All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
January, Check. Snow, Check. Sore Back, …
Before we get too complacent due to interglacial warmup here comes some more of that cold white stuff. And I don’t mean the AWFLs’ souls.
Good thing I didn’t sell the snow blower last summer. As Bing and Danny sang, “Snoooow, snoooooow, Snooooooooooooow!”
Our current awful culture is still western culture. Of course, it’s been dumbed down so that any idiot can sing along. And it now includes a whole preface that tells everyone that Westen Culture is a terrible thing that destroyed the rest of the world and the people that invented it are monsters.
But essentially, the whole world is adopting this impoverished version of western culture. And the stupidest people will fit in perfectly with it. While waiting for my car’s oil changes, I’ve been forced to see some of the programming that exists out there. Words cannot express the level of stupidity I witnessed. These are people who must have to be told to start and stop chewing their food while they eat. Vapid can’t begin to describe them. It was physically painful to have to hear their conversation. Chickens clucking around a farmyard pecking at droppings would tower as mental giants above these “tv celebrities.”
That’s the base line that our culture has established. And I’m sure that setting the bar so low is doing incalculable damage to our civilization. Children mimic what they see on screens. That has been going on since the invention of moving pictures. And with our high-definition video and ubiquitous internet connectivity young people spend countless hours watching idiots on TikTok and all the other venues for this mindless stuff.
But I think it’s a mistake to think that the lowest common denominator will define the complete spectrum of what our culture will consist of. On the contrary, I think there will be a reaction to the lobotomizing of our society. People will search out information and entertainment wherever they can find it. And as much as social media tries to restrict everything to content that conforms to the narrative, reality will find a way to break through. In fact, the taboo nature of the truth will make it that much more fascinating. All it needs is the right packaging to make it seem more forbidden.
Of course, there is a bell curve that defines the distribution of intelligence and that creates a distribution of various types of content; from the example of the television morons I described above on the left side of the x-axis to complex mathematical course work at the far right. People will search out the information they need and are interested in.
Without a doubt the “narrative” has done a lot of damage to the younger generations. The millennials and those who came after them have been gaslit by their teachers into believing a lot of the political propaganda about western civilization and the environment. And there will be a price paid for this indoctrination. I think a larger than normal percentage of these kids will fail to marry and have children. And this is regrettable but at this point I think it is inevitable. This will be a bottleneck for our culture. And this was intentional. Adding this to the policy of encouraging millions of third world migrants to move here produces an environment where western culture will be weakened and attenuated.
But this is still a partial change. The more gullible people will remove themselves from the gene pool and those who produce children will look for a culture that encourages human survival and excellence instead of the Greta Thunberg version.
Currently there is an effort being put forth by right-wing activists to cleanse some of the colleges of the leftist propagandists. Notably Chris Rufo has been appointed a New College of Florida board member and has broken ground on how woke colleges can be purged of woke ideology and practices like DEI, critical race theory and all of the LGBTQ agenda. I think this process is the best way to improve the state of our culture going forward. Eliminating all of these dangerous concepts and practices like affirmative action will be necessary to repairing the damage done by the Left.
Of course, the question remains whether the Left will allow themselves to be displaced. At the federal level they are in charge. We should have an answer in 2024. If the federal government remains in the hands of the Left, then only a partial geographical reversal of the dumbing down of western culture will be possible. What will be interesting is what the Left’s areas; the east and west coasts, will look like after the areas have a chance to follow their differing philosophies. Let’s say after a century of DEI will the people in California still be able to walk upright and use fire? We’ll have to wait and see.
Every one is in a small way the image of God.
Marcus Manilius
Yes, the bubble, the echochamber. “It must be true because we all say it is true”. Then they employ the device they created, Bureaucracy, to wear down any dissent. As Stanislaw Lem wrote in “The Cyberiad”, the Steelypips found out that the Big B can defeat almost anything.
That is why they so fear and despise Trump. He is not of the system. He hates the Big B and its inherent evil. He slashes through it to get work done. He knows what paralysis and evil is hidden in reams of ill-used and sometimes arcane regulations with the force of law and which were not voted upon by public or congress.
She is right, of course about some things. Why buy Bucks’ noxious fluids full of arcane ingredients for 7 bucks when, with a Mr Coffee and a can of Folgers or Maxwellhouse, you can make your own caffeine drink at home for a few pennies a cup? Why, outside of need when busy, buy a breakfast sandwich of a toasted English muffin, a fried egg and a sausage patty for $4 when you can make it at home for about 60 cents?
But she is wrong about most Americans not changing their spending habits. Most of us, including old, widowed farts with adequate income streams, are changing spending priorities. I don’t fly to Europe unless it is in the back of a C-17 or other military jet. Then only when tasked. I eschew fast food dining except when on the run around the first of the month when I get most of the monthly chores accomplished. I do admit Five Guys burgers are rather good, but don’t ask for a large fry as I did my first time.
Liberal WASP women, especially those who are lesbians or cannot attract and keep a man, have a very skewed viewpoint. Personally I believe boxed wine makers are diluting their already useless product with various hormones to ensure addiction and with hallucinogens to prevent them from seeing reality.
The on-line magazine Vox employs someone named Emily Stewart. She describes herself as a “millennial” from a “solid working-class background.” She wrote an article called “You don’t need everything you want. Our expectations around money are all out of whack.”
This is one of a number of articles I’ve seen that are meant to make people think that runaway inflation is perfectly normal and nothing to get upset about or vote a president out of office for. Well, anyway that is the hope. Let’s see how she does.
“I am tired of talking about money. I recognize how that sounds, given that I talk about money for a living. Still, it feels like an inordinate number of conversations I’m involved in lately end up about how much more expensive everything is now (which is true) and how much the economy sucks (which is false) … It’s not that these issues aren’t painful, it’s just that they’re also exhausting. Some of them have simple solutions, too, just not fun ones. You can cook at home. A fancy wedding is not compulsory. Tips are optional, and if you’re that upset over giving the barista a dollar or two, there are cheaper alternatives for your morning coffee.”
So, she “covers business and economics for Vox and writes the newsletter The Big Squeeze, examining the ways ordinary people are being squeezed under capitalism,” but she’s tired of talking about money? What would she prefer to talk about, her horoscope? If we need any clearer indication that the facts don’t support her thesis in this article, I don’t know what that would be.
“Part of the issue is that we seem to have blurred the distinction between a want and a need. Child care and a place to live and a tank of gas to get to work are necessities. The latest iPhone, not so much. On this, some people — and I include myself here — have lost the plot. If you took a European vacation this year, what a delight. Also, it was a privilege, not a right. It’s a choice, too, and one that might make your financial goals later down the line harder to attain.”
Okay so here is the explicit distinction; want and need. European vacation and tank of gas. And that is very clear. What she doesn’t admit is that for the great, great majority of people in this country it’s the “child care and a place to live and a tank of gas” money that has become unattainable. The average person picking this up and reading it will be mumbling curses under his breath and thinking what a clueless prima-donna. She’s taking European vacations and quibbling about how she should feel about it.
“The American economy remains one of abundance. Said abundance isn’t equally distributed, of course, and lots of people really are struggling. But as angry as consumers say they are about the economy, they’re not, on aggregate, changing their spending habits. For many people in the country, life is pretty good. And yet, they often don’t feel that way. No matter how much we’ve attained, we always want more.”
Now this is a crock. I guess under her definition Venezuela is a land of abundance because there are several billionaires living there. Even though the average citizen is trapping sewer rats for his dinner, it’s a land of plenty because there are still plenty of sewer rats. This woman is delusional. They don’t change their spending habits because they spend their money on rent and food and gas. Unless they commit suicide they still need those things.
“I say all of this recognizing that I am in a bubble — I am a millennial living in New York City and surrounded largely by middle- and upper-middle-class people, though many of them don’t see themselves that way. I also say this as someone who is upwardly mobile from a solidly working-class background. If I could tell the child version of myself how things were going to turn out — that I’d be living in a big city, be able to afford to rent an apartment in said city, and have the chance to regularly take trips that involve a plane — she would not believe it. I am aware this is not the case for everyone in my generation or those before or after me. Still, I sometimes catch myself feeling like it’s not enough.”
She got part of it right. She is living in a bubble, an opaque bubble. Apparently, New York City is filled with middle- and upper-middle-class people. I guess I must be missing something when I see the headlines about the illegal immigrant hotels and the homeless encampments. Eric Adams, their mayor, looks pretty shook up about the fiscal meltdown the city is currently going through but apparently La Stewart hasn’t heard about it yet.
“It all feeds into the hedonic treadmill, where we’re constantly chasing down the next dopamine hit but ultimately return to our baseline level of happiness, whatever happens. The pursuit of constant pleasure or fulfillment is enticing, but it’s also not wise — eventually, that Big New Thing just doesn’t have the same kick. Even if we can buy that $40 bottle of wine to have with dinner, it’s genuinely often better to stick to the $15 bottle and keep the pricier option for special occasions. Really good and special experiences in life should be rare, Schwartz said, so they don’t become commonplace and can still deliver satisfaction. (He joked that as far as he knows, “no one on Earth” has ever taken this advice.)”
Ah, so this is her target audience. Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs). She is writing to the single middle-aged childless urban cat ladies who need that $40 bottle of wine and “want to see Taylor Swift and Beyoncé live.” She is consoling them about having to vote for Joe Biden despite the fact that that means they will only be able to see “Taylor and Bey” in the movie version of their concerts.
It’s stunning how myopic and self-centered Stewart and her cohort are. Someone who writes on business and economics could look up just how many people are living paycheck to paycheck, at best. People are taking out loans to buy food and pay the rent. These are not times of great abundance, unless you’re an AWFL with a sinecure at one of the New York media properties. Then it’s pretty good.
But there is an audience for this article. And she eventually staked it out pretty clearly. It’s just not people that anyone normal would want to talk to.
Who can believe that all these mighty works
Have grown, unaided by the hand of God,
From small beginnings? that the law is blind
by which the world was made?
Marcus Manilius
Well, here I am at 10 pm writing a post for the morning. And that is the worst possible circumstance. Creativity and even sentience is at a low ebb. But life finds a way.
So, our insect overlords have decided to turn the United States into Brazil. Well, I guess the odds are in their favor. They’ve got all the money and are already in control of all the levers of power. So, let’s assume they get their way and succeed in flooding the country with a hundred million random third-worlders and their offspring over the next four or five years.
Okay, so that will make things very different from even the mess we have now. The level of chaos that will introduce into day-to-day life will be impressive. Crime, of course, will become an omnipresent part of life. And the ability of communities to provide first world amenities like utilities, paved roads and emergency services will become extremely difficult. More and more, these atributes will be restricted to islands of affluence and order in an ocean of poverty and chaos. And these islands will need to be self-sufficient and extremely well-guarded.
So, this will be the future. It seems to me that the best outcomes will be realized by those who organize early and begin to build an infrastructure that creates one of these islands. Maybe the island will be built around a factory that can employ some significant number of people and then build a “company town” around it. The important thing is that the entire community is owned by some corporation that has enough clout to prevent the area from being infiltrated by a federal program that seeds prosperous areas with Section 8 housing and introduces drugs and crime into the community.
In a red state the state government can encourage the establishment of these islands as nuclei from which larger functional areas can be created by their natural growth. You might think that red states can just maintain a healthy society based on their laws but I tend to doubt this. Every state has one or more highly dangerous urban center that will act as a locus of crime that will spread out into the suburbs and even the rural areas surrounding it. All that the state government can do is try to limit the exportation of this crime. But it will be many years before all of this dysfunction burns itself out. In the meantime, it is a choice for those living here whether they will find safe places to live or just sit there and be drowned in the coming tide of barbarism.
I realize I’m being optimistic here. Perhaps the only islands of affluence will be those that have already been formed by the elites. Maybe the red state leaders will just sit on their hands and allow the tidal wave of poverty and crime to overwhelm everything. That wouldn’t be entirely unexpected. But if so then those of us who have families will be forced to flee farther afield. After all, even in Fifth Century AD Italy, a few safe havens were formed to avoid the rapine and pillaging of the Huns, Goths and Lombards. In fact, Venice was specifically founded for this very reason.
So, I guess the idea is to look for places where efforts are being made to create areas of restoration and revitalization. The chief indicator will be the imposition of strict law and order. The tell-tale sign I’d look for would be the liberal use of the death penalty to restore order. It is a very effective methodology.
