Author: Kilgore Forelle

Erratic Behavior

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Isn’t it odd when someone known for erratic behavior erratically does something with which an observer agrees, suddenly that erratic behavior becomes the mark of “stable genius?”  On the other hand, the action becomes betrayal.  Check out Senator Lindsey Graham, for instance.

Well the bad news is that there has never been a POTUS who was not a consistent warmonger.  The very nature of the office demands it.  There have been 45 warmongers, but some worse than others.  The good news is that the office of POTUS is on a path of self-destruction.  The path of civilization leads from authoritarianism toward laissez-faire.  A human being, a social animal of breadth and depth, does not need to relegate choice and responsibility to a fictional leader.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Free Daniel McAdams

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

It seems like a trivial thing, Daniel McAdams‘ getting banned, for life, from Twitter for using “retarded” in language attempting to describe Sean Hannity.  But it is more than a ripple on the pond.  McAdams has been a voice for freedom, and therefore has made many enemies.  But those of us who understand that freedom of access is part of the freedom of speech package should be offended.  But we also understand that Twitter, Facebook, cable news, the blogosphere, etc. are just slurry pipes carrying corrupted information among the effluent.

McAdams remains a pertinent figure in the voluntaryist, foreign-policy, freedom, anti-war movement.  Follow him at his source, as Executive Director of The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.  For the sake of thoroughness, I recommend that you check out the work of everyone listed on the “About” tab, or on the Archives > Featured Articles path at RPI’s web site.

An irony here is that The Ron Paul Institute has a presence on Twitter. Anyone not banned at RPI, is therefore not banned at Twitter.  It reminds me of John Perry Barlow’s observation that “[t]he Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”  Networking is.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Do the Math

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Have you come to the conclusion that we, the people, are innumerate?  If not, how do you account for the fantasy of voting or the illusion of government education?  One of the major goals of government schooling is the cultivation and advancement of innumeracy.  Another major goal, of course, is illiteracy.  Look for distorting of the knowable (history), masking of the process (cloaking of the present, reason), and obsessing over predicting the unpredictable (prognostication).

There are two types of students — those who are convinced that math is not in their skill set, and those who are identified as math gurus but bundled up and exiled to sterile lands of abstraction.  The ones who buy the myth of incompetence are then glorified in reverse as being regular folks.  The few who are tricked into believing their own competence are shamed into obscurity by anti-intellectualism.

State monopolized schooling, strengthened by so-called standards, is controlling not only actual government schools but private, parochial, unschooling, and home-schooling.  The status quo thrives on the myth that the “king is good” to cover the reality that “it is good to be a king.”

I have before ranted about the confusion between product and process.  In the case of math schooling, the process has become so convoluted that the product is corrupted.  We are producing math innumerates and math nerds because those two products perpetuate the wayward process — and neither can excel at day-to-day, genuine numerical cleverness.  The poor math perceiver thinks that quantities are either mysterious or complex.  You see this in numerous walks of knowledge.  Accountants, for instance, mask the commonsense of their trade with linguistic yadda, so everyone else will see them as experts of their trade.  Consequently, commoners do not understand the technical difference between a deficit and a debt.

— Kilgore Forelle

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The Evil of Two Lessers

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Here we are, more than 13 months from the next POTUS election, and the oligarchs have already limited our choices to zero.  The incumbent is an incompetent, crazed liar, and the challenger field has reduced itself to three incompetent, crazed liars.  In very short order, we will have the evil of two lessers.  As a friend once pointed out, the top of the manure pile is no better than the rest.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Mismeasurement

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Science is fine, but logic is better.  Ayn Rand often challenged, “check your premises!”  (And if one automatically tunes out whenever the name, Ayn Rand, is mentioned, one needs to check one’s premises.)  A bad premise should, logically, go into the round file, because you cannot do science on the absurd.  Garbage in, garbage out.

The above is in response to Stephen Jay Gould‘s book, The Mismeasure of Man.  Although we can impute Gould’s main objective to be the debunking of Eugenics, my big takeaway is that you cannot make mud into ice cream simply by processing it enough — you cannot make the Earth flat through distorted observation of relevant facts.  Nor can you make the absurd come true by incorrectly observing a poorly chosen set of facts or assumptions.  And finally, you cannot make science elegant or eloquent or “settled” by surveying the wrong variables with inappropriate calipers.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Hidden Agenda

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

This is a book report on The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.  A very good friend, but a liberal intervener, recommended the book to me, and I’m sure that she recommended it because its main theme is that the current White House is grossly negligent.  But I got a far different message from the book.  I already knew that administering the cancer, aka the federal government, was impossible.  I already knew that, even if the feds were manageable, that this White House is deeply incompetent, having a snowball’s chance in Hell of draining the swamp.  I already knew that this monarchy-disguised-as-democracy was never intended to work for the person-in-the-street.

I recommend the book because it seems to offer a far more accurate picture of the bureaucracy than offered by the MSM, and how the bureaucracy are just silos of self-serving, making things up as they go.

Lewis covers several agencies of the USA’s official face of the oligarchy. And he also covers the pre-election WH wannabees, how Chris Christie was sandbagged as head of the “transition team,” having the rug pulled out from under him when the slapstick operation realized they were headed to the West Wing.  There was no transition.  The agencies were left in the dark.

How much do you know about the ongoing project list at any bureaucracy?  How is it that the feds can find a specific cow, but not an individual terrorist?  Why did it take nearly a decade to deal with Osama bin laden?  Why have we never found the WMD?  It’s because the unfinishable project is the dream of every tax thief.

— Kilgore Forelle

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