Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Further marriage advice

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It’s been a very long time since I;ve had to date, now into grandfathering so my post on Marriage Advice for Millennials may be very out of date and dangerous. This is an article on sexbots replacing women which seems to appeal to quite a few since it avoids having to mix it up with the modern woman of our own time. This is the central point of the article:

Women have lived too long in a monopoly economy and so let down quality. It used to be that men had jobs and money, and women had that, so they married to let each get some of what the other had. The woman had to be agreeable as a selling point. Now women have jobs and don’t need men, or to be pleasant. Some are nice anyway, but it’s no longer a design feature. Of course they often end up old and alone with a cat somewhere on upper Connecticut Avenue, but they don’t figure this out until too late. Anyway, they stopped being agreeable. They learned from feminists that everything wrong in their lives was the fault of men.

It is a real problem: American women are inoculated from birth with angry misandry insisting that men are dolts, loutish, irresponsible, and only want sex. (To which a response might be, “Uh…What else have you got?”)

I have no real idea how right or wrong this is, but the cost of separation is so massive that you do have to wonder. N’ertheless you need real woman to have children and a date for New Years. It is also the death of civilisation, but every civilisation dies. Maybe this is how our’s will go.

Also see here to feed your pessimism further.

LET ME JUST ADD THIS: This is Camille Paglia: Prominent Democratic Feminist Camille Paglia Says Hillary Clinton ‘Exploits Feminism’. And it’s hardly just Hillary. A bit from the interview but the part about Trump:

Donald Trump’s retro style of confident masculinity (which dates from the Frank Sinatra/Hugh Hefner period) was surely a major factor in his victory and represents what was probably an inevitable and necessary course correction in American gender relations. The delirious excesses of unscientific campus gender theory, translated into intrusive government regulations by elite school graduates saturating the Obama administration, finally hit a wall with the electorate. The mainstream big-city media too have become strident echo chambers of campus gender dogma, as demonstrated by last year’s New York Times fiasco, where two wet-behind-the-ears reporters fell on their faces in trying to prosecute the Trump of his casino days as a vile sexist. I mercilessly mocked that vacuous article in my Salon.com column and stand by every word I wrote.

Why Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals won’t work for the right

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Here are a selection from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals that only work for the left and cannot be applied by the right. And the reason they don’t work is that the left by and large have no principles, only an empty sentimentality that allows them to line up behind their power-hungry leaders without any ability to see the consequences of what their leaders actually do. These people are unteachable. They have learned nothing from all of the revolutions that have gone wrong which have imprisoned and impoverished all of their supporters while making their handful of leaders wealthy and powerful beyond any other possibility they might originally had. Look t this list and try to find any leverage at all in dealing with the left.

4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

12.”The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.

13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

The problem:

1. The left have no principles, only tactics.

2. The mentality of the left is founded on the self-righteous belief that everything they do is pure good based on their pure intentions, and will therefore never listen to or accept they have ever done harm or are at fault about anything.

3. Violence is the prime tactic of the left.

4. No member of the left is ever embarrassed about anything done on its behalf by any of its leaders.

Trump’s Rules for Conservatives

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Same as Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals except they are applied by us.

The Rules
1. “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.

7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.

8. “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.

9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” It is this unceasing pressure that results in the reactions from the opposition that are essential for the success of the campaign.

11. “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

12.”The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.

13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

Meanwhile, what has Trump already done.

* Enacted more legislation and signed more executive orders in the First 100 days than any president in a half century
* Enacted 28 pieces of legislation, more than any other president since Truman
* Signed 25 executive orders, the most of any 100 days in over 50 years (will be over 30 by day 100)
* Achieved first Supreme Court Confirmation in 100 days since 1881
* Instituted tough immigration policies that have driven illegal border crossings to a 17-year low
* Removed more job-killing regulations through legislation than any president in U.S. history
* Estimated savings: $18 billion annually
* Economic optimism has been renewed, with consumer confidence reaching its highest level in 16 years
* Ordered the toughest new rules to stop the revolving door between Washington lobbyists and government officials in history

100 Days of Accomplishments

Job Creation:
* Stronger Enforcement of Trade Guidelines
* Approving Permits for the Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines
* Study Into Using American Material in Future Pipeline Construction
* Withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership
* Historic Partnership with the Private Sector

Immigration:
* Ordering a Freeze and Study of Immigration from Areas Compromised by Terrorism
* Halting Funding to Sanctuary Cities
* Increasing Numbers of Immigration Enforcement Personnel

Public Safety:
* Establishing Commission on Opioid Crisis
* Standing with Law Enforcement Officers
* Creating Task Force on Violent Crime
* Tackling International Cartels

National Security:
* Targeted Strike on Syrian Airfield
* Travel Restrictions on Select Countries Compromised by Terrorism
* New Iran Sanctions
* Calling for Increased Defense Spending in Budget Blueprint
* Cost Savings on F-35’s

Cutting Regulations:
* Energy Independence Executive Order
* Revocation of Federal Contracting Executive Orders
* Reexamination of CAFÉ Standards
* Review of Waters of the United States Rule
* Creation of Regulatory Task Forces
* Eliminating Stream Protection Rule
* Eliminating Regulations on Extraction Companies
* One-in-Two-Out Regulatory Reform
* Minimizing Affordable Care Act

Helping Women/Minorities:
* HBCU Initiative
* Canada-United States Council for the Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs
* Promoting Women in Entrepreneurship Act
* Promoting Programs to Engage Women in STEM Fields

Of course there is that CNN breaking news on “Two Scoop” Trump that makes all this irrelevant.

Marriage advice for millennials

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I happen to agree with him. Not getting married by your late twenties is a bad idea, and not having children if you can is a much worse idea. But turning 70 without someone you’ve already been with for thirty-five years is the worst idea of all. And as an extra piece of advice for people who come to sites like this, for heaven’s sake don’t date anyone who votes for parties of the left.

Les Miz after reality finally bites

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An absolutely stunning photo. The people behind the barricades are, of course, the people who put Chavez and now Maduro into power. I wonder what they now know that they didn’t know then. If you look to the government to give you things you didn’t earn for yourself, this is the very plausible place you will end up. That is why when I have gone to see Les Miz, I always cheer for Inspector Javert.

Picked up at Instapundit.

UPDATE: Here is perhaps an article that may have the explanation: What Caused Venezuela’s Collapse Is No Mystery — Except To Economically Illiterate Journalists. So let us see what answer they come up with. This is where they start:

The cause is simple. Socialism. End it and you will end the misery.

I suppose that’s right, but what is this thing referred to as “socialism”. What are its characteristics and what can be done to avoid it? This, I’m afraid, we don’t entirely find out. The rest of the article describes how mainstream journalists evade the issue, with examples from The New York Times, The LA Times and USA Today. They attribute the collapse to falling oil prices, corrupt business leaders and even the weather which brought on a drought. And, of course, these weren’t the causes of the drastic failure of the Venezuelan economy, but after all is said and done, we end where the story began.

It is their unwillingness to admit that socialism can’t work that drives so many mainstream journalists to look for something, anything, else to blame when socialist economies invariable fail.

Socialism is merely a word that describes lots of economic systems, many of which have been very successful. What’s missing is any discussion of what in particular they have been doing wrong. It is this that seems to leave out that specifics of what needs to be avoided and what ought to be done in its place.

PhD gender weighting

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Throwing a bit of light on a very vexed issue. The data and the subsequent quote are both from “What’s Your Major”: Another Blow to the So-Called Gender Pay Gap.

Ph.D. Fields of Study With the Highest Gender Weighting

“Most Female”                             “Most Male”
Art History                           Aerospace Engineering
Psychology                          Mechanical Engineering
French                                 Electrical Engineering
Comparative Literature               Physics
Sociology                                Computer Science

The study goes further and lists which fields of study tend to be “most male” or “most female,” meaning fields in which the gender imbalance is the greatest. One must have lived under a rock not to know that so-called “STEM” fields are in great demand and pay well in the marketplace. Lo and behold, all of the “most male” fields of doctoral study are in the STEM fields, including Aerospace Engineering, Mathematical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science. . . .

Ignoring how fields of study differ by gender is only one problem with the supposed 20% gender pay gap. The 20% figure ignores that men tend to work longer hours, to have more years of work experience, and to work in jobs that are more physically and financially risky than women. After accounting for these factors the unexplained portion of gender pay differences – the part that could potentially be explained by discrimination — shrinks significantly. Factoring in differences in fields of study, which exist not only at the Ph.D. level but in undergraduate and Master’s-level education as well, would shrink the potential range of gender discrimination even further.

Which American president does this remind you of?

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Other than his being an introvert, that is. From introverts tend to be better CEOs — and other surprising traits of top-performing executives:

So what did make CEOs successful? After analyzing all of their data, the researchers found that roughly half of the candidates earning an overall ‘A’ rating in their database, when evaluated for a CEO job, had distinguished themselves in more than one of four management traits. (Only five percent of the weakest performers, meanwhile, had done the same.) The four were: reaching out to stakeholders; being highly adaptable to change; being reliable and predictable rather than showing exceptional, and perhaps not repeatable, performance; and making fast decisions with conviction, if not necessarily perfect ones.

Indeed, that last trait — a willingness to make a call quickly, even without all the needed information — was one of the four “essentials” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, detailed in his own letter to shareholders last week. Calling it “high-velocity decision-making,” Bezos wrote that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” Being wrong isn’t always so bad, he wrote. “If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Botelho agreed that first trait was the most surprising. “We frankly expected to find that strong CEOs stood out for the quality of their decisions — that they turn out to be right more frequently,” she said. “But what very clearly stood out was the speed. Quality was likely something they developed earlier, but then they’re willing to step up and make the decision faster, even with more uncertainty.”

Finding yourself right most of the time gives the confidence to keep making those decisions, and allows others to to defer to your decision-making when everything is so entirely opaque. It’s like the question Napoleon used to ask his generals: do you think of yourself as lucky. For those where things turned out as they had hoped, it would often have looked as if it had been little more than luck. But the better judgement you have, as they say, the luckier you become.

Discourses on the Election of Donald Trump

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It may be absurd but this is how I look upon my The Art of the Impossible, my blog history of the election of DJT as president. You can order a copy here. The discourse were, of course, written by Niccolo Machiavelli. I naturally say “of course” in recognition to the fullest extent of its ironical intent. Our educated classes are the shallowest political generation in history.

DISCOURSES ON THE FIRST DECADE OF
TITUS LIVIUS.
BOOK I.
* * * * *
PREFACE.

Albeit the jealous temper of mankind, ever more disposed to censure than to praise the work of others, has constantly made the pursuit of new methods and systems no less perilous than the search after unknown lands and seas; nevertheless, prompted by that desire which nature has implanted in me, fearlessly to undertake whatsoever I think offers a common benefit to all, I enter on a path which, being hitherto untrodden by any, though it involve me in trouble and fatigue, may yet win me thanks from those who judge my efforts in a friendly spirit. And although my feeble discernment, my slender experience of current affairs, and imperfect knowledge of ancient events, render these efforts of mine defective and of no great utility, they may at least open the way to some other, who, with better parts and sounder reasoning and judgment, shall carry out my design; whereby, if I gain no credit, at all events I ought to incur no blame.

When I see antiquity held in such reverence, that to omit other instances, the mere fragment of some ancient statue is often bought at a great price, in order that the purchaser may keep it by him to adorn his house, or to have it copied by those who take delight in this art; and how these, again, strive with all their skill to imitate it in their various works; and when, on the other hand, I find those noble labours which history shows to have been wrought on behalf of the monarchies and republics of old times, by kings, captains, citizens, lawgivers, and others who have toiled for the good of their country, rather admired than followed, nay, so absolutely renounced by every one that not a trace of that antique worth is now left among us, I cannot but at
once marvel and grieve; at this inconsistency; and all the more because I perceive that, in civil disputes between citizens, and in the bodily disorders into which men fall, recourse is always had to the decisions and remedies, pronounced or prescribed by the ancients.

For the civil law is no more than the opinions delivered by the ancient jurisconsults, which, being reduced to a system, teach the jurisconsults of our own times how to determine; while the healing art is simply the recorded experience of the old physicians, on which our modern physicians found their practice. And yet, in giving laws to a commonwealth, in maintaining States and governing kingdoms, in organizing armies and conducting wars, in dealing with subject nations, and in extending a State’s dominions, we find no prince, no republic, no captain, and no citizen who resorts to the example of the ancients.

This I persuade myself is due, not so much to the feebleness to which the present methods of education have brought the world, or to the injury which a pervading apathy has wrought in many provinces and cities of Christendom, as to the want of a right intelligence of History, which renders men incapable in reading it to extract its true meaning or to relish its flavour. Whence it happens that by far the greater number of those who read History, take pleasure in following the variety of incidents which it presents, without a thought to imitate them; judging such imitation to be not only difficult but impossible; as though the heavens, the sun, the elements, and man himself were no longer the same as they formerly were as regards motion, order, and power.

Desiring to rescue men from this error, I have thought fit to note down with respect to all those books of Titus Livius which have escaped the malignity of Time, whatever seems to me essential to a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought. And although the task be arduous, still, with the help of those at whose instance I assumed the burthen, I hope to carry it forward so far, that another shall have no long way to go to bring it to its destination.

Making Marxism cool again

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There are so many different directions from which cultural Marxism comes that it is impossible to keep up. If you do not understand and wish to sustain a society of free individuals whose aim is to live in freedom and direct their own lives in their own way, and by the way to also live in prosperity, then there is almost no defence against the centralising force that are found at every turn. There was a comment on my post on Communism for Kids that has added yet another dimension to this web. I am going to quote what “Robin” has written but will slightly reconstruct the order in which he brought out his points in a way I find easier to understand. This is what he wrote in the second of his comments:

I actually dropped in from the US to alert Australians to this push from March to force a shift to Human Capability Theory [HCT] in the name of supposed preparation for work.

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum seem to have created HCT to implement the Marxist Humanist view of education globally without that being appreciated. The Capability Approach and Human Development is what the global change agents call this theory and they get together now quite a lot to plan how to implement it out of our collective sight for the most part.

Communism for Kids is published by MIT Press. I’m no longer surprised to see a university engaged in such kinds of work, but it’s not because they are a publisher and publish what they think will sell along the lines of selling the rope that will be used to hang them. They do it because HCT is part of a project MIT is involved with. The background to the book was outlined in the first of his comments.

This is translated into English from German I believe and relates to what I refer to as little ‘c’ communism. It is also what Gorbachev and others call Marxist Humanism. Its ties to what Marx called the Human development Society and education are covered here.

Marxist Humanism and little c communism are what the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN and its Dignity for All by 2030 campaign are all about once we become familiar with the theory. MIT’s involvement makes far more sense once we know they are partners with the UN in its Earth Systems Science Partnership that is about the behavioral and social sciences, including education.

Also the necessary premise for the Human Development Society where “from each according to abilities and to each according to needs” would be the operating principle was that capitalism would have produced a necessary level of technological innovation. ICT [Information and Communication Technology] is regarded as that magic technology worldwide and MIT is essentially homebase. China and Russia installed Communism on an agricultural base. Therefore, unfortunately, the theorists insist that their history does not invalidate what communism might entail if the theory can be implemented on the right technological base.

This remains a dangerous theory if not correctly understood. Letting it come in as ‘systems science’ for example is just as dangerous and much harder to see.

One superficially negative review of the book however ends with this.

There were a couple of positive reviews of the book, though none of them verifier buyers. “I loved this book so much!” wrote Sophia Nachalo. “It’s not really a kid’s book, but rather a book for everyone written in a fun and easy way that uses stories, fables, and funny characters to explain everyday life. It makes marxism cool again!”

Fredrick Jameson, a Duke University Professor, endorsed the book, claiming “this delightful little book may be helpful in showing youngsters there are other forms of life and living than the one we currently ‘enjoy,’ and even some adults might learn from it as well.”

And in another negative review there was nevertheless this at the end which totally reversed whatever mild criticisms there were:

CNN’s Chris Cuomo said communism is “uplifting” as he talked fondly of Cuba. This is the state of affairs in the United States today.

“The concern was the freedom of the people,” he continued. “What is the point of this communist regime if it is not to truly make everyone equal — not at the lowest level; not by demoralizing everyone; but lifting everyone up?”

I had a friend from the far left who was overjoyed by the fall of the Soviet Union now almost three decades ago. With no negative example before us, he was sure Marxism would come back stronger than ever. It may be the only political judgement he has ever been right about, but it is one that should worry you all.