Don't Stop The People, Outlaw The Dinghies

No dinghies, no immigrants.

The French, or the EU, pass a law that requires all dinghies - which will be very broadly defined - must be licensed, and that any dinghy out on the water must be operated by a Licensed Dinghy Operator (LDO) or an employee of a Competent Dinghy Owner (CDO). CDOs are Goverment organisations such as the Police, Customs, Immigration, Lifeboats and so on. Non-CDO licensing will be done at the local police station, and getting an Operator's licence will require an examination held once a year in a small hall in Clermont-Ferrand Only EU nationals can license a dinghy, and registration must be made by an LDO or the competent applicant (CA) of a CDO. Competent applicants must be company secretaries. Anyone with a Master's Ticket is automatically an LDO. A dinghy must display a license with the name of its LDO / CDO. Oddly, these licence documents will only be available to French organisations: the gendarmerie will always be waiting for those to arrive.

Unlicensed dinghies are subject to immediate confiscation by the French Police. Selling a dinghy to anyone who is not an LDO/CDO is illegal, as is transporting unlicensed dinghies. As you can guess, practically every dinghy not on a ship or used by a government organisation, will be unlicensed.

Now when the French Police see a bunch of people huddled around a dinghy, they can move in, confiscate the dinghy, and leave. No need to ask for anyone's papers. No need to get involved in debates about illegal immigration or anything else. They're just taking the dinghy. And leaving Gaston behind to make sure nobody brings another dinghy out from behind the shed.

If the dinghy does make it into the water, the French can go after it, make them turn around, confiscate the dinghy, and leave everyone else on the shore. Nobody is stopping illegal immigrants illegally immigrating. It's just an administrative law. Nothing personal.

Forming Habits Instead of Setting Goals

Despite all the hype, a salaryman doesn't need any self-discipline or inner drive. What he needs is the ability to grind and the fortitude not to run screaming from it all.

Consider how my waking days went. 05:15 - 08:00: wake up, breakfast, commute, sit in cafe, walk to work; 08:00 - 16:00: work; 16:00 - 17:30: travel to gym and work out; 17:30 - 18:45: commute; 18:45 - 21:30: supper and maybe watch a movie or a couple of episodes of something.

That leaves about two hours free time in the evening.

How much effort did I have to put into filling my time?

None. My big decision was what to read on the train.

Now I don't have a job.

Now I have to make decisions?

One thing I know: direction, plans, goals, and self-discipline are not the tools I need.

That's externalising one's motivation: it's why gurus say we should tell our friends what we want to achieve and have them "keep us honest".

That's how jobs work.

The way our time works is that there are things we have to do, and having done those (aka "been productive"), we do things we enjoy doing. Which doesn't mean lazing in the sunshine - though I bet it does on the Northern Mediterranean coast - and could mean doing things that are challenging in Millennial-speak. I'm not sure what kind of challenging I would be interested in, but I'm pretty sure You Tube rabbit holes aren't it. Or spending too long reading the newspaper (on my iPad, of course).

I think the trick is to do the compulsory stuff (exercise, walk, food shopping, cooking and cleaning) first and early, and then I have the rest of the day to do anything or everything else.

Which is a habit it will take a few weeks to form.

Goals and Plans For 2022

So given my prediction for 2022, and my expectation that what has rightly been called Covid Theatre will continue to 2025, what the hey am I going to do to improve my life in 2022? Never mind onwards?

I started to think of some things I might do, and halfway through thought these are all tweaks. What would not-tweaks look like?

When I made a list, with the usual items such as part-time work, I spotted the commonality: all of them were about adopting something out there to provide structure, meaning and direction to my life.

Let's see, I did that for 43 years.

How did it work out?

It was so wonderful that...

I don't miss my day job. I don't miss seeing the people. I don't feel lonely and I don't feel like my mental health is deteriorating.

I already did the one thing most guaranteed to improve my life.

I retired.

I have three daily goals: 1) stay sober, 2) stay as fit and healthy as I can, 3) occupy myself with whatever takes my fancy from time to time.

Maybe you would do something far more worthy and virtuous.

You do you, and I'll do me.

For the first time in 43 years.

Follow The Money vs Mass Formation Psychosis

The latest theory about why we accepted lockdowns and restrictions is called "Mass Formation Psychosis" (MFP). It says that when a population experiences a) lack of social bond and isolation, b) feels life as meaningless or senseless, and c) has free-floating anxiety, then they are sitting targets for someone offering up a scapegoat, and if the accompanying rhetoric takes, people will start to do things they would never otherwise thing of doing. (Don't mention Germany in the 1930's.)

I don't like theories that excuse people's behaviour by saying, in effect, that they went bonkers because their lives were a bit off, and were tipped over the edge by some crass propaganda.

Most people are not fragile. Most people do not go bonkers. (Except people who go to psychiatrists and therapists, who in turn come up with ideas like MFP.)

Most people do know a good thing when they see it.

So when the Government told us all to go home - well, except train drivers, farmers, shepherds, foresters, binmen, nurses, supermarket workers, lorry drivers, firemen, policemen, pharmacists, builders, telecoms repairmen, sewage plant workers... oh, actually, pretty much the entire working class, making up about 50% of the working population - so when the Government told everyone with a cushy laptop job to go home, they all went home.

Because they could sleep in and save a ton of money. They saved a lot in April-June 2020, and then what amounted to an average train fare / petrol costs after that. (I looked at the data. People who didn't have laptop jobs saved much less, but not many actually came out worse.) They saved money by not going on expensive foreign holidays, or buying takeaways at lunchtime. They spent some of that money doing up the house / flat. Parents who liked their children got to see more of their great kids. Couples who had been wanting to, um, "spend more time together", did so. Unscrupulous people took out emergency business loans they had no intention of repaying, and bought Porsches. Unscrupulous employers claimed furlough and kept their people at work, effectively getting a salary subsidy. Drama queens were in seventh heaven. Amazon brought things to your door, and you were in to receive them. Employees were getting furlough, self-employed people were getting subsidies. Most businesses were not paying rates and many were paying reduced rents. Banks gave out repayment holidays to anyone who asked. Builders, decorators and other tradesmen were making out like bandits.

What was not to like?(*)

But.

No-one wanted to admit they were doing well out of this.

Other People were dying. Other People were suffering from psychological problems. Other People's kids were having a hard time. Some businesses were closing.

Walking around with a big grin on your face would be... tactless? Tone-deaf?

Masks, social distancing, testing, Track-and-Trace, getting Pinged, not being able to see the In-Laws you never really liked anyway... these were small prices to pay for all the advantages absolutely essential public health measures for Other People's benefit. What self-sacrifice! What virtue!

The appearance of nationwide bonkers-ness was created by Government policies were badly-thought out, inconsistent and fragmentary, communicated and enforced by crass and crude propaganda. Of course they weren't gaslighting psychopaths, but that was how they behaved.

Add to that the special interest pushers, apoplectic wanna-be tyrants, strong-leader fetishists, policy dumb-asses, creepy careerists, corporate cost-savers, faceless bureaucrats looking for fifteen minutes of fame, airhead marketeers, get-rich-quick operators selling PPE and tests... all given free column inches and airtime by the usual bunch of mavens, journalists and commentators desperate for content.

The sense of crazy was entirely an artefact of the media.

So we don't need an elaborate and dubious psychiatric theory to explain why someone paid six figures to be smart, thinks that wearing a tissue-flimsy mask is effective against a nano-virus modified to be highly contagious(**).

We just need to follow the money.


(*) Yes. I am telling you that at least almost half the population actually mostly liked the first lockdown, and made the best of it, especially if they avoided the media. The anxiety was about when it would end, to which the answer was July. The second lockdown was nothing like as bad, and most people who wanted to be at the workplace could be and were. The other almost-half of the population went about its jobs as usual right from the start. The people who suffered were those "shielding", or in bad domestic situations, or who were vulnerable. That's not a large proportion of the population, but when the population is 63,000,000, it is still a lot of people.

(**) If masks work, it is because they make talking awkward and shouting almost uncomfortable. That reduces the amount of air you expel with force from your respiratory tract where all those nasty viruses live. But if they said that, you would feel like a naughty child every time you wore one.

My Predictions for 2022

I did have a longer list with more details. But it kept saying the same thing...

2022 is going to be a carbon-copy of 2021.

Mo' woke, mo' illegal immigrants, mo' inflation, mo' working from home, mo' test-and-isolate, mo' staff shortages, mo' bed shortages in hospitals, mo' pupils being sent home, mo' bullshit about everything from diet to football to hypersonic missiles and the next generation of iPhones. Mo' Taliban, mo' left-wing hysteria, mo' tax rises, mo' right wing hysteria.

Because the same people who made all the dumb, ill-informed, dubiously-motivated decisions in 2021 are still going to be in their jobs. And they will double-down on those dumb, ill-informed, dubiously-motivated decisions, because that's what people like that do.

Happy Last Year (again)

Sir Anish Kapoor On Political Art

So I quote from Anish Kapoor's editorial in the January 2022 Art Newspaper:

There is no question that the arts and an education in the arts is deeply connected to human rights, to Black Lives Matter and equal opportunity, for all...and then of course the tragedy of global warming and the 80 million refugees in our world today.

(For those who are blissfully ignorant of the Artworld, Sir Anish Kapoor is a sculptor and painter, and as Establishment a figure as could be, with honorary degrees and prizes out the wazoo.)

So I have a question. Why isn't art deeply connected to the problems of unemployment and under-employment in the UK? Or to the horrendous social problems caused by the trade in cocaine and heroin? Or to the health issues of pharmaceutical companies replacing perfectly adequate generic drugs with new, patented and therefore expensive, drugs that are not actually any more effective? Why is it not connected to the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries? Or to the issues of free speech raised by the ownership of broadcast media and publishing by a handful of multi-nationals? Why isn't art connected to the problems of dysfunctional nutrition across the world?

Or any of a thousand other issues?

Because those are the wrong kind of issues.

The "right kind of issue" meets two criteria:

First, it must offend as few people in the Artworld as possible. Buyers, curators, civil servants in the Department of Culture, journalists, gallery owners, and other assorted gate-keepers.

Second, it must create paid employment and funding amongst the "right kind of people". Arts graduates. Bureaucrats. Activists. NGOs. Artists. Documentary film-makers. And lawyers. Especially lawyers.

"Human rights" allows one to pick and choose from a wide range of genuine abuses. The Uighyrs in China are perfect: it is pro-Muslim, which pleases the Arab buyers in the Artworld, and is anti-CCP, which pleases everyone else in the world outside the CCP itself.

"Global Warming" is even better, since assigning a tragedy to "climate change" means we don't have to think about a practical solution (Rising water levels? How about building sea and river walls? Oh. Excuse me for being the engineer.) but can kick it down the road to be solved when we solve the "real problem".

"Refugees" provides lots of work for lawyers and NGOs. All the expense borne by the taxpayer. None of the inconvenience borne by the Right People inside their gated communities. It allows the Right People to identify the Wrong People, since illegal immigration is a touchstone issue.

By contrast, sorting out the drug problem means giving money to the Police, Border Forces, and other such Wrong People. So does dealing with the problems of persistent unemployment, though it's a different set of Wrong People who benefit.

Follow the money.

The Anthropic Principle (Again)

Apparently Ed Witten has abandoned all rational thought about the fundamentals of the Universe and embraced a version of gasp! the Anthropic Principle. At least that's how Peter Woit sees it.

The Anthropic Principle is an answer to the question why are the fundamental laws of physics, and the values of electron mass, charge and the other fundamental constants, so nicely tuned to make it possible for human life to appear?.

The Anthropic Principle says, very crudely, that if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. To stop that being a tautology, it is taken to mean that the values of the physical constants are not compulsory. There are many values the fundamental constants could take, and most of them lead to a Universe that would be hostile to human life. We might be able to show more, which is that a Universe that started off with one or more fundamental constants that were very different would somehow never really get started: it might never cool down enough to become transparent, or it might fly apart because the force of gravity was too weak... there are all sorts of reasons. This would show is that if the Universe was stable at all, it would have to be life-friendly.

The Non-Anthropists want the Laws of Physics to be such that only Universes fit for human life can and must form. and only those Universes.

There are seventeen or so fundamental parameters in the Standard Model, and none can be derived from any of the others. The Non-Anthropists are claiming there is a set of as yet unknown Laws of Nature / Fields / Particles, without any arbitrary numerical parameters, that in turn determine the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. After decades of work by some of the smartest people ever to walk the planet, we are nowhere near such a theory.

Suppose we did find such a set of fundamental-constant-determining laws. Would this answer the Non-Anthropists' question?

It might. But some ten-year-old would perk up and ask: why those laws? Why not others? .

The infinite regress of ten-year old's questions.

So there has to be a point at which we say "ENOUGH" about explanation, even in physics. I can safely say that any phenomenon that requires 10,000 engineers, a 13 TeV, 27-km accelerator, plus hundreds of hours of statistical analysis to find, will not be used by any medical equipment manufacturer. Or anyone else. For all practical purposes, the Dirac equation and its associated particles are "ENOUGH".

This is really the Non-Anthropists's problem. They want mo' research: to abandon smashing ever-higher energy beams of hadrons and finding no "new physics" year after year would be some kind of abandonment of the Human Project. Like not subsidising contemporary composers whose music is read more than it is performed. (Apparently actually performing one's work is passe. The Kool Kids pass around their latest compositions as MIDI files by e-mail.)

Hope springs eternal in the Non-Anthropists' breast. Next year someone may discover the Missing Laws / Fields / Particles.

I'm not saying they aren't there to be found. I don't know.

I am saying that, if we did find them, it would not help us reduce our carbon emissions, or whatever Liberal causes Non-Anthropists espouse. It would not cure cancer, or create a universal vaccine.

I guess I'm saying we know ENOUGH fundamental physics to work on all the other problems we need to solve.