Chapter 31
What are the publicly visible results of outbreeding depression?
If you are a newspaper, you do not maximize advertising income by repeating the same material endlessly nor do you maximize clicks on your web site.  So, news is disproportionately the new compared with the important.  The current pandemic sweeping the globe is important, so much so that just about every person in a rich country must have heard of it.  You would think that anybody depending on voter support or tax money would not rest until assured that the response to the pandemic was as swift, well-funded and well directed as was humanly possible.  It seems that something else is on the minds of our leaders.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwJq4u_120U 40.  This seems hard to believe.  If you had a job that paid well, came with lots of prestige and security and didn’t require a lot of work, much less working through weekends, you would not let a week pass without reflecting on how you looked and how to look better. 
As I write this, Dr. Campbell, who continues to give his avuncular advice after so many have vanished, (1525) High death numbers in India - YouTube 41, is reporting, if antique memory serves after warranty expired so check it out for yourself, that a new line of the pandemic is reported in India with 28 – I swear it – 28 mutations from the original virus.  (1537) Heart inflammation in Israel - YouTube 42 It has emerged and spread so rapidly that it has become in places the dominant cause of new infections.  That bodes ill for the rest of us; unless we all seal our borders, we’ll get it.  Dr. Campbell calls this “lack of being pro-active;” I am disposed to call it plain old-fashioned incompetence; he’s trendier than I.  But his point is well taken.  They really ought to be about business.  Australia and New Zealand have sealed their borders and have essentially no new cases of the pandemic.  It takes no head scratching to see that this is a winning strategy.  Does vaccination mean that people can cross borders safely?  Well, the new strain is so new that nobody knows.  Obviously, prudence dictates playing it safe.  Clearly the new strain is more contagious.  Is it more deadly or worse in any other way?  One must assume so for a year or two while information accumulates.  Today you can fly from New York to London; you can fly from India to the US.  Vaccination?  Well, none of them are 100% effective. 
Our leaders either are amazingly dumb or just don’t care how bad they look.  If you hired me to rake your lawn, and I raked the north half and disposed of the leaves and then raked the south half and dumped them on the north half, you would have words for me.  If I then could not do it right, you would either look for a different job for me or look for somebody else to do my job.  We are getting what we deserve. 
Contemporary politics seems to be the interaction of two modes of thought, each regarding the other as utterly mad.  In my humble, they are probably both right.  What I think of as the “corporate media,” consists of just about all those news outlets you have heard of for more than a very few years.  The billionaires have bought or wangled control of all of them.  They favor enormous concentration of power in the hands of the federal government; logically, that should mean they think they have more control over the feds than the reverse, and who am I to doubt?  Counterpoised are the “populists.”  I remember in high school civics the teacher dismissing a movement as “populist.”  When I asked for clarification, she said, “It’s people who want to do what the majority of people would like to see.”  If I had my life over, I would have said, “Isn’t that what democracy means?”  And of course, the plutocrats would have increased their power all the same.
There is this information mill called “the internet.”  Anybody with minimal resources and a bit of time can put an opinion out there.  It is an open question as to how much freedom from censorship we enjoy.  To the extent we have such opportunity, we can refer to opinions that come thence as “independent media.”  In ancient Rome, hardly my favorite historical regime, there were “talking statues.”  These were designated landmarks, where one could speak and others could gather and listen.  Evidently this was not permitted on just any old street corner, but the talking statues were easily monitored, which made sedition a bit less likely.  Then as now, those with power were paranoid at the notion that somebody else might want to have power as well.   
The corporate media and the independent media appear to be colluding to give the impression that they are not working together.  But given a bit of memory, one can conclude that they are indeed cooperating.  Think of two teams competing in a sport.  Within certain rules they compete.  Outside those rules, they cooperate.  Nothing is supposed to interfere with the serious matter of pleasing fans who pay. 
Of course, having the team express a political position not shared by the fans might seem to break that rule, but I am reminded of a story a couple psych nurses told me when I was at Harvard Med.  There was a man with pretty serious mental limitations.  At one point he tested positive for what we then called a venereal disease; like so many subjects where they want to keep you from thinking, the terminology has been changed.  Anyway, this fellow made his diagnosis the center of his identity.  If you spoke with him, he would typically reply, “Sure, sure.  Talk to a venereal.  Venereal, venereal, talk to a venereal.  It’s all part of the act.”  I find that logic compelling in public life, in the media, in entertainment including sports and so forth and so on.  What superficially appears to be strife supports the narrative that there really is strife.  “It’s all part of the act.” 
Part of the act, if I read the news aright, is that a group called “Black Lives Matter” have demonstrations calling for police reform; that has to mean more and better trained police.  I cannot object to that much.  Also, it alleges selective brutality of police against Black citizens; if true, that’s a problem.  Whether it is true depends rather heavily on the source you choose.  On the other hand, it seems to me that such protests serve as cover for riots in which Black businesses are burned and looted and Black people killed.  And far from taking the obvious steps for police reform, the activists want to defund police and demonize them.  Hmm.  Sounds like madness to me, and the failure to make this widely understood – that has to be madness as well. 
The strife, fictional or not, serves to channel thinking along the two lines.  I trust we can agree that reality contains more possibilities than a single pair of alternatives, however cunningly they may have been designed.  Anything else is, to paraphrase Campbell, madness.  So yes, our overlords are high-profile insane.  Welcome to outbreeding depression.
There used to be a pollical entity called the Soviet Union.  They were unabashedly communist and, in due course their economy fell apart.  Communism, in which decisions are made by the government, cannot compete with freedom.  Think about it.  One decision making process compared with hundreds of millions of independent thinkers.  It should not be difficult to guess which is going to work out better.  But communism was, and remains, the darling of our academic institutions.  Their logic seems to be: we are smarter than anybody else.  Life is unfair.  So, we ought to have total power so we can make it fair.  Of the three points, only the middle one is defensible.  The first, that academic sorts are smarter than average, would make you scream, but they keep the assumption hidden. 
There once was a US senator called Joe McCarthy, who made a career of trying to sort out academic communists.  I think he is regarded to this day as a force for evil or else he is forgotten.  But during his heyday, Stalin, wielding the power of communism, was turning much of Russia into a mass grave.  You are free to argue that the communist sympathizers of the time didn’t know as much, but it cannot have escaped them that they did not know the contrary.
The thing that defines you as a human is not your DNA nor your social position.  It is the sum total of your decisions.  That, oh beloved reader, is scripture.  You can hardly be forgiven for not knowing it.  Socialism/communism, by denying humans of their choices, is dehumanizing, just as is slavery.  Yet our outbred mighty of the earth cannot wrap their feeble minds around that much. 
When I was a teenager, one of our innocent pleasures was getting a few buddies together and drinking root beer.  Then in something like January or February of 1960, the government looked at data from an experiment that fed pounds of sassafrin, the tasty component of root beer, to rats.  Rats have a known tendency to develop bladder cancer.  And what would you know, but those rats did?  So sassafrin was outlawed.  Conflict of interest?  I’d say so.  You can’t patent sassafras; it grows as a weed.  But you can patent an inferior substitute.  So, the teenagers began taking marijuana.  Did this mean the government reviewed the result of their intervention?  Don’t make me laugh so hard.  I could rupture myself. 
Back when I was at a single digit age, world war two was winding down.  Germany had surrendered, and their leaders were being murdered under rules that had not existed when the rules were broken.  Japan was on the ropes.  The US military had finally figured out the diplomacy involved in getting Japanese soldiers in impossible straights to surrender rather than dying.  So, the US, having built a primitive nuclear reactor under a stadium in Chicago, decided it would be a jolly good thing to make a bomb using the same principles.  So, moving fast before the Japanese could surrender, the US made a couple of versions of the atomic bomb and tried them both out.  Then the Russians stole the technology and made one just the same. 
Now you might think the decision was made, “Let’s not build any new and more terrible weapons because they will only be stolen and turned against us.”  But that would have required sane people with power, and even back then this seems to have been an impossibility.  So, we invented the hydrogen bomb, and sure enough the Russians – actually the Soviet Union – stole that, too. 
If you only look at atomic nuclei, there is a pattern such that on average the larger the nucleus the more stable up until the size of an iron nucleus.  From there, the larger the nucleus the less stable until rather big nuclei last such a brief period of time that physicists have to scramble to characterize the newly synthesized elements before they go away.  The atom bomb exploits the instability of large nuclei such as 235U. The hydrogen bomb exploits the relative instability of hydrogen, specifically 2H or 3H.  So, if you take a wad of heavy hydrogen and torch it off with an atom bomb, it can – if you’ve done your engineering right – ignite as a hydrogen bomb. 
So, let’s say you are a genius, and you are sitting in the creek playing with your feet when your boss shows up.  “Genius, we need to cram a lot of hydrogen into a small space, and compressed air bottles would be inconvenient.”  “Boss, just react the hydrogen with some lithium and it will compress itself.”  “Right.  Maybe we’ll pay you today.”
Using such a ploy, they built a hydrogen bomb, and it went bang.  They knew how much energy the hydrogen fusion should have yielded, and I trust that by now you know what they found.  Sure enough, the lithium fused and the energy yield was twice what they expected.  Excuse me for screaming, but this is important.  THEY HAD NO IDEA WHAT THEY WERE DOING.  And don’t give me, “That was then, this is now, we know what we are doing.”  So, what happens if you force two carbon atoms to fuse?  You get iron. 
Suppose you fused 20 pounds of carbon.  How big would the fireball be?  I don’t know and it’s not crucial, so let’s say a mile across.  Now if you were to fuse the coal in the North Antelope Coal Seam, the fireball would be about 500,000 miles across.  For comparison, the distance to the moon is about 240,000 miles.  Just one little bomb down a coal mine, and we vaporize the planet.  That’s why there is not a single nuclear bomb on the planet … oops! Oh yeah.  Thousands.  But nobody would be insane enough to let one anywhere near a coal mine … oops.  Yeah, North Korea set off a test bomb in a convenient hole, that happened to be a disused coal mine.  Feel safe yet? 
I guess I’m not the only one with issues concerning our overlords.  Wikipedia is a site where one can post opinions with the appearance of being facts.  Well according to one of the original founders, not all are facts, and it is not possible to clear all the falsehoods. (Former Founder of Wikipedia Says Wikipedia Is BROKEN, Lies Stay Up and There's No Recourse 43 (1535) Former Founder of Wikipedia Says Wikipedia Is BROKEN, Lies Stay Up and There's No Recourse - YouTube
Apparently, Wikipedia is well funded.  Otherwise, you would think that the rules could be changed or a new site established, so you’d have to identify yourself when you posted an opinion. 
There is a book by David H. Friedman called Wrong (Little, Brown and Company, NY, 2010).44 I find it quite readable, and would recommend it on such ground alone, but you also might find it valuable.  As I have been ranting, there are reasonable grounds to suspect that inbreeding can result in insanity, dishonesty and stupidity.  Since I have demonstrated that inbreeding depression and outbreeding depression follow the same chemical pathways, a reasonable person must suspect that the same terrible three should occur in the context of outbreeding; these can be considered forms of infertility although not the only forms.  Not to steal Friedman’s mighty thunder, his thesis is that expert opinion is frequently bad.  I recall a mention many years ago that a scientific paper has a half-life of 30 years, after which time it is as likely to be disproven as to remain acceptable.  Friedman teaches that things are worse, much worse.  He lists under what I would call madness:  irrational thinking and automaticity.  Under dishonesty:  corruption/pandering (telling them what they want to hear).  Under stupidity:  ineptitude.   He highlights lack of oversight.  The parallels are clear except for the oversight thing, where I don’t readily see outbreeding as a direct cause; it’s just incompetence, which might be any of the terrible three. 
Chapter 32
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