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GUIDING THE WHEEL

How did the pendulum swing from “defund the police” espoused by politicians like Mayor Bill de Blasio, to a resurgence of law and order?

GUIDING THE WHEEL

New York City seems poised to elect a mayor who’s either a former police captain or a Guardian Angel vigilante of public protection — Eric Adams or Curtis Sliwa. How did the pendulum swing from “defund the police” espoused by politicians like Mayor Bill de Blasio, to a resurgence of law and order? And how can we guide the wheel of history?

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28 replies on “GUIDING THE WHEEL”

Very good analysis which does comport with history as all good analyses do.
Though one group of people I think you left out of the “they will never be convinced” bucket are the elites. The rich. The ones who do not suffer the consequences of their actions.
BUT……..
One thing that can skew the turning of the wheel and make Winters longer is if the weaklings steal elections. If the people who get fed up with weakling rule are allowed to vote in free and fair elections the wheel will turn at nature’s speed…human heart speed. But if the will of the people is thwarted then the Wheel slows during Winter time.
Another thing is that we have to be more explicit and thorough in our prognostications:
We have to tell them what hill happen if weaklings win and WHY.
We have to tell them what is happening with the weaklings in power; that we TOLD them it would happen and why. and how to get out of it.
The populace can never be confused as to what is happening; what we said and why we said it. Reagan used to propound the Conservative Proposition extremely well. No politician has done it as well ever since.

Sometimes you get a good puppy…sometimes you get a particularly dense puppy… a puppy that’s majoring in gender studies…. LMAO Well put!

He’s a black activist who happens to be pro law and order. Making him better than any other Democrat in NYC. He started his rise with 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement.

Still, I don’t think Sliwa has a prayer against him.

Spot on, Bill. Especially the part about farmers. A couple of my best friends are farmers and like the great Milton Friedman and Tom Sowell, they exhibit both keen intellect and tremendous common sense.

What the Giuliani administration realized is that it is not one criminal per crime, crime is their job, one mugger may commit 200 muggings a year so locking up 200 muggers could eliminate 40,000 muggings. Also since criminals are stupid and arrogant and don’t obey ANY laws, grabbing misdemeanor subway turnstile jumpers gives police the right to check the records and find out many are wanted on various and often multiple outstanding arrest warrants for more serious crimes. Of course some idiot media types would grumble about ‘ nothing else to do but grab kids at turnstiles’ , as usual missing the point. 

Love the shout out to farmers. My brothers and I are immune. We grew up on our grandfather’s and later our father’s dairy farm in the 60s and 70s.

Increasing funding to law enforcement even to the point of infinity won’t do anything to stop crime as long as the judges and prosecutors refuse to enforce the law through the imposition of serious consequences for serious offenses. The “low-level drug offender serving a life sentence” canard has proven to be an increasingly deadly delusion. Three strikes and you’re out was as vital to re-establishing civil order for the law-abiding as broken windows policing, because both policies ensnared the incorrigible. A small segment of society is always responsible for an inordinate amount of crime. The number of violent crimes currently being committed by repeat offenders out on insignificant or even no bail is an atrocity neither party will address. The fact that Larry Hoover and Gustavo Colon are both eligible to apply for early release under the much-vaunted First Step Act proves the insanity being foisted on the innocent by our sociopathic ruling class: “‘“He fired repeatedly into the body of [the victim], and then casually held the gun to the head of [the young woman], who was spared only because the killer’s earlier zeal had emptied the weapon.'”
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-one-of-the-worst-chicago-gang-leaders-now-seeking-early-release-under-trump-passed-first-step-act

The barbarians operate on the same wheel, but with the opposite perspective. They too have learned how slow it down and speed it up, often by breaking the rules and using our goodness against us. And needless to say, they love our sternly-worded objections to their lawlessness – – They love our politicians.
We must now do more than just walk away and hide – We must take away their money. This starts with our side having a better understanding about what money fundamentally is.
(Fundamentally, it is a contract. But with technology – especially open source technologies – it is much more – because, the best contracts are self-executing ones. That’s the promise of crypto currencies like Ethereum 2.0, Etc.)
I urge this community to learn more about this to spin the wheel our way.

When talking about the the current US crisis a lot of people talk about the fall of the Roman empire but some historians and archeologists note that the relative wealth and health in the provinces went up in the era, 600 AD to 900 AD. Religious liberty flourished. Steel making went from a roman government monopoly to a thing most farmers and villages could do in a corner of the yard. New varieties of food and livestock were bred. Government and taxes were localized. Trade became much freer and more flexible. Roads were maintained but not where they enabled invaders fast movement. Every man carried a sword, ever woman a dagger and many children had a small knife. The bow was ubiquitous. Decentralized liberty had replaced Empire.

Actually I know of quite a lot of farmers that exhibit zero common sense and do very bad things. The beauty of farming is that such bad farmers go broke very fast and the bank sells their land to someone else. Sadly many failed farmers then end up in either the department of agriculture or the department of lands and start stuffing everyone up. In Australia politicians have actually called the agriculture bureaucrats “the department of failed farmers”. The worst case scenario occurs when the failed farmers end up working for the banks.

I fear that on top of the shorter-term cycles you are describing, there is a larger scale, longer-term cycle that actually means total civilizational collapse. That’s what makes me look 10, 20 years into the future with some trepidation.

I sure hope you’re wrong!! We will have to wait and see and hope for the best.

The Empire was dying. No one could prevent that. The coming dark ages could last 30 millennia. But one man set out on a quest to shorten the dark period to a single millennium.
Bill Whittle is Hari Seldon! Or maybe he is Daneel Olivaw. We can speed up the period of darkness and extend the time of light. Just need to find the correct cam and push really hard.

I’m listening to that series of books right now. I read it more than 30 years ago when I was overseas and that’s deep enough in the memory fog that it’s almost, not quite but almost, like a new experience. I still remembered some basic plot lines and characters but listening to the books again is fleshing it all out once more. I’m doing this because the TV series “Foundation” is coming out some time this year or next and I wanted a fresh overlay in my head to fully appreciate the show. That said …

You’re right, Bill is espousing a principle of Psychohistory as that science was developed by Hari Seldon’s character created by Isaac Asimov.

I’ve long said that our great hope in the Information Age is the ubiquitous nature of available information — And it’s also proving subsequently to be our most dangerous technical toy ever developed.

The hope lies in the fact that universal, global dissemination of knowledge so cheaply available that nearly everyone has access to it is something that has never occurred before in the history of mankind. Those who want to learn ever more can do so with no more than a pittance invested and even those who cannot afford the pittance have access to public facilities where that information is a keystroke away. This is novel to the human condition.

Sadly, a side effect of this cheap, voluminous, readily available knowledge is that certain elements of human society are becoming even dumber and more destructive than ever before. The Summer of Riots is a good example of this. It is highly doubtful that before information technology became common and nearly cheap as dirt that something like that would have spread and sustained itself for so long. Law and order would have stepped in and stopped it but information technology allowed a counter-culture to offset and combat the power of reasonableness.

Evil evolves. I don’t know if that’s actually a “thing” in Hari Seldon’s science of Psychohistory. Isaac Asimov was brilliant but I doubt even he, when he wrote the Foundation series, had an inkling of the true effect of universal access to knowledge and communications — At that time.

Isaac Asimov wove a great yarn with that series and in doing so was quasi-prophetic. Something we see in a lot of Science Fiction.

I think Bill is right and so are you. I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen that we need to let the opposition have what they want, good and hard. Not let them have everything they want, but as much as we can afford to traverse. While doing that, we need to focus on core values and rights to preserve them through the dark times and give us tools to get a leg up when the darkness lifts. We need the First and Second Amendment to remain relatively intact. We need to preserve knowledge of what actually works economically so that after people shoot themselves in the foot and suffer through that pain for a time they become willing to apply principles that actually work. We need to drive through this stupidity while not succumbing to it nor allowing it to take away the implements that will allow us to grow a better nation when we emerge from the other side.

The art is going to lie in navigating this current “Seldon Crisis” without becoming another Venezuela. That, not the perfect implementation of absolute conservative ideals, should be our main consideration right now. When the pain comes we need to be ready to say a lot of “I told you so” and “This is how you fix this, and this is how we know it works”.

The parallels to the Foundation series are eerie. Like Bill says, this may not be the perfect course of action but it may well be the best one available.

Let us hope what we’re facing is Asimov’s dark ages and not Niven and Pournelle’s Crazy Eddy cycles of total collapse back to barbarism ala The Mote in God’s Eye.

Last summer I started with the Robot Novels and progressed through the Foundation stories in the Chronological order of the story, not the order in which it was written. So I started with I, Robot and Caves of Steel.
The Author’s Note of Prelude to Foundation contains Asimov’s suggested reading order for his science fiction books: The Complete Robot (1982) and/or I, Robot (1950) Caves of Steel (1954) The Naked Sun (1957) The Robots of Dawn (1983) Robots and Empire (1985) The Currents of Space (1952) The Stars, Like Dust (1951) Pebble in the Sky (1950) Prelude to Foundation (1988) Note: Forward the Foundation (1993) was then unpublished, but would have followed Prelude. Foundation (1951) Foundation and Empire (1952) Second Foundation (1953) Foundation’s Edge (1982) Foundation and Earth (1986)
It was fun to revisit and come full circle. ( I read them when I saw the first trailer for Apple’s show. I hope it is good, I fear it will succumb to the woke-fest and somehow become very Mary Sue. But I will give it a shot as I loved the stories and actually like the work of the actor portraying Selden.)
Listening to Bill this morning is probably the first time the Strong Men make good times circle made me think of Psychohistory and the goal of shortening the savagery of the low cycle.
In addition to the 1st and 2nd Amendments staying intact we will need the State’s to preserve their sovereignty so that there will be places in the US that are still part of America. Need some place to put the Encyclopedists. The Second Foundation will be led by Bill deep in the heart of LA.

Thanks for the chronological list. I copied it and will put that on my reading/audio book agenda. I listen to audios when I’m doing something like working outside (on a Bluetooth speaker, I hate headphones except as noted, they bugger up my situational awareness something fierce) or mowing the lawn. I have 4 acres of lawn to keep up and I have a headset that I wear doing that (tractor and ZTR mower) and the occasional heavy equipment operator job I do for a friend when he’s short handed. In those cases it’s not likely that my situational awareness would be acute anyway due to machine noise and it’s just a lot more pleasant to do that stuff with sound deadening cans than without.

I read at night before I go to bed. I’m going through the Fleet of Worlds/Ringworld series at the moment. I’ll probably start on Asimov when that’s done. Out of the list you provided I think the only one I have never read is Pebble in the Sky. I started it once and was really enjoying the first few chapters when something came up and I just never got back to it. So I’m looking forward to that one and thanks for the reminder.

Probably because I’m listening to Asimov’s Foundation series when I watched the above video this morning I too was reminded of Hari Seldon’s Psychohistory and to be frank wasn’t at all surprised when reading the comments that it had occurred to you also. GMTA 🙂

I vote for Alaska as a locale for the Encyclopedists.

And yesterday, someone made the comment that Elon Musk is D. D. Harriman.
We are making our own mythology into reality. If our “leaders” won’t or can’t take us to the future, we will do it ourselves!

Here are a couple observations. Your growth, and therefore your delivery, are impressive and important for us listeners. Your ideas give all of us a chance to think through those topics you bring and consider for ourselves how to act, not just generally but personally. Thank you for that.
The other observation is that mankind continually runs experiments, much as scientist do. Part of our nature, as you have said, is to live a moment and then consider how to make things “better”. We run an experiment: does this philosophy, when implemented, make things better? If we defund or reallocate funds from the usual policing, are conditions better or worse? If we spread wealth around to try to make life better for everyone, does that work? We have outcomes and we react to those outcomes, even in the most dire and threatening of situations. Clearly our current emphasis is on our domestic experiments and the one thing to be avoided is to let the results become permanent. There are other threats, those involved in foreign policy, and for the past twenty plus years we finally realize these most recent experiments have failed, but we still, at least currently, have not learned the vital lesson of national interests and how to insure them.
The wheel does turn and history, as you expressed, rolls “forward” even as the top moves to the bottom, creating a track which can bring terrible pain and suffering or wealth and greatness. It is a mistake to focus on the movement of the wheel as being stopped. Indeed, we don’t want it stopped, because stopping would imply a sort of finality. Our concept of being in a good place is a false one: we always seek “better” and must experiment to determine what that really is. We know the experiments in Germany, Italy, China, and Russia in the past 100 years failed. Our greatest danger is trying to achieve a better outcome based on those hypotheses. In the US we have learned the great danger of racism and segregation, and those who wish to try those experiments again should not be permitted to go ahead because we already know the outcome. But trying to deny them that ability is not attempting to stop the wheel but to shift its direction.
I understand the idea of speeding the wheel up and slowing it down, but I see the basis as shifting direction to avoid the path we have learned from earlier experiments does not get us where we want to be. Modern farmers learned those lessons, through the dust bowls, through cooperation to obtain otherwise unaffordable machinery, to trying various pesticides, and so on, some of which lessons were incorporated into changing the direction of the wheel.

“… and the one thing to be avoided is to let the results become permanent.”
Which is of course why we need to seriously consider having sunset provisions in almost every law that gets passed. Five years to 20 years, depending on the subject matter, seems about right to me. In a few selected cases I would even argue for a 30 to 50 year span for constitutional amendments, say for the 16th or 17th, to give them a fair shake of exposure but not a continuing legitimacy if problems arise.

Note also that for any wheel to actually change the course of the vehicle or axle to which it is connected, there must be a frictional force applied to the ground to cause some form of side movement. 

Great points, and tie in with term limits. While some say we have limits based on elections and can alter the wheel in that way, your observation on the sunset has merit because it forces re-engagement with the fundamental concepts behind the law. I disagree with doing the same with Constitutional amendments because the passion of people can undo basic rights. Think of Germany in the thirties in which fundamental changes in law regarding citizenship were instituted rather easily. Had those changes required a complex and lengthy process the new laws might never been passed. I believe certain rights are so fundamental to our nation that any change should be very difficult. Consider also the changes in decisions by SCOTUS which directly impact the interpretation of the Constitution and my point may be clearer.

The way “the wheel” is going right now is a way that says if we disagree with those guiding its path, WE don’t get choose another path.

I couldn’t help but refer to the end of GOT. The crusader Dani, becomes blinded by her own lust for power. After burning down an entire city and its citizens she asks the man she loves to help her break “The Wheel.” He sees that she has fallen into the destructive trap set by ultimate power, and zealous revenge. Those who disagree with her plan will not “get to choose.” After years of war and endless deaths, he sees no mercy in her and no end to the terror. So, he kills her as his way to guide “The Wheel.”

Don’t know if we are looking into the abyss. The path the wheel is on is making a very ugly crunching sound…! God set the wheel of history in motion. Humans have taken it off the path He set for us. He and only He can break the wheel. Pray for guidance as the current administration’s wheel tries to grind us all down to dust.

You definitely cheered me up, Bill. Your wisdom and ability to conceptualize the moment and prognosticate the future is why I’m here everyday. Your vision helps refine my understanding and gives me hope, when all about me I see chaos and loss of discernment.

The first few lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” remind me of you and the man you are:
If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

Sometimes you just need to let your dear friend hit rock bottom in order for them to get their life on track. My friend group had to let this happen to one of my best friends and now 5 years later he is happily married with his first son on the way. I think we may need to do the same with The United States of America. The true patriots need to insulate themselves from the coming fall as much as possible so that we can be there once the rest of the country hits rock bottom and help rebuilt our great nation.

what of us who are 73? i protect my assets and try to stay out of the limelight but here i am now cornered by the va who will require me to get covid tests just to enter their buildings, then the vaccine to get dental work and insulin.
i have no other avenue.

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