Lingua Nova 17

Posted: October 29, 2026 in Cognition, Culture, Friendship, Literacy, Nomenclature
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Kelvin wave: massive underwater band of warm water driven by El Niño expected to inundate a large portion of the Pacific shoreline in South America before transiting to North America

400-word war: the struggle to get readers young and old to read more than a typical 90-second interval allows before attention and concentration dwindles to nothing

rational ignorance: cost-benefit analysis demonstrating how being informed is a losing proposition when weighed against influence and change vectors

liquidated commons: community resources including labor, safety, and personal networks, formerly passive benefits of a particular zip code, now commodified and sold as a service (e.g., friend.com, which sells not friendship but an unnerving AI facsimile)

Hawthorne effect: the tendency to alter one’s behavior if one knows he or she is being observed

hyperactive agency detection: projecting decision-making onto blind processes, algorithms, and automatons

Noonday Demon: synonym or personification of the Greek concept of acedia, or loss of care about the world, its inhabitants, and their activities, often occurring in the middle of the day; also Noonday Devil, Demon of Noontide, Midday Demon, and Meridian Demon

Jerusalem syndrome: religious sensibility triggered by visiting the Holy Land, often dispelled after a few weeks; related: sense of profound sorrow and spiritual unease at touring the site of immense historical suffering (e.g., U.S. Civil War battle site, WWII concentration camp, Cambodian killing fields)

Canary in the Coal Mine

Posted: October 22, 2026 in Conspiracy, Culture, Debate, Fascism, Journalism, Politics
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The title refers to the former practice in underground mining of bringing a caged canary into the mining space to test for breathable air. If the canary expires, that’s the warning to miners to get out before oxygen is exhausted. Other early-warning signs are commonplace in human health, which tend to be ignored until problems become acute and unavoidable. The early warning now flashing in Western culture is rioting across France, which if reports are correct is spreading to other European nations. My trust in such reports is very low, as U.S. media organs under editorial control of oligarchs (who arguably run U.S. government as well) almost certainly don’t want U.S. residents (citizens and noncitizens alike) getting any ideas. In short, no French contagion allowed (as if it could be held back).

The real curiosity to me is not that rioters are largely young males or that riots become the opportunity for looting of businesses and violence directed at authorities (police and gendarmes in France) but that dissatisfactions being brought to the fore include failures on the part of the state to provide meaningful education. Being disenfranchised before adult life even begins — seeing their opportunities foreclosed and turning them into debt slaves or wards of the state — is an egregious failure. It’s not limited to France or Europe, of course. Similar effects of late-stage capitalism eating its own are felt around the globe. Perhaps for cultural reasons (France not yet diluted beyond recognition through immigration), pushback is appearing first in France, the first canaries in the coal mine.

Predicably (again, based on reports), authorities in France appear to be taking the wrong message from events. Although petitioning government to address grievances is a U.S. right (Amendment No. 1 of the Bill of Rights), what do civil authorities think rioters are doing? Well, rioters are asserting themselves through the only means that will cause government to listen: mayhem and violence. Sending in the military to quell unrest is IMO a refusal of government to address such grievances, which is tantamount to an admission of government illegitimacy. At least that’s the story we tell ourselves about Western liberal democracies. The truth is something else, namely, that the rule of money has been operating out in the open yet strangely and assiduously ignored, much like the proverbial emperor’s new clothes. Once some youthful dissenter speaks up to observe naked truth, everyone must then choose between their own lying eyes and the carefully constructed narratives that keep rulers intact. The fact that governments in France and elsewhere have failed miserably to govern effectively on behalf of the people (the masses, as opposed to a few elites) is coming into full, glorious view now just as in the past.

Murmuration and Erratics

Posted: October 15, 2026 in Idle Nonsense
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A few years back, the idea of power laws was introduced into the public sphere. Power laws function like physics as remorseless, inescapable traps. Yeah, everyone is subject to gravity. What’s the point of resisting? Why characterize power laws (or physics) as traps? The obvious answer is to overcome them as mere obstacles, not as fates to be accepted with chastened resignation. The network effect is among those power laws and has the curious property of amplifying small changes or perturbations within a wider system. I’ve been holding out for quite a long time writing about the network effect, which feels far too multifaceted to describe in a few paragraphs. I was surprised recently that in one of his Friday Franklys, Nate Hagens provides the following description of emergent aggregate behavior:

We came up in small troops, and we are still built for it. We watch our rank. We reward the loud and the confident. We take the reward today and let tomorrow look after itself. Now, one of us is easy enough to understand. The trouble begins when you put a great many of us together. A single starling turns for reasons of its own, but ten thousand starlings make a shape in the evening sky that no starling itself ever chose and no starling could stop. We’re like that. Our wanting, multiplied by billions and wired together through money and trade and incentives, produces a behavior that belongs to the whole but to no one inside it.

Murmuration of a flock of starlings seems to me as applicable as anything to human behavior writ large as well as the dynamics of human institutions, reified or not. In addition to the behavior emerging out of aggregation, it is blind, anonymized, and random (like fractals). Yet observable patterns and structures seem less accidental and more inevitable. Put a different way, randomness conforms to an underlying template that doesn’t just allow for outliers and erratics but requires them. Think of it as being similar to an atomic nucleus throwing off particles to maintain a low-energy, stable state. In human culture, a good example is how some individuals are lucky (or unlucky) to be unusually <something> while the mass clusters heavily around an average. In economics, relatively few are beneficiaries of a system that routinely coughs up produces wildly unequal fortune and attendant fame. Undoubtedly, moves are made to position oneself successfully (opportunity meeting preparation), but success is actually a weak indication that those moves were causative. More typically, it’s the equivalent of being struck by lightning and afterwards proclaiming oneself a lightning rod. The network effect pretty much forces aberrant results on someone like that one starling (or a few) that isn’t absorbed into the murmurating flock.

The Ideology That Refuses to Die, pt. 3

Posted: October 9, 2026 in Culture, Economics, History, Idle Nonsense
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Among the 45 U.S. Communist Party goals reproduced here in pt. 1 are quite a few that openly seek to infiltrate, seize control, and transform American corporations and institutions from within. As revolutionary strategies go, it’s not smash-and-grab but rather subterfuge and patient planning that may take generations to pay dividends. Accordingly, the strategy has been called “the long march through the institutions” in the attempt to position those with collectivist ideology in seats of influence that can effect subtle, incremental changes that propound through time. The most effective deployment has arguably been in teacher training institutions. Used to be relatively confined to higher education, but graduates sign on and then become teachers who instruct collectivist lessons. Just like with religion: get ’em when they’re young.

Capitalists employ their own long-term strategies, typically outliving whoever sits in the CEO chair at a given time. In the middle term, operating as a loss for a period of year to drive competitors out of business clears away competition and consolidates a market. Indeed, corporations are perpetually devising ever more effective ways of dominating markets, forming de facto monopolies and cartels and thwarting attempts to break too-big-to-fail entities into smaller ones, which might then be forced to compete with each other. Is there a company in recent memory forced to break apart under the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) or Clayton Antitrust Act (1914)? What about being denied an embiggening merger or acquisition? The current era is clearly one of market consolidation, which frankly has been going on for decades. Once dominance is established and growth crests, even more novel strategies are concocted to exploit both customers and employees. That’s how the game (neoliberalism a/k/a cutthroat capitalism) is played.

Surveying the scene today, it’s impossible to argue that these strategies, pursued in parallel, haven’t both been successful. Extreme wealth inequality has awarded economic power to a narrow set of oligarchs whose own behaviors demonstrate they can’t stop even after their wealth becomes morbid (i.e., it morphs into a liability and consumes their souls). For large corporate institutions worth many notional billions (some worth trillions) of dollars — at least before the engines of commerce seize and stop working — survival instinct kicks in long in advance of actual decline. A giant list of bankrupted entities no longer in existence (airlines, banks, retailers, manufacturers, dot.com startups, etc. all suggesting a rather large cemetery of dead franchises) form a dog-eat-dog backdrop uppermost in mind lest a few unprofitable quarters put the stank of the dreaded death spiral on some once-dominant entity.

Success in the marketplace of ideas, if one believes polling, is now increasingly dominated by collectivists bent on reengineering society as a whole. Insinuation into educational ranks already complete, they are now taking over the U.S. Democratic Party and have found ample support among the electorate. Several collectivists already occupy seats of power, and the more virulent among them call openly for gutting the U.S. Constitution, not dissimilar to the half-wit movement to abolish the police a few years ago. Collectivists are not anarchists, but it should be obvious that the U.S. cannot be a nation of law without a governing document and enforcement mechanisms more powerful than the entities under regulation. Of course, selective enforcement, typically focused on the wrong parties, only adds credibility to ambitions to scrap it all and start again from scratch.

Hard to predict where the tension between these two ideologies will ultimately lead. Capitalism yielded some ground to labor movements in the past (FDR’s New Deal, for instance) but has successfully beaten back collectivism in its various instantiations throughout the 20th century. Yet collectivism is once again ascendant. Recognizing that fact, capitalists have launched a media campaign to invalidate collectivism. Scarcely a day goes by that I don’t see yet another think piece tracing the history and failures of collectivism. However, capitalists are not confronted today with their grandfathers’ version of collectivism. It’s become something remarkably different from the most prominent historical failure: the U.S.S.R., which failed peacefully (!) in 1991. Moreover, quite a few successful (for now) blended systems straddling both ideologies point to the real possibility of a better life than penury and debt servitude. Thus, need for significant reform.

More to come in pt. 4.

Lingua Nova 16

Posted: October 2, 2026 in Cognition, Consciousness, Idle Nonsense, Music
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AI psychosis: faux mirror neuronal activity provoked by AI therapists that (not who) provide simulations of empathy and support

dickover: a panel, popover, or curtain inserted by a website or app deliberately obscuring content to frustrate users with unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interactions such as acceptance of cookies, subscription requests, surveys, offers to install a mobile app, and agreements to terms of service (i.e., being a dick about it)

secret loser status: a condition of frustration, failure, and low self-esteem concealed from oneself and others by overcompensating bluster

approval bombing: overwhelming someone with excessing approval and praise (until they believe the hype), such as with sycophantic chatbots; related: love bombing

bafflegab: a combination of lies and self-aggrandizing rhetoric containing no useful information as practiced in particular by politicians; related: word salad

million-dollar minute: munitions in foreign theaters of war discarded blown up rather than repatriated when U.S. operations cease and forces withdraw

-maxxing: suffix applied indiscriminately to every imaginable trend to signal maximization of a single attribute, or less commonly, multiple attributes

boomercon: portmanteau of boomer and conservative designating someone (not strictly limited to boomers) superficially self-described as a conservative but who conserves nothing beyond the State of Israel; a progressive obediently observing posted speed limits

Goodhart’s Law: usually stated as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”; related: self-fulfilling prophecy

ontological primitive: an experience that cannot be constructed (or reconstructed) out of something other than itself, e.g., consciousness and music

cognitive surrender: releasing to an outboard processor one’s own rightful thought processes leading to self-hobbling

Traffic Report No. 13

Posted: September 30, 2026 in Blogosphere, Conspiracy, Debate, Environment, Industrial Collapse
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/rant on

Funny, for an established blog like this one with a long history and a clear perspective (no AI slop) on a variety of topics, it used to be that I’d have to empty the spam folder build-up with some regularity. Ran a brief experiment years ago where I published all spam, which had no noticeable effect on anything. Well, along with traffic, even spam has dried up, the latter of which I suppose is a blessing I oughta count. Best guess is that spammers moved on to other media better suited to need than the dreaded text-based blog. After all, semiliterate youth simply can’t be bothered to attempt to read. TL;DR.

Aside: I can’t say that youth are particularly wrong for refusing to read, or indeed, for being fixed on their screens. Their whole experience in life up to now is essentially being taken care of and looked after. The notion that one should strive and prepare for adult achievements looks particularly hollow at present, which sparks premature and (arguably) inappropriate nihilism across an entire generation who recognize the world is so badly distorted and disturbed prior to their entering adulthood that careful prepping for rising dystopia makes little sense. Called to mind my movie review that settled on the moral of the story being how persevere in the face of abject despair.

If this blog is not even spam worthy, well, it’s not worthy of comment, either. A few readers hit the like button regularly, but there is no active commentary. That, too, has probably moved on to other platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and podcasts. (Admittedly, other bloggers attract sizable readership and with it comments numbering in the thousands.) With most blog posts, I hold back a little something so that there is more to say, which has been a losing strategy considering commentary is uniformly missing. However, let me reiterate (yet again) that the point of blogging for me is collecting and sharing my thoughts (sense-making, if you will); it is not and never will be a futile attempt to drive traffic (as if I had the faintest idea how to do that reliably) or go viral.

If not spam or comment worthy, well, it gets more dire. Even my commentary at other blogs (e.g., WordPress and Substack) is decidedly unworthy. I don’t comment often, but when I do, comments are typically duds (if measured by response). The one response I do draw, which absolutely sticks in my craw, is removal or deletion. I’ll call out one writer in particular: Elizabeth Nickson. Without going into her biography or character of her Substack (dissident and conspiratorial), I put up a balanced and well-stated comment, which promptly disappeared. I don’t object in the slightest to light moderation to remove trolls and spammers, but I’m neither. Indeed, as Notabilia explained at his blog what he meant by ideological grifters (distinct from monetary grifters) only slightly prior to my comment removal at Nickson’s Substack, those who gather an audience and the usual seal-clapping praise frequently succumb to insulating themselves from negative comments, which is to say, reader engagement. The result? Ideological blinders and echo chambers. I didn’t save my comment, but it went something like this (from memory):

Sorting your assertions into categories of believable and unbelievable is a full-time job, just as it was no doubt for you to assemble them. Here’s where I fall.

Falsifying decades worth of scientific evidence of climate change is simply not believable. Even those with basic appreciation of scientific principles can weigh arguments and conclude that species die-off and climate change that normally takes evolutionary and geological time (meteor impacts aside) is now manifesting within recent human history. On the other hand, it’s entirely believable that a cabal of self-interested and -serving leaders latched onto the issue to drive through radical social engineering that would never be accepting without extinction-level fear-mongering.

What’s a normal person to do? Some still covet comfort and prestige. Others want to pull the levers of power in directions dictated by their conditioning. Most of us are just riding the ride, often scarcely aware of its destination or full freight.

/rant off

Drawn Back In

Posted: September 20, 2026 in Blogosphere, Cognition, Education, Literacy, Mental Health, Sports
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In educational circles, it’s commonplace (or used be) to think and teach in terms of three domains of learning: the cognitive, the affective, and the psycho-motor, corresponding figuratively to head, heart, and body. A balanced person gives each attention; an unbalanced person concentrates on one to the exclusion of the others.

Abundant energy in youth enables the psycho-motor domain handily, especially through participation in youth sports. Effort required to maintain such activity in middle age (and beyond) ebbs away and requires concerted dedication. Similarly, although learning of all types is fastest in the first two decades of life, it’s typically not until middle age at least (if ever) one develops sufficient syncretic knowledge to be truly intellectual. Exceptions do not disprove the rule. Lots of reading is the surest path toward that destination, though reports on cratering literacy and some credentialed college graduates being functionally illiterate suggest the tide is flowing out on that particular domain.

Affective (i.e., emotional) learning needs less attention insofar as it is an essential, inescapable element of the human psyche. However, without maturity and discipline, affective response to provocative stimuli risks being hijacked by those who would seek control over others especially through a combination of overexcitement and fear — goads, really. That’s essentially what electoral politics has become: incessant fear-mongering and aspirational noise to herd the public toward predigested policies and prefigured votes.

These days, I’ve arguably reached a mature emotional end state and my physical prowess is undoubtedly on the downslope, though I strive to retain what I can. That leaves the cognitive/intellectual domain to reassert primacy over the others. I sense I’m being drawn back into my head, out of my body and away from my heart, which is a perversion I’ve studiously avoided over decades. It doesn’t help that novel ideas are flung out like read meat regularly, which I feel irrationally duty-bound to give consideration before discarding or developing them. One in particular will soon be the subject of a multipart series. I admit to having panicked briefly as my mind raced to connect dots and rehearse before putting anything in writing. It’s always a slow process for me with myriad blind alleys. Spending that much time in my head, however, is its own risk, unbalancing the equilibrium I try to establish through avoidance of obvious distortions. If I’m being slowly seduced yet again, maybe I won’t fight it so strenuously this time.

The Fungibility of Truth

Posted: September 13, 2026 in Crime, Debate, Ethics, History, War
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Although my previous blog post is offered without comment, an additional blog post is needed to unpack (some of) its implications.

The idea has been floated many times that actions undertaken in one’s official capacity as, for example, head of state are inherently immune from criminal prosecution. In practice, while perhaps more true than not, the losers of conflict — the ones who don’t get to write the history that is accepted and taught as consensus — are judged as culpable for some of the worst crimes of history. Many atrocities have taken place in the context of war, so in modern parlance, they constitute war crimes. Although it’s commonplace in the era of corporate personhood to foist responsibility for war crimes committed by individuals onto government entities and institutions, activities ordered by individuals wielding the considerable power of the state are many orders of magnitude greater than what even the most out-of-control psychopath could accomplish. Accordingly, Truman’s order to drop not one but two atomic bombs on Japan is considered a war crime by some. Bush’s decision to go to war preemptively with numerous Middle Eastern countries in the aftermath of 9/11 and Trump’s decision to attack Iran unprovoked are similar unresolved controversies despite victory in any of those escapades being open to debate.

It’s a truism that history’s winners get to write both history and new rules for the losers. Even allies tell divergent stories of their own contributions. Those same putative victors enjoy considerable protection against prosecution for crimes committed during wartime. Two examples illustrate the fungibility of truth in just that manner: (1) responsibility for the Holocaust falls squarely on the German high command, either posthumously or in immediate postwar prosecutions at Nuremberg, and (2) leaders of Israel (with significant U.S. support) skirt responsibility (for now at least) for the Gaza genocide and ongoing conflict in the Middle East. If history were told from the perspective of the losers (Italians, Japanese, and Germans in WWII; Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese today), one would expect startlingly divergent versions of history just as there are to this day Southerners in the U.S. still holding grudges and grievances over loss of the American Civil War (in their lingo, the War of Northern Aggression). White-hat heroes routinely trade places with black-hat villains.

Historical revisionism is rampant in the past two decades (or more) as students of history cast doubt, aspersion, and blame for all manner of atrocity by seeking cancellation of historical figures who heretofore often enjoyed profound respect and admiration. No one is safe from reexamination and being judged unworthy. Considering sins of the father and stains of the past never go away but are easily dredged up anew, motivations for taking upon oneself some remnant of responsibility are puzzling. Everyone downstream in time shares theoretical culpability with history’s worst crimes against humanity? Some 16 million people today are descendants of Genghis Khan, one of history’s worst actors. Do they all share somehow in his villainy?

Offered Without Comment 54

Posted: September 10, 2026 in Crime, Fascism, Legal Matters, Politics
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From an article by Robert Higgs entitled “If Men Were Angels: The Basic Analytics of the State Versus Self-Government,” published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies (2007):

Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state. It is unfortunate that some individuals commit crimes, but it is stunningly worse when such criminally inclined individuals wield state powers. [citations omitted]

Detecting Paradigm Shifts

Posted: September 9, 2026 in Cognition, Consciousness, Conspiracy, Culture, Debate, Intellectual History, Journalism
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When I launched this blog in March 2006, identifying myself as an armchair social critic, my principal preoccupation was (and continues to be) the mystery of consciousness. That, combined with my emerging awareness of credible scientific reports regarding climate change, led me to prophesy an approaching paradigm shift. Back then, it was loss of the way of life to which most of us are adapted and accustomed. Manifestations of that shift take many different forms, and although a fixed or steady state cannot be asserted, the sheer rate of change and density of signal events leading to before-and-after assessments pose inflections that many like me believe provide evidence that one or more smaller paradigm shifts have indeed occurred before the big one. That plurality also reinforces my contention that any dominant paradigm is always a moving target, solidifying too briefly only to be superseded by the next major event crowding the calendar.

As the 25-year anniversary of 9/11 approaches, expect to see numerous accounts of that fateful day, some broadly accurate, some plainly revisionist (to varying degrees). A satisfactory official story has not yet emerged, but there can be little doubt that the U.S. public and its leadership went more than a little round the bend in response. It was a paradigm shift, the first of several piled up in the first quarter of the 21st century. The 2008 financial crisis, the rise of disorienting social media, preemptive forever wars stretching beyond two decades, the election(s) of Donald Trump and subsequent derangement syndrome, DEI and Wokeness, and the Covid pandemic are all turning points, and anyone too young to remember how weirdly discontinuous they were probably can’t appreciate them fully by getting first-hand accounts from older family members or even studying history. Maybe those of us present at the time can’t, either. Who knows how 9/11 is being taught in schools?

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