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THE THEORY OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY

    I was very privileged to be allowed to attend a business program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business as a military veteran.  During the course I was given the rare opportunity to have a private discussion with two great economic professors from this esteemed university over a dinner.  During our time together I shared a story about valuable intellectual property (IP) being highjacked and abused by profiteers, and also about the artificial barriers to market entry that were created by unaccountable committees with some members whom were being paid by said profiteers that subsequently prevented the use of the IP in business.  The passion behind my hurt must have looked and sounded ridiculous to these two wise men who, when I was done with my long lament full of the pain that I felt having just recently discovered that most human beings choose to use operating systems that are driven by greed and self-aggrandizement rather than by justice and honor, simply looked at each other and said “The Theory of Economic Regulation”1 in unison.  They laughed out loud as I asked my very pertinent next question: “the theory of what?”

     

    The professors proceeded to unpack this significant economic work by Mr. George Stigler from 1971 where he discusses the many reasons that industries will seek governmental regulation and benefits, which are considerable, but amongst these reasons lies the power to control entry into a market.  My two esteemed academic masters then proceeded to unravel a world of dark wonders from which I had previously been shielded by my ignorance, and like two wizards they explained the pig slop market to a naïve barn-yarder who did not yet know that the quest for power has almost universally corrupted every single Orwellian-American pig on the farm. Imagine my surprise when they explained to me that every industry or occupation that can buy enough political power will certainly do so in order to utilize state controls that can prevent other companies from interfering with their profiteering.  And then they fired salvo after salvo at the very politicians whom had been running the military in which I had served most of my adult life, as well as at the judges whom are frequently paid by the same profiteers and therefore routinely prostitute themselves and their public positions in order to line their own pockets since they are free from the threat of prosecution. 

     

    And when I attempted to counter their dark map of the world as I didn’t know it, I did so by stating that the industry I was attempting to gain traction in was involved in the fielding of life saving medical devices and was therefore actually concerned with saving lives, they laughed even more.  This is because they had already connected all of the dots between our health care industry, which had birthed such putrescent hell spawn as those whom would charge $800 for an epinephrine auto-injector with less than $5 worth of drugs in it, and their willingness to pay off government officials, politicians, and even judges in order to limit competition and to better secure the undiluted governmental gravy train coming to their doorstep.  The more they spoke, the more apoplectic I became but the truth in their arguments, as well as the truth in Mr. Stigler’s work from 1971, is that human beings, without either robust accountability and transparency or possibly some form of permanent altruistic lens or filter through which to view their role in this world, will always operate in accordance with the worst of human nature.  This means that they expressly will, and quite often do, lie, cheat, and steal in order to feed their own lust for power and financial gain.  I read the article by Mr. Stigler and surmised that my problems with committees regardless of how altruistic the reasons for founding one were not unique to my situation, because they were commonly shown in The Theory of Economic Regulation to eventually betray their express purpose for being a committee in order to serve the interests of the committee members.  In truth, we found committees that eventually become only committed to being committees and expanding their power base if at all possible.

     

     

    But Mr. Stigler also stated that “[w]hen an industry receives a grant of power from the state, the benefit of the industry will fall short of the damage to the rest of the community.”2  However, I submit to you that, even with our impossibly interconnected wi-fi enabled modern lives, we most often do not notice when we suffer harm from either the abuses of regulation or from the profiteering of our political leaders and their beloved governmental agencies until it actually directly harms us.  The regulatory fact patterns are often too complex to sift through and are further obfuscated by layers of liars who spout known falsehoods like so many lemmings chanting a “follow me – I know where I am going” mantra as they run off of the proverbial cliff.  People avoid complexities naturally and, even when a person exists as a part of an overtly complex schema they may not actually understand the overarching impact of either the existent system programming or even of their own actions within the system.  This is the norm: the function does not follow the form, but rather the forms of government that we create and fund enable the furtherance of unplanned agency functions as our baby morphs into something else entirely.  But there are patterns to the evolutionary changes of both committees and governmental agencies, even when we can neither see nor appreciate them at first glance.  Somewhat in accordance with the basics of Chaos Theory 3, but also from my own experiences dealing with ambiguous and hazardous situations, when one takes an action to engage the chaos and uncertainty around them one creates information, and it is that information which can be utilized to plan the next step in order to pursue a return to order by reducing or otherwise mitigating the chaos.  It is important to note that there are certainly consequences to the actions that one takes when responding to chaos, but neither chaos nor the corruption created by the obscurity of regulations or political cronyism will fix themselves, so the best answer is always to take action in an attempt to restore order.  And it is good to be careful with the forms (e.g. institutions) that we create along the way as well as to constantly reinspect their functional authorities and foci because, even if the much-maligned lemmings do not actually follow one another off of cliffs in nature, we as a distracted and unaware society will certainly do so if we continue to not pay attention.

     

    So, what is true about the eventual corruption of individuals, businesses, and committees per Mr. Stigler also must be true of the now massive bureaucratic state that was allegedly created to protect the freedoms of the American people.  This is not a partisan political observation because the administration before this one (i.e. the Biden administration) identified that the United States could have lost as much as $1 Trillion dollars during their four year term to fraud,4 and this figure did not include the recently exposed abuses of USAID and other agencies.  Yet when the new administration (i.e. the Trump administration) exposes de facto corruption in our federal agencies, as well as extravagant waste and money laundering by often inept and even corrupt government officials, the defense of the exposed and unconscionable corruption is somehow presented as a new found partisan wisdom and it is then subsequently regurgitated back upon we, the people, as a political weapon to smear the party in power.  Based solely upon the disgusting abuses of our American system of governance that have been uncovered in this purge operation thus far, all persons with an actual soul and an IQ at least two points above plankton must reject any media or political argument that attempts to refute the need for the further pursuit of complete transparency on the spending patterns and inefficiencies of our government agencies.

     

    Any honest person should seek the objective truth of a matter before adopting an opinion as a belief, and this specifically means resisting the adoption of any perceived truth espoused by collectives with which one seeks to either identify or to belong, and especially from our global non-objective media sources whom seem to relish emoting their own opinions rather than reporting the facts in an objective fashion.  I propose gleaning data from more than one source of information from different points on the political spectrum, and then discounting at least 50% of what everyone reports as either outright lies or the vanity of opinion, and to specifically avoid reports from reporters whom wear wooden clothespins on their fire jackets while reporting on a fire so that they look better or whom repeatedly conduct interviews in an overtly biased fashion.  And with the information that you obtain, seek to form opinions which you know are transient and that you may change when you are given more information, rather than anchoring yourself in the emotive depths of what you wish to believe in order to avoid continuing to seek the objective truth.  I also implore anyone reading this to think of government as a business that provides services to the people in the society, and that those whom are granted the authority and responsibility inherent in any government position are actually representing the American people.  Then ask if those represented by the business of government deserve to know how their investment dollars (i.e. their taxes) are being spent and if they, as stock holders in this national corporation, should be able to demand that the wanton waste and fraudulent taking of their investment dollars be curtailed. 

     

    Any working Theory of Government Efficiency is going to take time to develop into true and robust safeguards and this will involve a concerted effort at all levels, but our government could, and should, seek to be more efficient.  The abuses being uncovered are a direct result of extensive fraud being known and discussed but somehow remaining unchecked for decades.  Fraud is now so widespread that it unfortunately involves more than a few of our elected and unelected officials, government employees, and even some esteemed committee members purportedly serving the greater good.  But let’s make a new, working Theory of Government Accountability (TOGA) become a reality by maintaining a bias toward action and continuing to root out those whom defraud their fellow citizens in an effort to improve our governmental business processes.  We can simply no longer afford to give the keys to our kingdom to political cronies and privateers who seek to utilize once esteemed public positions for private gain.  If we continue to discuss accountability but have neither a metric for success nor a means to eliminate known fraud and waste, then our nation is a circus and we, the people, are the clowns.


    An American by the name of Dr. Deming helped develop a cycle of continual improvement that was adopted to great effect by Japanese manufacturers and, I believe, it is as applicable to government processes as it is to business ones.  The Deming Cycle is Plan – Do – Study – Act (PDSA)5 and it has been used successfully to continually improve products, processes, and services in corporate sectors around the globe.  And probably since approximately $600 million USD was known to be lost to fraud during the first Trump administration, but also because the President is a successful business person and is very adept at seeking value through efficiency, his administration is now eliminating wanton wastefulness in the “Act” part of the Deming rubric during the beginning of their second term. President Trump will certainly continue the cycle by observing the effects of the actions being taken to curtail the waste and excess of USAID and other agencies, and then begin the cycle again with planning as more information is created and analyzed.  And since I tend to point out the potential neuro-genesis of such harmful thinking as was present at a USAID, who actually spent our money to feed and fund our enemies,6 as being propagated by too much Dopamine 7, which has been observed to make people extravagant enough to spend “taxpayer dollars like it was monopoly money,”8 take it under advisement that your brain may be seeing the world through too blue of a dopaminergic filter if you do not believe that our government is too big and does too little to cost this much.  Efficiency can be gained if we simply drop our beloved colors and stop acting like a member of warring gangs and start acting like concerned citizens of a country that has overspent it’s wealth like a drunken sailor on shore leave due to a system that is long overdue an overhaul.

     

    If we fail to search for and find greater government efficiency and accountability solely because we stop looking for it in the name of either lining another pocket or standing against a political rival without any regard to reason, then we deserve to go over the cliff that we are running towards.  So, let’s seek ways that can make all of those whom serve this Nation in the public space accountable for what they do, and not just our soldiers and military service personnel whom are sometimes made to pay for things in their charge whether or not they actually lost them.  In one very personal case the items charged to my account were utilized for the express purpose of evacuating casualties from the battlefield, and yet the author of this paper was required to personally pay the US Army for the use of those items in that exact role.  And yes, that is a true story so please do not try to tell me that these bureaucratic behemoths which were created at our expense should continue to cost us much more than they benefit us, or that those whom run them can continue to hide behind layers of lawfare and corruption so that they cannot be held accountable.   


    If I can be held personally responsible for the use of items to care for casualties in a war, and to be clear I am not proposing that I should have done anything different because it was the right thing to do and I would not change my actions ex post facto even if I could, then I expect the same accountability from every single governmental employee including all of our politicians.  We are all responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of this Nation - it gives us both the individual and collective freedoms that we can use to pursue our own interests and to live our own lives in any legal manner that we see fit.  We certainly do not need a bigger government at this point in our journey because only the criminals amongst us will continue to benefit from a sloppy, wasteful, and corrupt government that expropriates the property of its citizens “without due process of law.”9  Our civil servants and agencies must account for all of the money that they spend and we must create societal efficiency and transparency where it is needed most – in our now wasteful, inept, and often corrupt government where it seems that only a select few are diligently serving anyone else’s interests but their own.

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    1. Stigler, George J., “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 1971), 3-21.


    2. Ibid.








    9. The Due Process clause in the 5th and 14th Amendments stem from the Magna Carta and a 700-year-old promise by the King to treat everyone fairly by acting in accordance with the law with regard to everyone. The money a person earns is property and if he or she is coerced by the state to relinquish it to pay a tax burden that is certainly within the scope of the law at least when it is levied fairly and spent legally. I would argue that Due Process is not violated when officials elected by the people pass laws that impact the people’s tax burden because the people elected them and therefore have some procedures to address the decisions of those elected (discussed in Bi-Metallic Investment Co. v. State Board of Equalization, 1915). However, when those same funds are given to unelected officials whom then either fraudulently spend it or otherwise illegally utilize their property, especially for purposes that undermine national and individual security guarantees from the government, what is the legal procedure for the individual taxpayer to address the removal of his or her property to fund the downfall of our nation? All of our federal and state agencies produce regulations and even ask for comments on proposed rule-making prior to making the rules that become de facto common laws, but these are only read by a select few and therefore rarely deviate from the writer’s intent creating another form of law fare that expressly defies oversite. I believe that there are potentially due process claims to be found in the refusal of USAID or other agencies to provide information to our duly elected officials (i.e. Congress) whom sought to make these rogue agencies accountable on our behalf. There are certainly other legal means to pursue those who lied to Congress about the classification of aid being provided to companies in the Ukraine and in other places so that it could not be either reviewed or curtailed by Congressional oversite. But the 11 words of the Due Process Clause are worth reviewing because if the process and procedures are purposefully kept opaque and spending remains unreviewable and unaccountable, then neither the citizen nor their elected representatives have any legal recourse to follow in order to fight the removal of their property for use funding activities that may actually cause them harm. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/due_process


    Red Brains, Blue Brains


      The current political turnover in America happens to coincide with a deep dive that I am doing on neuroscience partially due to a book I am writing and partially because it is simply fascinating to study how we think and come to believe certain things.  I will share some of this information here because, if you are like me and view different news channels each day, you may actually question if the reporters are from different countries due to the seemingly incongruent coverage of what are ostensibly the same exact events.  They are not from different countries but, as it turns out, they actually have different brains or, at least, their brains have different structures and chemistries that are influencing how they see the world. The American Journal of Political Science published an article entitled “Correlation not Causation” in 2002 that measured the relationship between political ideology and personality types.  The researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University felt that they would find “High “P” values in the conservative group, with “P” representing a cluster of behaviors that make up this personality type.  The “High-P” personality grouping includes such features as a tendency to be manipulative, tough minded and a drive to be authoritarian with demonstrations of risk taking, sensation seeking, and impulsivity.1,2

       

      And, probably because they were looking for the “High P” group to associate with conservatism, possibly because the “Low P” group were typified as being more generous and altruistic with a tendency to be well socialized and empathetic, the researchers published findings matched their initial impressions and they labeled those with “High P” features as “conservative” and those with “Low P” features as “liberal.”1  But this labeling convention simply did not correlate with other research in this area over the next several years and so, 14 years after it had published the article, the American Journal of Political Science issued a retraction because the findings about the groups were exactly reversed.  The new categorization in the retraction matches what is becoming a mountain of other research in this area and the article states that, “[f]irst, opposite our expectations, higher Ρ scores correlate with more liberal military attitudes and more socially liberal beliefs for both females and males.”2

       

      It is important to note here that the “P” factor stands for “Psychoticism” and persons with high levels of it are more prone to madness and mental ills of many kinds, but specifically are more prone to the development of both schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder.  The study of large groups results in a broad generalization of course, but it is clear that those with personalities that are associated with “High P” levels are also typically the most creative amongst us and many become academics, entrepreneurs, or artists and, if their individual developmental environment is also rife with choices and differences of opinions, they tend to generally gravitate towards a liberal ideology.  In a large study of a relatively isolated population (i.e. Iceland) researchers found “that creativity, conferred, at least in part, by common genetic variants, comes with an increased risk of psychiatric disorders conferred by the same genetic variants.”3  In fact, the brain structure of liberals versus conservatives has been a frequent focus of study in the past few decades as people have become more polarized and dogmatic about the way that they see the world through their preferred political lens. Interestingly enough a large Swedish study found that “[t]he relatives of the academics had significantly increased risk of suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder”4 and so it is also demonstrably true that the academic world fills most of their ivory tower tenured positions with professors whom largely identify as being politically liberal.  

       

      Therefore, the tendency for the underlying structure and chemical processing of some brains to produce more liberal ideations about the world around them than others is well established. It has also been shown that these beliefs can be modified through the administration of drugs that increase the Serotonin in the brain and depress Dopamine uptake (e.g. those routinely used to treat depression) in Dopaminergic persons (i.e. persons with more Dopamine receptors and greater Dopamine activity in their brains) so that the liberal persons response to these drugs is to demonstrably think and behave in a more conservative fashion.  To restate that in a more succinct fashion: since the person with more Dopamine receptors will tend to have a Higher P score and generally exhibit more liberal tendencies if given a certain developmental environment in their formative years, the liberal minded person will also, over time, modify their positions to a more conservative mindset if they are given drugs that limit the uptake of Dopamine in some way.  This should make it clear that our dogmatic political opinions are in fact more the result of cloudy chemical lenses on top of our already rose-colored glasses and are not the result of either divine revelation or superior intelligence.1 I make this next statement as much for myself as for any reader of this article:


      Be careful with thou dogmas, O mortal, chemicals cloud your judgment!

       

      When I was in Sweden we were discussing certain political decisions made by the Swedish government and a Swedish Officer told me that, when a person is too idealistic and not grounded in objective reality with their ideas, the Swedes will say that "your eyes are too blue on this point." This is a way of saying that you are thinking too much like a Swede and, for what may be an international or multi-dimensional problem set, you should be careful projecting such a limited perspective because the world does not think the same way . All of us tend to look at the problems of this world through the lenses developed by our environment and chemical processes, and that might not translate well when you are projecting onto global problems and other groups characteristics that are inherently limited by your own historical exposures. We might adopt this and say to one another "I think that your brain is too blue on this point" or "I think your brain is too red on this issue" because our brains, in trying to make sense of the complex world around us, tend to oversimplify the problems and we default to the components of reality that our brain chemistry feels is most important, whether this is objectively true and accurate or not. So, whether your brain activity is primarily influenced through chemicals like Serotonin and other endorphins, or if it is mainly Dopaminergic in nature and you have more Dopamine receptor cells and activity, having more or less of specific gene expressions does in fact make groups of people from this globe behave and think either more conservative and concrete or more liberal and abstract. 


      One specific example from The Molecule of More1 shows that the D4 gene which codes for Dopamine receptors in the brain, and its variant the 7R allele, have demonstrated to researchers that the more 7R you have the more novelty seeking, impulsive, fickle, excitable, quick tempered, extravagant, and exploratory you will behave.  This is because you can use more Dopamine molecules to influence brain cell activity and therefore you will be more prone to focus on the newest and most “progressive” ideas and inherently you will pursue more abstract ideals and potentially become left leaning in the political sense as well. The Dopamine molecule and the availability of receptor sites for Dopamine in the desire circuits are what drive us to pursue new, novel, and unusual things, and can become out of balance driving people to continually seek new and more novel thrills.  And this most often also correlates to persons in artistic professions whom experience higher divorce rates and even certain mental illnesses at a higher rate than other populations.3

       

      Comparatively, people with lower amounts of the 7R gene expression tend to be more reflective, rigid, loyal, slow tempered, stoic, and frugal in nature.  These persons are more prone to thinking and voting with a more conservative mindset and their more Serotonin driven system is the opposite of Dopamine driven ones making them more empathetic towards the concerns of people in their community as they tend to be more altruistic. Conservative persons tend to prefer to personally give to others in a direct way rather than through the utilization of big government programs that will somehow “solve” the ills of humankind through education and other means like their liberal counterparts, who tend to prefer solving problems at a certain distance from the people in need in order to avoid personal interactions just as the dopamine in their brains prefers.  Surveys of itemized tax records show that, in persons whom itemize on their taxes, conservative voters give in much more altruistic ways as a component of concrete thinking where they believe that they can, and should, actually assist their fellow humans personally, while the more Dopaminergic and liberal voters want either the government or education, and ostensibly both, to provide aid to others and eventually fix the entirety of humanity so their individual charitable giving is much lower.1 

       

      The high 7R brains have more tightly packed Dopamine receptor arrays in their brains as discussed recently by the Institute of Psychology in London, where the stronger Dopamine signals due to the densely packed receptor sites was also associated with liberal political thinking globally.1  Dopamine can make people more creative (e.g. actors, artists, academics, and even tech and other entrepreneurs) while also making them think in a more progressive ways because the desire to pursue anything new is propagated by Dopamine.  But this can lead to the delusion that they can, and even will, and in fact, MUST save the world in some grandiose, yet quite possibly completely impractical and possibly hazardous way even while sometimes actually creating something with global impact for better or worse (author’s opinion).  The same Dopamine that makes someone a great mathematician who can wrestle with complex abstractions which may eventually create practical quantum computing or other key scientific breakthroughs, also makes them less satisfied with the way things are right now and can drive them to constantly pursue the newness of change and anything unusual, or non-status quo, as a general rule when they engage the world around them.  In the same way that Dopaminergic thinking can be creative and allow people to make beautiful art and enable creative advances in technology, and even sometimes, allow mere mortals to write beautiful words . . . (or did until the progressive academics killed both the form and function of poetry in the pursuit of new and abstract writing styles, elevating the currently unsatisfying, and often formless, word groups that get read by less and less people each year as the epitome of poetic expression, while throwing every well metered and symmetrically beautiful Shakespearean effort into the garbage), elevated dopamine levels can also be used to hold onto:

       

      “a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary,”  

       

      This is, of course, the definition of the word “delusion” that I deliberately used earlier and of which we should all be more aware, especially since the definition concludes with the following:“as a symptom of serious mental illness.” 5

       

      I was once personally told by a neuroscience researcher that at least “20-30% of the people from any given population are actively experiencing delusions.”6 I asked him to unpack that statement, and he said that by delusion he meant that the delusional people are actively experiencing, and even pursuing, a reality markedly different than the objectively quantifiable one everyone else is experiencing.  Think of that number and then think of how easily brain chemistry, and your brain specifically, can trick you into either seeing or focusing on something that is not real and not true just because it is new.  This happens a lot under survival stress where people may perform some programmed response in response to the threat that objectively does not make sense under their present circumstances (e.g. pack behavior, flight, freezing, etc.,), as their brains attempt to shut out certain aspects of a hazardous reality that is unfamiliar to them. Brains under stress will turn the “pages” of perceived reality like it is a rolodex, trying to find a picture that fits the situation in order to make sense of something that it has never experienced before and, as a result, the person under extreme stress may believe the things that their brains are telling them which are imprecise snippets of objective reality and, sometimes, even wholly untrue.  His research was actually focused on predicting and improving reactions under stress in military groups, and his finding that delusional people were also present in the global military in larger numbers than you would think, but not as large as the general population, was confirmed.  I have personally experienced the dissonance between objective reality and what my brain told me was true so perhaps I will unpack that further in the future and until then let's just agree that it is not your heart that lies to you and cause you harm, but it is your brain.


      So, even if my reference to this stress reaction researcher's research is anecdotal at best, my view is now that these data on dopaminergic thinking being future focused and abstract helps indicate a basis for some of the liberal ideations which led to dangerous and consequential choices that have turned a recent fiery red outcome in a very blue state into an apocalypse.  In the modern world having an opinion and aligning oneself with online opinion groups so that outlier opinions cannot get into one’s own carefully constructed thought silo has become, in essence, a commonplace commitment to the creation of imaginary worlds.  I say this not as a condemnation either for all users of social media or for dopaminergic persons, because I certainly can be both of these to varying degrees, but rather for the purpose of illuminating a problem: if you are excessively dopaminergic in nature and are always pursuing the new and the abstract, and you convince yourself that your individual ideations are the only way to better or save humanity as a whole, you may also miss the clear signs in this objective reality that lead to disaster for yourself and the other humans in your proximity.7 

       

      I work to know my brain and how it functions and I have good reason to do so, but so do you and therefore, you should do the work to at least know how your own brain works so that you can be prepared when it trips you up and tries to prioritize fantasy future outcomes over present objective realities.  I still firmly believe that the objective truth is accessible and that it matters, and also that nowhere is the need for truth seekers greater than in our nation right now. But we must all endeavor to seek the actual objective truth rather than some perception of it overly influenced by social media suggestive persuasion and our own very specific brain chemistry.  If you are absolutely convinced of something in spite of valid information to the contrary, you may be experiencing a delusional episode rather than having a divine revelation so perhaps proceed with non-dogmatic caution whenever your conviction levels exceed 80%.  And if you really want to be counter-culture and resist something of merit, the most disruptive thing that you could do in this climate is to show some grace and respect to the brains and personhood of those with whom you, and your brain chemistries, currently disagree. 

       _________________________________________________________________________

      1.      Liberman, Daniel Z. and Long, Michael E., “The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity – and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race,” BenBella Books, Inc., 2019. This book is highly recommended for all cognizant humans trying to understand the mental lenses through which we all must see the world.  This book contains a lot of science, but it is not written for scientists and contains mountains of useful information for everyone and it is as accessible as it is a compelling read.  Many aspects of this blog are referenced in this book which is also available on Audible. 


      2.      Verhulst, B., Eaves, L., & Hatemi, P. K., “Erratum to Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34-51, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12216 .  I am citing the retraction article from 2016 but by association the original work from 2002 is also referenced.  


      3.      Power RA, Steinberg S, Bjornsdottir G, Rietveld CA, Abdellaoui A, Nivard M, et al. “Polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder predict creativity.” Nat Neurosci. (2015) 18:953–5. doi: 10.1038/nn.4040


      4.      Parnas J, Sandsten KE, Vestergaard CH and Nordgaard J., “Schizophrenia and Bipolar Illness in the Relatives of University Scientists: An Epidemiological Report on the Creativity-Psychopathology Relationship,” (2019) Front. Psychiatry 10:175. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00175.

       

      5.      Dictionary Version 2.3.0, Apple Inc., Copyright 2005-2024, All rights reserved.


      6.      This is only an anecdotal citation as I am now, 30 years after our conversations, unfortunately uncertain about the name of this particular researcher and therefore I cannot definitively cite his work.  If I can correct this error in the future I will update this citation because I feel that the research he was doing on stress precursors was fascinating and important. 


      7.      Kyaga S, Landen M, Boman M, Hultman CM, Langstrom N, Lichtenstein P, et al. “Mental illness, suicide and creativity: 40-year prospective total population study.” J Psychiatr Res. (2013) 47:83–90. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2012.09.010

      Eating Inauguration Cake


        Baking cake is normally a glorious affair because the eating of cake is a bit of ecstasy that can civilize the palate while soothing the suffering in one’s soul.  It is a pleasure that can force a smile from even the cruelest of dictators apparently causing them to forget, at least momentarily, their despotic duties and oppressive obsessions.  It should be somewhat difficult to harm oneself, or one’s nation, with cake unless possibly due to recent economic changes one has to choose between heating one’s home or baking a cake and, understandably, chooses the latter but subsequently freezes to death while in a #CakeComa. But for the record, even if the candidate being inaugurated in January 2025 is not the one that you chose with either your voice or your vote, you should still celebrate this momentous occasion with #InaugurationCake because our nation still actually gets to select a new President every four years.  And on an especially despotic planet like the third one from this sun, which is referred to colloquially as #Earth, a peaceful election followed by a peaceful transition is almost always cause for celebration. Therefore, we should all enjoy some #InaugurationCakewhile America transitions executive teams because the very tenets of totalitarianism and despotism are being usurped by this model, even though it is not perfect, election process.  But if you are, in fact, a loathsome and delusional creature who celebrates #Totalitarian regimes and the tyrants whom run them, then you can skip the cake but please, do not ruin the celebration for the rest of us.

         

        And because election outcomes can sometimes feel unfair, we must be careful to continually provide ample coverage for all citizens under a cloak of #Justice if there is to be any #LibertyCake for all of the people to enjoy.  In order for #Justice to cover us evenly the founders constitutionally positioned our judges to be free from political intrigue by appointing some of them for life and, in a few cases, apparently even longer.  However, once our political beliefs became a de facto religion a class of believers was created that apparently have neither the faith in #Democracy nor the fortitude to abstain from becoming extremists, political cronies, and profiteers.  When our system of justice is poisoned by political intrigue and subverted, oppression is introduced and this can be seen in the now plainly visible political weaponization of governmental agencies.  When political opponents and opposition view holders can be persecuted by those in power, eventually ballot control will be used as one of the tools to procure more power by those to whom providing for fair voting is anathema:  the #Despots, #Dictators, #Oligarchs and their legions of brigands whose only true loyalty is to the opportunity to profiteer in order to gain more power.

         

        In this past election it was even postulated by individual states, in a union of states that is to be ruled by one executive person whom must be elected by all of the states, that a state could dictate to all of the states that one individual could not be included on the national ballot.  This conjecture is so patently partisan that only delusional minions and rabid extremists could possibly believe that it has either any basis in law or any place in this objective reality.1 Notwithstanding that some candidates are more appealing than others in certain locales, and that some locales will have strong preferences for certain perceptions of policy positions regardless to their relevance in the election outcome and subsequent governance scope of the elected, these preferences are often turned into #Orwellian - like slogans to be used when any aspect of a utopic election outcome fantasy is challenged.  But #LibertyCake in a #Republic is the just reward for an involved citizenry committed to adhering to the #RuleOfLaw and attempting to usurp unwanted outcomes of any election with rioting and/or violence undermines the #Republic and every single #Freedom guaranteed by its structure. 

         

        Fair voting is cause for celebration in any society, but this is especially true after an actual dictatorship is dissolved and the people are given the luxuriant freedom of participating in their own governance.  I say ‘actual dictatorship’ in order to differentiate between actual and imagined by referring to the one that ended in Iraq in this era, where an actual dictator practiced throwing some enemies off of buildings while feeding others to lions until he was eventually hung from the neck until dead by his own people.  When this actual dictator is juxtaposed against an imaginary one, whom oddly enough actually transitioned power to the next party peaceably after the last election and whom is to be inaugurated to the office of President after this one, the difference should be clear.  The actions of the citizenry of Iraq after their Dictators removal in voting on how their own #Liberty would be adjudicated, demonstrated a desire for freedom from actual oppression that was so great that they were willing to line up and vote even though the ink used to mark them as having voted stained their hands and made them targets of violence.  And do not forget that many #Iraqis, #Afghanis, and other persons whom were recently liberated from actual oppression have given their lives to help make a cake that they knew they might not live to consume and that our short attention spans and stupid ideas may have actually ruined.  We should therefore be careful with the amount of #Discord that we sow by using either our positions (e.g. buffoonery from the bench) or our platforms (e.g. malignancy-minded media forays into projecting outcomes rather than reporting them) to derail the very democratic functions that serve us all.  To borrow a line of thinking but not an exact quote from Mr. Albert Camus, whom I am reading at the moment and whom I will cite here in an attempt to avoid the degradation of being nominated to serve as President of an Ivy-League University once I have borrowed enough from everyone else’s efforts and honest intellectual pursuits to over-aggrandize myself into acceptance as a leader of those with whom I failed to participate properly as a peer, I believe that it is appropriate to surmise that:  

         

        A society that sows discord should expect to reap anarchy.2 

         

        The cake we are preparing must be inclusive in ways that are representative of our democracy and must ensure that any citizen, including me or even, perhaps, my dead body after I am lynched for speaking truth since life is not necessarily a co-requisite for either ruling or for voting, could run for the office of President of these United States.  It stands to reason that a #ConstitutionalRepublic ruled by all through the process of an #ElectoralCollege system is more to be desired than governance by individual States that weaponize the very instruments of statehood, especially the #Judiciary, to pursue the punishment of political rivals.  As desirable as it may seem to keep one person or another off of the ballot, or in court on countless charges in as many states as possible, or as the subject of one front page derogatory story after another all manufactured for the express purpose of conducting propaganda campaigns, in order to sway the vote is devilishly despotic, anti-democratic, and downright fascist.  To quote a writer whose words were consequential to Western thought (i.e. #Rousseau) for both better and for worse, and to take the attribution away from the regent upon whom it was improperly bestowed (i.e. #MarieAntionette), as it seems that either some revisionist media mogul sought to further justify the French Revolution ex post facto, or possibly yet another academic glory hound failed to properly attribute a weighty quote to the former source and illicitly placed it upon the unlikely crowned head of the latter, someone apparently once quipped:  “Let them eat cake”3 in reference to the disdain some political leaders had and can have for their constituents.  But I propose that we can should be civil enough of a society to peacefully bake and eat some #LibertyCake together regardless of whomever won whatever election.

         

        Notwithstanding that, particularly in a #Republic, the cake of liberty is designed to be eaten by all but will, undoubtedly, be enjoyed by some more than others during any period of time.  Of importance to the pursuit of happiness element engrained into our national psyche, voting is not an activity that is meant to ensure that your personal enjoyment and pleasure will be constantly maintained by those whom are elected in the voting process.  It is, however, an activity that ensures our essential liberties and freedoms will continue to exist so please, let everyone contribute to making the cake we will eat in 2025 a #Peaceful and #Gracious one.  The making of our national #LibertyCake must be allowed to include ingredients that may be preferred by some while being disliked, and even possibly abhorred, by others.  Some cakes may very well be, either subjectively or objectively, better and more enjoyable than other cakes depending upon your own personal preferences. But our national cake is by design meant to be a collective #LibertyCake and therefore #WeThePeople must demand the peace and stability to bake and eat our own piece of cake within the structure of fair elections regardless of the outcome.  Sowing discord from either the bench or from a state government position by attempting to eliminate a presidential candidate or cancel presidential policies based on partisan politics is simply not within a state’s rights.  In fact, the attempts by some states to dictate to the entire union whom can participate in a national election are egregious errors in judgment and this line of thinking is the antithesis of America because it would “sever the direct link . . . between the National Government and the people of the United States” (U.S. Term Limits, 514 U.S., 822).4  And, therefore, #WeThePeople should demand that the only thing served by our #Judges is #Justice within their specific scope of authority and that our national ballot is constructed without interference from an unrestrained #Judiciary from any state in our Union.  And finally, we must always demand that our media report #OnlyTheFacts as #News and to be 100% accountable when they either misrepresent or manipulate the objective facts in a matter.  After all, the process of voting produces a cake that we all must certainly eat, whether we like it or not. ________________________________________________________________________

        1.      Primarily the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment made it illegal for a state to pass laws "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States... [or] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, [or] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." And while Section 3 does provide for the barring of certain persons with regard to insurrectionary activities by stating that no one can hold office that “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof;” it also clearly states in Section 5 that “[t]he Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” So even if the law were interpreted so as to make Mr. Trump an insurrectionist against himself, oddly, as the President and Chief Executive at the time of the alleged insurrection, it must be the Congress of the United States that enacts legislation to remove any person from a national ballot and clearly could not possibly be a power given to individual states of this Union.  Also, the argument to remove a candidate from the national ballot by an individual state would be negated by the same 14th Amendment cited for justification of the removal of Mr. Trump, in that a state level removal would be without due process if done without the involvement of Congress and it would also subsequently violate the equal protection clause if this was not made to be uniform in all of the states, once again, by Congress. 

         

        2.      This quote is attributed to the author of this article as far as I know, but I cite a work by Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, And Death (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 208 in order to credit him in some way due to the similarities of our individual quips.  What Mr. Camus actually wrote, that I was reading again recently and that made me feel that I should mention Mr. Camus and his work even if what I quipped in this blog is not so closely related to his topic and his work other than they both involve politics, was that “[t]he State that sows alcohol cannot be surprised to reap crime.”  Even if the similarity does not warrant a citation perhaps it will inspire one reader to pick up a book by Mr. Camus (in particular this author recommends The Stranger), or any other book by almost any author in any time period and actually read it, then the citation is more than worth my time and effort.  Because while I do not often agree with either the political ideas or the individual beliefs of Mr. Camus, I always agree that his writing is especially excellent and should be read, and subsequently discussed, by all persons whom believe in liberty and freedom enough to actually discuss alternative views without vilifying the person from whence they came. 

        3.      Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, (1782).  Mr. Rousseau made this comment some years before the French Revolution actually began in 1789: “At length I remembered the last resort of a great princess who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat brioches." The quote seems out of place to attribute to Marie Antionette because of the concern she demonstrated for the poor in spite of the extravagances of the royal family.  According to Wikipedia the first mention of this being attributed to Marie Antionette was by Alphonse Karr, a French Journalist, writing in Les Guêpes of March 1843 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake).  It is therefore not known who actually said it first, but it is doubtful that Marie Antionette ever said it in the context of the revolution as Mr. Karr described.

         

        4.      Add on:  Since the 14th Amendment was framed with the intent of limiting state powers rather than expanding them, as some seemed to believe based on the litigation attempts to kick a national candidate off a national ballot in places such as Colorado and Maine, in all of the preceding litigation it is crystal clear that allowing the state’s to determine whom could be a national candidate would “sever the direct link that the Framers found so critical between the National Government and the people of the United States.” (U.S. Term Limits, 514 U.S., 822) Interested parties can read the succinct and unanimous 9-0 verdict by the U.S. Supreme Court on the Colorado effort to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot in Trump v. Anderson, 601 U.S. ___ (2024), here:

         

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