Pro Commerce

Civil War Problem

I agree with many people that we have the right emotional conditions for a civil war.

Personally, there are many times in the past 5 years I would have gone out with a rifle and pistol to shoot the ‘woke’ media and government people.

Elon Musk and others are right; we have been ripe for a civil war for many years.

I didn’t go out and shoot people because I could never find the right person or place to shoot that would start the civil war.

The actual American Civil War had a geographic point of origin.

“The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina.” 

The public attitudes were geographically divided into many Northern and nearly all Southern states.  No such distinct geographic division exists today between the ‘woke’ and the anti-woke. Even the core of cities versus the rest of the nation is a poor division of ‘woke’ and anti-woke.

At one time I was tempted to call on my fellow patriots to meet at the newest federal government building on Mission St. in San Francisco and begin shooting anyone who went in or out.  But that would have killed many of my own compatriots.  It wouldn’t have worked.

The new civil war can not begin until most people on each side are geographically separated.

Who Can You Trust?

The Internet has changed our world in the most fundamental fashion.  We no longer have trust in any of the large cacophony of information that we receive. The most authoritative sources are widely distrusted.  My son calls this the ‘collapse of narrative.’

How can you trust anything when contradictory information is just a click away and virtually every institution has offered unreliable information at some recent moment?   You can’t.

I want to offer my own approach.  You have to have yours too.

First off, I trust no information I get.  I even doubt some of the things I see with my own eyes in the solid world around me.  What appears solid may not be; what appears safe may not be like trying to run across one side of a freeway with few cars on it.  I have no trust in any government source, or news media or professional association. Any argument by authority is almost always rejected; such as ‘scientists find,’ or ‘the Dental Association says.’

So how do I get a sense that any particular information is reliable? 

I trust some people because they either can-not make false statements or are leery of making statements that they are not certain of.  In the first group are nearly all Japanese, 120 million of them. They can obfuscate but they can not lie.

Who Can You Trust?

I trust data where I can see the original source, where it has not been modified, where I know the collection methodology and where I can do the calculations myself, such as the average, the variance and the sequence over time.  I have been a statistician since I taught it in university.

The same applies to all documents.  I learned at the U. of Chicago to always read the original document or to be leery if it is not available.

I trust some people who are public figures or writers if they have been totally reliable over long periods of time.

We have now reached the end of my trusted sources.  Sadly, it is a new world with a complete absence of authority, anywhere.  

Neither Wikipedia nor Google search is authoritative. In both I’ve seen pieces that were factually very wrong based on my personal experience.  In the case of Wikipedia I’ve corrected major errors and included reliable reference sources only to see my corrections disappear a day or two later.