Oxygen > Inspiration

In this soft and easy age, it is understandable if people forget that there are more important things than being “inspirational”. Competence, in particular, being one of them.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, who went missing aboard his Titan submersible vessel along with four other passengers on Sunday, told an interviewer he didn’t want to hire a bunch of “50-year-old white guys” like other submarine companies because he wanted his team to be “inspirational.”

“When I started the business, one of the things you’ll find, there are other sub-operators out there but they typically have gentleman who are ex-military submariners and you’ll see a whole bunch of 50-year-old white guys,” Rush told a representative with Teledyne Marine.

“I wanted our team to be younger, to be inspirational and I’m not going to inspire a 16-year-old to go pursue marine technology but a 25-year-old you know who’s a subpilot or a platform operator or one of our techs can be inspirational,” Rush continued. “So we’ve really tried to to get very intelligent, motivated, younger individuals involved because we’re doing things that are completely new.”

“We’re taking approaches that are used largely in the aerospace industry, is related to safety and some of the the preponderance of checklists things we do for risk assessments and things like that, that are more aviation related than ocean related and we can train people to do that. We can train someone to pilot the sub, we use a game controller so anybody can drive the sub.”

Setting aside the fact that game controllers use very, very inexpensive plastic parts that have been known to fail, Rush’s preference for youth, inspiration, and color appear to have proven fatal.

Former OceanGate director of marine operations David Lochridge — one of those “50-year-old white guys” Rush wanted to avoid hiring for not being “inspirational” enough — was fired by Rush in 2018 after he reportedly blew the whistle on OceanGate by raising safety concerns over their first-of-a-kind carbon fiber hull and other systems.

Personally, I’m finding the entire OceanGate debacle to be absolutely inspiring. But let’s not fail to address the obvious: hadn’t this guy ever heard of either Watergate, Heaven’s Gate, or Pizzagate?

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Of All the Boomers Who Ever Boomed

These may have been the boomerest. From SocialGalactic:

Late 80s high school friend attended a state retreat for gifted kids. They chose a theme song at the end, Alphaville’s “Forever Young”.

The Boomers in charge overrode with “Imagine”.

I don’t know that anything summarizes the awfulness of the Wicked Generation better or more succinctly than that. It’s all right there, the generational solipsism, the entitlement, the inexplicable abuse of power, the Beatles, and most of all, the total lack of regard for their children and grandchildren.

It’s not just that the Boomers abused their power and privilege, as they observably did, but the weird and foolish ways they chose to do so.

It’s ironic from a musical perspective too, because Forever Young is a much better and much more epic song than Imagine. Based on the streaming statistics, the younger generations would even appear to agree.

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A Confession

I suppose I might as well come clean about my fake chair and fake library now that the cat is out of the bag. It’s actually just a commercial green screen image that costs $2.99 sold by a streaming software company. My apologies to everyone who was taken in by this shameful deception. I was just trying to impress everyone.

I hope you will find the wherewithal to forgive me for this moral failure.

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You Really Didn’t, Donald

President Trump still thinks he hired the best people for his administration:

During a portion of an interview with the Fox News Channel aired on Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump responded to questions on why he hired so many people who he has now criticized or have criticized him by stating the overwhelming majority of people he hired were good hires, he did hire the best people, and that he “didn’t know” Washington, but does now.

Trump said, [relevant remarks begin around 16:10] “When I came down to Washington, I was in Washington 17 times in my life in D.C., and I never stayed overnight. I was never there. I didn’t know the people. I didn’t know that world, other than I was involved in politics from the other side very much. And I had — I put great people in, but I put some people like Bill Barr and Bolton and a few of them that — actually, Bolton was good because everybody — every time I negotiated, people said, oh, they’ve got this maniac here. He’s going to go to war with us and they’d concede every point. It was actually pretty good in a certain way. But we put people in that were great and we put people in that weren’t. I now know Washington probably better than anybody. I know the good ones and the bad ones.”

Host Bret Baier then noted that Trump vowed to only hire the best people in 2016. Trump responded, “Well, I did do that.”

No. The best people absolutely were not hired. Mike Cernovich explained why: all the genuine experts were eliminated during the vetting process by the Swamp creatures performing it.

Does anyone truly believe that his economics advisors were better than Steve Keen or me? Does anyone seriously think that he wouldn’t have done better to consult with the likes of Lind and van Creveld on defense matters?

And let’s not even get started on Fauci….

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Phonics are the Only Way

Mississippi is no longer the uneducated laughing stock of the US public school system:

It’s a cliché that Kymyona Burk heard a little too often: “Thank God for Mississippi.”

As the state’s literacy director, she knew politicians in other states would say it when their reading test scores were down — because at least they weren’t ranked as low as Mississippi. Or Louisiana. Or Alabama.

Lately, the way people talk about those states has started to change. Instead of looking down on the Gulf South, they’re seeing it as a model.

Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.

The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids.

We utilized phonics to teach our children and all of them were reading simple sentences before they were four years old. Originally, with a Powerpoint slideshow, and later with a homemade Android app, then followed by the Bob Books. Any child can learn to read before the age of five if provided with a daily phonics run, first through the alphabet, then through the randomized phonemes.

Phonics vs whole language is the precisely akin to the difference between learning to read Japanese through kana and through kanji. The former is easy and can be accomplished in a matter of months. The latter is incredibly difficult and requires years of study for even basic literacy.

Don’t ever take any teacher, professional educator, or scientist seriously if they oppose phonics for any reason. At best, they are ignorant and maleducated. At worst, they are malevolent and seeking to intellectually lobotomize children.

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The Bindery is Installed

If posting and streaming are light and I’m generally unresponsive this week, don’t be surprised. Today marked the completion of the Castalia Bindery installation, which means that all of the machines we require, and more, are now physically present inside the bindery space.

This is a more significant development than it might seem, since today was a major operation that, in the case of one machine, required two forklifts, two ramps, eight men, and the partial disassembly of the machine concerned. It took three hours, and we faced challenges that ranged from missed trains to a rented forklift that was DOA, but there were no accidents or incidents, and by the time we knocked off around 7 PM, the big machine was fully reassembled inside the building.

Tomorrow, all the machines will be tested, connected to the compressed air system, and the training will begin in earnest. We’re not live yet, but we are on the verge of getting there.

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Biden as Valens

Martin Armstrong draws a historical parallel:

My phone has been in meltdown ever since Trump was arrested… EVERY phone call I have had from Asia to Europe, they are all expressing complete shock that the United States is collapsing and they are now all seeing that our forecast that the 2024 Presidential Election would be the most corrupt in history and market the END of democracy in the United States.

These people just do not get it, they crossed the line and now the view of the United States from the outside looking in, they no longer believe that America is the beacon of liberty to the world. It is becoming so obvious that our computer will be right again. I warned it even was showing that the 2024 election might not even take place. That was a small 18% probability, but that NEVER came up EVER in this history of running our political models – NEVER!

This year, 2023, was a MAJOR Directional Change that was showing up in both the LEFT & the RIGHT databases. The year 2025 is when a president would take office in January. This has been the #1 target on our political models for decades. The NEOCONS are in full control of the government. There is no way to stop the collapse of the United States at this point. Nobody will listen and there is nothing I can do. People often ask what if people protested? We will never realize the opportunity to reestablish a new form of government post-2032 without the pain and destruction first.

During the Reign of Valentinian I and his brother, Valens, who came to power in 364AD where Valentinian I died in 375 and Valens ruled into 378, there are serious correlations from both and economic and monetary perspective. They too saw their power weakening so they allowed the Goths to cross the Danube and settle within Roman territory provided they would also then serve in the Roman military. This is what is really behind Biden allowing all these people to flood in through the border. What they do not realize, is that history repeats as Biden grants citizenship in return for military service. The Neocons want to build an army to defeat China and Russia simultaneously.

We all know what happens when you don’t sink the ships. Eventually, the barbarians take over the government. In 2004, when I first predicted the collapse of the USA as a political entity in 2033, the prediction was seen as an utter absurdity. Now, it’s not looking crazy at all.

We’ll know it was dead on when people start denying that I could possibly have seen it coming three decades in advance. But history always rhymes, and the patterns are there for those with the education and the wherewithal to read them.

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The Course of Future History

Like Paul Krugman, Peter Turchin was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation. Unlike Krugman, Turchin appears to understand that psychohistory is not merely fiction, it is impossible due to the instability introduced by mathematical chaos theory.

I am often asked by people who first encounter Cliodynamics whether I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and what is the relationship between Asimov’s Psychohistory and Cliodynamics. I read Foundation some 35 years ago, and it left quite an impression. I actually begin my popular book War and Peace and War by referring to Hari Seldon and his prediction of the collapse of the Galactic Empire. So there is no question that Asimov’s ideas have been an influence.

However, there are many differences between the Asimov’s imaginary science of history and the reality of Cliodynamics. Asimov wrote Foundation in the 1940s – way before the discovery of what we now call ‘mathematical chaos.’ In Asimov’s book, Hari Seldon and psychohistorians develop mathematical methods to make very precise predictions years and decades in advance. Due to discoveries made in the 1970s and 80s we know that this is impossible.

In Asimov books Psychohistory, quite appropriately, deals not with individuals, but with huge conglomerates of them. It basically adopts a ‘thermodynamic’ approach, in which no attempt is made to follow the erratic trajectories of individual molecules (human beings), but instead models averages of billions of molecules. This is in many ways similar to the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, and indeed to cliodynamics, which also deals with large collectives of individuals.

What Asimov did not know is that even when you can ignore such things as individual free will, you still run against very strict limits to predictability. When components of a dynamical system interact nonlinearly, the resulting dynamics can become effectively unpredictable, even if they are entirely deterministic. For complex systems like human societies this possibility becomes a virtual certainty: they are complex and nonlinear enough and, therefore, must behave chaotically and unpredictably. This is, by the way, why weather cannot be predicted more than a few days in advance (and in Connecticut, where I live, not even a day in advance).

The hallmark of mathematical chaos is ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’ In climate it means that a butterfly deciding to flutter its wings (or not) can cause a major hurricane to veer from its predicted path.

This is actually a very optimistic result. It means that human individuals are not as powerless as Asimov imagined them. Exercising one’s free will can have major consequences at the macrolevel, just like a butterfly fluttering its wings can affect the course of a hurricane. However, such optimism should be tempered by realism. Although each of us probably affects the course of human history, most of us have a very slight effect, and any large effects are probably a result of a completely unforeseen concatenation of events.

In short, making precise predictions about events in human societies decades or centuries in the future is just science fiction. It seems that Asimov himself became uneasy with the mechanistic unfolding of future history according to the Seldon Plan. He solved the problem by throwing in the Mule – a mutant with frightening mental powers who derails the actual history from the course predicted by Seldon. In actuality, we are all ‘Mules.’ By exercising a multitude of choices throughout our lives we constantly derail the course of future history in unpredictable directions.

There is, of course, a considerable amount of general predictability concerning the course of the future due to the fact that people are still people and behave according to the same behavioral patterns that have been exhibited reliably across the millennia. Alphas are going to alpha in the future, just as gammas gammad in the past. History does not repeat, but it rhymes sufficiently to provide us with a reasonable clue which way things are going; it was not difficult to anticipate the pendulum eventually swinging back with a vengeance on globalization and its manifold ills.

However, no purely material model will ever suffice, because no material model can account for either human evil or spiritual evil. And that is the fundamental weakness of cliohistory, since it takes no account of anything beyond the material world.

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