I got a tattoo of a gigantic bruise on my left ankle in case anyone ever asks me to go hiking.
Or help them move.
*.*
Scientists in China say they have been able to create artificial weather.
The weird thing is, an hour later, you feel like another thunderstorm.
*.*
I tried to get into a trendy New York nightclub last night.
The doorman said to me, "Sorry sir, you've had too many."
Confused, I replied, "What, drinks?"
"No, sir, birthdays!"
*.*
My wife accused me of spending too much time online.
Which is funny, when did I get a wife?
*.*
Me being rude: Shut the hell up.
Me being polite: Please shut the hell up.
Quote of the Times;
The Inquisition prosecuted 421 people per year for the crime of pretending to be something they were not in order to feign loyalty to the Spanish crown; just last year, the British crown prosecuted 419,000 people in England and Wales alone, many of them for simply expressing their opinion about the migrant invasion of their country. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
Congress Members Should Not Be Dual Citizens:
https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64605
Issue of the Times;
The Biden-Harris Afghanistan Bugout 3 Years On by Austin Bay
August 2024 marks the third anniversary of the Biden-Harris administration's most consequential international policy action: the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
Why Biden-Harris? Vice President Kamala Harris has said on several occasions she was "in the room" -- meaning in the decision loop -- when Joe Biden ordered a withdrawal based on the calendar and not on battlefield conditions. "Completely out by 9/11" is a sound bite, a political bumper sticker. It isn't clear-headed senior leader strategic guidance for a military withdrawal from a complex war zone.
The Trump administration planned to withdraw, but in order to support the pro-U.S. Afghan government, the U.S. would keep the huge Bagram airbase as a logistical hub and intelligence post. But Joe Biden nixed Bagram and decided to withdraw via Kabul's inadequate airport.
Why? Ineptitude? Dementia?
In late May, The Washington Post reported that retired Gen. Austin Scott Miller, the senior commanding general during the 2021 withdrawal, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee "he was so troubled by the administration's 'lack of understanding of the risk' that he privately warned a Marine Corps commander charged with planning for a possible evacuation to prepare for 'really adverse conditions.'"
As the Afghan debacle unfolded, the world's most vicious actors -- Russia, China, Iran and its proxies -- saw American senior leaders posture, flounder and then abandon its Afghan allies (and an undetermined number of U.S. citizens) to Taliban revenge.
Here's the telling Biden quote, one that bears repeating: Biden knew early on his bungled withdrawal had become a catastrophe. On Aug. 31, 2021, Reuters published the transcript of a July 23 telephone call between Biden and Afghanistan's then-President Ashraf Ghani. Biden told Ghani that "... the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren't going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban. And there's a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture."
"Whether it is true or not." That's jaw-dropping. The lives of U.S. citizens, U.S. soldiers and U.S. allies were at stake. But a good story for the press and public in the next news cycle guided White House decision-making.
Biden wanted to project a picture, not project American power. Ghani got the picture -- and he fled.
Around the globe, the thugs concluded the weak White House gave them a strategic opportunity. Their moment had arrived. The czars, commissars, ayatollahs and cartelistas concluded Biden-Harris America would talk but wouldn't fight -- and if pushed, preferred to run.
Yes, run. Remember Biden told Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelenskyy he should flee. The gutsy Zelenskyy told Biden he didn't need a ride, he needed ammo.
The buzz phrase is "loss of deterrence." Biden's 2021 Afghanistan debacle damaged U.S. credibility and encouraged adventurism and aggression by terrorists and authoritarian states.
The Biden-Harris Afghan bugout seeded two hot wars with nuclear warfare potential -- Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine, and the Israel-Iran war involving four Iranian proxy armies. Russian and Islamist proxies are involved in several guerrilla conflicts in Africa. Venezuela's dictatorship, which has Iranian ties, has threatened to invade neighboring Guyana. China threatens to invade Taiwan while waging a slow but expanding war in the Philippines' maritime exclusive economic zone.
Here's a compounding factor: A large cadre of Free World elite academic, media and political personalities don't believe the vicious actors really mean what they say, even when the thugs back hard talk with paid mobs, assassination, guns and bombs.
Afghanistan in 2024: Al Qaeda and the Islamic State are using Taliban Afghanistan as a base to train and reconstitute their forces.
In April, retired Gen. Frank McKenzie (former CENTCOM commander) told ABC News the Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) was operating "unabated" in Afghanistan and the U.S. had "almost no ability to strike" (the terrorists).
So, the U.S. can't project sufficient power. What a sorry picture.
News of the Times;
Girling the Boy Scouts:
https://www.city-journal.org/article/girling-the-boy-scouts
German police to ‘secretly’ search homes:
https://www.rt.com/news/602629-germany-police-secret-searches/
Beloved dad shot dead by neighbor after daughter ‘touched the mulch’:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/14/us-news/beloved-dad-shot-dead-by-neighbor-after-daughter-touched-mulch/
Justice Gorsuch on the Administrative State:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/08/justice-gorsuch-on-the-administrative-state.php
Planned Parenthood Employees Joking and Laughing:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/pure-evil-newly-released-undercover-video-exposes-planned/
Brits Are Being Arrested:
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/08/08/brits-are-being-arrested-for-social-media-posts-now-n3792879
Israel's Path of Peril:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/israels-path-of-peril
Chinese megaconstellation launch creates field of space debris:
https://spacenews.com/chinese-megaconstellation-launch-creates-field-of-space-debris/
Singapore’s Birth Rate Plunges:
https://lionessofjudah.substack.com/p/devastating-crisis-singapores-birth
UK doctors ordered to ask men if they’re pregnant:
https://www.rt.com/news/602449-uk-doctors-men-pregnant/
African Immigrant Trucker Who Killed Three Motorcyclists:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/african-immigrant-trucker-who-killed-three-motorcyclists-while/
Disney World Wrongful Death Suit:
https://www.tmz.com/2024/08/14/disney-wrongful-death-streaming-loophole/#continued
nitter.poast.org:
https://nitter.poast.org/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1822771460236042358
Popular YouTuber ‘Pretty Pastel Please’ Dies Suddenly:
https://slaynews.com/news/popular-youtuber-pretty-pastel-please-dies-suddenly-myocarditis-30/
NASA watchdog finds quality control problems with Boeing:
https://spacenews.com/nasa-watchdog-finds-quality-control-problems-with-boeing-sls-work/
Bagram?
Place?
I'm not lazy.
I'm just highly motivated to not do anything.
*.*
Instead of calling it the John, I call my bathroom the Jim.
That way I can say I go to the Jim every morning.
*.*
Oneliners:
The older I get, the tighter companies are putting lids on their jars.
No matter how old you are, an empty wrapping paper tube is still a light saber.
There's a word for people like you and that word is "leave."
I wonder whether I can trust doctors with dead plants in the waiting room.
I just assume I do everything wrong since I don't have a wife to confirm it.
If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.
Somewhere, a smart Lasik surgeon has an office full of brochures that are all slightly out of focus.
I hate to call them "one night stands"; I prefer the term "auditions"
People are making Rapture jokes like there's no tomorrow.
I run entirely on caffeine, vodka, and inappropriate thoughts.
*.*
In North Carolina, a man won a $1.1-million lottery jackpot two days before his birthday.
If I was a friend, I'd definitely be taking back my gift.
*.*
You can steal my jokes whenever you want, but just remember that I lick every single one before I send them.
Quote of the Times;
"Democracy too is a religion. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." – H.L. Mencken
Link of the Times;
New Video Appears to Show DC Police Units Planting a J6 Pipe Bomb:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/08/16/new-video-appears-to-show-dc-police-units-planting-a-j6-pipe-bomb/
Issue of the Times;
The Triumph of Red States by Joel Kotkin
Forget the presidential election. The real contest about the future direction of the country has already taken place, and it’s the red states that are clearly winning.
What we are witnessing is not so much a national ideological triumph, in the manner of the Reagan era, but a grassroots shift in economic, social, and, ultimately, political power from one set of regions to another. This continues a pattern congruent with American history since the first settlements pushed out from the Atlantic coast, expanding all the way to the Pacific. Even today the wealthiest states, not adjusted for costs, remain perched on the Northeastern or Pacific coastlines.
Today’s shift is not a repeat of “manifest destiny” associated with the old adage “go west, young man,” but more like a call back to the South, and even some places in the country’s vast center. These areas are still catching up with those areas that flourished in the last half of the twentieth century. But over the past four decades, income and job growth in places like Texas and Florida were 50 percent or more above New York and California.
In recent years, the gap between regions has narrowed. Texas, Nevada, Florida, and Arkansas experienced the nation’s highest personal income growth; in contrast, ultra-blue California ranked last, followed closely by Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Sunbelt states dominate the list of fastest job creators while California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Oregon rank toward the bottom. Overall, in the past decade, the six fastest growing Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee—added more to the national GDP than the Northeast, the traditional economic powerhouse.
Follow the Carbon
In an era where the media and investors obsess over the latest craze, be it bitcoin or artificial intelligence, the states that have done best also tend to retain energy-dependent industries, such as agriculture, resource extraction, and increasingly manufacturing. The movement of some lower-tech manufacturing like textiles was largely based on low wages and employer-friendly labor law, but the current shift has as much to do with regulatory policies common in blue states.
Until the recent wave of climate-related regulations, much heavy industry and high-tech manufacturing remained in states like California and New York. But the ascendancy of draconian climate regulation has had a strong impact on blue collar jobs, a traditional source of upward mobility. The best areas for industry, notes Site Selection Magazine, are in the Southeast and Utah, while California has lost almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 according to the Census of Employment and Wages. Oil and gas, once a major industry in the state, is now slated for extinction, while construction and logistics growth have been slower than in competitor states.
A half century ago, California and New York were industrial dynamos, along with the Upper Midwest. Over the past decade, Orlando, Austin, and Las Vegas have led the charge while manufacturing has declined steeply in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. New industrial growth is taking place primarily in the South and Southeast, and in red states like Indiana and Ohio, including the preponderance of new EV and battery plants. For example, the supply chain shortage has made producing silicon chips—a California invention—a priority; yet virtually all the new planned semiconductor facilities, employing thousands of workers, are being built in Texas, Arizona, and Oregon.
Erosion in Elite Sectors
Until recently, liberal pundits, and some on the Right as well, dismissed the loss of such industries as irrelevant. The new economy, people like New York Times’s Neil Irwin insisted, would be in the biggest, bluest cities. “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees,” he wrote in 2019.
To be sure, for decades jobs in technology, finance, and business services gravitated to places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, and Chicago. Yet a recent analysis by Zen Business reports that Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots and are also attracting the most tech workers. The erosion of California’s lead in tech and other advanced industry jobs has been going on since at least 2005, as more jobs in advanced industries gravitate to lower tax states, largely in the South and Intermountain West, according to recent research from Chapman University and UC Irvine.
For the first time since the last century, when Massachusetts seemed a serious threat, Silicon Valley has a serious and capable challenger in Texas. The Lone Star State has been less hit by recent layoffs. Some tech linchpins have already moved their headquarters to Texas, including HP Enterprises, Oracle, and perhaps most crucially, Tesla. Many other firms like Apple, Airbnb, Amgen, Uber, and Space X are expanding largely outside of the Golden State. These trends are accelerating, notes a recent Hoover Institution study.
The increasing shift to working from home could further accelerate this outflow. Roughly 50 percent of all Silicon Valley jobs, notes a recent University of Chicago study, can be done at home. Although the Bay Area and parts of Southern California are wonderful places to live, the housing market is out of reach even for well-off people. Some 40 percent of Bay Area tech workers say they would like to move to a less expensive region, which suggests locations outside of California. In a recent survey, three-quarters of high-tech venture funders and founders predicted the same for their workforces.
A similar dispersion is occurring in business services. For most of American history, the financial sector was based solidly on the East Coast, notably New York, with powerful firms also based in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. But business services—a key sector for urban growth particularly—is increasingly headed primarily to red state capitals, led by Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Charlotte.
Just as the tech industry is dispersing to new centers like Austin, Phoenix, Nashville, and Atlanta, so too is finance. Since the pandemic, Texas and Florida have seen their finance industries grow ten times as fast as their New York counterparts. The biggest push is in Dallas-Fort Worth, which recently dethroned Chicago as the number two U.S. financial center and has started to raise capital to build a new stock exchange backed by key players.
The Great Migration
Losses of industries and companies are devastating enough, but the biggest crisis facing blue states and regions is demographic. In the past decade, five Southern states—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, along with Arizona in the West—exceeded growth in all of the other (44) states and the District of Columbia, notes demographer Wendell Cox. This pattern has accelerated since 2020, with Southern states gaining 1.7 million people, while the other three Census regions (the Northeast, Midwest, and West) all had net domestic migration losses. In 2023, Southern states accounted for 87 percent of all U.S. population growth.
In contrast, New York, New Jersey, and California are all losing net migrants, often to these same states. Since 2020, the Census Bureau estimates, New York has lost 884,000 residents to other states. As a percentage of its 2022 population, New York’s net domestic migration loss of 1.1 percent last year was larger than any state’s, exceeded only by California’s net outflow. Between 2022 and 2023, New Jersey lost 0.5 percent of its population, eighth among the states in net migration loss.
One clear trend has been the migration of wealthy individuals, the very people who fund the expansive blue welfare state. This was a slow pattern but gained momentum after 2019. Last year, affluent migrants took almost $24 billion out of California, $14 billion out of New York, and almost $10 billion out of Illinois. Those funds ended up primarily in Florida and Texas, as well as Tennessee and the Carolinas.
Even before the pandemic, affluent young professionals were heading to less expensive and congested cities in search of homes in places they could afford. Over the past decade, the strongest lures for Millennials were not New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, all of which suffered net losses in this group according to Brookings, but instead, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston. Last year, the biggest upsurge in new business formation took place in the Deep South, Texas, and the Desert Southwest, while New York and the West Coast economies lagged.
California, once the ultimate magnet for the young and ambitious, now suffers the worst attraction rate in the country and, according to an analysis of IRS data, is hemorrhaging families. Looking ahead to 2060, the state’s Department of Finance predicts no population growth and a reduction of 1.7 million for L.A. County, the state’s largest county.
Immigrants are following the same pattern, migrating not to traditional gateway cities like New York or Los Angeles, but to places like Dallas, Miami, and even small towns in the Midwest. The foreign-born population of Los Angeles declined over the past decade while, according to Brookings, the most recent stream is settling down primarily in Texas and other Sunbelt locales. Much of the same is happening with minorities in general; migration among Asians, blacks, and Latinos has been fastest to red states, where for the most part, they enjoy higher rates of homeownership and higher real incomes
These trends suggest America’s demographic future will be largely red. According to demographer Lyman Stone, birth rates are also higher in red states such as Texas, Arkansas, Utah, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Over time this constitutes what he labels “the conservative fertility advantage.” In contrast, the lowest fertility rates are found in deep blue states like California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington.
The Governance Crisis
Conservative and libertarian economists explain these shifts largely as a function of tax rates. Though taxes are certainly a factor, blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts long thrived with higher tax rates than states like Florida and Texas, much less than laggards like Mississippi and Alabama. California and other blue states, such as New York, benefited in the postwar era from investments in physical infrastructure and education. But in recent decades, the other states have caught up while California’s government, in one recent study, was ranked least efficient. States like Washington, Texas, Colorado, Utah, North Carolina, and Florida are duplicating “many of the great things about California,” according to Christopher Lloyd, President of the Site Selection Guild, which tracks investment flows. “The development model has turned on its head,” Lloyd suggests. “These states have learned from California. There seems to be a failure there to recognize things have changed and tech people are much more mobile.”
More serious still, as the competition was upping its game, many blue states have shifted away from growth-oriented strategies to environmental or “social justice” goals. Today, taxpayers in blue states are not rewarded with improved roads and bridges and efficient education systems, but the bill for some of the most outrageous failures—like the Second Avenue Subway, the California Bullet Train, and Boston’s Big Dig. In California, with the highest gas taxes in the country, taxpayers fume about some of the nation’s worst roads.
Education represents an even more dire failure. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—commonly referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card”—California 4th graders scored lower in mathematics proficiency than those in 29 other states/jurisdictions, with only 30 percent at or above the NAEP standard. In contrast, 41 percent of Florida’s 4th graders and 38 percent of 4th graders in Texas—states that pay far less per student—scored at or above the level of proficiency in math, significantly better than their California counterparts.
Such failures are endemic across Blue America. In Chicago, many schools have not produced a single student who has achieved expected proficiency in standardized tests. New York’s once respected public school systems have also declined precipitously, while the shift toward indoctrination over basic skills in many blue states, notably California, does not bode well for the future workforce. And now the rot is headed even to the elite level, as the scandal about unqualified medical students, selected by race, has undermined the reputation of UCLA’s once highly regarded but now embarrassingly woke medical school.
The Political Future
The blue states are not mandated to embrace headlong decline. Yet, so long as they remain in thrall to a deadly combination of public employee unions and progressive ideology, they will continue to be replaced by conservative-run cities and states. The effects of this shift will not only be felt by New York and Los Angeles, but also well-positioned cities like Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Denver.
Today, many blue states—notably California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland—suffer deep structural deficits that will likely require a massive bailout from D.C. for their pensions and persistent deficits. But they may lack the political power to engineer a fiscal rescue. In 2020, migration changes helped Texas gain two congressional seats, while Florida and several other red states each gained one. Meanwhile New York, California, and Illinois all lost seats. If current trends continue, the South in 2030 will have 30 more seats than it did in the 1970s.
Do the blue states have an answer to their current political decline? To fix their current woes would require more centrist Democrats—following the lead of Keir Starmer in Britain—who could reverse some of the most destructive progressive policies. The Democratic stronghold of San Francisco, with similar efforts underway in Los Angeles and Oakland, are already trying a new strategy of cleaning up the core and reeling in spending. It is increasingly clear, notes some Democratic analysts, that the party cannot compete nationally if it bows to the activist Left.
Some blue state politicos are reassessing some of the most radical progressives. California’s Gavin Newsom now is ready to oppose progressives on issues like keeping the state’s last nuclear plant alive, cutting welfare funding, and even sending the National Guard to the state’s southern border. He also stands for now against a proposed wealth tax that could further accelerate the already devastating flow of affluent people out of the state.
If reinvigorated, blue states still enjoy physical legacies like the ports of Los Angeles and New York, the residual brainpower in the universities, and existing tech firms, critical for the startup economy, as well as unmatched cultural and media assets. Simply put, things too evolved for Dallas to ever offer the cultural and entertainment values of New York, nor can Florida weather come close to the perfection that Californians, particularly on the coast, enjoy.
There’s always the chance that the red states will undermine their political gains by pushing positions—such as bans on abortion—that will lead to some hesitancy on the part of younger people to move to their states. A return to cultural values of the nineteenth century has little appeal. But none of this will matter much if blue states can’t walk back progressive ideas and follow more traditional liberal approaches again. No matter how much sanity can reassert itself, the shift of power and wealth is already in place, but it’s just a question of the scale of this power shift and how it shapes American reality in the future.
News of the Times;
US admits it spread disinformation about Covid vaccine:
https://www.rt.com/news/601714-pentagon-admits-vaccine-disinformation/
The twisted psychology of Covid mask-wearing:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-14-psychology-of-covid-mask-wearing-democrats-liberals.html
Harris campaign mandates COVID-19 vaccine for employees:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/harris-campaign-mandates-covid-19-vaccine-employees
AP Publishes Hilarious Headline:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/08/13/ap-publishes-hilarious-headline-news-outlets-were-leaked-insider-material-from-the-trump-campaign-they-chose-not-to-print-it/
Excessive Internet Use Disrupts Key Parts Of The Teenage Brain:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/excessive-internet-use-disrupts-key-parts-teenage-brain
Automakers Sold Drivers' Data for Shockingly Low Amounts of Money:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a61711288/automakers-sold-customer-data-for-small-profits/
Gun Control Industry Shoving Their Cash at the Kamala Harris Campaign:
https://www.shootingnewsweekly.com/2024/07/29/gun-control-industry-shoving-their-cash-at-the-kamala-harris-campaign/
Meet the Trans-Identifying Male Felons:
https://archive.is/2cK8I#selection-687.0-687.77
Bidenflation Finally Takes a Bite Out of McDonald's:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/07/30/bidenflation-finally-takes-a-bite-out-of-mcdonalds-n4931180
Charges against pro-Hamas rioters have routinely been dropped nationwide:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/charges-against-pro-hamas-rioters-have-routinely-been-dropped-nationwide/
Biden's Illegal Alien Flight Program Halted:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/08/02/bidens-illegal-alien-flight-program-halted-due-to-rampant-fraud-n2642897
Army chaplain taken to hospital following stabbing:
https://gript.ie/army-chaplain-taken-to-hospital-following-stabbing-outside-galway-barracks/
CNN value collapses to near ZERO:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-12-cnn-value-collapses-zero-warner-bros-writedown.html
Teachers’ Minn. pension fund under Tim Walz ‘cooking the books’:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/10/us-news/teachers-minn-pension-fund-under-tim-walz-cooking-the-books-by-vastly-underreporting-madoff-miracle/
Secret Service Agent Abandoned Post at North Carolina Trump Event to Nurse Her Baby:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/report-secret-service-agent-abandoned-post-north-carolina/
I'm just highly motivated to not do anything.
*.*
Instead of calling it the John, I call my bathroom the Jim.
That way I can say I go to the Jim every morning.
*.*
Oneliners:
The older I get, the tighter companies are putting lids on their jars.
No matter how old you are, an empty wrapping paper tube is still a light saber.
There's a word for people like you and that word is "leave."
I wonder whether I can trust doctors with dead plants in the waiting room.
I just assume I do everything wrong since I don't have a wife to confirm it.
If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.
Somewhere, a smart Lasik surgeon has an office full of brochures that are all slightly out of focus.
I hate to call them "one night stands"; I prefer the term "auditions"
People are making Rapture jokes like there's no tomorrow.
I run entirely on caffeine, vodka, and inappropriate thoughts.
*.*
In North Carolina, a man won a $1.1-million lottery jackpot two days before his birthday.
If I was a friend, I'd definitely be taking back my gift.
*.*
You can steal my jokes whenever you want, but just remember that I lick every single one before I send them.
Quote of the Times;
"Democracy too is a religion. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses." – H.L. Mencken
Link of the Times;
New Video Appears to Show DC Police Units Planting a J6 Pipe Bomb:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/08/16/new-video-appears-to-show-dc-police-units-planting-a-j6-pipe-bomb/
Issue of the Times;
The Triumph of Red States by Joel Kotkin
Forget the presidential election. The real contest about the future direction of the country has already taken place, and it’s the red states that are clearly winning.
What we are witnessing is not so much a national ideological triumph, in the manner of the Reagan era, but a grassroots shift in economic, social, and, ultimately, political power from one set of regions to another. This continues a pattern congruent with American history since the first settlements pushed out from the Atlantic coast, expanding all the way to the Pacific. Even today the wealthiest states, not adjusted for costs, remain perched on the Northeastern or Pacific coastlines.
Today’s shift is not a repeat of “manifest destiny” associated with the old adage “go west, young man,” but more like a call back to the South, and even some places in the country’s vast center. These areas are still catching up with those areas that flourished in the last half of the twentieth century. But over the past four decades, income and job growth in places like Texas and Florida were 50 percent or more above New York and California.
In recent years, the gap between regions has narrowed. Texas, Nevada, Florida, and Arkansas experienced the nation’s highest personal income growth; in contrast, ultra-blue California ranked last, followed closely by Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Sunbelt states dominate the list of fastest job creators while California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Oregon rank toward the bottom. Overall, in the past decade, the six fastest growing Southern states—Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee—added more to the national GDP than the Northeast, the traditional economic powerhouse.
Follow the Carbon
In an era where the media and investors obsess over the latest craze, be it bitcoin or artificial intelligence, the states that have done best also tend to retain energy-dependent industries, such as agriculture, resource extraction, and increasingly manufacturing. The movement of some lower-tech manufacturing like textiles was largely based on low wages and employer-friendly labor law, but the current shift has as much to do with regulatory policies common in blue states.
Until the recent wave of climate-related regulations, much heavy industry and high-tech manufacturing remained in states like California and New York. But the ascendancy of draconian climate regulation has had a strong impact on blue collar jobs, a traditional source of upward mobility. The best areas for industry, notes Site Selection Magazine, are in the Southeast and Utah, while California has lost almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs since 1990 according to the Census of Employment and Wages. Oil and gas, once a major industry in the state, is now slated for extinction, while construction and logistics growth have been slower than in competitor states.
A half century ago, California and New York were industrial dynamos, along with the Upper Midwest. Over the past decade, Orlando, Austin, and Las Vegas have led the charge while manufacturing has declined steeply in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. New industrial growth is taking place primarily in the South and Southeast, and in red states like Indiana and Ohio, including the preponderance of new EV and battery plants. For example, the supply chain shortage has made producing silicon chips—a California invention—a priority; yet virtually all the new planned semiconductor facilities, employing thousands of workers, are being built in Texas, Arizona, and Oregon.
Erosion in Elite Sectors
Until recently, liberal pundits, and some on the Right as well, dismissed the loss of such industries as irrelevant. The new economy, people like New York Times’s Neil Irwin insisted, would be in the biggest, bluest cities. “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees,” he wrote in 2019.
To be sure, for decades jobs in technology, finance, and business services gravitated to places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, and Chicago. Yet a recent analysis by Zen Business reports that Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots and are also attracting the most tech workers. The erosion of California’s lead in tech and other advanced industry jobs has been going on since at least 2005, as more jobs in advanced industries gravitate to lower tax states, largely in the South and Intermountain West, according to recent research from Chapman University and UC Irvine.
For the first time since the last century, when Massachusetts seemed a serious threat, Silicon Valley has a serious and capable challenger in Texas. The Lone Star State has been less hit by recent layoffs. Some tech linchpins have already moved their headquarters to Texas, including HP Enterprises, Oracle, and perhaps most crucially, Tesla. Many other firms like Apple, Airbnb, Amgen, Uber, and Space X are expanding largely outside of the Golden State. These trends are accelerating, notes a recent Hoover Institution study.
The increasing shift to working from home could further accelerate this outflow. Roughly 50 percent of all Silicon Valley jobs, notes a recent University of Chicago study, can be done at home. Although the Bay Area and parts of Southern California are wonderful places to live, the housing market is out of reach even for well-off people. Some 40 percent of Bay Area tech workers say they would like to move to a less expensive region, which suggests locations outside of California. In a recent survey, three-quarters of high-tech venture funders and founders predicted the same for their workforces.
A similar dispersion is occurring in business services. For most of American history, the financial sector was based solidly on the East Coast, notably New York, with powerful firms also based in San Francisco, Chicago, and Los Angeles. But business services—a key sector for urban growth particularly—is increasingly headed primarily to red state capitals, led by Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Charlotte.
Just as the tech industry is dispersing to new centers like Austin, Phoenix, Nashville, and Atlanta, so too is finance. Since the pandemic, Texas and Florida have seen their finance industries grow ten times as fast as their New York counterparts. The biggest push is in Dallas-Fort Worth, which recently dethroned Chicago as the number two U.S. financial center and has started to raise capital to build a new stock exchange backed by key players.
The Great Migration
Losses of industries and companies are devastating enough, but the biggest crisis facing blue states and regions is demographic. In the past decade, five Southern states—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, along with Arizona in the West—exceeded growth in all of the other (44) states and the District of Columbia, notes demographer Wendell Cox. This pattern has accelerated since 2020, with Southern states gaining 1.7 million people, while the other three Census regions (the Northeast, Midwest, and West) all had net domestic migration losses. In 2023, Southern states accounted for 87 percent of all U.S. population growth.
In contrast, New York, New Jersey, and California are all losing net migrants, often to these same states. Since 2020, the Census Bureau estimates, New York has lost 884,000 residents to other states. As a percentage of its 2022 population, New York’s net domestic migration loss of 1.1 percent last year was larger than any state’s, exceeded only by California’s net outflow. Between 2022 and 2023, New Jersey lost 0.5 percent of its population, eighth among the states in net migration loss.
One clear trend has been the migration of wealthy individuals, the very people who fund the expansive blue welfare state. This was a slow pattern but gained momentum after 2019. Last year, affluent migrants took almost $24 billion out of California, $14 billion out of New York, and almost $10 billion out of Illinois. Those funds ended up primarily in Florida and Texas, as well as Tennessee and the Carolinas.
Even before the pandemic, affluent young professionals were heading to less expensive and congested cities in search of homes in places they could afford. Over the past decade, the strongest lures for Millennials were not New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles, all of which suffered net losses in this group according to Brookings, but instead, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and Houston. Last year, the biggest upsurge in new business formation took place in the Deep South, Texas, and the Desert Southwest, while New York and the West Coast economies lagged.
California, once the ultimate magnet for the young and ambitious, now suffers the worst attraction rate in the country and, according to an analysis of IRS data, is hemorrhaging families. Looking ahead to 2060, the state’s Department of Finance predicts no population growth and a reduction of 1.7 million for L.A. County, the state’s largest county.
Immigrants are following the same pattern, migrating not to traditional gateway cities like New York or Los Angeles, but to places like Dallas, Miami, and even small towns in the Midwest. The foreign-born population of Los Angeles declined over the past decade while, according to Brookings, the most recent stream is settling down primarily in Texas and other Sunbelt locales. Much of the same is happening with minorities in general; migration among Asians, blacks, and Latinos has been fastest to red states, where for the most part, they enjoy higher rates of homeownership and higher real incomes
These trends suggest America’s demographic future will be largely red. According to demographer Lyman Stone, birth rates are also higher in red states such as Texas, Arkansas, Utah, Kansas, and the Dakotas. Over time this constitutes what he labels “the conservative fertility advantage.” In contrast, the lowest fertility rates are found in deep blue states like California, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington.
The Governance Crisis
Conservative and libertarian economists explain these shifts largely as a function of tax rates. Though taxes are certainly a factor, blue states like New York, California, and Massachusetts long thrived with higher tax rates than states like Florida and Texas, much less than laggards like Mississippi and Alabama. California and other blue states, such as New York, benefited in the postwar era from investments in physical infrastructure and education. But in recent decades, the other states have caught up while California’s government, in one recent study, was ranked least efficient. States like Washington, Texas, Colorado, Utah, North Carolina, and Florida are duplicating “many of the great things about California,” according to Christopher Lloyd, President of the Site Selection Guild, which tracks investment flows. “The development model has turned on its head,” Lloyd suggests. “These states have learned from California. There seems to be a failure there to recognize things have changed and tech people are much more mobile.”
More serious still, as the competition was upping its game, many blue states have shifted away from growth-oriented strategies to environmental or “social justice” goals. Today, taxpayers in blue states are not rewarded with improved roads and bridges and efficient education systems, but the bill for some of the most outrageous failures—like the Second Avenue Subway, the California Bullet Train, and Boston’s Big Dig. In California, with the highest gas taxes in the country, taxpayers fume about some of the nation’s worst roads.
Education represents an even more dire failure. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—commonly referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card”—California 4th graders scored lower in mathematics proficiency than those in 29 other states/jurisdictions, with only 30 percent at or above the NAEP standard. In contrast, 41 percent of Florida’s 4th graders and 38 percent of 4th graders in Texas—states that pay far less per student—scored at or above the level of proficiency in math, significantly better than their California counterparts.
Such failures are endemic across Blue America. In Chicago, many schools have not produced a single student who has achieved expected proficiency in standardized tests. New York’s once respected public school systems have also declined precipitously, while the shift toward indoctrination over basic skills in many blue states, notably California, does not bode well for the future workforce. And now the rot is headed even to the elite level, as the scandal about unqualified medical students, selected by race, has undermined the reputation of UCLA’s once highly regarded but now embarrassingly woke medical school.
The Political Future
The blue states are not mandated to embrace headlong decline. Yet, so long as they remain in thrall to a deadly combination of public employee unions and progressive ideology, they will continue to be replaced by conservative-run cities and states. The effects of this shift will not only be felt by New York and Los Angeles, but also well-positioned cities like Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Denver.
Today, many blue states—notably California, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland—suffer deep structural deficits that will likely require a massive bailout from D.C. for their pensions and persistent deficits. But they may lack the political power to engineer a fiscal rescue. In 2020, migration changes helped Texas gain two congressional seats, while Florida and several other red states each gained one. Meanwhile New York, California, and Illinois all lost seats. If current trends continue, the South in 2030 will have 30 more seats than it did in the 1970s.
Do the blue states have an answer to their current political decline? To fix their current woes would require more centrist Democrats—following the lead of Keir Starmer in Britain—who could reverse some of the most destructive progressive policies. The Democratic stronghold of San Francisco, with similar efforts underway in Los Angeles and Oakland, are already trying a new strategy of cleaning up the core and reeling in spending. It is increasingly clear, notes some Democratic analysts, that the party cannot compete nationally if it bows to the activist Left.
Some blue state politicos are reassessing some of the most radical progressives. California’s Gavin Newsom now is ready to oppose progressives on issues like keeping the state’s last nuclear plant alive, cutting welfare funding, and even sending the National Guard to the state’s southern border. He also stands for now against a proposed wealth tax that could further accelerate the already devastating flow of affluent people out of the state.
If reinvigorated, blue states still enjoy physical legacies like the ports of Los Angeles and New York, the residual brainpower in the universities, and existing tech firms, critical for the startup economy, as well as unmatched cultural and media assets. Simply put, things too evolved for Dallas to ever offer the cultural and entertainment values of New York, nor can Florida weather come close to the perfection that Californians, particularly on the coast, enjoy.
There’s always the chance that the red states will undermine their political gains by pushing positions—such as bans on abortion—that will lead to some hesitancy on the part of younger people to move to their states. A return to cultural values of the nineteenth century has little appeal. But none of this will matter much if blue states can’t walk back progressive ideas and follow more traditional liberal approaches again. No matter how much sanity can reassert itself, the shift of power and wealth is already in place, but it’s just a question of the scale of this power shift and how it shapes American reality in the future.
News of the Times;
US admits it spread disinformation about Covid vaccine:
https://www.rt.com/news/601714-pentagon-admits-vaccine-disinformation/
The twisted psychology of Covid mask-wearing:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-14-psychology-of-covid-mask-wearing-democrats-liberals.html
Harris campaign mandates COVID-19 vaccine for employees:
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/harris-campaign-mandates-covid-19-vaccine-employees
AP Publishes Hilarious Headline:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2024/08/13/ap-publishes-hilarious-headline-news-outlets-were-leaked-insider-material-from-the-trump-campaign-they-chose-not-to-print-it/
Excessive Internet Use Disrupts Key Parts Of The Teenage Brain:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/excessive-internet-use-disrupts-key-parts-teenage-brain
Automakers Sold Drivers' Data for Shockingly Low Amounts of Money:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a61711288/automakers-sold-customer-data-for-small-profits/
Gun Control Industry Shoving Their Cash at the Kamala Harris Campaign:
https://www.shootingnewsweekly.com/2024/07/29/gun-control-industry-shoving-their-cash-at-the-kamala-harris-campaign/
Meet the Trans-Identifying Male Felons:
https://archive.is/2cK8I#selection-687.0-687.77
Bidenflation Finally Takes a Bite Out of McDonald's:
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2024/07/30/bidenflation-finally-takes-a-bite-out-of-mcdonalds-n4931180
Charges against pro-Hamas rioters have routinely been dropped nationwide:
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/charges-against-pro-hamas-rioters-have-routinely-been-dropped-nationwide/
Biden's Illegal Alien Flight Program Halted:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2024/08/02/bidens-illegal-alien-flight-program-halted-due-to-rampant-fraud-n2642897
Army chaplain taken to hospital following stabbing:
https://gript.ie/army-chaplain-taken-to-hospital-following-stabbing-outside-galway-barracks/
CNN value collapses to near ZERO:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-08-12-cnn-value-collapses-zero-warner-bros-writedown.html
Teachers’ Minn. pension fund under Tim Walz ‘cooking the books’:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/10/us-news/teachers-minn-pension-fund-under-tim-walz-cooking-the-books-by-vastly-underreporting-madoff-miracle/
Secret Service Agent Abandoned Post at North Carolina Trump Event to Nurse Her Baby:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/08/report-secret-service-agent-abandoned-post-north-carolina/
Hollow?
Horrible day on Wall Street.
I tried to call my broker, he had changed his number!
*.*
Demi Moore has teamed up with digestive health company Wonderbelly to promote the normalization of flatulence.
No, I'm not pulling your finger.
*.*
PYONGYANG — Olympic fever swept over the Hermit Kingdom faster than a winter famine this year as the nation celebrated the astonishing accomplishments of the North Korean Olympic Team in Paris. To date, the team, composed exclusively of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, has reportedly been awarded “all the gold medals,” according to state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun.
“The divine athleticism of our Dear Leader has shocked the war mongering West, who reek of gun powder and Gatorade, and brought honor and glory to the people of True Korea,” said Kim Il-guk, President of the DPRK’s Olympic Committee and Concentration Camp Manager for Families of Losing Athletes. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
He then went into great detail about how, despite a torrential downpour and bolts of “heavenly lightning that cowed everyone else,” the North Korean leader executed flawless, gazelle-like leaps during the 110- and 400-meter hurdles.
*.*
Top 5 Possible Slogans for the Upcoming Democratic Convention:
"Ignore What We Said Earlier. We're going with this one!"
"We're The Party Without Those Two."
"Done Watching the Olympics' Disaster, Check This Out!"
"Anyone Know We're Even Doing This?"
"It's Pronounced KAM-uh-luh"
*.*
I sat quietly with my own thoughts today.
Remind me never to do that again.
Quote of the Times;
Americans and Afrikaners are “colonizers” on “stolen land” despite 400+ years of presence in America and South Africa. But the Rwandan immigrant who murdered British children is “Native Welsh”. - @Klaus_Arminius
Link of the Times;
Candace Owens: ‘Blackmail Ring Has Been Running the World’:
https://vigilantnews.com/post/candace-owens-blackmail-ring-has-been-running-the-world/
Issue of the Times;
The Hollow Kingdom by Christopher F. Rufo
A dispatch from London on the brink of chaos.
I have spent the past week in London. The city’s transformation, which I had followed only abstractly in the newspapers, has prompted a visceral shock.
“I haven’t been to London since I was a student,” I told a group of British journalists. “What the hell happened?”
“The fact that you would ask such a question,” one responded, “is an act of racism.” The others laughed.
The unstated premise of the joke was that everyone knows what the hell happened—mass immigration—but no one is allowed to speak about it. The statistics reveal the general trend. Since my last visit nearly two decades ago, the White British population of London has declined from 60 percent to 37 percent. Meantime, the Muslim population of London has nearly doubled, and migrants from South Asia and Africa have entrenched themselves throughout the city.
Anglos have been a minority for more than a decade. What I’ve observed in the city this week has amazed me. Women’s eyes peering through the slit of black niqabs. A procession of sub-Saharan Africans traversing Westminster Bridge, waving the flags of their homelands and demanding reparations. Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad. Districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman.
These are facts. There is nothing inherently racist or antiracist about them. The question is one of perspective. England’s progressives would have one believe that these snapshots represent the triumph of diversity. But this position appears increasingly untenable.
For good reason. England, unlike the United States, does not have a long history of assimilating others. And many of the country’s migrants—in particular, the large Muslim population—are among the most difficult populations to integrate.
From a critical perspective, the history of mass migration in Britain is a history of civil tension, punctuated by violence: riots, terrorism, murder, rape. Events of this week have brought this suppressed conflict to the surface once again.
The day after my conversation with the British journalists, England broke out in another round of riots. A first-generation Rwandan teenager had stabbed three young girls to death, prompting British nationalists and Muslim counter-protesters into the streets. The resulting clashes led to significant property damage and nearly 400 arrests. The country’s left-wing prime minister, Keir Starmer, has signaled his support for suppressing the nationalists.
A question lies buried under these events: What makes a nation? And what is the relationship between its content and its form?
It’s easy to understand why migrants from Somalia or Pakistan would select England as their destination. The political, economic, and cultural form of their home countries is a disaster. In England, by contrast, these migrants are able to secure an income, often including public benefits, and enjoy the fruits of a developed, modern, peaceful country.
The predominant theory among Western elites is that the content of mass migration—the particular people, and the culture they bring—is irrelevant. All groups are equal. Individuals are interchangeable. To think otherwise is to engage in bigotry.
This logic has a whiff of liberalism, but only in the most reductive, naïve sense. The truth is that, even if we believe in the principle that all men are created equal, this does not mean that all cultures are equal or interchangeable—far from it. The structure of a civilization is a delicate thing. Changing its citizens will, over time, change its form.
This process is underway in London. The buildings, avenues, and palaces look the same as before; there is still a parliament, a king, and the pound. But the central city feels hollowed out. The old connection between citizen and nation has been altered. The old bonds of culture have been frayed.
The situation in London recalls the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that asks whether, if every part of a ship is replaced, it is the same ship in the end. The answer, in our case, is a confident “no.” England without the Englishman would no longer be England. The form—parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture—might hold for a time, but eventually, it would give way, too.
News of the Times;
Historian unearths solid evidence:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/671084
Zelensky Bombs Zaporozhye Nuke Plant:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-81124-desperate-for-escalation
Here's the Headline 14 Years After:
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/07/20/heres-the-headline-just-15-years-after-dems-hailed-affordable-care-act-passage-n2398588
UK judge upholds ban on puberty blockers:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/3102612/uk-judge-upholds-ban-puberty-blockers-for-gender-dysphoria-children/
Harris Campaign Busted Spoofing News Outlets In Headline-Altering Ad Scheme:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harris-campaign-busted-spoofing-news-outlets-headline-altering-ad-scheme
Tests confirm humans tramped around North America more than 20,000 years ago:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/05/tests-confirm-humans-tramped-around-north-america-more-than-20-000-years-ago/
Journalist Who Criticized Aaron Rodgers for His Views on COVID-19 Vaccines:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/journalist-who-criticized-aaron-rodgers-his-repeated-conspiracy/
Gina Carano Lawsuit Initial Judgment Reveals:
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/gina-carano-lawsuit-initial-judgment
Brendan Depa who severely beat teacher over Nintendo Switch sentenced to five years:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/hulking-florida-teen-brendan-depa-sentenced-to-five-years-in-prison-for-attacking-teacher-over-nintendo-switch/
Dr John Money and the sinister origins of gender ideology:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/05/dr-john-money-and-the-sinister-origins-of-gender-ideology/
"Millions" Wasted On Electric School Busses:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/millions-wasted-electric-school-busses-maryland-pivots-back-diesel
Christians arrested in Paris for riding bus protesting Olympics:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-arrested-in-paris-for-bus-protesting-olympic-ceremony.html
Tim Walz Was Dead Wrong:
https://reason.com/2024/08/08/tim-walz-was-dead-wrong-about-misinformation-and-free-speech/
Caught On Camera Allegedly Attempting To Meet 13 Year Old Boy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bronx-ada-resigns-after-being-caught-camera-allegedly-attempting-meet-13-year-old-boy
Brits Are Being Arrested for Social Media Posts Now:
https://www.lucianne.com/2024/08/09/brits_are_being_arrested_for_social_media_posts_now_133612.html
I tried to call my broker, he had changed his number!
*.*
Demi Moore has teamed up with digestive health company Wonderbelly to promote the normalization of flatulence.
No, I'm not pulling your finger.
*.*
PYONGYANG — Olympic fever swept over the Hermit Kingdom faster than a winter famine this year as the nation celebrated the astonishing accomplishments of the North Korean Olympic Team in Paris. To date, the team, composed exclusively of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, has reportedly been awarded “all the gold medals,” according to state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun.
“The divine athleticism of our Dear Leader has shocked the war mongering West, who reek of gun powder and Gatorade, and brought honor and glory to the people of True Korea,” said Kim Il-guk, President of the DPRK’s Olympic Committee and Concentration Camp Manager for Families of Losing Athletes. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
He then went into great detail about how, despite a torrential downpour and bolts of “heavenly lightning that cowed everyone else,” the North Korean leader executed flawless, gazelle-like leaps during the 110- and 400-meter hurdles.
*.*
Top 5 Possible Slogans for the Upcoming Democratic Convention:
"Ignore What We Said Earlier. We're going with this one!"
"We're The Party Without Those Two."
"Done Watching the Olympics' Disaster, Check This Out!"
"Anyone Know We're Even Doing This?"
"It's Pronounced KAM-uh-luh"
*.*
I sat quietly with my own thoughts today.
Remind me never to do that again.
Quote of the Times;
Americans and Afrikaners are “colonizers” on “stolen land” despite 400+ years of presence in America and South Africa. But the Rwandan immigrant who murdered British children is “Native Welsh”. - @Klaus_Arminius
Link of the Times;
Candace Owens: ‘Blackmail Ring Has Been Running the World’:
https://vigilantnews.com/post/candace-owens-blackmail-ring-has-been-running-the-world/
Issue of the Times;
The Hollow Kingdom by Christopher F. Rufo
A dispatch from London on the brink of chaos.
I have spent the past week in London. The city’s transformation, which I had followed only abstractly in the newspapers, has prompted a visceral shock.
“I haven’t been to London since I was a student,” I told a group of British journalists. “What the hell happened?”
“The fact that you would ask such a question,” one responded, “is an act of racism.” The others laughed.
The unstated premise of the joke was that everyone knows what the hell happened—mass immigration—but no one is allowed to speak about it. The statistics reveal the general trend. Since my last visit nearly two decades ago, the White British population of London has declined from 60 percent to 37 percent. Meantime, the Muslim population of London has nearly doubled, and migrants from South Asia and Africa have entrenched themselves throughout the city.
Anglos have been a minority for more than a decade. What I’ve observed in the city this week has amazed me. Women’s eyes peering through the slit of black niqabs. A procession of sub-Saharan Africans traversing Westminster Bridge, waving the flags of their homelands and demanding reparations. Street corners that could be confused for Peshawar or Islamabad. Districts in which one could pass an entire day with barely a glimpse of an Englishman.
These are facts. There is nothing inherently racist or antiracist about them. The question is one of perspective. England’s progressives would have one believe that these snapshots represent the triumph of diversity. But this position appears increasingly untenable.
For good reason. England, unlike the United States, does not have a long history of assimilating others. And many of the country’s migrants—in particular, the large Muslim population—are among the most difficult populations to integrate.
From a critical perspective, the history of mass migration in Britain is a history of civil tension, punctuated by violence: riots, terrorism, murder, rape. Events of this week have brought this suppressed conflict to the surface once again.
The day after my conversation with the British journalists, England broke out in another round of riots. A first-generation Rwandan teenager had stabbed three young girls to death, prompting British nationalists and Muslim counter-protesters into the streets. The resulting clashes led to significant property damage and nearly 400 arrests. The country’s left-wing prime minister, Keir Starmer, has signaled his support for suppressing the nationalists.
A question lies buried under these events: What makes a nation? And what is the relationship between its content and its form?
It’s easy to understand why migrants from Somalia or Pakistan would select England as their destination. The political, economic, and cultural form of their home countries is a disaster. In England, by contrast, these migrants are able to secure an income, often including public benefits, and enjoy the fruits of a developed, modern, peaceful country.
The predominant theory among Western elites is that the content of mass migration—the particular people, and the culture they bring—is irrelevant. All groups are equal. Individuals are interchangeable. To think otherwise is to engage in bigotry.
This logic has a whiff of liberalism, but only in the most reductive, naïve sense. The truth is that, even if we believe in the principle that all men are created equal, this does not mean that all cultures are equal or interchangeable—far from it. The structure of a civilization is a delicate thing. Changing its citizens will, over time, change its form.
This process is underway in London. The buildings, avenues, and palaces look the same as before; there is still a parliament, a king, and the pound. But the central city feels hollowed out. The old connection between citizen and nation has been altered. The old bonds of culture have been frayed.
The situation in London recalls the Ship of Theseus, a thought experiment that asks whether, if every part of a ship is replaced, it is the same ship in the end. The answer, in our case, is a confident “no.” England without the Englishman would no longer be England. The form—parliamentary democracy, economic growth, liberal culture—might hold for a time, but eventually, it would give way, too.
News of the Times;
Historian unearths solid evidence:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/671084
Zelensky Bombs Zaporozhye Nuke Plant:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-81124-desperate-for-escalation
Here's the Headline 14 Years After:
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2024/07/20/heres-the-headline-just-15-years-after-dems-hailed-affordable-care-act-passage-n2398588
UK judge upholds ban on puberty blockers:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/healthcare/3102612/uk-judge-upholds-ban-puberty-blockers-for-gender-dysphoria-children/
Harris Campaign Busted Spoofing News Outlets In Headline-Altering Ad Scheme:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harris-campaign-busted-spoofing-news-outlets-headline-altering-ad-scheme
Tests confirm humans tramped around North America more than 20,000 years ago:
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/10/05/tests-confirm-humans-tramped-around-north-america-more-than-20-000-years-ago/
Journalist Who Criticized Aaron Rodgers for His Views on COVID-19 Vaccines:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/journalist-who-criticized-aaron-rodgers-his-repeated-conspiracy/
Gina Carano Lawsuit Initial Judgment Reveals:
https://fandompulse.substack.com/p/gina-carano-lawsuit-initial-judgment
Brendan Depa who severely beat teacher over Nintendo Switch sentenced to five years:
https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/hulking-florida-teen-brendan-depa-sentenced-to-five-years-in-prison-for-attacking-teacher-over-nintendo-switch/
Dr John Money and the sinister origins of gender ideology:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/02/05/dr-john-money-and-the-sinister-origins-of-gender-ideology/
"Millions" Wasted On Electric School Busses:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/millions-wasted-electric-school-busses-maryland-pivots-back-diesel
Christians arrested in Paris for riding bus protesting Olympics:
https://www.christianpost.com/news/christians-arrested-in-paris-for-bus-protesting-olympic-ceremony.html
Tim Walz Was Dead Wrong:
https://reason.com/2024/08/08/tim-walz-was-dead-wrong-about-misinformation-and-free-speech/
Caught On Camera Allegedly Attempting To Meet 13 Year Old Boy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/bronx-ada-resigns-after-being-caught-camera-allegedly-attempting-meet-13-year-old-boy
Brits Are Being Arrested for Social Media Posts Now:
https://www.lucianne.com/2024/08/09/brits_are_being_arrested_for_social_media_posts_now_133612.html
Striving?
The top six foods that make your fart are beans, corn, bell peppers, cauliflower, cabbage and milk.
Or, as my co-workers like to call it, "Lunch!"
*.*
According to GQ magazine, 28% of men do gamble at least once a year without telling their wives.
What are the odds?
Oh and don't tell my wife I asked...
*.*
The Department of Defense has run out of funding after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin blew roughly $300 billion at a Las Vegas blackjack table, sources confirmed today.
“This is not the time to cast judgment, because everyone makes mistakes,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman. “The Department of Defense has come back from worst and we all need to just tighten our belts for a little bit and hold out for new funding.”
According to defense officials, a slightly irritated Austin was found at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting his 3 a.m. Frontier Airlines flight.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never thought it would be a good idea to split 10s,” the secretary remarked sternly. “Sometimes the best way to learn is to just jump off the deep end and figure it out, and I’m now a better man for it so it’s probably best we just move on and forget it ever happened."
When asked why he would use DOD funds instead of personal funds, he explained to reporters: “My credit card is a Citi card, so I accidentally used my [Government Travel Card] instead, a silly mistake that service members make all the time.”
*.*
When you think about it, if you have an actual "House of Dragons," wouldn't that be really hard to keep clean?
*.*
I just ate what I thought was a feta cheese crumble from my salad off my shirt.
Turns out it was deodorant.
How's your day going?
Quote of the Times;
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Link of the Times;
Enraged Butler Cop On Bodycam Says He Told Secret Service To Cover Warehouse:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-fking-told-them-enraged-butler-cop-bodycam-says-he-told-secret-service-cover-warehouse
Issue of the Times;
The End of Israel by The Zman https://thezman.com/wordpress/
One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.
It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.
The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.
What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.
It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that these programs must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.
The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/06/missouri-cori-bush-primary-bell-aipac-israel
There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.
This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.
On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/05/the-1948-irgun-re-born/
The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”
The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.
The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.
What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.
How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?
News of the Times;
Tim Walz Replaced MN State Flag:
https://nationalfile.com/tim-walz-replaced-mn-state-flag-with-somali-symbolism/
Medicare's Real Contribution:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/medicares-real-contribution-hollowing-out-healthcare
A Swim in the Sewer:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/how_do_you_match_the_disgusting_display_at_the_olympic_opening.html
California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets:
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom
Von der Leyen commission loses Covid vaccine case:
https://www.rt.com/news/601236-eu-hide-details-covid-vaccines/
Wind Farm Operations Shut Down By Feds:
https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/vineyard-wind-reports-turbine-blade-damage-in-offshore-incident
Police report details what led to arrest of former Phoenix Suns player:
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/07/16/police-report-details-what-led-arrest-former-phoenix-suns-player-scottsdale/
TikToker Who Urged Migrants To Invade US Homes:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illegal-alien-tiktoker-who-urged-migrants-invade-us-homes-reportedly-worked-venezuelas
‘Really, Really Difficult’:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/19/really-really-difficult-bureaucrats-worry-behind-closed-doors-theyll-be-sent-packing-under-trump/amp/
The FBI Set Everything Up:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/fbi-set-everything-up-they-wrote-script-whitmer/
Russia’s New ‘Combat Icebreaker’ Heads For Sea Trials:
https://gcaptain.com/russias-new-combat-icebreaker-heads-for-sea-trials/
The Hundred Years’ War and the English colonisation of France:
https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/the-hundred-years-war-and-the-english
Nearly Half of German Welfare Payments Goes to Foreign Migrants:
https://modernity.news/2024/07/11/nearly-half-of-german-welfare-payments-goes-to-foreign-migrants/
West Jerusalem has accused the 27-year-old model:
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/601399-adidas-bella-hadid-israel/
Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy:
https://protestia.com/2024/08/07/vice-president-pick-tim-walzs-lutheran-church-is-a-trainwreck-of-heresy-and-blasphemy/
Or, as my co-workers like to call it, "Lunch!"
*.*
According to GQ magazine, 28% of men do gamble at least once a year without telling their wives.
What are the odds?
Oh and don't tell my wife I asked...
*.*
The Department of Defense has run out of funding after Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin blew roughly $300 billion at a Las Vegas blackjack table, sources confirmed today.
“This is not the time to cast judgment, because everyone makes mistakes,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman. “The Department of Defense has come back from worst and we all need to just tighten our belts for a little bit and hold out for new funding.”
According to defense officials, a slightly irritated Austin was found at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas awaiting his 3 a.m. Frontier Airlines flight.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never thought it would be a good idea to split 10s,” the secretary remarked sternly. “Sometimes the best way to learn is to just jump off the deep end and figure it out, and I’m now a better man for it so it’s probably best we just move on and forget it ever happened."
When asked why he would use DOD funds instead of personal funds, he explained to reporters: “My credit card is a Citi card, so I accidentally used my [Government Travel Card] instead, a silly mistake that service members make all the time.”
*.*
When you think about it, if you have an actual "House of Dragons," wouldn't that be really hard to keep clean?
*.*
I just ate what I thought was a feta cheese crumble from my salad off my shirt.
Turns out it was deodorant.
How's your day going?
Quote of the Times;
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Link of the Times;
Enraged Butler Cop On Bodycam Says He Told Secret Service To Cover Warehouse:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-fking-told-them-enraged-butler-cop-bodycam-says-he-told-secret-service-cover-warehouse
Issue of the Times;
The End of Israel by The Zman https://thezman.com/wordpress/
One of the myths of the 20th century that is slowly starting to wither away is the one about Israel just striving to exist. Since the wars of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the narrative has been that Israel is this plucky democracy fighting for its existence in the midst of savage not-democracies. The line, “Israel has a right to exist” has been the company slogan for Israel Inc. for close to fifty years now. Over the last year this official narrative, like so many others, has started to collapse.
It is clear at this point that Israel is not the victim of aggression, but the primary instigator of conflict in the region. The assassination of the Gaza leader in Tehran, on its face, is an unjustified act of war. Ismail Haniyeh was not just the lead negotiator for Gaza, but the most dovish of the Palestinian leaders with regards to making a deal with the Israeli government. The only reason to kill him was to foreclose further negotiations over Gaza and to bait the Iranians into war.
The Israelis, the Zionist and their supporters in the West will claim that there can be no peace as long as Hamas exists, so they are acting in self-defense when they assassinate the people on the other side of the peacemaking table. They also argue that there can be no peace as long as Iran exists as an Iranian state, so they are acting in self-defense when they attack Iran. Currently, they are arguing for Israel to pre-emptively attack Iran before Iran retaliates.
What we are seeing is an evolution of that myth from the 20th century. The original myth was that Israel just wanted to exist and it was the Arab world that refused to acknowledge Israeli’s right to exist. All the Arabs needed to do was not make war on Israel and there would be peace in the region. Now, the narrative is that Israel must make war on the region in order to secure peace. We have gone from supporting the plucky underdog to backing the savage master.
It is similar to an observation by Christopher Caldwell regarding the programs that sprouted from the civil rights revolution. It was first argued that these programs must be supported because their beneficiaries are too weak. Now it is argued that these programs must be supported because they are too strong. We see this with Israel. Fifty years ago, the Washington political class supported Israel because she was weak. Now they support Israel because the Israel lobby is too strong.
The thing is though, regimes in serious trouble often go on the offensive thinking it will lead to some breakthrough or change the situation in some way. Armies that are beaten will often stage one last great offensive. Ideological regimes will crack down on dissent, like we are seeing in the West. The Israel lobby is proudly intervening in American elections, because it fears support is faltering. Israel seeks war with Iran, because is it very unstable domestically.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/06/missouri-cori-bush-primary-bell-aipac-israel
There is no question that the ground has shifted over the last year with regards to support for Israel in the West, particularly America. In the United States, where it matters most, unconditional support for Israel is now limited to old white conservatives, primarily located in the Bible belt. Everyone else ranges from Israel fatigue to outright hostility to Israel. The actuarial tables tell us that support for Israel among American is in a death spiral that cannot be arrested.
This coincides with the decline of the American empire, especially in the Middle East, where decades of intervention have exhausted the military and exhausted the American people’s patience with the topic. The days of the American empire dictating policy to the region are drawing to a close. This is why Israel is desperate to start a regional war with the Iranians. They think it will bring their patron back into the region, even though it is clear that this is highly unrealistic.
On the domestic side, an area that gets little attention, Israel has some profoundly serious internal divisions. This post by Alastair Crooke describes some of it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/08/05/the-1948-irgun-re-born/
The current Israeli government is caught in a vice. One jaw is the reality of the situation with regards to Israel and the Arabs and the other jaw is that “an eschatological Right-wing cult now holds the majority in cabinet – and wields a vigilante militia ready to attack the military establishment, and the Israeli state.”
The ideological cross currents within Israel reflect the demographic collapse that has been underway for a couple of generations. The once dominant Ashkenazi Jews, these are the Jews of the diaspora, are now in steep decline largely due to their low fertility rates and the relative high fertility rates of the other groups, particularly the ultra-orthodox and the Mizrahi Jews. These are the Jews who never left the Middle East, and who hold an expansive view of greater Israel.
The result of all of this is a hyper-aggressive Israel that is seeking a big war with all of its local enemies and a hyper-aggressive Israel lobby in the United States that is aggressively interfering in elections. One result is the collapse of the old narrative where Israel is the plucky democracy in a world of antagonistic not-democracies. In its place is a new narrative where Israel is instigating the final conflagration to settle all of these outstanding issues for good.
What all of this tells us is that Israel is in deep trouble. The underlying reason for it is the country was born in war. Countries that are the creation of war tend to end in war because they must always seek war. For Israel, “normal” is the endless state of emergency, the constant fear of another attack. This dovetailed well with the diaspora fear of you know who jumping out of the history books. It has evolved to the point where Project Israel cannot exist in peace, so it must seek war.
How this ends is not clear. The geezers currently running Israel must eventually give way to a new generation, but that new generation is more war-like and vastly less sophisticated about global matters. On the other hand, the Arab world is young and increasingly sophisticated about how the world is changing. Can the Israelis figure out how to live in the new world or will they seek to take the rest of the world with them into the abyss of the dying old world?
News of the Times;
Tim Walz Replaced MN State Flag:
https://nationalfile.com/tim-walz-replaced-mn-state-flag-with-somali-symbolism/
Medicare's Real Contribution:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/medicares-real-contribution-hollowing-out-healthcare
A Swim in the Sewer:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/how_do_you_match_the_disgusting_display_at_the_olympic_opening.html
California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets:
https://www.thefp.com/p/abigail-shrier-california-gender-law-newsom
Von der Leyen commission loses Covid vaccine case:
https://www.rt.com/news/601236-eu-hide-details-covid-vaccines/
Wind Farm Operations Shut Down By Feds:
https://nantucketcurrent.com/news/vineyard-wind-reports-turbine-blade-damage-in-offshore-incident
Police report details what led to arrest of former Phoenix Suns player:
https://www.azfamily.com/2024/07/16/police-report-details-what-led-arrest-former-phoenix-suns-player-scottsdale/
TikToker Who Urged Migrants To Invade US Homes:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/illegal-alien-tiktoker-who-urged-migrants-invade-us-homes-reportedly-worked-venezuelas
‘Really, Really Difficult’:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/19/really-really-difficult-bureaucrats-worry-behind-closed-doors-theyll-be-sent-packing-under-trump/amp/
The FBI Set Everything Up:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/fbi-set-everything-up-they-wrote-script-whitmer/
Russia’s New ‘Combat Icebreaker’ Heads For Sea Trials:
https://gcaptain.com/russias-new-combat-icebreaker-heads-for-sea-trials/
The Hundred Years’ War and the English colonisation of France:
https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/the-hundred-years-war-and-the-english
Nearly Half of German Welfare Payments Goes to Foreign Migrants:
https://modernity.news/2024/07/11/nearly-half-of-german-welfare-payments-goes-to-foreign-migrants/
West Jerusalem has accused the 27-year-old model:
https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/601399-adidas-bella-hadid-israel/
Tim Walz’s Lutheran Church is a Trainwreck of Heresy:
https://protestia.com/2024/08/07/vice-president-pick-tim-walzs-lutheran-church-is-a-trainwreck-of-heresy-and-blasphemy/
Solzhenitsyn?
Simone Biles shook off a calf injury to dominate during the qualifying rounds at the Olympics.
My questions: Why did she bring a baby cow to the Olympics and how did it get hurt?
Poor calf.
*.*
A Jewish man wins a huge sum of money in the lottery and he is discussing with his wife what they will do with it.
His wife asks him what they should do with all these letters begging for money?
The man responds, "Keep sending them out."
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Baseball Team isn't going to the Playoffs:
MLB has banned games from being on TV, for reputation's sake.
Entire team usually quits after 6 innings.
6 players still hitting off a tee.
Owner thinking about trading entire team for a Sony Playstation 5.
New team flag: All-White!
*.*
There are a couple of small meteor showers underway for the next couple of weeks, just in case you're awake during the wee hours.
They call them the wee hours, because that's when I get up and wee.
*.*
Sending a text to the wrong person is considered the most embarrassing thing people can do.
I was obviously not included in this survey.
Quote of the Times;
It’s always fascinating to see how the biggest champions of “our democracy” are unelected elites whose number one priority is thwarting the genuine will of the people and taking advantage of their position to enrich themselves and their masters. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
General Syrsky Shocks With News of Russian Armor:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-72424-general-syrsky-shocks
Issue of the Times;
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us by Gary Saul Morson
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1 Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and especially literature.
Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature “could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.
Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:
Literature is the conscience of a society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will agree, is the worst kind of lying.
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.
The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate: “Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”
Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and philosophical systems do not.
If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble, and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”
Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that “beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”
This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be “‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”
Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian fiction became the object of condescending scorn.
And so, in one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.
Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness.”
In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces” that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum, fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.
More and more, students view literature as what they teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels have appeared in the past half century?
What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience needed to avoid a disastrous future?
When a country disparages the classics, it invites what Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.
At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
News of the Times;
Japanese oncologist:
https://expose-news.com/2024/07/03/japanese-oncologist-i-didnt-have-a-covid-vaccine/
3 Palestinian terror suspects caught:
https://nypost.com/2024/07/28/us-news/palestinian-terror-suspects-caught-after-crossing-illegally/
San Francisco McDonald's Closes:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/24/san-francisco-mcdonalds-closes-guess-why-n3790826
Navy Will No Longer Require Sailors to Pass Physical Fitness Tests:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/06/in-latest-blow-to-military-effectiveness-u-s-navy-will-no-longer-require-sailors-to-pass-physical-fitness-tests/
Arrested on Election Fraud Charges, Released Without Bail:
https://resistthemainstream.com/dem-campaigners-arrested-on-election-fraud-charges-released-without-bail/
Foreign Nationals Probing Military Bases:
https://pjmedia.com/ashleymccully/2024/07/05/concerning-trend-foreign-nationals-probing-military-bases-homes-n4929457
SpaceX May Save Stranded Boeing Starliner Crew At ISS:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/greater-50-50-chance-spacex-may-save-stranded-boeing-starliner-crew-iss
Send This Article to People Who Say “Ivermectin Doesn’t Work:
https://brownstone.org/articles/over-100-ivermectin-studies-a-summary/
AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/ai-trains-on-kids-photos-even-when-parents-use-strict-privacy-settings/
US Spent A Record $140 Billion On Debt Interest In June:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-spent-record-140-billion-just-debt-interest-june-30-all-tax-revenues
Another Ten Year Delay for ITER Fusion:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/07/another-ten-year-delay-for-iter-fusion.html
About That Wind Farm Off Nantucket:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/07/31/about-that-wind-farm-off-nantucket-and-the-big-blade-that-just-kicked-the-bucket-n3792518
Hillary Clinton Is The Biggest Donor To Extremist Climate Protesters:
ernity.news/2024/08/02/it-turns-out-hillary-clinton-is-the-biggest-donor-to-extremist-climate-protesters-in-the-uk/
Microsoft Cuts DEI Team:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/microsoft-cuts-dei-team-no-longer-business-critical
Leading 'Trump Russia Hoax' Propagandist's Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-cia-wife-wapos-spy-hunter-max-boot-indicted-foreign-spy
My questions: Why did she bring a baby cow to the Olympics and how did it get hurt?
Poor calf.
*.*
A Jewish man wins a huge sum of money in the lottery and he is discussing with his wife what they will do with it.
His wife asks him what they should do with all these letters begging for money?
The man responds, "Keep sending them out."
*.*
Top 5 Signs your Baseball Team isn't going to the Playoffs:
MLB has banned games from being on TV, for reputation's sake.
Entire team usually quits after 6 innings.
6 players still hitting off a tee.
Owner thinking about trading entire team for a Sony Playstation 5.
New team flag: All-White!
*.*
There are a couple of small meteor showers underway for the next couple of weeks, just in case you're awake during the wee hours.
They call them the wee hours, because that's when I get up and wee.
*.*
Sending a text to the wrong person is considered the most embarrassing thing people can do.
I was obviously not included in this survey.
Quote of the Times;
It’s always fascinating to see how the biggest champions of “our democracy” are unelected elites whose number one priority is thwarting the genuine will of the people and taking advantage of their position to enrich themselves and their masters. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
General Syrsky Shocks With News of Russian Armor:
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/sitrep-72424-general-syrsky-shocks
Issue of the Times;
Solzhenitsyn Warned Us by Gary Saul Morson
The great Russian writer understood the West and predicted its future with frightening precision.
Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead of recognizing how much he had missed when cut off from New York, Washington, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, this ex-Soviet dissident not only refused to accept superior American ideas but even presumed to instruct us. Harvard was shocked at the speech he gave there in 1978, while the New York Times cautioned: “We fear that Mr. Solzhenitsyn does the world no favor by calling for a holy war.”
For his part, Solzhenitsyn could hardly believe that Westerners would not want to hear all he had learned journeying through the depths of totalitarian hell. “Even in soporific Canada, which always lagged behind, a leading television commentator lectured me that I presumed to judge the experience of the world from the viewpoint of my limited Soviet and prison camp experience,” Solzhenitsyn recalled. “Indeed, how true! Life and death, imprisonment and hunger, the cultivation of the soul despite the captivity of the body: how very limited this is compared to the bright world of political parties, yesterday’s numbers on the stock exchange, amusements without end, and exotic foreign travel!”
The West “turned out to be not what we [dissidents] had hoped and expected; it was not living by the ‘right’ values nor was it headed in the ‘right’ direction.” America was no longer the land of the free but of the licentious. The totalitarianism from which Solzhenitsyn had escaped loomed as the West’s likely future. Having written a series of novels about how Russia succumbed to Communism, Solzhenitsyn smelled the same social and intellectual rot among us. He thought it his duty to warn us, but nobody listened. Today, his warnings seem prescient. We have continued to follow the path to disaster he mapped.
We Have Ceased to See the Purpose collects the most important speeches Solzhenitsyn delivered between 1972 and 1997.1 Inspired by various occasions—Solzhenitsyn’s winning the Nobel Prize, arriving in the West, and delivering that Harvard University commencement address, among others—these speeches convey a single message: Western civilization has lost its bearings because it has embraced a false and shallow understanding of life. The result is the accelerating decay of the West’s spiritual foundations. The very fact that the word “spiritual” sounded suspiciously outdated to so many intellectuals at the time shows how far the decay had already progressed. Sooner or later, Solzhenitsyn warned, Western civilization as we know it would collapse.
Solzhenitsyn would not have been surprised that, three decades after the collapse of the USSR, American intellectuals again find Marxist and quasi-Marxist doctrines attractive. Young people embrace “democratic socialism,” a phrase that Solzhenitsyn calls “about as meaningful as talking about ‘ice-cold heat.’”
Today we can ask: Why do so many cheer, or at least not object, when they witness mobs embracing the bloodthirsty and sadistic Hamas? Perhaps for the same reasons that young, pre-revolutionary Russians once celebrated terrorists who murdered innocent citizens? Having studied his country’s history, Solzhenitsyn foresaw the process that would lead to today’s chants of “globalize the intifada” and “any means necessary.” He repeatedly cautioned that Russia’s past may be America’s future.
How can it be, Solzhenitsyn asked, that so many Russians found the strength to “rise up and free themselves…while those [in the West] who soar unhindered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and fatefully, almost [seem] to crave slavery?” Why do crudeness of thought and the repetition of ill-understood slogans pass for sophistication? “I couldn’t have imagined to what extreme degree the West desires to blind itself,” Solzhenitsyn told a London audience in 1976.
Those who have reflected on Soviet experience, Solzhenitsyn advised, readily discern “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he identified one such warning: “The center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.” What would he say if he had seen the Antifa riots following the murder of George Floyd or the cowardly responses to today’s university encampments?
Solzhenitsyn discovered the root cause of the West’s decline in its assumption, shared by almost everyone with any influence, that life’s purpose is individual happiness, from which it follows that freedom and democratic political institutions exist to make that goal easier to attain. And so elections usually turn on the growth of an already abundant economy. Could there be a view of life less worthy of human dignity? America’s Founders acknowledged a higher power, but now the most “advanced” people have succumbed to “the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious, humanistic consciousness. It has made man the measure of all things on earth—imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects.”
Acknowledging nothing higher than themselves, people overlook the evil in human nature. Original sin, what’s that? Sophisticates laugh at phrases such as “the Evil Empire” or “the Axis of Evil” because “it has become embarrassing to appeal to age-old values.” And so “the concepts of Good and Evil have been ridiculed for several centuries…. They’ve been replaced by political or class categorizations.” Crime and other ills supposedly result from readily amendable social arrangements and will inevitably give way to progress.
Like the Soviets, Westerners speak of being “on the right side of history,” as if progress were guaranteed and what comes later will be necessarily better. How readily such thinking seduced early-20th-century Russian (and Weimar German) intellectuals! And how vulnerable it leaves us to underestimating the evil that human beings can commit! “We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we are being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life” and our moral sense. People cannot even understand evil unless they recognize that it “resides in each individual heart before it enters a political system.”
“As for Progress,” Solzhenitsyn replied to self-styled progressives, “there can only be one true kind: the sum total of the spiritual progresses of individual persons, the degree of self-perfection in the course of their lives.” For the hedonist, death looms as the terrible cessation of pleasures, but for spiritual people it is proof that, as Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, enthuses as he points to the sky: “We must live, we must love, and we must believe not only that we live today on the scrap of earth, but that we have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole.” Or as Solzhenitsyn argued in his Harvard commencement address: “If as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual: not a total engrossment in everyday life, not a search for the best way to obtain material goods. . . . It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life’s journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it.”
People can accomplish such moral growth not by self-indulgence but by its opposite, self-restraint or, as Solzhenitsyn also called it, “self-limitation.” Without that, they remain mired in the world of things and unable to see beyond the present moment. Après moi le déluge.
“If we don’t learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria,” Solzhenitsyn insisted, “we, mankind, will simply be torn apart as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.” Voicing the overriding lesson of the Russian literary tradition, Solzhenitsyn told Westerners: “if personality is not directed at values higher than the self, then it becomes inevitably invested with corruption and decay…. We can only experience true spiritual satisfaction not in seizing but in refusing to seize: in other words, in self-limitation.”
The spiritual malaise of hedonism fatally weakens a society by leaving it unable to defend itself. “The most striking feature that an outside observer discerns in the West today,” Solzhenitsyn asserted in the Harvard address, is “a decline in courage,” which “is particularly noticeable in the ruling and intellectual elites,” presumably including his Harvard audience. Amid an abundance of material goods, “why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life in defense of the common good, and particularly in the nebulous case when the security of one’s nation must be defended in an as-yet distant land?” People naturally say, “Let someone else risk his life.” European powers “bargain to see who can spend least on defense so that more remains for a prosperous life.” (Thirty years later, few European countries not on the Russian border meet the agreed-upon defense expenditure of 2 percent of GDP.) America bases its security primarily on its formidable arsenal, Solzhenitsyn noted, but weapons are never enough without “stout hearts and steadfast men.”
One step beyond unwillingness to defend one’s country is actual hatred of it. I thought of Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when I learned of campus mobs this year shouting “Death to America!” For Solzhenitsyn, that is where the cult of individual happiness, sooner or later, is bound to lead. Facing the slightest frustration, forced to endure a modicum of adversity, or exposed to a world of contingency and misfortune, those educated to regard individual good fortune as their due seek someone to blame. They readily embrace any fashionable ideology that divides the world into oppressed and oppressors, the innocent good people and the implacably evil. But as Solzhenitsyn famously observed in The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil runs not between groups but “through every human heart.”
Why worry about external enemies when the real threat supposedly comes from another group or party at home? “Or why restrain oneself from burning hatred,” Solzhenitsyn asked, “whatever its basis—race, class, or manic ideology?” As in the French and Russian Revolutions, such anger feeds on itself. “Atheist teachers are rearing a younger generation in a spirit of hatred toward their own society.” From the perspective of 2024, it is easy to verify Solzhenitsyn’s prediction that “the flames of hatred” against one another are bound to intensify.
Society tears itself apart. Turning all questions into a matter of absolute rights makes amicable com-promise impossible, and it is the most privileged peo-ple, shielded from life’s inevitable disappointments, who are the most inclined to such thinking. Those raised in gated communities and preparing for lucrative professions are the first to express resentment and complain they feel “unsafe.” As Solzhenitsyn anticipated, “the broader the personal freedoms, the higher the level of social well-being or even affluence—the more vehement, paradoxically, this blind hatred” of America.
The specter—or rather, the zombie—of Marxism has returned because it divides the world into the damned and the saved. They need not be “the bourgeoisie” and “the proletariat” but can be any pair that conveniently presents itself. To the amazement of those who only recently escaped such thinking, “what one people has already endured, appraised, and rejected suddenly emerges among another people as the very latest word.”
Solzhenitsyn asked: Why does one country blindly embrace another’s catastrophic mistakes? Why can’t those mistakes become a cautionary lesson? “This inability to understand someone else’s faraway grief,” he pleads, “threatens to bring on imminent and violent extinction.”
Surely there must be some way “to overcome man’s perverse habit of learning only from his own experience, so that the experience of others often passes him by without profit”! And in fact, there is: art, and especially literature.
Great literature has the power, he explained in his Nobel Prize lecture, to “impress upon an obstinate human being someone else’s far-off sorrows or joys” and to “give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions that he’s never himself experienced.” He went on: “Making up for man’s scant time on earth, art transmits from one person to another the entire accumulated burden of another’s life experience … and allows us to assimilate it as our own.” Nothing else possesses literature’s “miraculous power” to overcome the barriers of language, custom, and social structure and thereby communicate “the experience of an entire nation to another nation that hasn’t undergone such a difficult, decades-long collective experience.” Literature “could save an entire nation from a redundant” and self-destructive course.
Solzhenitsyn’s audience must have wondered: But surely novelists can err, mislead, or even lie like everyone else! Isn’t that what Soviet socialist realist, “Party-minded” writers actually did? Here it is helpful to remember that in the Russian tradition not everything called a novel or poem qualifies as “literature.” Writing that lies or lacks compassion for those who suffer cannot belong to the canon. As Dmitri Likhachev, the foremost scholar of medieval Russian literature, explained:
Literature is the conscience of a society, its soul. The honor and merit of a writer consists in defending truth and the right to that truth under the most unfavorable circumstances…. Can you really consider literature literature, or a writer a writer if they side-step the truth, if they silence or try to falsify it? Literature which does not evoke a pang of conscience is already a lie. And to lie in literature, you will agree, is the worst kind of lying.
When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, also a Nobel Prize winner, praised the Soviet government’s imprisonment of dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, the editor and poet Aleksandr Tvardovsky, joined by novelist Lydia Chukovskaia and others, expelled him from “Russian literature.” “Sholokhov is now a former writer,” Tvardovsky asserted.
The most that ordinary people can do when a totalitarian regime blankets them with lies, Solzhenitsyn explained, is not to participate: “Let that come into the world—only not through me.” But writers can do more: “It is within their power … to defeat the lie! …The lie can prevail against much in the world, but never against art.”
Why exactly can a genuine novel not lie? What prompts Solzhenitsyn to deem “the persuasiveness of a true work of art irrefutable” and declare that “it prevails even over a resisting heart”? The answer is that a novel tests ideas as political speeches, journalistic articles, and philosophical systems do not.
If an author implausibly makes a character assert or do something just because a political position requires it, readers will sense the falsity. They will recognize that the assertion comes from the author’s prefabricated ideology and does not arise from the character’s experience. It seems fake, forced, out of character. Analogous tests pertain to other artistic forms, which display their own kinds of proof and disproof. That is why “a true work of art carries its verification within itself: artificial or forced concepts do not survive their trial by image; both concept and image crumble, and turn out feeble, pale, convincing no one.”
Genuine works of art based on truth “attract us to themselves powerfully, and no one ever—even centuries later—will step forth to refute them.” They become classics. When Dostoevsky’s famously stated that “beauty will save the world,” he meant that even if regimes crush truth and goodness, “the intricate, unpredictable, and unlooked-for shoots of Beauty will force their way through… therefore fulfilling the task of all three.”
This view of art as something sacred made Solzhenitsyn highly impatient with the “falsely understood avant-gardism” of certain kinds of modernism and postmodernism. As he explains in his speech “Playing Upon the Strings of Emptiness,” delivered in New York in 1993, cleverness alone ultimately proves trivial and, at times, destructive. “Before erupting on the streets of Petrograd, this cataclysmic [Russian] revolution had erupted on the pages of the artistic and literary journals of Bohemian circles. It is there we first heard…[of] the sweeping away of all ethical codes and religions.” Even the most talented “futurists,” ensnared by a false revolutionism, demanded the destruction of “the Racines, Murillos, and Raphaels, ‘so that bullets would bounce off museum walls’” while calling for the Russian literary classics to be “‘thrown overboard from the ship of modernity’.”
Decades later, some Russian writers of the Brezhnev era embraced postmodernist relativism: “Yes, they say, Communist dogma was a great lie—but then again, absolute truths don’t exist anyhow, and it’s hardly worthwhile trying to find them.” In this way, the masterpieces of Russian fiction became the object of condescending scorn.
And so, in one sweeping gesture of alienated vexation, classical Russian literature—which never disdained reality but sought the truth—is dismissed as next to worthless. Denigrating the past is deemed to be the key to progress. And so today it’s once again fashionable in our country to ridicule, debunk, and throw overboard the great Russian literature, steeped as it is in love and compassion.
Even more than Russia, Solzhenitsyn said, the West has embraced this shallow relativism. The most advanced theories teach that “there is no God, there is no truth, the universe is chaotic, all is relative, ‘the world as a text.’” Postmodern literature purports to “play,” but this is “not the Mozartian playfulness of a universe overflowing with joy—but a forced playing upon the strings of emptiness.”
In literature as in life, “nothing can be fashioned on a neglect of higher meanings.” No doubt about it, Solzhenitsyn maintained, the world is going through a profound and accelerating spiritual crisis, and its only hope—great literature—is betraying its mission. In a rare moment of hopefulness, Solzhenitsyn found it “hard to believe that we’ll allow this to occur.” He said, “Even in Russia, so terribly ill right now—we wait and hope that, after the coma and period of silence, we shall feel the reawakening of Russian literature, and witness the subsequent arrival of fresh new forces” that will spiritually uplift the world. But only if people return to “higher meaning.”
If Solzhenitsyn’s warnings about their society’s collapse irritated Westerners, his exalted view of literature struck them as too naive to take seriously. How many Americans regard novels as supremely important, let alone redemptive? Today, as literature departments “decolonize” the curriculum, fewer and fewer become acquainted with the greatest works at all.
More and more, students view literature as what they teach—or rather, used to teach—in required courses. Literature no longer has sufficient prestige to attract the best minds, and so the process of decline accelerates. Who reads contemporary poetry, and what timeless American novels have appeared in the past half century?
What’s more, young people increasingly lack the patience that great literature demands. They surf, they scan, they tweet. So how likely is it that, as Solzhenitsyn hoped, literature would transmit the experience needed to avoid a disastrous future?
When a country disparages the classics, it invites what Russians experienced as a “seventy-year long ice age.” People imprison themselves in the present moment and, in the name of freedom, enslave themselves to a single way of seeing the world. Wisdom earned by very different experiences seems increasingly irrelevant.
At the end of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn directly addressed those elites most resistant to his warning:
All you freedom-loving “left-wing” thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it someday—but only when you yourselves hear “hands behind your backs there!” and step ashore on our Archipelago.
News of the Times;
Japanese oncologist:
https://expose-news.com/2024/07/03/japanese-oncologist-i-didnt-have-a-covid-vaccine/
3 Palestinian terror suspects caught:
https://nypost.com/2024/07/28/us-news/palestinian-terror-suspects-caught-after-crossing-illegally/
San Francisco McDonald's Closes:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2024/06/24/san-francisco-mcdonalds-closes-guess-why-n3790826
Navy Will No Longer Require Sailors to Pass Physical Fitness Tests:
https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/06/in-latest-blow-to-military-effectiveness-u-s-navy-will-no-longer-require-sailors-to-pass-physical-fitness-tests/
Arrested on Election Fraud Charges, Released Without Bail:
https://resistthemainstream.com/dem-campaigners-arrested-on-election-fraud-charges-released-without-bail/
Foreign Nationals Probing Military Bases:
https://pjmedia.com/ashleymccully/2024/07/05/concerning-trend-foreign-nationals-probing-military-bases-homes-n4929457
SpaceX May Save Stranded Boeing Starliner Crew At ISS:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/greater-50-50-chance-spacex-may-save-stranded-boeing-starliner-crew-iss
Send This Article to People Who Say “Ivermectin Doesn’t Work:
https://brownstone.org/articles/over-100-ivermectin-studies-a-summary/
AI trains on kids’ photos even when parents use strict privacy settings:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/ai-trains-on-kids-photos-even-when-parents-use-strict-privacy-settings/
US Spent A Record $140 Billion On Debt Interest In June:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-spent-record-140-billion-just-debt-interest-june-30-all-tax-revenues
Another Ten Year Delay for ITER Fusion:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/07/another-ten-year-delay-for-iter-fusion.html
About That Wind Farm Off Nantucket:
https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/07/31/about-that-wind-farm-off-nantucket-and-the-big-blade-that-just-kicked-the-bucket-n3792518
Hillary Clinton Is The Biggest Donor To Extremist Climate Protesters:
ernity.news/2024/08/02/it-turns-out-hillary-clinton-is-the-biggest-donor-to-extremist-climate-protesters-in-the-uk/
Microsoft Cuts DEI Team:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/microsoft-cuts-dei-team-no-longer-business-critical
Leading 'Trump Russia Hoax' Propagandist's Wife Indicted As Foreign Spy:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/ex-cia-wife-wapos-spy-hunter-max-boot-indicted-foreign-spy
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.