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The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny

July 17, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Compromise is great for business deals, arbitration, professional workplace disagreements, property-line disputes, and the like. At lawmaking governance levels, it’s often needed to get something done (say, to get enough legislators of the opposition party aboard to pass a budget).

However, compromise is, like most concepts involving social interaction, prone to abuse.

Stay alert to ways you can be compromised adversely, manipulated and taken advantage of, and resist those — whether at personal levels by abusive “friends” and “lovers”, or on larger scales, by government and media. Yes, you can be on the hurt side of an abusive relationship with a governing authority. History is chock full of examples.

A large-scale, abusive use of the concept of compromise is when high authorities wish to restrict the liberty of the people. That’s called tyranny. Genocides under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are famous large-scale examples just in the last 100 years. Without quite as much overt killing (yet still a lot, per the Uighurs), is the ongoing, worsening, Orwellian techno-control dictatorship in mainland China.

Less extreme, but just as insidious, are slow-drip, incremental tactics here and anywhere else in the so-called Free World, acclimatizing people to each seemingly minuscule sacrifice of freedom, until one day, you are in a de facto prison. How does that occur? Convince you to give up your own liberty, and it’s rather easy.

Gaslighting occurs not just in personal relationships, but by Big Bureaucracy. Situational types:
“Confused? We’re the experts at telling you what’s real, all else is disinformation.”
“Here, this pain I’m doling out is for your own good.”

We’re conditioned early to these vulnerabilities by having to accept needed pain as kids, at the behest of parents — such as by enduring awful-tasting medicines, painful shots, or stinging antiseptics applied to scrapes, that truly were for our own good. This conditioning renders us vulnerable to systemic, governance-level gaslighting as adults, via the same persuasive tactics. Furthermore, the process can be sudden, or creep along in tiny steps spanning years, or even generations. Generations!

Don’t we owe it to our children, and theirs, to ensure their liberties are greater than ours, not less?

At societal scales, freedom almost never returns after being sacrificed for what command-and-control figures plea is the “common good”. Who are they to define it? Who are they to make my decisions for me regarding anything I do that doesn’t directly and provably (in a legal, beyond-reasonable doubt sense) harm another individual?

Better it is to leave “common good” decisions to local scales, where groups of neighbors can better contextualize solutions to local needs. Neighborhoods and towns, perhaps even cities if not too large and diverse, work best. Above that, the bigger the scale of government, the greater the fallacy of “common good” when it comes to anything affecting freedom. Why? Simple: one size doesn’t fit all. In a physically and culturally vast nation like ours, the people and their situations are too diverse (by the true meaning of diversity) for that.

To wit, water restrictions in Las Vegas are rather inappropriate for Upper Michigan, on whose shores wash the three biggest Great Lakes. Fuel taxes hurt the Kansas wheat farmer or the poverty-level working single mom in Bakersfield more than the Boston loft dweller with no car. The same federal and state red tape involving business books and taxes burdens the margin-straddling machine shop in Minnetonka proportionately harder than the Minnesota Vikings, whose owner hires legions of accountants at the snap of a finger. Even within one city, zoning must vary, because development, drainage and land-use needs are nonuniform. More examples abound, by the millions, in countless situations.

Big bureaucracy commonly imposes, after gaslighting us into accepting they’re for our own benefit, or the benefit of others, one-size “solutions” justified off “the common good”. Again one size does not fit all.

Beware simple tactics of propaganda, such as the use of the words “compassion” or “empathy” in the political context; those are quite often little tools of psychological manipulation to soften resistance against top-down theft of freedoms. Bureaucracy cannot have “compassion” nor “empathy”. Only individuals and God can.

Freedom is God-given, per the concept of free will. As the Founders rightly recognized and wrote, our rights come not from the government, but are bestowed by the Creator on the governed. Liberty is a divinely inspired ideal! We should treat it as no less important than that.

Give the agents of tyranny an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Therefore, those who value life and liberty should not yield even an inch to those who wish to take it. “Compromise” with tyranny only incrementalizes its takeover.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: common good, compassion, compromise, empathy, freedom, gaslighting, government, individual liberty, liberty, tyranny

American Education: Emulate the Asian Model of Rigor and Effort

July 2, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Sacrificing scholastic excellence and high achievement in the name of “equity” is destructive to the health of our society as a whole.  Though this story presents more of an India-rooted angle, we’ve known for decades that Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other east Asian nations’ pupils blow ours away mathematically at the same age levels. This has been such a sustained phenomenon that to ignore it is profoundly foolhardy.

It’s not racial, it’s cultural.  Culture is changeable.  The malignant American culture of familial brokenness, parental uninvolvement/apathy, valuing materialism and entertainment over knowledge and diligence, artifice and appearances over results and work, “equity” that undermines excellence, and other contributors to academic underperformance, needs to change for the better here.  We must also strip sociopolitical agendas out of education and return to curricular fundamentals:  reading, writing, mathematics, and factual history.  Apply to it the rigor of late-1800s to early-1900s grade-level texts, but the updated factual knowledge of today, under stern and unyielding expectations of excellence, encouraging the hardcore work ethic of the Asian study model.

I’ve seen first-hand, even back to my childhood as a “gifted student” with such classmates, the readily apparent, tremendous value and time investment that these cultures place on education. Such families (most certainly including first-generation immigrants) are doing something right, and it should be replicated, not ignored nor discouraged.

And yes, poor kids can and do achieve high academically despite the economic handicaps.  I have some first-hand experience there as non-immigrant yet economically poor “white trash”, as did many of those first- to second-generation immigrant Hmong, Han Chinese (escaping Maoist communism), non-Hmong Vietnamese, and Korean and Japanese students I knew who mostly had been treated like trash in their native lands, except for the Koreans and Japanese.  Yet they succeeded in school despite their socioeconomic and linguistic limitations, and because of ferociously diligent work ethics imparted in a close familial setting.  For them there was family honor in high scholastic achievement, not just personal reputation, with family valued over self.

This offers non-scholastic lessons from which we can learn.

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: academics, Asian achievement, childhood, curricula, discipline, education, educational system, honor, parenthood, rigor, work ethic

Gasoline Prices: A Layered Issue

June 26, 2022 by tornado Leave a Comment

Oil prices: it’s not just Ukraine, nor “big bad oil companies”.  Not is it even mere supply and demand.  I’ve seen a lot of people on social media (including friends) fall for some fantastic fallacies and pop-appeal “malarkey” offered by politicians and celebrities, that are wildly ignorant of economic fundamentals as applied to the crude-oil markets.

First and foremost, oil is a predictive market — strongly futures-influenced.  You can call it “speculative” if you want, but you’d be misrepresenting things; “speculation” implies guessing without basis, and therefore is as worthless a term as calling weather forecasts “speculation”.  Both can be wrong, and often are to varying extents, but are still well-educated predictions by experts in their fields, and are near the mark more often than way off it. Unexpected spikes and falls happen due to unexpected and/or severe events, whether geopolitical (invasions, etc.), mechanical (major-refinery failure) or natural (tsunami, northern Gulf hurricane, protracted deep freeze or heat wave).

Because oil prices are rooted significantly in futures, current and recent Federal government policy (yes, that includes executive orders as well as things Congress threatens to do, much less actually passes) absolutely influences prices. Yes, canceling pipelines and imposing moratoria on new leases and drilling don’t change the current supply. Each does, however, threaten to curtail future supply. Again, prices are based on futures. Then when a major producer (USA) isn’t producing to its capacity, that dwindles current supply and prices, as well as raises futures. An obvious solution, purely economically, is: produce more!

Overlay these factors, along with other global supply threats like a war involving a huge and boycotted oil producer (Russia), and we get what we see.  Throw in ambient price inflation due to unrestrained money printing (watch this this slightly over 1-hour lecture by Milton Friedman for a full explanation), and the resultant devaluing of the money relative to goods and services, and that adds to the problem.  In turn, rising fuel costs add to inflation, and it becomes a sort of slow-motion death spiral. Hence, the Fed steps in and raises interest rates, which historically curtails inflation over the span of months to years, but harms the Federal budget through higher interest payments on our incomprehensibly enormous national debt.

Oil companies aren’t innocent here, but not for the reasons you may think. All companies have the right to make a profit; otherwise they go bankrupt and fail shareholders (including many Americans’ 401Ks and pension plans). Blaming profiteering or price gouging by oil companies is populist bullshit!  Utter economic quackery, and most of the politicians who say this know it…they’re just pandering for votes from the mass ignoranti.  Nothing more.

Oil companies can profit off low prices at high volume, just as off high prices at lower volume.  Instead, where they went wrong was in their experts’ inability to foretell supply (and supply-chain) problems and adjust accordingly beforehand, including through greater refining and production capacity.  Part of that is their fault through lack of foresight and poor planning. Penny-wise, pound-foolish!  But a lot of it is not.

What is one reason refining and production are slow to move? Wait for it…governmental regulation (a.k.a. interference). Every unfunded governmental mandate adds to the cost of doing business, no matter your business. It just does. This is fact. You experience this when you spend lots of time (time is money!) doing your taxes, which is mandated, or buying software to help you. Business owners see this in many more ways.

Magnify that by hundreds of thousands of regulations — federal, state, and local — baked into the cost of extracting and producing petroleum-based products of all kinds, including gasoline. Compliance corporately is a huge drag on cost, additively.  Indirect attacks, such as regulating banks that lend to the oil industry, further add cost.  [Look up “Biden Administration Restricts Leasing for Overseas Fossil Fuel“, which of course the Sierra Club loves.  I presume none of them ever have been poor and needed to drive a petroleum-powered vehicle to work.].

It’s fair to argue what regulations are needed and what aren’t, but the fact is, they *add cost* regardless.  Take a look just at biofuel mandates, for example.  Threats of still more regulation, prohibitions, and actual executive orders, drive up futures.  Futures heavily move current prices.  Therefore, the oft-seen mantra, “Presidents don’t influence prices” is garbage.  They absolutely, positively do.  While the Biden “I did that!” sticker you see on gas pumps isn’t completely true, it has some merit.

It’s irrational how people who support one party’s candidate or the other subscribe wholesale to whatever that candidate spouts off.  Whither independent thinking?  Those who claim Biden policies have nothing to do with inflation as a whole, or of fuel in particular, have turned off a key part of their brains.  Same with those who ignored Trump’s straight-up factual lies on other topics.  Yet these men were both pretty honest about what they were going to do, and they did it.

Biden fulfilled promises that have direct and short-fused influence on petroleum inflation.  If you like that, it shows either your ignorance of basic ECON 101 concepts, or reveals a pampered, soft, privileged status of not being poor enough, and being hurt enough, by inflation to change your mind.  I was in a poor household, in the ’70s to early ’80s oil crises, and can testify the effects are real even to renters, on prices of basic needed goods, electricity, and so forth, as well as rent itself.

Stop falling for and repeating political lies because you voted for the liar — of either party.  It hurts your own credibility in argument.  To wit, the current administration’s turn from “Putin’s fault” to “price-gouging oil companies”, for the very same event, has been remarkable.  Both excuses are way, way overplayed, with only a partial, lower-order speck of truth in the case of Putin.  It’s just a distraction and diversion to take your attention from the tangible effects on futures (thus on current prices) of this administration’s executive orders and this Congress’ statements and bills directed at future availability.

Finally you can say we should get off oil.  Fine.  Over decades, I agree.  I think we should too, and in America, go all in on lowest-carbon, highest-efficiency, smallest-imprint, least-waste-volume  nuclear energy long term.  Others claim renewables someday, somehow, will be a steady and dependable source.  Whatever.  That’s then.  This is now.  Until we can, and do, we are dependent on fossil fuels, especially for transportation and lubricants — like it or not.  High prices in all those drive up costs for all goods and services, and hurts the poor the most.

Perhaps, just perhaps, that’s by design.  After all, even if not deliberate, the more people in poverty, the more dependent they are on central governmental authority.  And by extension, the easier they are to control.  We are clearly headed for a digital (therefore trackable by centrally controlled AI) currency.  Do some critical thinking about that as well.  When you do, current events make more sense, including what China is doing with their mass tracking and “social credit” tyranny.  I’ll leave the specifics of that exercise to you, to the extent it can be applied here.

Finally I’ll finish with a quote from a recent President’s State of the Union address.  How I wish the same claim honestly could be made today.

“Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy.  Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources.  Right now, right now American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years.  That’s right – eight years.  Not only that – last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.” — Barack H. Obama

Filed Under: Not weather Tagged With: Barack Hussein Obama, Congress, economics, economy, energy, futures, inflation, investing, Joe Biden, Milton Friedman, money, money supply, nuclear energy, petroleum, President, supply and demand

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