Why is it…

It’s only controversial if it bucks the trend of collectivization and group identification?

Consider the following statement:

Here’s my question to those who are wedded to diversity and inclusion: Are people better off the less they have in common with one another?

https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/01/20/diversity-and-inclusion-insanity

I think we can agree that many people would say this is “controversial.”

And why is that?

Why would common sense statements like “people are happier when they are around those similar to them,” or “rewards go to those who achieve more,” arouse such angst in people?

I don’t believe these attitudes are real in the sense that people alone with their thoughts believe any of it to be true from them personally.

That is, rich liberals aren’t hanging out in the inner cities, nor are they giving away amounts of wealth that impact their lifestyles to reward the poor for their lack of achievement.

Obviously many in the so-called “victim classes” applaud efforts to be treated preferentially, whether that’s a woman getting an undeserved promotion or a black kid getting a pass for disrupting a classroom.

But note what we are saying here: we are lowering standards… and that might not necessarily be a bad thing. But it also may not be a good thing if we are merely replacing one set of preferred categories (white, male, heterosexual) for another (Non white, gender fluid).

Why?

The answer is we are seeing the death of the mass production paradigm: the System never saw you or me or anyone else as an individual because the entire mass production metaphor is centered around large numbers and categories.

Factories produce large amounts of product that are “suitable for purpose”

Schools produce large numbers of graduates who are just smart enough to produce large amounts of product…

And pop culture creates HITS to generate large numbers of consumer/fans to sell to:

While politics is neatly divided into two teams (red and blue) to generate large blocs of voters who can be sold pandered listened to.

The Nazis did it better.

These models only exist because humanity saw how fantastically efficient the machine is at outputting large amounts of stuff and decided two things:

  • more is better
  • efficiency is the highest goal

As it turns out, having a small number of processes accounting for more instances of a product (where physical or human) is much easier for a small number of people to control. Handy, that.

But we screwed up because the mid 1990s introduced the world to the internet- which is the model for a new paradigm.

The network.

The network gives humanity a completely different model: one where each voice can have an equal platform against the masses in the market place of ideas.

A model where individuals can learn a curriculum designed to their talents and interests which will help to produce shining examples of brilliance as opposed to a mass of mediocrity.

A model where each of us can contribute to our own communities- communities we choose rather than the arbitrary buckets that the machine throws us in.

So now you know why the powers that be are tightening their grip on EVERYTHING: they understand they are finished hat once we see how much opportunity is out there… if we just open our minds a little.

They have to put us back in the box. Twitter and Facebook are becoming echo chambers/circles of shame where anyone with unorthodox ideas is shouted down as literal Hitler or Science Denier (which may be the dumbest, most insanely ignorant epithet ever).

Which leads me to the painful aspect of all this: Most of the freethinkers have to align with the assclown in chief, Orange Man because he represents the freedom to say something different from the crowd.

God help us all 🙂

This Watch Tells Time

picture of the item
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Burn In Heaven, Steve Jobs

Hi. I’m Mike. And I’m white. And I love technology.

That’s as succinct as you’re going to get.

But I’m no tech slut. Sure, I’ve flirted around (I want to love you Linux, but we’re just not right for one another), maybe even had an extended affair (I still miss you, iOS. Thanks for the good times!) and sometimes I get a little freaky (Zune and Windows Phone, you little minxes- we could have had SO much more fun together) but at the end of the day, I want technology to do things for me.

I’ve mostly resisted the siren call of wearables for the lack of a problem to solve. Fitbits provide what I’d call cursory activity monitoring and notifications and little else while more sophisticated smartwatches suffered from poor battery life, lack of useful applications, ecosystem lock or a combination of the three.

I began softening my stance during The COVID Madness and it’s concurrent work from home posture. As the initial two week work from home period morphed into the new (ab)normal semi-permanent arrangement I became increasingly frustrated at my inability to monitor Outlook and make my meetings or respond to important emails in a timely fashion.

Of course this isn’t my issue. It has to be the technology!

My work is mostly creative and I can get lost in thought as I solve vexing problems, create data visualizations or attend meetings tackle interesting projects. But what can a young analyst do? Have a monitor devoted to an email/calendaring app, constantly staring at it for a signal that my overlords are summoning?

If you know me then we already know the answer starts with “fuck” and ends with “that”.

But I do have a work-provided iPhone which already bombards me with dozens of pointless notifications per day.

And there’s the killer app for Apple Watch: put the notifications on my wrist, let me look down, triage the incoming enemy fire (mixed metaphor, get used to it, Fucker) and proceed with The Mission.

It seems like overkill to spend $200 (Did I mention I’m white?) for a single use case but the peace of mind this bad boy delivers is easily worth half an ounce of hydroponic.

Besides, I’ve learned over time that like a K-Bar Knife

Not just for killing anymore.

this tool has many, many functions.

Much like the man who wears it.

Don’t Ask Me: Tea Time

I started watching some of my favorite cartoons from early adolescence and I am mildly surprised how casually gender-roled they are.

If you’re a BWB then you might claim this is sexist.

And maybe it is, but what do I care?

Flash Gordon is saving the fooking galaxy and he wants his tea!

You sure are, Dale.

Things I Learned From The Chans- Rights

This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Things I Learned From The Chans

A guide to understanding if something is a “human right” or not (all sic):

If you can drive 300 miles into the desert, where there is no other person or government official, and you can still do it – it’s your human right.

If you can’t do it because there is no electricity / running water / wifi / Walmart / someone to take money from / someone to enslave – then it wasn’t your human right to begin with.

Let’s test this guide, shall we?

Walking, Running, Talking? You can do them in the desert, they are a human right.

Getting free food / healthcare/ tampons from the government? you can’t do that in the desert, hundreds of miles away from civilization, and therefor they are NOT human rights.

The World of the (un)Real, Part 2

A Sweet Deal Gets Sweeter (for some)

As we saw in Part 1 America created Magic Money after closing the gold window in 1971: the ability to create money in a computer and buy anything in the world with it because oil sales are denominated in dollars.

All those dollars sloshing around the planet in a process called exporting inflation. The US creates extra dollars which sit in overseas bank accounts or are invested in US companies or come back to the US banks to be lent out again…

And here’s the rub: making money from money has lower risk than starting productive businesses.

The cornerstone of the so-called “service economy” is the Finance Insurance and Real Estate complex, though now it’s being supplanted by the so-called FANGs: Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google. All four of whom could go tits up tomorrow with the world not missing a beat.

FIRE and the FANGs merely illustrate the principle that what is made matters far less than how it’s sold. After all, we can ship factories overseas, pay some Vietnamese schlub $2 a day to make $150 shoes with the majority of the money going to marketers and pitchmen! If Americans don’t earn enough to buy them, we can lend them the money!

The silhouetted man on these shoes “earns” $80-100 million a year from endorsements and other business activities.

Or we can make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy and flood the market with seemingly cheap government backed college loans? Put the risk on the taxpayers and inflate the price of college to the point where 18 years olds have to take on $30,000 in debt to get a degree in an economically-worthless field? As a bonus we can hire the otherwise unemployable to skim off any excess dollars as various college administrators!

Or do the same in medicine by setting up byzantine insurance systems to skim money while providing NO VALUE WHATSOEVER. Not only that, what idiot would buy insurance against something that’s guaranteed to happen like checkups and routine illnesses? We’ll tell them that it’s a benefit to overpay and they’ll believe it because their out of pocket cost for substandard care will be so low! HA HA HA!

And here’s another idea- let’s con people with body dysphoria that they can change their sex through the magic of hormone therapy and surgery!

Because we know better than nature…

and if it turns out that defying nature doesn’t work out so well? We are all getting paid, so screw it!

So this is where we are in 2020: riding an economy that makes little of value in favor of skimming operations and activities that are so disconnected from reality. Productive enterprise is largely shipped overseas to take advantage of lower-cost labor so the managers and celebrities get a bigger skim. Then any residual profits profits (or even borrowed money if not enough profit is available) is plowed into share buybacks so the senior management gets paid more from their bonuses and stock options.

All fueled by magic. Illusion.

But that’s about to change, hopefully for the better.

The World of the (un)Real, Part 1

Get ready, it’s coming

We Live In The World of the Unreal

We live in a world of fake money and fake wealth: wealth created out of a magic trick the US pulled off over four decades ago in plain sight of everyone.

And Americans have still thought of their nation as the most advanced economy on the planet while more and more of the business of making things– things people want and need- left America in favor of the business of making money– the so-called “service economy” or ironically the FIRE industry: Finance Insurance and Real Estate.

It Stated Out Well Enough

Europe and Japan were in ruins after the Second World War as the United States,– untouched by the war– was both the sole producer and sole consumer of goods in the non-communist world.

This posed a number of problems for the United States. Not only did American companies need markets to export to, the American government needed stable partners in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union and her allies.

Enter the Marshall Plan.

The United States spent massive amounts of capital to help Western Europe and Japan rebuild after the war. In return the US received military base rights and markets to export to. The dollar was exchangeable for gold so Americans could buy overseas goods and foreigners could redeem their dollars for gold. Remember this.

As the Europeans and Japanese built their industry from the ground up with modern plants and machinery they rapidly became more competitive against American firms leading to trade deficits.

At the same time that American industry was becoming relatively uncompetitive, the US military was spending trillions of dollars maintaining overseas military bases, providing military aid to anti-communists and fighting small-scale wars. The holders of these dollars couldn’t spend them in their home countries and had little reason to buy increasingly uncompetitive American products so they took their dollars to the gold window, asking the American government to live up to its pledge that the dollar was “as good as gold.”

Then The Run On the Dollar Came

The United State didn’t want to raise taxes to fund the Vietnam War and Great Society programs but as long as the US could maintain the dollar’s fixed price to gold the appearance of inflation could be managed, meaning the US could

  • continue to run deficits
  • have foreigners buy the debt
  • and redeem the debt in inflated dollars later

But the world was wise to the game. When push came to shove, President Nixon closed the gold window and let the [tooltip keyword=’dollar’s value be set in relationship to other currencies’ content=’this is called a floating exchange rate’]. Americans would have to buy local currencies like Marks, Pounds and Yen to buy goods from overseas.

Nixon tells the world to get bent. (Photo by Ellsworth Davis/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

“You promised a magic trick!”

so I did.

Here it is:

The US Government went to Saudi Arabia (the world’s largest oil producer) and said “Nice place you have here. It sure would be a shame if something happened to it. You know, Israel’s only two doors down and they’re likely to go off the handle at any minute and wreck the neighborhood.”

“But if you agree to take dollars-and only dollars-for your oil then we’ll guarantee nothing bad happens.”

“That sounds like a shakedown”

DING DING DING

And here’s the magic: EVERYONE NEEDS OIL. So the US prints as many dollars as they want and everyone takes those dollars no matter what because oil is priced in dollars and EVERYONE NEEDS OIL.

You like magic, here’s a trick: create a computer entry in a bank account that’s denominated in dollars. Send those electrons to a bank in another country and buy WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH IT. Magic dollars backed by nothing other than a mafia-like shakedown agreement with a family of corrupt Arabians!

Some good things… get betterer

As we learn in part 2.

Rush- The Hidden Gems: Kid Gloves

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Rush- Hidden Gems

80s Rush Was Weird(?)

Rush always strove to recreate themselves: their career is easily chunked out into phases.

Hard Rock1974-1976 (Rush, Fly By Night, Caress of Steel, 2112) The band grows out of its basement-playing roots and stretches themselves conceptually with new drummer/lyricist Neil Peart.

Prog Rock- 1977-1981 (A Farewell To Kings, Hemispheres, Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures) Having explored complexity to its insane limits, the band turns to shorter compositions and more grounded lyrics.

Synth Era- 1982-1987 (Signals, Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows, Hold Your Fire)

Coming off the otherworldly success of Moving Pictures, Rush looked out at a musical landscape and latched onto New Wave as the next vista to explore… only New Wave wasn’t an easily defined class of music as hard rock or prog were. Neil leaned towards reggae and ska as you’d expect a drummer to while bassist/lyricist Geddy Lee wanted to expand his sonic palette by moving keyboards into a more melodic role.

What was Rush turning into, The Police or Ultravox?

The answer was Weird Rush.

A Mixed Bag…

Rush did embrace the New Wave in ways that other bands didn’t or couldn’t yet their willingness to change led to the most uneven output of their career, not just from album to album but often from track to track.

1984’s Grace Under Pressure reflected the schizophrenia of Synth Rush. Not only do we get a dance song(?) in The Enemy Within but we get the ‘corniest, lamest ‘scary’ keyboard hook this side of a Count Chocula commercial’.

But we also get this little nugget, a reggae influenced rocker buried on the backside. Listen to how much fun guitarist Alex Lifeson has with the solo. As he recalled the song later:

What I like about the solo is… it’s got a hip, kind of slinky attitude, a little goofy humor. When I play it, I feel a certain confidence, almost like a prankster, which is not the way I am in real life at all.

https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/rushs-alex-lifeson-my-3-best-solos-194741