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Sedition

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

The Parthenon — One of the interesting things about it is how small it is — Athens, Greece

On a personal note, it’s super-depressing to be writing about the events of the past week on the day before Thanksgiving. Hoping these simply pass means that when you unearth this post a couple of years from now, you won’t know what I’m talking about.

Last week, six Democratic senators decided to make a large-scale announcement on X, telling the troops of the US Military that they didn’t have to obey “illegal” orders. They didn’t give any examples of illegal orders, doing nothing but admonishing the rank-and-file with the implication that Trump has in the past given them illegal orders, and that at a minimum, they need to be insubordinate to these. As I said, there are no examples — just a broad brush telling them of the oath to the Constitution. The Constitution itself is notoriously sparse when it comes to telling the military exactly how to run itself, other than members of the Army and Navy (that’s all there was at the time) should obey the orders of the Commander in Chief, and the Commander in Chief was the President of the United States. I don’t think our Founding Fathers quite anticipated the psychopathic information wars (they were not totally naive to the ways of manipulation, but still) we are encountering today. I kinda think they wouldn’t have imagined senators and congress-critters as using gross stupidity as a defense, or the notion that language should be parsed without any implication.

But here we are — where we’ve had the Democratic Party shrieking that the current President is a fascist (once again, total Humpty Dumpty with this word.). For those that need a Humpty Dumpty refresher, showing psychopathic manipulation was alive and well even during Lewis Carroll’s day, here’s the famous quote from Through the Looking Glass —

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

What is fascinating, if you follow this blog, is the memetic tricks being played by the various actors — in particular Mark Kelly, D-AZ. While he admonishes the military rank-and-file (he is a decorated veteran and Space Shuttle pilot) in a tone that implies they’re being given illegal orders, he beats feet away from this position in subsequent interviews. He poses his comments as some kind of avuncular reminder to the troops as a post-statement interpretation. It’s totally whack, of course. But decide for yourself. (Youtube has problems embedding in WordPress pages, but the link should work.)

Arguing against the original posting by the Six is a fools errand, and I won’t do it here. But what is fascinating is the Six surf the wave of memetic understanding, arguing that what is obviously a context-laden message, full of insinuation, should be taken literally and completely fragmented, and out of context. The perpetrators use memetic simplicity, along with a follow-on message of assertion of the First Amendment as their escape hatch. They have the right to say anything they want, of course, and they get to pull the Humpty Dumpty.

When Trump responded on X and Truth Social by angrily reminding them that basically what they have done could be considered an act of sedition, punishable by hanging, there’s a cascade of angry pearl-clutching in unison across the entire Left. What’s wild is that they all ran Trump’s statement of fact into “Trump wants to hang all of us.” Well, he might, but Trump didn’t say that at all. They are counting on psychopathic manipulation — clever deletion of a few words, while counting on the Neo-tribal politics I discuss in this piece to hold sway. The Left has spent the last nine or so years demonizing Trump — certainly the public must realize he is an illegitimate President, disposable by violence.

What is wild is that the Left continues to lay ground for what is known as a Color Revolution. And what is a Color Revolution? From ChatGPT –

Large-scale public demonstrations calling for political reform or resignation of leaders.

Unified branding (e.g., a color, flower, or simple symbol on clothing, banners, etc.).

Civil resistance tactics such as marches, strikes, and occupation of public spaces.

Rapid mobilization often sparked by disputed elections, corruption, or economic crises.

Focus on nonviolent action, although violence may occur around the edges.

This Color Revolution is focused on Trump, obviously, in attempts to brand him as a fascist and some kind of ersatz King. Even considering the argument a year into Trump’s Presidency is exhausting. The force of the current Color Revolution derives from endless haranguing using generic terms that the general public really can’t define. If Trump was a real fascist, the various operatives on the Left would at a minimum be in jail, and likely have already been executed. But the drumbeat of social media repetition goes on. The immiseration process never stops.

And the people doing this are pros. One of the Seditious Six, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) is a former CIA officer. Her bio is incomplete, but it doesn’t take much reading in between the lines that she helped subvert active organizations for a living. The others are trading on their service records in a “how could I possibly want to subvert the government” sleight of hand.

As of tonight, November 26, there have two National Guard members critically injured by an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan. There’s no question that the constant direct emboldening by specific members of the Seditious Six contributed to the atmosphere allowing these killings. Slotkin herself was warning that National Guard members were likely to start shooting US citizens in the various cities that they’ve been deployed to only last week, which translates to legitimacy of various aggrieved parties taking shots of their own. It’s going to be a wild week seeing how this latest development gets spun.

Stay tuned.

How Psychopaths Weaponize Free Speech

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 3 Comments

Cascade Mountains, WA — Winter is Coming

One of the craziest things that’s happened in the last six or so years is the blatant injection of speech control by the Left in all aspects of what I’ve called Collapse Narratives. What is a Collapse Narrative? It is the story and framing of a “moral racket” to bully others into silence, and that if you follow the narrative thread, your society will collapse. “If you say that, not only are you evil, but we will ostracize you from society AND kill the baby panda. And it will be ALL YOUR OWN FAULT.”

The technique works best when utilizing sexual taboos, which the psychopaths are allowed to discuss in celebration. But if you protest, you are (pick one or all) a bigot, a racist, and so on. And you better shut up.

No better example could be found than when Sam Brinton, former undersecretary in the Department of Energy, in charge of nuclear waste disposal went on various tours promoting his kink, which I can’t quite characterize. It involves being surrounded by other men dressed up in leather dog costumes, complete with butt plug tails inserted into their poopers.

Brinton was later dismissed for a particularly pernicious habit he had of stealing other people’s luggage off airport baggage carousels, then going home and wearing the dresses in public.

But while Brinton was in play, we, the public, were subjected to what I’d call “Walsh’s Progression” (credit to Matt Walsh at the Daily Wire) regarding all this psychopathic nonsense. We were supposed to Tolerate this reprehensible behavior, followed by Accept this as normative, then forced to Celebrate this as somehow adding to the modern cultural zeitgeist, leading to Normalization, and ending, of course, in Coercion and Punishment if you can’t follow the script.

All these types of manipulations depend on the psychopathic entity violating taboos and norms in society, followed by a pronouncement that only they are allowed to discuss this. The only allowable response across society is sycophancy. What they are promoting is usually, by their standards, some ostensibly necessary sexual deviancy. Why does it have to center around that deviancy, in the larger psychosocial picture? Because it mainstreams a channel for sexual abuse, mostly directed at children, who once traumatized, will then increase the odds of them developing a personality disorder and joining the ranks. It’s a combo psychosocial control/memetic reproductive act.

And that’s why it’s necessary to be done in public, especially publics containing children. It simply doesn’t work behind closed doors.

To repeat — psychopaths take taboo subjects, self-identify, demand acceptance and then use these to shut down broader debate. And because these subjects are ALREADY taboo in the larger cultural zeitgeist (call it polite society), it’s not that hard a task.

Let’s take another example — illegal immigration. While LEGAL immigration policy is a debatable good, illegal immigration is truly a consolidated blight on society. They are not the same. Illegal immigration often involves human trafficking. And human trafficking is inordinately profitable, both for the Mexican cartels that pipeline people into the US, as well as the various entities in the US exploiting the labor.

How does this work? Let’s say you are a contractor bidding a federal contract. You must bid this contract at prevailing wage rates, or it will be rejected. But if you fill your workforce with illegal aliens, you can likely pay these people half or less that same wage rate, resulting in a windfall for you. This becomes money that both you and the cartels can pump into the political machine to “look the other way” in whatever regional market you occupy.

Now pour on the psychopathic messaging. “These are hardworking families (growing dope in Ventura County.) “If you don’t support them, you’re a racist!” and so on. One pours on the messaging because there is an extensive web of government support services that are also profiting off the existence of these people, with housing, food and medical assistance, all part of the associated moral racket. “They are only looking for a better life, you monster!” And unless you’re made of sterner stuff (like me) you’re going to wilt.

Folks on the other side can’t even open their mouths regarding the very immediate impact to their own circumstance — especially in adjacent, poor communities. In the Scandinavian countries, rapes increased some 50% from baseline with the importation of migrants from Africa. And heaven forbid if you actually discuss the demographics of the illegal migrants — mostly young men in their 20s and 30s, and the inevitable characteristics of letting in an uneducated army into your country, while housing and feeding them. It’s all booby-trapped with psychopathic taboos designed to make you keep your mouth shut.

It’s even difficult for me, writing in the abstract, to imagine using the very real argument that my friends’ daughters will increase the chance of them being raped by allowing this illegal wave in.

That’s the power of psychopathic taboos.

One can also see the extreme reaction from the Left on this issue against Donald Trump. Tom Homan, Trump’s deportation czar, attacks the psychopaths head on. Instead of deferring to their manipulation of taboos, he confronts them with stories of direct experience. But because the majority of our mainstream media has abandoned their own ethics, or are willingly supporting the psychopaths, there is no amplification.

And, as with all things psychopathic, in the v-Meme space, the psychopaths take any dissent, as well as detail, and shove it down into the macerator of reality. The only “appropriate” response is conformity. And that requires relational disruption and loss of agency — THE key psychopathic identifiers — for all adjacent actors. And so the folks responding to the use of these psychopathic taboos march down into Tribal v-Meme knowledge structures of myths about past immigration. Nuance or reasonable policy is not acceptable.

Do the psychopaths know they’re doing this? I think the ones at the top do. But much of this turns into an emergent cascade — once the masters at the top, interested in some strange brew of anarchy, chaos and low level control, set the tune, the local dynamics of relationships comes into play. Understanding the complex web of both illegal actors, and legal institutions in perpetuation of all this strains the brains of all but a few of us.

Diabolical.

What’s the remedy? The modest thing is resist the psychopath’s efforts to rename pathological behaviors into more palatable forms. Don’t use the language of the psychopath. Call illegal immigration “illegal immigration” — not undocumented workers. Do not use the phrase “children’s gender affirming care.” Call it child castration. You’ll see an immediate revulsion for describing these various things as they are. But if we cannot reclaim the language, we will see the psychopaths carry the day on the field.

Let’s get going.

Requiem for Charlie Kirk — A Victim of Memetic War

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 5 Comments

Charlie Kirk at WSU, April 2025 — picture from the Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA ED and conservative influencer, was assassinated yesterday, September 10, in Orem, Utah, while doing an event at Utah Valley University. There are lots better sources of Charlie’s life trajectory than this blog, and I’m not going to repeat all the various details of his activism, his life, nor his demise.

What was interesting about Charlie was that his events consisted of direct engagement with students. Opinions will differ on his intellectual veracity, or his demagoguery. I’m not really interested in that, either, because so much of one’s take on Charlie’s opinion directly depends on your own position in the v-Meme stack. But you cannot argue — there is simply too much evidence — of his relational style. He would get out there, meet people, and talk to them. It didn’t matter in the least what your title was, or what your take on an issue was either. He would debate you, bringing his perspective and facts, against your facts and arguments. Some might say it was his schtick — and maybe it was. But it was straightforward. It was how he built relationships.

If one were categorizing Charlie with my work, it would fall into someone passionately committed to independently generated, data-driven, trust-based relationships. He would look people in the eye, and construct his argument based on what you said. It is the way that empathetic relationships start, even if these conversations were only 5 minutes long. For those that need a translation, here’s the short version. He was interested in authentic friendships.

People are asking today “why Charlie?” I would argue that his relational construction mode made him a primary target in The Matrix. Whether you loved or hated his opinions, he was firmly on the side of rational, data-driven relationships. Yes, he did have status — he knew Presidents and such. But that was not the card he played. He leant heavily into his argument.

And that made him a key target in the Memetic War we find ourselves in. The vast majority of the population do not understand this, nor acknowledge it. The media prefers old labels — Left/Right, liberal/conservative. On and on. But that is really not what is going on. What is going on is a memetic conflict — two different primary pathways people’s brains work — belief vs. reason. And that is not so easily remediated. It is deeply structural, buried in our subconscious, both locally and across the Matrix. I discuss its downstream outcomes in this piece. It’s one of my best.

Rest in peace, Charlie. I appreciated what you were attempting to do. Let’s hope more folks wake up and realize that it’s not just the top level that matters. Independently generated, trust-based relationships built the world we enjoy today. You were a champion of this. The old externally defined, status-based relationships simply cannot maintain it. And we are, as a society, under massive attack from psychopaths and elites attempting to herd us back down that devolutionary trail. I weep for your children, who will never know you and your genius. And I am sorry you are gone.

Moral Heat Maps and Relational Dynamics

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment
Blue Canyon, Salmon River, Idaho

One of the most difficult concepts for people to internalize that I write about is the notion of Independently Generated, Data-Driven relationships vs. Externally Defined, Belief-based relationships. These two archetypes form the core of all human relational systems and social structures, and if you believe me, are the things that create the baseline of our cognitive neural systems. The first is based on agency-driven, data-based empathy (think in terms of simplification as reading the complex mix of verbal and non-verbal communication for building gradated trust.) The second is belief-based, and created outside the individual by the larger social structure in play. These require no agency — the fact that I’m a professor, for example, is defined by my university. Whether you think I’m a nice guy or not, however, is dependent on your own judgment.

The short version is that these belief-based relationships map to the same part of the brain as limbic/emotional states. As such, they’re coupled to very short timescales, as well as immediate reactivity to information. Very different than an independently generated relationship, that depends on interaction, autobiographical narratives, and far more complex and complicated processing in the pre-frontal cortex. Your conscious mind is a powerful thing. But it takes more time and energy.

I’ve often been asked if there’s any set of experiments I could do to validate my various theories, other than trust in my skills of observation. I always laugh, and say “well, if you gave me $10M I could.” I’d have to hire real people in psychometrics, and sort through all of it.

But then this meme started making the rounds of the Internet. And maybe, just maybe, it might not be so impossible. I’m talking about the figure below.

Paper in Nature Communications, Waytz, Iyer, Young and Haidt (Sept. 2019)

My primary critique with Haidt’s work is that he basically just makes up categories with no physical basis, that sound good, and this is no different. But he also is great at intuitive guesses, so at the same time, I do recommend reading him.

What this graph shows is the differentiation between how conservatives and liberals view moral obligation. Conservatives, on average, start closer to home, with more weight placed on people that they know, and then with concern dying out as distance in time and space increases. Liberals are the exact opposite. People adjacent to them accrue no credit for distance minimized, with concerns being projected on people further away, or even things that are often deeply unknowable.

What these folks don’t posit (mostly because they’re academics, and are invested in a low empathy environment, which then conditions their own bias) is that this also clearly demonstrates the potential morality that springs from a combination of independent, empathetic connection, as well as validity grounding — the ability to believe something because you witness it with your own senses. These two things are necessarily confounded (the experiment wasn’t set up to separate them) but you can still see how this plays out.

Short version — some majority of conservatives value a personally collected stream of information more than they do other sources, or experts and their stories. With the exact opposite being true for liberals/progressives. And this creates a profound neural gap between how the two will sort into social structures. Because of this relational divide, conservatives are far more likely to be communitarians than liberals. And liberals are far more likely to sort into elite-governed hierarchies, and be status conscious. You show your level of cool to your liberal pals by being concerned about the politics in West Papua, which you can never really hope to affect. And you can also appreciate how missionaries tend to be conservative. You want people to be saved? You travel and tell them about Jesus.

One can also see how this develops low- and high-responsibility mindsets. You can care about the entire world, but the reality is there’s not much effect you can have on the entire planet. But you can impress others with your virtue, which will then elevate your status in your social hierarchy. Contrast to the conservative viewpoint — you can affect your local environment, let’s say by planting a tree in your downtown, and while the global effect of that action is also unknowable, you can be responsible, and hold yourself accountable for that particular action. You can check on how the tree grows — an exercise in validity grounding –– and then, importantly change your behavior to improve the tree’s thriving. And all the time, you’re really cultivating how your brain processes information.

Since the election of Donald Trump, I’ve had to deal with a spate of attacks and abandonment from many of my liberal friends. This is not pleasant — even for me. Any straying from more and more extreme party orthodoxy means condemnation and alienation. I have picked up some more conservative friends along the way, and honestly enjoyed the development of some very honest and refreshing relationships, often hooked to the social media app X/Twitter. For me at least, these are data-driven — I ‘tweet’ and then people follow me for my ideas. I’m fully aware there is group aggregation in all of this. But as an original content creator, it’s been very refreshing.

The downstream cascade of the isolation the liberal community is actually promulgating is not going to be pretty – for them. Based on purity tests and adherence to orthodoxy, it is inherently relationally disruptive, and as such, prone to being kidnapped by psychopaths, who are far better liars than most of my friends trapped in progressive claques. Because it’s tied to our limbic centers, more people are likely to make snap decisions about which friends to keep or reject. I’ve certainly seen this on Facebook. And worse — if you’re prone to splitting, it ain’t gonna get better.

It’s also disorienting for those same progressives. As more fantastic crimes get dreamt up, the more the liberal mind loses its grip on a more adjacent reality, and the more we see projection of this mindset on conservatives. And that adjacent reality is the thing that creates the world we navigate.

As I’ve noted before, psychopaths always make a big splash up front. But over time, the system manages to find a way to isolate its relational vampires.

Or the whole system collapses. Stay tuned.

On Immigration

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Yosemite North Country, headwaters of the Tuolumne River

Immigration has turned into one of the most controversial issues of our day. Why? Because we are in the days of what I would call the Great Validity Grounding — where our elites have carried population manipulation through propaganda to such a level, there is no way we can swallow the various fictions and not get hit over the head by reality.

And immigration is far from the only issue. We are told that boys are girls, and there is no harm in pumping teenagers full of cross-sex hormones. We are told that our very agencies responsible for subversive activity around the world are only the positive narcissistic storefronts for saving lives around the globe. That Americans really aren’t owed any reasonable egalitarian trade policies. That we should be involved in endless, historic wars around the world. The list goes on and on.

Most Americans want to retreat from all this — and have. Being hyper-informed (I am the worst when it comes to digesting the constant stream of news out of the Internet and social media) AND being a teacher who actually engages my students — I sit with them and nonjudgmentally ask them what they know — it is stunning how little most of them are aware of what is going on, nor how they are being manipulated 24/7. But the crunch is coming for the population, and certainly no one has championed the re-grounding effort in common-sense reality than Donald Trump. I’ve been very critical of Trump in the past. But as I wrote in a recent piece, maybe we needed an inveterate narcissist to play-act the role of national father to shake us out of our shared cognitive delusion.

When it comes to immigration, I am profoundly against illegal immigration of any sort. What happened during the Biden administration was an appalling betrayal of the national interest. And the accounting of the damage is yet to be reckoned with. And assembling coherent narratives of that damage is nearly impossible – because by and large, the elites in our society have benefited. And our press will simply not report in any coherent manner on the actual effects of the past 20M (or more) illegal immigrants coming into our country in the past four years.

But such a tidal wave of humanity had to have mechanisms that supported it. That led to growth of large-scale Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the gaslighting machinations to hide from and defraud the American people, who paid for all of it. But there is more — if you need more proof of the size of the effort, go to Youtube and search for “migrants – Darien Gap”. You’ll see the encampments set up in Colombia — often nation- or language-specific that shepherded the mass of humanity (mostly 20-30 something males) up through some of the most remote jungle on the planet, and onto buses and trains into the United States. Bret Weinstein on Tucker Carlson gives insights on the darker part of all this — Chinese migration into the US.

The other dark side of all this is that Sinaloan gangs from Mexico form a huge part of the infrastructure for getting illegal migrants from around the globe into the U.S. There are no clear numbers on the money involved with the cartels, but it is clear that it ranges in the tens of billions, to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars. The idea that peasants or lower caste individuals from African countries could figure out how to get to Ecuador or Colombia and then traverse the Darien Gap, purely on their own gumption, is laughably ridiculous. The cartels get the cash, and then provide the services. And any deficits are made up in the sex slave trade.

Further, the travesty of the border then fuels huge monetary reserves for those same cartels to buy politicians on the border, as well as along the route. If you expect these same cartels, with their violent economic morality to suddenly acquiesce to the federal government shutting down a primary revenue stream, you are deluded.

But that is not the main point of this piece. My experience is primarily with the connected consequences of our legal immigration policy — which involves the evolution and development of our technical workforce. That is something we must address as well, because how we approach this already has, and will continue to dictate our own economic composition of our own country.

To start, I think it’s important to remember that there are phases behind any social policy. While social policy is always going to be heavily biased towards elite interests (Peter Turchin in his book, End Times, notes that there’s basically no period in a society’s life where this ISN’T true) that doesn’t mean that every policy propagated will necessarily damage those not high-status. Policies, however, run their course, and inevitably, as they get hacked and manipulated by sophisticated individuals, who have some psychopathic members as part of their cohort, must be revisited before the disparate impact becomes so damaging they threaten the fabric of that same society.

Let’s get to the basics. Folks have been gaslit for so long on this issue they deny basic realities.

1. Increased competition drives down wages at the bottom of the wage scale.

2. Same makes housing more unaffordable for poor folks.

3. Labor surpluses leave little incentive for politicians to fix deficits in training and education for people on the lower part of the wage scale.

4. H1B visas gut the demand drivers for improving technical education for high school and undergraduate students.

5. Lack of a society that generates good jobs mean more “culture of poverty” problems for society, as poverty and single-parent homelessness drive crime rates and violence.

What one realizes is that these policies directly fuel the Wealth Pump — the social mechanisms that Turchin describes that moves money from the lower classes into the upper classes. This then exacerbates the income gap problem the country has been experiencing since the early ’70s. Which then drives an empathy gap, as the country moves away from egalitarian, high social contact lifestyles that might lead to emergent levels of compassion, as well as compensatory policies that actually make sense.

But what is NOT discussed is that immigration also serves as a metacognitive drag. I’m an engineering professor, and one of the drumbeats in the background of my entire career has been the need to educate more engineers. Or recruit them. Or whatever.

But around 1996, I noticed a new phenomenon. Engineering students, who a priori had typically received two offers at graduation, suddenly only were receiving one. And salaries had also gotten stuck. Neither of these phenomena indicate a starving job market. In fact, the opposite. And this has not changed. In fact, what HAS happened is there have been an increase required in experience for someone to get a job as an engineer. 30 years ago, maybe 50% of all students had an internship, which then did facilitate them getting a job. Now, my guess is that 90% of students have internships. And jobs are not really available for students who have below a 3.0/4.0 GPA. We in the university have compensated for these pressures as far as facilitating some of these requirements. But the pressure on the universities themselves to improve their own curricula has been non-existent. Instead, universities, contaminated by status-seeking behaviors, have doubled down on “research productivity.” Most research produced by universities is garbage — but then again, most new thought is garbage. You’d never know from watching how universities sell themselves, though. And it’s also true you have to have some area of inquiry for faculty to pursue — especially in rapidly changing fields like engineering. Without it, it is far too easy for faculty to stagnate. But, as with all things, there are limits. And universities, with their meta-linear metrics, fuel nonsensical creep of numbers rather than looking at actual advancement.

Like it or not, one starts to realize the key lever to forcing this society to fix its problems is to radically cut back on the number of H1-B visas currently issued. Then elites will have to start applying pressure to political systems to fix the educational system. Yes — there will be some pressure to offshore some of the work. But that is not without its costs. And I’d argue it would be far easier to just to fix our own educational systems.

And, as Americans, we would all be better off.

Decision Tempo and Performance

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Friends are where you find them – Ginger and Mike, Costa Rica

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen, in my long career as a university profession, is the total ungrounding in time and space that happens in university decision making. One of the most prized possessions inside any given department is space inside buildings, and this is only modestly divided rationally. Seniority matters, and as such, if you’ve occupied a given space for a really long time, it really is your kingdom — regardless if your kingdom is coming apart, or came apart years ago. As a professor, you literally get to hold onto this until you retire or die. A further extension of this is the constant construction cycle that also happens on university campuses. Find me a campus where a new building is not being built, and I’ll show you a campus on the edge of collapse.

To be fair, universities must be modernized regularly, and lots have been around for over 100 years. But a lot of this is memetic construction of mindset that the entire social system feeds into. “Pharaohs need pyramids” is what I’ve told every person puzzled by the phenomenon. It’s deeply baked into the incentive structure as well. You’re not going to become a provost (head of many deans) from being a dean if you haven’t supervised a large-scale construction project.

And when it comes to making timely decisions, or having any sense of rationality in that decision making, good luck with that. You’d think in a fast-paced field like engineering, we’d be constantly updating our course curriculum. Not so fast. Even if we wanted to revise our curriculum in engineering, there are myriad committees that are university-wide that exist to review and approve various changes. Certainly, some review is warranted. Though every University president alive lies through their teeth about this, the university actually sells reliability — not innovation. But there are days when we fall increasingly behind, and for those of us attempting to stop the plane from crashing, it feels like we’re out on the wing of the B-29 with a wrench, desperately cranking away to fix an engine, and hoping we can hang on and not get blown into the propellor.

I’ve been attempting to put into words what this affects — to name something is to at least start to tame it. I came up with the term “Decision Tempo”. How long do we take to make a decision of particular scale? There is no official formula for any of it. Inside an academic department issues are topically assigned to various committees, who are supposed to ruminate on them and then bring them back to a faculty meeting for a vote. Faculty meetings are the butt of every joke in academia for reasons. They allow nit-pickers to, well, nit-pick. From a memetic perspective, what this means in a Legalistic v-Meme organization, where status matters, individuals can argue endless exceptions to generalized rules, to fix smaller and smaller problems, in the pursuit of completeness. What’s more interesting is that history in most of these decisions is only contained in an oral tradition – a true Tribal/Mythical v-Meme flex. We’ve cycled back, even in my department, which is modestly functional, to various overall curriculum changes multiple times. As now one of the two most senior faculty, I’m often the only person that can even remember where we were 20 years ago.

With Decision Tempo, the term, I can at least start the conversation with younger faculty about what theirs might be. Swimming in a static world without time, there isn’t even any consideration of how long most decisions take. There are tons of decision-making frameworks (of course) and if you can’t come up with your own, you can always use Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). Google it.

If there’s a larger lesson, the first step of transitioning out of emergent, v-Meme, unconscious strategies is to name and make conscious something you’re attempting to optimize. As with Decision Tempo, you’ll find others have thought about it. Then you’re at least part way towards changing the memetic structure of our organization. Because once you confront Decision Tempo, you can then have a discussion on how you view trying new things, and the cost of failure. Which is THEN the root cause of innovation. As discussed in this article on SpaceX and the Boeing Starliner.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 4 – Filling in The Liberal Arts

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Boo Boo at the Dinner Table — Always Polite

One of the things we don’t discuss much, when deciding what courses students should take, is the selection of core university requirements that our students are subjected to. The quality of these courses varies wildly, primarily dependent on their age since inception.

What does that mean? Having spent so much time in the academy (37 years as a professor at WSU) I’ve had more than one chance to witness the cycles of course development. The short version is that new courses roughly follow the demographics of Rogers’ Theory of Innovation. The Pioneers and Early Adopters show up and invent the courses. But, not surprisingly, they move on, becoming bored over time with any repetition in teaching. Early Majority does OK, but it’s not too long until any course, created with the best of intentions, ends up being taught by Late Majority or Laggards, with all the problems you might imagine as far as creativity goes. The worst classes are in the required core, which the Liberal Arts faculty largely have shifted to the contingent workforce, which are literally slaves on the plantation.

I hate to criticize the slaves directly, because some of them are obviously paying for bad karma in a past life they had no control over. And there is nothing more saintly than doing a reasonable job teaching Freshman English Composition. Students aren’t taught really how to write in high school, and they show up needing their papers bled red upon. It’s really a historic problem that’s gotten worse, and is likely to continue to decline. I owe my ability (or at least the trajectory) to write on my first community college professor, who taught the science fiction literature class I took. He had both the grace and temerity to tell me frankly that I sucked. And I am forever in his debt for that. Because I did.

I have far less sympathy for the other courses (various history, sociology and psychology courses) students are forced to take. Many of these are “woke”, and my white male students in particular suffer. They supposedly exist to teach students critical thinking, but it’s of the Cool Hand Luke variety. If the students don’t get their mind right, they are treated harshly until they do. To be fair, I have not gone up to these classes, and sat through them. But the students complain. And the advice I give the students also hasn’t wavered much. Sit tight, it’ll be over soon. Kind of like a root canal.

But it’s deeply problematic, as more and more students show up ungrounded with any sense of engineering outside of assembling a Lego kit. Fair or not, becoming an engineer comes with a pretty heavy set of ethical obligations. Most students have no idea, for example, that they are getting a professional degree, and that they have to take their studies seriously or they could get someone killed.

Getting changes in the core curriculum is also not easy. Major changes have to go to the Faculty Senate, which I used to preside over. In tightening budget circles, I guarantee you that there will be fights over any change in core, because core provides the biggest buck for the bang of all the classes. The contingent slave class of graduate students and clinical professors are paid poorly, but tuition per credit hour is the same. You do the math. And the faculty in those departments wear their victim cards on their sleeves. Outside a handful of them, what they’re doing inside those classrooms is not for polite company.

If we wanted to improve our engineering students, we’d teach two history classes dedicated to the History of Technology. The use of mathematics inside the class itself would be primarily disallowed, with the goal of students understanding the larger narrative structure of the history of science and technology as being the takeaway. I was recently at the Technical University in Munich, and the Germans do a great job with this. The halls of the Metro stop are painted with murals discussing all the greats that contributed to the march of both science and technology. Even as an American, I was inspired by thinking I was walking the same grounds as the German pioneers of engine and aviation science. Our students literally know nothing –even about our space program.

I would also reinstitute the language requirement, with a twist. Most language classes at the university focus heavily on grammar. The result is that students emerge with no knowledge of anything. All classes would be required to focus on conversation, so that students could actually relationally expand outside their limited circle.

All of this would displace the toxic narrative of despair that has replaced any actually critical analysis of history, or useful liberal arts-based skills. As it is, the university system exists primarily to depress our students. It’s got to stop. And the place to start is in the narrative structure of the modern liberal arts, earnestly dedicated as it is to collapse of Western civilization.

P.S. Needless to say, I’d have little problem expanding great books and classics. I refer to the Iliad and Odyssey all the time in my classroom. These classes have to be well-taught to be useful, though. An eye toward providing a foundation of Western moral principles would be key — with the expectation that professors could count on those concepts themselves in later classes. FWIW — I have few students that have even heard of great books. But the few that have actually are affected by them.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers -Part 3 – Focus on Who our Students Actually Are

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Braden with a nice Dorado, Ensenada dos Muertos, Baja California Sur, MX

One of the things that is rarely discussed in any meaningful way is the change in the student stream coming into contemporary engineering programs. Historically, when I was an undergraduate (I graduated from Case Institute of Technology in Cleveland, OH in 1982) engineering students were a mix of middle-class kids, along with the sons (there were basically no girls) of the unionized class of auto and steel workers whose parents were blue collar and employed in regional factories. There were some outliers. But mostly, my graduating class came from places like the Jersey Shore, or Brookpark, OH. What we had in common was working on cars, building model rockets, and drinking beer. One of our most memorable projects involved pirating the new-tech (for then) satellite TV signal off the Terminal Tower in downtown Cleveland. I was in a functional engineering fraternity, and we assembled a satellite receiver dish from a metal snow saucer, complete with tin can collector, and a 4.2 GHz downconverter. The picture was fuzzy. But it worked.

By the time I had graduated with my Ph.D., though, the picture of the standard engineering student had started to shift. The students that I taught at my first years at Washington State University (WSU) had metamorphosed from those hands-on students that we were, to more professional replacement. Now it was kids that likely had parents who were professionals, but were likely good at math, and were looking for a comfortable career at Boeing. My guess is that I’ve educated at least 500 students who have ended up at Boeing, and likely more. It’s honestly challenging for me to walk into any division over there and not have at least one (usually more) of the engineers being a legacy from my classroom.

Times changed yet again, to the almost-current students we have now. Before it was the “in” thing to focus on recruiting underrepresented minorities into our program, I was hard at work mainstreaming kids whose parents were primarily Mexican, who were farmworkers in the Yakima Valley. We are now approaching something like 33% of our current student population as being from “underrepresented” minorities. Except, by any demographic measure, they are NOT underrepresented. There is still academic cultural pressure to increase these numbers, but it is likely not possible. We have reached some psychosocial thermodynamic efficiency with this percentage (the population of minority students is now overrepresented for their demographic in the state) and any effort to do so will profoundly come at the expense of other students in the program, in a world of diminishing dollars. Compound that with the election of Donald Trump is the lightning-fast dismantling of DEI, we have the current mix from a race/ethnicity perspective that will continue.

And to make matters worse, we are still recovering from the dramatic de-socialization of the COVID years — the true “Long COVID” epidemic — as well as the transformation of all schools to functional prisons because of the ongoing fears of school shootings. To sum it up, the kids I teach now know little to nothing about engineering before they arrive at WSU, they are pathologically obedient, which means they suffer from extreme agency problems, and they simply have no conceptualization of what a functional mentor/mentee relationship might entail. They don’t even hit me until their senior year, which is a mind-blowing experience for them, with my radical expectations for self-motivation and actual production of results. I would love to tell you that kids come to my classroom knowing what to expect in my design clinic. But most, unless they’ve been informed in the pre-class, walk into the clinic program having no idea what the program is, how they might benefit, or even who I am. I’ve worked on all these things — part of my ‘brand’ is my title — Dr. Chuck. But even though I am a functional “institution at the institution”, the students really are oblivious. Forced through infinite cascades of fractalization, and unknowing due to the dismantling of authority in the modern university, they arrive in front of me poorly prepared for their capstone experience, which is supposed to be their transitional experience into the work world. It is a burdensome experience for me emotionally, and a “lift” I find that I do with increasing trepidation. Students have emerged from the Longhouse with some modest expectation of being coddled. Needless to say, that doesn’t happen with me.

And while I don’t coddle them, I often find that I am one of the first people to explain to them the fundamental virtues of a successful career. I do tell them that I am world-class, which initially makes them blanch. And then I tell them I have no intention of teaching students who do not have equivalent aspirations. They have been told for most of their career at WSU that they are second-rate, and even at this land grant university, suffer from a pandemic of low expectations. A range of companies, regional, national and international sponsor my program. I tell them that I will not tolerate them being second-rate — but I also give them the motivational structure on how to be world-class themselves.

Almost all of my students are in the 20-23 year old age group, and the good news is that their neuroplasticity saves most of them. But I have no expectation that the students showing up at my door will improve over time. It’s not a matter of SAT scores. It’s a direct consequence of grounding validity — that internal sense of a reality that comes from making direct stories inside their brain through interaction with their own hands and a problem. And this is a neurobiological evolution. Kids raised in a bubble, whether that bubble is in suburban Redmond, or Toppenish, WA, have little idea how to conceive of a life as an engineer at a factory. Those from poorer parts of the state are obviously far more disadvantaged than students from more wealthy areas. At least those students from middle class neighborhoods can conceive of a potential lifestyle. But you might as well be talking about life on the Moon to many. And for the kids in places like the Yakima Valley, their ambitions are to return back to that same place, whether there’s a job there or not. I have a hard time arguing for the current migratory lifestyle and “making it” with many young people, just FYI. But it’s deeper than that. There are actual different cultural patterns that play a role — virtually all of my male Mexican students are engaged by their senior year. Their fiancees are expecting marriage and children soon. So the “return to Mama” urge, which hits at 5-10 years for my white kids, for them is immediate.

The good news is that, regardless of the roughness of their preparation, most of the students go on to productive careers. The ending of the various DEI mandates will actually help the minority kids the most, as these things provide counterintuitive incentives to many hiring managers. Managers look at ALL new hires as a gamble. But a minority is an especially large gamble, because it will be very difficult, if not impossible to fire them if they don’t work out. My students from minority populations are absolutely not distinct in performance from my majority white/Asian populations. So DEI has created a burden on the minority kids for hiring that is exacerbated by a lack of what I call “social coding” — them not coming from the dominant engineering culture — that will be eliminated.

All this said, what should the future of engineering education look like, considering these generalized student demographics?

  1. I strongly believe in promoting programs like First Robotics in high schools, as well as all sorts of shop classes. None of these programs are controversial, and a class in auto mechanics can offer that brain/hand integration I discuss in this piece on the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking.
  2. Engineering programs will always have a bias toward kids on the autism spectrum, as most early engineering consists of Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme rule following. I think that all potential students in high schools should practice more in team-based collaborative environments, with less emphasis on grades and more on production.
  3. Math will remain a weakness, but the way we teach math currently is wildly atrocious. If we would take a socialized approach toward teaching math, we’d likely see far more comprehension. A revolution is required in our pedagogy, based on students co-teaching students.
  4. One of the things that seems to be very difficult for people involved in educational development to understand is that young people lack the ability to engage in cross-paradigmatic and analogic thinking. The real fix for this is more interaction where students are shown manufacturing and engineering environments, as well as meaningful examples of how technology uses the various classical disciplines (math, physics, social sciences) early on.
  5. There should be far more summer camps for engineering and pre-engineering students. There will be no transformation of local educational systems in the near future. Some level of compensation could be achieved with these camps.
  6. Design and problem-solving methodologies should be included in all college levels of engineering. It would amaze people if they knew the proportion of analysis vs. synthesis/design in a contemporary engineering curriculum. We don’t have students build anything except nonsense simulacra of physical principles in most of our lower-level classes. Such a deficit must come to an end.
  7. We are going to have to have some classes on social skills and behaviors. Kids do not know how to manage mentoring relationships, or basic public etiquette. It’s not that they’re running down the block naked. But performance environments very quickly pick up on cues for like-minded individuals, and will exclude those that cannot deliver those cues. We can practice some of this in labs. At the same time, they would also benefit from being directly addressed.

It may surprise some subset of individuals outside the Sausage Factory that these obvious things (they seem obvious to me, at least) are not being done. But they aren’t. And if we have any intention of fixing our technical education pipeline, we are going to have to become student-focused. Right now, we sure aren’t.

Raising the Next Generation of High Agency Engineers (Part 2 of a bunch!)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Baby Coho, Windblown, Salmon River outside White Bird, ID

“Manufacturing is insanely difficult. It’s under appreciated in its difficulty.” Elon Musk

One of the things I’ve found to be profoundly curious about the debate regarding fixing our educational systems is how so little discussion occurs around the people delivering the educational content to students. Sure — we’ll argue about topical lists, appropriateness of grade level with material, and such. And then things will then diverge into polemics on the various politics of universities in general (almost always very liberal) or perhaps the politics of individual faculty members.

It’s not that those conversations shouldn’t be occurring — but they will not get at the root cause of the deep problems inside our modern educational systems — especially those in higher education. At some level, we just assume that students are going to get trained, somewhat correctly, with various holes in their knowledge because they did, or did not, take a pedagogy class. FWIW — our Colleges of Education are largely train wrecks, so if you think you’re going to fix the problems in higher education’s pipeline by having everyone take a pedagogy class, I’ve got news for you. My favorite story at my own university happened a while back — there was an “active learning” class — where students were supposed to do exercises themselves, and the classroom would be run by the professor from “the back of the room” (as opposed to the “lecture/sage on the stage” model.)

The class was delivered by lecture.

And I can tell you as well, as the former President/Chair/whatever of the President’s Teaching Academy, no young professor ever called me to ask for advice, nor sit in their classroom. Education is simply an arbitrary venture at the contemporary academy, though I think it’s also fair to say that occasionally, a charismatic individual passes through and makes a temporary difference in how education is structured.

But trust me — nothing sticks. The REASON nothing sticks is that, unless there is a conscious intervention by an individual, Conway’s Law must hold. And universities are inherently rigid hierarchies, with an obsession with titles, and there is a chronic ‘regression to the mean’ phenomenon that goes on in the vast majority of the curriculum. How you lecture can matter, and of course, with the various physical sciences and engineering, you do have labs. But overall, it’s not just the elephant in the living room. That elephant is out roaming on the savannah, eight thousand miles away.

Bottom line — if you want to really change education in general, and engineering education in particular (what this piece is about) you really have to re-think what are the guiding principles that undergird your educational factory. Students are the pieces of work that are being programmed, and at least as much thought has to go into how you are going to create the machines that make those pieces of work as you do arguing about the list of topics. Right now, we don’t do much at all. I find it pathologically fascinating that even at my own university, I have yet to be asked to give a single guest lecture on education, even though I a.) have received university-system-level awards, b.) bring in healthy amounts of money from external sources, and c.) even headed up institutional level organs for improving teaching. My passing is literally a hole in the fossil record.

The problem with even saying that is from an academic perspective, from the primary Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme that the academy operates under, even making that statement is some kind of narcissistic sour grapes. I must be butt-hurt over all of this. Honestly, I’m not. What I do in my Industrial Design Clinic, where students work with real sponsors, on real work, with real deliverables, and real expectations, is more rightly called World Creation. The idea is more like a Live Action Role-Playing game (LARP), except the participants (the students) have no real idea that they’re in a LARP. They do know it’s a class, and they do know they have to accomplish real work or they won’t graduate. At least that’s what I tell them. The reality is that I create the motivational environment, buttressed by sufficient and plentiful resources, and a customer/mentor WITH appropriate process that they are cattle-chuted through the game, learning skills and finding appropriate partners, that the statistics of them NOT getting it done are extremely low.

But I got to this very evolved form of education after serious study AND soul-searching after a ton of work. The principal ethos evolved early. But I’ve been doing this for some 29 years — longer than virtually all my students (and some of the younger professors) have been alive.

So what are we doing now? When we hire new faculty, there are really only two primary criteria we apply before we hire. First is that they have “research” prowess and specificity of the area, and secondly, that they stand out from whoever is in the pool that they’re competing with. Occasionally, there might be a nod to some DEI concerns — but honestly, not much. The faculty in my department are mostly foreign born (Chinese/E. Asian, Indian/S. Asian, and from the Middle East) and we really don’t care much at the time of hiring if they have any industrial experience. We hardly bias anything to folks being American-born. We do think about their ability (it is discussed) to bring in research funding, because without money, they will not make tenure. And then we’ll have to start the process all over again. All things considered, I feel like we’ve been pretty lucky. I like our young faculty. But if there’s any illusion that we have anything other than superficial concerns about classes they can teach, when it comes to education, let me disabuse you of that notion.

What that means is we end up with the v-Meme-NA of our own social structure deeply embedded in our activities. How that manifests itself is shown with the basic characteristics of how Legalistic/Absolutistic systems produce knowledge. It’s Completeness uber alles. One of the most obvious is the number of credit hours we require students to take. I think we’re currently at about 131 hours, whereas our accrediting body only requires something around 95. We don’t teach meaningful synthesis/design until the senior year. Teaching early in the curriculum is almost all lectures, and considered a booby prize by all faculty. What that means is excellence in education early on is highly dependent on the instructor and their own independent ethos on how they deal with a classroom, which in the first two years is very likely to be large. A class in Dynamics, which is a very difficult subject for most students, will likely have 200 students in it.

How to sum this up? We really don’t care about the most difficult part of what we do — building and staffing the factory. Especially at the undergraduate level. And because of this, our reject rate (the number of students that do not persist) is phenomenally high — often, in various classes, over 50%. Imagine a factory whose waste was 50% of the raw material brought through the door. The mind reels.

And the research on all this is appalling. One of the things I absolutely do know about student retention is that if students feel like they are connected to the program, then they’ll likely stay and finish. But instead of meaningfully and deliberately constructing environments so that students are connected, we fractionalize ad infinitum. Working together is called cheating. And the various DEI excuses now definitely come to the fore, though the reality of my classroom, where students actually befriend each other and work together, belies this. Stupid research is historically done on team size, for example, where it’s decided that four is the optimal number of members. But if you look at the actual research where that number was generated from, it was from building marshmallow straw towers in the course of an hour, between strangers. It is literally insane (see earlier comment about how educational research is largely garbage.)

If we want to build an environment that actually links industry and the university in a meaningful way, we are going to have to hire with a very different set of expectations than any current Carnegie R1 institution (the categorization for top research institutions in the US) does. In order to run my clinic, I need on any given week the following skills:

  1. Knowledge of a broad range of topics, at a level where I can sort complexity quickly.
  2. The ability to negotiate contracts and conflicts.
  3. Some knowledge of adolescent/post-adolescent psychology, and the ability to identify the symptoms of various mild pathologies so I don’t over-react if someone’s having a bad day.
  4. Actual knowledge of developmental behaviors and goals for a range of both students AND collaborators. Anyone proposing creation of an educational environment that doesn’t understand what partners need, as well as students, cannot create anything that lasts.
  5. Sales ability to continue to recruit outside collaborators into the fold.
  6. Ability to map procedural steps to educational outcomes.

The biggest has to be to think consequentially. What this means is that one must own a large sense of responsibility if students in your LARP don’t advance past a certain level in an appropriate amount of time. It means you’ve built the game poorly, and you have to own it. We’ve constructed education as a very low responsibility endeavor for teachers. If the students don’t learn it, and it’s an accepted part of the curriculum, it’s the students’ problem, and they will be graded/punished appropriately. The beats will continue until morale improves. This is absolutely counter to the high performance environment one MUST establish if you want students to move through the game over the course of a semester. Further, the more fear you use, the less likely students are to come forward quickly with what’s actually wrong with your creation. At round one, it’s your version of reality you’re creating.

If I had to hire a faculty for starting something like Elon’s Texas Institute of Technology and Science (TITS), I’d probably split the percentages of people with industry experience and Ph.Ds about 50/50. I’d teach people how to construct meaningful customer relationships, because everywhere you look in making a true paradigm-shifting institution, your primary job is building and maintaining a large social network that has as its priority transfer of information across all its nodes. I’d train directly to these goals as well — and at least some of this is salesmanship and deal creation on an individual level. If you want to pull something like this off, you must have people who have profound, place-taking empathy. A heavy lift. I also don’t think I’d hire all but a few under the age of 35. Younger people developmentally are simply not at the stage where they could be expected to master some of the more complex social dynamics.

There’s more, of course. And there would be coffee. Because coffee is for closers.

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.