On god, the devil, Kingsnorth, acting good, etc.....

 "God" is a completely subjective concept, and a personification of that.  'God' is infinite good.  We need, however, the devil, to be able to 'know' god.

This is why Trump and Maga, etc. is useful.  If not for these 'evil' actors we would not be able to coalesce around the concept of good and act to promote 'good'.

My idea of 'god' comes from Kierkegaard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard

And my ideas about the need to 'coalesce', meaning our need to have directed action, and not be lost in our own individual lives completely, to act together for good, is inspired by an article about Kingsnorth. Here is a quote:

"The Machine is both an old idea and a modern curse.  As a metaphor, it whirred to life in the seventeenth century, when Descartes, Hobbes, and Boyle imagined nature as glorified clockwork.  Since the nineteen-sixties, it has been a countercultural refrain: we fight the Machine, rage against it, or feel ourselves feeding it.  Kingsnorth's conception encompasses all these modes.  He's talking about the actual devices that chew through the Earth and spit out waste, and also about a machinelike cast of mind: automatic, unreflective, content to produce and consume in an endless cycle.  Capitalism, which lubricates the Machine, has fostered a mania for measurement that has steered public policy for decades, reduced our values to financial value alone, and scorned ideas like heritage and tradition--all that we love but cannot count."

My idea being that we feel lost and unable to deal with the good parts of our life, because we don't even see them in perspective, without evil.  God needs the devil.

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20251126

How Same Sex Marriage Both Liberates and Protects us all.

For No Kings Day in 2025. 

Todd A. Marshall, put up on https://oldhippytodd.blogspot.com/

This story starts with how rulers and monarchs give us, or allow us, protection, but bind us, take our lives and property, in return for military protection.

So, must we give our lives, our children, our everything, to a monarch?

Now it's how, we allow and give limited powers to a ruler for 4 years, we do not give  absolute power of a monarchy.

How does Conservatism get something to conserve. We get our power from the country.

We need conservation to have conservatism.  And we need liberated people, life, liberty, happiness and nature.  

Anyone who has seen this country for themselves, 'sea to shining sea', 'redwood forests to gulf stream waters' realizes how much we have to conserve.  This is what it is we are conserving and defending. And it's part of our culture that we protect.

How does liberation protect us, how is it achieved and expressed?

We allow liberty and freedom of belief in any god, but we liberate ourselves from the bindings, the slavery of monarchs, gods and absolute rulers.  

So the story is now, how do we achieve this liberty and it's power to conserve us.

There are moments in history where we achieve this liberty and still conserve and protect our land, country, and nature, and our own nature.  Moments in history that often end in war, but not necessarily.

Do we need a god or a king to be conserved?  We have our land, ourself, our forests, mountains, valleys, deserts, and waters. Our nature, animals and plants, and our peoples.  Is that not enough to conserve?

We combined the history of native americans, african, asians, and europeans into one, even if violently,  but not necessarily violently, and now we are here with "No Kings Day".  The final chapter of this story.

Ask ourselves, why we need gods and monarchs, bindings, servitude?  It is to give us life beyond our own, to protect our multi-lifetime cultures and livelihoods.  Much of this has been destroyed. African American, Native American, Nature itself in many ways.  Must our rulers be conservative religious absolute monarchs?  To give us 'everlasting life'?

Or, alternatively, must we have liberation to be our natural selves, free of bindings.  We must ask ourselves, does nature allow for our freedom, does it sanction and protect our absolute freedom to love who we choose?  How is this accomplished?

We can ask our knowledge of nature to guide the answer.  Does sexuality determine love and give us the ability to marry, to bind each other in love to each other?  Or does nature do that, irregardless of the bindings of an imagined male-female polar biology?

So why and how does this particular freedom follow those other liberations? Why does the freedom to love who we choose, and be sanctioned in marriage, provide for our common good, freedom from monarchs and gods?  And the protection of our lands and nature? 

We know the answer but we hide from it's logic, sometimes, uncomfortable in the light of a new but clear day.  We acquire the strength of knowing what's right.  It is stronger than anyone's particular belief, god or monarch, or individual culture. White, brown, black, or any color in between and inclusively.

To do these things, to conserve, to be conservative, requires truth and we know there is one truth, which is our freedom to protect and conserve without rulers or monarchs, And...to choose our own god, or gods.  We cannot sanction oppression by any gods or monarchs because we have the liberated truth, the freedom of pan-sexuality or any personal belief, life, private and public.  We reject serfdom, servitude, slavery to any creed other than this one: freedom.  And this is the source of our absolute strength. 

End of story.

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Robert P. George, Remnick and the New Yorker Radio Hour, October 4, 2025

New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick with Rob George, October 4, 2025

I'm disappointed and maybe a little bit shocked by George's views, and by Remnick's lack of questioning of those views.  At least to clarify things that I think are very diffuse and ill-defined.

1) "Human Nature" the definition.

George points to human nature but does not say what it is.  He falls back on some kind of default assumption of it without defining it.

What is 'human nature' specifically?  Anything?  Maybe it's just what we think at the moment, and not anything concrete.

2) The need to fight if we disagree.

Professor George seems to think that if, for example, a Chinese factory worker and a Princeton professor disagree about something, they need to fight about it, because there is only one truth, and if we don't agree, we will fight.

This seems to be nonsense.  Truth should always elicit battle?  Where is his understanding of the subtleties of life?  The realities of existence?  Not here, it appears.  He is some kind of weird absolutist, and not just that, but a warrior about it.

Professor George does not like secularism, or also, our age of 'feelings'. So how we feel is of less importance than faith and realism.  His view that faith and realism are good and that secularism is bad, is the truth?  Well all creatures on this earth are motivated by their feelings, and Neuroscientists are exploring the connections between our physical feelings and our rational thinking and decision making.  That's biology.  Whether George wants to believe that HIS faith and rationality is above, or beyond, our biology, nature and the world, is up to him, and up to us to debate, but he goes further.  He believes that we have to battle to find one truth, obviously HIS truth, and there can be no other that is relevant in this, or his, world.  In view of the multitudes of human experiences?  Is this a reasonable view?

This is what's shocking or very uncomfortable, to me.

I think his view that 'human nature' is somehow central to his ideas, indicates that conservatism, and a delusional view of 'human nature', are intimately connected.  We think human nature, whatever it is, is bad or needs to be suppressed.  We can't abide with any flexibility or fluidity in outlook, our inner selves, sexualty, etc.

The problem with "Human Nature" is his assumptions, that our basic human nature predisposes us to think or do certain things.  His opinion about this has no factual analysis, definition, or evidence.  His 'certain things' are specifically whatever supports his viewpoint.

Maybe he thinks that human nature is the need to fight over ideas, or for men to abuse women or lower class individuals.  Maybe I believe Human Nature is to love others and be kind, and to avoid war at all costs.  Possibly "human nature" is many different things, depending on who the human is.  Does George admit to this possibility or is he an absolutist, that it must be some definite, specific thing that HE thinks?  But he never says what that is.  To be warlike if I am male, and loving and mothering if female?  This is obviously garbage.  There are loving men, and warlike women.  He does not like LGBTQI+ either, even though that is supported by science, that we have a spectrum of fluid sexuality, and that hypocrisy really exists, in that a male who wants to deny a feminine side can over compensate and be overly and overtly mean and cruel.  To think that faith and rationality are on his side and (literally) battle others about it.

Todd.

 

Exercise and weights, perhaps a misconception.

Why call it an injury?

There are articles and books that state that exercise, of the 'resistance' or 'anaerobic' rather than aerobic exercise like running, causes injury to the muscles, and then the body repairs the injury, which brings about the desired result of strength and a more muscular physique. (".." what is the word for a guy's build).

--A baby that cannot initially raise her head or crawl.  Her first use of muscles might be the ability to raise the head, which any parent raising a newborn knows about... Or learning the first time to crawl.  Is someone arguing either the the baby injures her muscles in getting the first muscular ability to raise her head or to start crawling?  I don't think so.

--What I think really happens is that when you exercise, let's say an arm for example.  If you lift a weight up or down (curl or extension) what really happens is that the movement creates chemical signals that travel throughout the body.  You can feel this sensation of the body responding to this type of exercise, it's known to work out/gym 'freaks'.  It could even be partly electrical.  These are growth hormones that cause many changes in our body.  Alternatively, if you INJURE yourself, you cause black and blue marks on your body.  Is someone saying that anaerobic training causes black and blue marks?  I don't think so...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/opinion/muscles-bodies-fathers-daughters.html?unlocked_article_code=1.J08.rLJG.Dkriqz7HORNz&smid=url-share

The Musk Trump Story, a response to Dr. Richardson

 The Musk Trump Story, a response to Dr. Richardson

20250225

  Personally I am surprised and unhappy that there is not a better understanding of the recent events around Trump since the election and what’s happening here.  Lets simplify and talk about the underpinnings of events overall, to interpret what’s going on.  I’m offering my experience to try to show what’s “behind the curtain”.

  First of all Musk was hired because he promised Trump to elect him if he would agree to help Musk with his businesses.  How obvious does it have to be?  Musk then is able to use his experience at Twitter to redesign the federal government.  That’s the story in a nutshell.  It is simple and clear, easy to understand and verify with our understanding, logic, events and facts.  No conjecture needed.

Secondly, Musk brought a team of his best programmers.  These people as we can easily assume were involved in other Musk businesses like SpaceX and Twitter.  They are highly skilled and motivated elite hotshot wizard programmers.  (The types Musk wants to procreate). Our society has had a tradition for 40 years or more, and they’re the latest representatives of that.  This work force starts with early computer companies, the 60’s and 70’s.  I’ve been doing it myself, it’s an established practice, an occupational work force that has evolved through the 80’s, 90’s, etc. from times before Windows, the ‘Dec’ PDP computers, OS/2 and IBM,  it ushered and was consumed by networking and was biased to Unix, which Steven Jobs adapted for Apple.  It includes Apple, Microsoft’s WIndows, Linux, embedded, robotics and drone technology, medical technology and all of entertainment’s digitization, and warfare.  There are different beliefs and sects in the field, beyond the original divisions of electrical engineering, hardware expertise vs. software ‘programmers’.  We get started with Cobol vs. Fortran in the 60’s, assembly languages and lots of theoretical work with languages, grammars, databases and graphics software.  Business vs. techie, science, and hardware people.

  Musk’s guys are hopefully a healthy mix of this, but they’re obviously the more aggressive of them, the type that is attracted by working with drones, robotics, A-I floating point, not to mention cryptography and forms of math that influence society.  But there are also softer more humane types of programmers that work more in the internet.  These are live (“full-stack”, back and front end), web site programming, user interfaces, and database programs that fuel the apps, smart phones,  notifications and API based work that integrates computing in our daily lives.  The Musk guys are likely more the scientific types.  They are revolutionizing chemistry and other scientific and math oriented analysis like flight.  Things like inventions that can bring us new deadly poisons or drone strikes.  Manipulation of populations with A-I.  The targeting of elections with psychological scientific techniques to suppress certain sectors of the population and tilt the vote.

  These are all obvious conclusions that can be drawn from recent history using the knowledge of how the tech industry has infiltrated our daily lives and now it targets the government itself, with this tech ‘coup’.  I’m just reviewing recent history of the past half century leading up to now.  So the goal of these tech bros, their  milestones and hopes, consists of redesigning the practices of government algorithmically, with the hope of streamlining and increasing ‘efficiency’.  These are their goals, obviously, and their methods are seemingly more opaque to people who are not experienced in modern engineering practices.  Since I have worked intimately as an engineer and software director since I started with a computer science degree in 1978, I hope to convince you that it’s kind of obvious to me.

  My point is that it’s not ‘rocket science’ to describe what’s going on because we have a long history of software development and engineering teams, at least 4 decades long, so let’s just talk about it, deal with it, follow the trail.

  These 23 year old kids running things are boisterously following regular, academic and commonly studied and taught, well known tech team dynamics.  What hard evidence is there? Well, we have seen the release of the surveys and questionnaires.  Selections and  required responses that ask:  “What did you do last week?  Describe your job and how you do it.  What do you do?”.  These are things every employee of any remotely tech oriented company is familiar with.  Even school teachers are asked to fill out surveys and forms.  It’s often cloaked in ‘Quality’ speak, terminology, and oversight.  But these guys are figuring out, diagramming, designing software to take over and streamline who does what.  Flow chart, cut things out, and see what happens when ‘leaf nodes’ are trimmed in the tree of the executive branch of the government.

The Tech Smokescreen

  Saying that the work of the ‘Doge’ team is opaque, is going along with what they want, but they take advantage of what exists already; it’s not really opaque but it seems that way to us.  It seems that way because most people don’t have tech, or engineering, work experience and so can’t follow it’s progress, procedures, mile-stones, all of that.  So the opacity is inherent in the work.  They just stay focused on what they’re doing.  It’s been done already, in case you forgot, on a large company called Twitter.  They fired or let go over half of the work force and turned it into a ‘lean’, or ‘agile’ company that just follows along and follows orders, but it is not creative research or work on the human side, it is optimization work.  It’s impressive and theatrical.

Where Are We Going?

We can extrapolate the likely evolution of the organization.  What overall changes will occur over time.  These things happened at Twitter, and are part of the other organizational changes being mandated by good engineering practices and patterns.  You can see that in the use of surveys and in the propensity to remove functionality to see and analyze the results of changes, including losing people, departments, and initiatives that they cannot easily assess and evaluate as being ‘core functionality’.  We have to calmly study and keep abreast of anything we learn.  Listen to what fired, severed, cut, people and contractors have to say about what’s happening.  What written documents like the notorious surveys say, about their motivation and methods. Lets assume the obvious:  categorization, processing, analysis is happening.  What are the areas to address?  What do people do?  You can think of it being like the old “data entry” process.  Type in the data, grind out computations on it, and get output. Test the output, make changes, and see what happens.  Rinse and repeat, ‘Iterate’.

  This is what Musk does to build his rockets, he iterates, analyzes, tries things, and most importantly, learns from mistakes.  Tech people have the luxury of being able to perform trial and error and use the resulting knowledge to get what they want.  Whatever the techies desire.

  Back to Trump, what did he get from his bargain, his ‘great deal’ with Musk?  He got what he wanted.  Another chance to  bolster his businesses and family, provide for his grandchildren, and very importantly to not lose his status as the great businessman and politician he wants to be known as.  He is reborn like a Phoenix.  To him, it’s working out just great!  But if the ship starts to sink, he does not want to be in it.  He might need some kind of life-boat.  That’s what Musk does, build ships so that we can migrate, to space colonies and ultimately to Mars.  That’s what Musk gets from the deal.  They don’t like migrants coming to our land, but us migrating to another place like space is okay with them, just in case Earth is poisoned too far to survive a growing population of techies and their followers.

  This is the story I’d like to lay out, but I’d also like to comment on Dr. Richardson’s comments equating the motivations of, and comparing Peter Thiel and Henry David Thoreau.  That stung me, but this is enough for now!

Todd Marshall.

My experience in over 45 years in the tech industry.

BSCS Degree Rutgers, 1978. Worked in software as full time or contractor at: Vydec/Exxon information systems, Atari and Colecovision games, Doswell and Carabiner in the early multimedia era of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s(the OS/2 era), Pedagogue/Saba learning and assessment, Sesame Street CDROM games, the FAA (airspace communications), Imacor Inc. (medical ultrasound devices), Horiba Scientific(Spectroscopy), Tek-Instruments(airplane transponders), RDRTec(defense radar), AstroNova,  ScottCare Holter ecg monitors.

Lawlessness, The Rich and Maga.

It's interesting how we have to again defend the law in our society, in the U.S., similar to old westerns or other old movies about crime.

We have obscenely wealthy people who owe their wealth to technology and progress.  (And liberal politics that started bailing out failing businesses in 2008, pumping insane amounts of money into the general money supply).

Elon Musk owes his wealth to his industrial skills, Tesla, SpaceX, his aggressive work ethic, and accelerated technological progress.  He is now promoting lawlessness.  Trump is very lawless, he wants to end democracy, voting rights, and equal rights, equality regardless of WEALTH.

So we are back in the primitive wild west and the America of massacring Native Americans, African Americans, and others such as women, and we have to defend ourselves and the rule of law.

A tragic but kind of logical situation given the abrupt and extreme social and financial situation we are in, again, in our society.  We did not defend our rights over the last 50 years or so, and this is how it has ended up.