This is a fantastic piece John. Saved in my archives.
If we believe in some inventory of personality attributes, and I do, and add differentiation in cognitive and physical tendencies... you end up with a categorization of fundamental human capability that then, in a well-functioning socioeconomic system, should lead a person to a career that is a good fit for them. Experience happens over time, both in the discipline selected and in general human self-awareness and behavior (the wisdom thing), and the person becomes a master of that particular productive domain... and this benefits society and the economy as well as the individual that masters a productive endeavor.
It is the advance of labor-eliminating technology, the offshoring of productive money-making options, and the shift to the industry of higher learning advertising to parents that their little darlings must earn advance degrees in non-productive areas of study in order to be seen as adequate... that has caused a bottleneck of marbles bunched up at the top of the Rub Goldberg Machine without enough career paths down.
From my perspective, we have a lot more smartasses because they earned high academic credentials and thus expect some seat at the upper levels of the human hierarchy, but in actuality they actually wasted time in their life failing to launch, failing to work, failing to find a career that was actually a good fit, and failing to start to develop mastery and wisdom through productive work experience. I think they fundamentally know that the B-average captain of the high school Lacross team that completed a year of community college and now owns three car dealerships is fundamentally more worthy of his higher social status, but it burns them so much that they collect together in a mob to "change" society into a model where productive merit isn't rewarded so much as is their academic "brilliance".
So, part of this destructive smartassedness we are experiencing is a coordinated cultural and socioeconomic class to flip the socioeconomic script. It is in fact, a war that really has no option for compromise.
Frankly they are all malcontents and misfits that burn with resentment that they have felt out of mainstream... a mainstream that has traditionally elevated productive merit. But instead of reaching for their own productive merit, they have decided to leverage changes in the economy and their donor class power to put a jackboot on the necks of the productive class so they, the unproductive class, can feel more superior by comparison.
It keeps coming back to Ayn Rand's three actors of producer, looter and moocher. The American Democrat party is that of the professional looter and their moocher constituents with their hands perpetually out.
I will address the. COVID issue first. There were many research scientists that showed the lockdowns and masking would not work and likely extend the time COVID was at pandemic levels. The 6 feet of social distancing came from a very old and flawed study of the transmission of TB that concluded the rate of transmission when an infected person coughs drops significantly if the non-infected person is 6 or more feet away.
Just after COVID appeared, a scientist (I wish I could remember her name) had completed a study on the transmission of viral diseases through the air. If I remember correctly, she found you had to be at least 30 feet away from the infected person to see a significant decrease in transmission rates but transmission could occur at 60 or more feet. I remembered her study was attacked by the CDC as overestimating the distance viral particles in the air can be transmitted because she attempted to account for real world variables like air currents. Many variables can affect the speed of the air currents that are rarely accounted for in most studies. I remember a few years later, the CDC admitted that the 6 foot social distancing would not slow the spread of COVID but it would be followed by most people. They had concluded that 12 feet could be effective but that would be impossible to implement under many circumstances.
The the whole fiasco of masking. Before I became a teacher, I was a research scientist and was trained in proper masking techniques. For masking to be effective, one must thoroughly wash their hands before handling the mask. They should only touch the outside when putting it on. Wearing sterile gloves is better. If you touch it with your hands even five minutes later, you have contaminated it because your hands have picked up germs, even if you are wearing gloves. Once you take it off, it needs to be tossed, you wash your hands again just before putting a new one on.
In real world applications, this was not being done and even if the public was aware of this, most could not prevent contamination in daily use.
They were pushing surgical masks, which are very leaky and meant to be used in a sterile environment with highly filtered air. It slows transmission of diseases during surgery under ideal conditions.
Years later, Dr. Fauci stated that they knew masking would not work but it made people think they were doing something to protect themselves from COVID.
The reason that vaccination would not work is the same reason Dr. Fauci could not develop a vaccine for HIV. HIV mutates quickly. It is basic evolutionary biology; vaccinate against a specific protein on the virus, you promote conditions where viral particles with that protein will be selected against and those that have mutated proteins that are different enough for the vaccine not to recognize, those viral particles will have an advantage.
We saw this with the various COVID vaccines. Vaccines increased the mutation rates and the formation of new variants.
Vaccines are most effective against viral particles that are slow to mutate.
The only reason the COVID vaccine was produced quickly was through genetic engineering that could produce a mRNA to be injected. That would cause the person's own cells to make the protein that your immune system will recognize as a foreign invader and make antibodies. Theoretically, the mRNA would be seen as foreign and be attacked by the immune system.
This had not yet been tested. Many geneticists had concerns. I earned a degree in genetics a long time ago but I could see problems. I read the scientific journals and saw those concerns with many others being voiced.
The problem was the Smartarded researchers ignored those concerns because they came up with this concept of making a mRNA vaccine and had a financial interest to make it work. If something went wrong, they were confident they could retweak the process to fix the issue.
In the old days, there would be years of testing before a small human trial would ever be considered.
So, with the EUA from the FDA, these companies were able to do their testing on us. It was not under controlled conditions that would have occurred in lab testing. So it would be easy to say any potential issue is just a fluke unrelated to the vaccine. Even if something could be linked to their vaccines, they were protected by the Federal Govenment, the same government that was pushing for their mandatory use by people in the government that had did benefit financially because of their ties to Big Pharma.
Many years ago, I attended a science conference. The special speaker was Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist that helped build the bomb during WWII.
He made a comment that has stuck with me. He took to task scientists that set themselves up as intellectually superior that the general public and hide behind scientific jargon to prevent the average person from understanding what you were doing. This was around 2000, and he said we, as scientists, need to be able to explain what we do and what we have learned in every day language that the average person could understand. If you cannot do that, you are either arrogant or do not fully understand your work as well. This is also the reason why the general public distrusts scientists.
On the topic, Einstein once stated that a scientist needs to be able to explain his ideas to a 5-year old child so they understand it. Only then do you really understand your work.
When an intellectual veers out of their area of expertise, they say some wrong things and expect the public to not question them because they are famous.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a prime example. He is an astrophysicist and spend many years explaining what we know about space in a way that most could understand.
He then moved out of his lane and started commenting about biological topics. He got many of those wrong. Recently he tried to defend transexuals as normal and not a mental health disorder. I lost all respect for him when he stated our chromosomes do not determine our gender, our brain does. He knows very little about biology. For all organisms that exhibit two genders, it is based on genetics. There are a wide variety of sex determination methods in organisms. Some have XX develop into females and XY into males. In birds the opposite is true, males are XX and females are XY. In some insects, females have two sets of chromosomes and males one set. Ultimately, it is the genetics that direct an embryo to develop as a male or as a female.
I couple of years ago, I was teaching a unit on human genetics. I stated that XX individuals are female and XY are male. I had a transgendered male student who took exception to that. She told her mother (I refuse to cave in to mental illness) and I had to have a meeting. I brought the state adopted biology book as well as the pertinent biology standards I am required to teach.
The administrator started with the state law that I am required to use preferred pronouns and respect all students based on the long list of categories.
The mother laid into me for misgendering her son. I did not say a word. I wanted them to get it all out so they would hear me when it was my turn. My turn came and I pulled out the biology book that stated XX individuals are male and XY individuals are male. I then pointed to the biology science standards that stated the same. I then went back to the biology book to show how the Y chromosome directs male development. If it fails to work properly, you end up with a person with female sexual organs but who is XY. These individuals are usually not identified until late in their teen years when they see a doctor to determine why they have not started menstruation, or worse, older and married and trying to find out why they cannot get pregnant. This condition is not normal, it occurs when something goes wrong during development.
Personally, I would never try synthetic meat. Human diets have evolved over a millennia of evolution. We need animal protein in our diets as well as plant based food for the things animals do not have. This has been determined by our evolutionary development, not how we feel.
This is terrific. I find that most "Smartarded" people qualify as conspiracy theorists, who cherry-pick enough "facts" to concoct theories with no basis in reality and chock-full of logical fallacies and errors, while ignoring Occam's Razor with regularity. The Trump deranged heavily populate this category, along with a bevy of people on the right who follow Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and a few others.
Very well said. You can add to the smartarded all of those fools that publish papers, teach classes, run NGOs, and run companies, etc. in make believe fields like “queer studies, “peace studies,” etc. they all have degrees and think they’re smart because they know big words. They just don’t know how to use them.
This is a fantastic piece John. Saved in my archives.
If we believe in some inventory of personality attributes, and I do, and add differentiation in cognitive and physical tendencies... you end up with a categorization of fundamental human capability that then, in a well-functioning socioeconomic system, should lead a person to a career that is a good fit for them. Experience happens over time, both in the discipline selected and in general human self-awareness and behavior (the wisdom thing), and the person becomes a master of that particular productive domain... and this benefits society and the economy as well as the individual that masters a productive endeavor.
It is the advance of labor-eliminating technology, the offshoring of productive money-making options, and the shift to the industry of higher learning advertising to parents that their little darlings must earn advance degrees in non-productive areas of study in order to be seen as adequate... that has caused a bottleneck of marbles bunched up at the top of the Rub Goldberg Machine without enough career paths down.
From my perspective, we have a lot more smartasses because they earned high academic credentials and thus expect some seat at the upper levels of the human hierarchy, but in actuality they actually wasted time in their life failing to launch, failing to work, failing to find a career that was actually a good fit, and failing to start to develop mastery and wisdom through productive work experience. I think they fundamentally know that the B-average captain of the high school Lacross team that completed a year of community college and now owns three car dealerships is fundamentally more worthy of his higher social status, but it burns them so much that they collect together in a mob to "change" society into a model where productive merit isn't rewarded so much as is their academic "brilliance".
So, part of this destructive smartassedness we are experiencing is a coordinated cultural and socioeconomic class to flip the socioeconomic script. It is in fact, a war that really has no option for compromise.
In a sense, all of liberalism is an effort by losers in some facet of life to rewrite the rules so that people like them are actually the winners.
Trans dudes: You have to like men like me or you're transphobic!
Black liberals: You have to say what I'm doing is good or you're racist!
Feminists: You have to appreciate angry, unattractive women like me or you're sexist!
Liberal academics: My credentials should lead to vast amounts of respect, money and power or we'll have to change the rules until they do.
Yes, I agree with that.
Frankly they are all malcontents and misfits that burn with resentment that they have felt out of mainstream... a mainstream that has traditionally elevated productive merit. But instead of reaching for their own productive merit, they have decided to leverage changes in the economy and their donor class power to put a jackboot on the necks of the productive class so they, the unproductive class, can feel more superior by comparison.
It keeps coming back to Ayn Rand's three actors of producer, looter and moocher. The American Democrat party is that of the professional looter and their moocher constituents with their hands perpetually out.
I will address the. COVID issue first. There were many research scientists that showed the lockdowns and masking would not work and likely extend the time COVID was at pandemic levels. The 6 feet of social distancing came from a very old and flawed study of the transmission of TB that concluded the rate of transmission when an infected person coughs drops significantly if the non-infected person is 6 or more feet away.
Just after COVID appeared, a scientist (I wish I could remember her name) had completed a study on the transmission of viral diseases through the air. If I remember correctly, she found you had to be at least 30 feet away from the infected person to see a significant decrease in transmission rates but transmission could occur at 60 or more feet. I remembered her study was attacked by the CDC as overestimating the distance viral particles in the air can be transmitted because she attempted to account for real world variables like air currents. Many variables can affect the speed of the air currents that are rarely accounted for in most studies. I remember a few years later, the CDC admitted that the 6 foot social distancing would not slow the spread of COVID but it would be followed by most people. They had concluded that 12 feet could be effective but that would be impossible to implement under many circumstances.
The the whole fiasco of masking. Before I became a teacher, I was a research scientist and was trained in proper masking techniques. For masking to be effective, one must thoroughly wash their hands before handling the mask. They should only touch the outside when putting it on. Wearing sterile gloves is better. If you touch it with your hands even five minutes later, you have contaminated it because your hands have picked up germs, even if you are wearing gloves. Once you take it off, it needs to be tossed, you wash your hands again just before putting a new one on.
In real world applications, this was not being done and even if the public was aware of this, most could not prevent contamination in daily use.
They were pushing surgical masks, which are very leaky and meant to be used in a sterile environment with highly filtered air. It slows transmission of diseases during surgery under ideal conditions.
Years later, Dr. Fauci stated that they knew masking would not work but it made people think they were doing something to protect themselves from COVID.
The reason that vaccination would not work is the same reason Dr. Fauci could not develop a vaccine for HIV. HIV mutates quickly. It is basic evolutionary biology; vaccinate against a specific protein on the virus, you promote conditions where viral particles with that protein will be selected against and those that have mutated proteins that are different enough for the vaccine not to recognize, those viral particles will have an advantage.
We saw this with the various COVID vaccines. Vaccines increased the mutation rates and the formation of new variants.
Vaccines are most effective against viral particles that are slow to mutate.
The only reason the COVID vaccine was produced quickly was through genetic engineering that could produce a mRNA to be injected. That would cause the person's own cells to make the protein that your immune system will recognize as a foreign invader and make antibodies. Theoretically, the mRNA would be seen as foreign and be attacked by the immune system.
This had not yet been tested. Many geneticists had concerns. I earned a degree in genetics a long time ago but I could see problems. I read the scientific journals and saw those concerns with many others being voiced.
The problem was the Smartarded researchers ignored those concerns because they came up with this concept of making a mRNA vaccine and had a financial interest to make it work. If something went wrong, they were confident they could retweak the process to fix the issue.
In the old days, there would be years of testing before a small human trial would ever be considered.
So, with the EUA from the FDA, these companies were able to do their testing on us. It was not under controlled conditions that would have occurred in lab testing. So it would be easy to say any potential issue is just a fluke unrelated to the vaccine. Even if something could be linked to their vaccines, they were protected by the Federal Govenment, the same government that was pushing for their mandatory use by people in the government that had did benefit financially because of their ties to Big Pharma.
Many years ago, I attended a science conference. The special speaker was Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist that helped build the bomb during WWII.
He made a comment that has stuck with me. He took to task scientists that set themselves up as intellectually superior that the general public and hide behind scientific jargon to prevent the average person from understanding what you were doing. This was around 2000, and he said we, as scientists, need to be able to explain what we do and what we have learned in every day language that the average person could understand. If you cannot do that, you are either arrogant or do not fully understand your work as well. This is also the reason why the general public distrusts scientists.
On the topic, Einstein once stated that a scientist needs to be able to explain his ideas to a 5-year old child so they understand it. Only then do you really understand your work.
When an intellectual veers out of their area of expertise, they say some wrong things and expect the public to not question them because they are famous.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a prime example. He is an astrophysicist and spend many years explaining what we know about space in a way that most could understand.
He then moved out of his lane and started commenting about biological topics. He got many of those wrong. Recently he tried to defend transexuals as normal and not a mental health disorder. I lost all respect for him when he stated our chromosomes do not determine our gender, our brain does. He knows very little about biology. For all organisms that exhibit two genders, it is based on genetics. There are a wide variety of sex determination methods in organisms. Some have XX develop into females and XY into males. In birds the opposite is true, males are XX and females are XY. In some insects, females have two sets of chromosomes and males one set. Ultimately, it is the genetics that direct an embryo to develop as a male or as a female.
I couple of years ago, I was teaching a unit on human genetics. I stated that XX individuals are female and XY are male. I had a transgendered male student who took exception to that. She told her mother (I refuse to cave in to mental illness) and I had to have a meeting. I brought the state adopted biology book as well as the pertinent biology standards I am required to teach.
The administrator started with the state law that I am required to use preferred pronouns and respect all students based on the long list of categories.
The mother laid into me for misgendering her son. I did not say a word. I wanted them to get it all out so they would hear me when it was my turn. My turn came and I pulled out the biology book that stated XX individuals are male and XY individuals are male. I then pointed to the biology science standards that stated the same. I then went back to the biology book to show how the Y chromosome directs male development. If it fails to work properly, you end up with a person with female sexual organs but who is XY. These individuals are usually not identified until late in their teen years when they see a doctor to determine why they have not started menstruation, or worse, older and married and trying to find out why they cannot get pregnant. This condition is not normal, it occurs when something goes wrong during development.
Personally, I would never try synthetic meat. Human diets have evolved over a millennia of evolution. We need animal protein in our diets as well as plant based food for the things animals do not have. This has been determined by our evolutionary development, not how we feel.
This is terrific. I find that most "Smartarded" people qualify as conspiracy theorists, who cherry-pick enough "facts" to concoct theories with no basis in reality and chock-full of logical fallacies and errors, while ignoring Occam's Razor with regularity. The Trump deranged heavily populate this category, along with a bevy of people on the right who follow Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and a few others.
Very well said. You can add to the smartarded all of those fools that publish papers, teach classes, run NGOs, and run companies, etc. in make believe fields like “queer studies, “peace studies,” etc. they all have degrees and think they’re smart because they know big words. They just don’t know how to use them.
See Oswald Bates from the classic show, In Living Color. https://youtu.be/71xxvp5R9hE?si=dwEzslGcsN-j-uc2