I’m sitting here thinking about our liberal friends, and wondering: are they smart, or not so smart? They must be smart-ish, else they would not have been the ruling class in America for the last century and more. They are good at handing out the loot, at hounding Republican presidents from office. But not much else.

What with liberals on Trump’s tail I thought about fighter pilot Col. John Boyd, who lived from 1927 to 1997. I wrote about him back in 2005. Boyd was responsible for the F-16 and F-15 fighters, because science. Boyd is also the inventor of the OODA loop.

To paraphrase the philosopher Joseph Biden: “if you don’t know about Boyd, you ain’t ‘Murican.”

There is now a colonelboyd.com for the benefit of fans and researchers. If you want to get all philosophical, you can read Boyd’s monograph “Destruction and Creation” which gets deep into Gödel and Heisenberg.

But if you just want the slide deck, there is “Conceptual Spiral” waiting for you.

Basically Boyd says that if you want to descend into death and disorder, then keep on keeping on with your closed system that explains everything, dear liberal friends. But that’s not the way the world works. The way you get out of the spiral dive and the increasing entropy of the closed system is with “novelty.” So on the 38th slide in the slide deck Boyd says:

Since survival and growth are directly connected with the uncertain, ever-changing, unpredictable world of winning and losing we will exploit this whirling (conceptual) spiral of orientation, mismatches, analysis/synthesis, reorientation, mismatches, analysis/synthesis… so that we can comprehend, cope with, and shape, as well as be shaped by that world and the novelty that arises out of it.

Got it? Just like Elon Musk and SpaceX. It’s the same concept that George Gilder calls “surprise” using Claude Shannon’s notion that “information is most essentially news or surprise.”

Do you see the point? I interpret Boyd and Gilder to say that if you legislate welfare state government programs that, according to Chantrill’s Law, cannot be reformed, it means you are going down the road to rising entropy and eventual social death. And that’s where our liberal friends are going. They believe in lifetime jobs for liberals in regulatory agencies that just sit there and add restrictions and mandates. They believe in funding their supporters with lifetime jobs and lifetime entitlements. They believe in peaceful protests for the kiddies. And they believe in the eternal rule of the educated class, peasant.

The last thing our liberal friends want is “novelty” or “surprise” -- for themselves. But there is nothing more glorious than to spring a surprise on an insurrectionist grandmother or President Trump with the FBI at Mar-a-Lago.

All this is, of course, very male and patriarchal. Whatabout women? I’m glad you asked.

Women are very much into the “novelty” and “surprise” game. It’s called “babies.” See, every new baby is a new combination of DNA, a surprise that reverses the descent into same-old-same-old and entropy and death. Scientists at the Catholic Church figured this out centuries ago when they banned cousin marriage.

But notice how committed our liberal friends are to stopping “novelty” and “surprise” for women. Take the vitally important careers-for-women. You know, of course, that “career” comes from the French “carrière” or race track: round and round in circles. You know that childlessness -- for incels, soy boys, feminists, careerists, LGBT, is also the road to entropy and death.

I just don’t think that liberals are good for women.

Well, bless my buttons. Here’s Instapundit linking to a piece on exactly the same subject: dynamism vs. stasis. Talk about a “far-right” hive mind!

Dynamism? It is learning,

a decentralized process of trial and error with feedback provided through competition and criticism.

Stasis? It’s either “stability,” as in don’t rock the boat, or “technocracy,” as in Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the future.”

Technocrats often praise the idea of progress but define it as moving toward a single, known goal. 

After trudging through all this, trying to understand surprise and stasis and dynamism, I’m feeling a bit depressed. Because it all makes me realize how utterly clueless our liberal rulers are. They are fabulous at peaceful protest, indefatigable at lawfare, endlessly churning out rules and regulations for thee, but not for me. They can rig elections and demand that nobody notice.

They had workers voting for them for decades, because Robber Barons. They have owned the votes of blacks for decades, because racists. They have single women voting for them, because abortion.

All I know is that the next decade or two is going to be really hard for ordinary people. Between sky-high energy prices, sky-high housing prices, green energy regulation, and Get Trump, Americans are facing a dark future.

And liberals did it.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Gaudencio Garcinuño via Flickr