“You, King Gelon, are aware the 'universe' is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the Earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the Sun and the centre of the Earth. This is the common account as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the 'universe' just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun remain unmoved, that the Earth revolves about the Sun on the circumference of a circle, the Sun lying in the middle of the Floor, and that the sphere of the fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the Sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the Earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the center of the sphere bears to its surface.” ~ Archimedes, circa 220 B.C., The Sand Reckoner, quoted in “Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius et Dimensio Circuli” translated Anno Domini 1913
How do you know? There are a number of paths by which people come to know things. The most divine is spiritual knowledge which comes to us from God. We have a considerable body of spiritual knowledge set down in documents. We have uncovered ancient copies of these documents which indicate that since about the time the evil pagan Romans were busy slaughtering the Essenes at the scriptorium near the sea of Arabah two thousand years ago, the documents, including every book of the Bible except Esther, have been character for character the same.
Another way you may come to know things is by studying other authorities on various topics. We call that approach to knowledge by the word scholasticism. Scholars read what other scholars have written. Some knowledge is imparted in these ways. Unfortunately, this approach runs into the problem of experts. They are not trustworthy. They often try to derive knowledge from false ideas, leading them to building structures upon the shifting sands of error. The structures fall and great is their fall.
You can also derive some knowledge from a small number of axioms or principles or ideas. Geometry is a body of knowledge built upon such ideas. Philosophy since the time of René Descartes has built a certain amount of ideology on his view cogito ergo sum or “I think therefore I am” from which he derived many other ideas. We have from about his era (AD 1561 to 1650) the idea of a scientific method to examine the universe by observation, formulate hypotheses, seek to falsify these by examining data from observations that may contradict a given hypothesis, and, if possible, reforming the hypothesis to account for the available data.
Kurt Gödel (AD 1906 to 1978) used a set of logical proofs to establish that any consistent system of knowledge built upon axioms is necessarily incomplete. In other words, you always end up with certain ideas that have to be present at the foundation or you cannot get anywhere. His theorem comes in two parts. First he proved that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure such as an algorithm is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers. Then he proved that the system cannot prove its own consistency.
I mention these ideas in relationship to the recent propaganda surrounding the concept of vast computational systems that are designed to employ sets of algorithms to identify relationships about knowledge. We live in what my friend
calls an “algorithm ghetto” where those of us with ideas that challenge the narrative of the hoax stream mass murderers, war profiteers, rapists, and cannibals are kept from having our ideas seen very widely. Incompleteness illustrates some aspects of how monstrous that situation really is.Learning
There are seven really useful systems for learning which are not widely taught in the propaganda mills that pass for public schools. These methods are extremely ancient, probably pre-dating the civilisations about which we have written records. Understanding them is important, especially if you ever want to teach anyone anything.
The trivium is a group of three sets of ideas: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Grammar is the study of the parts of speech, the syntax we use to relate words to one another, the semantics by which we understand meaning, and also morphology, and phonology. We understand words by studying grammar. We can also get some sense of the history of their meanings by studying the etymology of words, the source languages from which our words come, including the times and cultures from which they derive.
Rhetoric is the study of persuasive speech. In the last century, one of the studies of rhetoric is propaganda which is sometimes lied about by men and women who call it “advertising” and “public relations.” Rhetoric examines how arguments are made, what fallacies are widely used, and how to reason critically about the things someone else is saying.
Logic is the study of understanding. We use logic in reasoning about the world around us. Logic is related to grammar because we use syntax, properly or improperly, to make reasoned statements. Logic is related to rhetoric because we use reasoning to make persuasive arguments. The ability to penetrate semantics and rhetorical statements to come to a clear understanding is a key capacity to develop using logic.
Teaching the trivium is highly regarded among classical educators. With grammar, rhetoric, and logic a person has the most important tools for understanding words. At the top of this section, I mentioned seven systems of learning. The other four are arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Because they are four, they are often called the quadrivium. They are important tools by which we teach students about numbers and their application to the world around us.
The graphic at the top of this essay is meant to describe some of the ideas of Aristarchus by which an ancient Syracusan mathematician named Archimedes was very impressed. Hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus the Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus not only understood the phases of the Moon as illustrating the spherical nature of that celestial body but also came up with geometrical equations to identify the circumference of Earth and its distance to the Moon.
At times I’ve gone to certain lengths to describe these ideas. For example, a friend of mine published my Space Scouts Field Manual Parody in the early part of AD 2017. In it, not only do I go over the kinds of experiments Aristarchus used to illustrate the spherical nature of our planet and measure its circumference, but also I showed how you can go about conducting similar experiments today. Trigonometry is a very useful field of study within the broader system of learning we call geometry.
People who have other ideas about Earth being a disc sitting on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a turtle, which in turn stands on the back of another turtle, are free to choose to believe whatever it is they wish to believe. I myself do not believe that it is “turtles, professor, turtles, turtles, turtles, all the way down.”
Suits
The title of this essay refers to business executives. Men and women in business, especially those whose work forces them to interact with banking gangsters, politicians, and parasitic bureau rats, often wear suits. In our culture we substitute the people for their apparel.
The subtitle of this essay identifies that feature of our culture as metonymy. If you want to understand rhetoric, you should understand metonymy. It is one of the masterful tropes, or substitution techniques used in literature. The other three major tropes are metaphor, synecdoche, and irony. If you read my essays, you should be able to find plenty of examples of irony. The substitution of “suits” for “business executives” is not synecdoche, in that the suit is not a necessary or essential aspect of the executive. You may notice “casual Fridays” and weekend cram sessions when business execs fail utterly to groom themselves and appear in informal attire.
I mention “suits” because quite a lot of our culture, for a very long time, has been about deference. It has been my direct personal experience that people treat me differently if I am wearing a suit jacket than they do if I am not. A winter jacket doesn’t ever generate the same deferential treatment. Also I have found that slacks and a suit jacket have an adequate number of pockets for my everyday carry items, about which we may have a discussion in the comments or another time.
Clothes do not make the man. The fashion industry has been morally bankrupt since it was invented by Jean-Baptiste Colbert to impoverish the French aristocracy for the benefit of the machinations of total control of Louis Quatorze. But people do make assumptions based on appearances. If you are groomed, recently bathed, and appear in certain formal or semiformal attire, people will treat you with some deference, a bit of respect, and make tentative forays into conversation. If you are dressed in street clothes, smell of bodily wastes, and are raggedy, people will treat you very differently. These are not necessarily good aspects of our culture, but they do exist.
I note with amusement that the web client that I am using tonight to write this essay through the Substack web interface did not include semiformal, synecdoche, nor metonymy in its “dictionary” until I added them today. The culture in which we live is a decadent and substantially degraded version of an earlier, higher culture that has been deliberately attacked and harmed by the vile demon worshippers of the “Progressive” movement in the last 144 years.
If you are one of those “suits” who plans to invest heavily into “artificial intelligence” companies, I would like it very much if you spent some time with the problems inherent in assigning power and authority to systems that lack even a cursory knowledge of the words we use to describe rhetorical devices such as metonymy and synecdoche, let alone how those tropes are used in literature.
Suits with such investment plans may view Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Andrew Ng, Eric Schmidt, and their ilk with deference, respect, and even admiration. I myself do not. The algorithms are not intelligent. Judging by results, neither are some of the algorithm crafters.
Private schools
In a recent Substack notes conversation with
of the vital and useful ‘stack The Freedom Scale the topic of long term solutions to the problems caused by the excesses of politics came up. One of the aspects of American culture that I overlooked in some of my responses is private education.Public schools are awful. The communists have made them that way. By communists I mean all the trade union activists in the teacher and public employee unions. I mean the freemasons, because Marx was a freemason hired by freemasons who promoted his terribly stupid ideas. There are over 98,000 publik skools run by bureau rats who hire teachers who deliberately hurt 49.4 million students from “pre-kindergarten” through high school as of AD 2025. Delightfully, that number is unchanged since 2022.
Now, I find that statistic interesting because in recent essays I’ve written about the children under 18 years of age who were prevented from voting because the political system hates them, treats them like slaves, and disregards the idea of no taxation without representation. There are 76.1 million such children. Divided into 17 age cohorts we get 4.48 million per year of age. We then multiply that value by 4 to account for the years before pre-kindergarten. (See how useful arithmetic is? Yay quadrivium!) We get the number 17.92 million. Thus we are curious about the 58.2 million school age children.
For the year 2025 we find that 5.72 million children are enrolled in private schools in the US. There are right around 32,461 private schools in our country.
Perhaps you see right away the difficulty with these numbers. If about 10% of school age children are in private schools, that’s really excellent. Any number of them may be learning Latin in Catholic schools, learning the trivium and quadrivium topics in private settings, and getting a great deal of one-on-one time with teachers hired not for their “didn’t earn it” features but for their ability to teach. The difficulty arises, though when we sum 49.4 and 5.72 and get 55.12, a value that is smaller than the 58.2 number above for the millions of school age children. We are missing about 3.08 million students.
Home schools
Happily, there are about 3.7 million students being home schooled in the Spring semester of this year. Which is, as you notice, more than the number of school age children for which we have not accounted. I suspect that more careful evaluation of the numbers will reveal some interesting facts.
My three older brothers taught me the alphabet, arithmetic with flash cards, and how to read with the “Dick and Jane” books when I was three years old. In other words, I was home schooled before my “school age” years. My dad would read the L. Frank Baum “Wizard of Oz” books to us every night when I was a child. There were thousands of books in our family home, and I learned a great many things about a great many topics by reading those books, including the large one-volume encyclopedias and the multi-volume encyclopedia. Truly interesting facts about explosives and chemistry may be found in the pages of older books, by the way.
So one way to explain the numbers of children not adding up is to consider the possibility that children younger than four years of age are being taught in home schools. The same may be true of some private schools. Another way to explain the numbers is to consider that the people involved in the publik skool system of deliberately dumbing down Americans to subjugate us and push us into slavery are incompetent.
I do not believe that the census counts everyone. There were some recent articles published this year that make it clear that the census techniques for counting rural populations are really bad all over the world. Given that there are far more people in rural communities than are accounted for by official numbers, there are most likely more people on Earth than the politicians and bureau rats claim. We may have as many as ten billion people on Earth right now.
How would you know? You certainly cannot trust the evil, perfidious, ugly, decadent, and disgusting people in your county who are charged with the counting of votes, based on the shenanigans in every election since AD 1788. You therefore should not take seriously the census numbers. I myself was not counted in the 2020 decennial census, and I have reason to believe that my household wasn’t accurately counted in 2010, 2000, and 1990. I don’t agree with the enumeration of the people (see 2 Samuel 24 for details on how it is a sin). If twenty thousand people were killed because David sinned in enumerating the population of Israel, how many should be killed because the evil men who wrote the constitution deliberately and maliciously included a decennial census in its text?
We know that the votes are not counted accurately. We have no reason to suppose the adult population is counted accurately. I don’t think we know how many school age children there are in America. So there might be tens of millions of children who are not being tormented by the ugly awful policies of the reprobates who administer and teach in the publik skools. In any event, fifteen to twenty percent of American children are in private schools or home schools or are unschooled. (If you like the ideas of home schooling, you should look into unschooling. Children often do very well learning without a structured system once you give them the basic tools of knowledge.)
Nukes
One of the recent Substack notes conversations with Christopher Cook included a few exchanges on the topic of who would protect us in a free market world without evil tyrants from private persons getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Christopher’s thoughts on the topic are excellent.
We know that there have been exactly two cities blown up by nuclear explosions. Zero of those cities were blown up by privately owned nukes. We know that 528 above ground nuclear tests have taken place with tens of thousands of witnesses and any number of victims. Some of the fall out from some of those tests (including US tests in Nevada) was allowed to hurt people in small communities in rural areas. Those people were “studied” in much the way the victims of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments were studied, without informed consent. We have reasons to believe from eye witness testimony, including testimony of persons who cleaned up after some of these above ground tests that there were prisoners chained in some of the ships anchored within the blast radius of some of those nuclear explosions.
We know that there have been at least 2,056 nuclear explosions, including above ground and underground tests, since AD 1944. We know about these tests from declassified documents, from eyewitness testimony, and from detailed scientific instruments including seismometers used to establish the nature and extent of the explosions. If you are called upon to consider the validity of the hypothesis that mankind has exploded nuclear weapons, you have a considerable body of evidence in support. So falsifying that hypothesis would be difficult. Zero of those two thousand nuclear explosions resulted from private ownership of nukes.
In addition, those of us who have studied nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are aware of certain facts about nuclear technology from which the methods for making a dirty bomb (a radiological weapon to spread radioactive dust with ordinary explosives) or an actual nuclear bomb with ordinary means. There is even an instance of a teenager doing so on his family’s property. Several fiction and non-fiction stories in science fiction magazines have given the details on how to do these things. George W. Harper wrote the lengthy article “Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood,” which appeared in the April, AD 1979 issue of Analog magazine.
Knowledge is powerful. One of the more interesting books of the last forty years was written by Alvin and Heidi Toffler. In AD 1990 they published Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century. It is a really good look at a vast array of topics regarding who has power in our world and from where they get that power. It turns out that violence is not as powerful as wealth which is not as powerful as knowledge.
It would be wise to teach your children carefully and well. They would be more capable as a result. Might save your life. Might save their own.
That’s all I’ve got for today. Come back next time when I have something new. Or old.