markjgsmith

Tried to get back into some blogging yesterday, but it’s not the sort of thing you can just pick back up. It takes a while to load your brain back up with all the current zeitgeist and think about it, and write some notes etc. That’s the biggest problem with all this boom bust cycles that are constantly happening to me, it just cripples your ability to do anything. Ideally I’d be doing a bit of writing and a bit of coding and some podcast listening everyday, and the flow would be more constant.

Unfortunately the world is not allowing that, too much harassment and blocking and all the rest of it like the horrendous weather. So the past few days I did get quite a lot of coding done, considering all the set backs, but it meant I had to drop everything else. That’s why yesterday was a bit frustrating, made worse by the extreme passive aggressive sparrow people.

I still got a bit of writing done but I wasn’t particularly happy about it.

I think I’ve gotten loaded up with some good ideas after listening to several podcasts, so perhaps today will be a bit better blogging-wise. I also have a few odds and ends I need to deal with related to the past few days coding. I made all the updates last night, need to test and merge them this morning.

It’s Friday so the other thing is the newsletter. I opted to not do this edition in advance, though I have been compiling the list of podcasts as the week progressed. I like the knowledge that something will definitely get sent out when you prepare it in advance, there’s a sort of relief to doing it that way, but I hate how the newsletter ends up being this update frenzy, all disjointed. Anyway this week I’m back to just writing it, probably in a mad rush tomorrow morning, which will feel crap, then I’ll be lucky if I am able to eat a sandwich and drink a coffee for the entire day. #

Escallations started early, I’ll add them to this note:

• Early morning, a "recycler" leaving the garbage bin open
• The workmen that caused an issue yesterday morning were back again, this time closing the bin for no apparent reason, I guess "doing me a favour" but they likely were responsible for opening it in the first place. See once a garbage theme starts it continues everywhere. Then sitting next to me, wanting to watch me get ready, which is basically blocking as far as I’m concerned. They left eventually on their motorbikes shouting ‘we god’ as they departed.
• Motorbike gang stalker drives past making a loud noise sounding like someone who has reached the end of their tether, maximum frustration if you will. Something like Ooouuwooo-ooo. Hard to put into words. Peace world piece.
• Woman who sits quietly nearby watching videos as I get ready turns up exactly after I have gotten ready. I predicted this would happen and tokd the troublemaker workmen. They are filling up every gap possible. It’s really just more passive aggressive anger goading, eventually everything in every dimension will be full up and the mutliverse will implode, and I will be blamed for it all.
• As predicted yesterday, the school girl standing at the corner where the old lady does her weird humping exercise has been turned into some weird pedo pervert shit. Today as I passed the corner in question was a white minivan, and as I passed the white minivan an old bloke wearing all white cycled past precariously really looking at me like he was waiting for a reaction. On the perpendicular street, a man walking was waiting and sprung into action as soon as I arrived into view, he too was wearing all white. I walked the rest of the way completely quietly to the internet place with both hands in peace signs.
• Moody bloke at the internet place that sometimes tries to murder you by forcing you into on-coming traffic is clearing his throat and coughing exactly as he passes me. Soon he’ll be spitting.
• Woman that runs one of the cafe next to the internet place just started a 'Pay!' harassment cycle. That never ends well.
• Now people have started 'yah’ing' and laughing, and then the cafe woman is responding with exasperated 'lie!', even though she started it.
• Having spent the last hour at the internet place handling all the escallation notes etc I finally got to merge the first bit of code I wrote last night. About 2 seconds after clicking the merge button, a motorbike drives past me on the small alley way where I’m standing. The motorbike had a young girl in the back, she can’t be more than 6-7 years old. As they pass, she very happilly shouts 'Aaaaaahhh'. It’s like she’s been told to do it as part of a game or something. A moment later a woman from one of the cafes shouts 'data!'. Remember I told you yesterday the 'data' incident would lead to pedo pervert shit didn’t I. Then another short moment later a man from the other cafe shouts 'see?'. I do what any sane person would do in respobse to all this strangeness, and do a peace sign, then s double peace sign. Then alternating evil / good bloke emerges from hid house and says 'you dog'. I then loudly say peace vietnam peace. This is a classic example of a shirt escallation cycle, which quite clearly included pedo pervert shit. And as I was typing uo the writeup, quite clearly they tried to pin it on me.
• Lots of people at internet cafe saying 'gay' and one clearly saying 'I am gay lord'
• On the way to the sandwich shop, I crossed the road from the internet shop, and who should be right there, the overly camp bloke that often appears at the public toilets when I happen to go there. And guess what he’s got a small pussy cat on his shoulder, as he sweeps the floor. It’s very clear to me that this is all a big planned pedo pervert anger goading escallation just as I go back to the sandwich shop where they keep anger goading me.
• Sandwich shop bloke corrected my near perfect pronounciation of the name of the sandwich, which he doesn’t normally do, then made the sandwich but got his collegue to give it to me, all while making a really sad face.
• Got to the shop cafe and there was waiting there a hugely tall asian bloke with a woman, apparently just about to pay. He must have been close to 7ft tall. This is the shop cafe with the grafiti penis in the wall. It’s more manufactured escallation pedo pervert shit as far as I’m concerned. One or two of these situations could randonly happen but it’s literally continuous, multiple events at every location I go to. By the way tall asian bloke threw a straw wrapper on the ground in front of me, remember straws have been trending all week, and the woman he was with repeatedly kept saying the word 'come' in amoungst her presumably vietnamese. Sure that’s not a manufactured situation. Anyway, they got multiple peace signs from me. I hope they have a nice day.
• The music playing in the shop cafe as I wrote the previous escallation item was some non descript asian boy band (sorry) and the final 2 minutes of the song was just someone saying 'tchew' over and over like they were sneezing. As I write this note item bloke shop staff is saying 'wanker' over and over, and 'okay' over and over. Followed by 'he’s learning'.
• Video game tutter bloke waited exactly until I started eating my sandwich abd is now on a loud speaker phone call on some sort of tirade. One of the cafe shop bloke staff is in the back room also on phone in some sort of 'okay', 'lie' and 'liar' tirade. A minute after I started drinking my hot coffee back room bloke started making overly elaborate yawning / extreme tiredness sounds.
• It’s lunch time now, and a massive school kids tsunami, blocking all the seats and tables with their bags. 80% girls. But also a few folks in their 20s. Again 80% women. I get the sense there is some pent up harassment, trying to surface, several metaphorical shives, but I’m not reacting to anything. So of course lots of 'well dones' which is a shiv in itself. Totally unnecessary in a public space IMO.

Ed Dowd [23:23]: "They don’t believe in god, they believe they are the gods."

This is a quote from a podcast I listened to yesterday, and guess what, that’s literally what troublemaker workmen shouted at me this morning. #

cat << EOF > Tom Tugendhat on the british system of government

I really enjoyed the latest episode of the Conversations With Tyler podcast, a discussion with UK member of parliament Tom Tugendhat. He is in the running for the Conservative Party leadership.

One bit that stood out was his instinctive and deep understanding of the government machine as it were, how the pieces fit together, and how they are intended to work, their mechanics, to create particular features. Here’s a quote:

Tyler Cowan: Can the british system of government in it’s current parliamentary form, how well can that work without broadly liberal individualistic foundations in public opinion?

Tom Tugendhat: I think it works extremely well at ensuring that truely liberal foundations are maintained. I mean not in the american sense, but in the old liberal tradition that emerges in the UK in the 17-18 hundreds, where freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, the right to own property and all those principles that then became embeded in various different constitutions around the world, including your own.

It does very well at doing it because our system forces you into partnership. There are 650 people who you have to work with in some way in parliament over the next 4-5 years, and there are 4 of us currently going for leadership of the Conservative party. And there is one reason why, despite the fact that we are competing, almost in a US primary system, the way in which we are dealing with each other is very different, is because we are all going to have to work together over the next 4 years. Whoever wins is going to have to work with the other 3, and the idea that you can simply ignore each other isn’t true.

There's only 121 of us Conservative MPs in parliament, and what this system forces on us, is the need to deal with each other in a way that you have to deal with someone as if you have to deal with them tomorrow. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the british political system has endured, because it forces you to remember there is a long term interest, not an immediate one, not just a short term one.

On a related note Tyler then goes on to ask about the House of Lords:

Tyler Cowan: Should the House of Lords be phased out?

Tom Tugendhat: No it shouldn’t. The extraordinary thing about the House of Lords is that it’s not something that anybody would invent, but it works! Well you might, you are the kind of economist that might :). The weird thing about hereditory peers is that there are plenty of changes you can make to hereditory peers, but the weird thing about it is that it’s a system of randomness, that injects lottery into government. I can certainly see an argument for turning that from a family lotery into a jury system, where it’s a temporary lotery.

But the other thing that the House of Lords does, which is very very difficult in a democracy, is to force you to think longer over time. And what the House of Lords used to do, through it’s hereditory principle, was force you to think not only long term over time for yourself, so 20-30 years, but actually think generationally.

If you want to guard the stability of your country, so that your children or your grand children inherit your wealth, then you need to be thinking over 50 or 100 years. And one of the problems that democracies have is short term thinking, and balancing long term and short term thinking is something every democracy should be trying to do [...] the fact that they introduce long term thinking, that they don’t actually have the ability to block anything, and that they force, effectively, a power base beyond the day to day will of the prime minister, I think is a benefit, and I think it has been good to have as a revising chamber. I don’t think it should ever have pre-eminance, and I think that the elected chamber should always have the ability to over-rule it, which we do, but I think having that long term thinking is really important.

I thought this was a really great interview. Tyler asks some fantastic questions. I was impressed with Tom’s clarity of thought when it comes to the engine of british government. Based on this interview, it’s the first time I’ve heard him speak about anything, I’d say he would be a good leader. He instills a certain amount of confidence, you get the sense he’d be rather good at keeping things running.

I do wonder whether he has any big ideas, things ge wants to change. I’ve only heard he’s not too keen on being in the European convention of human rights. That I find kind of worrying. That doesn’t sound like something we should be throwing away too quickly. In any case, even if he doesn’t have any big ideas he wants to implement, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes just being in maintenance mode for a while is what’s needed.

But if he does, and he has the right team around him, I feel like he’s likely in a good position to judge as to what changes might be achievable.

Just a few thoughts I had after listening.

I thought it was also quite interesting in juxtaposition with the latest Rogan podcast with Michael Shellenburger where they get into some of the design philosophies behind the US government, as well as problems institutions are facing. Interesting contrast. Conservatism built into the system vs implemented by the political party, at runtime so to speak.

I don’t really have an opinion on which is better, but it’s certainly useful information, to understand what sort of environments each would be suited for, and something to keep in mind as we try to continue to further a mutually productive relationship with the US. #

cat << EOF > Joe Rogan and Michael Shellenburger on the current problems in science and society

I thought this was a particularly insightful back and forth following a discussion about science and specifically the efficacy of vaccines [0:37:05]:

Shellenburger: It’s very authoritarian. [...] What Fouchey and Peter Hotez and Bill Neigh call "science" is not actually science, because science is a process. The way they talk about it, is more like a doctrine, or a dictatorship. In a dictatorship science is done by scientists. Well actually science can be done by anybody. It’s like journalism. You don’t need a PHD to do science. Science is something that you do, and it’s also not the same, sometimes you do experiments in labs, but science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number or gorillas or whales. So when they say "science" they really mean "obey me". That’s what they mean.

Rogan: And it’s people that are connected to institutions. All of them.

Shellenburger: Very powerful ones.

Rogan: So you are connected to educational institutions, you are connected to these pharmaceutical industries, various institutions that are funding media. So they have enormous influence and power over narratives. And then you have people like Bill Niegh who’s not even a scientist.

Shellenburger: I know, he’s an engineer.

Rogan: Which is really wild. A guy that’s not a scientist, is "the science guy". [...] There’s a scientific method, and that’s what science is. Science is applying the scientific method and data and trying to find out the truth, based on what we know. It’s not "trust the experts". Especially when the experts are severely compromised.

Shellenburger: Science comes out of Christianity. It comes out of the desire to understand god’s creation. Then over time the church gives more and more freedom to these scientists to study things, that end up being quite inconvenient. The earth revolves around the sun or there’s evolution, there’s all these things that scientists discover. It’s the opposite of doctrine. They are discovering things that are content doctrinaire [...] Science tries to tell you how things are, not what you should do.

It’s worth going back a bit and listening to the path they took, the I think pretty well thought out criticism they make, to get to their summation. They go on to talk about some of the issues current day institutions are running into. And also what will be likely seen as a rather controvercial chat about drug legalisation / decriminalisation, but I think they make some very good observations.

Really interesting discussion. #

Joe Rogan [0:53:49]: "The crazy thing is it seems to be an emergent behaviour pattern. When people get into power, when people have power, they always go in this very particular direction of control. And this is what the founding fathers of the constitution, the people that founded this country, when they were laying it out, they were trying to prevent that from taking place, and they had this very elaborate plan to sort of subvert notmal human behaviour, to stop it from taking root in this country, and make this a better experiment in self government than what they had experienced under dictatorships. And people always want to get it back to where they are comfortable, which is being a dictator." #