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Poetic Justice Warrior Douglas Engelbart Bootstraps Individual Production to Collective Knowledge

April 22, 2020/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

Legal justice is a system of laws, however subjective they can be, that punish vice. Poetic justice is a code of moral principles that rewards virtue and punishes vice. While some politicians are threatening the arbitrary use of government force during the Wuhan virus fiasco, and others are defending individual rights, no one is talking about the poetic justice solution to the pandemic.

Most politicos rally around the three V’s – vaccines, ventilators, and v-shaped recovery. In Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine claims that life will not get back to normal until there is a vaccine. A threat. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo complains about the lack of ventilators in area hospitals. Yet he has authorized spending billions on the failed projects of his donors. In Washington, economic advisor Larry Kudlow and his sycophants in national media are cheerleading a v-shaped economic recovery, despite their demand-side remedy for their supply-side disaster.

They fail to grasp two moral principles – production is primary to human life, and producers must be free to innovate. These principles are codified in Say’s Law, the mother of all economic theory – production creates its own demand. A corollary is Engelbart’s Law, the mother of all high-tech bootstrapping – exponential progress. The justice of the peace who married the individualism of production with the collectivism of human knowledge is Poetic Justice Warrior Douglas Engelbart.

The Ultimate Resource

Engelbart’s philosophical achievement is proving the volitional nature of knowledge, we are not merely products of our environment. We can objectively understand reality, even when political overlords try to indoctrinate us into dependency. He defines this as the socio-technology fabric.

Engelbart showed we can grasp the nature of this socio-technology fabric, and make improvements to it. With his Bootstrap Paradigm, Engelbart demonstrated that the accumulation of human knowledge is exponential, and is stored for human flourishing in the Dynamic Knowledge Repository. Technically speaking, its all part of his Concurrent Development, Integration and Application of Knowledge (CoDIAK) process.

More simply, in economics, its called prices. In politics, its called, say what? Oddly enough, the political solution to complex problems is something less reliable than moral principles, it’s their computer models. Their utilitarian purpose is to predict the future and control behavior, for the common good.

Economic forecasting to justify government spending is known as Econometric models. Climate forecasting to justify government spending is known as Earth System models. Since both have perfect batting averages for striking out, the political response to the Wuhan virus pandemic is also rooted in computer models. Oddly enough, they too were horribly wrong, and huge swaths of vital production have come to a halt.

The solution to macro social problems is human ingenuity. In economics, Julian Simon proved this in his book, The Ultimate Resource. In environmental science, philosopher Alex Epstein proved this in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. For computer models designed for physical sciences, economist Jesus Huerta de Soto proved they are useless for the dynamic systems of human ingenuity.

Moore’s Law

Engelbart’s theory of knowledge, abstract concepts derived from simpler forms, is his ABC Model. In this structure of human behavior, the simplest activity is A-level, business as usual. Its history is the Dark Ages, society does not advance. In demand-side economics, this is known as equilibrium. A-level compulsory public education was best expressed by its architect, John Dewey, “There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”

B-level activity improves on the status quo, society advances, and civilization evolves. The prime historical example is the rebirth of reason that led to the Renaissance. Because Western society began to flourish under individualism, freedom, and science, supply-side capitalism broke the chains of feudal anarchy and deprivation. Its educational philosophy was advanced in the private-sector by Maria Montessori; a system aimed at the cognitive, rational faculty of each student’s mind. In calculus, B-level would be the first derivative of speed, and C-level would be the second, acceleration.

Engelbart preferred turbocharging the “C” activity by accelerating the acceleration. In the world of semiconductors, we know it as Moore’s Law. Named after Gordon Moore, he predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year. His prediction was based on the more reliable SWAG computer model (scientific wild-assed guess), “I just did a wild extrapolation saying it’s going to continue to double every year.”

For Engelbart, bootstrapping had its own corollary, the exponential nature of human life. As living proof of Engelbart’s CoDIAK process, the science of DNA sequencing was taking shape as semiconductor performance was doubling. Concurrently, Nobel physicist and microbiologist Walter Gilbert and his colleagues were isolating proteins that bind to specific regions of the DNA strand.

Here’s a simple way to think of this, all life has three components – the memory chip instruction manual is DNA, the fat burning motor is mitochondria, and the glue that holds it all together are proteins.

The Mother of All Poetic Justice

Because of computing power, Engelbart’s Law also applies to the cost of DNA science. It now costs $10,000 to map an entire genome instead of $100 million twenty years ago. The Wuhan virus genome was mapped earlier this year. None of this was possible without capital. Capital is not possible without production. Production is not possible without human ingenuity. Human ingenuity is not possible without political freedom. Political freedom is not possible without economic freedom. Economic freedom is not possible without profit.

Profit is the poetic justice solution that is rooted in moral principles. Yet our political overlords have contempt for the profits essential for vaccines, ventilators, and v-shaped recoveries, let alone the producers who are essential to human existence. To them, it just happens, so it makes sense they would suspend the supply-side economic activity they consider unworthy.

Instead, they give stay-at-home orders, and disregard the immune system overload that is the greatest danger of the Wuhan virus. Hygiene is essential, but our overlords are silent about fortifying immune systems. While maximizing the number of low risk, healthy, highly productive workers should be the top priority, we’re sacrificing them instead, for the common good.

According to Dr. Amesh Adalja of the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Wuhan virus, like every corona virus that preceded it, will be with us forever. In fact, immune systems have adapted to countless viruses over millions of years of evolution. Known as terrain theory, healthy living is dependent on our body’s ability to resist disease. Choosing to live is not the avoidance of death, yet our overlords are addicted to germ theory because avoiding disease depends on their pharmaceuticals.

As poetic justice would have it, Douglas Engelbart chose to live. He delivered The Mother of All Demos 52 years ago in San Francisco. Its goal was to show how technology would turbocharge “C” activity, augment the ability of the human mind, and expand possibilities, exponentially. The windows graphic user interface, display monitor, word processer, hypertext, file linking, keyboard and mouse were introduced to the world; proving that necessity is not the mother of invention.

For today’s A-level thinkers in government, all of this was non-essential activity. Tell that to those under stay-at-home orders from the ignorant, power-mad governor of Michigan, while networking and performing essential work, remotely, thanks to Engelbart’s Law.

How NPR Is Carrying The Dirty Water Of The U. S. Climate Assessment, Ignoring Complex Systems.

December 11, 2018/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

On November 26th, 2018, NPR released a dire headline: New U. S. Climate Assessment Forecasts Dire Effects On Economy, Health. The co-author of the assessment, Katherine Hayhoe, a long-time Union of Concerned Scientists activist, clarifies the assessment’s conclusion in her interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday by saying: “Climate change is happening here and now.” It must be a new thing.

And it must be true, because the Climate Assessment is daunting, according to NPR it is, “the culmination of years of research by the country’s top climate scientists. It’s well over 1000 pages touching on a daunting range of topics.” Conveniently, the NPR article makes no mention of the years that were studied, the methods used to accumulate and analyze the data, or the reliability of the forecasting models.

But there are two things we know for sure. First, that the Assessment cost untold millions of taxpayer dollars, thanks to the lobbying efforts of John Podesta, Tom Steyer and George Soros’ Center for American Progress (their senior fellow Andrew Light served as a review editor). And second, blame for the economic damage the Assessment predicts will fall squarely on, drum roll please, greenhouse gas emissions.

Greenhouse Gases

The most abundant of all greenhouse gases is water vapor, and by this logic, the most insidious. Heck, its invisible, and once it metastasizes in the hydrosphere, it triggers convection currents, and these lead to clouds! When clouds become saturated with water vapor, condensation occurs, and they explode! And it rains. According to the assessment, if rainfall increases, agricultural production will fall, coastal flooding will “threaten” billions in property damage, and local governments will destabilize. Yikes.

The next most abundant greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide (CO2), which of course is the villain according to greenhouse gas police. You know, the most virtuous among us who have voluntarily decided stop exhaling (after everyone else does). According to Wikipedia:

CO2 is produced by all aerobic organisms when they metabolize carbohydrates and lipids to produce energy by respiration. It is returned to water via the gills of fish and to the air via the lungs of air-breathing land animals, including humans. Carbon dioxide is produced during the processes of decay of organic materials, or their combustion (wood, coal, petroleum and natural gas).

And it is the combustion of organic fuels that is blamed for global warming. The NPR article goes on to predict dire consequences such as wildfires, tick and mosquito infestation, harmful ozone levels, air pollution, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes.

Examples of recent headlines include: Death Toll Mounts to 60 in U. S. Storms, Tidal Wave Ruined Norway Fishing Towns, Earth Growing Warmer – Swiss Glaciers Reveal, Cuban Malaria Increases, Midwest Hopes for Relief from Heat – 602 Killed, Famine Faces 5 million in Drought Area, 7 Lives Lost as Tropical Storm Whips Louisiana, and Antarctic Heat Wave. In geologic time, this is very recent; the year of these headlines was 1934, before significant CO2 emissions began, according to Alex Epstein in his book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

The third most prevalent greenhouse gas is methane, and according to the climate crowd, it is also a global warming culprit. Thankfully, methane emissions caused by bovine flatulence in Ireland and Denmark are finally under control. Right now, Danish bovine herders are being taxed $110 per head because the cows don’t have any money, yet.

Complex Systems Defy Modeling

For most objective observers, any climate research funded by government is suspect. Has there ever been a climate study funded by government that used forecasting models whose variables could not be manipulated? This happens all the time in the world of economics and finance with their econometrics and faulty use of mean variance optimizers.

For example, did any econometric model include variables like AAA ratings assigned to subprime mortgage pools, or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buying these mortgages with less than 2% capital reserves, and thereby predict the housing crisis of 2008? Did any mean variance optimizer include mark to market accounting rules for bank stocks, or the unreliability of alternative asset class data sets, to predict the financial meltdown that began in 2007? The complexity of the systems being studied, whether they are economic, financial, or earth’s climate, have far too many co-dependent variables to be subject to reliable modeling.

Regarding our atmosphere, did the Climate Assessment’s models include the output of the sun in relation to earth’s orbit? Changes in sunspot activity? Urban heat island effects? The volcanic activity of earth’s 700 active volcanoes? Landfills and wastewater plants? One data point that was certainly ignored comes from NASA, and it tells us that Earth’s outer atmosphere has been getting cooler. I guess that’s why they call it climate change now, and they’ll blame human economic activity anyway.

It’s commonly known that Earth’s average surface temperature has not increased in the last three years. What is not commonly known, and was recently reported by Martin Armstrong in LewRockwell.com, is that the Earth’s average high temperatures over the last 200 years are below the highest temperatures recorded during the Medieval Warming Period (900 to 1300 AD). And, back then, it lasted twice as long. Must have been the bovine flatulence.

Earth Calling Environmental Globalists

Lets just keep it simple. The Earth has stopped warming, at least for now. The outer atmosphere is getting cooler, and not because of carbon and methane flatulence. For today’s globalist political elites to claim that global warming threatens developing regions the most is nothing but political pandering. The greatest threat to developing countries is their lack of political and economic freedom, such as in the Middle East and North Africa. And this is precisely why Israel is despised and attacked so vehemently. Israel’s high tech economy is an amazing success story, and it is their economic reforms that unleashed innovation that made it happen.

So why the hoopla over the Climate Assessment? According to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, the report is “tripe.” But environmentalists continue to lobby for the eradication of human economic activity, aka life. The Heartland Institute‘s John Dunn calls it a “400 page pile of crap.” But politicians need to find new excuses for raising taxes. And according to Eric Worrall of wattsupwiththat.com it is “baseless scaremongering.” But for the media, its whatever it takes for the progressive movement to control the levers of government.

In human history, the last three periods of above average temperatures roughly coincided with the rise of the Roman Empire, the onset of the Renaissance (1300 – 1600), and the Age of Enlightenment. Yet now, maybe global cooling is the greater risk. Fortunately for humanity, Western Civilization has survived and ultimately thrived through periods of global cooling that include the fall of Athens, the Dark Ages, and the Little Ice Age (1600 – 1800). Human ingenuity has, does, and will continue to overcome the challenges posed by the scaremongers.

Independent Minds Discover The Flexible Fabric of Reality.

June 18, 2018/in Articles /by Mark Shupe

“When I’m playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales.” These words are from Mark Twain’s 1883 memoir Life on the Mississippi, and at that time – a whimsical daydream. But according to author Dava Sobel in her book Longitude, “Anyone alive in the 18th century would have known that the longitude problem was the thorniest scientific dilemma of the day – and had been for centuries.”

For all of mankind’s seafaring history, cartography and navigation involved a baffling and complex system – an orbiting and rotating planet. It was a global challenge for the most complex of systems, the neurons and synapses of the human mind.

The Space-Time Continuum

The imaginary fabric of Twain’s net was first presented graphically by the Greco-Roman mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy in 150 AD. And determining latitude was relative child’s play, the laws of nature had revealed the equator as the zero-degree parallel. Yet as Sobel describes, “the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.” Ptolemy could put it wherever he liked, and he did, and in the following centuries it became a purely political decision.

It was mathematician and astronomer Galileo, whose land based method using Jupiter’s moons, finally gained acceptance in 1650. As Sobel writes “Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe. Palatial observatories were founded in Paris, London, and Berlin for the express purpose of determining longitude by the heavens.” But it was another observation of Galileo’s that changed the course of mankind, despite the political and scientific elites.

While a young medical student sitting in church, Galileo observed the motion of a swinging lamp. He timed its arcs with his own pulse, and discovered that its rate of speed was a function of the length its chain. According to Galileo’s protégé Vincenzo Viviani, “Galileo always intended to put this remarkable observation to work in a pendulum clock, but he never got around to building one.”

What he did, according to Sobel in her book Galileo’s Daughter, while a professor at Pisa in 1589, “he measured the swinging of pendulums; and he rolled bronze balls down inclined planes to derive the rate of acceleration in free fall.” This was a breakthrough discovery. As Galileo was stitching together the flexible fabric of space and time, he was also scratching the surface of the anti-Copernican Edict of 1616. For his efforts he was awarded a conviction by the Holy Offices of the Inquisition in 1633.

The World Wide Web

A century before the Copernican Edict there lived another renegade. His countrymen referred to him as a traitor, but today Lisbon proclaims: He is ours! In middle age this maverick renounced his native land. He then received a commission from King Carlos I of Spain to venture west. His Anglicized name is Ferdinand Magellan, and according to historian William Manchester in his book A World Lit Only by Fire, “he couldn’t even be certain of what he was looking for until he found it, and the fact that he had no clear view of his target makes the fact that he hit it squarely all the more remarkable.”

Like his contemporaries during the Age of Explorers, he was almost always lost. According to Magellan’s scribe Pigafetta, “The captain spends many hours studying the problem of the longitude but the pilots content themselves with the knowledge of the latitude.” A singularity among 16th century men, he rewarded those who performed well and was respected for his supreme competence.

According to Manchester, he was “meticulous, fiercely ambitious, stubborn, driven, secretive, and iron-willed. Magellan possessed an inner vision he shared with no one. He was a man of boundless curiosity, and found reality equally enthralling.” His sense of mission was adventure, but his political sponsors had a different sense of mission – property. He used them to eventually stitch together the world wide web, our flexible fabric of meridians and parallels that cover mountain tops and oceans floors.

Connecting the Dots

Ptolemy defined the problem of longitude, and in 1519 Magellan studied it as if his life depended on it, and it did. Galileo’s celestial solution was useless to navigators, but his idea of pendulums as time pieces was lightning in a bottle. The dilemma, “one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history,” instead led to “accurate determinations of the weight of the earth, the distance to the stars, and the speed of light.” As Sobel continues in Longitude, “what Newton had feared as impossible,” required not a celestial clock, but a mechanical one.

In 1714 the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act. It established prize money for a reliable and repeatable solution, and was worth millions of dollars in today’s money. It was finally awarded to a man “with no formal education or apprenticeship to any watchmaker, he nevertheless constructed a series of virtually friction-free clocks that required no lubrication or cleaning, made from materials impervious to rust.”

In 1773, John Harrison finally collected his prize, despite “decades of political intrigue, the backbiting of academic elites, and scientific revolution.” Sobel concludes Longitude saying “With his marine clocks, John Harrison tested the waters of space-time. He succeeded against all odds, in using the fourth dimension to link points on the three dimensional globe. He wrested the world’s whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.”

The Flexible Fabric of Reality

Ptolemy, Magellan, Galileo, and Harrison shared qualities that make them shining hubs among the countless nodes of the creative human network. Among them are curiosity, reason, vision, ambition, and will. In that order. Hierarchies are only in the way. The rotation of the earth is a concrete. The dark matter of gravity is a concrete. They are everywhere. They are complex systems to be understood and appreciated. The flexible fabric of reality discovered by these renegades belongs to all of us. And like them, the flexible fabric of human action is everywhere, and it is called spontaneous order. It is the incomprehensible network of human activity we call economics.

It’s nodes are countless scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, inventors, artists, and consumers; all engaged in life affirming activity, trading value for value. And they stand ready to defend the only concrete it requires, economic freedom. As economic scientist Ludwig von Mises has discovered, “In a system where there is no market, where the government directs everything, all freedoms are illusory, even if they are made in to laws, and written up in constitutions.”