Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

When the Ship of State Capsizes

Sometimes I get a hundred readers on my blog. Hmmmmm, I think, What's it with this? What makes this blog different from the ones that get less than ten (10) looks?. Most of the readers are non-members and it’s a mystery who they are and where they come from. Maybe they’re aliens, or government agents or spirits from the past… Only kidding, I’m slipping but not far gone enough to consider these serious possibilities. I would however, like to know who some of you are and if you have a moment, drop me a line at [e-mail].

The things I write about in this blog are things that connect in my mind that help me explain to myself what swirls about that small point in space and time that I occupy. I make no claim to any science that backs up the structures I create to explain things to myself. Nor do I think that I have a corner or even a small nitch when it comes to grasping the momentous and diverse forces that drive this Universe. What you read here is the world seen through the lens of Percy Goodfellow and while I base my views on observations they are a blend of fact and fancy, realizing that all wisdom is not reposed inside my mind. What I think is the result of a connectional CPU churning constantly, trying to link together ideas that are possibly not as related as I might be suggesting.

In the past few blogs I’ve been talking about Standard Deviation. I could have just as well been talking about PI, which is another one of those marvelous discoveries of a universal truth. At the present time I am on a diet and this morning I woke up to seeing on the scale an unanticipated weight gain. Darn! I said to myself.

Food is a good thing and a bad thing. It gives us the energy to animate our bio organism and at the same time it poisons it. Is that irony or what? What would seem to be a good thing also turns out to be a bad thing. Like in the SD construct, “minus.” When we act to make the world a better place there is a bill payer. For every gain we make something else suffers. It's a world of conflicting forces that propel us forward on the one hand and on the other plot to return us to the dust from whence we came. If we save up our money to buy a house a bunch of trees get cut down in the rain forest in Brazil. If we establish a food stamp program for those who need it, those who don’t, get on the bandwagon and ruin it. If this isn’t bad enough there is the law of “Diminishing Returns,” that I talked about in the last several blogs. As we strive to get closer to perfection, the costs double for each increment and it is all but impossible to get to that last percentage point of excellence. Still we keep trying.

In the United States we had the best healthcare system in the world. Sure, there were imperfections as there are in anything. To squeeze that one last drop of blood out of the turnip the President kept doubling down on his political capital until it was all spent. Is anyone listening to him anymore?

In my RC model airplane hobby a 68% effort isn’t good enough. It has become clear in my convoluted mind that I'll have to invest more to keep from crashing. So I make the investment to get to the 95% level which means I have to double down. On the other hand I could go sit at the field and watch the others fly, or I could fly on the “Simulator.” (I do great on the simulator.)

In conclusion “Good” is striving to make the world a better place than it otherwise would be. “Neutral is the Natural mean which is what will happen if we do nothing. “Bad” are all those unintended consequence that lurk below the “Average” of doing nothing. So, what we have is not an absolute “Good” or “Bad but a range that falls above and below the average.

“Greed,” which the Greeks blamed as behind the downfall of man’s efforts to excel is blindly striving for that last percentage point of excellence which could well be the exclusive domain of God. The cost of such a venture is unaffordable and the downfall of many worthwhile things.

The struggle is not between conservatives and liberals; it is between old money and new. It is the same struggle that got the aristocrats in France guillotined during the “Great Revolution.” In this country the old money has aligned with the socialists to get the votes they need to exercise power that will destroy the middle class. Old money in this country is hidden in trusts, charities and nonprofits. If you want to hear the liberals scream, just threaten to withdraw “Tax exempt” status from these sacred cows. The result of these struggles is that the standard of living enjoyed by the middle class will not be a benefit passed on to the next generation. What will come is an even greater polarization until the system becomes so top heavy with the disenfranchised that the ship of state will capsize as a consequence of the skewed distribution of wealth.