Category Archives: Culture

Collective Amnesia

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As the roll out of ObamaCare looks more and more like a roll over a cliff, keep in mind that this is probably the best of times for the program. In time, the reality of the program will be impossible to deny. Quietly, so as not to offend the racial sensitivities of blacks, the program will be gutted and rolled back. It can’t work and it can’t last, because it will be an albatross on the political class. It’s like creating a food shortage and thinking it will be good politics to run on building better bread lines.

How is it possible that anyone is surprised that this is a gigantic flop?

No one alive today can recall a government project that came in on time, under budget or worked anything like it was promised. For as long as anyone has been a live, there have been jokes about $500 hammers and $1000 toilet seats. The image of the government worker asleep on the job has been a stock character for a century. Yet serious adults have been walking about for three years believing the government could pull off a monumentally complex IT project without a glitch.

It really is amazing.

Steve Sailer likes to bring up the fact that we seem to forget a lot of important things as a society. It is clear we are getting collectively dumber. People in Boston today lived through the Big Dig. As public works projects go, it was one of the greatest boondoggles in the nation’s history. For close to two decades, every local yokel with a shovel found someway to get his beak wet on the thing while slowing down completion. This old blog post does a nice job covering the finer points.

Yet, those very same people who saw that nonsense for close to two decades have total faith in government to handle health care. It is as if they have brain damage. Not only that, the same people,e preaching for government run health care will fly into a purple faced rage over the evil of corporation health care. They will often do it from the pages of corporate media platforms. It’s as if they are incapable of remember what they said five minutes ago or recognizing their own staggering hypocrisy.

It is not just government projects. People rhapsodizing about how well Tip O’Neil and Reagan got along and made government work. They say, “Tip and Reagan would not let the government shut down.” Anyone alive then should know that the two men went at one another hammer and tong for eight years. It was often vicious. They had quite a few government shutdowns in the process.Politics were probably worse then than now as Democrats regularly claimed Reagan was a nut hell bent on blowing up the world.

Of course, collective amnesia is a feature of politics. You see that with the treatment of Ted Cruz by the media. Not long ago, the moderate Democrat was wither a social conservative, but fiscal liberal, or a social liberal but pro-business. That was considered the moderate wing of the party and there were a lot of them. That’s Ted Cruz. Thirty years ago he would have been a moderate. Today he is a far right Republican.

Of course, that points to just how far Left the political class has moved over the last several decades. That march Left relies on a collective amnesia, so it is probably just a natural part of the Progressive ruling coalition. They control the media, so they get to decide what is forgotten, which is everything inconvenient to current efforts. Forgetting the past, however, just means repeating past mistakes over and over until something really bad happens, like a revolution or wide scale social unrest.

But history is not for the amnesiac.

In China Everything Is Fake

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One of the weird things you see in illicit drug markets,  is the intolerance for a specific form of fraud. Just about anything goes in the drug game, except for fake drugs. If a dealer gets caught passing off baby laxative as cocaine, he is going to be dead. It is not just that he ripped off his customers. It’s that he cheats his fellow drug dealers. The guy selling fake stuff raises everyone’s costs and risks. The faker gives everyone a bad name.

It is one of those truth about the marketplace that everyone just accepts. No matter how rough the trade, every deal is based on trust. It’s why pawn shops willingly cooperate with the police to counter theft for similar reasons. Their customers are not going to solicit a business that supports burglary. Antique dealers try to uncover fakes as it undercuts their business. Why spend big money on an original when you can get a fake?

None of these measures stop the fakers, of course, but part of every organic market is an organic mechanism to police the market. Counter-intuitively, highly distributed markets can do this better than centralized markets. It’s why industries like music and movies lobby the state to crack down on forgers. Unlike the drug dealer, the record company cannot kill a downloader. Hollywood cannot go around breaking skull in movie theaters when they catch a guy pirating a film. They turn to government for that.

There is a vast middle ground where most of us live and that’s where fakers can cause the most trouble. For example, a site like National Review will post something like this in their article queue. It is not an article, but an advertisement dressed up to look like an article. National Review agrees to place ads like this in their article queue in order to trick people into clicking on the link, thinking it is legitimate content.

Magazines now have multi-page advertisements made up to look just like one of their normal stories. Even more strange is the ad in question here is itself full of fake stuff. The whole xenoestrogen stuff is largely nonsense, at least as it relates to organic food. Plants have all sorts of tricks to ward off pests. That’s just one of the many ways life has evolved over millions of years. Calling something organic has come to mean “good” and in morally good, but it is important to remember that cobras are organic too.

Putting that aside, this is deception. it is just as much a forgery as the guy printing fame art or selling fake drugs. The market place for ideas is a marketplace like the drug trade or the art trade. It relied on the participants acting in good faith and maintaining a high level of intolerance for fraud. When the creators of the market for conservative ideas are embracing wholesale fakery, it calls their integrity into question.  In the case of conservatives, it simply confirms what everyone has suspected for a long time.

It does not stop there. According to this story in the Economist, academic papers are also being forged. The market for fake term papers is well developed. Even before the internet, there was a market for term papers, and essays among undergraduates. Today, the internet makes it a thriving market, so colleges now employ software to combat it. You can probably outsource your thesis if you are so inclined. Since few of them are every read, who’s going to notice if your thesis is mostly recycled from prior work?

To no one’s surprise, the epicenter of this new fraud is China. There’s always been an embrace of banditry among the Chinese.  We get the term “sand bag” from China. In the colonial days, Chinese tea merchants would put sandbags at the bottom of casks to defraud the British. It is a bandit culture with no history of integrity. There are companies that have to use special coding on their boxes to distinguish their product from the fakes, as the Chinese will fake even the most mundane things.

Like the fake news story, fake research has a terrible trade off. If no one can tell the real stories in a magazine from the ads, people stop buying the magazine. If we can no longer distinguish real research from fake stuff from China, we no longer do research because no one can trust it. This is the great challenge to the West posed by China. If they are to remain a part of the developed world, they have to play by Western rules regarding fraud and theft. If they can’t do that, then they have to be isolated and excluded.

That’s not so easy when China can offer Western counties access to a billion cheap workers and unlimited ecological degradation. Making batteries in China is cheaper than making them in California, because the Chinese government does not care if the workers die and the land is poisoned. The battery maker is willing to tolerate some theft, but can the rest of us tolerate it?  Is that a good trade? What’s good for business is not always what’s good for society. Otherwise, we would still have slavery.

Immigration Fanatics

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I fully admit to being torn on immigration. The arguments against allowing high numbers of foreigners to settle here are indisputable. We have too many workers right now. It is not just low skilled or laborers. It is all types. Depressing wages by flooding the economy with foreigners is not what a responsible government does to its people. Then there’s the issue with assimilation. The Hispanics are simply not assimilating like the myth claims they will.

The statistics are grim when you look at crime, addiction and social pathologies like illegitimacy rates. Our cultural elites celebrate ghetto life (from a distance) so it should come as no surprise that the imported peasant classes embrace the black ghetto culture as soon as they arrive here. In the prior century when the elites strongly embraced White values and demanded rapid assimilation, you got a different result. That and the immigrants, except for the Jews, were from white countries.

On the other hand, low levels of  immigration has worked in the past. America is better off having allowed certain types of people to settle here. The sort of person who packs up his bags and sets off for a new land is usually from hardy stock. It takes balls to do it, even with all the welfare help in place. Most people are afraid to move across town. That sort of risk taking is what keeps a culture vibrant and self-renewing. It’s a fresh injection of the pioneering spirit to keep the old stock population fresh and bold.

There are trade offs and maybe that’s not discussed enough, but the emotional side never gets discussed either. We sort of know we are getting things right when the world wants to come here and join the deal. That has value too. On the other hand, the focus on the romantic side of immigration could also be a sign that American culture is entering an the death phase. A people romanticize their past when they can no longer bear thinking about their future. That could be why we are so open to endless immigration.

The deciding factor for me is amnesty. There is no rational argument in favor of granting amnesty to illegals. None. It is simply a way to get grace on the cheap for people who fundamentally hate themselves, hate their fellow citizens and hate their country. In some cases, it is merely a way to rip off the public with some cheap labor. Put another way, the people in favor of high levels of immigration are either lying on looking to stick the rest of us with the cost of their quest for grace. If they’re for i, I’m against it.

Poor Little Indians

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The people who came to settle in the Americas, after migrating from Asia over the Beringia land bridge during Late Pleistocene era, make for a great case study with regarding human evolution. For example, science can now use DNA to tell the difference between those who settled ion South America from those in North America. The initial population split and became isolated enough from one another to develop different genetic mutations from one another. That buttresses has been observed elsewhere in the world.

Of course, it is interesting to try and puzzle through what happened to ancient or forgotten civilizations. In some cases where they put together something that looked like an advanced civilization, then suddenly it collapsed. Figuring out why it disappeared in a few years is fun. It can also tell us something about human civilization in general. Although, knowing why the Greeks and Romans failed at the end has not changed a single mind among the modern ruling classes so it may not be a worthwhile endeavor.

The trouble, of course, when it comes to talking about the Amerindian societies is the modern primitives and their superstitions get in the way. We are no longer allowed to point out that sub-Saharan Africans never advanced far beyond the stone age until the white man arrived with the wheel, writing and so forth. Similarly, any discussion of American Indians must be is such reverent tones that it makes discussing the topic close to impossible, at least in an objective way. Here’s a good example.

In an otherwise straight forward story  you get something like this:

The first evidence of a settlement in the Cahokia area is from the year 600 CE, at a time when the Maya civilization would have been at its peak. But it wasn’t until after the largest cities of the Maya began to fall in the 1000s that Cahokia came into its own. It’s estimated that the city center held as many as 15,000 people (making it comparable in size to European cities of the same era), and reached the height of its productivity between roughly 1000-1300 CE.

The implication, something we routinely see in stories about the Mayan, Aztec and other Mesoamerican groups, is that these people had reached a comparable level of civilization to that of Europeans. Sometimes they are described as being more advanced, at the time, than Europeans. Always lurking somewhere in the discussion is the implication that everything was fine until the pale face came along and screwed everything up. It’s a version of the noble savage, with the white man as the villain ruining paradise.

The first step in human civilization was agriculture. This required something larger than kin-based organizational units. One guy planting a garden is not enough. Figuring out how to raise crops required large scale (relative to hunter gatherers) cooperation amongst people. The mesoamericans got this far. They also got to the point where they could have specialization. Instead of farming, some portion of society were craftsman, tradesmen and government functionaries/religious class.

That’s a big deal as it allows for a class of people who come up with new ideas and improve on old technology. Successful agriculture allows for an intellectual class. If Bill Gates had to till his fields every day, he was not going to have time to steal code from IBM. Having a class of people dedicated solely to metallurgy allows for constant improvement in that technology. The results help a society grow richer and add to its stock of people working on non-agricultural projects. There is a compounding effect.

That’s thing with these ancient people. They never made it that far. Europeans were smelting metal for 2,000 years before the Maya were stacking rocks on top of one another to make a simple wall. When they were at their richest, presumably allowing their best and brightest to try new things, they did some impressive stuff with stonework and architecture. More often than not, however, it was used for ceremonial, cultural and religious ends, rather than practical ends, like plumbing and sewage.

They did not invent any new technologies that would help them take control of their natural surroundings. While the Maya were perfecting stone age technology, Europeans had passed through the bronze age and were well into the iron age. Comparing the civilization achievements of these people with Europe is simply ridiculous for these reasons. Why one group went down a blind alley and one did not is interesting and useful to know, but it is not allowed to be discussed in the current climate of righteous hysteria.

Of course, we’re all supposed to feel bad for what happened to the Indians. To show that, we celebrate the achievements of the Maya, Aztecs and whoever else we can find that was kicking around the Americas before the white man. Throw in a healthy dollop of the noble savage myth and you have middle-aged white women claiming to have “Native American” ancestry. The American Indian has become a stock character in the never ending morality tale of white guilt and the quest for redemption.,

Reality is something different. The Indians were a dead end of sorts. At least when comes to technological achievement. The most advanced civilizations in the south never developed a large enough smart fraction to overcome their environment to a degree that allowed the shape their environment. They maxed out their ecosystem, but where never able to take control of it as happened in Europe and Asia.There were a few smart Indians around, but never enough to reach the necessary critical mass.

That last bit is the key. Europe in the 900’s was not a fun place. War, disease, famine and general mayhem made living beyond 30 a rarity. We called it the dark ages for good reason. Still, the ingredients were all there for a breakout. People had figured out the basics of agriculture to the point where they could produce more than they consumed and there fore have an inventive class, working on making better tools, better weapons and better ways to organize themselves in order to capitalize on their advances.

Understanding that process and why it happened is important. We know Amerindians have an average IQ a little higher than Africans. We know Europeans and Asians have significantly higher IQ’s than other human groups. That’s probably the place to start when trying to understand why the Aztec went down a dead end and were never able to get over the hump in terms of cultural development. This is all taboo, so instead we waste time worshiping people for having been mankind’s greatest losers.

The Genius Cat Lady

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This is one of those sites that is so full of nuttiness it almost feels like satire, but it is completely serious. Obviously, a site calling itself “Brain Pickings” should be brimming with sarcasm, but this one is brimming with unintentional comedy. For starters the blogger describes the site as “a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” There is a better than even chance that Maria Popova is going to end up living with 50 cats. It juts has that sort of vibe, based on the first impression.

The “about” section is a bit sad. Anytime you see someone claiming to be in “search for meaning” you just know they are acquainted with the psychiatric industry. Women seem to use that expression a lot and almost always they are single, childless and full of feminist nuttiness. Women with kids and a husband have all the meaning they need. They don’t have blogs where they talk about their feelings and pretend to be free spirits. Perhaps there are exceptions, but that’s the general rule.

Anyway, The post is about someone called Angela Duckworth, who appears to have been given a MacArthur genius grant for telling people things that are mostly false. Her claim to genius status is a new book explaining  how “self-control and grit — the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal — impact success.”  While that is largely true, you are born with these qualities, or not born with them in the case of people who lack those qualities.

Is there anyone who does not know that successful are blessed with personality traits like determination and a relentless work ethic”? Now, the blank slate people don’t accept that these are innate qualities, for the most part. Instead they think they are the product of environment like good home habits and good schools. There’s money in selling people books about how they can acquire the skills that will make them successful, so it makes sense that people write such books. A genius, however, should know better

Now, Miss Duckworth is not dumb. According to the post, she thought about starting a school to put her theories to the test, but decided the “model did not hold much promise” so she “decided to pursue a PhD program at Penn.” It’s always better to be someone offering novel, untested theories that confirm the deeply held beliefs of the ruling class, than to be the person trying to make those novel ideas work. The former pays better and has little risk, while the latter pays poorly and usually ends in tears.

Another amusing tidbit from the post is this weird way of avoiding the obvious. “She found that the students’ self-discipline scores were far better predictors of their academic performance than their IQ scores.” This is certainly true, but the correlation between IQ and impulse control is high. There’s a very good chance that the kids with poor self-control also happened to be black. They were probably from poor families. It’s hardly a revelation that poor impulse control, low-IQ and poverty are features of black communities.

This is the trouble people often have when thinking about this stuff. The the traits associated with high achieving people tend to be clustered together. That is, there are few high-IQ people with poor impulse control and high time preference. On the other hand, there are people with self-control, but a low-IQ. Intelligence is still the main factor in life outcomes, but self-control can either mitigate or amplify it. A dumb guy with self-control is going further than a average guy who can’t control himself.

A better way of stating it maybe is to think these various traits as forces pushing in either direction on a person. Some push harder, because they have greater value in current society. Intelligence means a lot today, but not as much in the tenth century, at least with regards to life outcomes. The mafia used to say you get further with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word. Today you get further determination and high-IQ than just determination. That’s strangely difficult for modern people to accept.

TFA Uber Alles

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I saw this linked on Steve Sailer’s site and thought it worth a different take. Steve tends to focus on the race angle, which is not unreasonable. For as long as I have been alive, public policy types have been harping about the race gap. Sometimes they take a break and lecture about the lack of females in science, technology and math fields. They always start with the same premise. White men have rigged the game and are surreptitiously keeping the black man down and the girls out of the STEM fields.

No one bothers to explain why white men have allowed Jews and Asians to overrun the system. n fact, east Asians are starting to overrun elite prep schools and universities, which is why they are dropping the private school entrance exams in NYC. Too many Chinese kids are winning places in the schools. We have spent tens of billions on every education fad imaginable and the numbers have not budged. In fact, they may have declined. For some people, that’s a clue that maybe something else is at play.

This first quote from the Teach For America article is amusing. “The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA’s general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America’s educational inequality.”

If the missionary zeal was not clear enough, there’s this. “Although TFA seminars and presentations never explicitly accuse educators of either, the implication is strong within the program’s very structure: recruit high-achieving college students, train them over the summer, and send them into America’s lowest-performing schools to make things right. The subtext is clear: Only you can fix what others have screwed up.”

Youth organizations in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany had the same premise. The older folks had made a mess of things. The next generation, the young people, they can start fresh as the new model citizen in the new model army. Ladling on a healthy dollop of “trench socialism” gets you an individual who has given over themselves entirely to the cause. Of course, it’s not hard to see how this can get out of hand. Today TFA is helping little black kids read. Tomorrow they overthrowing the state.

Well, maybe they won’t until tomorrow. In the weeks between accepting the offer to join TFA and the start of our training, I was told by e-mail that “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset,” I was reminded, “is at the core of our Teach For America.”

Anyone familiar with 20th century European history can see what the TFA is doing. It is not quite a cult, but it has the trappings of a mass movement. The people running TFA are trying to build something more than a teacher training program. They want an army of true believers infiltrating the schools. Presumably these young fanatics will one day take up positions of authority and run the education system. The fact that every totalitarian movement aims first at the youth is not coincidence here.

It is the sickness of democracy. With a king, there’s no doubting his authority and legitimacy. His father was king. Alternatively, with a great warrior or general, he earned the spot by killing the enemies of the people. Even a dictator has the legitimacy of force that he uses to maintain power. In democracy, the only reason for anyone to be in charge is they talked the dumbest people into voting for him. Therefore, you need some way to convince people to follow the rules and respect the system.

The trouble is, civic religions quickly turn the country into an ideological state and what soon follows is the fanatics. Unlike the Maoist or Stalinist fanatics, no one is under any illusions about their source of power. In a democracy, the people become convinced they voted for the fanatics. The only way to prevent this is to have an official religion that has a source of authority outside the state. It’s a different form of throne and altar, but it can keep the fanatics under control, at least until the throne kills off the altar.

Being Remembered

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One of the great insights I found in David Goldman’s book, How Civilizations Die, is how he linked fertility, religion and the desire to be remembered. As someone who is non-religious, it made a lot of sense. After all, the primary biological imperative, the reason all living creatures exist, is to pass on their DNA to the next generation. Like salmon, cornflowers and butterflies, humans are wired to reproduce. That is just the material way in which we are remembered.It’s how nature remembers us.

For a species cursed with self-awareness, it is easy to see how this can mutate into a desire to be remembered for our deeds, the composition of our life as a members of our tribe. We honor our dead, mark their graves, so we will be remembered by those who come after us. Being able to walk through a cemetery and recognize the names or stand in the same spot as your ancestors once stood is an important part of what motivates all people. We want to be remembered as we remember those who came before us.

I’m at an age when these thoughts come easily so it is no surprise that this column by Steve Sailer brought it to mind. The Graduate was released before I was born and was already a cultural icon by the time I had any clue about it. I may have seen it at some point, but it left no impression on me. I don’t recall anyone in my peer group ever mentioning it. For Baby Boomers, it remains a cultural touchstone. The title alone means things to them. It conjured memories of that old American they once knew.

The thought that occurred to me is what happens when the Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil? Will that movie still be a considered great art? I’m sure Steve would probably say yes and point to films like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Citizen Cain is probably the best example of a movie that remains a classic long after anyone involved is dead, but does anyone watch it? I’ve never seen it and I doubt I know anyone who has seen it. The only people who talk about it are film buffs and academics.

The answer is I may never know if anything of the Baby Boomer generation leaves a lasting impression on future generations. I probably will live long enough to have some inkling, but maybe not. despite the fact the Boomers can never stop talking about themselves, they don’t seem all that concerned with being remembered. Instead, if pop culture is any indication, they seem obsessed with redoing the culture of the youth but better, as it more material and less spiritual.

It’s impossible to figure this stuff in the moment. History is the story of unexpected men and events. What gets remembered is often what was unknown at the time. The Sound and the Fury was a dud until Faulkner was in his dotage. I think it sold 3500 copies when it was released on 1927. Today it is considered the greatest work of Southern literature and one of the great American works of fiction. The movie A Christmas Story was a flop when released, but is now a staple of season.

The thing I wonder about these icons of early Boomer culture is whether they will be used to explain the insane rampage through America’s cultural institutions over the last half century. If the movie touched Boomers because of the alienation of the main character, the question is why were all of these kids feeling alienated? What went so horribly wrong that a generation of middle-class Americans produced a batch of kids determined to commit cultural suicide? Will their cultural items provide a clue?

Given the arithmetic, it is unlikely the nation survives the denouement of the Baby Boomer generation. Libraries full of books will be written on how they did it. The degeneracy, the lack of a future orientation, Jewish influence will all be causes future historians point to explain the death of America. Why they did it will be the great question to be debated for generations after. Maybe The Graduate will be one little piece of the puzzle and therefore be remembered long after the last Boomer is finally in Hell.

The Bob Seger Lesson

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I was getting a haircut on Sunday and the chit-chat with the barber was about music. She is my age, mid-40’s, so she thinks the new pop music is mostly crap. Her son is listening to hip-hop, which is degenerate crap. That was never said, but the thought was in the air, so to speak. Whatever artistic merit there was to hip-hop, if any, disappeared when white boys in the suburbs became the prime demographic for music about the ghetto. That and the performer cannot sing, read or write music or string together comprehensible lyrics.

There’s lots of crap in pop culture, so hip-hop is just one example. To paraphrase John Derbyshire, pop culture has always been filth. It’s also always been a racket to skim middle-class whites of money. Read the book The Wrecking Crew and you will learn about how the early rock music was mostly manufactured by middle-aged Jews from the Jazz era. The difference between now and previous eras is that there used to be talented musicians and groups producing some quality stuff.

A good example is Bob Seger. He got famous in the 1970’s with a bunch of hits that still get airtime today. Go into a college bar and you will still find a few Seger songs getting played. Seger was before my time, for the most part, but my generation was playing his stuff in the 80’s and 90′ so it is not like he is a newly re-discovered fad because of a TV commercial. The reason he had some staying power is the quality of the music. Even doggerel put to a simple ditty can aspire to the sense of the timeless.

I was never a big fan, but I have been listening to his greatest hits lately. The lyrics and pacing are phenomenal. It is what you get when experienced professional musicians with talent make records. In all probability they hammered out each song on a piano and then brought in the rest of the instruments. The studio sessions were about getting the sound on vinyl, not making bad voices and bad musicians sound good. Seger and his collaborators had real talent and produced a quality product.

That got me thinking about what is and what is not quality pop music. There are probably dozens of examples from each decade that you can point to like this. The 1950’s were dominated by manufactured pop hits, but Chuck Berry made the electric guitar do things unheard of before his time. Fifty years from now people will find his licks beguiling. The Stones, The Who, and Hendrix will hold up and have held up. The 70’s had Zeppelin, which may have been the most sophisticated rock band ever.

Nothing in pop music rises to the level of Beethoven, of course, but there and bands and performers in most decades with artistic talent. That seems to have slowed in the mid-70’s with the rise of disco and hip-hop. I’m not sure who from the 80’s would be in the same club as the Stones or The Who. The 90’s saw things fall apart completely, as there were no dominant acts. That could simply be my age showing, but I was till plugged into pop culture in the 1990’s, so I don’t think I’m falling into geezerism here.

This apparent decline in high end quality music the last two decades is a mystery that goes without notice. Instead, the pop industry just turns up the hype to eleven figuring young people will not notice they are being sold synthetic pap. It’s not an accident that the “hype man” has become a feature of everything from sports to movies. There are thousands of people paid to tell us that the latest movie, TV show or pop act is the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel.

Still, where are the talented musicians going if not into the garage or basement to create something good? Part of the answer is nowhere. Young people are simply not picking up instruments as they did in the past. When I was a kid, everyone played something, even in poor neighborhoods. It was just the way. I was started on the trumpet at six and took lessons until I was 12. Most kids dropped it for sports or other stuff, but many stuck with it.

Today, the only kids I see with an instrument are Asian girls carrying violins. Blacks have abandoned the guitar and seem to be losing interest in the drums.  Whites have dropped music entirely. This old post describes the plight of the guitar in music. As white culture recedes, pop culture has changed to appeal to non-whites. As pop culture has become a formal part of state control, garage bands no longer have a place, so white kids don’t bother wasting their time learning to play instruments.

Another argument is that computers are filling the void. Anyone can now sit down at their PC, load some software and create the sound of drums, guitar, piano, etc. They can make their voice sound like something other than a bag of cats. There’s no longer a need to learn to read music or play an instrument. Certainly studios stopped using drummers when they could use computers instead. The problem here is the computer does not improvise, experiment or make adjustments.

Again, this a reflection of the culture. As whites become a minority in their own lands, their culture switches from that of a confident majority to that of a captured minority. There can be great art to emanate from a defeated people. James Joyce was a man from a captive people. Southern literature reflects the culture of a defeated region of old America. Maybe pop culture will change to reflect the plight of whites in the West. Alternatively, American Indians never produced a pop culture after their defeat. They just died out.

That brings me back to Bob Seger. He did not hit it big out of the womb. He kicked around for years learning how to play music that people enjoyed. Good musicians have an ear for what others will like. That comes from many nights in many clubs. Dragging your computer gear into the club and “DJ’ing” is really not the same thing. When you get down to it, you’re just wearing another man’s suit, pretending you look better in it. A vibrant people make for a vibrant culture, which makes a Bob Seger possible.

Like America, our pop culture is dying with autumn closing in…

Living Past 115

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This is an interesting post that touches on two interesting things. One is the fact we may be reaching the limit of human longevity. Once you eliminate the problems that come from scarcity and then address the basics of medicine, human life spans start to grow. People also get healthier over their lifetime. Humans are far healthier late in life than at any other time. We are probably within reach of solving some of the big killers like cancer, heart failure and dementia. While some may never be “cured” they will be manageable.

For things related to aging, the eeffects will continue to be postponed. Within living memory, a healthy a vigorous 70-year old was something like a miracle. Today it is common. We will certainly be seeing more and more vigorous octogenarians, especially as medicine gets a grip on using things like HGH and SARM’s. Of course, we are already seeing drugs that allow humans to extend their sexual activity into old age and the demand for this stuff will spike as Boomer head into their final chapter of life.

This need to extend life and the quality of life is not without some spooky stuff. Here’s a bit from the linked post.

“The only way to get a person past the “Calment limit” of (say) 125 will be some sort of genetic engineering. This might prove to be, if not easy, at least fairly routine — in technical terms. Fiddling with just a few genes in worms, fruit flies and mice has enabled scientists to extend their lifespan, sometimes up to sevenfold. One recent study in Lausanne found a 50 per cent reduction in the activity of just three genes on Chromosome 2 increased mouse lifespan by about 250 days, and kept them healthy longer.”

Once you start talking about genetic engineering people, the mind quickly moves from the spooky to the sinister. As soon as it becomes possible to alter one’s aging with gene therapy, drugs will be created to give the same effect. If reducing a certain protein extends youthfulness, a clever company will bottle it and sell it. Human nature being what it is, there will come a time when this is not just possible, but considered essential.

Strangely, the naive assumption that people will be ethically constrained in this area is why we will see the genie get loose as soon as it can be uncorked. Matt Riddley, the writer of the linked post, thinks it is hard to imagine any scientists willing to do what is necessary to bring such technology forward, with regards to humans. After all, it will require human trials and that means experimenting on embryos, which will be brought to term. That’s a nice way of saying it will require experimenting on kids.

The fact that China would have zero hangups about doing this is alien to most western ethicists. Amazingly, China remains an inscrutable place for the West. The Russians would probably have no trouble with the ethics either. Even if they were not willing to experiment on their own people, they would happily team up with India or maybe the Iranians to conduct the research on their people. Making fewer better people is probably the next phase of the arms race between peoples.

Riddle asks an interesting question, which suggests something about the Western cognitive elite. “Plus, ethics aside, it is not easy to see where the demand for such a drastic and expensive step would come from. Who would actually want their next child to live past 125, let alone badly enough to go through with it?” There’s that fatigue with living that turns up in the elites, that animates the current culture. The thing is, not everyone is looking to call it quits. That’s the Western disease. 

Hispanic Heritage Month

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I’m watching the NFL and I keep seeing references to Hispanic Heritage Month. I watch the NFL via Red Zone so it is a bit of an echo chamber for whatever they are hawking each Sunday. It reminded me of traveling through Hispania as a boy with my parents. It was so odd hearing everyone speak Hispanish instead of English. Of course, even a child had to be impressed with the great achievements in Hispanic culture.

My goodness. There is no such thing as Hispanic culture outside the blinkered world of identity politics. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans call themselves Hispanic unless they are getting paid to do it. The word “Hispanic” is like the word “African-American” in that the only time you hear it is when ruling class types are around. I live in a black neighborhood and I never her anyone say “African-American.” Not even me.

More important, let’s say we’re lumping all Latin culture into one bucket for the sake of brevity, why would anyone celebrate it? Hispanic culture sucks. We know this because half of Latin American is trying flee it for North American culture. Even Africans, given the choice of Mexico or staying put are not going to Mexico. These people are coming here to get away from Hispanic culture, not celebrate it here.

It is, of course, just part of the larger anti-white campaign. The Cold Civil War, between good whites and bad whites, has been hijacked by foreign elements and slowly turned into a war on whites in general. It’s not as obvious now, but it will get increasingly obvious in the coming years. Cerebrating Hispanic culture is really just a way of celebrating the planned death of white culture.