All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Well, the obnoxious Nikki Haley finally, finally figured it out. She’s been the patsy of the Never-Trump cavalcade of clowns like the Koch Brother (after all if there’s only one left is he still a brother?). Now even she can see that if the only ones who vote for you are Never Trumpers and Democrats, the only places you can win are Vermont and Washington DC where there isn’t anyone else.
Don’t go away mad Nikki. Just go away.
Most of the end of civilization stuff seems overly dramatic. The dysfunction we see around us is distressing but somehow the lights stay on and the stores still have overpriced hamburger meat and eggs on their shelves. And although it seems like the kids have given up on living the lifestyle their parents and grandparents had, well, they still seem to feed themselves and have the latest Apple electronics when they complain about their poverty.
So, it’s interesting to think about just how much life in these United States will differ from even today in let’s say a decade. In 2034 what will be radically different?
Well, for one thing the oldest Millennials will be well advanced into middle age. For instance, the crop from 1980 will be fifty-four years old and retirement will be on a lot of their minds. The ones who didn’t get married or have children are maybe looking around at the world they “saved” by refusing to procreate and may be discovering that the world has completely passed them by. What might that situation do to their world view? Well, maybe very little. After all, when you’ve opted out of family life it doesn’t much matter whether you’re sixteen or sixty-six. You can still spend most of your time sitting in front of a computer screen playing some game or other. And in fact, playing video games is a viable option even when you’re eighty-six. So, a large proportion of Millennials will probably check out on the couch, joy stick in hand and eventually be scraped off the furniture and carted off to the Soylent Green plant without anyone even knowing they were gone. And the Millennial cat ladies will suffer a similar fate. Except in their case, they’ll provide a temporary source of cat food for their feline roommates.
But there will be a subset of the Millennials that buck the trend and have families. And they’re the ones that will determine what the future looks like. If like some of the parents of Zoomers that we read about, they sacrifice their kids on the altar of woke parenting then basically all they will accomplish is a one generation reprieve from the extinction of their genetic lines. Their children will follow the majority of their parents’ cohort down that sterile avenue to childless oblivion.
But the fraction of Millennials that succeed in bringing up their children with normal old-fashioned values and priorities will inherit the Earth. Think of it. The Millennials were an echo of the Baby Boom. Not as numerous but still the largest cohort currently on the scene. If they only produce a small generation of children and most of them fail to reproduce, then the ones that do will be an island of youth in a sea of old dead-enders. They will be the only game in town. They will be the future. And maybe that will put an end to all of this anti-human nonsense that the Gaia worshippers have invented. Maybe when Greta Thunberg hears her biological clock stop ticking, she will realize that she’s been sold a bill of goods by the Left and wasted her life fighting a moronic war against human flourishing. Hopefully when she reaches fifty, she can watch a video clip of herself hectoring some government panel, “How dare you destroy my childhood by providing modern inventions to allow me to live beyond neolithic conditions which are all I deserve!” I’ll already be gone but maybe historians can get a statement from her to act as a cautionary tale for future young idiots.
So even if the luddites get rid of gasoline cars and force us to eat crickets, I think the demographic trends will bring about a changing of the guard that will favor rationality and begin to eliminate those who bought into the anti-human cult that currently has most of the young under its sway.
That’s not to say that this irrational mindset won’t have damaged this country and the rest of western civilization terribly. It will have. There’s no way now to prevent the damage. But in some senses, it will be a self-correcting problem. Basically, the sane will inherit the Earth.
Love this poem. I grew up near Gloucester and visited the Statue of the Man at the Wheel many times. – Master Diver
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Sea-Fever
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
John Masefield
The 96th Academy Awards will take place March 10th 2024. Now I haven’t watched any part of the Oscars in coming on twenty years. Even back in the early 2000’s they had become unwatchable both for the virtue signaling that made up most of the spectacle and for the unbelievably low entertainment value of the movies selected as nominees.
In the spirit of open mindedness I decided to take a look at the publicly available information on the movies that are up for the Best Picture award. Below are links to each of the nominees.
You can check for yourself if your tastes may differ from mine. Most of them sound unwatchable. A multi-decade exploration of Leonard Bernstein’s bisexuality or a courtroom trial to determine whether a wife killed her husband or he committed suicide or whether he just fell off a balcony with their blind son as the chief witness or several other even less interesting plots.
I suppose a lot of older women might want to see Barbie. And I’m sort of interested to see whether Oppenheimer is any good. But after those two movies there isn’t much else. Interestingly, those two movies appear to be the only ones that made any money. The rest of them didn’t even break even. And since the Marvel movies lost money last year does that mean Oppenheimer and Barbie are the only source of income for Hollywood in 2023?
So my experiment in open-mindedness crashed and burned. Hollywood is no longer a thing. Other than maybe a source for genre movies (action/adventure, sci-fi and comic book heroes) they’ve basically moved away from a pretty large chunk of what used to be their audience.
And it shows. This list of best picture nominees is made up of either vanity projects by arthouse directors or Hollywood virtue signaling vehicles. There’s even that time honored chestnut, the Nazi Holocaust period piece (The Zone of Interest).
So, I still haven’t gotten around to watching Oppenheimer. I’ve heard it’s a mixed bag. It has some interesting things but it’s more than bit too long. Eventually I’ll watch it. But as for either watching the Oscars or any of these movies that ain’t happening. In fact, I can’t imagine that I’ll ever have a reason for watching the Academy Awards ceremony again. Maybe if they were brave enough to make Ricky Gervais the emcee I might watch the compilation of his insults of the nominees. That I could see as being worthwhile. What he did to the Golden Globes as the host was epic and well deserving of my time to rewatch it.
In fact that’s what I’m going to do on March 10th. I’ll rewatch the clip showing all of his best zingers at the Golden globes.
Now that’s entertainment!
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Andrew Marvell
There is a somewhat famous poem by a somewhat famous poet that went like this:
-What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
-Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
-Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
-Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
-Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
-Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy
Cavafy was a Greek living in late 19th and early 20th century Egypt, who was fascinated with the Byzantine past. The history of that worn down vestige of the Roman Empire helped him define his place in the world. After all Egypt where he lived had been an important part of the empire until the Muslim conquests sheard it away. And so, he imagined what it was like to be in Constantinople after all those centuries of Goths, Bulgars, Turks, Arabs and other hordes washing over the lands of their realm and crashing against the impenetrable walls of the city but inexorably wearing away the “empire” until all that was left was the city itself.
And so, you reach the mindset of the poem. The life of the Byzantines was defined by the idea of just resisting the passage of time, of the changing of epochs of even the disappearance of whole civilizations by shutting the gates and withdrawing inwardly. Eventually you can justify almost any decadence or depravity by shrugging your shoulders and pointing at the chaos outside your walls.
This familiar end of empire mentality is appropriate for any number of decaying systems. It applies almost equally well for western civilization as a whole, the British Empire, the American Global Empire, American “democracy” and in particular the Republican Party. Waiting for the barbarians could be the description of how the “conservatives” have handled their campaign to resist the progressives. It’s a crouching posture of weakness where resistance is merely a reluctant acquiescence to whatever new outrage has broken out under the eyes of the faithful standing on the walls of the city, above the wreckage of the empire. As the last of their possessions are appropriated and converted by the enemy, the nobles and their lackeys look down from their protected heights and wonder how this all came to be. The fact that they long ago gave up leading their followers into battle isn’t even a memory. All they remember is the ancient glories of the “Gipper” and how wonderful it was back then to be real men.
But now a real problem emerges. What if there are no more barbarians. “Those people were a kind of solution.” They could blame their uselessness on their enemy’s strength. What if, heaven forbid, Donald Trump wins the election and they have to rule? How could they pretend to be beautiful losers? Well, they’ve come up with the answer. Now Donald Trump and the MAGA conservatives becomes the barbarians and they’ll cooperate with the Democrats to destroy them so that things can go back to normal.
And that’s the situation we may be faced with. Joe Biden is so incompetent and despicable that even Democrats have begun to mock him. The Democrat party is beginning to sound desperate to find a convenient way to ditch him and Kamala Harris together. And, of course, the bait and switch at or after the convention seems like the obvious ploy. But what if they bungle this whole election and Trump wins so convincingly that even these master cheats can’t make it happen? What then?
My belief is that the Republicans will sabotage the Trump administration just as they did during his first term. They will cooperate with the Deep State and throw away the chance at reform. They will see the Democrats as their natural masters and cripple all attempts at reform.
That’s what my instincts tell me. But there is always the chance that Trump will find a way to get things done. It’s not likely or even explicable. How would he get things done without the Congress? How would he break the power of the Justice Department? To carry this already overtaxed metaphor to its utter absurd conclusion Trump would have to be the founder of a new empire and re-order the old world into something new and dynamic.
Of course, that’s a different era. Ends of empires only go in one direction. So, we won’t be on the walls but we’ll get a ringside seat to the next act in this drama. “Those people were a kind of solution.”
The world in all doth but two nations bear —
The good, the bad; and these mixed everywhere.
Andrew Marvell