Two examples this week of the marvelous persistence of skill memory.

1. I got tired of 3d graphics and detoured into revising and expanding two old Windows programs. Both were originally done in 2002, recompiled but not revised in 2012. I haven’t done any C++ since 2014. The skill returned immediately after starting to read the source files.

2. For the same ten years (or more) I’ve been wearing old-man shoes with Velcro straps. The last pair was losing traction, so I tried to order new from LLbean, but they were out, like everything this year. So I got the tied version instead. The first time my fingers touched the laces, they knew what to do. No practice needed. The tie is far more comfortable on the arch than the straps, and the new rubber makes a REAL difference on snow.

Why did I depart from tied shoes ten years ago? The reason is lost.

I’ve made a habit of watching all Batya interviews, at least until they turn boring. I know Batya’s story by now, but she has the old-fashioned journalistic knack of interviewing the interviewer. The interviewer’s story is sometimes interesting.

This clip with three Bros got boring soon, with the Bros doing the usual Bro things about Fasting and Keto and Supplements and Hitting The Gym and Weightlifting A Thousand Reps, and Everyone Is Morbidly Obese. Crap. Americans used to be skinny because we smoked, not because we hit the gym.

Before that point, the Bros were asking an important question. Now that everything is based on the subscriber model, how can you hope to get unbiased news from any media at all?

It’s not a conflict, and it’s NOT NEW. As I’ve been pointing out for years, newspapers used to depend mainly on subscribers, and each paper had its own explicitly advertised viewpoint.

BEFORE GLOBALIZATION UNIFIED AND MONOPOLIZED EVERY FUCKING THING, a town of 200 people typically had one weekly paper, and a town of 5000 had two competing papers. Before a dozen unnecessary expenses became mandatory for all businesses, it was POSSIBLE to survive on a few hundred loyal subscribers. Smart papers did everything possible to keep the subscribers loyal.

Now we’re back to the same situation, aided by a few gutsy blogging and writing platforms that (SO FAR) resist the pressures of ideological compliance. Substack, WordPress, Rumble and others, now make it possible to run your own small-town weekly, with the same amount and type of content, and it’s possible to make a basic living that way. The typical Substack newsletter has “hundreds” of subscribers paying $5 a month. If you don’t need lawyers and accountants and Diversity compliance officers and EPA compliance officers and CDC Nazi mandate officers, you can live on that.

So it’s not a conflict now, provided those gutsy platforms don’t all get shut down.

As I’ve also been pointing out for years, radio in the 30s and 40s was the source of relatively unbiased news.

People EXPECTED newspapers to favor their own tastes. Competing brands are healthy for business. Paying for value AS YOU PERCEIVE IT is the key to real honest business.

The Fairness Doctrine FORCED radio to be unbiased, and it WORKED. There was no way for a station to gain more advertisers by breaking the fairness rules. So stations had to compete by increasing quality, not by increasing bias.

But the Fairness Doctrine was only strict for 30 years, and was repealed in the ’80s. So it’s not a permanent solution. In all eras, the real source of unbiased info has ALWAYS been your own senses and experience, with no interference or mediation from leaders or media.

BE YOUR OWN BEACON.

Continuing on Kirn’s latest hit:

Even the fiercest of our debates now occupy about 1/100th of the spectrum thinkers and writers of earlier times have used while exploring major human questions. Through censorship and timidity, we’ve lost access to bandwidths we don’t even know exist now. Deafness is setting in.

Focus on Deafness is setting in. Presumably Kirn means that we can’t process what we can’t hear. There’s a much more powerful metaphor in our real perception mechanism.

Our inner perceptual world is designed, and preset in youth, to match the full range of our outer sensory mechanisms. Our ears can handle 30 Hz to 20 KHz in frequency, and 0 to 120 dB in loudness. The inner world is mapped to those ranges. As we age in a noisy world, the cochlea loses the lower end of loudness and the upper end of frequency. We can’t hear faint sounds or high-pitched sounds.

Reprint from 2014, dealing with the loudness side:

Our perceptual system is based solely on proportions and changes.

Let’s take this graph as a baseline for normal hearing. Sound gets louder; your input to the cochlea gets louder in proportion; the perceptual system follows along.

If you have impaired hearing, your physical input starts at a higher level. You don’t hear the fainter sounds at all. The perceptual system tries to maintain its full range, but it has to start where the hearing starts.

Result: Perceived loudness grows faster than it would in a normal ear. This phenomenon is usually called recruitment, which is a poorly chosen word. It would have been better to call it something like ‘stretched loudness’.

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Limiting the range of discussion has the same effect. Our internal map assumes a wide ANALOG range of possibilities and decisions on every subject. Treating it as a transfer function, with reality on the X axis and our feelings on the Y axis:

As reality changes from civilization to Nazi torture chamber, our outrage rises.

When our input range is restricted, we can only sense the difference between correct usage of preferred pronoun and incorrect usage of preferred pronoun. Our response rises from calm to outrage over this extremely narrow distinction of input:

As the permissible range of discussion narrows and digitalizes, we still FEEL that we are experiencing a full range, because the perceptual range is remapped to the available input range.

Inputs outside this range don’t exist, so they don’t need to be mapped.

In a semi-serious Facebook thread about a shoplifting arrest, one commenter mentioned that the thieves need to report their illegal loot to the IRS. I couldn’t believe it, so I looked it up.

Sure enough, it’s true. I hadn’t seen it before because it’s not in the regular instruction PDFs. I always file Schedule C, and always read the annual instructions. It’s here in Publication 525.

Illegal activities.

Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Schedule 1 (Form 1040), line 8, or on Schedule C (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

Wage gangsters working for mafias should report on Schedule 1, and gig gangsters should use Schedule C. Do the mafias send out W2s?

IRS made a media push back in December to remind SMALL criminals of their legal duties.

Hmm. That’s odd. I never heard IRS reminding Facebook about its duty to pay BILLIONS. FB uses an ‘offshore patent location’ to evade BILLIONS, and other BIG criminals like Amazon simply buy their own tax laws from Congress.

In the last couple days I’ve been writing and reprinting two opposite approaches.

1. Surrender immediately!

2. Mid-level powers should try to assert their power!

Not really contradictory, just two different categories of people and nations.

Powerless people should avoid exciting psychopaths into a killing frenzy.

People with some power should use it carefully.

DeSantis showed the correct balance. At first he surrendered to the Faucians instead of protesting and getting slaughtered. Magufuli of Tanzania heroically resisted and got slaughtered.

After DeSantis determined the boundaries of available action, he started regaining control step by step, steadily and calmly, explaining his actions at every step to bring his people with him. No mystery, no Delphic utterances, no backdowns.

Speaking of cancelling reminded me of the university now being organized by the Famous Cancelleds. When I looked at their website in November, it was all future plans, and felt like vaporware. Now there’s one class or seminar firmly scheduled:

Our Forbidden Courses summer program invites top students from other universities to join us for a spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities. Students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement. Instructors will range from top professors to accomplished business leaders, journalists, and artists.

Note the emphasis on TOP students and TOP leaders. This is not for the powerless. This is elites training elites as usual. Outsiders have no way of knowing whether the TOP students will be learning to tolerate and ignore disagreement, or just learning new tactics to censor and ruin the peasants.

Last month I was uneasy about the motives:

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I see three inadequate points in their FAQ.

1. They’re seeking accreditation, which is a powerful force toward orthodoxy. The accrediting agencies expect maximum Wokitude.

2. I don’t see a commitment to avoid tenure. After tenure gets up and running, there’s no escape from ever-narrowing orthodoxy.

3. I don’t see a Trinity House motivation loop. If they simply invite the right kind of students, the wrong kind of students WILL get in and ruin the setup. Stings and APs have plenty of Deepstate money, and know how to manipulate the system.

Maintaining an unorthodox purpose against the headwinds of Parkinson bureaucracy and accrediting agencies requires a more specific feedback loop of money for value. Trinity House, working for safe navigation, has been funded by ships safely reaching port, and it has maintained its purpose for 500 years. Funding for this university needs to depend on students safely reaching the port of independent thinking. How? I don’t know, but I’m sure the TWO-WAY OBLIGATION is necessary.

Also, there are some pure Deepstaters in the founding crowd, like Peter Singer and Larry Summers and Strossen of ACLU. The whole thing could be just another fake front.

= = = = = END REPRINT.

The seminar does nothing to relieve my uneasiness.

This is hardly a new thought, and it’s not a dramatic or binary thought, but it deserves more emphasis and repetition.

We need more GUTS and strength in the middle levels of our structures.

Nature is infinitely modular, from mitochondria to cells to tissues to organs to animals to hives to local ecosystems. Every level supervises and comprehends the level below it, and every level depends on every level below it. Infinite loops of two-way obligation.

A healthy company or city or country needs the same distribution of strength and activity and feedback loops.

For 40 years Deepstate has been steadily and systematically dismantling all intermediate structures, in government and economy and culture and technology. Everything favors DC and NYC and Bezos. All laws and regulations are EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO KILL SMALL BUSINESS AND SMALL SOCIAL STRUCTURES.

Despite the obstacles, the middles are NOT technically or legally impossible.

The people in the middle have simply abandoned their posts.

When a mid-level ruler takes full control, wonderful things happen. See DeSantis. He has saved Florida from the Faucian Nazi torture chamber, and the Faucians haven’t punished him yet. After two years it’s looking like they can’t figure out how to do it. They screech and make horrible noises, but he continues to restore 2019 in Florida.

In the tech world, most mid-level companies have GIVEN UP their own servers and let AWS do the work and take full control of their data. The exceptions prove that this isn’t necessary. For instance, the American Radio Library runs its own servers in its own building.