In dissident circles, it is generally accepted that the West has lost its way due to two main problems. One is that the ruling class has embraced a set of ideas about human organization that are at odds with biological reality. Either from a desire to feel righteous or just from reckless disregard for their duties, they have embraced a set of beliefs about humanity we loosely call multiculturalism. The two roots of this belief set are the blank slate and egalitarianism. We are amorphous blobs with equal potential.
The other problem is that this desire to include everyone has allowed all sorts of barking at the moon crazies to gain positions of influence in the culture. These are the people who show up in the corporate human resource department chanting about the need make sure everyone holds the exact same opinions, all in the name of diversity. These are the people running around attacking statuary on the college campus. Fear of these crazies has damaged our normal mechanism for defending society from external threats.
At Our Wit’s End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for Our Future, by Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie, offers an alternative explanation for why we are seeing the West in crisis. Ed Dutton is an English anthropologist who teaches at the University of Oulu in Finland. Michael A. Woodley is a British ecologist and intelligence researcher with the Center Leo Apostel at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Both have written extensively about human intelligence.
Their book is an effort to track general intelligence in the West, against the backdrop of human accomplishment in the West. More specifically, they make the case that the West is getting dumber, even when adjusting for immigration, and the process has been going on for a long time. As a result, the West is following in the same path as prior civilizations that experienced a similar decline in general intelligence. Stupid people do stupid things and cumulatively, they eventually bring the whole thing down.
The book starts with one of those obvious examples that is so obvious, you wonder why you did not notice it. Fifty years ago this July, humans landed on the moon. The lunar program was started roughly a decade before and NASA went from having crude rockets unable to put satellites into space to sending people to the moon and bringing them back safely. To people alive in that time, it was an incredible moment, and one they assumed was the dawn of the space age, when man would traverse the stars.
Today, we cannot reach the moon. In fact, we struggle to hurl a probe to the moon. The Israelis are celebrating because their probe managed to actually hit the moon, rather than miss it entirely. NASA is no longer able to do much of anything and instead spends its time celebrating diversity. Whatever the reason, in this one area, the West is clearly not where it was fifty years ago. Instead of the moon landing being a launching point for the exploration of space, it was the peak of human ability to explore the stars.
Another obvious example they begin with, one that should hit home for men in their middle years, is the Concorde. If you were a kid in the 1970’s, the Concorde was the shape of things to come. Instead of six and seven hour flights across the continent or the Atlantic Ocean, flight time would be a few hours. Everyone was sure we would soon be hopping on super-fast planes to be halfway around the globe in a few hours. Instead, we stand in line for hours at the airport to get on planes no faster than fifty years ago.
These two great examples are the jumping off point to explain that we are not only getting dumber, but the biological process causing it. The book itself is actually a series of essays, grouped together into topics related to the main theme. It is written for a general audience, so even if the reader has little exposure to cognitive studies, the material is easy to follow. In fact, the book also works a great introduction for those curious about IQ and the ways in which science has for studying human cognitive ability.
For those with an interest in Roman history, the discussions of intelligence in the Republic, as well as the Empire, are very interesting. There are a great many theories as to why the Republic collapsed into autocracy and why the Western Empire collapsed. In fact, that’s the fun part of studying the Romans. Why they suddenly, so it seems, veered from consensual government to military dictatorship and empire is one of the great stories of Western history. It’s a great story full of amazing characters, both good and bad.
What the authors suggest is that a biological process was the root of the rise of Rome, it’s flourishing as a republic and then it’s decent into autocracy and eventually collapse. Their theory is a great addition to Joseph Tainter’s ideas about the collapse of complex civilizations. Taken together, it suggests Spengler’s observation about civilization is the result of people building social organizations that eventually become too complex for them to manage. Or, they simply become too dumb to operate what their ancestors left them.
Perhaps the most compelling example is their look at the golden age of Islam. Maybe it is because it is unfamiliar to Westerners, so we have no emotional bias, but the math presented to explain the rise and fall is revelatory. Not only does it explain the collapse of “high Islam” but it explains the rise of modern Islam. It opens the door to understanding this strange, esoteric civic cult that has taken up residence among the ruling elites in the West. It is a short essay, but very powerful in explaining their argument.
Now, the one complaint about the book is it really could have gone into great depth about some of the examples used to make their points. The section on Islam would make for a great 10,000 word essay. They only brush up against the phenomenon of religion rising, falling and then rising again in the late stages of civilization. It is a great example of a short book that the reader will wish was much longer. Usually, the opposite is true. Most books are too long and in need of a ruthless editor. This is not one of those books.
Finally, for dissidents, this book is a black pill. Most of us hang onto the hope that we can find a way to argue and organize our way out of this decline. The truth is, the West may simply lack the human capital to keep the plates spinning much longer. In other words, the die may have been cast a dozen generations ago when smart people started limiting their fertility and helping the poor make it too adulthood. The result being a steady decline in our IQ to the point where we are no longer fit to carry on as a civilization.
Maybe he’s right about the population getting dumber but I bet it’s not the reason that things fall apart. I have a theory that over time psychopaths and various other grifters take over the institutions that others built. Maybe the builders were smart and dedicated but they’re not nearly as ruthless as the followers who latch onto institutions to bleed them of their wealth. Over time these psychopaths and grifters drive the whole thing into the ground.
A good example in Lockheed-Martin. When I saw that they were having problems I searched a little and found a Women who used to run a bread company was running it now. Now running a bread company is an honorable business but how does that qualify her for running a highly tech intensive business? It doesn’t. The counter example is look how drastically fast Musk has been pushing in every industry he enters. He’s very accomplished in knowing not only what can be done but in what can’t and pushes everyone towards these goals. The spread sheet businessman knows nothing but numbers that are spit out by who knows what lying metric that he doesn’t understand at all. All these spreadsheet posers drive businesses into the ground. All they know is cheap. Not how to structure the business. Typically these guys can run a business for about ten years and increase profits but they don;t know how to do anything but cut cost so eventually the product tech they depend on dries up and they are not capable of determining what to do to stop the bleeding. At this time they give themselves huge bonuses and move on.
Hitler brought Germany out of worse. We now have the internet which WE invented. The Word is Out.
Using NASA Moon missions or Concorde is a bad argument
SpaceX will put people back on the Moon and on to Mars in the next five to ten years, I suspect most people reading this hate Musk but he is slowly getting it done. Also there are a few super sonic passenger jets in the works, smaller than Concorde but they may last longer since its easier to fill a ten seat jet than Concorde i
I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, so forgive me if I’m reheating leftovers. Another possible contributing factor could be the millions of European men killed in WWI and WWII. The military doesn’t take the cripples, mentally deficient and (as far as I know) people who are crazy. They take the strongest, smartest, the best; special ops are always touted as the ‘cream of the crop’. The men who should have been at home running things were getting killed, and the 4F types were all that were left to birth the next generation. It’s not a complete theory, since American losses were relatively light compared to European and may not explain American backslide, but the world wars certainly didn’t help in the grand scheme of things. Taking several generations of your smartest and strongest men and dumping them into a meat grinder isn’t a strategy for long-term success.
It might be wise to encourage the truly unintelligent to accept their ultimate fate.
https://suicide.is/threads/10-reasons-to-drop-dead-already.113/
The really unintelligent should be encouraged to accept their fate.
https://suicide.is/threads/10-reasons-to-drop-dead-already.113/
Atlas Shrugged……When the Right Gives Up
The “obvious examples” — the Apollo program and the Concorde — are not at all persuasive. I could argue that the reason we haven’t been back to the moon is because there is no money to be made there, and that the Concorde was dangerous plane from the beginning and that its luck was bound to run out sooner or later. These arguments aren’t necessarily right, but they aren’t obviously wrong either.
The thing is, we have technological achievements today that are enormously impressive. We may not have gone back to the Moon, but we can measure its distance from the Earth to within inches. The hardware and software that powers the Internet is a spectacular intellectual accomplishment. Our technological civilization today requires so much brainpower to maintain that the idea that we are being held back from the Moon or supersonic travel by dysgenic intellectual devolution (rather than, say, the economic pointlessness of those projects) just seems foolish. If Dutton and Woodley really think these examples are compelling that doesn’t reflect well on them. I’m a firm believer in HBD, and it seems clear to me that certain human populations are just smarter than other populations, and that this is something that matters. But it really is possible to take this line of thinking too far. Not everything is a nail.
There is a chicken and egg conundrum for the problem of declining intelligence throughout the society.
Western societies are increasingly being driven by stupid narratives. Do the structures and incentives create dumb people or are the dumber people creating a dumb society.
Almost all organizations are now structured in a way where there is a strong disincentive to be smart. There is a great article written by two organizational behaviorist on this problem.
Stupified: you don’t have to be stupid to work here but it helps.
https://aeon.co/essays/you-don-t-have-to-be-stupid-to-work-here-but-it-helps
Their findings of the need to join every popular bandwagon, no matter how stupid or self destructive for the organization, apply to Silicon Valley now. When I have shown this to execs in Asia who work for western multinationals they are shocked to see that every finding applied to their company.
However, the stupidity can be at least partially explained by the changing demographics of the societies especially the prevalence of women in key decision making capacities. It doesn’t help that Jews, who have a history of insane, self defeating behavior, have increased their control of funding and development of acceptable narratives.
So people who have risen above their level of incompetence create dumb organizations. Dumb organizations incentivize stupid behavior.
People want status. Now, it is hard to gain status without doing and advocating dumb things.
This process also removed the disincentives for incompetence. Reward the incompetent. Penalize the competent. Then you get today’s world.
Yeah. Whats coming is only the strong survive. A certain Armageddon. Christianity speaks much about Armageddon. It is a wake up call and a test of our mettle. Thats where being strong gets you survival. Out of that it is a long brutish climb back up to high IQ civilization. We are on that downward slope for now. It doesn’t mean Ragnorak for us dirt people, if anything it vindicates who we are and we being and always have been the ones who ever effect positive change in this world. Happens all the time. It is the cycle of legacy. Our legacy in America is a civilization our founders gave us in the form of Liberty. Never happened before, I think why it is called “The 5000 Year Leap”. Even the wise ancients and their classical understanding of human nature, law, and history missed that one. Of all things. Close, but no cigar. This Armageddon is the great purifier, the only true equality lets say.
As Men of the West, uniquely so, and we know who among us we are, what I call The Honorable Resistance, The Legion, (though it has not yet reach that inflection point of all great zeitgeists, where this legion understands it IS a Legion. But that is inevitable, it needs a few more outside pushes), we will come to love the battle axe.
There are the survivor Men among us. That is categorized as someone who doesn’t give up even when the going gets tough and all hope of success and living fail, because as the great Admiral Stockdale stated you can never loose faith that in the end you will prevail. The raw nasty reality, is that hope has nothing to do with it. That it is perseverance, the indomitable spirit in you that makes survival of Armageddon possible, and we all know in our heart of hearts who we are on that score.
There’s gonna be a test on it. You need to know these things, about ourselves if we are Men of The West and we intend to survive this Armageddon. The Bible was right on that score, it was always right about Armageddon. It would always come back around.
It goes back to the dirt people.
A great example exists.
After all the Jacobin’s and Tory Fabian’s could throw at us, their great empire the sun always shone on, after all the words and great deeds of philosophy, the great show of the colonial elites and their classical education smarts, their instigations of decades to bait the British Empire, and have their war of hope they would win by attrition, long distances and even longer lines of communications, of foreign intrigue in Paris conning the Fabian’s and Jacobin’s to fight each other again, remember the French Indian Wars was not that long past, in the end, the very end, when the Wig brothers, General and Admiral’s both, had given Washington every chance and excuse to win and he abjectly failed completely, when the brother’s resigned into private life, and the Tories regained power in parliment, and began their once and for all bloody eradication campaign, started in Savannah with their scorched earth march up the eastern seaboard, to once and for all burn these rebel scum out, leaving nothing our nobody behind them but a raised smoking moonscape, it was a small band of irregular’s, dirt people warriors, in Carolina, the fiercest combat warrior leaders from the French Indian Wars, who at all odd’s, waged 4th Generation war of pure to the knife small unit infantry combat tactics, and in three battles decimated the British army in Virginia, so badly they where done as a fighting force.
Most are not aware of this late stage history. It has long been memory holed from our lexicon of our dirt people mettle and warrior mindset we naturally possess. For good reason. The generational descendent’s, you could say the Cloud People forebears, of the Fabian’s and Jacobin’s really do not want us to know what us free dirt men are like. What we are wholly capable of. Historical Revisionism runs strong in their operating style. They already take enough shit from us. They despise us dirt people like nothing on this mortal plane, we keep thwarting their agenda. And kicking their arse. This is the basis of the strategy and tactic’s we see arrayed against us now. Like this movie trailer of this upcoming video agitprop. Its neo-bolshevik agitprop Kill The Kulak, (instead of trains across the countryside, its technical arts, 5th column academia’s main gift to it’s useful dupes), but lets not push them too far, just to the edge, because they got too many guns and all or nothing tempers that break like a sniper rifles trigger.
The really wild part is it is always this small Legion that is indomitable, has this power all outside it’s diminutive size. Which is beginning to show up in many ways. There are large elements of this evident in The Yellow Vest’s. Catalonia, couple years back. Remember how brutal the crackdown on the secession dissident’s was? Aside from our rifles and our will to use them, they fear nothing like they do secession. Examples abound. The war of Northern Aggression, ( deny the Confederation of free states the very thing the North kept for itself). The final Bundy Ranch standoff under the overpass in the dry gulch in Nevada against the power elites mercenary thugs. Burns Oregon: LeVoy Finnicum understood, he sacrificed himself to save his fellow Patriots, to keep them all from being massacred when he stepped out of his truck into the snow. 64 Million dirt people beat the fuckers at their own game, waged a totally open source, leaderless color revolution, American grass roots style, and won on 11-8-2016. It was a terrible blow against the sonofabitches. They never saw it coming. They are still reeling from that.
It is a great story. One we all must know. Though the warriors among us just know in their bones. We only have to realize and become cognizant of this within ourselves. That is where our cold anger comes in.
This White genocide bullshit. It is simply Totalitarianism 101. The Patriot Act was an earlier stage. Use fear as a weapon, to control as many as you can, give excuse to all who will seek safety instead of fight, let them lay the chains of slavery upon their own wrists, this is the age old timeless dictator’s tactic of divide and conquer, and all who are left from the great demographic threshing who are not afraid and will not bend a knee, stick out like a sore thumb, are easily pointed out, those afraid then know exactly who NOT to help, are a large plurality out of the way, and those who defy and stand their ground are easy to pick off piecemeal. Of course like Adolph Hitler, you at the same time create a body of “laws” where you proscribe those you want to genocide, a wide net of Attainder of Writ, simply make everyone a criminal. Easy Peasy.
At least that is the intent.
The reality is very different in one important way.
They keep picking at this scab of White identity tactics, pretty soon that prudence of The Men of The West, says fuck this, all that cold anger takes over, and its BFYTW.
Weeeeell, I’m 80 so it’s hard to give a shit.but you are right. And I watched a 100 year old company collapse for exactly the reasons you say
Just consider the following proposition:
https://ia801408.us.archive.org/27/items/ThePoliticallyIncorrectCaseForLegalizationOfAllDrugs/The%20Politically%20Incorrect%20Case%20for%20Legalization%20of.pdf
I wouldn’t say we can’t go back to the moon because we’re too dumb. Go back and look at NASA’s budget as a % of the Federal budget in the 60s vs. now.
Open Borders
+Cloward Piven
+Dunning Kruger
———————–
=Calizuela X 50
=DemSoc plan for permanent political power in the USA.
Here is the Rep. Green doing his best to humiliate white men. Black Nationalist? Or just race baiter? Both?
https://youtu.be/NhnO8CUfJDQ
So, Notre Dame de Paris has been almost ruined by fire. I attended Mass there with my wife in 2009, honored to do so in this edifice that has survived so much. A building that was assembled over generations, a monument to the greatness of a people and the Faith that informed their civilization.
By tomorrow the White Nationalists will be getting blamed for it.
It breaks my heart. The French, as annoying as they are, are a wonderful and proud people, and this has to be a shock for them. And to the rest of us, who have visited and admired Paris and France generally.
The end times are closing in.
The French police are now stating that they believe the fire to be an act of arson, but will they – or the rulers of France – drop the other shoe (chaussure) and identify the perpetrators, who are almost certain “cultural enrichers” from the MENA region? Cathedral de Notre Dame Paris is synonymous with France herself. The soldiers of Allah have been trying to conquer La Belle France for more than a thousand years; now that they are making progress toward that goal, what will the French people do about it?
“Edward Dutton and Michael A. Woodley of Menie,”
Who or what is “Menie”?
Are they Blue?
A bit OT, I know, so apologies. But hard to think of a better metaphor for the destruction of Western civilisation. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47941794
” In other words, the die may have been cast a dozen generations ago when smart people started limiting their fertility and helping the poor make it too adulthood.
Idiocracy, in a word. Like the movie of the same appellation.
We? WE? You talk as if I haven’t been operating on the KISS Operating System for the past 3 decades!
Given the extreme risks our technology poses to the well being of our peoples , I for one am fine with seeing high tech society come to an end
Nukes, bio engineering , networked surveillance, chemical poisoning with a hundred deadly things all of this right now tech much less possible future tech like nano tech , AI and autonomous killing machines pose an existential threat to us all
Hell simple automation played a huge part in the fertility decline , the loss of male utility means smaller families and a thus far permanent below replacement fertility
Outside of low IQ immigrants and the ultra religious nobody is having kids and not a single nation has ever been able to under any policy able to get to a fertility rate of 2.1 or higher.
Not a single one.
If my descendants well if I ever have any kids need to farm the land or work as a miller as our forbears did, so be it. At least they’ll have a future
Islam is embraced by the ruling elites because it is composed of the haves, and have nots. With the have nots being slaves to the haves. Democrats, and others, missing the cause and effect genes are led to believe that the slaves have a chance of becoming haves, through hand outs, free stuff, welfare, redistribution of wealth vote buying scams, etc. unfortunately, without the cause and effect genes, they are incapable of seeing, or grasping, the reality of this dead end road.
The Left appears to not be very good at seeing where things lead. They are either blinded to the actual by the appeal of the theoretical, or are too busy taking the “skims” of various sorts to bother with longer term thinking. Our longer term preoccupation with where things lead, and how we get there, tends to hobble us. On the other hand, we are more resistant to false lures, and at least our world view and our reality, as much as we can make them out, appear to be mostly consistent, and full of real world possibilities.
The globalist western elites want to advance their project and secure for themselves more power, centralization and wealth. One of the social engineering mechanisms which has been extremely effective for them is the Hegelian dialectic. Foment a crisis, provoke a reaction, and then step in with the “solution” which advances their agenda.
Importing Muslims also imports the violence, bloodshed and chaos of jihad (holy war) which have always accompanied them wherever they have gone down through the ages. By letting the Saracens rape, murder, riot and pillage their way across the continent, the elites hope to provoke a crisis so severe that the people of old Europe will welcome with open arms the permanent militarization of their societies. Obviously, these forces – and a vast, all-powerful bureaucracy to run them – will be totally under the control of the globalists at the EU.
The mandarins at the EU and their collaborators – globalists like Macron in France and Merkel in Germany – have the blood of countless innocents upon their hands. Every bit as much as the rampaging Muslims themselves.
This discussion is but one side of the coin (mating selection to favor intelligence). The other side is the extinction of hardship and existential threat in a modern affluent society that eliminates selection via subtraction of the stupid from the gene pool. Things will get worse until they get better.
Wasn’t NASA just grooving along doing its thing until Obama told them that their mission was to make Muslims feel good about the things they did centuries ago? If they’re still focused on that and not the “Space” part of their name, it’s Trump’s fault.
When the Space Shuttles were retired, they went out of the manned-space business. They’ll loft an occasional satellite for the CIA and launch space probes with unmanned rockets. That’s about it.
Notre Dame survived everything except Macron.
No, it survived everything but imported, weaponized Mohammedism. This was deliberate, particularly at the start of Holy Week, and the authorities will never, ever admit it.
“Somebody maybe did something”.
Interesting post.
Take the Moon landing. The NASA of 1969 is not the same NASA of 1980 let alone that of 2008. he NASA of today is the end result of 30+ years of bad management and AA policies that drove out their talent and replaced them with degreed ticket punchers and mouth breathers..
You know why we don’t have a shuttle replacement? Because Lockheed and Boeing are too stupid to make one. They tried in the 1980’s and failed horribly. They had no idea how to design and build them. NASA had to cancel the contracts they were so bad.
Boeing used to be a company run by serious airplane men, not shady accountants playing tricks and giving us a defective plane like like the 737-MAX. Martin Marietta – the same thing happened. Lockheed gave us the U-2 and SR-71 but that company doesn’t exist anymore. Today it’s a welfare program producing junk for the AF. BTW these companies bend over backwards to hire female engineers no matter how insipid they are. They are put on fast track promotion programs while white male engineers are kicked ot the side. Really smart men avoid working for such companies. They go to work for Scaled Composite or Space X.
Also factor in the company’s talent base. It takes decades to build up a core of experienced designers and researchers to build rockets that are reliable. It’s easily lost if not maintained. But you can’t tell a bunch of low IQ MBA’s and lawyers who think workers are interchangeable. That’s what happened during 90’s when aerospace consolidated and downsized. It lost a tremendous amount of talent that was irreplaceable.
If the Feds were smart they would have paid the companies to keep these men employed and doing work while training the next generation of engineers and scientists.
This is why our space program has regressed to 1950’s level. If we didn’t have Space-X we’d have no space program at all.
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris is burning;
the spire has collapsed;
the roof is nearly all gone.
Yes, a colossal tragedy. As far as I can tell, it took firemen over two hours to get water trained onto the blaze. If that turns out to be so, the IQ collapse argument holds. The French micro-manage the hell out of ordinary existence. Yet they can’t put out a fire.
Tragic! What a metaphor for Western Civilisation….Shudder. Shall see if Muslim induced (that may be covered up in the news), or large bureaucracy/low IQ induced (forget to lockout/tagout and contractor corruption taking shortcuts).
If the official report states the burning was caused by mistake, will the Yellow Vests believe it? I think not.
Then again, maybe going down in flames is a more dignified fate for the old cathedral than eventually be turned into a mosque.
So deeply ironic. France is no longer Catholic. Her most religious inhabitants are Muslim. Perhaps the most famous cathedral in Christendom crumbles in ashes, long after Christendom vanished from its own people and country.
If it’s rebuilt it will be only because it’s required to serve Asian and deracinated white tourism.
Christianity is in need of many things, but a large pile of carved rock in the center of Paris is not one of them.
Book ordered. But not from Amazon. The irony of purchasing books from a company that bans them is too much for me to stomach.
Book Deposity, AlLibris, Powell’s…anyone but Bezos the Book Banner.
Sing it, Chuckles! The Booby’s with you. Screw Amazon and that little fascist prick Bazos!
While you’re at it, quit Facebook, too, and use DuckDuckGo instead of Google.
When I first saw the video of the three SpaceX boosters land safely (two on land and one on a ocean barge) I thought it was pretty impressive. But then I thought, well, in 1969 Neil Armstrong did the same thing, only he did it on the moon, without GPS, without supercomputers, and his life was on the line. If he failed he was dead.
After getting to the moon, the Apollo astronauts undocked from the command ship in moon orbit, descended, landed, relaunched, redocked, deorbited the moon, traveled to earth, undocked again, and made a firery descent. If any of the maneuvers failed, they were dead.
For SpaceX, they just fired the boosters to suborbital space and let them fall back to earth by gravity (with some help from retro burns and guidance maneuvers.) If they failed, they just lost a replaceable rocket.
When the boosters landed the cheers from the SpaceX control room were thunderous. They were rightly proud, but, in an historical context, too proud for the actual level of achievement.
The Saturn V was built and successfully launched in 5 years from the time the final design was announced. After America’s 50 years of experience in launching rockets, today Boeing is 8 years into the build of the Space Launch System (the Saturn V replacement), and they still haven’t tested a finished rocket. They plan a first launch in 2020, but that may be delayed. Who knows when, if ever, it will launch.
The technical plans for the Rocketdyne F1 engine on the Saturn V still exist, but it can’t be built today because we don’t have the skilled engineers and craftsmen to do it. Modern fabrication, though seemingly more advanced in materials and computer design, actually takes longer and is more complex.
Paradoxically, we live at the apex of human technological achievement, but we can’t even manage to do things we’ve already done because of the weight of technological demands for perfection and the weight of the social burdens to take care of billions of people. Maybe we’re just too smart for our own good.
Employment advertisements today always contain a phrase such as “must be a team player”. In our Advanced Products engineering group in the early stage of the Apollo program, we would have welcomed an Elon Musk. There was no HR department.
Reaching the Moon took almost 2% of GDP for ten years, and all we got was some lousy rocks. There’s no reason to go, not with that price tag.
Likewise with the Concorde: it doesn’t have a viable business model. It could only fly over water because of the sonic boom, which meant that the only lucrative route it could service, was Paris/London-New York. Also, just as it was introduced, fuel prices shot through the roof, and haven’t come down yet.
Not to mention the Concorde was basically a flying bomb, as those poor folks in Paris learned
All planes are flying bombs, as those poor folks of New York learned. The Concorde had only one accident in its lifetime.
You miss the point entirely with your MBA mentality. A bunch of men with slide-rules did what a bunch of engineers with super computers on their desks can’t do. Put a man on the Moon and bring him back safely.
Today we can’t even put a man in orbit or supply the space station because we have lost so much of our technical prowess.
No, he isn’t. Those are simply bad examples to use to support the claims of Dutton and Woodley, because there are much simpler explanations for why there hasn’t been moon flights since the 70s or why there are no supersonic commercial passenger aircraft in use today.
The Apollo program was first and foremost a Cold War propaganda exercise and further development of supersonic passenger jets was killed by the oil crisis. We don’t really know whether we could repeat those feats today or not, because no one has tried. Because ultimately, there isn’t much of a point in trying to repeat them.
If we dumped that kind of cash on a new Apollo program, of course we could go to the Moon – hell, we could probably put a man on Mars for that kind of dough. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s because there’s no reason to. Manned spaceflight is a dead end until launch costs come down to allow space tourism.
The ISS is a case in point: for the budget of the ISS,we could’ve launched sixty robot missions with the size and payload pricetag of the Hubble telescope. Sixty. The Hubble greatly advanced our knowledge of the structure of the universe, the ISS greatly advanced our knowledge about growing watercress in micro-gravity and combating bone loss in astronauts.
If you believe that modern engineers are less capable than their grandfathers, you don’t know anything about engineering. Much more impressive than either the Apollo or the Concorde programs, is the particle smasher at CERN but it doesn’t emit impressive noises and pretty lights, and it has a concrete purpose other than trying to impress the Russkies.
And one more thing: as robot missions are getting cheaper and better at a dizzying pace, the practical value of a human in space is diminishing rapidly. We could finance a Mars mission for what we’ve used on zero gee plumbing.
There’s only so much space money to go around, and the ISS is a hog of almost no scientific or commercial application. If I were Elon Musk, I’d shoot the fucker down so we had an excuse to get real about space.
What would you rather have? One guy puttering around on the Moon for a week, or twenty robot rovers, each worth 10-15 years of service?
And let’s not even consider that we could probably build a working fusion device for what a new Apollo program would cost.
Makes one wonder what % of GDP ancient Egypt devoted to the pyramids. Remember we didn’t send food or gold to the moon. The material cost was minuscule. The cost was directing our brains and skilled workers to the task. Also think about the most exclusive professions today. Dermatologist! What a fukkin joke. We populate that field with our best and brightest. That and bonds trading.
We populate that field with our best and brightest.
Good point, but that’s the way of the world. You can’t force people to become engineers just because they’re good at math.
And not every engineer gets to design rocket engines, 99% of them are ham-and-eggers spending their lives to shave off 2% of the fuel consumption on 100-year old ICE designs.
Bond trading – as long as the Ponzi scheme keeps running – is money in the bank, and money in the bank is not to be scoffed at.
I have been assured that we’ve been on the moon since the Fifties.
Not directly commenting on the exact topic but I just want to acknowledge the high quality of this post and indeed this blog in general. Thanks for the time you put into creating it.
This takes me back to the “Northern Alliance” idea from years back (from Derb?), a political re-alignment where higher IQ K-selected “Ice People” (Europeans, North Asians, North Americans) join ranks to hold back the tide of lower-IQ, r-selected “Sun People.” Lower density isolated populations are the seedbeds of fortuitous mutations like high IQ while billion-man favelas epitomize reversion to the mean. If we’re to avoid Idiocracy, Ice People need physical separation, population control and generations of “cultural infrastructure” investment to rebuild or replace the institutions wrecked by freak-friendly fanaticism. We’re in the protean stage now, dissolving old loyalties (muh Constitution, etc) and forging new ones. If we look at geopolitics through the lens of biology, evolution and realpolitik rather than pussy-hat colored glasses, it sorts into Northern Alliance vs. Southern Horde.
My understanding is that “Protoss v. Zerg (with Sakoku characteristics)” is a good way to meme this to people 40 and under.
#YangGang is going to force me to do a gamer deep dive for fresh memes.
The U.S. is certainly too dumb to operate the Republic we’ve inherited. I think that exact thought every time I hear a moron wanting to get rid of the electoral college or scrap the Constitution.
They have no awareness that those were the fundamental compromises that made the nation possible. Those are the load-bearing walls they want to pull down. Maybe I should be cheering for them to do it – but unlike them, I have an idea of the consequences.
The left is the politics of envy.
Coincidentally, I was just thinking about this the other night. Take a look at the two image links below. The first is the courthouse in my county seat. It’s not architecture on the scale of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in NYC or the Palace of Westminster by any means, but it’s an elegant, imposing building, built in the late 19th century in what was, even then, a remote Appalachian backwater.
The second is a Catholic Church in a nearby small city, built in the same period.
These buildings were built by big gangs of 19th century workers with local masons and locally baked bricks.The courthouse cost $143,000 — I can’t calculate inflation that far back, but if that was in 1913 dollars, that would be about $3.6 million dollars today. Not bad in modern dollars for an entire courthouse construction, but we wouldn’t get anything that looked like that.
We can’t build anything like these buildings now for anything like a reasonable cost. In fact, I would bet a lot of the custom masonry skills on display on these two buildings are essentially lost.
When new local churches or public buildings are constructed in the area now, they’re bland and crude-looking by comparison, and shoddy — they won’t be standing with the grandeur and solidity of these buildings in more than 100 years.
We have regressed as a people. We can’t do what earlier generations did with far less.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NLCTRMbwOsufGQGMIruWWk9B-CEUmqgQ/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MkkIx2NdNX1o6sV1axyNSaIqmH5GmNs2/view?usp=drivesdk
I built this amongst other things and the standard of masonry is as high as ever, its not easy though as the planning authorities rather like modern boxes, it can be done though and not at a bank busting cost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFym-BGE4MM
It’s a lovely little cottage, but I don’t think it compares. The photos don’t really do the courthouse and church justice on the detail (and of course you can’t see the interior work).
The small detail is there but not too obvious on clip, I’m working on something bigger and grander at present, we built to please the heart and soul once and still can at a pinch, but profit comes before beauty it seems.
It does do my heart good to see something built with such obvious care and skill.
There was a file sharing error. Should be fixed now.
I had a similar thought at Cape Hatteras light house. Its a purely functional building in what was a remote, low population site but has fairly ornamental ironwork and masonry.
I would like to read the book, but it’s still a bit pricey right now. I’ll be the first to admit that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but I’m still not convinced that white iqs are plummeting. Is there objective evidence for this? In the form of real iq testing? I think it can all be attributed to decay of standards in education. If you look at pop culture and the arts, the collapse is too sudden and complete. It suggests a sudden political intervention rather than a gradual decrement of cognitive ability. Are white brain sizes (correlated with iq) actually shrinking? Doubtful.
The moon landing was an amazing achievement, but you can make arguments against it. Was it worth billions to put a man on the moon? It was a contest in heavy lifting, like to climb Everest or the Matterhorn. The quality of medical care continues to improve, along with life expectancy; things are getting better in some domains.
Maybe the problem is that the powers that be really don’t want the high IQ people doing things. They would rather remain comfortably ensconced in an environment where hereditary nobility is safe, living amongst the bureaucratic mediocrity. Keep the “skims” from the system in front of the amount of “gibs” given, and personally pocketing the difference. Ask Bernie Sanders how it all works, he has it dialed in down cold.
Yeah I agree. They don’t want real quality out there to have to compete with.
“I’m still not convinced that white iqs are plummeting”
That is because they aren’t.
The Flynn effect has masked the decline in general IQ (also called G). While G has been proven (as good as can be anyhow) to have peaked in the period 1800-1850, the flynn effect (increase in abstract reasoning skills) has added more IQ point than have been removed.
There is however evidence that the flynn effect is levelling out and IQ may (or has?) start(ed) to decline by about 1 point per decade.
I have always believed that Christianity has as much to do with the current decline of the West as it originally had with it’s rise. Christianity did a lot for the growth of Western Civilization for many reasons not the least of which was the propensity of the West to explore, conquer, colonize, and civilize the world in the name of bringing Jesus to the savages. And it worked. Then they decided the “savage” had been driven out of these people and there are “the same as we are”. Sorry, not it wasn’t and no they aren’t. Hence here we are today with Christianity in decay and Western Civilization facing a Darkening that must be stopped with the blood of billions, not millions.
Jonathan Bowden once pointed out that in medieval times the attitude of Christians was, “God created the peoples of the world different and meant for them to stay different.” If only that attitude had been preserved…
19th-20th century Chrisitianity (esp. after WWII) mostly discarded their good ideas and doubled-down on the bad. I blame the leadership not the religion. Russell’s “Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity” showed the good side of syncretism. Christianity’s 20th Century decline, esp. after WWII, shows the bad side. Until the late 20th, most Christians were parochial, not universal, and looked at the Chosen as pariahs, not blessed overlords.
I find your blog posts interesting and informative, but I am glad I am old.
I’m with you. There is a human conceit that there is a good answer for every question or problem. Sometimes the brush fire simply needs to burn itself out.
Ha. I’m not old enough. Do I want everything to fall apart now when I’m still vigorous or later when I’m infirm but maybe dead. Hard call
Hon…you crack me up! Yep, bring it on or wait a generation or two. But we both know this is unraveling really fast at warpspeed. Is imminent.
The fruits of conservative cowardice. When these lunatics could have been stopped the right just punted. I have more contempt for our supposed allies who are bought off with GDP and sending our money and men to the Middle East for Israel. When that’s your definition of winning, it’s no wonder we’re going down.
Another factor is the dysgenic effect of war. Our strongest and bravest were put through a meat grinder in The War Between the States and the World Wars in particular. The fake post-war prosperity led to the soyboy baby boom.
Here’s the blackest pill of all (and if you want to ban me after this, I totally understand): Western Civ won’t make it, because increasingly stupid people have access to nuclear weapons. I’m actually a big fan of Vlad Putin, for the simple reason that he’s not stupid. He’s a shady guy, and the Russians are always up to their eyeballs in capers, but Putin isn’t dumb enough to let a nuke loose. Everyone else, though….? I don’t know what Kim’s IQ is, or the Ayatollah’s, but they’re full retard because of ideology — they remind me of nothing more than colleagues I had at university, who would brag about their high IQs while doing the dumbest stuff imaginable. The clown show that is the UK has nukes. So do the French, and their leader is — god help us — Emmanual Macron, an idiot of the first water. South Africa has nukes, for Christ’s sake (unless you really believe they scrapped ’em). India and Pakistan — two places I’ve seen up close and personal — have nukes, and I wouldn’t trust them with any weapons technology more sophisticated than a rusty can opener. Look at every single Democratic presidential candidate — if Trump loses (as he probably will), one of those cretins will have her finger on The Button. It’s the final countdown….
Ultimate victory is swallowing the blackest of black pills, every day, and simply refusing to let it take you down. Keep doing your thing, even though you know what’s up. It drives everyone else crazy.
Our only hope to postpone getting nuked is the human proclivity to achieve and keep…..the 17 year old gymnast/hot women (yes, Putin as her), good liquor, a beach house/dacha. Religion wise, the Shia muslims scare me. They are waiting for the 12 imam to climb out of the well only when the world is set on fire. These religious nuts don’t have normal human desires for the 17 year old gymnast/liquor to stop them from blowing up the world.
Derb wrote an article >15 years ago about a British scientist, “Sir Wigmore Can’tremember”, who wrote a book predicting our demise in no later than 30 years by the unforseen, i.e. the Hadron collider causing a rip in time and space, a direct asteroid hit, the micro gray goo eating us up, another Aum Shinrikyo deadly virus release, and so on. Never underestimate unintended consequences and the unforseen.
The 12th Imam thing promises 72 hot gymnasts later, instead of the one they aren’t going to get today. A bunch of people take them up on that flimsy promise.
Yep…weird Shia delayed gratification.
Another way we will collapse is this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/GilletteVenus/status/1113565570354409473
Aren’t you guys looking forward to this babe! Yum!
Another people walk in and push us over like Bobo the sandbottom Clown.
Unless you know a lot more about Shia Islam than I do, I opine that the Sunnis are decidedly worse: more prone to ISIS-style violence, and rigidly dogmatic in religion.
The Sunnis I’ve met were generally arrogant assholes, while the Shia were thoughtful gentlemen. Then again, they all had doctorates….
Having no personal experience, will consider your personal experience. My point isn’t about personal behavior; it is about the cultural ideology to get the 12h Imam out of the well, oh well, the world must be set on fire. Different from Sunnis. Just because someone is nice, doesn’t mean they don’t dabble in assholery.
Why would you be banned because of this? Doubly so since it is complete fantasy. A ‘nuke’ is the absolute LEAST of your worries, so you may want to go spit that blackpill out.
You are already under attack by a weapon of mass destruction far more insidious than the fission variety. A two prong combo of mind-virus (SJW/NPC/Die-versity fanatic cult) and a very effective bioweapon in the form of the Orc Hordes.
It is happening in slow motion right in front of your face every single day and your biggest fear is a rogue nuke? LOLWUT. I think your watch stopped in about 1960 at the height of the Cold War. In fact… a rogue nuke could do a hell of a lot of good depending on what city it landed on. It this a boomer thing here again? I’m mystified by posts like this when we are facing annihilation by a very effective and constant means already deployed against us.
Mr. Predator…..yes…you are addressing a large chunk of truth. In addition to “facing annihilation by a very effective and constant means already deployed against us, and the Die-versity fanatic cult” …..this is a game of 52 card pickup. Yes..the orc hoards are a massive threat. Yes the Left has gone insane, hate us and desire to kill us. Have you not read in my posts my horror at the tsunami of Orcs and Progs? Additionally, there are multiple other threats as we decline. Included is a hand-off dirty bomb threat. Shia want the apocalypse by fire. Trump just signed a bill to harden the national grid. Not the Big stuff but should be on the radar.
Are you saying throw everything at the most pressing Orc/Prog problem and don’t sweat the “small” stuff? That is a valid way for you to operate. Then don’t think about other issues but the big ones. Additionally, have noticed that life will often flank with the under-the-radar dumbass stuff and bite hard when all attention is drawn to the big stuff. You have a good brain, a bit testy, yet appreciate your views. Invite you to move to a western town to get ready. Room to breathe and prepare. Take care out there.
” Invite you to move to a western town to get ready. Room to breathe and prepare. Take care out there.”
I’m trying bud… I am unfortunately locked in at Sodom on Potomac by circumstance because I was an ‘early adopter’ of pushing back against The Machine. Pro Tip: Don’t try this at home. It had… consequences. I didn’t go to prison, but only barely and it still fucked me up in manifold other ways as you can imagine.
I am a bit testy because I walked my talk unlike 99% of others and I paid quite dearly for it. I understand now why most people simply ‘go along to get along’ because this system will utterly destroy you should you choose to push back against it.
Apex man…..do you have a story! Let me put it this way, you have knowledge gained the hard way.. to share and shape. So keep analyzing and shaping opinions and us as your words teach and inspire. We can learn from you. And do keep in mind that some of us had different patches of fur singed off in bloddy battles, also. Most of us are here to help and buoy up each other in a monumental time of history. Extend the same to you, brother.
PS: I’m an almost old girl, not a bud…not transitioning ever….so you can call me “girl” now! Ha!
PSS: Sure wish a lot of you folks could re-think and reset goals to get the hell out of Dodge. I got out of downtown Oakland, for God’s sake, way early retirement and cut in retirement pay, and swear it saved my life. Living small town out West costs less. We will need all of us making the pilgrimage to mass together at some point.Sodom on the Potomac will throw acid on your soul, and you’re worth more than the Imperial Capitol can offer. This country is probably going to split. Do the best we can then muddle along!
Oh gadd you didn’t go the tax protester route, did you? You would been be better off if they found you with vibrants stacked like cord-wood in your basement.
Sid…you’re babbling. What in God’s name are you talking about? Happy to have a dialogue but you make no sense. Try again?
Oh, just took a stab at what ApexP did to almost get thrown in jail. May be confused regarding who replying to who.
Roger that.
A brown fella was running his mouth because he had never met a White Man before. He had met ‘white males’ which are pretty much all you will find anywhere near DC. I corrected his behavior.
One call to the po-leece “threatened by whitey” is all it takes today to be completely destroyed by this system. No concern about how we got into that situation all they knew is a minority is threatened by a white man who is also a firearms owner. A ‘Roger Stone’ SWAT raid later, and I survived w/o being killed but the did manage to steal most stuff that wasn’t nailed down ‘Evidence’ and all that innit. Now w/ a rap sheet that has multiple charges I realize the folly of challenging a minority in a place like DC. This was my personal ‘Charlotsville’ moment. My only consolation is that it could have been far worse since death and imprisonment were both on the menu that day.
Whenever you hear someone saying how ‘Civil War 2’ will be over in a few weeks, remember that it will NOT just be Orcs you are fighting. But the Badge Gang that stands 100% behind them nation wide. It will be long and brutal. Plan accordingly.
South Africa has nukes, for Christ’s sake (unless you really believe they scrapped ’em).
I would believe that they have failed to maintain them in operable condition.
Actually, I thought I remembered something about the outgoing White government handing over its nukes to someone else when Black rule was imminent.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the older nukes, worldwide, aren’t readily operable. They need a good bit of skilled maintenance and periodic resupply of some rare materials.
And here’s a punishment worse than banning:
https://youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw
(Heh. They’re still together with the same lineup from this video!)
Yes…one of the points I was making to keep on the radar. Hopefully, as a society we can still juggle multiple balls in the air. Maybe not.
I find the neoliberal End of History, sought after by the whole of the Western elite and by millions upon millions of NPC’s they’ve developed and control, a much bigger black pill. Globe spanning dystopian idiocracy, masses of mixed-race consumer-retards living entirely for consumerism and modern pop culture (fast food, video games, Hollywood, negro athletes, porn, status signalling, et al) within massive, sprawling ghettos, ruled over by a tiny, distant plutocrat elite, obscenely wealthy, debauched, and demonic. Virtually all human nobility, high culture, healthy ecology erased and forgotten.
I personally don’t foresee the West being saved without some sort of reverse 1917: mass, sharp suffering delegitimizing the whole of the Western elite and their System in eyes of masses of whites, creating an opening for a shrewd, ruthless dissident Right to seize power and impose, ruthlessly, a sane order. I think this is highly unlikely to transpire. A nuclear exchange, creating chaos that enables a regional breaking of the grip of our elite, our System, “our values”, may just be our only hope.
As I’ve said before, only to be shouted down because it’s too controversial, war is a natural cleansing mechanism that culls vast amounts of stupid people. Not only the people fighting the wars, but the refugees fleeing it, or living in war torn slums. During a major conflict you need to 1) plan survival/exit scenarios, sometimes by the minute, and 2) execute them when necessary. Even a median IQ can do that, but not the very low end. It’s no secret that Rwanda is one of the most thriving places in Africa right now. No one wants to admit that the million people hacked to death were holding the others back. Europe had so many wars for so long in that confined space that culled vast amounts of the stupid. Japan, an archipelago, had a brutal shogun culture until the mid 19th century. The stupid people couldn’t even get off the islands before being turned into rice fertilizer.
Modern Christianity can’t process this. It hasn’t been able to since the 1950s when the Disney Jesus was invented. Stupid people build up like kindling, decade after decade. The human genome is likely programmed to start wars after a certain amount of stupid people are roaming around.
This is also way women are practically programmed to fawn over the returning “war hero.” Someone who didn’t get killed in a violent set of events, naturally would be smarter. Yes, lucky, but that’s only part of the story.
Then WWI and WWII should have improved the populations of the UK, Germany, France, and Russia. Nothing of the sort happened, as can be seen from observation today.
Casualties in modern warfare are based much more on wrong-place, wrong time than on personal factors like decision-making or prowess. It’s hard to believe Europe & Russia were not set back decades by the World Wars which targeted civiliian populations indiscriminately.
How is that any different compared to ancient warfare? Do you think all those Romans got slaughtered at Cannae because of their personal failings, or because they happened to be in a really wrong place at a really wrong time?
“The truth is, the West may simply lack the human capital to keep the plates spinning much longer. In other words, the die may have been cast a dozen generations ago when smart people started limiting their fertility and helping the poor make it too adulthood.”
Indeed. People don’t realize that one of the most ingenious, though perhaps evil, inventions of the modern West is its bureaucracy. Before y’ll get enraged, hear the Booby out:
Anyone who has ever had to deal with the maddening layers of bureaucracy in modern society thinks bureaucracies are stupid. They’re not stupid; they’re brilliant. The people working within the bureaucracy are stupid. The bureaucracy is a magnificent machine that allows even the stupidest people imaginable to be in positions of responsibility, and yet things still – kinda, sorta – get done for the most part.
No, things don’t get done nearly as well as if they were done by one intelligent person unconstrained by a stifling bureaucracy, but they get done just well enough to keep the house of cards from collapsing. The hive of semi-retards just have to follow the flow charts, procedure manuals, etc. and that allows the system to operate on some level
Even more so, the bureaucracy means no one is accountable when things f**k up. So long as everyone followed procedure, mistakes can’t fall on anyone’s shoulders. Jobs are safe.
It’s brilliant, in an evil sort of way.
It’s also why societies that should have collapsed decades ago keep going on. How much longer ours can continue is anyone’s guess. The Booby respects not the bureaucrats, but he fears the bureaucracy.
I can’t remember who said it (maybe Buffett) that he only invests in companies a monkey can run, because all companies end up being run by monkeys.
We haven’t gone back to the moon because it is barren rock and nobody has figured out how to make money off of it. I’m not saying the thesis doesn’t have merit, just that the timeline is longer. We have plenty of human capital but it is occupied with consumer goods. The modern phone is a true wonder. Note that we didn’t even know the structure of the hereditary vehicle 70 yrs ago. Now we can manipulate it at will. The Chinese just announced that they have made a smarter monkey. South africa is, in contrast, is getting to the point that lack of human capital has fallen below that required to keep the lights on. I watch SA closely these days.
Yeah, I’m not disputing (or affirming) Dutton’s thesis, but the the moon and concord aren’t great examples. Going to the moon was a pissing contest with the Soviets, no more. We won, and everyone decided there were better things to do with their money. For a variety of reasons, the Concord wasn’t economically feasible. It wasn’t a matter of brains.
Again, not saying that Dutton is incorrect, just that these examples don’t prove his point.
Our Germans beat their Germans.
“No Senator. They did not. Our Germans are better than their Germans.”.
The Right Stuff is a great movie.
The thing about the moon landings and the Concorde is to do these things, and see where they lead. That they led to nothing significant is not a surprise, it is how most leading edge experiments turn out. These were simply very high profile ones. Now we don’t even try any more, though Elon Musk, a nutcase or the first order, is out there trying a lot of things. If you watch his people land rockets on floating rafts and don’t get a tingle down your spine, you have something wrong with you.
One can also argue that the whole integration/colorblind/lift up the bottom end experiment has been a failure as well, but there are just to many gibs to be had to allow that one to quietly go away. Same with the gender/gender fluid/gay thing, though we don’t appear as far down the path yet, on that one. Still, the gibs to be had will likely keep that thing going.
Musk is not a nut. What would you do if you found yourself with several billions? A man can only consume so much coke and hookers in a lifetime. Keith Richards is probably the benchmark here. The real nut is Bill gates. Apparently his goal is to prop up africas population so that when the die-off comes it will be really horrific and destructive. Who knows, maybe it will take Europe down with it. We are lucky that we have musk. He and bezos are keeping the know-how from the from the moon shot advancing, however tenuously. My hope is that china will goad us to action. We need someone to compete against.
Agree re Musk. As far as I can tell, he is guilty of a number of outright criminal acts (e.g. securities fraud), as well as being a bit of a huckster overall.
Still… may a thousand Musks bloom! We’re better off with him than without. Just be careful about investing any money with such people.
The problem with space exploration is the same as from day one: too costly to use the present technology to lift payload into orbit. We, and the Soviets, had rocket technology developed primarily to lift heavy nukes to each other’s borders and those (technology) were “borrowed” to start a space program. But the whole thing was a stunt and predictable in limitations.
NASA of course continues to send costly stunts into space, but those will never get us off this planet. If we were serious, we’d spend most of our resources to develop an alternate, cost efficient launching technology and of course the appropriate propulsion engines to use in space. But perhaps the Dutton/Woodly explanation is correct, there are not enough smart people left to create/engineer such things?
There is no “alternate, cost-efficient launching strategy” that could enable routine space travel from Earth. It takes a fixed, massive amount of energy to accelerate a mass to critical velocity to escape Earth into space. That amount of energy is a function of the laws of physics and will never change. The efficiency of rocket engines can be improved, but that has limits.
There is an analogous problem with hypersonic airplanes. As a matter of physics, it consumes a massive amount of energy to accelerate a mass to hypersonic speeds. This cannot be overcome with better airframe design or more efficient engines.
Newtonian physics are a bitch. They impose real, physical limits on the advancement of technology. This is why you see entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, who made fortunes in fields like computing, which are not limited by Newtonian physics, struggle when they launch transport engineering projects.
I’m trying to figure out how literal you are being about ‘barren rock’ and ‘making money’ because if you are being 100% literal that is sort of scary.
The thing about the moon is that it requires capital outlay and risk that is simply not the norm today. We don’t ‘go boldly’ anywhere anymore for paragraphs full of reasons I won’t be typing here that are already known to most readers.
As for the ‘making money’ once you had the initial huge upfront cost covered there is this little thing on the moon you may have heard of it before, Helium 3. It is kinda, umm, sorta… like, valuable. And stuff. Incredibly so in fact given that making it requires more energy that it produces. When it is already existing however well… let’s do some quick math. Gold is currently valued as of today at $1290 per ounce. An ounce of Helium3 would cost you about $44,000 by comparison. So…there’s that.
The problem, as you alluded to, is getting to it and getting it back. But my point is, in a different time we’d have a culture that would have put up the untold trillions needed to create the infrastructure. The nice benefit of He3 is since it is literally -fuel- it would become self sustaining as it could be used directly on the moon for all manner of things that require power. Life support, hauling, lifting, building, etc etc.
But in 1965 instead of pushing the untold trillions into the nascent space program we aborted it in the crib. Instead we have… *drum roll**… Detroit. Thanks J3ws and negro3s! Job well done.
I actually had Dutton playing on Youtube when I saw the new post.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXkspDRJlxo
I’ve always thought the “Golden Age” of Islam was bullshit. It was just converted Goths and Carthaginians continuing their Classical civilization ways for a couple of generations without being bothered by Islamic raids and piracy.
After 2 generations, their descendants were fully indoctrinated into Muslim life and had bred with the Arab invaders. Then the region that had been the bread-basket of the classical world quickly descended into permanent poverty and irrelevance.
At least where advancement of science and other civilizational metrics are concerned, the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam is a myth created over the last century or so by the leftist academy. Germanic tribes were responsible for the end of classical Greco-Roman civilization; that dubious honor also falls to the Muslims, who began the Dark Ages by rolling back or destroying much of classical civilization.
The book, “Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy” by Emmet Scott concerns the lengthy history of the historical controversy which attached to the 1920s work of Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, who advanced the thesis below:
“During the 1920s Belgian historian came to an astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world, was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs, whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne, it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic features of classical life disappeared from Europe”
“Pirenne’s findings, published posthumously in his Mohammed et Charlemagne, were even then highly controversial, for by the late nineteenth century many historians were moving towards a quite different conclusion: namely that the Arabs were actually a civilizing force who rekindled the light of classical learning in Europe after it had been extinguished by the Goths, Vandals and Huns in the fifth century. And because Pirenne went so diametrically against the grain of this thinking, the reception of his new thesis tended to be hostile. Paper after paper published during the 1940s and ’50s strove to refute him. ”
(Above from online review of the Scott book)
We routinely land probes on Mars, where they drive about looking at stuff. Space failed to go anywhere simply because there was no way to “monetize” it. The only possibility for profitable space activities is asteroid mining, specifically for PGM’s, and that is only a $7 billion a year market. Additionally, SpaceX is now flying reusable rockets. Something NASA never even attempted in its “heyday” of the late 1960’s.
The Concorde was never economically competitive (consumed too much fuel) and generated a sonic boom where ever it flew. Concorde overflights over the U.S. were banned in 1976 because of the sonic boom issue. Boom Aerospace is working on a commercially competitive SST that would fly at mach 2.2 for the price of business class on regular planes. Unlike the Concorde, Boom’s airliner will have trans-Pacific range.
Nevertheless, despite these poor examples, I consider the thesis that we are all becoming thicker to be highly credible. So the issue becomes what to do about it.
First, you want to practice life extension as far as its available. Senolytics, Resveratrol, NR/NAD+, etc. Things that bring life extension into the personal vision quest range. Once the protocols for both mitochondrial fission/fusion as well as invivo cellular programming become available, you will want to do these things as well.
Next is core group. This is where the “Heinleinian” competent people who identify as such and view themselves as a group with commonality come together and begin to network. We create citadels in the coming decades (seasteads are one such example) if things really do go bad. The purpose of the core group is to maintain and extend technological innovation, and the means to do so, such as to enable an unlimited, open future of radical abundance. The memes need to be created that foster this goal. I believe these memes already exist. It is up to alt-right and other pro-west types to promulgate these memes as they really are the true essence of Western civilization. It is most important to recognize that Western civilization is inherently promethean. We should always encourage this.
Lastly, the bio-engineering technologies to increase cognitive ability, executive function, and human performance in general; in both existing adults as well as embryos, should be developed to the maximum possible extent.
The most important thing to understand is that the number of people necessary to maintain and push technological innovation is a very small percentage of the total population. The second most important thing to understand is that, in most fields, technological innovation tends to reduce the cost of further innovation. Thus, it becomes possible for small groups or even individuals to do what formerly could only be done by continental scale governments and or large corporation. IT IS THIS LATTER POINT THAT OUR SALVATION IS TO BE FOUND IN. This cannot be said enough times because it is this self-empowerment ot technological innovation that will allow for those of us who do seek the openness and greater future to make it happen INDEPENDENT OF THE REST OF THE HUMAN RACE.
It is precisely this that we should work towards.
Once you are in orbit, the solar system is yours. The obvious next step in space exploration / exploitation was a space elevator. Depending on who you ask, either we don’t have the available technology to form the necessary carbon-strands, or we do have the ability but can’t be bothered. Or maybe we’re smart enough to form the concept but not smart enough to engineer the solution.
A better idea than the space elevator is the Lofstrom Loop/Launch Loop. Active support structures do not need super strong materials.
NAD precursor is sitting on my kitchen sink for mitochondrial renewal.
This is essentially what I was getting at in my post above about small independent groups forming with the goal of continuing the mission of Western Civilization whether the various tribes of malcontents and parasites like it or not. This is what we all need to realize – we need to stop asking permission of the dregs and forge ahead without them.
One problem is that if we fall completely off the cliff, it will be much harder to climb back up because all easily exploitable resources have been used.
…if we fall completely off the cliff, it will be much harder to climb back up
Astronomer, and no mean intellect, Fred Hoyle was of the opinion that due to the limits of easily exploitable resources, technological civilizations get one and only one chance to become space-faring. If you don’t get off the planet at your first opportunity, your species is likely doomed long-term.
DOOMED I say!
Salvation is to be found in the spiritual life, not in technology. Believing the opposite is a big part of our degeneration.
One Concord flight could spread Ebola all over the planet in days . Its getting bad enough that we’d be better off banning private aircraft in some ways and restricting flight to the military and government agencies
Hell we are almost to the ban engines on ships stage now
And yes I am well aware there is an experimental Ebola vaccine , not the point. There are plenty of other emergent diseases and a hundred other vectors that we can’t control
I am NOT mind you advocating for that but no matter how you slice it connectivity is very risky
As far as Space, outside of, roughly ,orbit we don’t need it We have more than enough of everything for billions of people to live well enough right here in Earth. With a bit more effort we can get all humanity to lower fertility and stabilize at a lower level.
When smart people have 1.6 kids or less on global average (all races here) no ability or frankly reason to go to space
Even the less smart even in Africa and the Middle East are stabilizing and in time so long as the violent religious zealots can be culled, man kind will stabilize
No need to try and colonize anything or to waste money on vanity projects like putting people on Mars
In any case our economies don’t actually create enough surplus wealth for a big space program anyway
To do that you need rising wages and rising demand via population growth in an economy.
Automation and social change have gutted wages, gutted demand for physical goods and as such just keeping the complexity up eats up more than we can manage
Its called catabolic collapse theory which grossly simplified states “societies that become to expensive to run collapse to a sustainable state.”
Ours is doing just that. I hope we get life extension before it all goes kablooey but who knows.
Probes are all well and good but we’re not going to settle Mars because the first “Xuman” to set foot must be a tranny or an Orc and they’ll never find one with sufficient smarts and resilience to survive the journey. So we’re staying right here.
The modern world is amazingly toxic in the literal sense. It seems everything from plastic wear to food is designed to destroy testosterone. Women were so eager to get useless degrees, that we still dont know exactly what hormonal birth control does to their brains.
As sad as it to watch the fermi paradox in slow motion, the collapse of complex chemical manufacturing will probably make us healthier. As the collapse of urban Rome into fuedal latifundia did for Europeans.
People who were alive at the time will recall that the baby boomers, then in the full bloom of young adulthood, were not particularly enthusiastic about the moon landing. They didn’t give a shit about accomplishments that signified national greatness and their enthusiasms came to define our politics for the next half century. IQ doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
This is a good point. Our smartest people in past generations wanted to create something real. Today, all the Zuckerbergs, Cooks, Bezos’, etc. want to do is sell you shit you don’t need. The internet was a great invention. Now the entire thing revolves around spying on your personal habits to target you with ads. Zuckerberg, with his high IQ and perfect ACT, should be curing Alzheimer’s, not creating a better way to view pictures of your friend’s kids.
I was just a tyke when the first moon landing happened — five years old. I can remember sitting between my Mom and Dad, though, watching it on TV. I didn’t really understand it, but Mom and Dad had impressed on me that something important was happening.
Yep, in the early 60’s we were already discussing the creation of paradise on earth if we only had the funding that NASA and the military were spending. Hell, I remember when Reagan was pilloried when the national budget went over $300B. We now spend more money on social programs (even adj for inflation) than those early SJW could have dreamed of—and how are we the better for it?
At least we got to the moon, took some pictures, and brought home a few souvenirs. LBJ’s “Great Society” spending produced nothing of value and arguably the desolation of a great country. As someone here once said, “Get the biology right, and it’s all downstream from there.”
I read this as a satirical comment. The last sentence is a well known boomerism.
Thanks Z…as always thought-provoking article. Why must we approach this “either/or?” Both Saml and Yves have solid points. Am voting for: Down we go and we should separate. Mainly though, we have developed the ability to medically save most people who 150 years ago would have died and not passed their genes into the gene pool. No later than 1910, 4 out of 10 kids under 5 DIED because their immune system took a gob smack and they went down. Case in point, I would have been dead 3 times by the age of 23. I am genetically the problem, not the solution. Only the strong survived. Throw in too much complexity, numerous other factors, and here we are.
Shortly after the Spanish influenza circled the globe, great medical innovations occurred, disinfection and chlorine were invented. We stopped laying out our dead in the parlor, and that room was renamed “the Living Room.”
In any societal collapse, the first to die will be those dependent on modern medical technology for their survival – pace makers, liver dialysis, refrigerated insulin, etc. It’s not ‘fair’ and it will be heartbreaking in individual and personal cases, but species-wide it’s nature’s way.
It is! Read post EMP world book https://www.amazon.com/Second-After-John-Matherson-Novel/dp/0765327252
I vote for modern medicine as the cause of the decline of the quality of human beings. With greater ability to defy death, the need for God slipped away. Now we immanetize the echaton. Too many dumb folk trying to equalize outcomes.
Human achievement in all kinds of areas has stalled or gone backwards. Medicine still can’t cure a virus. There is no one alive who can paint or sculpt like a Renaissance master. Computer science stalled out in 1968. The list goes on.
Whether Computer Science has now stalled out, I won’t debate. But it did not stall out in 1968. Not even close. I had the fortune of being in the field and working with computer scientists during some of the greatest applications known. The human genome project was complete via scientists developing the computer/mathematical algorithms for putting the gene splices together (circa 90’s). Google search algorithms/databases for what is now known as the internet (circa 00’s). For that matter, the internet itself, circa 90’s. Not to mention the WWW software that continues to expand. Hell, we’re using it right now.
in 1968:
1. using von Neumann architecture for CPUs
2. RAM memory
3. spinning hard disks
4. source code written in text
5. serial communications over wire
Still doing all those things the same way. When was there ever a big breakthrough in computer science in the last 50 years? OS360 was the pinnacle…
But you must understand that those “applications” are small beans compared to “getting electricity to do logic” or “making a process for integrated circuits.”
In the same way that Hubble is an amazing achievement– but it’s NOTHING compared to putting a man on another celestial body– all these algorithms are just “using the tools our predecessors built.” They’re not great leaps forward.
hepatitis C is cured. Child mortality rates in the West are minimal. Heart bypass surgery. The Green Revolution. And the list goes on…
We living in a golden age man. That’s what makes it so perplexing that they seem determined to throw it away
The US has rather high child mortality and is the worst in the developed world . we are 76% more liable to die at birth and 57% before more likely before adulthood than other developed nations
The US isn’t really developed socially anyway, its far more like Latin America
However its far too expensive for it to be developed and frankly Americans do not like one another well enough to pay what it takes to build a more modern state , if we could manage honest enough government which we can’t
Of course splitting the union is unthinkable untenable and would probably result in a massive intercontinental war in a short time anyway so the only option is to stay on the ride till it comes to and end on its own .
I am not a computer scientist or, indeed, any sort of scientist so I cannot speak from knowledge. But the impression I have is that computer science was once about pushing the frontiers of knowledge every-forward. Now it appears to be all about cobbling together the right algorithms for more effective monitoring and control.
yeah, all i knows is that red dead redemption sure looks alot better than pong.
Blame the 1930 Lambeth Conference of the Church of England. For the first time a major Christian denomination approved contraception. It was prompted by the country’s rich and powerful and smart, who didn’t want so many kids themselves, and wanted to limit the births of the masses. All major Protestant denominations soon followed. Within a couple decades, abortion also was legalized. Even the Catholic Church, which resisted strongly until the 1960s and still officially opposes contraception, hardly mentions it. Smart people are more likely to use contraception properly, or to drive to the abortion clinic on time. Meanwhile, the smart who want kids are taxed into penury to pay for the illegitimate profligacy of the poor. So the dysgenic beliefs and policies have been culling smart people for 89 years, and welfare nearly as long. I hear smart, college educated young women say, “I don’t want to have children.” There is no way out of this plunge downward but a moral revival seen nowhere on the horizon.
The irony is….we are hardwired to do what ever it takes, work hard, organize, birth control, invent.. to create and strive for an easier life. Once we achieve this, we commence to fall apart! How many of us in Z’s threads have noticed we were meant to be occupied with the struggle….not the Barcalounger.
Range Front, right on. This is why I’m so much against welfare proposals such as UBI. Without a bit of a struggle to survive, man is a degraded soul—and shows it!
In a normal world I would agree with you, Compsci – “He who does not work does not eat.” But in today’s Clownworld, where the decline is already apparent and demographically irreversible, and where Whites are systematically degraded and milked of their labor and assets, I believe Whites should get whatever they can from the carcass before all the diversity strips the bones clean. No, I won’t vote for the Oriental (or vote at all any longer) and I don’t see Whites ever really getting any gibs at all – but cut corners on your taxes, take every discount offered because of any ridiculous category you may be part of, etc. This is all antithetical to the way I was raised and what I believe, but we don’t live in a normal, functional society and to continue to be the only ones that play by the rules makes us willing dupes and suckers. Not for me any longer, thank you.
3g4me; under normal circumstances I’d agree with you.
The issue is that our society is now a hijacked plane. The only way we live is to soft crash it and build a new civilization in the landing zone.
Part II is something that has to wait for another day. Part I can be addressed now by “pouring sand in the gears” at every opportunity.
To me, UBI = looting the Empire for startup capital. It’s a survival strategy to help escape a sinking ship, the technocratic final solution to problems created by technocracy. In a properly based society, we would care for our people because they’re our people, not because GDP, efficiency, etc… For now, Get That Bag & put it toward a better future for our own.
All my best friends are ‘conservatives’ – work hard, listen to the daily roster of AM ‘thinkers’, scroll through their phones at lunch for stories from Breitbart or The Daily Caller, and never – ever – hear a sour word about President Trump. In their way they are as impenetrable as the enemy. They don’t read books, or the Zblog; they do all the things that the proper white suburbanite of 1980 is expected to do: They pursue the material idyll, as the natural and normal pursuit of all real men at all times. Their souls are monetized.
I reject their worldview almost as much as the worldview of our enemies. It’s like they can’t be reached. I am more right-wing than they are – but they are more ‘conservative’ than I am. It’s all very confusing.
First Western country to suffer from a major decline in reproduction rate was France in the 19th century-long berfore the Lambeth conference.
France was the only country that went through the Industrial Revolution and didn’t see a huge increase in population.
Not sure about the extent to which 19th century France was influenced by 20th century Anglicans.
Crowding plays a part on all this. 30 million people in a nation as small as France in 1800 is incredible . Its a bit over twice that now and terribly crowded.
Europe is overcrowded so if the USA and a non demented leadership in the West ones who weren’t obsessed with money, growth technology having more people to rule over would acknowledge this, close the borders and welcome slow population decline
In a few decades of that the population would reach the point where it stabilizes at a smaller level and with the than cheaper housing, larger families will probably happen
Since we are ruled by bankers more than anything and they require growth to leech off of, we can’t change course. End that regulate the hell out of finance and keep it minuscule and maybe we make it.
Or we keep innovating financial projects and destroying tech combine with mouse utopia and get replaced by the Amish which seems to be happening now
Why can’t it be as simple as the stupid are out breeding the smart.
Mostly because the stupid don’t always out breed the smart. For long stretches, the opposite was true. In the Middle Ages around fifty percent of children of peasants died before puberty. The upper classes, in contrast, saw most of their off-spring make it to adulthood. Having a lot of kids was a status symbol. There is a point where this flips. The smart build up society to a point where it is relatively safe and well fed. Child mortality declines. Violence declines. Elite fertility also declines.
Why do smart people stop having children? Why do they lose their religion and more important, lose the will to impose that religion on society?
Even if the stupid are outbreeding the smart currently, the absolute numbers of smart people are higher than at any point in history simply due to population growth. So in theory, the inventions, cures, innovations, etc. should keep happening. The bigger problem is that we are being ruled by the ever growing stupid population, who are putting so much sand in the gears that the smart people are having trouble navigating.
The vibrants protested funding for NASA. Those funds would have been better spent on gibs.
Here’s an example of this. Perhaps you even had this song in mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4
Don’t want gibs? Have lots of jobs that pay well enough to start a family in an urban environment for all skill and education levels . We haven’t had that in half a century or so
If the private sector doesn’t support such jobs and ours clearly does not than people will turn to the public sector
In any case , you cannot get out if paying for society and as society gets more and more complex , the cost of running it will increase and sooner or later ever dime, private and public will be eaten up
Once we can no longer make it work than we collapse to a level we can make work which we are doing with decaying infrastructure and 50 years of low fertility
The US society can’t tolerate being a developed nation apparently so it soon will not be
As a soon to be less developed nation, its reasonable to also assume there will be no money or skills for high complexity vanity projects like moon shots
We will be lucky if we get it together enough to maintain sanitation and electricity in a few decades
There are things we can do but they require sending away 50 million or so migrants and troublemakers and putting an authoritarian Right Wing state in charge for the interregnum .
That still might not work for a lot of reasons and such a state may not be able to maintain power but its about the only options.
Otherwise ACW 2 electric bugaloo and or Brazil 2 is in our future
Well, we may not actually have more geniuses today that say 300 years ago in absolute numbers. Generations of bringing the bottom up, so to speak, meant the odds of a genius marrying and reproducing with another genius went up each generation. When the pattern flipped, the genius pool gets quickly diluted.
That said, smart fraction theory is something worth considering here. At what point does the cart become so laden that the horses can no longer pull it? Then there is the very real observation that the truly smart are systematically excluded from the institutions. Creativity is frightening to the mediocre minds we see in control of institutions today. Even if we have a lot of geniuses, we don’t let them fulfill their potential.
Yep, it doesn’t a much of a drop in average IQ (assuming similar variance) to dramatically decrease the number of geniuses.
OTOH, we may more assortative mating going on today than ever before. The Soviets couldn’t have designed a better system for bringing smart people together. Our system sorts them at a very young age, funnels them into classes with one another through high school (helping develop a shared culture), sends them off for four years to mix and mingle and, finally, encourages them to live in relatively isolated urban neighborhoods to get the remaining singles together. It’s a fairly efficient system for sorting mates by IQ, something that was much more ad hoc in the past.
We do not have assortative mating by IQ, but by social status. Two very different things. Most graduates of “elite” educational indoctrination centers are not particularly bright. Ask me how I know.
We have high-efficiency assortative “mating” in terms of forming couples, but it doesn’t translate into actual “mating” viz. childbirths. Family fertility is massively suppressed through feminism, esoteric ambition, two-income trap, cultural propaganda, boutique parenthood, and the high cost of either living in hipster enclaves or else fleeing vibrancy. In terms of actual childbirths the system is a catastrophe.
Sending women off to college probably has been responsible for suppressing white child birth massively.
Women go off to college – and then (even if they don’t have a student loan or a head full of feminist BS) – are still in the position of having to ask the question of themselves: What was the point of college if I just get married and take care of kids for the next 25 years?
So they go off and have a “career” (most of them are just jobs – but they need to tell themselves they have a career) – which they spend the next few years at.
Maybe by around the time they’re 30 or so – suddenly they start realizing they want to have children. By then – for a lot of women – the egg timer is already counting down HARD.
If they’ve ridden the cock-carousel (hat-tip to Heartiste) – then most men who are still around and looking for a wife at age 30 don’t want to saddle up with something ridden hard and put away wet.
I know women in their FIFTIES – who are still twisted by the feminist “gotta have a career!!” mindset – and they’ve got a few decades of it not working out for them under their belt – AND – they weren’t subjected to the even more hard core feminist BS that is getting fed to the younger women these days.
One thing to note is that in some ways, computing and automation allow a single smart person to make a much larger impact, faster. But they also allow con artists to take from many more on a much faster scale as well.
“At what point does the cart become so laden that the horses can no longer pull it? Then there is the very real observation that the truly smart are systematically excluded from the institutions. Creativity is frightening to the mediocre minds we see in control of institutions today.”
I’ve always considered the bureaucracy necessary for day to day management of any large operation to be more or less a natural limit. Since the managers must necessarily have power and since power means politics you end up with the CYA culture. Managers, after all, are managers whether they work here or there, for government or private business their first priority is remaining employed their second is climbing the ladder.
Well, unless you are a genius with a farm, as Spock would probably say…having children in this day and age is not logical…and the practicing is all the fun anyway….
DLS, don’t think so. The tail end of the Bell curve may have larger total number of folk (due to it being a percent of a greater base population), but to the extent to which the population IQ mean has declined (remember, we renormalize to 100 every so often, so you can’t use that mean as an indication of non decline), that total number does not necessarily contain more “smart” people than previous generations.
In short, the “smart fraction” cutoff has moved farther out on the tail. Farther out, means fewer people. Fewer people means less people with the capability to maintain and advance a 1st world technological society, i.e., the USA. A larger population, particularly the way we are currently creating it (imports of low IQ POC, reduced White birthrates) will not necessarily help maintain the smart fraction we reached the moon with in the 60’s.
“the smart fractions we reached the moon with in the 60’s”, according to the old man, who would know, were rednecks that could do math. Those people don’t even get a sniff of those positions anymore. Actual conversation: “according to the computer model it should be working” “clearly your computer model doesn’t work” “according to the computer model it should be working”. If only the answer was in the appendices of their textbook.
Well said. You do remember that many calculations in those good times were done by slide rule. Anyone out there know how to use a slide rule? I do.
Me too. Still have my Post Versalog and a 6″ Pickett.
The slide rule is – or was – one of the most elegant demonstrations of human ingenuity ever.
Does anyone remember the old sic-fi movie called ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’? Peter Lorre and Walter Pidgeon figure out the exact place to fire a nuclear missile to save the world – and they do it with a slide rule.
That would have not seemed comical in 1960 or thereabouts, when the movie came out. A young Barbara Eden may also be seen and held in awe in this picture as well…
Anyway, +1 for the slide rule, and +1 for the young Miss Eden.
In my straight out of school job with shell oil I used a slide rule.
I still have one somewhere.
Well thanks for taking away my hope. I do wonder why we no longer produce Mozarts. Now it’s low IQ “musicians” creating beats by pushing buttons on a computer, or pop stars following the same style and patterns from 50 years ago.
This argument is specious. There are many excellent composers and musicians making technically complex, good music. Just because you don’t like some of what modern music produces and prefer Mozart does not mean they no longer exist. The crappy ‘pop’ music existed in Mozart’s time as well.
I am eager to find recorded examples of ‘crappy pop music’ from Vienna AM radio ca. 1780. They must exist – how else could you be so sure of yourself?
Ah, if only we hadn’t bred ourselves into ineptitude we’d have time travel by now and could ask the man himself.
A good start is “love songs of the American revolution”: https://www.americanrevolution.org/songs2.php
The “classical” music that has come down to us has stood the test of time for a reason. Folk (ie Pop) music has always been derided as low culture.
Why should the shape of the bell curve remain the same if reproduction at the lowest end is greatly increased and at the upper end sharply reduced? There will be a much longer tail on the left, shorter on the right than previously. Renormalizing the mean may move the midpoint but deoesn’t alter the shape.
It will show a bi-modal distribution.
“the absolute numbers of smart people are higher than at any point in history simply due to population growth.”
This may suggest that “intelligence” is perhaps not the pinnacle of evolution. Perhaps the point of intelligence is to be a brief burst that sends your genes to another continent or another planet, then the race normalizes until the next cycle.
As pointed out below, we are getting to the point where very smart people– the Atlas who holds up the tech world– are being excluded from society. It’s just not polite to be very smart and accomplish things… your neighbors get resentful. This might be an utterly natural human behavior pattern that maximizes human survival long term by slowing the number of dangerous experiments we try (like nuclear bombs, and pesticides, and communism) with our big brains.
China and India are purportedly filled with vast numbers of smart, high IQ individuals. That’s why they are such paradises on earth.
tl;dr: While the overall IQ of a nation matters, what matters more is the culture that those high IQ people create. I don’t want an alliance of Derb’s ‘ice people’ – the Orientals are not Europeans and their nations are not where I want to live. I already spent 2 years of my life in one – it’s not paradise and it’s not my natural environment.
Separate nations for separate peoples.
Doing engineering work with Indians and Asians is eyeopening. If it’s been done before they’re golden, if not they’re lost. Sometimes the answer isn’t known, sometimes there isn’t an answer, and sometimes what works makes no sense at all. They just aren’t new idea people. For some odd reason the Japs I’ve worked with are a little different.
Big countries produce lots of smart people. That’s just arithmetic and the law of averages. In its dying convulsions today, the USA produces – or imports – immense numbers of smart people.
In the 1960s, smart people got together and collaborated on a common – patriotic – purpose. A task had been set: To beat the Russkies to the Moon.
Eliminate the common purpose, and you eliminate the incentive for collaborative intelligence.
I’m of the opinion that in the end it will be seen that the worst thing that ever happened to the West was winning the Cold War.
Saw a fascinating video by an expat in China. He said regardless of how smart the Chinese may be, they just don’t have social trust at all. Everyone looks out for number one and they don’t cooperate unless someone makes them. His thoughts, don’t know myself, but it bears pondering. Really good criminals often have high IQs, it takes brains to crack a modern safe, or run the logistics of a narcotics distribution ring effectively.
I don’t know what Eisenhower’s IQ was, probably lower than Elon Musk’s or even Bill Clinton’s.
He led multinational armies in one of the great operations of military history. A hundred Elon Musks don’t give us one Dwight Eisenhower.
Can it be that character and purpose count for something in the making of great achievements, as well as that IQ we are all so smitten with?
Of course, high IQ isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss if it isn’t constrained by wisdom and discipline. I think we all know a brilliant colleague that spun off the rails early never to be heard from again. Personally i’m barely hanging on by my fingernails heh.
@3g4me
I agree and let every country stand on its own merits no charity from one to another…
India is an amazing example and I’d love to run the equation now without the British East India Company variable for 200 years…. They were once, by themselves, over a quarter of the World economy….
of course little things like a common language, railroads and postal system were lacking before that too…
Maybe the dreams we dream are mundane?
Yes — the dreams our elites / intellectuals et al dream are mundane, hostile and stifling. Multiculturalism, diversity, intersectionality, toxic masculinity, white supremacy etc. All the products of dreams gone awry.
This is another aspect of what I was talking about above. The genius is available but the society’s resource flows bypass it entirely on their way down into various sewers.
Zman wrote:
“Why do smart people stop having children? *Why do they lose their religion* and more important, lose the will to impose that religion on society?”
The second question is the heart of the problem. Smart people who lose religion lose future-orientation and see the burden of more children as an impediment to pleasure-seeking in the here & now.
The campaign to undermine Christianity in the West has both native and (((alien))) roots. The native ruling class followed the secular values of Christianity so far they talked themselves out of Christianity and became so open-minded their brains fell out and can no longer make simple cause>effect and/or pattern-matching observations.
The (((alien))) enemies of Christianity sought to make the West less a Christian society and will ride it down into a new Dark Age until they pop smoke and move somewhere more stable.
I was just going to make this point but you beat me to it.
I’m a big believer in the Pareto Principle – which in this context means 80% of your problems can be solved with a single fix. Many, ZMan included, have pointed out that the Tribe is not the cause of every single problem we have. That being said, if we resolved the JQ, we’d solve 80% of our current problems.
I love the Pareto Principle. It tells me – correctly, as experience shows – that one can become conversant in four foreign languages with the same effort required to master just one. I can ask for coffee in ten languages, but I can’t talk about the purpose of existence in more than just one. But no one I know wants to talk about the purpose of existence, so the PP makes me a scholar among men.
Long live the Pareto Principle.
“…that the Tribe is not the cause of every single problem we have. That being said, if we resolved the JQ, we’d solve 80% of our current problems…”
DING, DING, DING you win the see reality as it is prize!
China will not allow (((them))) in. Overseas Chinese Culture and (((their))) culture operate in very similar ways. They will have to return to their homeland.
Owing to first-hand observation and personal expereince I agree that Chinese think and act like ((special people)). WRT your first comment, however, a few articles and photos I’ve perused show that (((Economic and political consultants))) have been hobnobbing with the Chicom elites, including Mao himself, for many decades. Today some Chinsese universities offer courses on how ((special people)) accumulate wealth.
The science-based mindset is toxic to religion in general. Relligious leaders have mostly declined the challenge, retreating into anti-modernity. Protestants and Catholics alike are cheering Team Vibrant because they can’t sell faith to WEIRDs anymore. Islam & Buddhism’s adherents are vast-majority pre-modern. One of the toughest tasks facing dissidents today is how to inspire religious faith and meaning in people raised in modern society. Christianity’s defenders failed to show the faithful how the faith was still relevant and valid in the scientific age. Jung wrote a lot on this. Too many skeptical straws broke the back of faith. I’m not a fan of neo-paganism or the like, but I do think we need some bold re-thinking, not just a revival of the old time religion. Universalism and miracle-based theology will likely be casualties in that process.
Jews have proven more resistant to secularization. Ethnocentrism and cultural chauvanism, right down to having your own tribal Yahweh, seems superior to universalism when fighting the tide of Progress. Whether or not (((they))) deliberately weaponized universalism for the goyim, they don’t suffer from it. That’s something to consider in re-framing our approach. Inspiring a general acceptance of the reality of your immortal soul, a connection to past and future, is more important to our people than theology at this point. Learning how to kindle that in modrens is a enough task for one lifetime.
Look, I’m not a bible thumper. I’m one of those guys who can go to Church for years and never pay attention to the readings, and never really grasp what it’s all about. Still, on Palm Sunday, I caught this bit from Luke:
Christ, being mourned and lamented by various women as he was driven to Golgotha, said:
“Daughters of Jerusalem, stop weeping for Me, but weep for yourselves and your children. For behold, the days are coming when they will say,’Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed. Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’, and to the hills, cover us.’
“For if they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?”
It’s a commonplace that readings from the Bible mean nothing to you until they suddenly mean everything to you.
Anyway, to those who care – and more particularly those who don’t care – I wish an introspective Holy Week and a Happy Easter. If you really want the revival of western culture, start by going to Mass this Sunday.
@roo_ster
Amen Brother…
In the Middle Ages being born a peasant was not necessarily a sign of stupidity, nor was being born noble a sign of being smart. You were just stuck in your assigned category from birth with rare exceptions (probably best chance to rise was military valor or the Church). There was then as now regression to the mean, but also outliers of high-ability peasants simply carried off by famine, plague, or sheer exhaustion.
I have no opinion either way of the overall IQ theory, simply think that just-so stories are too common and should be avoided.
The idea that people were locked into their classes in the middle ages is a great example of the “just so story.”
A movie to watch is “Le Retour de Martin Guerre”. Sure, it’s just a movie, but it’s all grounded in court-recorded fact. It’s also a terrific movie, and is relevant to your thoughts here.
The church poses a threat to aristocratic power. Power being what it is, people always want more. So get rid of the church.
This has side effects. The church helps restrain the natural character of the aristocrat, who is a leftist by nature. Without a fear of God, the leftward ratchet goes faster and faster. Globohomo is just deracinated aristocracy. If it comes down to a rhetorical battle between the 100IQ farmer and his 130IQ liege, the latter will always win unless the former has institutional support. I know you don’t like the LARP characteristics of NRx. I think the more dangerous aspect is the glorification of the aristocracy. A NRx restoration, rather than proper reaction, would mean globohomo set to max speed. The vanities of the old families must be checked at every turn.
Elites lose their religion because they don’t want to keep it. It’s not in the noble character. Only hard times can keep it there. In good times, the prince hardens his heart and imagines himself to be God.
What if free will was actually true? What if people weren’t mere victims of biological processes but capable of good and evil? Interesting thought.
Because the stupid are being subsidized by the smart.
Raising a child is hard enough. Add in having to be smart enough to make a living in a “modern’ economy – a living that will allow you to live in one of those white suburbs – and it gets harder still.
I have spent a decent amount of my working career working in jobs that paid by the hour – or in start up companies where time was precious. At the same time I was working in start-ups, I was building a house. Literally every minute has to be made to count – to the point where I had to calculate how many hours of sleep I REALLY need to get each night – and I eat food based on how much time it takes to shove down my throat.
If I lived in a more low cost area – the pressure to perform would not be as high. And maybe I wouldn’t have had to work my ass off so much. The funny thing with paying attention to minutes is – you watch where they go. And you watch what they cost you.
So when I look at where my dollars fly off to – and I notice that they disappear into the gaping maw of the government – and also into the cesspool of “diversity” – I KNOW what those dollars cost me.
The only other people I know who make those kinds of mental connections are guys who work similarly hard for their money. Most of the people I run across just excuse away all the waste with boomer-cuck excuses like ” well if we didn’t pay taxes we wouldn’t have roads”.
The stupid haven’t really been FORCED to smarten up for a couple of generations now. I don’t see hardly any “culture” of work out of the young or the underclass like I did a few decades ago. It’s all about how to game the system.
Which is (once again) – why I go back to the money. Shut off the damn money – and bleed the damn system dry. I know it’s unlikely to happen – but the fact that people won’t even acknowledge that it’s a large part of where the problem is – is indicative of the mental rot that has taken over Western societies IMHO.
calsdad, while I have sentiments similar to yours, such as not subsidizing the breeding of those who can never contribute to the community, the message in your posts seems to be that everyone should be an atomized individual pursuing only self-interest.
If so, there simply aren’t enough like you to withstand the attacks of organized groups like the chosen or the non-whites, especially if your ultimate credo is “leave me alone” libertarianism. You must join and support an organic community to survive. I believe those groups are racial although I admit that the white community is weak now.
Having the low IQ of our ancient Anglo-Saxon forebears, but with none of the conquering and pillaging–well that just sucks.
The average IQ of Anglo-Saxons was probably higher than the average IQ today.
Crispr -> Speciation
Maybe our movement of dissent is a form of biological sorting of those aware of the decline, who understand at least in part some of its causes and are willing to self select themselves out of the eventual collapse.
Instead if saving the West we should separate and save ourselves. If the collapse is inevitable we should get out of the way. Our dissent is only holding back the march into the abyss. We should be pursuing separation from not accommodation with something no longer redeemable.
Having dealt with the dunderheaded state and county bureaucracy for decades in the business world, it was always my contention that we never went back to the moon because we couldn’t get a permit.
You’re on to something. I think it would take nine years to write the environmental impact statement for a manned moon mission.
now that is funny!
If you are intelligent enough to note Western decline, I don’t see how you could simultaneously hold the utterly delusional idea that separatism from the masses would be allowed prior to the point where the state was so weak that separation itself was a formality.
Separation has been going on for decades. Suburbs are white refugees relocation camps. During the past two decades whites have begun migrating north while non-whites have drifted south. No one has to run an advertising campaign, they are doing it already. Even retirement communities are no longer expanding aggressively in FL, CA, etc. Maine and the Northern Rockies are where even the Boomers are seeking escape.
Quiet conversations among families and friends about leaving blue rat holes and actually doing it as small groups of families and friends will be very difficult for clown world to interfere with.
It’s already started in my area and your welcome to join before it gets even more expensive to be here…If people would of listened back when I first advocated to build Communities they would be setting pretty right now…But alas no one saw the need at the time and they were just to comfortable to make that move…Sad That…
The central issue seems to be very simple.
All the “minorities”- Jews, blacks, Mexicans and assorted mystery meats, seem to hate and wish to destroy whites while at the same time demand access to Whites, white societies and their achievements on their own terms,
The solution is very simple too, it may however be too brutal for whites to implement.
@bile
Well Brother that’s what parasites do they latch on to a host and then proceed to kill it… Nothing new under the sun…
At the close of the 20th century the West still had the prospect of an extraordinarily bright future full of amazing triumphs such as human colonization of the solar system (and the stars), life extension, human intelligence augmentation through brain-computer interfaces, limitless energy from fusion, etc… It seems this is all going to be closed off in various ways for the mainstream society at least.
What I suspect will start to happen is simply that various groups of upper middle class and wealthy people who are NOT part of the Establishment or are dissidents within it will start building their own little alternative subcultures and ventures that are exempted from “diversity”, “democracy”, and of course “social justice”. These exemptions may be secured through bribes, clever use of offshoring to weak states, or even threats of force from their own private armies should the multikult nations of the West become sufficiently weak and chaotic.
Think of these things as a kind of “re-basing” of society away from reliance on organizational units that (often deliberately) contain discordant, recalcitrant, or just plain stupid factions toward those that rely on high homogeneity, high skill and intelligence level, and singularity of purpose. Together these attributes allow a lot of things to be left unspoken and unwritten and progress to be made rapidly. Meanwhile the mainstream society expends its energies chasing pipe-dreams of egalitarian utopias.
Another thing: Look at it as a matter of energy and resource flows. What do those flows look like in modern America (or any big Western state)? What we see is a flow of value from the still vast numbers of productive people and regions into the center, in the US this is a few mega-cities like Washington DC, NYC, San Francisco. From there resources flow back “out”, not to the people who make good use of them but to vast numbers of insane women, parasites, criminals, thugs, addicts, ethnic mafias, and academic “intellectuals” of the type who should be mopping floors. In other words this whole machine simply collects and then dissipates and destroys resources of all types. Of course it can’t put men back on the Moon or do much of anything new or inspiring. Generations ago it could because the collected resources were not squandered on nonsense. The new institutions I’m describing will hopefully be able to engage enough with the mainstream to collect some of its remaining resources and direct them to productive ends.
@Pozy
Very Well Said…I concur and am doing what I can to make it happen…
Early Monasticism was such a form of sorting. Likewise, the Amish today – here and in many places around the world – preserve one strand of western tradition, and thrive. They took your advice several centuries ago: They separated themselves and staked out a homeland of the spirit, some two hundred years before the Enlightenment.
Will put in a vote for the ‘too complex to operate’…or at least that complexity becomes fatal if there is not an almost hard encoded set of operating rules in all the participants. Start to introduce “diversity” and those formerly unconsciously automatic operating rules fall apart. Have seen it in spades in the financial services industry over the last three decades. Firms got so big, so complex, but more importantly as acquisitions occurred, kept importing foreign cultures to companies that might have operated successfully and grown organically with no problem. Eventually management loses control, has no real idea of how much value is at risk or the correlation of risks in the portfolio and boom! Saw that one up close and personal with CDS instruments in 2004-08.
There’s an excellent related article on UNZ this morning about intra-European brain diversity. Long but worth it.
http://www.unz.com/gdurocher/intra-european-brain-diversity/
The thing about the financial services industry is that the bureaucratization is now mostly complete. The plan is not to prevent the downside, which can’t be prevented anyway, only delayed, but to identify the scapegoats within the system, once things come apart. Look around, if you are in the industry, and identify those scapegoats in your midst. If you can’t, that scapegoat is likely you. Plan accordingly.
If I could up vote this a 1,000 times I would. It was happening to me a few years ago (more responsibility, oversight of other departments not related to anything in my purview, assigned to dead-end projects, fewer personnel and resources, left out of meetings, didn’t get the memo, etc…), so I left. A former colleague was recently terminated, and the interesting part was that it was clear 2 years ago that he was positioned to be the scapegoat.
“Scapegoatism” is not confined to the financial services industry, but other industries and society (see yesterday’s Zman post)
It goes hand and hand with the “too big to manage”. Scapegoats are necessary for executive management that largely has no idea what is going on in most of these organizations. Have to hand it to the old CEO of my former firm. When he took over, called the CDS guys in and kept asking “how do I have a loss on these things”. Kept getting bullshit answers and models that showed virtually no chance of loss. Then asked ‘why are we being paid so high a risk premium?” No good answer. Circle didn’t square. So in ’05/06 he ordered every deal unwound and commuted regardless of price. He took the heat for the costs to get the things off the balance sheet. But very few CEOs like that in large FIs.
“Complexity” is often just obfuscation of theft. Other times, it’s people who simply can’t think straight being put in charge of systems they do not understand.
You can see ridiculous levels of complexity in government laws and codes, and also within the financial system – which both rest on a huge foundation of theft.
This is why I constantly go back to the money. If people have become so stupid as to try to excuse away the massive amount of theft they have to suffer thru on a daily basis – well then they probably are just too stupid to keep the whole edifice going.