It’s Tuesday morning, the day after Christmas‒called Boxing Day in the UK and related places, though I’ve encountered no consistent, good explanation for that name‒and I’m sitting at the train station, waiting for the 2nd train of the day to bring me toward the office.

I’m writing this post on my smartphone because I semi-accidentally left my laptop computer at the office on Saturday.  I say “semi-accidentally” because although I realized that I hadn’t packed it in plenty of time to correct that oversight, I decided to give myself a wee break from carrying it.  It’s not that much of a chore, but considering how unenthusiastic I am regarding doing anything at all, I think it’s a tolerable reduction in load.

I haven’t yet signed up for health insurance.  I really ought to try to do it sometime this week.  My sister has offered to help me with it, since such processes are so unpleasant for me that I usually honestly feel I would rather sicken and die than do them‒I’m predisposed that way, anyway, so it’s not that big a leap‒but when I spoke with her on the phone yesterday, I completely forgot to ask how she might do that.  She’s over 1000 miles away, so I’m not sure what the help would entail.  I should check with her.

I certainly don’t want to go through any government services.  Quite apart from my own experiences of injustice at the hands of state and county and federal levels of government, the disgusting spectacle of how our government has run itself, and how our politics have become so moronically fractured, gives me not merely a lack of faith in their ability to carry out their roles, but a kind of anti-faith.  I believe, or at least suspect, that they will not merely fail to ensure justice and order but that they will actually engender and even enforce injustice and will, over time, make all things worse.

This is not a partisan position.  Though the specifics of their degeneracy and dysfunction differ, both political parties in the US have attributes ranging from the pathetic to the disgusting (and almost no remaining redeeming features).  They are mere mockeries of political parties that are supposed to represent the interests of the people of their communities and states and the nation.  Watching the misbegotten antics of the cretins in positions of power, it is only too obvious how much each and every one of them is but a baboon with delusions of grandeur, trying to work a machine which it has not even the capacity to understand.

All three branches of the federal government have become little better than frat boys from opposing universities at a college football game, chanting idiotic, drunken slogans at each other, getting into brawls, trying to show off for each other, painting their faces, going topless in below zero weather…not doing anything productive at all but definitely doing their best to prevent the “other side” from doing anything productive.  Meanwhile, the actual work that is supposed to be done by these people‒whose chosen and sought-after role was nominally to work for the good of the people they represent, regardless of party affiliation‒is not even addressed in anything but sound bite form.

Oh, asteroids and alien invaders, where are you?  We need a catastrophe that cannot be “blamed” on any other political affiliate to remind everyone of how government is a tool, not a fundamental entity, and that political parties are not-so-necessary evil.

The people in our local, state, and national governments are NOT our “leaders”.  They never have been.  Leaders create innovation, they march in front, they accept responsibility, and they put their personal well-being on the line in service of some (hopefully beneficial) goal.  We do not elect leaders‒that’s practically a contradictory notion.  At best, we elect managers.  These people are our servants, our employees, and we should treat them as such.  When they do a crappy job‒as almost all of them do‒we should fire them, not invent excuses to blame their poor performance on the “other side” or whatever.

It’s not really about “blame”.  It’s about actually getting the job done.  I don’t necessarily blame a person for being a bad carpenter, for instance‒maybe that person tries really hard but just doesn’t have the knack.  But once I realize they aren’t very good, I’m not going to use their services.  And even if I don’t know for certain how good a new person is going to be, if the current carpenter has less than a 20% approval rating, most random alternatives are likely to be better.  And we can keep trying new people until we find good ones.

I fear the system is going to have to burn itself down across the board before any better setup occurs.  That’s a shame, because at its root, the US Constitution has some pretty good ideas.  It’s a decent operating system*, and it has a built-in ability to be updated.  It’s certainly a better system than nearly all the people involved in elected positions based upon it, and that is the advantage of rule of law versus rule of person.

But of course, all laws have to be created and then carried out by naked house apes who are more driven by personal dominance hierarchy jockeying that serves inbuilt reproductive urges than by any higher brain functions.  Their cortexes** appear to be used almost entirely for making excuses, for post-hoc justification of actions they took on whims and urges of personal indulgence, instead of assessing reality and deciding what is honestly best to do.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky pointed out, if you enter the final balance in the ledger (or list of pros and cons) before you begin to do any figuring, all your figuring is irrelevant.  It does not provide any information.  At most, it’s there to deceive, and the fact that it serves to deceive the deceiver as well provides no absolution for the deceiver.  Reality gives no free passes.

Anyway, I don’t know how that got started.  I certainly didn’t plan to write about it.  But there it is.  I guess it wasn’t far from the front of my mind.  Honestly, if it weren’t for my children, and the children of my sister and some of my friends, I would just as soon see the whole world literally burn.  It’s going to happen someday, in any case, and if humans are just going to be carrying out their dumbshow over and over, with rises and falls of cultural intelligence, but with the lowest common denominator always thoughtlessly sabotaging the higher, it may well be a net gain simply to head off decades or centuries or millennia or eons of net misery with a return to zero.

Hope you’re having a happy holiday season!

*Maybe part of the problem is that, though the operating system is good, there’s never been any chance to reboot or even “sleep” the system.  So, it has continued to accumulate errors, inefficiencies, conflicting bits of data, until they make every program unable to run efficiently, or at all.  We don’t need to change the Constitution, and probably not even the laws (at least not to start); we need to change all the people (and the political parties).  We should just sweep them away, clearing the browser history and the cookies and the RAM and all that, and restart with the operating system unchanged, but without all the baggage.

**Should that be “cortices”?