Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 07MAR2024 – Civic Myths

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People do not understand just how extreme the demographic changes to America have been since the 1960s and what this will mean for the future of American politics, policy, and culture. Although we are told constantly that the shift in population groups was inevitable, this is just not the case.

 

 

1960s were the start of the decline.

The majority Anglo-Saxon culture had a massive influence on the expected behaviors and standards in America from the beginning. It’s what shaped our politics, laws, and entire society. Many cannot imagine how much impact this had on the nation in the areas of social, political, and cultural mores.

In 1960, the US population

was roughly 180 million, with the breakdown being 158.8M White, 18.9M Black, and 1.6M all other groups. For perspective, the entire population in the US of neither White or Black would only fill up the city of Phoenix, Arizona today. *

*A simplification for illustrative purposes notwithstanding the multitude of different ethnic and religious factions.

The US population is now at 330 million

(with estimates even higher when including illegal immigration.), and shows no sign of decreasing or leveling off anytime soon.

Would a lack of the massive global immigration ushered in by the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act have given us a utopian society? Of course not. There still would be challenges and obstacles to face, but I tend to believe it would have had a less stratified result we see in society today if a firm majority were still in place.

I used to believe in civic nationalism and the idea of the global populace buying a ticket to the (American) story and ideals. Funnily enough, around the time I held these beliefs was 30+ years ago in an America that had a firmly entrenched demographic majority of Heritage Americans. (Roughly 75% IIRC) See, that’s kind of the paradox of the idea of a successful nation operating under civic nationalism in that you still need a majority ethnic population who puts their full faith in the mythos of said nation’s founding, institutions, and ideals. Once it hits a certain fracturing of population and becomes majority-minority, with no one group asserting dominance – this gives rise to overt tribal tendencies.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 07MAR2024 – International Women’s Day

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Friday is International Women’s Day.

My company has asked us all to:
1) Be Inclusive.
2) Wear Purple. (Apparently the color of IWD. It is said to signify justice, dignity and honor.)
3) Write appreciation cards to our female coworkers.
4) Post “Heart hands pictures”

Now, I am all for recognizing people who do good work, but why limit it to women?
In fact, point three seems to be in direct conflict with point one above.

As for point 4, I am not a teenaged girl.

Update

(Editorial Comment)

Chemist, thank you bringing this important cultural occasion to our attention.  But some of these suggestions are problematic.  Purple is a problem for me.  Since I’m never sure if something is purple or blue I just call it “other blue.”  So maybe they can allow me to wear blue?  Of course sometimes something that looks red to me turns out to be purple which is why I sometimes call it “other red”  Would it be alright if I could also wear red?

I don’t think I should write appreciation cards to women.  I don’t think Camera Girl would like that very much.  Also I’m afraid if I got too specific about what I appreciate about them it could be taken the wrong way.  In fact I’m pretty sure there wouldn’t be a right way to take it.

As far as being inclusive can I include men in the International Women’s Day?  I’d like to appreciate Charlton Heston and Dwight D Eisenhower.  I don’t think either of them get enough appreciation for their understated efforts.  Heston’s work in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green is somewhat underrated.  And Eisenhower did get things going on the whole interstate highway thing which I really appreciate when I cross state lines.  So can I include these two men?

Ah, heart hands!  You really shouldn’t miss out on that.  That really looks like fun.

So let’s all try to embrace International Women’s Day.  Although be careful embracing women.  I know Camera Girl frowns on me embracing many women either international or domestic.  She’s made this very clear.

07MAR2024 – Quote of the Day

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Song of Solomon: 2:10-13, 8: 6-7

 

O voice of the Belovèd!

Thy bride hath heard Thee say,

“Rise up, My love, My fair one,

Arise and come away.

For lo, ’tis past, the winter,

The winter of thy year;

The rain is past and over,

The flowers on earth appear.

 

“And now the time of singing

Is come for every bird;

And over all the country

The turtle dove is heard;

The fig her green fruit ripens,

The vines are in their bloom;

Arise and smell their fragrance;

My love, My fair one, come!”

 

Our Easter Sun is risen!

And yet we slumber long,

And need Thy Dove’s sweet pleading

to waken prayer and song.

Oh breathe upon our deadness,

Oh shine upon our gloom;

Lord, let us feel Thy presence

And rise and live and bloom.

Jackson Mason

Ken LaCorte Asks What If We’re All Different?

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Ken LaCorte asked:

Do you know when was the last time that a white man won the 100-yard dash in the Summer Olympics?  It was 1980.

“For that matter, it was the last time a white guy even competed in the finals for the 100-yard dash. 

To give you some context, we’ve had eleven Summer Olympics since Scotland’s Allan Wells’ 1980 victory. Typically, in the finals of the 100m Olympic dash, eight men compete for the top positions. So that’s 88 non-white guys running in the 100m dash Olympic finals. One of those runners (in 2020) was Chinese, all the rest have African heritage.”

Now if the situation were reversed and only white men were winning this race the woke world would be up in arms that something had to be done to rectify this situation.  Racism would be the verdict and we would have courts and government agencies moving heaven and earth to do something about it.

Well let’s read on with Ken:

“Do we need to “fix” the problem of fewer white men competing in the 100m dash in the Olympics? I’m guessing almost no one would say yes. It’s certainly not racism or society’s fault.

Do we need to “fix” the problem of fewer minorities in Olympic swimming competitions or on hockey teams?

Suddenly, the question got a lot thornier. “

But maybe it’s time we just confront brutal reality.  People are different and that’s not a problem.  It’s reality.  Nobody gets every gift and everyone has strengths and weaknesses and that’s just the way it is.  Punishing some people for being stronger or faster or smarter or calmer is wrong.  Take what God gave you and don’t waste it in envy, use it!  And stop hating the next guy who has a different mix of gifts.  He’s got his problems too.

Nikki, We Hardly Knew Ye. And Even That Was Too Much.

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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.

 

 

 

 

A Self-Correcting Problem

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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.

06MAR2024 – Quote of the Day

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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

2024 Academy Awards – Oppenheimer and What?

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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!