Month: August 2025

What If We’re Not Doomed

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How many times have pundits (including my humble self) declared that we are already irrevocably tobogganing down the slope toward the decline and fall of the American Empire?  Probably too many to count.  And it’s not as if there isn’t a lot of dysfunction everywhere you look.  I won’t go through the litany.  It’s almost endless but all we have to mention to provide an undeniable example of societal rot and insanity is the spectacle of the American Medical Association embracing “gender affirming” treatments for minors including hormone therapies, mastectomies, hysterectomies and castration.

But what if things are about to improve?  Suppose the Trump administration is followed by the Vance administration and during this reprieve from leftist lunacy the country gets its financial health back to a greater extent.  Let’s go with that scenario.  People have enough money to buy houses again and raise kids and plan for the future.  What would that look like?  Of course, I have no way of actually knowing but let’s play the game and throw out some ideas and see if it leads us somewhere.

First off, I think it’s important to say what it won’t look like.  It’s not going to look like America in the 1950s or even the 1980s or 1990s.  The adults and children today; the millennials and the zoomers are very different from my parents’ generation and mine.  They’ve been propagandized in school and through social media to despise the world from those olden times.  They’re ashamed of their parents and grandparents and want to conform to the norms they’ve been taught.

Some of this can be seen in the situation playing out in New York City’s mayoral race.  The last two mayors have been liberal Democrats and under their administrations all the improvements in quality of life and safety gained during Republican mayors have been lost and the city is on the verge of collapsing into chaos.  So, what do the people there want in the next mayor?  A communist!  Now this is just an example.  There are others.  A similar radical is running for mayor of Minneapolis.  So, there is no lack of evidence that the millennials believe insane things.  Now it is true that there is precedent for people who believe these things being gob-smacked by reality and changing their minds.  Maybe that’s what we’re going to see.  It happened to the baby boomers in the nineteen seventies and eighties.  Maybe it’ll happen again.

But regardless, things will be very different.  I believe there has been a breach between the older America and what will follow.  It will not be the monolithic culture.  It will be several, or possibly many separate cultures.  Identity groups have been spawned and they will not disappear.  Ethnic and locality identities will develop and they will complicate social cohesion.  Hollywood and other purveyors of cultural content won’t be able to put out one product that resonates with everyone.  We already see that.  The multicultural experiment with superhero movies and other content have fizzled because people recognize they’re being handed a narrative to cheer for someone else’s team.  How many teenage boys want a female superhero beating up on much larger men as the template for the movies they are being handed.  They just stay home and play video games that allow them to control the narrative.

So, America might recover and even thrive.  But it will take generations for it to coalesce into a common identity.  In the meantime, we and our descendants will have to look out for our own interests, forming alliances and voting blocks where advantage exists.  There may even be a shining city on a hill.  But on the next hill may be a hellhole.  And that’s just the way it’ll have to be.

Well, Maybe It Wasn’t Such a Small Part of the Funding

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Despite assurances that federal funds were a miniscule part of the budget for PBS and NPR, those media groups have already begun to feel the effects of the rescission:

PBS To Cut Budget By 21% Following Public Media’s Loss of Federal Funding

“PBS plans to cut its budget by 21% as public media faces the loss of $1.1 billion in federal funding over the next two fiscal years.

Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS, informed station general managers Wednesday of the planned cuts. The overall pool of station dues will be reduced by $35 million, she said. Local outlets are grappling with their own budget holes given the loss of federal support.”

Very sad.

David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart are two “journalists” that appear on Fridays on the PBS NewsHour and I think that part of that $35 million could be offset by firing one of them.  Now how to do that is a question.  What occurs to me is a scene from the classic tv series Star Trek:

David and Jonathan could be dressed as Thralls and forced to battle in the arena while PBS viewers place wagers in quatloos that will pay the salary of whichever of them walks out of the arena alive.

Also, I read that NPR is forced to reduce its budget by $8 million for next year.  Also, very sad.

The article stressed that replacement funds from private corporations have not been forthcoming because the other Congressional budget cuts have impacted how corporations are allocating their charitable donations.  Apparently, everyone is scrambling after alternative funding sources and there just isn’t enough money to go around.  Also very, very sad.

So, what’s the takeaway here?  Well, I think it’s important to remember that when the Left tells you that government funding for something they like is miniscule and unimportant, that means it’s a lot of money and it’s critical to their operation.  And I think it goes without saying that the money is being used to make very comfortable existences for the people at the top.  There are homes in Northern Virginia and Ivy League tuitions and expensive wines at lunch that are being funded with that money.  Now that doesn’t mean that those things will go away because of these cuts.  No, that’s not how it works.  It probably means several lower echelon people will lose their jobs and several shows won’t get made.  Maybe the next Ken Burns series will be cut or Masterpiece will have to use American actors instead of British.  Or as I said Books and Capon; I mean Brooks and Capehart will have to get whittled down to Brooks or Capehart.

Now you might wonder if the heads of PBS and NPR might have an epiphany and try to sell Congress on the idea that they could truly produce non-partisan and unbiased content that appeals to both the Left and Right.  They could bring aboard conservatives on their boards and in management and put together a lineup of shows that even Donald Trump, Speaker Johnson and Senator Mike Lee would be willing to fund.  Now that would be something.  Of course, the chances of that happening are of the same order of magnitude as Nancy Pelosi going to heaven.

So, congratulations again to Donald Trump and his friends in Congress.  Their unprecedented action to defund PBS and NPR is already bearing fruit in ways we cannot yet appreciate.  Some show advocating for pediatric trans-surgery is probably not going to be funded because no corporate sponsor will want to touch it.  Very, very, very sad.

Bravo.

17AUG2025 – Quote of the Day

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There various news I heard of love and strife,

Of peace and war, health, sickness, death, and life,

Of loss and gain, of famine and of store,

Of storms at sea, and travels on the shore,

Of prodigies, and portents seen in air,

Of fires and plagues, and stars with blazing hair,

Of turns of fortune, changes in the state,

The fall of favourites, projects of the great,

Of aid mismanagements, taxations new:

All neither wholly false, nor wholly true.

Alexander Pope

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

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Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.