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I've ranted before about the ridiculous nature of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) a holdover from the Obama era.

It's primary gimmick is the following: it isn't dependent on funding from US Congress. At one time, it even used to be independent of the US Executive Branch until a court ruling in 2016 that the US President could fire the head of the agency.

A three-judge panel on the 5th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled this week that the CFPB's structure is unconstitutional because Congress has no control over the agency's budget, which is funded entirely by the Federal Reserve. Under the terms of Dodd-Frank, the CFPB is entitled to receive a budget totaling up to 12 percent of the Federal Reserve's annual operating expenses, and the Federal Reserve is not allowed to refuse the CFPB's requests for funding.

Now, that funding model has been used to reverse a ruling by the CFPB as unconstitutional with the potential to put all its rulings since formation into question on the same constitutional basis.

Why it matters: The reasoning behind the ruling, if upheld, could potentially invalidate all the rules enacted by the CFPB over its 11-year existence — including regulations underpinning the U.S. mortgage system.

This is one of the big reasons I oppose the passing of bad law even when it serves a concrete good. It can take a long time to fix the massive problems that such law brings.

And note that a key argument by the court was that there was no precedent for the CFPB's unconstitutional structure. If there had been other agencies with similar setups, this could have been very hard to overturn. Similarly, the CFPB is a precedent for future breaking of the US Constitution along these lines. Without the ruling, there would have been a stronger case for future misdeeds of this sort.

On the opposite bank of the Yellowstone River, I observed 4 or possibly 5 otteron particles had merged into a quantum incompressible fluid which would occasionally degrade into a multi-headed classic fluid and then reform.

I believe the unusual, extreme fluid had been created by subtle interactions of a persistent pressure field generated by touron particles on my side of the river which were taking extensive telephoto shots of the system and a strong attraction field from the river.

This is supported by the phase transition to a classical fluid occurring simultaneously with a otteron-looking-at-tourons behavior - indicating that there was a substantial interaction with touron fields and that it was linked to the quantum/classical oscillation.

This reminds me of my observation of a well-compressed, high temperature classical elkon gas system which I speculate had been under pressure from predatoron fields outside of my region of observation - grizons or wolfons being the likely candidates. A small number of neighboring tourons may have actually been acting in second order as a limited attractive force in this case too, since predatorons are repelled more strongly by touron fields than elkons are.

Perhaps, a combination of attraction and repulsion fields are necessary for this sort of dynamics to establish itself. Both sorts of particles mentioned above are strongly self-attracting as well, which probably is an essential pre-condition for the establishment of these sorts of fluids.

The non-classical nature (and also the incompressibility) of the multi-otteron field was surprising since this researcher expected otteron particles to remain distinguishable under the circumstances. Otterons tend to easily achieve high excitation energies which would cause the group to readily transition to a gas. That this didn't happen for several minutes of observation (the transitions to classical dynamics were brief and resulted in no expansion of the volume of the system) was very interesting and hints at unknown physics. I dimly recall that if one cools the system to liquid nitrogen temperatures, the otteron particles become sessile and classical - that is, easily distinguishable from one another. This system actually enters a quantum regime as temperature increases, which is an extremely rare phenomena!

As a side note, the elkon gas cloud exhibited the genderon symmetry breaking typical of elkon dynamics with the cloud consisting solely of doeons. I didn't have tools available to distinguish genderon state of the otteron particles, but the establishment of quantum dynamics may mean that the otterons didn't have such, or that the factor being quantitized was independent of genderon field dynamics somehow.

Given how often libertarians are mentioned here, I thought this would be interesting. And maybe there's some people with a lot more insight into what's going on.

A few months back (May 29), the national leadership of the Libertarian Party (the "Big L" political party, not the "small l" belief system) was taken over by a group called the "Mises Caucus". While their platform seems to be a mundane version of a normal platform.

In recent days, there's several state level "rebellions" which seems to indicate that the schism between the old guard and them isn't going away any time soon.

For me, they do seem to tilt at absolutist windmills rather than do stuff they want done - which is a common libertarian flaw. And the implicit emphasis on Mises economics is a huge problem for me. Their stance against vaccination and supporting Trump's allegations of election fraud seem pretty shifty.

OTOH, the previous leadership didn't seem all that interested in libertarianism. Maybe this will shake things up in a useful way?

So what are peoples' takes on this?

The first observation is that the people talking the most about the treachery of media sources gobble up naked propaganda without a second thought and can't argue their way out of wet paper bags. There's this huge chasm between the talk and the walk, particularly among the AC. For example, there's this classic Orwellian example:

It's on their border, and there is a high probability some of that Ukrainian shelling may have crossed over, all bets are off in your phony little "morality" play here. You really are quite the desktop warrior, eh?

There's this insistence on the "high probability" of a possible act that could tenuously be considered provocation for some sort of Russian military action, followed by absolutely no real world evidence of Ukrainian shelling over Russia's border (during the pre-2022 era) in the huge number of posts that followed. This was a common tactic in the thread, introduce arguments and then never mention them again - after they fall flat, though there were a few loyally carrying the Ukrainian nazi argument to ludicrous levels. The real argument was a repeated baseless accusation that I was somehow repeated mass media claims, or western propaganda and lies. And of course, the usual idiotic conceit that if they had ever presented a rational, well-informed argument, it would go unappreciated on me, the sole reader of SoylentNews.

My take is that when all the terrible reasoning and arguments are on one side, maybe it's because the side is deeply flawed in some way. I think for this war it's because the pro-Russian side can only hold its viewpoint via a complete abandonment of reason and morality.

Second, for an example of what we can learn from biased media sources, the Kherson counterattack appears to be happening - both Ukraine and Russia have claimed it is ongoing with very different spins on how well it's going down. But there's a few things I can figure out from this even in the presence of such a fog of war. First, it's a hugely telegraphed and slowly implemented attack by the Ukrainians. That's usually a very strong indicator for failure. If the Russians can't take advantage of that, then they are really terrible even by their past performance in this war. Also, the Russians must really be in a weak position, if it's even possible to get to this point where a snail-paced counterattack can go this far. They might really be terrible enough for the attack to succeed.

We're also starting to see signs of terribleness elsewhere. For example, the US is thought to be running low on supplies of ammunition that they're providing to Ukraine like the HIMARS rockets. I think this illustrates the terrible nature of US military procurement. I think other countries face similar trouble. The military industrial complex is great for sponging up public funds, but not so great for supplying a significant war. Maybe this war will clean out some of the glaring weaknesses in various western militaries, including Russia's, but I'm not hopeful.

Added: Ukraine is tight-lipped now (September 2). My bet is that if they were rolling up Russian lines easily, they'd be non-stop talking about it. So this is an indicator that things probably aren't going well. Absence of propaganda is another way one can use a propaganda source to glean genuine information.

Finally, there's the lunacy of Russia's actions have disrupted the world and status quo in ways that harm billions of innocent people: threatening the food supply and bringing humanity to the brink of nuclear war. My premise is as follows:

• There were peaceful, beneficial ways for Russia to pursue its interests. But that would run into the inherent contradictions of the Putin regime, such as trying to build a powerful Russia while simultaneously robbing it blind.
• Just because someone has an existential concern, doesn't make it a serious one. It should pass a rational person test - would a rational person believe the same in the circumstances. For example, it has been claimed that Russia needed to invade Ukraine before it was invaded by NATO - to avoid the "Stalin mistake" of not invading Nazi Germany before Nazi Germany invaded them. Well, that fails the rational person test. Even now, with Ukraine fighting with NATO weapons, there's no move to invade Russia.
• Threatening with nuclear weapons over penny ante shit. Sure, if Russia had a reasonable existential concern, then they could at least have a reasonable pretext for such a threat. But just mooching some Ukrainian land? That's garbage.
  
  On that last bit, do we really want to live in a world where nuclear threats are an automatic i-win button for stealing shit? There should be consequences else we're just paying the Dane (no offense to modern Denmark, but some of your ancestors were a bit scruffy).
• Is it too many to expect that rivals play smart and employ peaceful means to overturn the status quo/unipolar/hegemony rather than kill large numbers of people in venal and often counterproductive conflict?

You can whine about how unfair the mass media, western propaganda lies are, but well, there's this serious problem that we need to do something about before it tears apart our world. My take is that with a focused effort on development, most which doesn't even need to involve government action at all, we can make everyone in the world vastly better off. But the Russian invasion and its tremendous fallout helps hold that back. It makes the world a more terrible place.

I ran across a recent study ("Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views on controversial scientific issues", published July 2022) that had some interesting results. The study asked subjects to rate their opposition to some scientific claim that is generally held to be true (a "consensus"). They then asked the subjects to evaluate their own knowledge in the area and finally tested the subjects on their actual knowledge of the subject. This resulted in a three value data set of "opposition", "subjective knowledge", and "objective knowledge". The opposition questions are listed in the above study.

For example, one on GM foods:

"Consuming foods with ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming foods modified by conventional plant improvement techniques."

The primary conclusion is that for a number of claims that are generally held to be true by consensus, opposition to those results show interesting correlations: opposition correlates negatively with objective knowledge (what the final test indicated that the subject knew about the field), and positively with subjective knowledge (what the subject thought they knew about the field). Those who were most opposed tended to exhibit a large gap between what they knew and what they thought they knew.

Here's the list of subjects and then I'll get to the punch line:

• GM foods
• Vaccination
• Homeopathic medicine
• Nuclear power
• Climate change
• Big bang
• Evolution

Which one wasn't like the others?

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Climate change!

The question was in the same vein as the rest:

Most of the warming of Earth’s average global temperature over the second half of the 20th century has been caused by human activities.

Unlike every other field listed in this research, there was a slight positive correlation between opposition to the claim and objective knowledge of the subject (see figure 2).

What other consensus viewpoints are out there where agreement with the consensus correlations with greater ignorance of the subject? Economics maybe?

Once more, we have journals about the alleged insurrection of January 6. My take on that is that even if you're a US poster, the US is a free country and thus, you are free to be idiots. I'm also free to tell you that.

But you miss the real story. I quite agree that Trump riled up a bunch of loyal supporters and pointed them at the Capitol. I quite agree that he and his lackeys then dragged their feet on defending the Capitol from a riot that he caused. Those are shitty moves, but genuine politics - meaning any supporter who put up with his shenanigans (he's done worse) to that point isn't going to be concerned about some more shenanigans. Maybe it even rises to the level of insurrection though I'd like to see more there than some impotent whining that Trump didn't sign a confession.

The nasty move is near instantly throwing those supporters under the bus. This is the real Trump. They did what Trump wanted them to do and now they're fucked without a word of encouragement or any other support from Trump. Same goes for the people who filed all those useless lawsuits.

He's over it.

Here, we have naked betrayal of his most loyal followers - rewarded for their efforts with prison time and huge fines. If Trump's critics can't run with that, then we need a new batch.

A couple days back, we had a reapplication of the flawed idea of the paradox of tolerance - the idea, promulgated by philosopher Karl Popper, that if a community or society tolerates intolerance then it will eventually become an intolerant society - the alleged paradox is that tolerance leads to intolerance.

I disputed the idea then, but I think it's worthy of a more thorough thrashing. So I'll start with this post of mine from 2018:

Idiots like J-Mo aren't equipped to handle Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

There is no paradox of tolerance. Let's recall what Popper actually wrote on the paradox:

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Tolerating intolerant beliefs doesn't imply that one tolerates murder in the streets. While there may be ameliorating context outside of this paragraph, Popper commits a serious slippery slope fallacy here that tolerating intolerant beliefs then segues into tolerating physical attacks and such even though by no stretch of the imagination are they legitimate means of discourse, and then equates any flavor of intolerant belief with the subset of intolerance that settles disagreement with violence. Finally, he doesn't consider how this intolerance can be abused. I think we're seeing a taste of it today, where rival beliefs can be declared to be "intolerant" (often without regard for the content of the beliefs) and hence, fair game for preemptive intolerance.

That I think is the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Once you do it, you and your beliefs fall solidly in the category of things against which you are supposedly intolerant. You should be intolerant of yourself and your beliefs! Not going to happen in practice, of course.

Instead a far better approach (one which I might add has been rather successful with respect to dealing with discrimination in the workplace) is to tolerate the belief, but don't tolerate the observable, harmful behavior. That eliminates most of the Orwellian facets of the Popper approach. Often it also means that you don't have to care what people believe. If someone assaults another, it doesn't matter what either of them believed (except perhaps as a means to further demonstrate guilt of the attacker in court).

Let's consider that quote a bit. First, I'm quoting it out of context so there might be some nuance I'm missing. But so has everyone else who brings it up. My rebuttal is to the bare argument, but I think that reasonable given that no one else goes any further.

The core of my rebuttal is in the paragraph after the above quote. There are three serious flaws in the quote that need to be considered. First, a slippery slope argument that assumes the presence of intolerance will eventually avalanche into widespread intolerance. A rival viewpoint here is that exposure to tolerance can make the intolerant more tolerant.

Second, there is an conflation of intolerance with violence. However, this doesn't explain cultures that are intolerant in various non-violent ways. For example, there are a variety of pacifist, isolationist religions (for example, Amish and Hutterites). They qualify as intolerant since they eschew a great of contact with the outside world, but that intolerance never rises to the level of violence, much less the "fists and pistols" of the Popper narrative.

Finally, is the whole problem with this idea, the paradox of intolerance of intolerance. Sorry, just because your bigotry is against some out-group that happens to be intolerant (or worse, wrongly perceived to be intolerant) just means that you're engaging in the very same intolerance. It's not only hypocritical, it's continuing the problem.

My take is that engagement is the better approach. Consider this. Every wacko cult follows similar playbooks: they isolate their followers from the rest of the world so that everyone is in the same screwy environment. Only the true believers are allowed to interact with the outside world in any way. Many other intolerant beliefs operate in the same way - creating an "us versus them" mythology, echo chambers, and similar means to cut off the believers from exposure to experiences that could undermine the beliefs. The strategy of intolerance versus such believers enforces this isolation. It makes the problems of intolerance worse.

So not only is the paradox of tolerance critically flawed on multiple levels, it makes the basic problem of intolerance worse.

There's a huge bunch of flooding in Yellowstone National Park. It started with heavy rain yesterday that led to a mass melting of the high altitude snowpack. Net result is instant 100 year floods on multiple rivers through Wyoming and Montana. Here's a video of some of the flooding. That video shows the North Entrance road which comes into the park from the northwest side (starting at a town, Gardiner, Montana) and runs along side the Gardiner River, which is a minor river which dumps into the Yellowstone River - the latter is the largest tributary of the Missouri River.

Anyway, this shows the crazy erosion power of a mountain river that's flooding. With normal spring melt level (which is when the river is at its routine highest seasonally), the river moderately erodes its banks, but hasn't threatened the road in decades. But with this higher level of flooding, the road has been completely cut through in five places in the video. In addition to the road bridge (which is still in place in the video), there was a trail bridge about a mile north of the road bridge which was washed out too (it's almost center in the last frame, you can see a pull out on the right between road and river with a trail on both sides of the river - the bridge would have been in between the trail parts).

Finally, I linked to the map so you can see what the stretch looked like before the flooding. The helicopter is flying from south to north along the road. By coincidence, the video starts about where the tag is on the map.

Two of the four people accused of planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan have been acquitted of all charged. The jury hung on the other two.

"Through confidential sources, undercover agents, and clandestine recordings," the Justice Department announced in October 2020, "law enforcement learned particular individuals were planning to kidnap" Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and "acting in furtherance of that plan." But it turned out those individuals included the government's "confidential sources," who pushed the half-baked scheme and orchestrated acts "in furtherance of that plan" even when the defendants resisted it.

The appearance of entrapment, coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing between fantasy and criminal conspiracy, explains the embarrassing outcome of a federal trial that ended last week, when jurors acquitted two alleged conspirators and failed to reach verdicts for the other two. It was a well-deserved rebuke of investigative methods that crossed the line between prevention and invention.

Two of the six original defendants, Ty Garbin and Kaleb Franks, pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, saying they willingly participated in the kidnapping plot. But the record compiled by the government shows FBI agents and their informants were determined to advance a narrative that would justify their efforts.

Remember how I repeatedly warned about historical entrapment schemes by the FBI? This outcome is why. Even with two alleged co-conspirators pleading guilty and testifying against the rest as well as the testimony of four informants and undercover officers, they still couldn't make the charges stick against anyone.

They can retry the remaining two, but it's not going to look good when two cohorts have been acquitted of similar charges.

And as I noted, this same sort of problem holds for the would-be insurrectionists of January 6. It's much of the same failed tactics, particularly in relying on people to testify in exchange for lighter sentences.

Another example is the Rittenhouse trial which blatantly ignored the obvious self-defense argument. Unfortunately for the prosecution in that trial, the jury didn't ignore it as well.

It's time to understand why these high profile court cases didn't succeed as expected. The big one is a disregard for law. It's not merely incompetence. These trials are showboating and we see the consequences of that, such as the above lack of convictions.

I was trying to put together some musings I had about experimentation at the society level with an eye to eventually making society better, but suffered from serious writer's block. So here's what I have.

First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.

Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".

Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.

For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.

I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).

Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).

On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.