. But as Clint Eastwood said famously, when it comes to the Immiserators, we’ve all got it coming.

But if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And those progressive didn’t have kids. And now they’re old. They’re almost entirely composed of people that perceive themselves as the intelligentsia. But in reality, they’re idiots. Screaming idiots.

The Moscow/Pullman Immiserati.

During COVID, they screamed so much at me, as I made my steady progression toward the truth of COVID, and ended up profoundly on the ‘defending young people’ side of the non-issue for them, I finally quit. They would write their op-ed columns about me and my op-eds — what I would consider an op-ed journalistic violation. When you have a column, you have an obligation to inform your readers. You get the bully pulpit. And the first word. But your readership gets the last word — in the letters. Instead, they wrote columns that would probably be considered libelous about me. They would dance and holler. And so I finally just gave up.

This cadre definitely immiserated me. And when I left, they went back to the standard themes. We are all racists. Donald Trump is a fascist. If you’re not hanging your head in shame for living in our little isolated enclave, you’re a member of the KKK. And so on. A lot of people in that caste (as well as the letter writers) had done yeoman work in the past, when we actually had problems, at least regionally. Coeur D’Alene, and Hayden Lake, ID are not that far away. Who can forget Richard Butler and the Aryan Nations? But that ship has sailed, or at a minimum, burrowed underground. Escalating real estate prices are never good for true believers.

It’s too painful to count, but at least in the last year, every op-ed that runs from the ostensible Left side, is about Donald Trump, or Christ Church, and how their supporters/followers are evil racists. Folks, we don’t functionally have an African-American community in this middle-of-nowhere burg. There are no reported instances of racism, though we have had black-on-black gang violence. Every now and then, we do see something directed against the Native American community, the Nez Perce. But even that is literally a once-in-two-years episode. If that. Hell, we don’t even have a Hispanic community outside the university.

But Immiserators gonna immiserate. And well-meaning people who are NOT the members of the Immiserati line up behind them. When you have a community where a fair share of the members have OCD or OCPD, and you stand up and say surgical masks don’t work to stop COVID, and we should stop torturing our students in grade school with this crazy bullshit, you should expect to take some heat. In the fragmented world of Pullman/Moscow, they managed to completely isolate me. I literally was screamed at in the street. No shit.

How do these Immiserators immiserate? They take the issue of the day, and scream. Over and over. Take the trans issue. You don’t want a 50 year old man, dressed up as a woman in your daughter’s locker room? You bigoted transphobe. Let’s talk about how you don’t know about “the science.” You don’t want to castrate a confused young child being bombarded by social media that the only way they’ll fit in is with body-altering hormones, and complete loss of sexual function, as well as an inability to easily urinate the rest of their lives? You’re promoting child suicide. You don’t want your daughter playing volleyball against boys wearing pony tails and claiming they’re girls? There is no one worse than you.

And they’ll let you know it. It’s the beauty of immiseration. In the parlance of this blog, I call this “emotional state matching.” They want you to be as miserable as they are. And they’re going to double down with some mix of social pressure, rules and generalized screaming until you do. It doesn’t make any difference how preposterous it is — how crazy is it, really, that anyone would advocate for middle-aged men sporting a euphoria boner in a girls’ high school locker rooms, or how rare it is (if this was happening all the time, I guarantee there would be dead bodies in the street.) That’s NOT the point. The point is misery. Yours. Oh, and the self-righteous screaming.

Which brings us around to Donald Trump. I’ve written extensively about Trump on this blog (you can Google it) and none of it is complimentary. I’ve called him a narcissistic psychopath, among other things. But I’ve attempted to keep it real. Trump was, and is a moderate Republican in policy. He is not a fascist. He has a big mouth, and he violates institutional social codes of speech by saying the quiet part out loud. We have been seized by an institutional class that has, in league with the Immiserators, figured out how to successfully loot the Treasury, on every level of American society. Does he care about the American people? I think at some level he does. But he cares far more about his own personal image. I’m not as sure as I used to be that he is a narcissistic psychopath. But he’s still definitely a narcissist.

And he’s found his niche — fighting the Immiserati. He’s got some allies who actually have some policy sense on the misery — Vance, Kennedy, and especially Elon Musk. Elon Musk, who in any other time in America’s history would be a hero — putting people into space, creating WiFi for the world, electric cars, and the list goes on — is now chronically vilified by the Immiserati. One of Elon’s main messages is to young people — look forward to your life, there are not too many people on the planet, have children and families — the Immiserati beat the drum, and the sub-Immiserators chime in. Musk is bad. Evil, in fact. People are not nearly immiserated enough. Get ready for de-growth. They’re still functioning, aren’t they?

And a peace deal for Ukraine? Nothing is more immiserating than the threat of thermonuclear war hanging over everyone’s head. Lest you get carried away and think the Immiserators actually WANT nuclear war, I really don’t think that’s the case. But operating where they do, in the limbic zone, with its desire for depressive emotional state matching, they don’t care. It’s short term misery they seek, and damn the long-term consequences. I’ll still bet dollars to donuts that 95% of Americans can’t find Ukraine on the map. And Ukraine has its own Immiserators that are propagating policies that will annihilate their young male class. They’re emotional state-matching with our own US foreign policy Immiserators, that are watching the rivers of blood run while our own arms merchants get fat.

In order to fix this problem, we first have to recognize it. We have to dismantle the Immiserati, and their larger caste of Immiserators. That’s why the latest head of the Immiserati, a sock puppet as far as I call tell, Kamala Harris, tried to float the whole ‘Joy’ message. The fact that this whole campaign fell flat tells you that the public isn’t falling for it. Kamala went back to the drumbeat of the other side being Nazis, fascism, and the Handmaid’s Tale. They were more in form, and didn’t cause so much cognitive dissonance that people just tuned out.

We’ll see who wins. We’re still in a tight spot, regardless of who wins. But I’ve found that naming something is the first step in either saving something, or defeating. Let’s get out there and get busy.

Quickie Post — SpaceX and the Emergent Power of Memetics

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

SpaceX Starship Booster, post-launch

Today, October 13, 2024, is truly a momentous day. Why? SpaceX successfully launched AND recovered Starship V — the whole configuration, which included the heavy booster, AND the top stage, which will be the working part of their spaceship that will carry humans to Mars. Recovery of the heavy booster was accomplished by Mechazilla, the giant chopsticks-like device, while the top stage splashed down in the Indian Ocean. It would have been great to have the top land on one of SpaceX’s recovery ships, but that will come in time.

There are lots of YouTube videos that portray the flight, and considering this was written in the AM of Oct. 13,, there will likely be more. Here’s one to get you started if you’re reading this early.

Launch and beginning recovery

Why were they able to do this? You have to go back to Conway’s Law and understand the memetic evolutionary step that SpaceX has taken — which is to launch full configurations, knowing that they could explode in full public view, to do what we call an All Up test. There is some complexity limit in such an advanced craft that there is no way to gain more insight nor understanding from component testing. Sooner or later, you gotta put it all on the line and Light That Candle.

But only a memetically advanced performance-based community can do this kind of testing. If Legalistic Authoritarian status-driven NASA blows up a ship on the pad, then heads inevitably will roll. The status blow to the operation is one that NASA simply won’t allow. Because the elites in the company look bad. So promotion of managers that will enforce that memetic standard end up getting promoted, as opposed to more enlightened and non-risk averse individuals. And in the current milieu, you end up with people who will NEVER get a rocket off the ground. Like this guy.

And people will fall into line under that kind of leadership. When status matters, and not performance, you might be able to make McKinsey happy. But you’ll never design the next generation of space flight. People know, for the most part, that they have to go along to get along. You get down to that “I gotta feed my babies” Survival v-Meme pretty damn quick.

It’s in the knowledge that an organization produces. Because that knowledge creates the design. You simply can’t bring in enough outside, or unknown knowledge to get your ship off the ground. It’s true for bacteria, and it’s true for spaceships.

If there’s a simple memetic takeaway, though, it’s this. Status-based companies will produce stasis, and incremental improvement, until capture by rule-gaming psychopaths. Performance-based companies will hit goals and design new things. Things can and will go wrong — but it’s your only hope of actually creating something new.

Starship is the result of a lot of hardcore, diligent work. Make no mistake about it. But it’s company culture, and importantly company structure that made today what it is. Congratulations, SpaceX. The future is starting to look like the future!

Should We Really Include the A in Anthropogenic Global Warming? (Part 2)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Herd of Cape Buffalo, on the way to the watering hole

Probably should go back and read Part 1, if you haven’t!

For those that don’t know, I have been a hard-core environmental activist my entire career. I wrote a book on my backyard (full of amazing forests) and was an activist participant, organizer and strategist for forest protection across the U.S. for a good 15 years. I’ve also, at the same time, worked with timber companies, as well as oil refineries, in the context of my Design Clinic as an engineering professor as well. So you don’t have any surprises here — as an engineering professor in the Pacific Northwest, I work with almost everyone.

But in the late 2010s, regarding Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), my ardor toward all of this started to cool. After three decades of catastrophic predictions regarding AGW, none were basically coming true. Sea levels weren’t rising in any particular way. Storm frequency, the same. Regional modification of climate? Yes. Glaciers were melting. But glaciers started their retreat, at least in a way I could observe (using interpretive trail signs!) far before the magic date of the mid 1930s for the impacts of human development. And in my own backyard of the Palouse, basically no change at all.

But even more than that — it was the matter of tying actual events, in a meaningful way, to human activities at a global scale. As I traveled the world, I did see effects of extreme weather. Storm cycles in the Philippines made a big impression — certain areas were seeing 30 year storms every seven years. And so on. Why not just tie that to CO2? “Models” said so.

Ah, those climate models. They’ve told us over and over the world is going to end. Sea level rises of 8′. Total inundation of coastal areas. On and on. I didn’t know much about models (except they’re large finite difference codes run on supercomputers — the Earth is a big place…) and didn’t really want to find out. I actually know a fair amount about these kinds of models, because in a way, they’re just an inversion of the same stuff we use on airplanes. And trust me — those ones used to fine-tune aerodynamics of airplanes are spot-on. (I am a bona-fide aerospace/rocket scientist.)

But they’re spot-on for a reason. You can take an airplane (or appropriately scaled facsimile) and put it in a wind tunnel. I worked at NASA Ames for a couple of summers, and watched them do it. Every finite difference model in the world has to be tuned to give a correct answer. You tune this for given flow regimes, with a real airplane in the wind tunnel, you’ll get amazing results inside the computer. But that’s because you have a physical object, appropriately instrumented, that you use as your baseline.

To say that you can do this with the world is ridiculous. And the stupid keeps piling up. Even using temperature profiles any time and assuming that they’re accurate, before a self-declared “Age of Satellites” or “Age of P-3 Orions” is just nuts. And when you combine the self-inflicted errors from bad measurement WITH the inarguable spread of people across the planet, which would inherently impact many of those temperature measurement sites, you start seeing you have a major grounding validity problem on your hands. Grounding validity is matching whatever model you have with reality, at the appropriate temporal and spatial scales.

But I kept my mouth shut, and deferred on it all. Saying anti-AGW statements would get me thrown out of MY tribe. And I noticed that stridency on this had only increased. If only it were supported by actual events.

It wasn’t until Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, my Russian theoretical physicist friends, showed up on my doorstep, that I really woke up. Why? Because one of the recommendations to “solving” AGW, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was logging the Siberian/boreal forest to increase reflectivity, called albedo, of the planet to stop it. We were going to destroy wild nature on a planetary scale to save it.

Both Anastassia’s and Andrei’s work on how forests actually work should be part of the larger discussion regarding AGW. They are, along with their advisor, Viktor Gorshkov, advocates of a theory known as the biotic pump. What the biotic pump says is that without forests, you can’t have internal continental moisture – you get deserts instead. The forest itself is the primary transport mechanism for moisture into the interior of continents. Chop down forests, things dry out, save on the coast. On top of this, there is another extremely important implication. Vegetation interacts with the atmosphere in a profound way, that feeds back into the cycle.

This turns out to be a huge conundrum in how atmospheric systems work. Scientists like Antonio and his brother Paolo Nobre, have written extensively about atmospheric rivers, that bring literal rivers of moisture over the mountains and from the seacoast, that create the wet conditions required for places like the Amazon jungle to flourish. Chop down the trees, the weather stops happening.

Contrast this to what we would call an open loop system. An open loop system is one that is pre-eminent in basically all current climate models, where climate happens, and vegetation either thrives or dies dependent on what the atmosphere is, and the model says. The notion that these planetary systems are actually coupled doesn’t enter into models. And aren’t likely to be included any time soon – think of the additional complexity. Water vapor itself — the primary greenhouse gas — isn’t even a factor in most climate models. It’s CO2 uber alles, like some magical dial that all global climate depends on.

All these systems operate in some homeostatic form — meaning a process of self-regulation on the internal system — that all living creatures function in order to survive. Exactly where that internal/external system boundary is can obviously be an area of debate. Is a forest 10K acres? 100K? 20? The answers are often fluid. But the notion of the alternative — a one-way system, isn’t borne out by reality. If you doubt this, visit the coastal redwoods in Northern California. Redwoods are a microcosm of the biotic pump, living on seaborne moisture, and in turn preventing the desert that one can see further down the California coast.

It was then I realized I was in The Matrix. What is going on with suspected AGW has little to do with the science. Or at least the grounded science. But it has a ton to do with the memetics of climate science, which are often psychopathic in their direction. The current state of the accepted field, that lines up with the Mainstream Media, is Authority-driven, with the atmosphere playing the proxy of the boss, with the rest of the complexity absent from time and spatial variance, as well as flaws in measurement.

And Conway’s Law was still in play. The design of the system must fundamentally represent the social system that created it could not be more evident. The knowledge regarding that design of understanding is stuck there in the middle. Those with tremendous status and sophistication — the modelers — were controlling the debate on what was actually happening, armed with prestigious lab and university affiliations. And like the climate system model themselves, it was top-down.

Had we not just come off the catastrophe of listening to the Expert Class in COVID mitigation, I also don’t know if I would have paid much attention. Getting banished from one’s tribe (and I, as a forest activist, and definitely a fan and defender of the natural world) is no fun. But when your tribe has been hijacked, as has most certainly happened with climate science, and the main thing I love — the natural world — is on the literal chopping block, I had to gird my loins for battle one more time.

While AGW has been an issue for the last 20 years, I believe that COVID has made the passion for intervention even worse — regardless how crazy the intervention is. I’ve seen it said that a single billionaire, Lex Luthor-like, could set themselves up on an island with a huge sulfur atomization gun and spray sulfur into the atmosphere. The same principle I’ve maintained — that humans will, barring a major technological revolution (think paradigm-shifting like nuclear explosions) means that such actions will likely have little effect with their efforts. A major volcanic eruption can cause climate disruption for a couple of years (think 1883 Krakatoa). But most of what happens, damage-wise, happens to regional systems, including the people living adjacent. It’s a narcissistic fiction to think otherwise, and it’s also supported by Andrei’s scale analysis of energetics on the planet (see Part 1.) But that won’t stop the narcissistic billionaire. After all, they’re doing the brutal work of saving the world by destroying the atmosphere. It’s for our own good. Sound familiar?

But what happened with COVID — whether you were a COVID elite winner, and coasted through the pandemic with DoorDash, or suffered through losing your business because of lockdowns, the message of social and spiritual isolation was clear. In my adjacent town of Moscow, ID, the city government attempted to prosecute a group of singers from the full bible church, Christ Church, for holding a protest singalong. This was elite memetic prosecution and immiseration at its finest. The older progressive community, who are probably a good 30 years in age older than the younger Christ Church community, used their proxies to arrest the leader of the protest event. I’m not endorsing all the activities of Christ Church, and there’s a lot to talk about in the context of their minister, Doug Wilson. But clearly we’re moving toward late-stage liberalism. And it’s not bringing together its own membership with any degree of personal agency allowed for its members. Though the city government ended up paying out $300K for violation of Christ Church members’ civil rights, the diatribes in the local newspaper never relented.

Various social scientists have called this kind of hysteria “mass formation psychosis” and that may be accurate. But it is worth a minute to consider the causal path of how we got to a population susceptible to such behavior. People isolated, even with advanced development, need other people to maintain an open mind toward life circumstances of others. When humans are isolated, there is a process of depression that inherently occurs. And as I’ve written about before, depression of a population is a necessary precursor to Authoritarianism, which then (tri)dichotomize themselves into either Followers, True Believers, or the Unclean. Short version — the Followers/NPCs are low energy. And the True Believers are profoundly coherent, and undifferentiated, inside their In-group within an In-group. And the Out-group is, well, the Out-group. They can be disposed of.

What happens in the context of that spiritual devolution inside the movement is very similar to atomized gasoline presented with a match. Old people might just go to sleep. But young people, presented with an opportunity to connect with like minded people, rapidly become explosive. Google ‘Extinction Rebellion’ if you need to witness the various climate protests.

A similar behavior was witnessed among the masses protesting the Israeli invasion of Gaza this past year. The precipitating act by Hamas on October 7 has long been forgotten. But the profound need for belonging by young people, post-pandemic, finally found its catalyst in mirroring empathy for the Palestinian people. Hamas’ attack was only a day, whereas Israel’s invasion is still, as of this writing, ongoing. The fact of the complicated history of the region, as well as ostensible cultural proclivities (it is extremely challenging to understand how queer people would rally for a culture that would likely kill them, were they living there) all were subsumed in the human need to connect.

And it’s the same for AGW. It is precisely these dynamics why I’m writing this piece. Short term, Authoritarian coherence for a long-standing problem is a false god if there ever was one. And has the potential to lead a population to far greater atrocities than the original sin. The reality of banning fossil fuels, whose role in GW is far from clear (and potentially insignificant) will be the death of billions of the planet’s human residents. And the chaos unleashed will very likely affect the natural world worst of all.

If we were even remotely operating in a world where wisdom, which depends profoundly on metacognition (knowing what we don’t know) were the rule, you’d think we’d at least see solutions floated about preserving and restoring native ecosystems, regardless of their content, across the globe — and especially in ocean systems where our core knowledge of functioning is exceptionally poor. As well as dedication to rapid development of nuclear energy.

But we’re not seeing nor hearing this. Such a world connection perspective barely exists. What we hear are more monomaniacal calls for destruction of the natural world in the context of saving it. Nothing could be more emblematic of this than the razing of 4000 acres of Joshua trees for a solar farm. As with all things, it’s the dialog not being had which is the most interesting. If it really were about solar panel siting, how many acres exist across the tops of buildings in L.A. that can’t be placed there because of building code restrictions?

And it keeps piling up. In the lee of two moderate-sized hurricanes, Helene and Milton, that just hit the Gulf Coast of Florida, there is basically no headlines saying that these two storms were NOT caused by AGW. Every headline fingers CO2. What is really pathologically interesting is that only 20 years ago, the script that no one single storm could be traced back to AGW was an orthodoxy among climate scientists and meteorologists alike. But that was simply not providing the messaging coherence the current apocalyptic cult behind AGW needs to thrive, nor provide the spiritual connection. You’ve got to get down deeper in the limbic stack. And that means greater fear, as well as more profound threats to apostates like myself. There will be no debate. If your message isn’t The End Is Near, they don’t want to hear it.

What’s happened to the environmental activist community in particular, and the Left in general, is they’ve anointed CO2 and AGW as their One Ring — the magic talisman that they are going to use across-the-board to fix all our woes. But it fails to understand that the singular devotion to such a notion makes the entire movement perilously open to kidnap by far darker forces. J.R.R. Tolkien remains one of my favorite authors of all time, and the comparison between Sauron’s re-creation as Annatar, the Lord of the Gifts, and the singular focus on CO2 is particularly apt. The environmental community is participating in forging its own One Ring, just as the elves did on the sidelines in the Second Age of Middle Earth. And when it gets used against those of us that believe in protecting the natural world, as it inevitably will be (look no further than forest fire “prevention” if you need a simple example) don’t say a couple of us didn’t see it coming. If you’re not on the side of what J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as the Free Peoples, then you’re against ’em. That means being comfortable with the notion of freedom — which the Left seems to have totally abandoned. What would Galadriel do, indeed?

We are going to have to come to terms with our core humanity, and our predilection with profound fear of abandonment being sown by our current group of narcissistic psychopaths. But this fear is deeply rooted, for reasons. I close with a short parable.

About 15 years ago, I was on safari in the Greater Kruger Park in South Africa. I was lucky, and ended up with only me and the guide in the open-top Land Rover for most of my stay. One day, we were driving around, and happened upon a herd of Cape Horn buffalo moving down to the watering hole mid-afternoon. Two lions, an old one and a young one, were sitting on the side of the road, about 20′ away from our rig, watching the buffalo move.

A female cape buffalo, from that moment

The younger one

When driving in a safari wagon, usually one person does the driving, and the other person holds an elephant gun. I think ours was a classic 450 caliber Rigby, typical for use in hunting large game animals. We were only taking pictures, but I got to hold the gun because the driver couldn’t. Once we stopped, I stood up to take pictures of the lions. Immediately, the lions’ heads snapped around. Though lions won’t mess with bands of humans (you can take walking tours with groups of 10, though there are still guns involved) a solitary human is a prey species. The guide yelled at me to “drop” and went for the gun. The minute I vanished, the lions went back to watching the buffalo. We later heard from a ranger that a refugee from Mozambique had been treed for three days by three lions, before he had finally been rescued. And that lions had eaten something like 300 people fleeing the civil strife in Mozambique just that summer.

We have to confront the fundamental spiritual isolation of our current society, as well. It directs the psychopaths to use our fears against us, for what will be terrible ends. And like it or not, at this moment in time, it is FAR worse on the Left than the Right. If we cannot, the voice of the lion will be all that we hear.

Should We Really Include the A in Anthropogenic Global Warming? (Part 1)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments
Selway Falls, Idaho – Drone Shot

Readers note: I wrote this in November ’23, but didn’t publish it. My health is better, FWIW, though I’m still likely not to 100%. It’s still accurate, and I’ll continue the thoughts in the next piece. But this has a lot of important background.

It’s been a busy fall, and I haven’t had much of a chance to write down thoughts. I had a mesenteric venous thrombosis, with mandatory surgery after all this, that knocked the wind out of my summer. And though no real diagnosis has been made regarding the deep ‘why’ — I’m back at about 90% throttle.

One of the interesting things that did happen this fall was a visit from two Russian theoretical physicists deep in the middle of the climate science wars. Anastassia Makarieva and Andrei Nefiodov, both of the Petersburg Institute, came to visit primarily to discuss how one puts forward controversial issues in environmental issues that boil over into intense political discussions. My specialty, I guess!

Makarieva and Nefiodov both have done a first principles approach toward understanding climate science. They are motivated by both a deep love of their own forests on the White Sea, as well as a classic Russian attraction to physics. And since we are now at the edge of debates for planetary scale human actions ostensibly to save us from CO2 pollution, that is, once again, supposedly driving Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in order to save the planet, my position is pretty straightforward — we better be sure the crisis folks across the globe are purporting to exist actually does, and that what we are proposing at scale does not reap the whirlwind back on us.

To be honest, I’ve had my doubts about the current apocalyptic AGW narrative for a while now. As someone that’s been involved in this fight from the very beginning of the latest chapter (I’m calling this the last 35 years that really started with Bill McKibben’s book, ‘The End of Nature’, first published in 1989) I was always predisposed to the CO2 part of the narrative. And I waited for sea levels to rise, looked at articles on receding glaciers, and considered the, well, considerable iniquity of the various energy companies. All of us with lifelong careers in environmental politics had the map. Fossil fuels were/are bad, they’re literally destroying the planet, we’re going to run out of them, and we need to kick our very bad habit of endless war around them. It was easy, it was pat, and even now, a heckuva lot of it is demonstrably true.

But as sea level rise hasn’t happened — some spots here and there — and anything involving more than a cursory look at glacial receding indicates that glaciers were receding before the real effects of fossil fuel consumption. And finally, the mega-storms predicted haven’t really shown up either. Yes, we have hurricanes, but we’ve always had hurricanes. And we have seen some modest changes in the weather — I’ve noticed some destabilization of Arctic flows in the winter — but that’s about it. No reversal of the Gulf Stream.

What HAS changed is the intensity of the constant drumbeat toward apocalypse that comes out of the media. Weather maps with virtually identical temperature profiles to ones 50 years ago are splashed across our microsecond attention span screens, bright red and orange, predicting the end of the world every summer. But listen, folks. Texas has always been hot. Ask General Philip Sheridan. ” If I owned Texas and Hell, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”

And the reality? Miami, one of the first places predicted to be underwater because of AGW, is no closer to sinking than it ever has been. Which isn’t saying much, considering Florida’s natural precarity. The downstream effects of global warming are starting to seriously not match the narrative.

What is interesting is that, at least for me, there’s not a single piece of progressive activism individually taken to protect the environment that necessarily demands the AGW narrative. Oil companies continue to pollute and want to drill in environmentally sensitive areas. Renewable energy should still be developed apace. Natural areas should be saved, biodiversity protected. But AGW adds an overarching dynamic that none of these smaller pieces of effort demand. It demands wholesale lifestyle changes in spades. And it threatens that if we don’t fall in line with the cadre that insist on its political views, we are literally wrecking life on Earth.

The problem is that the immediate levers that the environmental community are really demanding to solve the climate ‘crisis’, which really sum to complete dismantling of mobility of our current population, their reduction, and a radical change to diet eliminating meat, all have immediate consequences to social structures and independent agency across the planet. Take meat consumption, for example. If we are having anything approaching a civilization-ending crisis, it is the metabolic syndrome/obesity crisis that populations literally everywhere are facing. In the US, we’re approaching something like 55% of the population as being overweight, and some lesser number being obese. I’ve written extensively about how this imbalance in diet, largely solvable by reducing dramatically our diet of manufactured carbohydrates and shifting to a more keto-based diet, is actually making us stupid on a physical level. And depriving people of their health is the one key element of reducing their agency, which then drives depression and isolation, two primary ingredients in any Authoritarian system.

It becomes obvious, then, that while the climate crisis might be up in the air, the memetic crisis is in full swing. To go to a less free, and free thinking society, you simply have to have relational disruption. Without it, people will organize against it — it’s what humans do in the long game. And as I’ve discussed many times on this blog, the key element inside any social network (not just talking about Facebook, folks) that causes that relational disruption are psychopaths. And psychopaths are all about power and control, and folks being depressed. If you’re depressed, you’re far more easy to control.

You’ll see this kind of messaging resonate across contemporary environmentalism. Even the protests symbolically involve gluing oneself to the street, or art, or just about anything. This meme sums it up best.

And the downstream effects of this memetic crisis are manifesting themselves among the young. Motivation in more evolved countries, to get married and have children is poor. It’s also no surprise that the issue eating up far too much oxygen in the political climate is the transgender issue, especially directed at kids. Instead of a focus on personal development, rigid gender stereotypes are used as a reason for any opposing gendered individual as a rationale for hormonal and surgical gender mutilation. If you think those kids were depressed before they started getting inducted as raw material in the gender reassignment industry, wait ten years. More depression, more ease of control. More people with borderline personality disorder and other obvious issues in the spotlight. And importantly, more suspension of agency for any somewhat normal to say that what is happening isn’t just batshit crazy.

I guess the point is this — when Anastassia and Andrei showed up on my doorstep, I was already into the world of increasing skepticism of the AGW narrative. And it turns out my skepticism was well-founded.

Andrei gave the first presentation at night to our local environmental group, the Friends of the Clearwater. He showed some pretty pictures before putting up this graph below.

This turns out to be a very interesting graph indeed. What does it show? The primary users of energy on this planet are not human. The real energetic flux is in soil and microorganisms, or plankton in the ocean. 90% of all energy — the literal life of Gaia — has basically nothing to do with us.

It’s only when you get down to contributions from vertebrates (~1%) that we show up at all. Fossil fuels have magnified our impact. No surprise there maybe boosting it from a thermodynamic basis to around 7%. So we do have an effect. But most of what passes on this planet has nothing to do with us.

I started this piece almost a year ago — and I should have posted it then. But really because of my own fears of social isolation in my community, I didn’t. I should have.

What is really going on with the AGW drumbeat? We’ve moved forward into an election year. No issue is more binned up, L/R, than AGW. Any shred of rationality regarding the consequentiality of this has been literally blown away. I’ll cover that in my next essay. I’ll spare you, my readers the punchline — as a result of out profound social fragmentation, we will now buy anything anyone who acts on our side of the line — for the Left, it’s institutional control — no matter how preposterous, or against events we can witness with our own eyes.

The problem with all this emphasis on control, and single factor blame, is that it’s turned CO2 into The One Ring. And we all know enough Tolkien to know what that means. Except, apparently, even in light of the billionaire class talking about building sulfur cannons on island mountaintops and spraying crazy levels of pollution into the air, we aren’t getting the very direct analogy.

More Boeing Blues — Starliner, DEI, and Getting Saved by SpaceX

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Three cheers and one cheer more!

Two astronauts aboard the Boeing Starliner, a reusable space capsule design by Boeing Defense, have been temporarily stranded at the International Space Station due to maintenance and reliability problems with their capsule. NASA Mission Control decided to bring the capsule back empty, rather than risk potentially catastrophic failure of the capsule during re-entry, without question the most stressful part of spaceflight, when the capsule must plunge back through the atmosphere in a literal fireball.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the two astronauts who took the big vertical ride early June 2024, were sentenced to additional months in orbit on the ISS because of the mission failure, though when the Starliner was brought back through the atmosphere, it did touch down in September (uncrewed) successfully. Starliner was a program funded coterminously with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, to the tune of $4.2B, while Dragon received $2.6B. According to Wikipedia, Boeing’s project had already exceeded its fixed price contract by $1.6B, indicating a major financial loss for Boeing.

There are all sorts of interesting top-level insights on the Wikipedia page, and I recommend reading it (I hadn’t until I decided to write this piece!) Of particular interest is receptivity to feedback from both the Boeing and the SpaceX engineering teams in the development phase of this project. The various mission failures along the path of Starliner resulted in the termination of Boeing Defense, Space and Security CEO Ted Colbert, who previously had been in charge of Boeing Global Services and CIO of the entire Boeing Company. From reading his resume’, Colbert had been rewarded with recognition that he was both African-American and an engineer multiple times in his career. I’m sure he was happy to play the DEI card in order to move up in Boeing’s chronic Game of Thrones hierarchy, and achieve entry into what many of us call Boeing’s Prince cohort. People at the level of Colbert wield a lot of power and authority. They get their own plane (and I’m not talking a Cessna 172.) I don’t know the exact number of levels in the hierarchy necessary to get to his position, but I’m guessing it is at least seven.

Was he hired because he was a black man? Well, that was probably a consideration. Boeing touts its DEI focus loudly, so I can’t really even understand why that would even be considered in a racist insult. That sword cuts both ways. But it’s just not interesting to me hanging the failure of Starliner all on one dude because he’s black. It really dodges the real blame of what different psychosocial systems produce. What does Conway’s Law really tell us, after all? Rigid psychosocial systems like the Boeing Company, at best, maximize incremental improvement and reliability. And at worst, reward the anti-risk-takers, who then propagate that attitude down the various levels of hierarchy toward a cult of new design mediocrity. Great for maintaining a legacy product line, maybe. Awful for producing anything new.

And Colbert didn’t take over Boeing Defense until 2022 — long after the various problems with Starliner’s problems with its thruster clusters were well-defined, if not understood. Sure — he didn’t fix them. But it’s not clear inside a massive, political rigid hierarchy, that he even could. What CEO, in a multi-stack hierarchical system, even does?

A better way of understanding the problems with Starliner, filled with status-driven infighting at the Boeing Company and its subcontractors, is to look at what SpaceX has done right. The answer is simpler than one might think.

SpaceX is willing to blow rockets up.

Why does this matter? One of the biggest challenges of complexity, that has been covered to death in the aftermath of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, was the lack of what’s called “All Up” testing. All Up testing means putting the whole system on a launchpad, and launching it into space. Doing this recognizes that there is only so much information that can be gathered from reliability testing of components. Why? Components in a large-scale system can only have their respective interactions observed when assembled together and tested. Even then, there’s no hope of constraining complex subassemblies and gathering statistical data for the entire system. You can’t launch a space shuttle 1000 times (or a rocket, for that matter) and gain that kind of confidence. Sooner or later, you have to put it together on a launchpad and Light That Candle.

But rigid hierarchies crave that kind of security. Boeing and NASA have, in the last 40 years, enshrined a no-risk culture that simply is not feasible for pushing the boundaries of spaceflight. The key concept here is what’s know as “configuration control.” What that is is you know all meaningful interactions between the various subsystems before you move forward. And while some level of due diligence in predicting those interactions is certainly part of engineering excellence, the other part of this is realizing you can’t know. And this kind of epistemic humility does not emerge out of experts in rigid silos.

Colbert was not set up as a fall guy for DEI, though he was indeed likely given the position because he had proceeded up the hierarchical stack and had the resume’ for the position. And he was black. But just look at his Wikipedia entry — everything in his career pattern was about exactly what the v-Memes of the contemporary Boeing Company enshrines. And that ain’t risk taking. So metacognition dies, your organization becomes insular, and all your enemies are, of course, on the outside. Because no one on the inside would even bring up a problem before it would happen.

That’s what the death of metacognition looks like.

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been busy lining up rockets to blow up, knowing a priori that they would. And because of a young engineering culture, and an expectation that they are creating a learning organization, they’re successfully learning the boundaries of what they don’t know — which is what you need when you cannot a priori assess the limits of configuration control. Knowing what you don’t know enables you to cure your ignorance. And then push the system boundary continuously outward.

There are also some natural consequences of demographics that SpaceX has going for them. I’ve done a couple of projects with them (I’ve also done projects with Boeing) and the main thing that impressed me was how young their engineering staff was. Aside from a couple of my ex-students, I never dealt with anyone older than 30. Combine that with goal-based v-Meme thinking (we just want to solve the immediate problem any way we can) and deep Guiding Principles directions from Elon Musk, the founder (we want humans to be a multi planetary species) and you have a far more potent v-Meme structure than moving up one more click in a massive hierarchy.

Will Starliner ever be a successful competitor to SpaceX’s Dragon crew capsule? I personally think that it will take a while, but yes. The v-Meme system at Boeing — a large Legalistic Hierarchy — has the ability to generate the information to cover the information space to make a space capsule. And in large part, their reputation for other lucrative contracts depends on it. But at what cost? We’re going to get some time/money comparisons out of this as far as the efficiency of psychosocial systems in generating and dealing with complexity. Right now, we’re easily at 2:1 or 3:1 in favor of SpaceX But the answer ain’t gonna be pretty for legacy organizational modes.

End Times and the Politics of Immiseration

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 9 Comments

Snow Peak, St. Joe National Forest

A book so interesting, I’m listening to it twice, as I digest the implications is Peter Turchin’s End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. In this book, Turchin explains his approach toward cliodynamics — a new field of his and his friends’ invention about mathematical modeling of history. Turchin uses large data sets to identify large-scale trends in history, borrowing from his own background in nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. He is down deep in empirical data, which has its problems. But his top-level insights are outstanding, and his book is well worth reading twice, if nothing except for the fact that it fits the historical moment so well. (I’ve attempted to contact him a couple of times, but he doesn’t write back. Which is a shame, as many of my more faithful readers know my own work in this field is highly complementary to his own.)

Turchin’s work is significant in that he tracks the rise and fall of elites in human societies, and their influences and antics. He notes there’s somewhere between a cycle of 50 to 200 years in which societies rise, and then must go through historic readjustment based on one important phenomenon — elite overproduction. The short version of this is that elites rise for various reasons, then have too many kids which want the same thing (or more) that their parents had, and then upon not being able to achieve this, form counter-elites and other disintegrative forces in societies. Polygamous societies, for obvious reasons, are worse than monogamous societies, primarily along the lines of one elite man being able to produce many multiples of offspring that a monogamous couple cannot produce. It would be fascinating to read Turchin’s cliodynamic analysis of Saudi Arabian society.

Along the way, what accelerates decline is creation of what Turchin calls a Wealth Pump — some mechanism that transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. This varies, obviously, dependent on the bases of the society, and is also driven by the number of elites’ children that need that Wealth Pump to insure their own entrance into elite society. We’ve seen this phenomenon ourselves in the last 50 years. Our own wealth gap has grown and grown, while the poor have grown demonstrably poorer, largely because of increased tuition costs at colleges and universities.

Turchin doesn’t talk about relational dynamics beyond his concept of popular immiseration — as the rich need more, they get more and make the poor more miserable. One can hopefully see how this separation might be attenuated a bit if we focused on empathetic human development. But this doesn’t fall under Turchin’s purview as a major factor driving societal evolution. And another factor Turchin ignores is the multiplication of psychopaths and their manipulation of mental models that also happen as societies stagnate. Considering the resurrection of racism through the drumbeat of anti-racism is a great example of this. Pot, kettle?

It was in Rob Henderson’s recent book, Troubled, that he introduced the idea of “luxury beliefs” — as elites ran out of money to buy goods and live lifestyles that appear elite, they tend to adopt beliefs to virtue signal to other elites that they were indeed part of that upper class. An example he explains in detail is the Defund the Police movement. Often these beliefs are sociopathic gaslighting, which the elites actually don’t adhere to themselves (he uses the example of decriminalization of drugs, which the elites can buffer, but is highly destructive to the lower classes.) But almost to a one, they are aimed at, if the poors follow them, immiseration to the lower classes. They’re a characteristic of how societies come to crisis. The basic pattern is this:

  1. The elites overproduce kids.
  2. The kids, having no truly economically beneficial way of becoming an elite, invent other high-status virtue-signaling modalities (think of the explosion of NGOs and their staff) to assure their position.
  3. These kids create situations for depopulation/beat the shit out of the poors, or their own ranks (think wars here for the most basic form) until there are finally enough chairs in the crazy musical chairs game they’ve started so that they all have seats again.

These behaviors seem to be memetically coded into entire populations. Witness the current U.S. Presidential race for a great example. Using Turchin’s framework, it’s pretty obvious that Donald Trump is, at least, declared on the side of the peasantry and anti-immiseration, while Kamala Harris is solidly on the side of making those Deplorables pay for being deplorable.

Many of the various tricks we’re seeing on a large scale have been tried before. Importing labor from immigrants to do this is a classic modality, and one in play, with elites in charge ignoring whatever historic restrictions might have existed in order to secure slave labor for themselves. This augments their own Wealth Pump, as well as deplete jobs for the poor and lower middle class, driving down wages even more, which then directly contributes to immiseration.

This coupling of the Wealth Pump to popular immiseration has multiple forms. I hadn’t really considered it before today, but the entire transgender movement is an amazing example. The larger blob takes advantage of people with gender dysphoria (someone who believes they are a sex other than their birth sex) whose presence, both passive (just dressing up and walking around) and active (entering opposite sex restrooms, advocating for pedophilia) causes a lot of misery, as these codes are enforced top-down on the peasantry. Simultaneously, the mainstreamed surgeries and hormone treatments demanded by the gender-confused individuals further enrich the hospitals and medical staff delivering these surgeries. Since the procedures involve essentially lifetime medicalization, the money never stops flowing from the general population to this group of people.

Much of this involves chronic gaslighting of the public. I wrote about this in my most recent piece on the normalization of obesity through propaganda here. Even the prurient pleasure of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has now been co-opted as a psychopathic weapon. You can’t even look at pictures of women with a nice rack and fantasize. Instead, you’re expected to, against your own deep genetic urges, to adulate a fatty. Because that’s the best you’re going to get.

Another current, ongoing example is the situation in Springfield, OH. “Someone” (not quite clear who) has resettled 20,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, OH, a declining Midwestern industrial town of 60,000. The hue and cry in Springfield in the news mostly surrounds the question whether the immigrants are turning local pets and waterfowl into barbecue. And while the mainstream press, an arm of the elites that has been more than happy to press forward with immiseration of the lower classes, declares such claims false, the reality is that 20K translocated Haitians, in such a modest size community, have no pressure to assimilate. They are also supported heavily by various federal refugee resettlement programs, distorting the local real estate market and availability of public services. And with such a skew, likely are actually governed by gangs.

The two political candidates, as stated above, in the U.S. Presidential election, perfectly exemplify this binning phenomenon. The Democrats are squarely in the elite’s corner, constantly condemning ordinary white people as “Deplorables” and even worse, gate-keeping any potential access to elite ranks through mandatory indoctrination in our colleges and universities. If you don’t subscribe to the belief structures, you don’t get your degree. And if you don’t get your degree, then ostensibly you’re condemned to the underclass you were attempting to escape. Talk about getting your mind right, indeed.

And on the Republican side, you have Donald Trump. Trump is hated perhaps on the surface for his manners and crudity. But the reality of what Trump proposes is a dismantling of the institutional class/caste. Trump as a President was a mediocrity — I can’t think of a single thing he did that was seminal. But by posturing himself against the institutions and threatening to stop the Forever War posture of the U.S. (drop out of NATO, stop sending arms to Ukraine, etc.) he’s attempting to kill two birds with one stone: stop the popular immiseration of the poor by not recruiting their sons to die overseas; and secondly, kill the Wealth Pump for the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. All this makes him a threat in both the memetic, as well as the monetary space. And that threat of destabilization of institutions, even though these very institutions are corrupt, creates irrational rage among those in the top 10% of the population that perceive themselves as elite.

And worse. Call it what you will (Trump Derangement Syndrome) but even when you speak against those institutions, you’re going to excite every Flying Monkey in the mainstream press corps that aspires both to be a member of the elite, as well as seeks to promote luxury beliefs in some way to prove their own virtue. This piece was written after the first Harris/Trump debate, which was notable primarily for the fact that the ABC network moderators continually fact-checked Trump while leaving Harris basically alone. Why there are even such a Praetorian Guard associated with a debate, where every larger societal truth is deeply nuanced, is mind-boggling.

I’ve already received feedback from friends and acquaintances who certainly don’t support Donald Trump. Yet when questioned on the basics of Trump’s policies — no Forever War, control of immigration, and stopping various programs of immiseration — they are firmly on that side of the issue-driven debate. Yet they’ll still declare themselves voting for Harris, even though Harris has promised more of the same, while actually delivering on those outcomes as Vice President. Why do people vote against their actual interests, even when issues are broken down clearly? Never doubt the power of the tides of history, or the devolutionary state of a country’s v-Memes. The Matrix rules over all.

How all this ends is fundamentally opaque. Other periods like this, as Turchin notes, ended when the various nobles killed enough of each other off. The problem with any total war where this might occur is obvious — not just mass immiseration of the entire population, but devastation as well. But other, more positive outcomes require elites to rein themselves in. It has happened in the past — Lyndon Johnson’s New Deal was also an example.

At this point, at least to me, it’s looking into a glass darkly. But at least, viewing things through Turchin’s lens, as well as understanding the memetic structure of the argument, the larger meme-scape is framed. Hang on. Let’s see how many folks wake up.

Back to Basics – Conway’s Law – the Mechanics of It All

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

A day at the beach

In between babbling about memetics to friends, every now and then one will get a word in edgewise, and ask “OK, Mr. Smartypants. How do we change outcomes?” My answer is always the same. “You have to consciously and deliberately apply Conway’s Law and change the social structure. If you don’t change the social structure, the emergent outcomes that you’re complaining about won’t change.”

They look at me, somewhat knowingly, like they MIGHT have gotten it. And then they walk away, just hoping their organization is going to suddenly morph into something that will produce different outcomes than the current version. Of course, this is insane. What they’re really doing is retreating back into The Matrix. And what people don’t get is that The Matrix has physical laws. You don’t get to break them. Like Grandma always used to say, “wish in one hand, shit in another, and tell me which one fills up first.”

That Grandma.

If you’ve read this far, I’m going to assume that you might be looking for an example (or something) that really conveys to management how this is true, and how they might need to readjust their thinking, as well as their org. chart, if they want a different product design.

Look at a nuclear reactor power plant. It’s a big thing, and at the center is a nuclear reactor. The reactor has support services that connect to it, like cooling fluid, and maintenance departments in charge of things like pumps, environmental controls and whatnot. You better believe that the org. chart looks like that hierarchy.

Last week, I had a visitor from Germany, an organic farming advocate. I was explaining to him that if he wanted small, robotic crawlers and grabbers, as opposed to enormous wheat combines (he got to ride in one) that had to start with a change in social structure of the organization producing them. Not easy to do with no obvious market, and folks making fine money on giant machines, now even driven by satellite.

But let’s take an even simpler design example. An airplane.

Virtually all but a handful of modern aircraft have a tube, called a fuselage, in the middle, upon which are hung wings. Engines then are hung off the wings, and then of course, there are subsystems inside the wings that drive things like flaps, ailerons and control wires.

But getting back to the social configuration, you’d better believe there is a wing group, concerned with the aforementioned components, and there is a primary structures/fuselage group. (Remember this is a simplification.) Within the wing structures group is a sub-group who talks to the fuselage folks regarding attaching the wings to the fuselage. Those folks might even hang out together, because pinning the wings to the fuselage correctly has all sorts of issues, and is obviously critical to entire system integrity. This probably seems obvious (it is). There’s also going to be a vertical stabilizer group (that’s the tail) and a horizontal stabilizer group as well. That’s aircraft 101. The people that interface all that in the design will talk to each other. And then at a large aircraft manufacturer like Boeing, they even have people called “Liaison Engineers” (which they pronounce “Lie-uh-zon” accent on the first syllable) that basically cruise around and make sure the interface people, as well as other folks having integration issues, are taken care of.

I’ve trained my share of Liaison Engineers.

All this seems obvious. But how would such a group ever change an aircraft design to something like a blended wing/body design? See below.

They couldn’t, of course. They are locked inside their social structure, refining the parts of the airplane they are responsible for. This is not entirely a bad thing, in that in the process of refinement increases reliability of the current configuration. Which is a primary reason that airplanes don’t drop out of the sky, and the biggest thing you have to worry about on a flight is whether you’re going to get a package of mixed nuts. Or not.

Any development of such a blended wing-body aircraft would require major redesign, with a major reshuffling and pulling of experts out of all the current groups into an entirely different social structure. Because you’d take some of the old v-Meme NA of the design (e.g. probably attaching engines works much the same way, and trust me, Boeing has specialists for nailing engines to wings) but other things would be entirely different. You’d definitely have to have an entire group for ground crew liaison, and on and on. Those people would then have to talk to the outside vendors providing those sky bridges we’re all accustomed to.

Short version — you’d have to create an entirely new social structure, which then would have to create an entirely new CAD model (think knowledge structure) which would then be instantiated in the final blended-wing-body design.

On top of that, I’m willing to bet that the people in the current organization aren’t used to jumping out of their hierarchy to talk to other technical specialists in the other hierarchies producing the other large parts. Remember — they have those Liaison Engineers for reasons. But you’d need that, and then you’d also have to have some evolved leadership so that if people aren’t “staying in their lane” they know that’s OK, and even encouraged to bring issues that the other parts of the new configuration might need to know about. People that are used to phoning it in because they’re master of their small square of real estate in the old design are going to have to be encouraged to seek out places where the new design requires design synergy.

And without that, you couldn’t make that cool new design at all. Now take that down to manufacturing and you’ll have a markedly different assembly line for such an aircraft. Boeing 737s are built on a continually moving line. If you wanted to build that new plane, you’d have to rethink all of that. And that would require a very different org. chart as well. As well as integrating the manufacturing people far earlier in the process, so you could actually build the thing. It would be revelatory to put the 737 assembly process org. chart up next to a B-2 assembly org chart. While there would be commonalities, I guarantee they’d be significantly different in topology.

If you’ve been reading much of this blog, you now can start seeing how you have different conflicts, as well as synergies in reliability and validity. And that’s going to require different brains, with different abilities to talk to other people with different brains. If you haven’t had an organization that has evolved empathy, that’s not going to exist. And trust me on this one — the thought of jumping out of the org. chart won’t even occur to most people, except in the context of whistle-blowing wrongdoing.

So that’s Conway’s Law in a nutshell. Your org. chart, and how you develop your people, which is largely due to how you set up your communication culture, is destiny.

Because Conway’s Law is The Law.

The Obesity Pandemic and the Balance Between Genetic and Memetic War

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

2024 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Cover

One of the things I spend far too much time pondering is the old “nature vs. nurture” question. Why wander about such well-trod ground? If you read my stuff, you can easily translate this to “genetics vs. memetics” and then start pulling apart the dark matter that is the latter, and has also been wholly neglected. We’ve left half the conceptual space blank when we want to understand information flows in society. Mores the pity.

But “nature vs. nurture” is really only the time invariant version of the question. The bigger question which is (to my knowledge) almost NEVER asked is “nurture => nature?” And importantly, how long? We have some evidence with epigenetics that trauma can modify neural codes, through the influence of cortisol and other stress hormones. But it’s still largely an undiscovered country out there.

My muse in pondering this question is my borzoi, Boo Boo. Boo Boo (formal name Thorondor, King of the Eagles from the Tolkien Legendarium) is a giant hunting sighthound. That’s Boo Boo below.

A pleasant day in the park with Boo Boo

Borzoi are notoriously difficult to train. They were bred to hunt in packs in front of horses, with the dominant prey being wolves, deer and Russian hares (they’re big.) Upon catching a wolf, they pin him to the ground and wait for the horses to catch up. And though they are a training challenge (I’ve actually trained Boo Boo) they are also quite polite and well-mannered on their own. Most are excellent and loving with children, puppies and other small dogs. But Boo Boo, if he encounters a dog that tries to dominate or attack him, well, that’s another story. He’s a wolfhound, and he’ll jump over it (he has to be provoked) grab it by the trachea and slam it to the ground. Needless to say, I was pretty surprised the first time this happened. Boo Boo had previously taken to running away at 35 mph, which then had me running for my car to chase him. You cannot chase an unwilling borzoi on foot.

What’s interesting about Boo Boo’s hardware/software combo is that the breed is approximately 600 years old — a cross between a greyhound and some guarding shepherd breed. Boo Boo has been with us from his puppyhood, and while I knew I was buying a giant hunting sighthound, and unlike many folks, had no illusions that he would hunt, it has been amazing watching his prey selection. I originally feared he would come into our quiet neighborhood, for example, and clean out the cats. But that has not happened. Boo Boo has only marginal interest in cats. But he catches squirrels regularly, and when his historic prey — deer — show up in the cul-de-sac, it’s all the control he can muster not to jump out of the window.

And when wolf hybrids show up in the dog park, Boo Boo immediately goes into a stalk. I clip him right up, of course. But it’s pretty wild. I have trained Boo Boo in the field for a strong retrieve, and he will come running from almost a mile away. And he will sit and lay down. But that’s about it. I never trained him to hunt wolves. Yet when one simulacra shows up, it’s game on. And so there is the question: how long did it take to go from nurture to nature?

Boo Boo and Ghillie on a long recall

It was with great interest that I tuned in last week to my X pal, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of public health at Stanford, for his podcast on obesity and root causes. He hosted one of his colleagues, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, who had done some elaborate data mining on the root causes of obesity. You can listen here. His controversial conclusion? That most obese women died during pregnancy and childbirth until the advent of modern obstetric practice, which basically in the process, allowed the explosion of genes that are part and parcel of the obesity crisis. My own take is that these things are multifactorial, and I’ve written a ton on this in the past. Listening to the podcast, I started out really skeptical, but I became convinced by the end that there was a “there” there. In only four generations, we’ve watched this flip from nurture to nature. Wild.

What is particularly interesting about this to me, though, is now we are being bombarded with photo after photo of obese women being promoted as sexy and healthy. I can understand this, and have some level of conscious sympathy. There are so many more obese people now than even 20 years ago. Obese people need love and touch, like we all do. And so on. The argument has been made over and over, and need not be made more here.

But the conscious mind is not what controls both emergence and convergence in the Matrix. What is also coincident to the obesity crisis is our current crisis of fatherlessness, as well as overproduction of elites. These two subjects are covered in detail — the first by Rob K. Henderson in his book Troubled, and the second by Peter Turchin in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. There are many takeaways from both books, and I highly recommend both of them. Troubled is Henderson’s personal story of how he traversed the foster care system, attended Yale, and ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge in England. One of his main points, after seeing the world from both sides of the tracks, is that elites speak in code that is often duplicitous and two-faced — they brandish luxury beliefs that convey social status to the person spouting such beliefs, but in reality they would never practice themselves. The canonical example he uses is “defund the police.” It’s easy if you’re rich and live in a gated community to tell other people you don’t need police. But if you’re poor and you don’t have adequate policing, you’re likely to be victimized by criminals.

Turchin’s book is a bit more complicated, with many points about large scale societal trends. But his main point is that when societies have too many elites, they move into crisis . And these elites wage some version of war on each other, as well as the general population until the herd is culled. What I’ve been pondering is this: What does this likely memetic war look like, and how is it prosecuted?

Henderson gives some excellent examples on how elites wage war on each other. He observed, during his time at Yale, students would be out protesting international investment banking one day, while clamoring to sign up for interviews at Goldman Sachs the next. He posited that maybe they were consciously or unconsciously attempting to limit the size of the pool before interviews, because they all wanted the high paying jobs at Goldman Sachs to stay in the financial elite. So they used these luxury beliefs against each other in order to cull the herd. Since this information and behavior that flows from that information, it is obvious that at least, on the surface, this is classic psychopathic memetic warfare.

But there might be more to it. The question that this behavior led me to is, with regarding obesity, that the conscious interpretation — care and promotion of obesity as a positive lifestyle choice — is a great example of a luxury belief. No elite man wants to marry an obese wife, and the elites have better diets, more access to information about lifestyle choices to counteract the larger societal forces heaping destructive diets on the poor. Stated choice — that obese women are sexy — vs. elected choice — marry a skinny wife — couldn’t be more stark.

But after listening to Dr. Fraiman, maybe it’s more sinister than that. If the obesity epidemic is buried in our genes, as he maintains, maybe in the larger subconscious overmind, elites are promoting obesity as normal to get rid of the competition. It may be that only four generations of genetic transfer were all that is needed to sow this root cause delivered by modern obstetric care into the general population. But genetic recognition of sexual fitness is not so easily rooted out. We know hot when we see it. And what we’re really seeing with this shaming campaign against people that would select for genetic fitness is an attempt to overwhelm our natural senses, once again, with a displaced memetic notion of fitness (fat women are hot) because in the elite mind, those that bought that particular t-shirt would then self-eliminate. The genetic overmind is not so easily persuaded that fat women won’t die during childbirth, though, because that’s what has been coded over a million years. That’s a lot shorter than the 600 years needed to teach a dog to hunt wolves.

But it’s back in the meme-sphere to rewrite this code for this turning of elite overproduction. And being attached to fundamental needs and drives, like the need for sex and touch, is actually diabolical. It’s in the same category in the memetic ungrounding that the transgender and trans humanist movements are based on. Do what we say, dammit. Or else we’re going to do unto you. And it ain’t gonna be pretty. Just like the kids at Yale playing each other as fools for the jobs at Goldman Sachs, we have a much broader campaign to eliminate the competition.

Still more thinking to do, of course. But this is a start. And the conclusion is macabre — if we can just get the unwashed to eliminate themselves, that would save a lot of trouble.

A good piece that might need a little updating, but is still useful, on my views on diet, is at this link.