Expert "How To" Videos

I've been watching youtube videos about cornering a mountain bike for a couple of weeks. I think the general category of expert "how to" videos is quite interesting and they show why the sci-fi nonsense sales pitch on "AI" is so dumb.

Many of the MTB cornering videos follow a "break down" approach, that is, they present cornering as a multi-phase, multi-step sequence. Step 1--look into the turn, step 2, lean the bike, step 3, position your body, etc... The concept is through repetition of the steps, a rider will become proficient at cornering.

That's not what happens at all though. What really happens is the riders brain and nervous system eventually encompass the bike so they can "feel" the tires on the ground and feel the orientation of their mass distribution on the bike. Once a person is an expert, they can ex post facto explain what their body is doing when they're cornering, or doing a hand stand, or whatever. To the novice, the word salad really isn't helpful. If anything it's kind of counterproductive.

I realize I don't have good feel for the bike's wheels. It's frustrating for me as a long time cyclist to throw away so much precious speed in a hundred corners by even feathering the brakes when I should be able to just rip through the corners. That said, I really do not want to crash and break the bike or my bones.

Anyway, it's obvious I will not learn anything from the videos; in fact there's really an obvious course toward improvement. Go to a free form loose ground area, like a big gravel parking lot, ideally with a slope, setup some "corners" by drawing them with a stick, then turn over and over and over and maybe take a video. The advantage of a parking lot is it's easier to repeat--more tries per unit time, plus a missed corner = rolling over a line instead of crashing into a tree.

The thing I'm really trying to do here is extend my nervous system to the contact patch of the tires and the ground. Currently, there's a big void there. Learning to ice skate or rollerblade is actually a very similar process. Prior to developing "feel" people are generally all "hands, head, and feet". If you watch a novice on rollerblades, they flail their arms around as their head and feet rotate around their center-of mass. They're generally oblivious to their center of mass, which is quite interesting.

Developing feel is a nonverbal process. Really words provide very little useful information for developing these skills. This is the severe limitation of so called "AI" because this concept of "feel" is pervasive in human endeavors.

In fact, it's possible to sort of flip this concept around entirely and see the effect of the dullard verbal mind model on the world. In general people dislike an irregular and even mildly challenging world where even the smallest obstacle is intolerable. They do not want to learn anything, ever. They don't want to condition their body for balance or strength or mobility. They don't even want to pay attention when they do something insipidly simple, like drive a car. It'd be good to understand what they really want. Like what's the goal of the average person when they're doing all the nonsense stuff they do?

The Willforce Delusion

It's quite common for people to imagine their "will force" somehow affects real world events. One example of that is focusing attention on a sporting event. People imagine they are "urging" a player to score a touchdown in a football game, for example, when they intently watch. This happens in all sorts of relationship scenarios as well, from the mundane work relationship to an intense romantic relationship.

It's all entirely, equally imaginary. There's no "will force", however, almost anybody reading this will understand what I'm writing about here. The fictional concept of "telekinesis" is the same thing. That is, in fiction, some character will be able to move an object with his or her "mind". It's often depicted as severe mental "exertion" to the point of causing a nose bleed, which is supposed to be blood leaking from the taxed brain,  I guess.

This is an interesting case of something that doesn't exist at all, that is "will force", turning into an idea that multitudes of people have. So where does the concept even come from?

All through life people "want" things. I can remember being a kid and fervently wanting some dumb toy or whatever, or as a young adult getting into messy romantic relationships and wanting some girl or young woman fervently or being wanted the same way by different women. The "want" existed as a sort of pressure. That pressure is almost certainly physical and hormonal and about procreation in the sex scenario. There are many examples of that same type of behavior among animals.

It seems plausible that the mental machinery of "want", which is actually an internal compulsion could lead to the idea that "wanting hard enough" will cause things to happen in the real world or even move. For some people this "willforce" delusion manifests as a desire for obsessive overall control and the idea that everything can and should be managed (by them).

A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".

 

Serious vs Play

I had two types of study-halls in High School. One was modeled on prison life and was like punishment by pure boredom and was no different than "detention". The students sat on one side of tables in a big room and were only allowed to do some quiet thing, like read, do homework, or doodle or just sit and stare. The other type was free-form and students could do whatever they want, like playing games, or laughing and joking around. I have no idea why some study halls were fun and the others were like prison, I guess it must have been up to the teacher running it.

In retrospect, it's obvious a big component of primary education is training students to be obedient "workers". For example, there are a lot of jobs where people believe they must surrender their human freedom when they're on the clock, so if there's nothing to do, they'll just sit around and stare at a computer screen or sweep an already clean floor or whatever until the clock magically frees them.

Those people have internalized a "serious" life, maybe from things like study halls. It's often instructive to lookup the etymology of a label like "serious". The day-to-day meaning of it comes from a feeling; everyone knows the feeling of being serious. Appropriately, scholars think the word comes from an ancient root word for "heavy". Being serious is the equivalent of telekinetically trying to move a heavy weight. People do that all the time. They imagine exerting their internal will-force has a real-world effect, when it has zero real world effect. That particular delusion is fascinating.

The opposite of a serious life is a frivolous or play life... not surprisingly the origin of that word is "light" as in "a light weight". Sometimes in the "fun study hall" my friends and I would get in trouble for having too much fun. For example, in one of those, we invented a game that involved a baseball made of taped up paper. I don't recall exactly how it worked, but someone would pitch, and someone would bat. The group of kids probably got too loud so we were chided for "playing". The collective idea in the school was the study hall should be in that punishment/serious mindset, I suppose.

Play and creativity go together, while "seriousness" generally inhibits creativity. My first "real" job was at a tree farm when I was 16 and it epitomized that "serious" mindset. The overall concept of that tree farm was "work is serious" in the sense that it should be simple and sort of stupid and kind of a workout and strength training exercise. 

One of the tree farm tasks for the kids was to go pickup the newly cut rounds of fallen trees and process them into firewood. We'd load them on a trailer, then put them one-by-one onto a hydraulic log splitter in wood barn and break them into firewood. The firewood was piled up in the barn where it dried. People would buy the wood by the pickup truck bed, which is obviously a totally arbitrary unit, and we'd toss it into the back. When I was just 16, I could see the workflow could be more efficient, even with just the primitive tools the farm had, but the point wasn't to improve things, it was to "work hard", that is, stupidly. I only worked there for a couple weekends.

The "play/creative" mindset won out massively over my Gen-X life and the "serious mindset" people ate it on the societal and individual level. Being "serious" is a sort of self-imposed punishment. Let's return to the tree farm example for a very obvious case of creativity winning out. Over the decades since I was un-ergonomically loading rounds into a hydraulic log splitter, people build log processor equipment that automated that whole process. One guy can generate a mountain of firewood in a couple hours by loading a tree trunk onto a machine with another machine like a tractor or skidsteer.

That "serious" mindset still managed to partially infect me in spite of seeing it for what it is. It's difficult to fully embrace philosophical absurdism and be freed from all the years of training by dullards. The training should be about an ability to focus and concentrate when needed as a tool rather than merely appearing to do so, or worse yet by "obeying" some dumb ass teacher in a school setting.

 

What is Anxiety?

I ride the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail multiple times a week. I eek out a little more speed almost every session. Since I just started riding there last fall, the steps of my progression are fairly obvious to me. I'm about 50% faster than I was when I started, mainly due to improved technique and skill rather than improved aerobic capacity.

One that stands out is I had an issue with hand numbness for the first few months I was riding, which is now all but gone. The reason is apparent, too, I used to forcefully grip the bars, now I barely squeeze them. That happened "by itself". The mountain bike teachers have a maxim "heavy feet/light hands" to teach this concept, but for me it mostly happened because I was trying to be relaxed and not waste energy by "fighting the bike", which happens on the road as well.

"Fighting the bike" means you're wasting precious watts by exerting nonsense forces on the bike. It can happen from exhaustion, ironically, or a condition that's similar to daily life "anxiety". The anxiety case is pretty interesting because it has broad daily life application.

There are a couple of sections of the Big Creek trail that took several months of attempts for me to even finish successfully, that is, ride without getting off the bike. One is a steep twisty uphill section which is crowned by a large beech tree root. The root looks like a stair step at the top of a steep, dusty 10-20 foot climb. When you're a novice mountain biker, it seems implausible a person could ride up such an obstacle, but it's actually pretty "easy" for me now.

For the novice many things are "unknowns", like what happens if you can't ride up that hill and fall off awkwardly? It's an "oh shit" moment when you ride around a corner and see such a thing for the first time. That's where anxiety kicks in, when it's actually least useful and is totally counterproductive. When you "fight the bike" with mind and body, you're all but certain to fail riding over any obstacle. Situational awareness flies out the window, and the body goes ridgid into a sort of fighting mode, which is completely counter productive.

I think that type of anxiety is really an evolutionary "brace for impact" adaptation. One common version of that is the "sympathetic grunt" when you see another person fall awkwardly. The person who is falling will often make a sort of grunt or groan even before they hit the ground, and if there's a person or crowd watching, even on video, they'll involuntarily make a similar noise, which I think is essentially stiffening the ribs with positive air pressure... it's basically like a human air bag deployment. That type of anxiety is an involuntary response. It goes away with experience in the mountain bike obstacle scenario.

The daily life cousin of that type of anxiety is the phantasmagorical imagining of some bad scenario, which is also counterproductive and maladaptive. It's also a "brace for impact" scenario, but it can play out indefinitely just in the mind. Ironically, the source of this form of anxiety is the notion that a person is "in control" through planning and intention, which is also ultimately where the mountain bike obstacle angst comes from.

On the MTB, the trail goes over the obstacle, so the rider must navigate it or jump off the bike before it turns into a crash and maybe injury or a broken bike even though the trail and the situation is completely contrived. The anxiety arises from a faux "goal".

The day to day life anxieties are really similar. A contrived, typically accidental scenario induces angst: "If I don't do XYZ, I might lose my job!" or some romantic scenario might completely occupy the mind or money trouble might plague a person's thoughts.

The MTB obstacles are basically the point of riding the mountain bike. The first time I cleared that hill, I was completely thrilled. Really, every time I do it now, I get a little rush. The Big Creek trail is loaded with 1000 similar obstacles.

People have wildly more anxiety about life situations that are extremly boring and not dangerous at all and are mostly phantasms. They think their neighbors and friends are laughing at them if they don't have the right car or if their grass is too long or their hair isn't blond enough or they're too fat or too thin or their teeth aren't white enough or whatever. A great example of how insane such people can get is offered by "Asian Plastic Surgery" youtube channels

The Ancient Seed Monopoly

There's kid lore in Chardon, Ohio that was passed down for generations. The lore is there is a tunnel network from Rocky Cellar, which is sandstone bedrock outcropping off Basquin Drive, up to the county courthouse about a mile away, and perhaps there is a tunnel network through all the sandstone to various places.

I think that story is a great example of how folk stories, in that case a kid folk story, encode actual information: the original detailed information is boiled off and jumbled up with generic archetypes. In that story case, a historical event, was replaced with a generic "secret tunnel" narrative. The historical event was a town official hid court records in Rocky Cellar during the war of 1812. The story also encodes the prevalent underlying sandstone bedrock in Chardon. The boring details of that original historical event got replaced with something interesting.

In some cases, historical events that are interesting in and of themselves retain their original narrative form. A good example of that is "Brady's Leap" in Kent, Ohio and the associated frontier adventure story. Since the event was cool and kick ass, the man's name and the details of the event is in the lore.

The vampire character blends together many real world concepts into a mythological character. One that I think is particularly intriguing the the element of the Hades/Persephone story that involves pomegranate seeds. Hades basically gets to keep Persephone because she ate the pomegranate arils. I read/heard many attempts to explain this element of the story.

Persephone being married to Hades is a seasonal myth. Hades is the king of the underworld, which is often equated with winter, that is the dead time of the year. To a modern person it doesn't make any sense that the king of the underworld and especially winter world would also be associated with wealth, which is the lean time of the year. Hades association with wealth spills over into the vampire myth: Dracula is even a "Count" and he lives in a castle.

The Arils component of the story involves "a deal" that Persephone broke, or was tricked into, depending on the version of the story. Why would that element of the story hang around for thousands of years?

I think that story is really about an ancient "seed monopoly" from the dawn of agriculture. I think that's also where the concept of interest comes from. This is also why "Hades" is associated with wealth, not the common interpretation that the concept was all wealth came from the underworld... which also makes no sense, unless you're talking about a mine, like a silver mine, which was another thing which was frequently monopolized.

Death and blood are at the core of the Hades/Vampire story for fairly obvious reasons... how is a monopoly built and maintained? murder and destruction.

The Book of Enoch and "The Jews"

In a previous post about the "cultural significance" of Star Wars versus the near insignificance of the movie Avatar I pointed out two narratives that permeate pop culture movies and TV shows and also the bible, which is really Star Wars + Avatar. There are basically three core narratives to discuss here:

• The Osiris Cycle, or the Demeter/Persephone Cycle (crops and winter);
• Moonman/woman and Sunman versus winterman;
• Rich people form a slave colony (Book of Enoch and Avatar, and 10,000 BC).

The Osiris cycle is "the sun" comes to Earth and is embodied in the crops like wheat or grapes, dies, and mutilated, and is reborn. In the Osiris story (there are some different versions), Osiris gets put into a tight fitting casket (wheat storage) and floated down a river (shipped). He's eventually reborn via artificial means (planted). In the grape crop based versions of the stories the plant-embodied-sun gets castrated (grapes cut off), and then torn to pieces by mad women in one case, stomped and mashed and made into wine. Jesus is wheat cult + wine cult. The violence in these stories should be regarded as looney tunes or Final Destination style cartoon violence where the character of Osiris, Jesus, or Dionysus is the personification of wheat (which used to be literally flailed by workers) or grapes.

The Demeter/Persephone/Hades version of this story is Persephone is "kidnapped" and kept in the underworld by Hades who is the wealthy king of the dead, and she is released in spring. One of the reasons Persephone is kept by Hades is she ingests Pomegranate seeds. Hades morphed into a vampire in modern times. He represents the never ending seed monopoly/finance scheme still used today.

The adventures of Moonman/woman and Sunman (the first released Star Wars movies Han/Leia and Luke) are another seasonal cycle story and the Osiris cycle provides the background. One example of that is Luke ends up hanging upside down in the ice cave on Hoth (winter planet, Luke/Sun in the south, i.e. upside down).

The "rich people form a slave colony" story is the Book of Enoch and Avatar, and maybe more interestingly Stargate and 10,000 BC. The TV series "The 100" is another example of this core narrative. The "rich people" slave colony story of the book of Enoch ends up in the bible in the Cain character and his city founding. This thread is also present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's a "nephilim" as described in the book of Enoch.

The Stargate and 10,000 BC movies depict the bible jews. I think the current concept of "jews" is a mangled, nonsense concept. The depiction of spece jews in the Stargate and 10,000 BC movies makes sense with respect to the Enoch narrative.

In Stargate the jews are the people who are contacted by people from Earth, that is, the advanced civilization. The character Skaara takes on the Enoch role. The name "Enoch" means "to train" or "initiated". In Stargate the Americans find these space jews ensalved to the Egyptians/Goauld snake people. In 10,000 BC, the white people find the first civilization people enslaved by the Atlanteans... and in that scenario the "slaves" are a rando assortment of people who are "the jews". Jews are the bamboozled slaves of an "advanced" slaver civilization rather than an ethnicity. Today an American is enmeshed in the slaver civilization system, but "American" is not an ethnicity.

Dojo Appeal

The corporate/consumer system in the United States is a soft version of military life, specifically life on a ship. Sadly, people are trained for it from the time they're a toddler. Kids get shipped off to "kindergarten" to get used to authority figures giving them orders and spending all their time on a controlled schedule inside an institutional building where their movements are controlled by institutional paperwork and orders like "hall passes". It's not even an American concept; it came from inbred Prussian lizard people.

A big component of the "midlife crisis" is the realization that life spent in this system is a waste. For many people, it's not so much a "realization", that is a conscious, well formed thought, it's more of a feeling that plays out in mute desperation and acting out. The certainty of mortality, and the corresponding preciousness of one's life collides with the absurdity of masses of people living under the thumb of a bunch of greedy cockroaches who have bamboozled the multitudes.

This realization is also why movies like They Live attain a "cult" following. It allows the audience to "externalize" this model of control, that is, the narrative of the movie allows one to be like a fish that climbs out of the fish bowl and see it for what it is.

However, once a person "can see", a possibly harsher reality is everyone now "needs" this pile of trash system because it makes almost everything including the most essential items like food and controls the distribution of everything with funny money.

That said, many of the things people do are purposely and firmly outside the corporate/consumer system. I experience one successful, very good example of that on a regular basis when I do my mountain biking hobby. I go to a public park and ride a trail that was built and maintained by volunteers who receive no compensation other than the ability to ride their bike.

After a summer storm, the trail can be impassible since it's in the woods and many branches and even whole trees or large chunks of a dying tree will fall on the trail... but they will disappear as if "by magic" over maybe a half a day. The "magic" is rando mountain bikers moving them or chopping them up. I've done it myself. A portion of the trail is only ~1200 feet away from my couch through the woods. I dragged a chainsaw over there and chopped up a log and cleared the trail because I wanted to ride the next day.

There are many other models of organization that match the mountain bike hobby and trail construction such as a dojo, which is maybe the most appealing one for free and productive people. Models like cults and religious orders maintain elements of corporate and military organizations that aren't appropriate to free men.

I never really thought about the word dojo and its inherent relationship to "the way", i.e. "do". A dojo is a place where you practice "the way" of a discipline like martial arts. The idealized dojo is organized like the mountain bike hobby, not like a corporation or military unit or public schools. If there's a hierarchy, it's a real hierarchy. The teacher is not an authority figure because of a title, but has natural authority versus a student who wants to learn "the way".

Many people have noticed this concept and tried to apply it to the tech industry or other commercial endeavors but it doesn't really work because someone is trying to get paid, which corrupts the structure and imposes a false hierarchy of "owner ship", which is the thing at the root of the corporate trash system. As observers like Jordan Maxwell pointed out, the "ship" is at the core of this thing.

Complexity of the Information Dimension

This past weekend I went for a bike ride on Butternut Road from Munson over to Burton. It was a perfect, bright, sunny and windy day and that road is picturesque. It goes through a handful of river valleys. The Chagrin, the West Branch of the Cuyahoga, and the East Branch of the Cuyahoga and has lumpy, rolling hills and open grassy fields with horses and other farm animals all along the way.

I'm on a geology kick lately and "see" the glacial deposition, which geologists gave a bunch of names like Kames, Hummocky Moraines and the like. That route passes over several different such regions, which are complex there because the road passes over three sandstone highlands. One of them even has a name "Maple Hill" which is Auburn Road near Cedar and Butternut.

The "experience" of riding combines with the maps I've been looking at for a couple of weeks to generate a new combination of observations in my mind, and my mind only, that is in the "information dimension" where my personal Thomas Anderson character exists. I have an understanding of the difference in elevation of the Cuyahoga Formation and the Sharon Conglomerate sandstone highlands and how that's filled in with glacial till because of the effort involved to climb various hills, or drop down various descents.

The (abrigded) etymology of "experience" is instructive here, it's "ex" (out of) "peritus" (testing). Also "expert", which is someone who had experiences basically. "Experiential" learning is much deeper than mere symbolic learning, which is basically a huge waste of time. It's wild that almost the whole population of a country like the USA flushes away their prime growing and learning years soaking in a soup of disconnected factoids preached by teachers who similarly don't "know" anything.

It makes sense that culture would go hog wild on these dumb fuck LLMs. The emphasis on a jumble of pure symbolic nonsense with zero experience goes hand in hand with rote "learning" and assemblies of facts. All the "actual" knowledge, like all the nutrition is in the experience not the words. That huge sea of information is not available to machines, it can barely be shared from human to human.

Anyway, this takes my back to an immense divide between "experts" and "dilettantes" and poseurs. The expert lives in the deep complexity of the information dimension. The dilettante lives "off the cuff" and on whims. I think the US ruling class is very toxic poseurs. I'm sure there's a bunch of such people, like CEOs saying things like, "What does the AI say about it?" in meetings all the time now.

The vacuum/negative space this black hole of foolishness is creating might give birth to another wisdom tradition in the US.

"The Way"

I recently watched a YouTube video about the vast cultural impact of Star Wars versus the zero cultural impact of the movie Avatar which was also a "mega blockbuster hit movie". The "Star Wars" topic is one of the things that got me started on the initial concept of this blog, which is humanity's mind model is inextricably bound up with mythology. Why is Star Wars a cultural icon while Avatar is not?

Star Wars is literally star wars which is the basis of a lot of mythological systems. I wrote a bunch of posts on this topic, but this one is a good summary. I'll jot down a few really obvious highlights. Millenium Falcon = the moon. X-Wing fighter looks like an erect penis. Luke literally shoots his load into the "death star". Rebels = solar imagery. The Empire is the world of the dead, that is, the Winter and last years sun and hoarded wealth, like the greek god Pluto, who's also a vampire. Luke (light) and Han are Horus. Princess Leia is Isis. Vader is Osiris/the constellation Orion. Every year the Rebels, the Sun, overthrows the Empire (the winter) and there's a big Ewok Party--Summer.

Avatar is possibly based on another old myth, but it's a less well known myth. It might be a twist on the Book of Enoch story or the story of the Nephilim which is also the basis of the Stargate SG-1 story, which is also the Atlantis story told by Plato, which is shown in bits and pieces in the movie 10,000 BC and is also in the 2000s Battlestar Galactica. That story is an advanced civilization came to prehistoric Earth and basically "engineered" humanity. In the book of Enoch, for example, the "watchers" teach humans "civilization". The nephilim enslave humanity, as in Avatar, an evil corporation sends an imposter to dupe the blue aliens.

For whatever reason, this story is not as widely known or celebrated, and all these entertainment products have niche fandoms, or no fandom, like Avatar, which was, ironically just corporate entertainment slop compared to Star Wars which was based on "The Contendings of Horus and Set" and "The Osiris Cycle", which are arguably products of the Nephilim. That is, the "seasonal religion" is a scam that's been used to enslave humanity for 1000s of years.

"Star Wars" also includes "the force" mythology, but in true Nephilim style corrupted it with the concept of "royal blood", which is the Nephilim/fallen angels myth. That is, "the force" is only available via biological and hereditary juju called "mitichlorians" or whatever. That's all a sort of grotesque corruption of concepts in Daoism. "The Force" = "The Way".

The depiction of "the daoist" comes and goes in entertainment products. I think corporations are not eager to promote it, nor are corporate types who are the people who make hollywood slop now. A classic example of this is Kwai Chang Caine from Kung Fu. The "Caine" surname and his origin story is drawn from the Nephilim story yet again (in the lore, it's the biblical Cain), but it doesn't fit the rest of the concepts in Kung Fu, nor the Shaolin Monk concept. Another similar, and corrupted example is the Ranger Aragon from Lord of the Rings who's the "secret king", but a ranger. The TV series the Incredible Hulk is yet another one where a wandering stranger goes around the world solving problems "outside the system". Of course Yoda and the Jedis are supposed to be Shaolin Monks who have a sort of stand-offish relationship with "the system" and have their own concerns about "maintaining balance" which is independent of the government's agendas.

"The Way" is the only way, so it necessarily supercedes religion, which is a pack of lies, and politics, which is also a pile of fraud and lies, and it really trumps all similar nonsense, like consumerism, or work anxiety, corporations, etc... It asserts itself in times of extreme madness, like in classical Athens during peak empire, or in ancient Rome in the form of stoicism, or now in the US where the "ruling class" is being revealed as utter trash.

Authentic Folklore/Imposed Folklore

I wrote a couple of posts about "kid knowledge", which I think is a great example of "authentic" folklore in the western world. A couple of examples of kid folklore from Chardon, Ohio are: 1) the story of the Melonheads; 2) the idea that there is a tunnel network connecting the high school, the court house and "Rocky Cellar" which is a sandstone bedrock outcrop off of Basquin Drive in Chardon.

The kid knowledge is "authentic" because it was generated by rando kids or adults over time and was handed down kid to kid through the generations. The "tunnel" story is almost certainly a jumbled up version of what was more or less an adventure story from the War of 1812, which was coincident with the founding of Ohio and Geauga County. An early county official stashed documents in Rocky Cellar to keep them safe from the British and Indian mercenaries of the British. Eventually that turned into a "tunnel to the courthouse".

The melonhead story is just a monster story, maybe about kids with hydrocephalus who lived near Wisner Road in Chardon, Township. It got embellished over the years to become a fantastical tale of a "mad scientist" run amok who was then destroyed by his creation, which is just a jumble of horror movie tropes.

Kids are motivated to tell and listen to stories for entertainment purposes, so the stories are lean on facts and more about being "cool" or interesting exercises of imagination. They also draw upon well worn story tropes and archetypes. I am guessing there is very little "kid knowledge" left of that kind. Instead it's turned into memes and funny stories and images on the Internet. 

I think the contemporary source of authentic folklore, or authentic human expression is the Internet, and specifically things like youtube videos made by actual randos, rather than astroturfed imitations of that generated by "ruling class" agents. Youtube is currently, far and away, the most watched entertainment medium.

 

The entire corporate entertainment industry is often a version of astroturf "folk lore" creation. The news is a version of that. PBS, NPR, etc... are just more versions of that. Essentially it's all a sales pitch from the "ruling class" about virtually every topic and is mainly meant to shape public opinion, or impose mind models that favor the ruling class or at the very least just impose their rando religious opinions on myriad topics.

Let's take the topic of "race relations" as an example. In the 70s and 80s, there was a constant drumbeat of government and "ruling class" propaganda about black and white race relations in the US, and a big effort to get white people to think "racism" was absolutely the worst sin and that anyone who had a racist opinion was absolute trash. I think that social engineering effort peaked in the 1990s with Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central, which was a huge hit and which treated the topic comedically and nonchalantly.

The main thrust of that propaganda isn't that "race relations" can be fixed or solved, it's actually that black people need the government to propagandize white people and "manage" the two groups, just as the blacks need the government for welfare, public housing, police at their beaches, their pools, and high school football games, etc...

In the early 2000s through today, though, lefty political people got extremely aggressive about the subject, so even the entertainment propaganda got extremely heavy handed and the concept of "DEI" started to show up all over the place. The concept shifted from the 70s/80s notion of "white and black people should learn to get along" to "white people are bad", which is also part of the management pitch.

That propaganda ran headlong into the Internet and youtube, which casually crushed it for a large segment of the white audience. White lefty women and men are the only people who are still onboard with the ruling class propaganda from the 70s to the early 2000s about black people, and in many cases, those white shitlibs live in a world of total nonsense and severe cognitive dissonance. For example, they live in extremely white areas, but imagine that somehow a "diverse" neighborhood is preferable, until they drive through black Cleveland, Ohio, and lock their car doors and drive as fast as possible to get back to their own civilization.

Anyway, I think it's not possible to keep imposing folklore on people. Eventually they notice it's fake garbage, which would probably indicate that all respect for "the ruling class" and their opinions is being lost.

Being "Wrong"/Bad Mind Models

I had an "earth science" class in 8th grade. It was an unusual class and maybe was some kind of educational experiment in our school district. It had two teachers and it culminated in a multi-day field trip to Kelly's Island in Lake Erie. We visited the glacial grooves there. I maintained an on again/off again interest in local geology ever since.

The glacial grooves at Kelly's Island are pretty impressive. It's obvious they were formed by an immense force scraping rocks and boulders along the exposed limestone. The force was provided by the slow motion flow of the laurentide ice sheet. For many years after the class, I had an opinion that the glacier ice was "miles thick" and uniformly deep. I thought it looked something like this painting at the boundary, but this concept was a "scientific" version of folklore.

In my hometown area where there is exposed bedrock there are no glacial grooves. Also there's significant accumulation of glacial till here; it's tens to hundreds of feet thick (in old river valleys). The mental model of miles-thick ice scouring the bedrock here doesn't jibe with that.

Images of the present day Greenland ice sheet shows it tapers down significantly at the edges, so maybe it's ~20 feet thick, plus it's all dirty and gray and it rides on a layer of rocks and ground up rock powder. Also it's shape and thickness seems to be significantly affected by underlying bedrock and land elevation.

This photo, below, from Greenland of the Isunnguata Sermia glacier is probably a good approximation for what the glacial times were like here in my neighborhood, which is on a terminal moraine from 14,000 years ago. Maybe there was more vegetation here at the time, like hemlock forests and grasslands since we're much farther south than Greenland.

So if I were living 14,000 years ago, the view from my current property would have been something like that. Maybe tens of feet of ice off to the north stretching on for endless miles into Canada. The southern side of the glacier was probably filled with streams and holes and lakes in the summer season.

A bunch of glacial till would be stacked up all over the place with new grass, weeds, and trees quickly taking over, and there would be lakes and rivers everywhere supplied by melt water. In fact, there was a lake just to the north of my property which eventually emptied out via what's currently Big Creek.

Anyway, I think most of the mind-models people have are low fidelity like my 8th grade glacier model. The folklore mind model of Ohio ice age geology is a pretty interesting one to think about. It shares some common traits with kid lore I learned in the late 1970s/early 1980s in Chardon, Ohio.

There's an "official"/technical and highly detailed version of Ohio ice age geology which is constantly updated by PhD students and geology researchers, plus a slow, steady stream of information comes from water well drilling companies into ODNR databases. This technical/detailed information ends up in maps, reports, whitepapers, etc... Some geology professors in Ohio will understand and have a significant amount of that info at their fingertips.

A popularized, shortened version ends up in text books. Middle school teachers will grasp some subsection of facts, and jumble and mix up other concepts as they convey that info to students. It turns into a narrative that borrows core elements from fictional stories, and get exaggerated and peppered with interesting concepts like "miles thick ice", which is way more interesting than a pile of dirty snow that ebbs and flows like a super slow motion waves on the beach.

Converged Dystopia

The "dystopian" sci-fi genre was pretty popular in the 1970s-90s. Movies like Robocop or Demolition Man and Idiocracy were entertaining plus their authors spent some brain cells trying to imagine what the future was going to be like based on the "trends" of the prior decades. Unfortunately, they were correct, and the present day is like a dystopia movie gumbo. It's mostly Idiocracy with chunks of Robocop, Demolition Man, and They Live mixed in, especially when the aliens in "They Live" represent jewish mobsters.

A great example of this was provided by the first episode of an HBO show called Euphoria which made me nauseous because it's so bleak and disgusting. It's more or less the 90210 for the dystopian world. 90210 was a multi-year after school special. This Euphoria show seems like depraved propaganda meant to mind-poison gen Z dummies, or put another way, it's entertainment for a completely mind poisoned generation.

The main character is a mixed-race mentally ill girl who is a crackhead, which I guess is supposed to be normal now. She's having a sad mope life because she lives in the suburbs instead of the city so she is a junkie and in rehab at age 16 or whatever. The hot white girl character immediately shows her boobs, then has sex with a black kid. The white high school jock kid is a rapist sociopath. There's an obligatory trannie high schooler who goes and has butt sex with a middle aged psycho white man. The show is dripping with black/urban trash "culture" which is all a hollywood invention anyway. The "normal" kids are dunks and drug users and sit around drinking and smoking vapes like they live in a giant crack house world.

I think the "converged dystopia" is really just the "mouse utopia" and it happens over and over again throughout history, but is cycles within cycles. There are micro cycles, like generational financial scams ebbing and flowing, and larger cycles of actual capital and technology creation, war cycles, all nestled withing big climatic and geologic cycles which put hard limits on human population and activities.

It's not possible to "fix" the culture, just like it's not possible to fix dysfunctional people, and it's not possible to make the mouse utopia work. 

Natural Thinking

A couple weeks ago I went after a Strava road bike segment that goes from Rt 6 in Hambden, south along Kile Road. It's a little over 2 miles and has a 50 foot climb in the middle.

A while after I finished the ride it dawned on me that Kile Road passes over glacial landforms which were created about 14,000 years ago. The elevation chart for the segment is more or less a cross section of the "Defiance Moraine", which spans Ohio from east to west and is named for the city of Defiance. It's a terminal moraine which is the debris that's piled up at the end of a glacier as shown in the following picture of a glacier in Greenland.

By NASA / Michael Studinger

Kile Road is an open air glacial surface feature museum. The moraine landform is subtle, but noticeable especially on a bicycle. It's even visible on google streetview. It's noticeable because Kile Road otherwise follows the east branch of the Cuyahoga River Valley which is about 1.5-2 miles wide there. At the center of the valley the elevation is around 1180 feet and it's about 1300 feet on either side. The valley runs north-south, but the moraine on Kile is running east-west. Also, there's a large flat and open area which was a lake in glacial times. There are several farms there, plus Pioneer Waterland water park whose central feature is a remnant of that glacial lake.

The following map is from the ODNR Ohio Geology Interactive Map. It shows the Strava segment (the red line) and the portion of the moraine which forms the hill on the segment, which is the dark green mass that is in the middle of the segment.

Both the moraine and ancient glacial lake weren't all that "obvious" to me even after studying local geology for many years by riding my bike around and looking at rock formations and also reading about the subject and studying maps for years. The geologists who put the story of Earth together in the 19th and 20th century managed to deduce a complex narrative from very subtle clues. I think they represent a very good example of following the evidence to get to the "truth" no matter where it leads.

The "truth" revealed by geology is the operation of the earth and climate system, which runs, obviously, without human intervention and with no regard for humans at all. It shows humanity isn't uniquely important and will come and go like many other species before us. The evidence for that is everywhere. For example, my house and property is right on top of the Defiance Moraine, so about 14,000 years ago, it looked like the photo above and a huge field of ice rolled off into the north. Millions of years before that, this land was under an ocean, etc...

People (including me) struggle and strain and fight over piles of imaginary nonsense. The masses allow the most horrible trashbucket element of humanity like politicians and priests goad them on into wreaking all sorts of havoc and murder based on magical thinking nonsense.

Worry Mode of Consciousness

I've been riding the Big Creek Park mountain bike trail on a regular basis since fall of 2025. Even though I'm in pretty decent shape for my age and am actually fairly fast on a road bike, I suck on the mountain bike. For example, I'm in the top 10, or sometimes the "king of the mountain" out of hundreds or even multiple thousand people on certain Strava segments on the road bike, but I'm in the bottom half or worse on the Big Creek Park segments, which probably means I'm the slowest of the "fast people" who are the ones that bother having a Strava account in the first place. I find this annoying, so I work to improve my speed.

Going fast on the MTB is at least as dependent on technique as aerobic conditioning. The technique seems to be about training the mind and body with a much more complicated center-of-mass/bike position model than is required for road biking. Of course that model is all based on "feel" and experience rather than a conscious physics model. The conscious mind model is too slow to pilot the bike effectively and efficiently.

On the mountain bike, efficiency is key, and efficiency means not braking too much for a corner or difficult section. Braking for every corner is one of the things that really drains all the speed/kinetic energy from the mountain bike/rider system, and then of course requires the rider to replace that energy from their legs, so it's also quite tiring. The inefficiency drags the average speed way down.

However, it's quite "scary" to try to maintain speed through corners, especially on steep downhill sections. The fear is really a manifestation of the lack of a good mind/body model for the mountain bike. The temptation to grab the brakes is almost impossible to overcome, for very good reason. The conscious mind "knows" there's a big gap in training and there's no mind/body mountain bike model to rely on.

Unfortunately, building up that model involves crashes. I just crashed yesterday while trying to "flow" through a "fast", but relatively flat section of the trail, but it has turn after turn after turn, plus little bumps and dips. I resisted the temptation to get on the brakes and tried maneuvering through each turn. Eventually the front wheel washed out on some soil that was loose and slippery compared to the rest of the corners and down I went.

A few minutes later, I realized my mistake "consciously", that I was off balance on the bike in that corner. My weight was too far back and probably shifted to the wrong side of the bike, that is, on the inside of the turn. Anyway, the whole of the mind/body model for the MTB seems to be about keeping the center-of-mass of the bike body system optimal over the wheels all the time, then developing a feel for the limits of the wheels for given soil conditions. When the center-of-mass is well positioned, it's possible to safely bail out of a bad situation, or to slide through a turn even when the wheels lose group.

The inability of the conscious mind, that is the "self" or the "ego" to wrangle with 3D reality is very common. One variant of this problem manifests as "worry" which is fairly similar to the "scary" feeling on a mountain bike. Worry is low level nagging stress that some situation is "out of control", that is, "unknown".

On the MTB, the "scare" feeling is the conscious realization that training is inadequate to handle a given speed through a turn. The "scare" feeling is transient--it lasts the duration of a turn which might be 2 seconds. Since the only way to get better is to train the turns there's no point mentally obsessing on it.

Worry is the consciousness trying to play out many different scenarios in an obsessive manner. It's generally worthless compared to the mountain bike training and learning process. People worry about work. They worry about love, family, finances, etc... Some people are worried their entire life. The "worry" scenario is all imagined, but it leads to adverse physical consequences, like higher cortisol levels which are the "bad" and "heavy" feeling.

A corresponding mode of consciousness to worrying is "enduring". The person who decides to "endure" their worry and heavy feeling has a model that they'll "get to the other side" eventually. That is, by struggling, they will eventually "make it" or succeed and their burden (the cortisol dose) will eventually go away. There are various sayings and folk-wisdom phrases associated with this mode of consciousness, e.g. "it's darkest before the dawn".

The enduring mode of consciousness is foolish to indulge because the "worry" is all imaginary. Old Obi-Wan's advice to "let go" is really good. The "go with the flow" model is really all that can be done anyway. The recognition of the reality of given circumstances is the best antidote.

Psychosis is Normal

A person having a "psychotic break" can't distinguish between their inner world imaginings and the 3D external reality world. If you witness a friend or relative struggle with psychosis, it's frightening, especially when that person might have been competent and balanced previously. That reveals the mind-model of reality is as contingent as physical health. "You" have potentially as little control over your mind model as you do on getting a cold or breaking your leg.

The concept of a "normal" mode of consciousness and a "psychotic" mode of consciousness implies that this state is "rare", especially if you ever witnessed someone lose it that way. However, once you start considering all the nonsense and bullshit that compels peoples' lives all over the world, the "psychotic" condition seems to be the norm.

"Lawn care" is a good example of a completely imaginary, groomed compulsion. Through the summer millions of people in the US are ruled by an image of uniform green squares. When their grass departs from that image, they must mow. People will spend $10,000 on a lawn mower machine. People who can't DIY anything will spend $1000 for a mechanic to change their oil and do other minor service on their mower. Some people pay thousands of dollars per year to landscapers to maintain that image, and never even go out of their house and walk on the grass, or even look at their flower beds. It's all very strange.

Political parties are another great example. Dolts imagine they are on a "team" with a scumbag like Donald Trump or Joe Biden, and the only thing preventing a utopia is the bad guys on the other team. That stultifying mental model dominates some people's entire lives. All the contrary evidence and day-to-day experience of actual reality doesn't change their mental model one iota. They'll argue with the other team until they're blue in the face about random issues they have zero first hand knowledge of.

There's endless examples. As I wrote in the previous post, much of this psychosis is cultivated by "the ruling class", many of whom earnestly believe it. In that scenario, they more or less project their own reality model onto their cult members and the shared delusion forms a herd. People scoff at a group like Heaven's Gate, but actually live that Heaven's Gate life. Their own personal Marshal Applewhite could be a boss, or a political figure, or some talking head who's preaching about COVID, global warming or any number of other topics.

One of the interesting reactions to this cult grooming is people who reject all facts or any model of reality that doesn't seem authentic to them. For example, the flat earther people glom onto a "theory" they consider the opposite of the authoritative teaching of "globe earth". The flat earthers are scorned, but they're actually more enlightened than a lot of people who simply regurgitate an authority's statements without any actual knoweledge.

The realization that one is going to die and that nobody knows anything is a good antidote to these forms of psychosis. Another useful realization is quite a lot of the human world is composed of inanimate objects that actually feed on human energy and attention, aka the world of the dead. The lawn care industry is a great example of that. People feed a giant grass beast and kill all kinds of other creatures to maintain their green square image. In some jurisdictions, it's even written into the laws that the plants in a yard can only be so long.

Rule by Common Sense

When I was in middle school and high school from the mid to late 1980s the predominant insult label you would throw at someone was "poseur". "Fag" was another one, which basically meant the same thing, that is the person was weak, incompetent, and a fraud.

The poseur term came from Punk Rock, which was a big thing at the time. In that world, "poseur" was a band who pretended to be a "punk" but was really just a commercial scammer. For example, the band "Blondie" reportedly disliked their big hit song "Heart of Glass" which was a disco tune, because they were a punk band, and didn't want to be revealed as greedy corporate money whores instead of authentic punk rockers.

There was a corresponding attempt to be "good at things" among my friends and peers at school. I don't think that 100% came from the concept of fear of being labeled a poseur. In fact, it was probably the opposite. That is, people who put an emphasis on competency would gravitate to use an insult like "poseur".

That emphasis on competency makes sense in the context of the US economy of the time. In the 1970s and 80s, the US still made stuff, so a widespread culture of competency sort of makes sense. However, at the same time, the US started to turn into the financialized, scam based shit show it is today. This was heralded by things like the "Savings and Loan" crime wave of the 80s.

The departure from "common sense" and the beliefs I grew up with goes hand in hand with the "elite overproduction" concept from Peter Turchin. There's an inverse statistical relationship between the "elites" and the "people", which is an age old story. We're in a period of peak parasite, and maximum social stress now. It's probably the maximum deviation from "common sense" as well.

The deviation from common sense is easy to understand. Government and corporations make novel claims to create new organizations and opportunities for wealth extraction. Trannies and pronouns are great current day examples. The "ruling class" can find fault with "common sense" and ordinary people and undertake social engineering quests. In the late 1800s it was the temperance movement. Today it's basically the opposite of things that happened then. Like in the 1800s around that time there was a "eugenics" movement. Today there's basically an opposite concept of racism and opposition to "white people" as a category. Both concepts are arbitrary inventions of the "ruling class" of the times.

The madness basically comes about through the financial system which extracts wealth from the population en masse and diverts it to the various causes of the ruling class people. It seems pretty likely the break between the ruling class and the common sense people will form around the financial system and associated institutions like the insurance industry or banks or the legal system, which is also a participant in the madness.

Power Law and Financial Fraudsters

Supposedly the debt money scheme came about when bankers realized people rarely asked for their deposits, so the bankers could loan out the vast majority of deposits, or in some cases, even more than the total deposits when the precious metals were just represented as digits. Their business model is fraud.

That's another example of a power law at work, i.e. only about 10% of deposit accounts might be closed over a given time period. The average person assumes a "flat" distribution, that is 100% of deposits must be available all the time.

The bankers know the situation with deposit accounts, but the average person has no clue. The average person's model of banking is it's like a more "secure" example of a cash jar you might keep in a cupboard and banks are just a money custodian service. This is another example of the genetic disparity in the definition of "common sense".

The average person's assumption of a flat distribution in deposit availability is based on a belief in fairness, and antagonism for cheaters such as the bankers who are financial fraudsters.

The banker and financial parasite class, which extends into entities like insurance companies and many corporations, assume the pretense of being "managers" or stewards of collective wealth even though all their systems fail repeatedly throughout history.

Time Orientation

We took our dogs to the vet last week. The bill for two annual checkups plus a couple of shots and a couple of packs of ivermectin based heartworm medication was about $1000. In the early 2000s, it cost about $80-90 for one dog annual checkup and medications. Annualized inflation of $90 to $500 from 2008 to 2026 is about 10%. The supposed official inflation rate over that time is like 3%. The inflation calculator predicts the current day vet bill should only be $140 if it was $90 in 2008. 

One theory about the wild vet bills is corporate and financial scumbags bought up all the vet practices in the US, so there's basically a cartel running the business, just like a cartel runs the medical business. I can imagine that's the case, but it's not the root cause. The root cause is debt dollars and people's overall time orientation.

Currently people believe the future is entirely owned by some financial trash people. For anything to happen in the present day, a business needs a loan. The loans are just digits the bank puts in an account. People then "work" to pay back the debt. A loan is a promise to work in the future.

When you own property, you have the opposite time orientation. You did all the work in the past. Now you have a valuable thing like a piece of property or a piece of gold, or a car or whatever. You don't have to do anything that doesn't add value or improve your situation. In that scenario you own your future and financial scumbags are seen as the obvious parasites they are.

The debt money economy has slowly morphed into a managerial economy, which is actually how the cartel vet business came about and why the vet business will turn into something like the medical industry in the US, which is another cartel business that's completely controlled into a giant rent seeking machine. People pay an enormous monthly fee to insurance companies to participate in the system. The insurance companies became big management cartels of the awful medical business in the US. They are apparently trying to do the same with vets.

The managerial component of this shitty system gets more invasive with each passing year. These vermin want to micromanage and track every aspect of people's lives. This is only possible because people believe in the debt money system. 

The Value of Voting (zero)

I know a handful of people who are political partisans, that is, they're really "into" political parties like the republicans or democrats. Thankfully, these groups represent small minorities now. Only about 27% of the population "identifies" as a democrat, and about 27% identify as a republican. That ~20% number is a consistent value across many disparate scenarios. I would guess about 20% of the population gets COVID shots now, for example. Indeed:

As of early 2026, about 17.5% of adults reported having received the 2025-26 COVID-19 vaccine, which includes booster doses.

The 20% number is evidence of some phenomenon that follows a power law. These are all examples of what I would call an "erosion of belief" scenario. COVID offers a great recent example. Initially there's a lie: "COVID will kill you if you don't get an untested, ineffective concoction from pharmaceutical companies." The lie is sold via the herd behavior of the populace. However, over time one-by-one people exit the herd as their personal experience contradicts the narrative pushed by self-interested salespeople like Fauci. For some reason though about 20% of the people continue to insist the herd opinion was correct.

The herd formation mechanism is easy to understand. Humans seem to have some "voting" mechanism in their brain just like ducks or chickens or cows. When confronted with an unknown situation, humans will decide what to do based on observation of other people in an ongoing informal "vote". Our flock of ducks does the same thing all day, everyday. They decide what to do as a group, especially what's "dangerous" or safe.

Imagine a scenario with 20 people caught in a rain storm who could take shelter in a cave or a spooky dilapidated cabin. The process by which the group "decides" the spooky scenario is safe is essentially a vote. The way the situation really unfolds is the "braves" or "independents" or "risk takers" actually decide what to do by going into the cave, then the others follow along once it's proven safe via a sort of "vote" that's quite similar to the duck's voting mechanism. The followers memory performs an "experience laundering" and they convert their following into a "decision"; this would correspond to the one-by-one reassessment of the COVID lie... okay, so what about the remnant 20%?

The remnant 20% seems to be stuck in what's essentially an imaginary voting loop. That is, they formed their opinion as a member of the herd. The herd moved on, they didn't notice. This seems to be the case for political partisans. During an election cycle, the herd gets convinced to vote for dirtbag "A" or "B". The election ends, ditbag "A" doesn't do anything promised or discussed in the election cycle. One by one, the herd understands that, except the remnant.

Anyway, an obvious conclusion is the value of the vote is zero. The only thing that matters is real information and an ability to evaluate it. The voting mechanism comes about because the common scenario is lack of info, and inability to evaluate it in adequate time. This scenario is rare/never happens for humans in the modern world, however, our ancestors lived in that world all the time for millions/billions of years so people "feel" like that's the ongoing situation.

The Rich Kids Table

We recently watched the TV show "Landman" which is about an executive at an independent oil company in Texas. It follows the same template as the TV series "Yellowstone". Ostensibly the writers of the show are "conservatives", at least that's the sales pitch associated with the string of shows from the same producers.

Even though the show is supposed to be "right wing" or conservative, and promotes the oil industry, it also includes ideas as you'd see in the other slop on Netflix or any of the other streaming services or networks which is labeled as "DEI", for example, there is always a tranny or gay character in these shows. Apparently that's obligatory, or the show gets paid to include that content.

It's odd there's some group of people with apparently endless money or influence who insist on pushing a handful of random concepts onto the public and there's endless minions who just go along with it and dutifully follow orders to promote those random concepts. Of the random concepts pushed, the tranny thing is the hardest to explain or understand. It's an issue that affects a micro-fraction of the population, so it barely has a real-world presence, but there's apparently at least hundreds of millions of dollars per year available to propagandize it. I spent at least 4 hours of my precious life watching corporate HR slop with similar propaganda.

Lots of observers, including me, struggle to understand how such a system "works". That is, how is it possible rando companies have to pay money to make employees watch videos about pronouns? It makes no sense at all.

The alt-media has been discussing this apparent system of control for decades now, but generally veers into realms of the fantastical and supernatural to fill in the "no sense" gaps. Works of fiction like the movie "They Live" show some version of this alt-media explanation. In that movie, a group of extra-dimensional aliens bamboozle humanity with a mind control ray fed through TV and ads.

I think a better model is offered up by high school cliques. The rich kids table in the cafeteria "runs the school". Their random opinions end up on blast over the PA. Lots of the other "kids" in the world high-school end up falling in line with the rich kids to get a share of the largess on offer from the rich kids.

It's interesting their random beliefs and opinions end up defining them as a clique. It's kind of the opposite scenario "real-politik" observers think is going on. That group believes the beliefs and opinions of the ruling class are calculated and are promoted for cynical reasons that keep the ruling class in power.

The real-politik explanation is the ruling-class are clever schemers with no real beliefs or opinions other than a lust for power and wealth, and all they do on the public stage is an act, or any beliefs they promote are meant to divide and conquer or whatever, that is, it's all calculated and fraudulent.

I think the real-politik explanation is incorrect. Basically the rich kids table world-view is a selection of random concepts from the inner world of a handful of people. It's packaged up as a religious creed for the rest of the school, but the ideas are just an incoherent list, like global warming is somehow associated with gays and trannies and pronouns.

Gadget Bicycles and Dilettantism

Last Sunday, I did one of my favorite bike rides through an Amish neighborhood near Middlefield, then back home via the Maple Highlands Trail bike path. The weather was ideal, so lots of people were out. I was on the bike path for about 10 miles, or about 30 minutes of my hour and forty-five minutes of riding. I realized most of the recreational rider people I passed were on a "gadget bike" of some kind. That is, it really deviated from the classic safety bicycle double diamond design that's been around for so long.

The two big gadget categories are recumbent trikes and ebikes. The people riding a classic road bike are few and far between. Road bikes are still the largest single category of bicycle by sales volume per year, but constitute less than half of aggregate bicycle sales according to the stats I see.

Sports like cycling are fad driven consumer activities in the US. This is a pattern I noticed over my life. Road cycling went through two booms, for example, since I've been riding. The first was the Greg LeMond boom in the late 1980s. The second was the Lance Armstrong boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During the booms, it was possible to go racing regularly. In between the booms, the number of active participants gets really low so in lower population areas, there's not even any races. Sports like rollerblading came and went in a  handful of years. Various "e" vehicles are the current fad/sport consumer stuff apparently.

Fad sports are part of a larger pattern of behavior in the US that's driven by the financial system and apparent debt driven "wealth" of the US which I'd label "dilettantism".  It's common for a person to try a bunch of different activities and hobbies in the US. It's rare for someone to pursue mastery of a sport or hobby. People can imagine they'd "like" pursuing a given sport, buy the gear, then don't really have time or the inclination to do it. It's like playing at playing.

Ironically, the reason people don't have the time to do what they imagine they'd like to do is they are spread thin through dilettantism. They don't gave time to be a good cyclist because they also imagine they want to golf, go fishing, work on classic cars, ride ATVs, mow their lawns, etc... A significant portion of the US population with at least a middle class income is like that. This leads to the phenomenon of "inch deep, mile wide" where people have no depth of knowledge, but some experience on many topics. This scenario is very common.

I think this tendency seeps into professional life as well and is exacerbated by LLMs, which allow amateurs and hacks to imagine they "know what they're doing" because they have a chatbot barf up an apparent answer to a question they type in. In reality, hardly anyone knows what he's doing.

Why is $5/gallon Gas a Pain Point?

I drove past several gas stations with gas at $4.999/gallon today, aka $5. That is a magical pain point for many people in the US. For some reason, only at $5 a gallon, masses of people begin to realize it's pretty expensive to own a car. Even a trivial trip, or god forbid, a long daily commute is observable cost. "Oh that was $10 in just gas" people will think.

At some point, though, gas prices kill the economy overall and oil prices will plunge again. That happened in the early 2000s with more empire wars in the middle east. I can't recall the peak oil price, but around 2007, crude hit something like $150/barrel. Gas got somewhere around $5/gallon back then too. I don't recall the details though.... that all led to the exposure of the big financial crime wave of the day, aka "a crisis".

Average mom and pop people can ignore certain expenses, but probably not gas and food. Eventually high cost of basic necessities squeezes the rest of the BS out of the economy... Can't afford gas--cancel Netflix and Hulu etc.... Can't buy groceries? No more crap from Amazon then.

I think they'll keep this dumb-fuck war going for quite a while. Americans have very little control over their own government.

Messy Life

For many years my "active" time has been divided up between work and one or two main hobbies. Although, I find as the years go by, I'm really only able to really support one hobby. I feel like I'm spread pretty thin. I work the typical 9-5ish kind of hours, then maybe do 5-10 hours of my hobby. Miscellaneous chores and errands take up the rest of my time.

One way I compensate for being spread thin is by letting my organization go to shit. For example I have a pretty good workshop. I have metal and woodworking equipment and tools for car and equipment repairs, etc... Sometimes it is very organized and tidy, but generally tends toward chaos. It's currently in a very bad state because my focus is on other things, but I do have to randomly tackle repair jobs on a car the house or whatever.

I noticed many active people end up in a similar situation. Being messy seems like a cheat code, but it really is detrimental overall. For example, a lost tool might add an extra half hour to some repair job, and that extra churn compounds the problems. Plus in theory it's even "dangerous" as in there is more stuff to trip over in a messy shop.

I know professional fabricators who are very good at being neat and clean in their workshop. That said, they can spend an hour or two of the day cleaning and putting stuff away and still be productive for 6 hours or whatever, while my general goal when I'm trying to fix something in the house is to be as fast as possible so I can go do other things.

I believe if I had a better system for organizing things, my workshop wouldn't be such a mess. I find, for example, the classic big toolbox for storing tools doesn't work for me. My problem is my collection of tools changes pretty rapidly as I need to tackle new jobs, but the storage for it doesn't... so it ends up shoved into toolbox drawers.

Anyway, periodically I spend some time refactoring my stuff and do a big cleanup. Now that spring is finally here in northeast Ohio, I'm starting on that project. I'm going to use boxes and shelves and bags instead of a toolbox.

Common Sense and Genes

I concluded a "multi-cultural" society leads to general dysfunction, mainly because there's no agreed upon common sense, because I think that common sense is essentially genetic. This conclusion is drawn from my personal experiences in the tech industry over the years working with people from different ethnic backgrounds. There are endless, more general/basic-world examples out there on YouTube as well.

My family watches random youtube videos in the evenings. We regularly watch a handful of clip channels. Now that people have cell phones and cameras are everywhere, things that probably seem entirely random an accidental to the individuals experiencing them are, once deposited on the internet, revealed to really be in some sub-category of human experience.

For example, there's a whole category of "third world janky bridges". It's apparently very common for people to try to cross a perilous, failing piece of crap bridges while carrying way too much weight. Most of the videos we watch focus more on the comic outcomes of such situations, so the bridges collapse in slapstick fashion, and everyone is OK. A quite common reaction by people in "the west" is: Why don't they just spend a little more effort and make a better bridge? In many cases, even the local materials like trees could be used to build a more robust structure. An Eagle Scout in the US would be able to make a significantly better structure to get a merit badge. To an American, the scenario defies "common sense".

By the way, I don't mean to cast aspersions on people in "the third world" and imply the "west" is vastly superior. I'd cite another very common category of video: police bodycam footage, as contrary evidence to such claims of superiority. Those videos feature the underbelly of the US. Many international viewers post comments on the videos wondering why there are so many crazy people in America; And why do so many of those also have guns? Or why do completely dysfunctional, even actually medically "retarded" people have a driver's license in the US? Those examples also defy "common sense".

The western countries are quite "rich", and that generally implies "organized". High quality of life and lots of infrastructure comes from a population that managed to cooperate for some period of time, mainly after WW2 up through the 1980s. The areas of the world with ad hoc infrastructure seem to struggle to organize to do something relatively simple and cheap like building a decent footbridge over a ravine.

The police bodycam videos in the US depict what I'd call the "mouse utopia" scenario run amok. Many problems in the US appear "solved", like infrastructure, in the sense that there's some system to handle it and generally the system works, although bridges still collapse and overall the country's infrastructure is in decline as the ruling class and monetary system sucks the wealth out of the nation. However, problems which have no solution, like mass mental illness, and toxic materialism have no solution, and the ruling class's "answer" to all that is more police and surveillance systems and the like.

One theory about the poverty of the "third world" versus the wealth of "the west" is warm weather is corrosive to societal organization, and cold weather produces the opposite effect. The cold forces people to organize and cooperate and maybe importantly, inoculates the population against cheaters. The opposite scenario plays out in warm climates. This is possibly because the "common sense" understanding of the two groups is different and born of people's ancestors living in different biomes for thousands of years.

from: here

In the cold climate case, people might have learned over time that it makes sense to cooperate on shared infrastructure because failing to do so meant death for individual's families in the winter. The apparent "sucker" behavior of contributing to a common good leads to a better chance of even individual's survival. OTOH, in the warm weather case, perhaps there's a significant penalty for being the sucker that devotes one's time to public projects, and a benefit in being a scammer/cheater because there's an abundance of food calories readily available. Also possibly, there's less of an emphasis on mastery of technical material or achievement for similar reasons.

Chinese Excavators and the Next Big Thing

There are several projects I would like to do this summer that more or less require a mini excavator. I want to fix some janky old infrastructure on my property, fix some drainage issues, build a pond, and maybe cut in some roads to join up the sides of my property that are bisected by a ravine. If I rented an excavator to do all that, the total cost would probably get into the $5,000 range. For a couple of years I looked for a used excavator for this purpose, but they're in the $25-30,000 price range and they do not sell very quickly. The used listings on Craigslist, for example, or heavy equipment specialty websites are around for months.

Used heavy equipment is sort of like a used car. A machine might cost $25,000 but require $5,000 in repairs the first year of ownership and ongoing maintenance and repairs. A new machine is more likely to be trouble free and might be fixed for free if there's a faulty part. Anyway, I've been reluctant to pull the trigger on that purchase.

Another, relatively "new" option for heavy equipment is Chinese made stuff. For example, there's a company called Rippa that has dealers in the US that sells machines that are the equivalent of a used Kubota for maybe $10,000 less, like their R18 is in the $17,500 price range currently. The machine uses a Kubota engine and Eaton hydraulic pump, so the core pieces are proven. A major downside is the used market for them seems non-existent, so it's hard to say how long it would take to unload it when I was done with all my projects. That said, $17,500 is very cheap for all the capability an excavator has and it's almost a no-brainer for me to buy one.

I think these Chinese excavators are a good example of what's coming next. The US economy and system is in full retard mode. The entire economy is focused on very high cost, resource intensive negative ROI nonsense, like LLM models in the workplace, data centers, spying on people, and mass murder overseas for Israel. Additionally, the economy is loaded with parasitism and rent seeking.

At the very same time, good old Mr. Chang from China is trying to give you a really good deal on an excavator or some other value-adding tool that can solve your real world problems. I recall the same scenario with Japanese cars when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s. Initially there was skepticism and incumbent car makers paid PR people to undermine the reputation of the Japanese vehicles, but inevitably real-world experience wins out, actually the formula is like this:

1. Initially 80% of people believe the con, and 20% of people form their own opinion;
2. Over 1-2 years, the 80% who always believe authorities update their opinion based on real-world experience.
3. Finally the positions reverse, so 20% of people are in the cult, 80% match up with the original 20%.

Good examples of this were provided by "W" Bush Iraq war and the COVID hysteria. The AI hysterical psychosis is just beginning that transition.

Anyway the guiding star for people with respect to Japanese vehicles in the 70s early 2000s was value and reliability, or an overall practical and pragmatic outlook on life. Today, Japanese manufacturers are like their Western counterparts, although the car manufacturers' management is not quite as stupid as GM's or Ford's or Chrysler/Stellantis whatever. Toyota, for example skipped the EV debacle, which maybe will bankrupt Ford eventually. That said, the Japanese companies seem to be following the rent-seeking, low value approach of western companies.

The "green field" is now that pragmatic, back to basics, reliability/value scenario.

Communities Can't Afford Their Own Infrastructure

We had a couple of days of very heavy rains in late March, which is quite common here in northeast Ohio. However, it caused a "flash flood" of sorts through the East Branch of the Chagrin River and pushed dozens of trees up against Wisner Road Bridge in Chardon Township and washed out a section of the road. Wisner Road is a tertiary road at best, but I ride my bike through there regularly because it leads to the base of one of the longest hill climbs in our area.

Anyway, the township does not have money to repair the road and it certainly won't have money to repair the bridge if it's damaged, which would cost millions of dollars to replace. It really doesn't have money to maintain the road, either. It's been in rough shape for several years, so the township is turning to the County and the State of Ohio, neither of which really have the money either.

This is a problem all over the country and around the world. All the infrastructure out there, especially the public infrastructure, is really just an ongoing debt and expense--basically because of the model of "payment" that comes from and makes the financial system function and extract wealth from the entirety of the economy.

For all practical purposes, the local jurisdictions, like the county and the township "own" the infrastructure and more or less collect tolls to operate it in the form of property taxes. However, they don't maintain a surplus or any form of savings apparently and every entity needs to borrow money to operate. This is actually very weird. Typically, taxpayers are funding debts in the form of bonds in their jurisdiction. The bonds is the source of money in the accounts of an entity like a township. The taxes don't just accumulate in the form of savings accounts, or gold or whatever, and are then spent as needed.

This results in the kind of crappy, nonsensical outcomes we see in a state like Ohio, like the "indefinite" closure of Wisner Road and bridge. A common model appears to be much of the infrastructure is left to rot until it falls apart completely. Then treated as "an emergency" even though it's 100% guaranteed to happen in a given time span. Households behave in a similar fashion. Rather than save up a bunch of money to regularly repair and improve a house, people will go into debt with "home equity" loans and the like.

Anyway people have been trained to follow this model, even though it's entirely contrary to their interest. The debt based money is created ex nihilo, then the public works to pay it off through productive activity. The debt is essentially magically monetized labor and resources, the banks essentially do a leveraged buyout of all the people in the country.

It's actually quite weird people keep going along with this trashy scam system. This system makes the real cost of infrastructure higher than it otherwise should be, just like cars cost more, houses cost more, college costs more because of "finance". It's all so dumb.