Maggie's Farm

Guggenbuhl-Craig has an essay diagnosing the pedophile hysteria as taking partial archetypes..``Whenever the divine child appears, its archetypal opposite also emerges: the destroyer of the child, the child killer.'' (From the Wrong Side p.57) But he's a Jungian.

My own translation is that today soap opera rules everything.

That in turn is because only soap opera fans can be lured into watching the news regularly enough to support the media business model. So their tastes edit every national debate.

No other idea has advertiser legs.

There is no system...

John Gall has the definitive book on systems Systemantics, which has gone through a series of unfortunate expansions through various editions, but still has its core.

My favorite axioms, from memory,

``Systems grow, and as they grow they encroach.''

``Systems attract systems-people.''

``Intra-system goals come first.''

``Reality is whatever is reported to the system.''

``Fail-safe systems fail by failing to fail safe.''

My favorite chapter is ``Administrative Encirclement,'' where each researcher is asked to write out his objectives.

The deepest insight, very subtle indeed, is Orwell's Inversion: the confusion of input and output:

``Example: A giant program is to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled ``You and the War Against Cancer'' have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input.''

Title IX in science, Vicki Hearne had the definitive analysis in Bandit, in a chapter wondering why ``vicious dogs'' bit many times more boys than girls, and boys are afraid of horses...

http://home.att.net/~rhhardin9/vickihearne.womenmath.txt

copied out long ago along with many other bits, a great book.