How To Get The Maximum

You may notice in the pacing and topics I post, that I tend to avoid a lot of current affairs. That’s because I’m trying to focus on enduring topics, given that enduring difficulties are the source of most of the woe. Also, many others comment on daily events, and my additional contributions beyond the concepts of which I ordinarily write likely have at best marginal benefit.

However, I could only shake my head to hear that Matthew Dowd had been fired from MSNBC, and as usual the reasoning (as per a reported memo) was “made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event” (the Charlie Kirk shooting). We could all scream that Charlie Kirk himself would have opposed this, etc.; but this is not particularly about Charlie Kirk, or any of the other people I’ll mention; this is about the honesty of (not just mainstream) media, and particularly media owned for-profit, that has to collect revenue to keep going.

Just as e.g. Meta Platforms Facebook has a right not to want to cover news on certain topics, and Paramount CBS has a right not to take a financial bath on late night TV hosts, so too, Comcast NBC doesn’t have to host commentators of a particular bent or slant. The Washington Post just let some people go because they weren’t going to write in support of corporate objectives. But, the program has to be explicit (as the Washington Post was), and the factual basis has to be clear, in order for us to trust anything else that comes out of the organization. Once you promote your position or philosophy regardless of the facts, you are just another corporate lobbyist; but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide valuable input. However, people have to realize that you aren’t going to surface or emphasize other valuable information; rather, they would like to get what facts or reasoning they can get out of you, and get the rest of the facts from somewhere else (e.g. the opposing lobbyists). If they can’t rely on your words having clear basis in reality, it’s just more dreck to ignore.

And this is where a lot of these organizations are failing:

• Alphabet/Google/Youtube, Meta Platforms/Facebook/Instagram, and many other online forums, inconsistently censor data.
• Paramount CBS pays a bribe to Trump, fires someone Trump doesn’t like, and then claims finances were the reason why Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled.
• Comcast NBC is undergoing major changes, such as separating the NBC News and MSNBC operations. Naturally, it’s going to be difficult to understand what slant or take (if any) the respective reporting is going to take.
• The Washington Post is struggling with unclear amounts of commentary in “normal” news articles.

The consumer of news, commentary, analysis, recommendations, etc. usually is less informed; they are relying on our support to prepare for decisions such as:

• Engagement in World War I, World War II, Vietnam, etc.
• The evaluation of candidates for office, in advance of these momentous decisions
• Whether to take actions, such as reaching out to representatives, protesting, or to kill people identified as threats/enemies

which means our readers are not in a position constantly to sort out what is true, false, our opinion, our reasoned conclusion, our hot takes, etc. WE HAVE TO HELP THEM if we want people to take any other attitude than the most short-sighted, what-I-see-is-what-I-get, rabble-roused mentality towards the world (which is to say: if we want them to behave like anything other than gangsters).

We have to present clearly helpful information; and the way we have to present is to use our confidence qualifiers, to separate what we think are clearly facts from things we hear reported, assumed, our logical deductions, weighing multiple factors, etc. and to try to limit our word counts so people have time fully to comprehend and digest what we’re communicating.

In this most recent instance, Comcast NBC’s reaction and follow-on memo failed on several of these, including:

• Ignoring the time context of the comments (including the fact that the presenter didn’t have, and knew he didn’t have, all the facts)
• Running their mouths about a free environment of ideas as they take concrete actions to punish a speaker

If Comcast NBC executives don’t think it’s appropriate to report on emerging events because of the likelihood of error, then they shouldn’t broadcast real-time commentary. If Youtube doesn’t want to sort out truth from falsehood, then they shouldn’t be yanking videos almost at random based on rumours. If Paramount CBS wants to put the almighty dollar first, then it needs to do that when it’s clear the red ink will not stop, and those thresholds need to be communicated to the shareholders. They need to try to do what the Washington Post is trying to do: say “this is what we are going to tell you” and then tell it to us as best you can. Right now, they are failing, and the sequence of actions is consistent with a pattern of behavior that hides the truth.

Sure, if the vast majority of media outlets collapse/become ignored by the general public, that’s “good” for my and many other independent thinkers’ and small-time journalists’ careers. However, when almost every aware person correctly considers lying to be human beings’ default, the historical precedent has been the establishment of gangster rule, the most notorious of which was Stalinism. Forget about killing some activists or even an emperor here and there: Stalinism, Maoism, etc. slaughter 10% or more of the population. Our wistful memories of the reliable free press that we had been building up in the post-WWII era would be among the least tragic losses.

Corporate America – United Healthcare, Boeing, Big Tech, all these media companies, and a lot more – as you lie and commit crimes, you join the mass of national politicians, the false religionists, and all the other enemies of society. “Enjoy” your irrelevance and inability to influence whatever it is that the rest of us decide to do.

As you will note from the “In 2023, The Elites Formalized The Return To American Terror” page, things have not gone so well. A lot of what is on this site is not so useful immediately (although it is useful as a vision statement or way of showing where we are trying to go).

Consequently, although I still have some pages to publish and likely will add or even do some revision – certain things I have been working on, and would consider as necessary for a complete policy portfolio, such as an optimal taxation policy (hint: it involves refundable sales taxes) are so far away from being advisable (in this case because you are essentially extending more credit to an American imperial government running massive debt as it arbitrarily cancels student loans) that it’s not worth specific work time (vs. e.g. you are stuck inside, hit by inspiration, etc.) to work on it, vs. straightforward political activism to fix problems.

That is to say – at this point the platform is set: balance the budget, win the wars, prompt and complete enforcement of the just law. Other things have to build on those.

You might notice that I’ve been updating a lot of pages this year, but most of them are editorial, not really content. New content does appear depending on my inspiration and/or time level.

A few got drastic changes, a few got significant reorganizations, most were corrections or updates.

Over the last two years, the two areas in which I clearly improved my understanding were romantic relationships, and education. Moreover, the hostile actions of Beijing East Asia in at least covering up (if not indeed engineering the bioweapon) COVID, and the recent actions by the Russian military, obviously require changes to recommended policies.

To address these, I updated the Voter’s Guide – Total Process Selection to have relevant detail; added a number of education pages; and also added one or two pages relating to sex and relationships. (Though in this latter, please let me be clear – I added about sex and relationships because I have the willpower to tell the truth as I see it in a very important area of human life, not because I am an expert.)

I also pushed a number of pages about technique in law and a wide variety of other topics, particularly as it relates to citizen law enforcement and due process – obviously hot topics in the last two years, but they have been problems for a long time e.g. in Baltimore, Chicago, etc. and always have been worthy of improvement.

My next step is to take another round of simplification and overall update edits if I can. There now are ~140 separate pages, not counting A Plan That Can Work, and you know that I am conscious about the sheer amount of content, and its organization. Having pages full of good material and references like this, some of which you can’t find elsewhere (at least easily), isn’t as helpful if you have to constantly re-read everything to realize where everything is.

It wasn’t the most prolific year per se, but some things got understood, and committed to writing. There’s more to come, particularly on education.

So when you see a couple of missing things in metaphysics, know that is why that happened.

Across a wide variety of pages. Most were relatively minor but I did heavily update a couple of pages that got way out of date. Also I pulled back a couple of things that really needed to be reordered, that lost focus.

IMO, most importants to deal with next: need to update the V1 platform spreadsheet example to V5, need to review all the checklists and categories/classifications of roles in economies etc. and unify them, updating the source pages accordingly (e.g. later metaphysics pages are way out of sync with spreadsheet decision model).

Although I tried to place them in a better grouping, there still are elements of duplication that need to be removed, and certain documents that need to be updated. But closer to the ideal.

Sort of contradictory: you put tons of voter spreadsheets out that you didn’t completely fill out, yet you hold onto other documents you put a lot more thought into, for months and now you finally are getting around to reviewing them for publication?

As for the voter spreadsheets, I don’t need personally to fill out all the columns since after gathering the information, I already can cull it down and rank for myself (and an individual must rank according to their own value system). That is consistent with the better examples I previously completed – I’m not advocating you unnecessarily spend time filling out portions of spreadsheets when the decision has been made. The only caution is to do a quick sanity check on major items. Most of the spreadsheets were done as development work for the template, to make sure it is complete and easy to use (and significant changes came out of this last round). I don’t belong to either major political party so the primary is mostly irrelevant for me. If the decisions were close, of course I would invest the necessary time either to determine the rank order, or to realize that I wasn’t going to be able to make a strict ordering.

As for the other documents I intend to start publishing…I don’t like to publish right away, even if that means I queue up a bunch. I want to try and keep the amount of material you have to read as low as possible, given other demands on your time. That, and the usual editing considerations. If anything, I will try and grind down content further over the next year, again to save your time.