Against Kimball: Science Advances by Breaking the Rules

Everybody says that they are in favor of logic and reason: St. Thomas Aquinas; the rational Enlightenment; conservatives. Even radical lefties say that modern capitalism and liberalism is all a lie because the truth is that capitalism and liberalism are all about oppression.

Now comes Roger Kimball with a piece in American Greatness on "Science!" He starts with statement that the two great scientific fraudsters, "the egregious Michael “hockey stick” Mann and St. Anthony “mask theater” Fauci, have recently received gratifying comeuppances." About which we can all agree. But then he starts attacking all my favorite guys:

[Paul] Feyerabend maintained that science is no more cognitively privileged than (for example) astrology, voodoo, or necromancy. The “only one principle that can be defended,” he wrote in Against Method, “. . . is anything goes.”

[Thomas Kuhn.] According to Kuhn, [in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,] scientific truth is “paradigm relative.” For example, what was considered true under the Ptolemaic view of the solar system differs from what we, having read Copernicus, believe. 

[Karl] Popper’s 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery made the curious argument that the distinguishing mark of a scientific theory was not (as everyone used to think) that it was verifiable by empirical evidence. On the contrary, Popper argued that a theory was scientific to the extent that it was “falsifiable.” 

Well, I think all three are right and Roger Kimball is wrong.

Feyerabend: The point here is that the record of the last century or so is that a new theory always busts up the assumptions of the reigning methodology. Maybe just a little, maybe a whole lot. Newton was based on absolute space and time; Einstein said that space and time are relative.

Kuhn: His argument is that the reigning princes of science will always defend the old ways. Only when the old generation dies off can a new "paradigm" get a foothold.  Of course this applies to everything. The current 80-year-old princes of the Democratic Party are about to retire and the Dems will only then complete their paradigm shift to lefty wokism.

Popper: The point of "falsification" is that if your theory explains everything it isn't useful. Climate change is an example. Everything that happens, from extreme weather to hurricane frequency, is said to demand that we stop using fossil fuels. Genuine science makes predictions upon which the theory stands or falls. The famous example of the 1919 confirmations of General Relativity is an example, including the "Perihelion precession of Mercury" -- which could not happen according to Newtonian theory -- and the "Deflection of light by the Sun" of a star that was close to the Sun during a solar eclipse. If these experiments "falsified" Einstein's equations instead of confirming them, it would have been "back to the drawing board."

The point that these three scientists are making is that every scientific theory is a stitch-up, good enough for government work. But once you start trying to apply it to more and more situations, then you are likely to find that, at some point, it doesn't work. The most obvious case is Newton's mechanics. It works at Earth scale. But when you get out into the universe, then it doesn't predict close enough.

And when scientists have to explain their anomalous results with things like "dark matter" and "dark energy" that is a "tell" that "Houston we have a problem." Nothing shameful about that: happens all the time. Here is an article that proposes that the "dark matter" explanation arose because scientists used Newtonian gravitation instead of relativity to model the behavior of galaxies. (Waat? Really?)

Now, my belief is that to understand what is going on here you need to understand the German Turn in philosophy and knowledge -- and Feyerabend and Popper were both born Austrians. Kuhn? He was Jewish American with a German name.

I have a lot to say about the German Turn, but it starts with the philosopher Immanuel Kant, a Prussian. He wrote that we cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only appearances. When we humans experience light hitting our eyes we process and interpret that light in our brains, and out of that processing we create an image of the world we are seeing.

For instance, I am sitting at a table. Hey, what more do I need to say? Well, if I wanted to construct a table, then I need to know more about the construction of tables, about materials, about tools, and so on. And if I were to use metals in my construction I would have to learn about the mining and smelting of metals. Behind what George Lakoff calls a "basic level" object hides an infinity of possibilities.

My argument is that Kant's theory of things-in-themselves and appearances set off the German Turn that leads directly, do not pass go, to relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are ridiculous at a "basic level."

So, whatever you believe, I suggest that you take the notions of Feyerabend and Kuhn and Popper, and ponder them in your heart.

Now, we conservatives and nationalists tend to ridicule the left and its "critical theory." Writes Andy Ngo in Unmasked, "Have you heard it argued that there is no such thing as objective reality and truth?" But the critique of objective reality and truth doesn't just come from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School. Kant's masterwork was titled "A Critique of Pure Reason."

My point is that if we want to own the future and banish lefty rubbish from the face of the Earth "we" need to understand "critical theory" from Kant to Kuhn and then go beyond it. That's Sun Tzu: To beat your enemy you must first understand him.

And this begins with admitting that there is no such thing as "objective reality." All realities are constructed, in our minds.

The Border: Where Do the Mexican Drug Gangs Fit In?

Well, so today it's reported that the Biden administration is asking the Mexican government for help at the border. In return for COVID vaccines. Hey, politics!

Here's what I wonder. Where do the famous Mexican drug gangs and their "coyotes" come in?

And where does the money go?

We know, for instance, that border jumpers usually get assistance from a "coyote."

We know, for instance, that Central American immigrants send a lot of money back home, using modern high technology, and I believe that New York Times owner Carlos Slim gets a cut because of his Mexican near-monopoly cellphone company.

"Remittances," they call it. And last year was a record. Yes, but I wonder who that money goes to? I'll betcha the money doesn't all go to the family back home. I bet it is also paying back "coyote" fees and various add-ons. In fact, I'll bet you a nickel that illegal immigrants never stop paying the "coyotes" until they get a green card.

I mean. suppose you are in the organized crime game. What better suckers than people who are illegal and need to stay clear of the police? I bet that these folks get threatened into helping the drug trade.

And I wonder how many illegal immigrants are basically slaves working for the drug lords and getting all their wages docked to pay their "coyote."

Look, any time that people are evading a law -- remember Prohibition? -- you get organized crime getting in on the action, because the rules are a bit tougher when something's illegal. You gotta pay off the cops and the crooked pols. The Godfather, etc.

Hey, I wonder whether our glorious US politicians get in on the action. Oops, not whether, but where?

It's funny that I/we don't know anything about this. All the media interest is in "kids in cages" and other diversions.

And I wonder where the US activist community comes in. When people are wearing "Biden Please Let Me In" t-shirts, I assume that the activist community has got into the act. As when people are marching on foot across Mexico. Army generals and historians and people like me know that people don't march across country without needing food and lodging. You can "requisition" the food, if you have the guns.

Anyway, what with the Biden open borders batters playing on a bit of a sticky wicket right now, I just want to know a bit more about the bowlers, and the umpires, and the wicket keeper. And the intrepid journalists doing the play-by-play.

I just have this feeling that we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Is There Really Anything We Can Do?

In his Gray Mirror blog Curtis Yarvin agues against dissident political action against the regime. He argues that when it is time for regime change it will just happen as natural as you please. One day the old regime will be in power. Next day the new regime will start up.

I suppose he is saying that "take the streets" is a lefty conceit, having to do with their fantasy that they represent the oppressed peoples, whose only way of advertising their suffering is by fighting and dying in the streets.

Very nice, but what he is saying is that the old regime has to utterly discredit itself before it gives up the game.

For instance, I was talking with an elderly educated-class woman waiting for a ferry, watching first the electric bikes driving off the ferry, then the manual bikes, and then motor bikes. I suggested that this order of egress represented some kind of social ordering. She allowed as how she thinks that electric cars are a good idea.

And today Lady Marjorie tells me that Seattle City Council is putting off its plan to institute car congestion charges in downtown Seattle. But, says the Seattle Times,

In the next two years, Seattle will create incentives for public and private companies to electrify their vehicles, encourage more walking, biking and transit ridership and may propose fees on driving in certain parts of the city to decrease congestion.

In other words, the regime is pedal-to-the-metal on its "urbanization" agenda. So, do you write your councilman? Do you hit the streets? Do you argue with your liberal neighbors to change their minds?

Not really, because to our liberal friends everything they are doing is good and progressive and educated and evolved.

As the scientists say, living things just go about their business until, all of a sudden, something frightens them and they stop in their tracks. And recalibrate.

And we have just been taught what happens when the plebs peacefully protest at the Capitol. The ruling class and their bribed apologists all scream about "armed insurrection" and bring out the national guard. Which a bunch of retired Pentagon generals argued against during the Summer of Floyd.

Put it this way. Do we have a chance of changing America before the average nice liberal lady has given up on at least half of the ten woke ideas I tabulated yesterday?

Spiked-online reported on ex-Downing Street aide Dominic Cummings on the disjunction of science and bureaucracy in the British government.

Yesterday he eviscerated the British state’s contempt for science and technology, and the vast bureaucracy that has attached itself to science and technology policy. 

Apparently Cummings helped set up the Brits' vaccination policy which worked, while the EU policy did not.

But can any of us trust government and science? Ever? Surely the lesson of the COVID Year is that government loves to use science as an excuse to impose complicated bureaucratic rules and counter-rules.

The Zman shows the problem with government and science.

Over the last year the main thread of the [COVID] story has been the political class trying to contend with the unintended consequences of their actions. The reason their story keeps changing is their inputs never have the desired outputs. They have to keep going back and rewriting the story of their actions to fit the present reality. It turns out that throwing wrenches into the gears of human society was not the smartest play on their part.

 Then there is the $1.9 trillion stimulus. Does the government have a clue what it is doing? I doubt it. The pols and the deep state are just doing what comes naturally: spending and borrowing.

The people who initiated these changes in American society are not working from a grand plan or a set of ideological goals. There is no point to what they are doing. Instead, our managerial revolutionaries are swept up in forces they do not understand. It is a strange, recursive and reactionary revolution from the top. 

The point of the ten woke ideas is that to justify your ruling-class power you have to have an existential peril to fight against. And if nothing seems to change despite your brilliant agenda, then you pile on and redouble your efforts. The point about the COVID masks and shutdowns is that the pols have to show they are Doing Something to protect us.

The really interesting question about Life, the Universe, and Everything is what do you do when things go wrong.

Well, we know. It's all brought out in When Prophecy Fails by Festinger et al. First you redouble your efforts. Then you keep going despite your doubts. Then people start to desert, and leave the movement. Then it collapses.

And whatever happens, it ain't pretty. 

Just like Curtis Yarvin says. One fine day the old regime leaves office and the new one takes its place.

The Ten Woke Ideas from FiveThirtyEight

 The chappies at FiveThirtyEight founded by Nate Silver have produced a piece on the ten issues that make up the Woke Agenda.

I thought I should put up a table of the ideas, with the validity of each idea and a counter argument.

	Idea	Validity	Counter
1.	America "not an exceptional nation." "U.S. has disempowered its Native and Black populations and women throughout its history," and has "never been a true or full democracy."	Baloney. Every nation is an exceptional nation. Every political entity favors the agenda of the ruling class and its supporters.	Yes, but the US has made extraordinary efforts to balance the agenda of all kinds of different people. US ruling class used to favor whites in the past, now it's anyone-but-whites.
2.	White people, particularly white men, are especially advantaged in American society (“white privilege”).	Actually, it was more Virginia plantation owners, followed by New England Protestants, followed by WASPs, followed by today's educated elitists.	Are white men -- ordinary middle-class white men without advanced degrees -- privileged in today's America? I don't think to.
3.	"People of color in America suffer from not only individualized and overt acts of racism" e.g., racial slur,  "but a broader 'systemic' and 'institutional' racism."	True up until 1964 Civil Right Act. But not enough. Otherwise why do you need Jim Crow laws to enforce racism and segregation?	It is one thing to use the government to prosecute acts of discrimination. Another thing to discriminate by affirmative action and diversity.
4.	Capitalism as currently practiced in America is deeply flawed, giving way too much money and power to the wealthy.	True. Humans are flawed, and capitalism is human! But capitalism doesn't "give money." it rewards good ideas until replaced by newer ideas.	Don't you mean Government "gives way too much money" to the wealthy, the middle-class elderly, to the politically active?
5.	Women suffer from systemic sexism.	Women only entered the public square in 1900ish. Prior to that, of course, upper-class women ran the world from their salons.	Women "expect to be protected" and will complain until protected. Only upper-class educated women with #WeBelieve signs need apply.
6.	People should be able to identify as whatever gender they prefer or not to identify by gender at all.	Yeah. Why not? But do we force the rest of the world to pay for gender reassignment surgery?	One little problem. If people don't have kids there won't be any genders in a generation. Just dust and ashes.
7.	The existence of a disparity — for example, Black, Latino or women being underrepresented in a given profession or industry — is evidence of discrimination, even if no overt acts of discrimination are visible.	No it ain't. People are different.	This accusation is just an application for a license to discriminate. In my America an absence of disparity would be prima facie evidence of government discrimination. Let the lawyers loose!
8.	Black Americans deserve reparations to make up for slavery and post-slavery racial discrimination.	Reparations is vengeance. The whole point of the legal system is to reduce vengeance to a dull roar.	And just who is to pay this? The Irish that suffered under the Brits for centuries? The Jews from the Russian pogroms or Nazi Holocaust? And to whom? The children of Barack Obama, scion of a tribal chieftain in East Africa and raised by whites?
9.	Law enforcement agencies, from local police departments to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are designed to defend America’s status quo as much as any public safety mission.	Yes. law enforcement is designed to protect people (especially women) from "domestic enemies," e.g., violent lower-class males in cities. That's why the Brits invented modern policing.	Hey, no skin off my nose. The police are there to keep violence in low-income communities down to a dull roar. And given the absence of fathers in low-income communities, what do you expect wokies?
10.	Trump’s political rise was not an aberration or a surprise. Politicians in both parties, particularly Republicans, have long used racialized language to demean people of color — Trump was just more direct and crude about it.	This is a straight-up lie. Trump is a "nationalist," meaning that he values Americans as Americans. And in 2020 increased percentages of Hispanics and Blacks voted for him. I wonder why.	If I were Trump I would sue for slander. The key and obvious thing about Trump was that he encouraged all people living in America to think of themselves as Americans and not as ethnic, or racial or gender minorities.

This sort of thing is going to increase until it gets batted down. The whole point is that the ruling class, our educated elite, obtains power from the Woke Effect. Because it gives them the right to use political power to help their supporters and to punish their enemies. 

That's the point. If there is no discrimination, no systemic this-or-that, then there is no need for allies to save the oppressed people from the white oppressors. QED. Period. Full Stop. 

That is all.

Sen. Ron Johnson Pushes Back on "Racist." Sorta

Here's what Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the other day about not being afraid of the pro-Trump rioters in the January 6 Capitol riot:

Now, had the tables been turned, and Joe — this is going to get me in trouble — had the tables been turned and President Trump won the election and tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa, I might have been a little concerned.

But notice how AP introduces his remarks:

Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin denied Monday that he made racist comments last week when he said he wasn’t concerned about pro-Donald Trump insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol in January but would have been worried if they were Black Lives Matters protesters.

Notice the "tell?" They left out "antifa." Well well well: nobody here but us journalists at the AP.

Now I think that "denying" that you made racist comments is not enough. I think you need to strike back, and say something like:

"I've been playing political poker, man and boy, for 25 years. And my experience is that the guy that plays the race card is the real racist."

Then you go on and waffle some more.

"Go ahead. Call me a racist. I don't care. But what I want to know is when my Democratic friends and my friends in the Democrat media are going to stop playing the race card so we can get down to solving America's real problems instead of the ghosts of problems past." 

Here's what I think. I think that the politician that figures out how to trump the race card, or how to hit the racist screwball out of the ball-park has got a glorious future ahead of him.

But first he has to have the courage to risk it. Rather like President Trump, who got nominated in 2016 by showing that he had to courage to go up against the Blob.

Yet even Trump didn't have the courage to trump the race card.

But let me tell you, the guy that figures out how to do it, and emerges unscathed from the usual media feeding frenzy whenever there is race-card blood in the water, that guy is going to go places.

Quote Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." 

And so it goes until the DA indicts the race racketeers for racketeering. But it takes a while, because usually when there is a racket it only thrive because it gets protection from the local politicians.

President Biden: Who's in Charge?

At The American Spectator Jack Cashill wonders about who's in charge in the Biden administration. It isn't former President Obama, he writes.

Although clearly immersed in leftism since childhood, even Marxism, he never left the shallow end of the pool. As president, he proved so adept at breaking promises because he did not care deeply enough to ensure those promises were realized. What mattered more was that he be seen striking the right pose, finding the right groove, spinning the right narrative.

Mind you, maybe that is all Obama needs to do to keep us spinning into the abyss.

But Conrad Black, who always hints that he knows a thing or two, writes at American Greatness that

At the midway point of the proverbial first 100 days, there is no indication at all that Biden will resist the pressures from the Left in his party.

As, for example,

The administration appears to be unable to demarcate spheres of influence between the ecological zealots who shut down pipelines.. from the agitations of the Democrats’ traditional supporters in organized labor[.]

Still, he avers,

It is disappointing that the wave of national revulsion that must be rising up from the depths of American public opinion has not broken over the heads of the cancelers, statue-defacers, bigots, defamers of American history, and secular iconoclasts.

This all confirms my suspicion -- based on no evidence at all -- that nobody is in charge in the Biden administration. But, so far, it doesn't need leadership.

For instance, the election steal, thoughtfully documented by Time magazine as the shadow campaign that "saved" the election, didn't need "leadership." Everyone knew what to do and did it.

Of course, there are developing crises, such as the mess at the border, and the economic mess coming down the pike from two years of money printing and giga-deficits and loot and plunder, and the rage of folks whose lives have been trashed by the COVID supremacy.

But none of these developing storms have intensified into an actual political hurricane that blows right across the ruling-class suck-up media narrative. None of these future crises need a brave decision by a strong leader. Not yet.

But that's the point. Everyone in the ruling-class world is doing their little activist thing, having a grand old time, and they will all keep having a grand old time until they hit the wall.

What the wall will be, and what will happen when the hit happens? I have no idea.

But when the proverbial ordure hits the fan that's when the problem of Joe Biden's incapacity becomes a problem for the ruling class.

And an opportunity for the rest of us.

Yeah, that's the point. The fact that there is no leadership at the top of the ruling class is a Good Thing for the rest of us. Because nobody is getting practice at making tough decisions.

So when it's time to make some tough decisions, there won't be anyone in the hot seat ready and seasoned and practiced in the art of tough decision-making.

So the chances are that the ruling class will botch the big decision that it will need to save its bacon.

The Small Minority Gig and the Ruling Class

In his NY Post piece on "To beat woke tyrants the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are," Instapundit Glenn Reynolds invokes the Chapter 2 in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: "The Most Intolerant Wins." He starts by noting that almost all prepared drinks have a "U" symbol on them that establishes the drink as Kosher. Even though full kosher eaters are less than one percent of the US population. Taleb writes that

It suffices for an intransigent minority -- a certain type of intransigent minority -- with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to submit to their preferences.

Not quite. It requires an intransigent minority supported by the ruling class to force the entire population to submit to them. If the ruling class doesn't care about them, or actively wants to use the small minority as a punching bag, well, keep your heads down fellahs. 

Because unless the ruling class encourages a narrative, and publicizes it, and teaches it in the media and the schools, it didn't happen. Case in point, The American Spectator's Dov Fischer, who is a Jewish lawyer and an orthodox rabbi. Says he in "Let's Play Holocaust:"

I grew up in the 1950s and much of the 1960s relatively unaware of the Holocaust.

See, the Holocaust didn't become much of a thing until the Seventies. And before World War II our national savior FDR wasn't in too much of a hurry to let the Jews of Germany into the United States.

You can see that this is the key to our ruling class's brilliantly successful campaign of championing small minorities against the rest of America to maintain its domination and hegemony. First it was blacks, because slavery and Jim Crow. Then it was women, because the patriarchy. Then it was gays, because of centuries of homosexual persecution. Then transsexuals -- sorry, transgenders -- because.

If it weren't for the ruling class championing these chappies, they would all keep a low profile and make sure to keep below the radar.

As you probably know, because of your eevil habit of consuming far-right media, a trickster has turned this game on its head by championing the idea of "Super Straights" as a helpless minority that demand their rights not to date transgenders.

But naturally, our ruling class has swung into action to censor this dangerous and "far-right" and transphobic movement.

See what I mean? If you are a small minority, be you ever so intransigent, and the ruling class don't like you, better head for the hills.

Because while the ruling class can use small minorities to solidify its power -- as our ruling class does today -- it can also turn on a dime and crush small minorities as the very agent of the Devil. That's what Literally Hitler did.

I maintain that all minorities maintain themselves using a Culture of Innocence. We, whoever "we" are, are innocent. Everything that goes wrong with us is the fault of the big guys, so we'd better all stick together. That is the point of the Culture of Innocence. It is the means for our community to stick together united against the world.

But the Culture of Innocence is almost always a lie. I had a serious confrontation with the lie of America's innocence lately, reading Flyboys by James Bradley, about the naval fliers in World War II. The Japs were inhuman killers, right? Well, the US treated Filipinos in the Spanish-American War rather similar to the way that the Japanese treated the Chinese in the 1930s. And the first thing the US did in WWII was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which outraged the Japanese as an attack on civilians. Then, towards the end of the war was the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, culminating in the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And never mind about carpet-bombing German cities. Hey, but we were the Good Guys, remember?

Yes, and so it is with our Woke Ruling Class today. All the Wokies are doing is fighting the "white oppressors," as the noble "allies" of the "oppressed peoples."

Akshully, this game of innocence occurs wherever politics is found. If you want to get the people off their behinds to fight a war for you, whether hot or cold or woke, you need to scare the people out of their wits with talk of a frightful danger, real or imagined. They, the enemy, are the worst thing since Frankenstein invented fossil fuel, and we, the helpless innocents, are the most oppressed and ill-treated since the invention of the patriarchy.

But, of course, one fine day, the world changes, and today's ruling class becomes yesterday's ruling class, and a new company of innocents takes the stage.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.