Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Crossword puzzle knowledge and Donald Trump

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There are two kinds of knowledge in the world, Crossword Puzzle Knowledge and then there is Knowing How Things are Done. As an intellectual with a social sciences background, I have the first kind of knowledge, where just about nothing I know or know how to do would be of any use to someone living either a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago or at any time besides the present. And then there are the genuine kinds of knowledge, which are based on the development of our scientific understanding of the natural world that surrounds us, the kinds of people who not only know “germs” cause disease, but are able to turn that knowledge into practical outcomes in real time for real people. Which brings me to this, whose title I have amended to this: Why Intellectuals Hate Trump. Here the focus is on why going even beyond the demented socialists of the left, even among those on the right there is a disdain for the American President.

The anti-Trump right-wing intellectual bristles at a political system that does not “appropriately” value their “expertise” and “superior” knowledge and which, consequently, elevates a “buffoon” like Trump to the presidency—and on the shoulders of millions of those “deplorables,” no less. Anti-Trump right-wing intellectuals traffic in information, the gold standard in today’s world, something upon which we are ever-more reliant. Yet, in this arena, the American electorate defied them and their harebrained “proposals,” offered coercively, not through persuasion. Brazenly so. Thus, they resent the man who smashed their pretensions of politics-as-white-paper-drafting-session and roundly repudiated their perceived “right to rule.

These people are the Crossword Puzzle (CWP) brigade, who know a million things like what’s the capital of Morocco, but not how to actually get things done. The President, who in fact knows quite a lot of CWP forms of knowledge, also knows how things work and knows how to get things done. And the resentment of the CWP types for those who know how to get things done is immense. But sickening.

Almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed

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Total collapse of civilisation in the 12th century BC.

One of the biggest mysteries in history is the late Bronze Age Collapse. There’s no good explanation for why an early globalized civilization should suddenly disappear at around 1177 BC. “Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again.”

There is no explaining the inexplicable, but one may nevertheless still wonder. A story I have never come across before, told as if it is common knowledge.

Lost souls

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The reason I have been up in Sydney was to go to a Wiggles concert along with my granddaughter. The place was packed to the rafters and for the under-sevens it was a sensation. But for me, it was how they ended the afternoon that truly astonished me. First they brought on Santa Claus which I thought was amazing enough. And then, wildly beyond any expectation I might have had, notwithstanding this being December, they then sang Silent Night, but in German. Still I thought, that was amazing since they could not have been more Christian in their presentation. And then they continued in English, and there is no more Christian Christmas carol than Silent Night. It was a perfect way to end for me, although I doubt there were many there who noticed or thought this was particularly remarkable, but it was.

Now tonight, more than a day later, I was reading this typical piece of dreck, title: America’s New Religions, in which the point being made by Andrew Sullivan was that one cannot live without some kind of faith in the transcendent, which I did agree with, but there towards the end was this:

Now look at our politics. We have the cult of Trump on the right, a demigod who, among his worshippers, can do no wrong. And we have the cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again Evangelical. They are filling the void that Christianity once owned, without any of the wisdom and culture and restraint that Christianity once provided.

This equivalence was obviously false. Only on the left is politics a religion substitute. These are lost souls. I will say no more than the obvious, that atheism is not a feature of the right and whatever may be the reason for our support for PDT, we do not think of him as a “demigod” who can do no wrong. But what is revealed is the tragic spiritual loss in the empty lives of so many on the left. There is much more that could be said, but will only add this from another website:

Liberty wasn’t born out of the United States Congress but from the heart of God. It is an inalienable right – a God-given right – a right which belongs to all men everywhere and in every age. The government doesn’t grant inalienable rights. Its task is to protect them. No person, no group, no government, is authorized by our Creator God to infringe upon what is the absolute inherent privileges of being made in the image of God or might interfere with one’s duty to God. When we try to separate liberty from the spiritual, when we base it in human definitions and objectives alone, freedom is corrupted, counterfeited, and dies.

I cannot link to these posts because of the primitive machinery I am on, but finding both online today does give me some hope for the future, not to mention the Wiggles who did the same.

The single most terrifying story you will ever see

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If you think my title is over the top, watch the video. From the ABC of all things! The portrayal here is truly terrifying and should be circulated as widely as possible.

Last night, in a cab home from a late night venue, our driver was Chinese so I asked him about his background and how he was able to migrate to Australia. Turns out he is unemployable inside his own profession but with a degree in science. So I asked him about “social credit” and he went on about Mao and communism to the point where he reached my own levels of antipathy and disgust. All of which he had learned from his parents who, he said, he trusted since they were the ones who brought him his food, while he completely distrusted the lies he was fed in School and by the government of China. We sat in front of the house for ten minutes talking after we got home, and with the meter off. Actually tipped him and from my own money as well. Really, if this doesn’t scare people into some kind of sober reality, I don’t know what would.

China is marrying Big Brother to Big Data. Every citizen will be watched and their behaviour scored in the most ambitious and sophisticated system of social control in history. Matthew Carney reports.

And if you are not terrified by this you have no idea when to be frightened. Orwell was fiction. What they are doing in China is an actual present-day reality that any country can adopt since the technology and the methodology both already exist and will only keep getting better as time goes by.

And there’s more here: China has started ranking citizens with a creepy ‘social credit’ system — here’s what you can do wrong, and the embarrassing, demeaning ways they can punish you.

Not to mention this:

USA’s ‘first biometric terminal’ ready to go…

Aren’t owls wise even night owls? Seems so

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MAYBE YOUR SLEEP PROBLEM ISN’T A PROBLEM:

I have heard this all my life: Society likes morning people. Loves them, actually. Early risers tend to be more punctual, get better grades in school and climb up the corporate ladder. These so-called larks are celebrated as the high achievers, the apple polishers, the C.E.O.s.

It’s basically the idea that Ben Franklin touted more than 250 years ago — “early to bed, early to rise” — with everyone else cast as lazy or self-indulgent.

But what if they are wrong? What if night owls are actually the unsung geniuses? What if we are the ultimate disrupters and rule changers, the ones who are better suited to a modern, postindustrial society ruled by late-night coders, digital nomads, freelance moguls and co-working entrepreneurs?

Regardless of that, it’s not a question of character:

According to Dr. Walker, about 40 percent of the population are morning people, 30 percent are evening people, and the remainder land somewhere in between. “Night owls are not owls by choice,” he writes. “They are bound to a delayed schedule by unavoidable DNA hard wiring. It is not their conscious fault, but rather their genetic fate.” . . .

When night owls are forced to rise early, their prefrontal cortex, which controls sophisticated thought processes and logical reasoning, “remains in a disabled, or ‘offline,’ state,” Dr. Walker writes. “Like a cold engine in an early-morning start, it takes a long time before it warms up to operating temperature.”

That might even serve an evolutionary purpose. When early humans lived in small tribes, as in the early scenes of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” staggered sleep schedules bestowed a survival advantage: Someone was always awake to watch for prowling leopards and club-wielding rivals, according to the book.

But it has been downhill for us night owls ever since. The rise of agriculture brought fields to till at daybreak. The industrial revolution brought factories with 8 a.m. time clocks. Night owls were forced to adapt, and that appears to have taken a toll.

Indeed.

68Posted at 9:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 

Mr Dee

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Mr Dee was the most eccentric teacher I ever had, in high school or out, but as I have always suspected after reading through the bio in his death notice, for the best teachers it was always a pose to get through the day without falling into deep depression and insanity. He had a kind of madcap approach to teaching, starting the lesson the moment the first student entered the class as we were rotating between periods, which naturally had a series of studenten rushing off from the previous class not to miss a moment – not me I might mention. And he had these monstrous blackboards full of lists of obscure German words we would have to copy down of which the only one I remember to this day is damenhelden which he translated as “lady killer” which had a different connotation back in our more backward times (better translation might be a male hero to women which is a term that has no modern usage so far as I can tell). I have always used his term for a kind of idiotic mistake which I pronounce as “Flutekeitzfehler” which I loved the sound of which I made many.

But reading through the obit, what strikes me is that he was a classical man of deep wisdom and grace, which were aspects of his character we would never have noticed or appreciated. It is also a reminder of how expensive it once was to go off to Europe which only a handful could do at the time. I am probably today more like him than probably any of the other teachers we had, but what would I know? They may all have been like him with a love of classical music and the arts, but whose wonderful attributes were wasted on us back then when we were just fifteen years old.