Pushing the soft tender flesh of a friend against the sharp rotating blades of the immutable machine.

You know I'm just the guy to do it, so here goes :

asciilifeform Still boggling mind at the newest pgp hatchet jobⁱ. Why the idiocy? or rather, why was it not cushioned in perfectly logical criticism of the spec (cruftyⁱⁱ; mandates support for hideously weak algos; etc) ? Almost enough to believe that the author is secretly on the side of the forces of good - i.e. he isn't genuinely trying to fool anyone. Like the mythical einsatzgruppen kommando loading blank shells.
mircea_popescu Because they can't afford to pay smart people enough.ⁱⁱⁱ

asciilifeform Can't afford - or won't prioritize ?
mircea_popescu Can.Not.Afford.

* asciilifeform favours crackpot theory: the seekrit skvirels prefer to enlist 'pure blood Aryans' and this is a painful constraint for them.^iv
BingoBoingo Lol.
mircea_popescu That's provably false : if they did, you'd know what the definition of Aryan is.^v

asciilifeform Definition of Aryan << something like Herr Snowden.
mircea_popescu "Something like" is not much of a definition.

asciilifeform American military tradition borrows heavily from the Brits.
mircea_popescu Orly. How did they manage to enlist a tranny then ?^vi

asciilifeform Slightly different dynamic there. Any street scum can enlist as a private. I think they even removed the age limits recently.
mircea_popescu But... they gave him the keys.^vii

asciilifeform They gave him the keys << the Anglos have a historic problem, in that they never invented политрукs. Thus they have issues with quis custodiet ipsos custodes. 'Diplomatic' (intelligence) corps are still largely 'Aryan' afaik.
mircea_popescu You're trying to sell this conceptual model where in alt-Nazi Germany one can be hung for being a Jew ONLY IF working as a clerk, but otherwise, all gravy. By its very nature aryan-ism has to be universal. Too painful cognitive dissonance otherwise.

* asciilifeform returns, every time he thinks about any of this, to the Great Mystery of why our beloved phriends never, ever leak anything interestingly cryptological
* asciilifeform wants to know wtf is in 'suite A', how AES drips key bits, etc.
mircea_popescu Stan's wishlist :D

asciilifeform If wishes were atomic dirigibles, beggars would rain thermonuclear hell upon their enemies. But in all seriousness, a leak history that favours tedious operational garbage and entirely omits the good stuff suggests 'hangout'.
* asciilifeform regards hypothesis 'there is no good stuff' as unproven
mircea_popescu The stuff that was leaked so far mostly follows the "brain percentage" criterion.^viii The stuff you want to know about, three people know. Unless one of them is the source, it's not leaking.

asciilifeform Not necessarily. The inventor, of, say, 'joseki' is probably long dead - but a small army of monkeys (engineers, sw/hw production staff, auditors, etc) have access to 'the goods' - and they aren't leaking either.
mircea_popescu Small. It's purely statistical, like say a biopsy. You'll find much less pituitary cells in a random biopsy than muscle tissue.

asciilifeform At the risk of sounding like Anatoliy Golitsyn (infamous fellow who insists, even today, that USSR faked its own death) - the available, afaik, evidence suggests either terrible - or incredibly good - cryptology.
mircea_popescu Let me put it some other way. Wouldn't you expect that if MP is conversant in PGP, so would be Obama ? So that people couldn't like, you knoiw, steal his selfies from his plaintext gmail acct ?

asciilifeform Obama - no. Private cocksucker - also no. Shadowfuhrer? Sure.
mircea_popescu Oh shadowfuhrer is it. That's a contradiction in terms don't you know.^ix

* asciilifeform searches for a better term, involving puppets and strings.
mircea_popescu Dr. Who ?

asciilifeform Let's say 'reptilian king' or the like.
mircea_popescu So who was D. F. Augustus' ? The spirit of Gaius ?^x

asciilifeform Lol.
mircea_popescu You're possibly the most mystically inclined engineer I know. I foresee that when you'll be old you'll write a great kids book.^xi

asciilifeform Ahaha.
mircea_popescu For srs.

asciilifeform Nothing mystical about thinking like a proper armchair general and pondering the strength of the hidden column of enemy. When the apparent column is so suggestive of 'ablative' cannon fodder tactic.
mircea_popescu The notion that there exists an unseen reality behind the seen reality, whether right or wrong, is the very substance of mysticism.

asciilifeform For proper mysticism, the hidden side must be deemed 'unknowable'. Here it is merely unknown. It will make itself known, presumably, if it advances to the front line and 'fires' - but wouldn't it be great to know -before- ?
mircea_popescu No, that's hermetism, when it can't be known. Mysticism is an erryday activity. It somewhat shares the fate of "frustration" in the hands of popidiocy, but outside of what the reddit horde thinks, frustration is a major psychological process, the fundament of all volitive activity.^xii

asciilifeform Mysticism: 'the gods shall strike us down' ; pragmatic armchair generalship: 'that fellow might have a pen gun up his arse'.
mircea_popescu The gods shall strike us down thing is mere eschatology. Lives on a different plane.^xiii

jurov Is there a historical example of such a mastermind?
asciilifeform Perhaps I implied that a literal 'lizard king' lives. This is not a necessary hypothesis for a cryptologically-strong USA, 'lizard king' perhaps should be understood as 'set of remaining competent commanders', i.e. http://btcbase.org/log/?date=27-07-2014#772890
jurov That falls into mastermind definition too, you know.
mircea_popescu The saddest fate in the world would be for such a set to exist, in a bunker somewhere. Imagine if you went to hibernate like a bear, and when you came through all your shit was broken and unresponsive.

asciilifeform Aye. Sorta like the Japanese version of 'Manhattan project' (they, if I recall, were actually on the right track, unlike Germany).
jurov How would the graybearded dude be able to even remotely comprehend all the intelligence? Even Mircea with all his minions says it's unlikely.^xiv

asciilifeform The hypothetical master doesn't need to. He just sorta sits there quietly and bakes pills against RSA; creates diddled but internationally-appealing block ciphers; etc.
jurov But you imply he needs to pull strings in addition to that.

asciilifeform He sits and plays 'Tetris' on his handmade optical CPU.
jurov So now we know what stan's fapping to. Handmade optical CPUs.
mircea_popescu A brain devoid of spinal chord can not work. Your "mastermind", provided he exists, is drunk and insane.

asciilifeform The strings, in this hypothetical narrative, are pulled by another master - one of disinfo, whose purpose would then consist of shielding the former greybeard. This is, admittedly, merely a plausible - if fantastic - hypothesis. But one admitted by the known facts. Like the nonphysical solution to a quadratic.
mircea_popescu It's not plausible. It is entertaining, but it lacks a fundamental point for plausibility : it's unbalanced.

asciilifeform Unbalanced ? How's that ?
mircea_popescu Well let's see. Suppose you have a WoL game table. While in principle any configuration is as possible as any other, the configuration you propose is mod2, ie, if the cell index is odd, cell is dead, if not, alive. This is not actually a possible outcome.

Aug 17 00:28:26 asciilifeform This is known as a 'garden of eden state' (in cellular automata jargon).
mircea_popescu It's what I mean by unbalanced. If you take "meaning" as a rough equivalent for enthalpy, your thing is too meaningful to exist.

asciilifeform But how does this apply? My hypothetical is a historically-humdrum 'skunk works' scenario.
mircea_popescu No, it's not. Your hypotethical is a brain in a jar separated from a pile of muscle in a barrel. Which both, independently, work, for the greater glory of theoretical abstraction. This is directly contradictory to how the world works, and specifically because your abstract objects tend to be contextless, which requires too large an expenditure of "meaning" for them to exist,^xv which makes jurov's fap observation quite on point : you're not describing a real, live human female here, you're describing a mythological beast abstracted out of miles of pr0nz reel.^xvi

asciilifeform Let's give them some context, then^xvii. Picture scenario where the $maxint in U.S. cryptologic work actually resulted in something useful. But so useful that, like a thermonuke, it isn't fit to trot out on just any everyday occasion. How would this world's observables differ from the known observables?
mircea_popescu Well counterfactuals are problematic, but let's see if you can get painted into a corner.

asciilifeform Please do.
mircea_popescu Does this SU exist ? (Something useful.)

asciilifeform That's the hypothesis. What if yes ?
mircea_popescu We are already accepting your hypothesis, I'm asking you questions as if your hypothesis was reality.^xviii So admitting it exists, has it ever been used ?

asciilifeform I'd say it has not been used. Waiting to the pig to get fatter, before slaughter.
mircea_popescu So it's never been used. Is it physically located ?^xix

asciilifeform Sure. 'Indiana Jones vault' or the like.
mircea_popescu Does everybody know about it ?^xx

asciilifeform Naturally not.
mircea_popescu What keeps central government from investigating this vault as a possible alien landing site ?^xxi

asciilifeform Some small circle of people would be privy to it. Like the proverbial 'bomb codes'.
mircea_popescu Are they in power ?

asciilifeform 'In power' in as much as anyone guarding something of value can be thought of as 'in power.'
mircea_popescu But if they are not in power absolutely, what keeps central government from investigating this vault as a possible alien landing site ?^xxii

asciilifeform Familiar with the story of Jimmy Carter and 'area 51' known to the alien aficionados?
mircea_popescu Vaguely.^xxiii

asciilifeform It went entirely like the tale of Gorbachev and Andropov and the soviet GDP.
mircea_popescu Tales tend to all go alike for the reason that they're tales. Nevertheless, my q needs an answer :D

asciilifeform 'Mr. Carter, you aren't cleared for this, and if you ask again there will be problems.'
* asciilifeform wasn't there, didn't personally boot Carter - or Gorbachev - from the goodies vault. But tale is plausible. Compartmentalization of 'fun secrets' is generally easy because of the miniscule number of qualified thieves - that is, folks who apprehend the true value of the goods.
mircea_popescu But the people doing it have to be in power. Without the "will be problems" rider this fizzles.

asciilifeform More traditional question - who, if anyone, can pilfer a working nuke? And correctly put it to its intended use.
mircea_popescu You're doing the psychic thing now^xxiv, where you try to flee the experiment.

asciilifeform Just trying to argue against 'nothing so valuable can exist, it would've been lifted by now'.
mircea_popescu That's not what I said at any point.^xxv

asciilifeform Help me along then, what's the experiment here?
mircea_popescu Well, either the SU keepers are in (absolute) power, or else they are not. If they are not, the number of problems that appear is overwhelming. If they are, then they have had to have kept it historically. This is also overwhelming.^xxvi It neatly reduces to an argument pro deus.^xxvii

asciilifeform Why this dichotomy. Is it not possible for them to have absolute power to guard 'the goods' but not, say, to control other aspects of the world ? Like any ordinary guard.
mircea_popescu No. Power does not divide. This is why the government needs both the power to kill people and the power to inflate the currency, and this is why wrestling any away is enough to kill the thing.

asciilifeform So, continuing with this lemma, the 'guard' is an impossibility because, were he to exist, he could trivially order his supposed superiors to disappear forever up their own arses, should he wish this?
mircea_popescu Basically. Now, in usual high fiction this is resolved as a bizarre order of sworn monks and so on. But mind ye that all through the middle ages about half the bastards were sons of monks.^xxviii

asciilifeform This is almost convincing re: the impossibility argument. But suppose the goods isn't a generic RSA pill^xxix, but something more akin to nuke. That is, Oppenheimer & friends didn't run off to an island and form own kingdom, because their 'jewel' required astonishing resources to put into action (industrial empire) and not very useful on their own, on paper. To make more concrete: say, a factoring algo that runs in polynomial time but with a stupidly large constant factor.
mircea_popescu Sure, but then does everybody know about it ?

asciilifeform I wouldn't imagine the 'sworn monks' can keep the lid on indefinitely - only thus far. As we've seen, they succeed in keeping the lid on 'suite a' & co. Is the argument, then, that the pressure under the lid cannot be too high then ?^xxx Let's give example from outside of cryptology. It is generally known that the 20th c. 'holy grail' of nuke engineering was the so-called 'pure fusion' device. That is, requiring no fissile initiator. Official story is that both east and west expended astonishing resources on the problem - and, generally believed, that nothing came of this.^xxxi If either side had tested a working pure fusion device, in the customary 'drilled well' method, the public would not necessarily have learned of the fact.^xxxii Someone, somewhere, may well possess the secret of how to build a thermonuke using the materials of ordinary electronics.
mircea_popescu But does this SU exist ?

asciilifeform I do not know whether it exists, but posit that it could, given observables.

And so now we're back full circle. Of course it could. There's no reason to suspect it does, which is no proof that it couldn't and not even much^xxxiii proof that it doesn't. I hope you enjoyed the trip.

1. It was linked in the logs (multiple times, I'm not even the last one) to much delight. [↩]
2. Nobody seriously argues that part, crufty it is. [↩]
3. You can't begin to properly appreciate this problem, as you're sitting in your chair currently. Consider, how much would you have to pay your wife to do the things the girls do in porn movies ?

   It's not about plain, first layer stuff like taking your and your best friends' penis in the asshole ; or spending the day naked at a non-nudist beach where random people take turns pissing on her. Like any plain, first layer stuff this can always be done. Buy a length of chain, hire some people to loudly brandy about machine guns or planks with a nail, it can be done, it won't even cost very much. (Yes, yes, I know, this is not stuff you want or would ever do. Nobody cares about you, we're not discussing your all important snowflake of a personality here, we're discussing reality, which is a wide band even if your head is narrow. So take a back seat.)

   It's about the second layer stuff : having her do all that and love it, have her do all that and rush back for more, have her do all that and then call you eighteen times Thursday to make sure she'll be included in the weekend's festivities (What do you mean nothing's happening this weekend! God help you, man) and try and divine what exactly is on the menu and try and ensure that it'll be even more than last time! Much, much more! Please.

   So go over, look at the woman, come back and come up with a figure. How much money ?

   But it's not money, now is it. Not all the money in the world could compensate for proper training, for that proper placement of heart and mind that wins battles. Battles, plural, with a view towards "any". No abundance of materiel can make a bunch of ADD-addled transvestite videogamers win a war, because wars are won by actual men, as wars always have been won by men. War never changes, and ADD, transvestitism and escapism are each individually great negative predictors of manhood. (And speaking of which...)

   So no, the current USG can never pay the people that are any good enough. Ever. No matter how much it borrows and spends, never could it have enough. The reason is quite exactly the same as the reason your wife will never take two dicks to the asshole or tan her skin that other way at the beach. That reason is that these are fundamentally different worlds, and each whole, complete worlds at that. (The misguided notion that "anyone could be a whore" is addressed here, by the way.) It takes a lot of training, and a lot of talent and actual interest on the part of the subject to become that good a slut. All this takes time. Time that your wife didn't spend this way. She didn't run off with the circus when she was 13 to show everyone her only pubic hair at the time. She didn't spend every waking hour behind the cameras on porn sets when she was a well used 16 yo tramp, watching enraptured every drop of the action. It's just not her thing, she didn't put the time into it, she's not into it, she'll never be any good at it. Maybe she'll be good at other things, but generally speaking, you don't ask the doctor why he isn't a great lawyer and similarly you don't ask your wife why she isn't a great whore.

   This is how it goes for all people that are good at things : becoming good at anything whatsoever is all about discrimination : this is right, that is wrong. Jimmy is doing it correctly, Johnny is doing it wrongly. Mary is a smart cookie, Imani is a fucktard. To become good at anything whatsoever you absolutely require a hierarchy, based on oppression of Imanis and Johnnys, and on discrimination against their actions, beliefs and opinions. A hierarchy to indicate who are the masters, and the experts, from whom you wish to learn. You can't do this on your own, because you don't know what you don't know.

   Meanwhile the USG is built on principles exactly contrary to that. The USG is all about inclusion, and all against discrimination. The USG is all about "making voices heard", which stands exactly opposite to "making the idiots shut up". It's all about "acceptance" and Gini indexes, which stand exactly opposite to the workings of competence and ability. The USG is all about equality, and not grading kids, and giving everyone a trophy, and preventing "bullying", which is its codeword for hierarchy formation. All this directly means that anyone who's any good at anything whatsoever grew up in a different space. Whether it's a geographically or intellectually isolated pocket within the physical space the USG tells itself it occupies or not, fact remains, any expert alive grew up outside of the USG.

   Which makes the USG his enemy. Whether he has yet had that "moment of awareness" the soviet survivors talk of or not, whether he realises it or not, whether he's fighting the realisation or not, whatever his own contorted interior life may look like, nevertheless, the USG is all about destroying the very possibility of the world that he was born in. That's the very definition of the enemy. And now, ask yourself : how much does your enemy have to pay you to convince you to work for him ?

   It can be done, right ? It's not that hard, really. Ah, but how much does your enemy have to pay you to be able to rely on you in his hour of need ? That one time when you can just drive a length of steel through his heart and walk away, how much ? How much would it have to pay you today so that when judgement finally comes, and it is sent to hell for being outright evil, how much would you take to go down with it then, for fellowship ? How much does your enemy have to pay you for you to love him ?

   Different questions altogether. Evil can never be loved, and for this reason patriotism is such a sore word in the modern festering pustule occupying what was once the civilised world. Consequently, most people with any self awareness and self respect wouldn't work for the USG any more than they'd want two cocks probing their rectum, and when they do work for it they feel thus used. The minority without either self awareness or self respect isn't going to be very competent by the very implication of what these things mean : one can't ever get all that good at anything absent self awareness or self respect.

   So there you have it : the USG can never afford to pay enough, and for this reason it is not long for this world. Or vice-versa. All it can afford are the social sciences postdocs, ie, the people with no self respect, and a bunch of mindless drones without any clear understanding of anything in particular, ie, the people with no self awareness.

   That's all it can afford and that's all you're going to see. Don't hold your breath for the great American novel, Minitruth has Jezbel and that twerp with the global warming and it'll have to be good enough. [↩]

4. In general, when one sucks at any given task, and that one also has an overdeveloped narcisiac side eager to prevent any ego wounds, that one will claim nobility.

   How does claiming nobility go ? Well, suppose Mary sucks at parking, so after five painful minutes watching her fail to pull the car in, you kick her out and park the damned car. At which point do you know what Mary has to say ?

   "Well of course I could have done it using the steering wheel. Anyone can do it with the steering wheel."

   Right ? She was being noble, trying to use a car without touching plebeian later additions such as the steering wheel. This is Claiming Nobility : the pretense that one was trying to satisfy a set of requirements distinct from the actual requirements of the task at hand, and constructed after the completion of the task out of the errors of the speaker that failed to complete it. Generally (due to meta-cognitive issues that beset the unskilled) that hastily arrayed lot will be a) inconsistent, b) not a very good description of the errors made so that one could have still performed better than the speaker even admitting the nonsensical set of riders and c) not exhaustive, leaving various bits and pieces of practice unexplained ("So then why were both your hands on it at all times, even when you should have touched the clutch ?").

   This is what I'm seeing here. The US "secret squirrels" are leaking information at a shocking rate - the French never got owned this badly and yet nobody would share intelligence with them after WW2 because "they can't keep a lid on anything". This complete and utter failure can only be explained by a complete collapse of the system, because not being able to acquire anything valuable is one thing, which may be related to the enemy's hardness rather than your own incompetence, however an inability to keep your own, arbitrarily generated secret documents secret is disqualifying. Think of a second generation rich kid that never manages to extend the family fortune his father made, but keeps it safe. Think then of his son, third generation rich kid, that never manages to hold on to any part of the family fortune his grandfather made and his father kept. We are here. [↩]

5. Quite. You see, the larger something is, the more observable it becomes. This rule can not ever be broken, and this is why apparent failure for no apparent cause can not ever be explained by "a cause so large".

   To best illustrate this problem, consider you're watching a work of fiction, say a crime mystery. Someone's killing butlers all over the place, horrifically beheaded and with the head missing. Imagine now that an hour into this thing, it was explained that nobody is really killing the butlers, they're all dropping dead because they said the word "it" and if anyone says the word it the knights of Ni pop out of nowhere and take his head.

   Wouldn't you expect to have noticed this earlier, like for instance at minute 1:12, when the narrator said "it" and there was no blood gurgle audible ? If in fact there existed such a rule of the universe, you wouldn't find out about it examining the minutia of butler disappearances in well to do mansions, but quite a tad sooner I daresay. [↩]

6. Remember private Charlotte Manning or whatever it was ? The guy with the redditesque "doubts" about things and everything ? [↩]
7. No argument, anyone can make cannon fodder. But this guy was no cannon fodder, now was he ? He wasn't in the front line, naked but for the rifle, skirmishing with the enemy. He was in fact at a safe location, some place other people were tasked with dying to protect.

   Getting back to the earlier point : how would you feel if you were an absolute expert, minutiously perfect, hired to do a job by the USG, which position you somehow accepted, contrary to the earlier discussion. Say because you're young and that makes you an idiot. But at your workplace, there's another guy, doing nominally the same job, on the same pay grade, who got there because he's black and the USG must has token black people in the white house. He's not doing anything useful outside of being you know, a complete moron, and in this making the USG's communist dedication apparent to potential critics/comissars. Would you tend to stick to your minutious perfection on the long term, or rather just go boozing with the morons ?

   Self respect shot by self awareness, huh. Well, so there you go, that's why it can't happen. It just doesn't work that way.

   How many minor infractions do you suppose were created in private Manning's workplace by the fact that he had "doubts about his sexuality" which failed to result in immediate canning and complete social mortification meanwhile ? It's obviously not the place of the guard to go, "I'm sitting here guarding with my life a bunch of trannies boozing in there" and get all depressed - he's merely a guard, and for all he knows that's how you crack codes : wearing a skirt and pouring Martini after Martini in the enema bag. However, it would be your place to observe that look at that poor guard, sitting there ready to die to defend - what ?! This fucktard ?

   Oh, I see, such wouldn't have been nice. Great. Go be nice all over some "research" you made explaining all about how being nice trumps being good, and how you don't really need discriminating minds and steeled hearts to be good at anything practically useful. Preferably make that research based on a song you wrote based on some lyrics you wrote, and for bonus points include "Black and white are the same color" and "I've never been punched" somewhere in there. I'm sure Mommy will applaud and what difference does it make that this psychotic dynamic is what made Daddy leave ? Love is all you need, eh. [↩]

8. There's a major point we conveniently won't go into : most leaks so far have been predicated on a desire to prove the value of a stash. If I have the complete collection of your daughter's emails, and intend to prove this to you, I will not show you her naked selfies, for two main reasons. One, that you are probably ill equipped to judge if they are authentic or not, and the other because sharing them actually lowers the value of my trove. Instead, I will go for exactly boring operational details, showing you that I know that she went with you on a dad-daughter trip and the train was late exactly 8 minutes should be enough for my needs.

   The fact that the naked selfies do exist and are in fact leaked can be judged publicly through all sorts of indirect means. Perhaps the best example today would be the HeartBleed headshot. [↩]

9. For the exact same reason Aryanism has to be universal, let's work these together.

   The whole concept of a Fuhrer as practiced by the Nazis is all about public image. As the actual shadow points out in a recently reviewed film, "You don't hold elected office in this town. You run it because people think you do. They stop thinking it you stop running it."

   The point of the Fuhrer isn't that he's any good - which emphatically he was not, neither the original corporal nor the ulterior bank robber (you know him as Stalin) or shoemaker (you know him as Ceausescu) or whatever other later clone. All these people trying to reenact the Augustan model of governance weren't personally very inept, of course, but they were not in their position because of anything to do with their ability. It wasn't a position merited in any conventional sense of that term.

   Instead, they were in the position because their face was on the coin, so to speak, or more plainly, because any system large enough and complex enough needs its own MP, which is to say one in whose hands the buck always stops, guaranteedly. Just how competent or incompetent or tall or sexy this person is matters not, what matters is that he predictably satisfies a need of the system, which is to not have any circular graphs : his inclusion in any graph means the graph is not a cycle and this allows the system to continue chugging along without getting lost into infinity.

   This said, obviously a "shadowfuhrer" is exactly like dry water - a thing that could never be. Even admitting water somehow "were" dry, it still wouldn't be water in any sense, because the reason you even drink water in the first place is that it's wet, and its wetness is specifically and as such required by a gazillion little processes going on constantly inside your body.

   Aryanism as a concept is no different, because it works very similarly to the Augustan model : it's a direct, simple, DIY means of social hierarchy. In most societies it matters not what the hierarchy actually is just as long as it exists, or to quote #7 in #bitcoin-assets +m,

   The #bitcoin-assets aristocracy is not incompetent. Whether in anyone’s estimation others not named are just as or even more competent is immaterial : arbitrariety is not the problem, incompetence is. The #bitcoin-assets aristocracy is not particularly fixed, at least in the sense of it being extensible (in fact the list was 25 names long earlier). Therefore, objections on this line will have to be a lot more refined than simply “it’s undemocratic and therefore bad” or “it’s unrepresentative and therefore evil”. Reality doesn’t work that way.

   So, are you whiter than him or darker than him ? If whiter, you go before him, if darker after him. Problem of "who goes first" solved, and inasmuch as it's an irrelevant problem anyway, it doesn't matter how it's solved just as long as it's solved. The Arabs implement this exact solution, which is why I never saw buluceala in their very popular mosques. The Romanians do not implement it, or anything else, and as such buluceala is their way of life and they wonder why nothing can ever get done because all available time and any available resources get wasted in an effort to sort a group. (The Italians are the exact same way, by the way, and from what I hear the Greeks idem.)

   It should be obvious now why partial Aryanism defeats the entire purpose : if there's cases and modes, you'll get the same buluceala of people, with the only difference that they're arguing your cases and modes rather than whatever (exactly identical) nonsense they'd have argued otherwise. So might as well not have it then, not like it makes a difference, and so if it doesn't make a difference it can't pay for its lease on the domain name, so to speak. In other words, nobody would remember its name or call it by the name if it doesn't do anything. This is why you have a name to distinguish a knife from a fork, but all rocks are equally rocks to you. Unless, of course, they're boulders. [↩]

10. The hint here is that this theory is unfalsifiable, as it can be proposed equally well about anything any everything everywhere. In being unfalsifiable, it's not an actual theory. [↩]
11. He has the exact proper brand of in depth understanding of the clockwork of reality and on the same hand fascination with the unseen. This is exactly what kids go for, and exactly what they should go for. It would be a great kids' book. [↩]
12. And similarly, the implication goes, is mysticism a fundamental part of thinking. I am aware it got a bad name, but for that matter what hasn't ? Anything difficult, anything disrespectful of the mediocre man, anything disinterested in his aspirations and expectations gets a bad name. Money got a bad name, for christ's sake. Whores got a bad name. Anything worth doing, anything right and proper in this world got a bad name, what the hell would come to pass if we started taking "bad names" to heart ?

    Any sixteen year old knows that "a bad name" simply means worthwhile, interesting and potentially fascinating. Any sixteen year old that's not going to end up a mediocre accountant as the pinnacle of his achievement, at any rate. [↩]

13. The proposition that there are things unseen behind the things as seen is a matter of ontology, it discusses existence. The proposition that the gods will strike us down is a matter of phenomenology, it does not discuss existence but action. They really have nothing to do with each other, and on a more general note : it is always a good idea to note the type of words and make sure you don't mix them unduly. For instance, explanations of ontological issues in phenomenological terms are always defective, and so can be the attempt to explain phenomena in terms of οὔσῶν, especially if executed by pedestrians.

    (To save you some quiet contemplative work with the books, catstyle : ὄντος (aka ontos) is the masculine genitive singular present participle of εἰμί (eimi), whereas οὔσης (ousia) is the feminine. This entire discussion has nothing to do with its rich tradition however, we're merely using οὔσῶν, ouson, as the plural masculine, in the tradition of using the plural masculine to denote the kind. So, "things of the kind of things that make ontology". Isn't flexion a thing of splendor ?) [↩]

14. To make sense of the world one rests on the most unlikey device of all : summarization.

    Take your ears, for instance. They are pressure gauges of a particular, very refined kind, but pressure gauges nevertheless. Yet most pressure variations your ears actually detect, you never hear, and this functional deafness allows you to go about your life, without being tuned 24/7 into the audible equivalent of white static noise.

    All data gathering is in fact measurement of something, and all comprehension of anything at all rests on a filtration layer that rests between the gathering of measurements and the creation of stimuli. So - perhaps you could hide the greybeard in a bunker somewhere, the rough equivalent of the cranial box. And perhaps you can hide the measurement units all over the environment, they're perhaps indistinct enough to be unremarkable. But the interlayer ? What of the interlayer ? Those things that know enough to know what not to relay, where do you put them ? [↩]

15. Admittedly all this is beyond vague. Let's see if we can work it together.

    Suppose you're God. Seeing how you just found this out, you count as a noob. Seeing how you're smart enough to be on Trilema, you're probably also not the sort of retard that starts immediately building a whole universe on his 2nd minute as a God. So you take it slow, decide to build a romance novel first.

    Can you ask your readers to believe your male hero is a socially marginal, insecure klutz ? Yes, you can. Easily. It'll not cost you anything, in fact, the readers will pay you to ask them to believe that. So this much is +EV and you even have a little capital to work with, which explains why you never read male-pov romance novels where the male is supercool (well, except for Trilema, but anyway).

    Can you ask your readers to believe your female hero is a (and I quote), "buxom blonde with flowing hair" ? Yes, actually, but it will cost you. Not that many human females are blonde, most are brunettes. Admittedly you're not asking for redheaded miracles here, but still. Buxom, for any definition of the term, is also quite rare, and there you go, you've wasted your little capital and are headed straight into the red.

    Now, on strict statistical terms, there's hundreds of millions of blonde chicks out there, and out of them millions have double D tits or heavier. So what's the big deal, right, this is merely the story of one among millions! Well... the trouble is that you've run out of capital, suspension of disbelief is work, and work is capital, so there you go. Fair or unfair, capitalism is capitalism.

    So now : can there exist an unicellular organism that moves about in its environment ? Turns out that yes, there can, and moreover there does. But can there exist an unicellular organism that lives in a cave, outside of any contact with the Sun at all ? (This is trickier than it seems, because all Earth energy cycling is backed by the solar FED, and without it you may not live long) Turns out that yes, there can, and there do! But can there exist multicellular organisms that live in such a sealed cave ? Yes, there can, and yes, they do. But... can there exist mammals ? Yes, actually, there can exist mammals. Except... they don't actually exist. Zing!

    The reason for this is that "the Earth" (understood as all the planets with life on them in the Universe) is not currently large enough to allow for the certain theoretical possibility of a cave large enough and old enough to have given rise to cave mammals. So : it's not sufficient for a posited alt-thing to not break the strict laws of nature that show "such a thing could never exist". It's also necessary to navigate the proportional laws of nature, that show "such a thing would require Y to exist". If your thing can exist according to the first pass, but could only actually exist if fifteen billion years were spent in evolution to reach that point, zing! The universe's not yet old enough, come back in a billion years or two. How do you like that ?

    And now we are equipped to understand the "meaning" comment : you see, all living things are meaningful in the sense any prototype is meaningful : if you give it to an engineer that engineer could tell you things about it. These things are not random strings, because if you give the same thing to a different engineer, he may tell you different things, but not different enough to feed a cryptographical application off their output. If the prototype you need is too meaningful it may readily be too meaningful to exist. Make sense now ? [↩]

16. Sure the super-heroine that cooks very well, enjoys her bukkake work and is a F1 pilot by day could exist, just like the sharpshooter specialist in classical Greek literature with a side of stockbrokering could exist. The odds however are too one in ten trillion for the mere ten billion population of the planet to provide. We have enough trouble getting eleven people together that can well chase a leather ball, let alone these sorts of SF works. [↩]
17. As to the contextless point, let me explain through sharing memory.

    Chitlin MP : "Dad, can you stop an antenna from broadcasting ?"
    Dad of MP : "Cut its power."
    Chitlin MP : "No, I mean from outside."
    Dad of MP : "What antenna ?"
    Chitlin MP : "Just an antenna."
    Dad of MP : "Sure. You need a jamming device."

    You see, making a jamming device for a specified antenna is one thing. Making a jamming device for any antenna is a scary project that as as far as I know has never been seriously undertaken. Now try and do it without any buttons, which is to say, make not an adjustable jammer, but a universal jammer. One that doesn't use an infinity of power, of course, and that's sustainable over time, of course. Note that we don't specifically know this to be impossible, either. Nevertheless, contextlessness always increases costs.

    This is exactly how it goes for masterminds, too. A mastermind, just like that, no further context is very infinitely hard to build. [↩]

18. A little game of oracle. It works in philosophy exactly in the way you'd expect an oracle to work, from all your cryptography experience. Because really, they're the same exact thing. [↩]
19. First, we establish if it's part of history. If it were part of history, we'd approach it with the usual tools of historical investigation, the blades well sharpened in massacring bubuli and other parahistorical mythologies. As it isn't, we proceed on the triad, first by examining if it's part of ontology, then by examining if it's part of gnoseology. Because, you see, a thing that's not physically located and that isn't known about therefore exists as part of metaphysics.

    And mind that these questions are harder than they seem, because they don't allow much escape. For instance, say something exists somewhere nobody's ever been. Well... how come ? Why is that ? How did it get to be there ? Why does it stay there, and what happens the day someone stumbles upon this enchanted Amazonia where women actually somehow are fit to rule and yet don't wear bras ?

    Similarly for the gnosis, what do you mean something exists in only a single person's mind ? How is this possible, for it to at the same time not be the product of insanity and yet to be irreproducible ? The hardness of this question is customarily shown by so called "brain wallets" being routinely exposed, because guess what : if you can think of something, odds are that so can someone else. That's why discoveries happen eventually, sure some may be delayed absent the particularly clever mind that made them, but delayed indefinitely ? Why and wherefore ? [↩]

20. If they do, how come I don't ? If they don't, how come they don't ? Plenty of people's job is to know. What happens when they discover it ? [↩]
21. Cause they don't know wtf it is, right ? What if you found a box in your living room, that you didn't put there ? [↩]
22. You see, this is the unmitigated value of this particular approach : proceeding from the universal to the particular, we wring out all details until there's no place left to hide. It's quite powerful, and it is in fact what gave reason its good name. This exact ability is what made white men more than all other colors, historically, and this exact ability is the precondition of equality for all men today, irrespective of their skin color. If you don't have it at the ready you're a nigger, no matter how your mommy and daddy looked. [↩]
23. This is a term of art really, it indicates to the OP to supply a definition of the thing, which will be accepted as such going forward. [↩]
24. Psychics and the proponents of meta-whatever are notorious for their dedication to escaping rational scrutiny, so much so in fact that Randi ended up offering a thousand or so Bitcoin as a prize for anyone that can offer any sort of verifiable example of such magics at work. [↩]
25. Because I haven't, I have no particular investment either way, for all I know la vie est ailleurs and all the cool chicks are already dipping their feet in the cool pool I don't even know exists. [↩]
26. There are more problems than that, but generally speaking the thesis is that whichever way you go, you encounter a bridge which you can't cross unless you cross your historical path that took you there. [↩]
27. Ie, that God exists. [↩]
28. It's all an application of natura non facit saltus, which is why you can't have an infinitely large rock housed in an infinitely tiny box, nor can you have a ten ton bridge propped by a toothpick, nor a number of similar things. Not that these don't make excellent fiction, of the cartoon kind (which is what all pornography is, incidentally). But fiction is one thing.

    Two important Romanian articles make this cartoon point much more substantial. One is 2012's Peripateticieni gen, cu deosebirile ca fete nu baieti, in pizda goala nu-n toga si prin casa nu prin gradina, da-n rest tatatat la fel, with a bunch of teary girls and a dead rabbit. The other is Cel mai adevarat in gangsta rap, about truthiness in gangsta rap. [↩]

29. You'll perhaps notice that it matters very little what the goods actually are, I've made no assumption about their nature all through the conversation. [↩]
30. Sort-of, actually. [↩]
31. Similar holy grail, the water engine. Official story is similar, crackpot story is that GM and others conspire to this day to keep the lid on the water engine. [↩]
32. Like it worked with cellphones, microwaves, the Internet and flight. And rohypnol. And everything else. [↩]
33. It's "operational proof", as per Occams' razor and all that, ie something one needn't be concerned with.

    This incidentally is a large part of what sunk the US, a procedural approach to creating "operational proofs", these proofs that aren't proofs but are arbitrarily deemed "good enough" to proceed on. [↩]