Rules

One, Two, Three

One, two, three
Oh, that's how elementary
It's gonna be
Come on let's fall in love
It's easy
Like taking candy
From a baby.

THREE is not only elementary, but it's also fundamental.

The ancient East Asian painting of the Three Vinegar tasters is supposed to be a representation of 1) Confucius, (Kung Fu Tse); 2) Lord Buddha; and 3) Lao Tse (the founder of Taoism) tasting vinegar from the same jar.

1. Confucius says that the vinegar tastes bitter which demonstrates to him that rules are necessary to impose order over chaos in reality and that it is up to you to impose that order.
2. Lord Buddha says that the vinegar tastes sour which demonstrates to him that all reality has to be endured so that you can pass from reality to the unobserved.
3. Lao Tse says that the vinegar tastes just like it is supposed to taste in reality. There is both reality, the observed, and the unobserved, but they are different to him.

Of the three, I’m on Team Tao. The fact that reality, the observed, is different than the unobserved does NOT mean that one or the other is better, only that they are different. Vinegar tastes how it is supposed to taste in reality, but that doesn’t mean it won’t taste differently in some place other than reality. What is “order” in reality,  might be considered “chaos” in the unobserved.

Common Sense.

 

Common As Muck

You're not Bridget Bardot, I'm not Jack Palance.
I'm not Shirley Temple by any circumstance,
Or Fred Astaire

We're as common as muck.
Bonne chance, viel glück, good luck
Where bold is beautiful, we don't give a damn
Luvva duck, we're as common as muck.

Maybe common sense isn’t very common.

We assume our leaders will have common sense. Leaders on average do approximate the range variable, s,  the tolerance, aka the Standard Deviation, of the absolute. In fact they match it better than most other ages of life in a group. But those who should be leaders are only 60% of the group.  The Voters and Advisors do better at matching the Absolute.

Even leaders can’t perceive the location variable, μ, of the absolute. They pale besides the Nash Equilibrium, whose followers perceive more of the absolute than is actually there. A Nash Equilibrium acts like the Absolute has a median/mean/location that is 120% of its actual value. But by doing so, it ensures that the members of the group are closer to their perception of the absolute.

		s	μ	Absolute Zero	100%	Absolute
Perceived	Young Ward	0.070	NA		0.45	41%
	Voter	0.288	NA	0.041	0.86	90%
	Leader	0.459	NA	(0.042)	1.22	144%
	Advisor	0.288	NA	(0.221)	1.04	90%
	Old Ward	0.070	NA	0.142	0.96	41%
	User Optimal	NA	0.000	1.500	NA	NA
	System Optimal	0.250	NA	0.500	2.91	100%
	Nash Equilibrium	0.500	1.885	0.023	2.91	100%
Absolute		0.500	1.571	0.000	3.142	100%

 

Individuals acting as a group perceive the absolute from their own frame of reference, hyperspace. By acting as if the Absolute is more than what can be perceived, the group can better match their perception of absolute.

But the values in the table for leaders are only the average of all those who could be leaders, not those individuals who are actually chosen as leaders. Individuals within the group of leaders are just as subject to error as anyone else. And even leaders are better at only the range of the absolute, not the Absolute itself. The current allies in MAGA of User Optimalists and System Optimalists don’t come close to the  the Absolute.  That is reserved for Nash Equilibriumists.  Even the common sense of leaders is NOT very common, and it definitely is not absolute.

Discontinuity III

 

Crossroads

I went down to the crossroads
Fell down on my knees
Down to the crossroads
Fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above for mercy
Take me, if you please

A discontinuity is a crossroads

In a speed-volume curve of traffic or water flow, there is a discontinuity at which laminar/uncongested/orderly flow becomes turbulent/congested/chaotic flow. At this discontinuity there is a crossroads in the behavior of the flow before the discontinuity and the behavior of the flow after the discontinuity. The flow approaches the crossroads/discontinuity from reality, from Point D in the figure below.

At the discontinuity, Point E, it can remain in reality on the left side of the figure, and move to the curve connecting Point A with Point E, from the orange curve to the blue curve. However that requires a rotation by 3/2 π  and this requires that the equation describing the flow from Point D to E to become the logarithm of a negative number, and that behavior is undefined. It can move to the curve connecting Point E to Point at C, also moving from the orange curve to the blue curve, a mirror of the original behavior, but that requires moving the wrong way on a one-way link. It can move to the curve connecting point E with Point B and stay on the orange curve. That is a continuation of the original path, but it requires moving to the right side of the figure, which is NOT observable reality. It is unobservable behavior. At the crossroads any of those behaviors is possible, but each has problems. But moving from reality to unobservable flow seems more likely at the crossroads than any of the other possibilities.

Ages

 

What A Piece of Work Is Man 

What a piece of work is man
How noble in reason
How infinite in faculties
In form and moving
How express and admirable
In action how like an angel
In apprehension how like a god
The beauty of the world
The paragon of animals

But man is STILL an animal, NOT a God.

The lyrics above are from the musical Hair, but they are also a speech in Hamlet. The Riddle of the Sphinx in Oedipus postulates that there are 3 ages of man as defined by how many legs are used: all fours as an Infant; two legs as an Adult; and three legs, 2 legs plus a cane, in Old Age. Game Theory would suggest that there are five ages of man, if he is trying to act as he perceives the absolute, God. For the first 1/6 of life, you are a ward of the state. This corresponds to the legal voting age in the US of 18 years. The next 1/6 of your life, e.g., from 18 to 36 years old you have become an adult,  a voter. In the next two 1/6s,  from 36 to 72, you can be not only a voter but a leader. In the next 1/6 of your life, from 72 to 90, you can be an advisor to, but not yourself, a leader.. In the last 1/6 of your life you have returned to be being a ward, say from 90 to 108 years old. (You might make a contribution, but you are not expected to do so, and you might be senile anyway.)

The US Constitution does set a minimum age for President as 35 years old, even though the minimum age for Senator is 30 years and the minimum age for being a member of the House is 25 years old. Leadership positions in the Congress are by seniority so they have only a de facto lower age limit. There are no lower age limits for judges but is rare for anyone to be nominated without a history which implies a de facto lower age limit. But leadership roles in the Congress do NOT recognize the upper or lower age limits. Nor are upper age limits in place for judges. Retirement age is normally 65 and at most 70 years old for Social Security. The age of Minimum Required Distributions for IRAs is currently 73.

So the age limits are roughly consistent with common practices. Maybe it would be appropriate to consider upper age limits? Why were upper age limits not set by the Founding Fathers in the US Constitution? In the late 1700s, at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, the age of life expectancy was so low, nature enforced its own upper age limits, so any Constitutional upper age limits seemed unnecessary. Now that medical science has advanced, maybe it is time to start thinking about the upper age limits, in addition to term limits. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2024/09/ceilings-ii.html

Republicans

 

Marat/Sade

Four years after the revolution
And the old king's execution
Four years after, remember how
Those courtiers took their final bow
String up every aristocrat
Out with the priests and let them live on their fat
Four years after we started fighting
Marat keeps on with his writing
Four years after the Bastille fell
He still recalls the old battle yell 

Republicans?

In the French National Assembly, before the French Revolution, those who supported the King sat on the right side of the Assembly and were called Jacobites. Those who supported the people sat on the left.  Ironically those who sat on the left were also called Republicans.  Fast forward to today and those who support Donald Trump are called Republicans.  Republicans are in favor of King Donald? Left is right! Dogs and Cats living together!  I think I hear the clock striking 13!

The Republican Party invited bigoted Know Nothings and tax and regulation hating Whigs into their party in the 1850s, as long as they opposed the expansion of slavery. To hold onto power in 1876 they ended Reconstruction, allowed Jim Crow laws, and started nominating presidential tickets that had one faction of the party as president and one as vice president. Thus you got McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and Harding and Coolidge; Eisenhower and Nixon;or McCain and Palin. But the VP also became the president upon death or as the heir. By contrast, Democrats went with tickets where the VP slot was from the SAME faction. Less likely to win but more likely that the VP would follow the same policies as his President. FDR and Trump; Kennedy and Johnson;  Johnson and Humphrey. The lesson was  also learned by the Whigs and Know Nothing descendants  and thus you get Nixon-Agnew and Trump-Vance. But if forced that faction foem ed by those descendants lets the progressive factions in, Nixon-Ford, and even will let all conservatives tickets like Trump-Pence. Or puppets like GW Bush-Cheney. Or sellouts like Reagan- GHW Bush. 

So given the choice Power or Policies, Power won. But Power corrupts and we get to today and MAGA has drummed most Real Republicans out of their own party. And absolute corruption has won out. And winning at any cost. And  the believers in a republic are no longer in the Republican Party which has been taken over by MAGA the descendant of the Whigs and Know Nothings, who are "republicans In Name Only", rINOs.

Renaissance

 It Ain't Necessarily So

It ain't necessarily so

It ain't necessarily so

The things that you're liable

To read in the Bible

They ain't necessarily so.

It might be true, but maybe it doesn't mean what you think it means!

In high school I remember in history class being fascinated by the Renaissance which was characterized as the “resurrection of forgotten knowledge.” Thinking that only the current way is best way is the height of hubris. I think that we have forgotten much, not only that which has been resurrected but some things that have not yet been resurrected.  

Read 1491, a book about the Americas before Columbus. It is possible that the Amazon rain-forest is the remnants of a garden feeding the Incas or some other Native American civilization and what we characterize as the “Stone Age” tribes of the Amazon are merely the “doomsday prepper” descendants of the caretakers of that garden. ( IOW that last scene in Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston is correct except we haven’t yet found the Amazonian Statue of Liberty.) 

Thinking that we can’t learn from the ancient Romans or any ancient Civilization is dead wrong, IMHO. if you believe that history repeats, MAGA, then wouldn’t  you want to learn from that history, Then the saying should be “ My country right or wrong.  If it’s right then keep it right, and if it’s wrong then make it right”, instead of just “My country right or wrong” .  I.e. MAGA isn’t wrong so much as it is incomplete.  

We should think “Those Romans,  I want to resurrect their knowledge. They knew how to make concrete.”  Not just their art, but the material that made the art possible. I want to find that medieval Irish monk before the Renaissance copying ancient Roman and Greek texts, not just the poems and plays, but the concrete handbooks. 

DOGE

 

Hare Krishna (from the musical Hair)

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna
Krishna, Krishna, Hare, Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama
Rama, Rama, Hare, Hare

And Krishna is the eighth avatar of Vishnu.

To look at the Hindu god of creation, Brahma, from another perspective, isn’t he a hoarder.  If you keep creating and never destroy anything, then isn’t the bad way of looking at that as being a hoarder?  Similarly the Hindu god of Destruction is Shiva.  From a bad perspective isn’t destroying everything without regard to its value a sign of mental illness?  But at least then you will have room for anything which Brahma creates from that point.  To keep both those gods in check, there is a third member of the Hindu pantheon, Vishnu, the Preserver. Vishnu decides what of creation should be preserved and what of creation should be destroyed.  As such he appears to be the Marie Kondo of the Hindu pantheon of supreme gods. You only keep those things that bring you joy.  If you were an ancient Greek, you might call these the three fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos.

There is a lesson in this for today.  You should not only create government programs.  Some may be good, but others may be bad.  Similarly you should not destroy all government programs.  Some may be good, and some may be bad.  We need a Vishnu, Krishna, Marie Kondo, in our government to judge what government programs should be kept and what should be destroyed.  Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Marie Kondo. Isn't that the real function of a Department of Government Efficiency?.  It should be preserving not just destroying.  The problem isn't government despite what Ronald Reagan said.  The problem is BAD government, not ALL government. and you can't just assume that ALL  government is bad.  There is old wisdom for that.  It is don't throw out the baby with the bath water.  Hear that Elon Musk!