Poor Rich People

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One of the great challenges of the demographic age will be re-conditioning people to think culturally, rather than materially. This is particularly true of conservative white people, who have been trained their whole lives to define their existence by the amount of stuff their heirs will throw away when they die. Theirs is an entirely materialist existence, so the transition to cultural thinking is going to be difficult. An example of this is in this post by Steve Sailer regarding public venues.

He starts with the observation that the ancients built a lot of very sturdy stone theaters and arenas, while those who came immediately after the fall of Rome did not built anything of significance. It was not until the Middle Ages that we see the building of large public structures, but those were cathedrals and churches. He notes that it took until modernity to build large public arenas. Sailer then jumps to the conclusion that the Greeks and Romans must have a lot of money relative to the Middle Ages.

Now, it certainly required a great deal of money to hire men to build amphitheaters and arenas in the ancient world. Reallocating thousands of people from farming and military service can only be done by a wealthy society. The early medieval period in Europe was not a time of great prosperity. Wealth is not enough, however. Those theaters and arenas were not just the toys of rich people. They were not built by rich people, at least not in the way in which our sports arenas are built today.

In fact, the more apt comparison is between the arenas and theaters of the ancient world and the cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages. The theaters built by the Greeks were an important part of their cultural life. The plays and festivals reinforced the cultural values that made Greek life possible. The arenas built by the Romans were not just for sport. They also had strong cultural importance. The reenactment of great battles tied the Roman to his past and to his ancestors.

For most modern white people, Sailer’s instincts on this seem natural. After all, we live in an age without any sense of culture, other than the endless war on what is left of white culture by the brown tide sweeping the land. For most Americans, the point of life has been to stuff their pockets with as much stuff as they can. The measure of life is your pile of stuff. The super-successful at getting stuff build really large buldings where you can buy stuff, like sports jerseys to remember buying stuff.

It is a good example of how the white people who came along after the Second World War became entirely materialistic in their thinking. This is not a Baby Boomer issue, but more about the legacy of their parents. That cohort went through the Great Depression and then the privations of the war. In the ensuing boom times of the early days of the empire, they justifiably enjoyed the fruits of their labor. It was a golden age, relative what came before, so they quickly learned to value material prosperity.

The so-called greatest generation gets credit for weathering the grinding depression, without embracing communism. They get credit for fighting two industrial wars on two continents, winning both and ushering in the Pax Americana. They also should get credit, and blame, for ushering in the material age, where all things are measured in material terms. The generation that built the American empire, also built a society in which everyone knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

It has become a meme to mock the Baby Boomers for their obsession with stuff, but it is a society-wide phenomenon. Modern America functions like a ghetto riot, in which the culture is a liquor store. Everyone is just smashing and grabbing what they can, not because they need it or want it, but because that’s what they do. This is particularly true with conservatives. All of their arguments, particularly those that fall into the cultural and spiritual, have been reduced to economic appeals.

In the long scope of things, the American empire will be seen as an entirely artificial construct, built on the wreckage of Western civilization. The two great industrial wars that opened the 20th century exhausted the people spiritually. This includes the people who claimed to have saved the West. The cultural achievements of the American empire, such as they are, reflect that lack of spirit. The American empire and the culture around it is a lifeless zombie shuffling through time and space.

A simple way of seeing this is the fact that Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and the center of American popular culture, has a homeless camp in the center. Estimates say it contains 70,000 of our fellow citizens. Yet, the super-rich who run the city are not concerned in the least. After all, they have their stuff. Even the most callous of Roman emperor had compassion for the poor of Rome. The modern American oligarch has nothing but contempt for those who cannot consume product.

The current ructions are not a response to the changing demographics as the suicidal wreckers like to claim. It’s not about the transition to a post-national order. The reason for the growing unhappiness is that modern American society offers no purpose, no beauty and no reason to celebrate life. It’s an ugly age with a sterile ascetic that reflects the transactional nature of the age. This is an unnatural state for people, so the people are increasingly unhappy with life in the material age.

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272 thoughts on “Poor Rich People”

  1. To understand the rise in consumerism you also have to factor in the rise in the advertising industry, the breakdown of community and the rise of an elite that is in opposition to the welfare of the majority of the population.

    Almost all humans battle over status and will take their cues from society to see what gives them status. At one time it might have meant a large family and role in the community. Now it is McMansions, coal powered cars, expensive phones and hating Orange Man Bad.

  2. Well yes, but.

    The current materialism is surely a consequence of the left’s worship of politics, and politics is always loot and plunder.

    Plus, the left’s religious agenda is to demolish the middle-class culture of responsibility, which casts most ordinary people adrift.

    Plus, the hollowing out of the middle class, with outrageously expensive houses and education, kinda forces ordinary people to focus on their material needs.

  3. O/T but anyone else catching Watchmen? On the surface very PC, and we have to endure Michelle Obama beating up rednecks.

    But slowly an undertow builds; and I think the writers are having a little fun ala District 9 with it. We saw JJ Martin do this with GOT quite a bit, and Man in the High Castle highlighted the 1950s and our natural success without the baggage we’ve collected.

  6. The greatest generation continued to live minimalist lives. The woman prepared food at home. The men took the bus so she could drive the kids to school or to run errands. The elderly and disabled family members lived right there with them. They didnt get divorced, stuff their folks in nursing homes, or have mid life crisis. The boomers were raised thinking their parents were cheap bastards and bought bigger houses, newer cars, did more shopping, ate more junk food and got fatter. Its certainly a boomer issue.

    And about LA, you have it backwards. Free shit is why they exist. the idiot citizens “care.” Theyre just too stupid to realize that homeless people destroy the free housing theyre given. Caring is the problem. Theyve decriminalized theft up to $900, sleeping on the street, defecating on the street are all legal. They even give free showers, food and needles to homeless. It brings more homeless. Drug experimentation and poor parenting, low IQ replication will continue to create more homeless. In the 50s, one’s family would take care of them. Today, our families are split up. Most of these homeless are loaners who lost everything in a divorce or dont talk to their family. The family assumes its the government’s job.

    • For a guy who was lecturing us on “Judeo-Christian” ethics and telling us to read the Bible yesterday, your tactical libertarianism in the face of human suffering seems inconsistent.

      I may be an anti-Semitic quasi-heathen racist who referred to these guys as “street-sh*tting madmen” above, but my days of wishing suffering Whites into the outer darkness b/c “welfare bum losers” ended when I left Objectivism.

      As Mike Enoch often points out, you can condemn individual behavior but don’t lose sight of the fact that systemic causes create these systemic problems and require systemic solutions.

      Labeling every homeless dude a bum who deserves his fate is the cheapest and most callous of copes, deployed almost exclusively by lolbertarians.

      As we often Notice around here, the intersection between lolbertarian materialism and Christian Zionism seems to be the only place where Conservatism thrives nowadays, if you call its shrinking ranks “thriving.”

    • You have an overly rosy view of the “greatest gen.” My Dad was a WW 2 vet as were a couple of my uncles and my maternal grandfather. They engaged in 50s and 60s materialism right along with everyone else. They presided over it — who is more of a Presidential Greatest Gen icon than JFK?

      Oh, my Greatest Gen Dad was married four times. My Silent Gen Mom three. Don’t give me any crap about the moral superiority of their generations over Boomers.

  8. Zman, as an avid reader and fan, can I just make a simple observation. I would say in at least 95% of your posts, all are framed in the negative. In other words, you are very perceptive in the ills that we face, not just as a people, but as a nation and current political issues. But have you ever thought about a PROPOSAL a CREDO a BELIEF that can unify, clarify, and electrify? You seemed obsessive with the negative but unable to elucidate the positive. The dissident right will never mature unless this is provided. You have pointed this out countless time. But what is YOUR vision or thoughts as to what this would encompass?? Thanks

      • I say that flippantly. My apologies. Much respect for Z and posters here. This is an amazing think tank of talented people. I’m humbled and inspired. And that is from the heart. I fantasize there’s a “silver bullet”, there isn’t.

    • Z talks about the need for positive identity more than most in the DR, especially on pods. I don’t see where you’re getting “95% negative” from.

      How did “get the biology right, get the culture right, and the rest works itself out” get past you? Pretty positive basis for letting a society build itself organically rather than purely by some master blueprint. Every one of us has a dozen of those, myself included.

      • O, is that all? All’s we have to do is get the biology right and the culture right. Come on guys, what are we waiting for?

    • He hints at it; our own, white (?) places somewhere, change one mind at a time.
      I think he’s avoiding purge, Feds, and doesn’t want to attract unseemly types who might do bad optics.

      He doesn’t like Conservative INC.
      This is above all clear.
      Or angry people.

      There is no program beyond organizing small groups, hopefully local, people you know. This is definitely steps in right direction. The end state is deliberately undefined, as are methods beyond talking.

  9. This is only a sidebar to this piece but warrants saying:

    The ‘costs’ of building a Greek theater were comparatively low —

    * They are built on the side of hills to minimize excavation.
    * Slave labor was utilized.
    * The orchestra and dais were minimal construction demands, single story structures.

    The Romans up’ed the ante in later years but their early constructs were similar to the approach the Greeks took. ex: https://s1.qwant.com/thumbr/0x380/1/d/ce9c71f7c44586cd0bb29a6c7ef816ff5c2f92884c6b11b754310f2b97f9a9/te1.jpg?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hierapolis-info.ru%2Fgal2%2Fte1.jpg&q=0&b=1&p=0&a=1

    Structures like the Coliseum are on par with the Christian churches. But I would offer the level of skill required to construct the cathedrals was at a whole another level. New forces, new materials and skills.

    • I stopped by Fuentes’ Livestream and he wasn’t on yet, but the commenters were declaring NC a loss for Groypers. That’s all I know.

      BTW, Fuentes seems to have a habit of scheduling his livestreams to start at a particular time, but then not showing up until long after, so if you tune in early or watch the stream later, there may be a half hour of elevator music and moronic text chat (it is YouTube after all) before he actually appears.

      To me that is sloppy and disrespectful, but of course his fanbois will defend it to the death for reasons.

  11. I say future historians will fold the entire American history into the “Decline of the British Empire” chapter. The British Empire was a huge and vibrant thing… then one of their colonies broke off, and Britain declined. A couple of world wars later, and the colony was still around, but lacking any kind of direction or spirit, it basically bungled things for about a century while everything fell to shit everywhere.

  12. I’ve read your posts over the past few months, some read very well, some not so much but one thing’s for sure……you are one depressing son of a bitch. Damn, just put the candle out and go to bed.

  13. the last few weeks of your posting have been profound and erudite . excellent job of seeing the forest through the trees.

  14. Tocqueville, 1831–I know of no other county where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts

  15. Z makes a good case against the materialism but i will push back a little. Prosperity is good. I’ve lived in the third/developing world and i can tell you indoor plumbing and nice reliable auto counts of a hell of lot. Antibiotics and modern medicine are also game changers, big time. As far as the super-rich; a guy like Musk probably does consume vastly more resources than a typical middle class guy. Same amount of food, maybe 2x-5x more oil, wood etc.. In his case he is spending his concentrated wealth on a space program and thank god because nasa is rapidly sinking into irrelevancy. I would certainly trust a guy like musk to spend money on things that will push our civilization forward over a slchub like Biden. Hey it just occurred, maybe we can make Mars a white ethno-world! Heh.

    • When someone can build a successful, self-sustaining city in the inland region of Antarctica, I might start taking talk of Mars or Moon colonies seriously.

      • Yep. Also note, we’ve never, ever, even built a self sustaining environment for astronauts. The Biosphere project here in AZ, was a failure and has never been attempted again. How could we attempt to send a bunch of astronauts to colonize or establish a base station on Mars without such a successful experiment here on earth. Of course, that’s not the issue is it. Whole thing is a stunt to distract the rubes.

      • It’s expensive, but the technology to do it is available. A nuclear reactor and a source of water and you’re good to go.

        • Inland Antarctica is technically a desert, but there are so many years of permafrost that there’s adequate water available for a very long time to come. One of the many ways in which Antarctica is vastly more hospitable than any off-Earth location known.

      • We need to do space, America needs to go up. Or we shall go over the world and continue to muck about and fuck about in the mud, with the muds. We are becoming mud.

        What you describe are engineering problems – and you’re ignoring we already build and sustain for decades in orbit.

        • We build tiny little habitats in orbit that are entirely supplied in food, water, air and other needs by shipments from Earth. That is completely unworkable for Moon and Mars colonies. There’s a huge difference between maintaining a little orbiting bubble of pressurized air and creating a colony where humans can live permanently and independently.

          As I said, I will take them seriously when they can actually solve those “engineering problems” in even an environment many orders of magnitude more hospitable than the Moon or Mars

  16. One thing that our side can do is to appreciate the “little things”.

    For instance, food. Put even 30 minutes into making a decent supper. Eat it slowly, and savor it. Be thankful for the company eating with you. If you have no company, savor every bite and be thankful that you have this amazing food in front of you.

    Be thankful for the house or apartment you have, even if it’s not much. I’m thankful for my heated apartment – coming in from the cold into a cozy, warm room. It’s not a very nice room but at least I can warm up.

    Be thankful for the warm sun, or the biting winter wind, or the snow, or the sunset. Feed off of the positive energy zeitgeist of many around you. Accept God (whatever form that may take) and know He is always surrounding you.

    We are blessed by so much in life, so much richness is all around us. In our material wealth we have forgotten the real wealth which can be had for free. Even just being in tune with these things will put you miles ahead of the fragile, directionless, disposable masses.

  17. Excellent post, it’s why we are referred to as “consumers” as opposed to “citizens”.

    One thing that really drove materialism was the advent of TV which allowed Madison Avenue into the home of every American family from the working class to the upper class. The house frau was bombarded with adverts for all sorts of gadgets that would revolutionize her life. They targeted men as well, where a man was defined by the car that he drove. Lower classes drove Chevy’s, aspiring middle-class drove Pontiacs and Buicks and those in management drove Caddies.

    Children were exempt from the evils of advertising until the early 80’s when Madison Avenue figured out they could turn children into consumers as well. Then came the barrage of ads on TV aimed at a children as well as cartoons that were nothing but 1/2 commercials for toys based on the cartoons.

    Those of us growing up in the 70’s could see this with the demise of old school cartoons like Bugs Bunny which no one was making money off of and slowly being replaced by crap like the Transformers.

  18. I think it is both, changing demographics and excessive materialism.

    A critical human need, as social animals, is for close human relationships. Zman’s diagnosis that we experience feelings of purposelessness is due in part to the fact that changing demographics and diversity inhibits the development of meaningful relationships with people. When the people around you are aliens with different values, religions, music, sports, language, churches, traditions, history et al, it becomes difficult to develop close relationships. Am I being unPC? Am I being culturally insensitive?

    So, since we don’t find sufficient satisfaction in human relationships we look for it in our relationship with stuff. Time spent with our stuff acts as a distraction from our yearning for time we would rather spend with friends, colleagues, and neighbors.

  19. So really, the current societal decadence will cause the system to fail, thereby creating the economic conditions for a revival of non-materialistic behavior. The wheel of history is always turning…

    • Boomers were a bubble in history.
      It’s a mistake to use them as a floor for economic metrics- growth, growth, growth, growth!

  20. Funny enough, hollywood (and lefty writers in general) pushed back against this materialism back when it first emerged post WWII. Any thoughts on reconciling that behavior, with how that same group of people now think and act?

  21. They define their existence by the amount of stuff their heirs will throw away when they die.

    Yes, thank you, I do like to start my day with a dagger to the heart along with my coffee.

    • That line should go on billboards. I’ve yet to be involved in a relative’s death that didn’t involve a dumpster in front of the place.

  22. While reading this column today, two thoughts occurred: one ugly, the other peaceful.

    *Black Friday and all of its mad people, stoked by mad men who have devalued Thanksgiving and Christmas.

    **Watching YouTube videos of life in remote areas where you build your own cabin and learn how to survive on very little. I need books and classical music, and tools. With tools you can create, build, live, and be satisfied.

  23. The Zman has correctly noted that “conservatives” often focus only on economic things, going back to Reagan.

    That’s why I found this first-person account by one of the Groypers who went to Don Jr.’s UCLA thing so fascinating:

    https://www.counter-currents.com/2019/11/groyper-war-ucla/

    It’s clear that the rush this young guy got was from the community of like-minded people. That made the speakers’ talking points about economics seem extra irrelevant.

    And this was in Los Angeles, too–one of the main loci, as the post points out, of our rottenness. White guys bonding amid the Globohomo detritus! It’s one of the most whitepilling articles I’ve read in a while.

    • I’m encouraged the young people have recognized the fraud that is “Conservative, Inc.” and are fighting against it. Bless ’em!

  24. The Romans had three things going for them; (1) access to prime building materials; stone and marble, plus the technology to quarry it (2) a good tax system to pay for and maintain everything they built and (3) cheap slave labor to do all the grunt work.

    The Romans simply copied everyone else who came before them, added their own engineering technology (including lead pipes and concrete) to build exponentially beyond what any civilization had done before.

    The middle ages lost all of that technology, including concrete and public running water systems. No one in Europe or Britain could duplicate or maintain what they inherited from the Romans. Instead they carried away the precisely carved stones from Roman villas to make crude stalls for their pigs and sheep.

    However one only need look at Europe’s to find that even today, hundreds of thousands of us still live in homes that are over 500-years old. Tudor and Thatch in England, Fachwerkhaus in various versions across Germany and northern Europe.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwI0xIRZF5w

    I challenge you to find 10,000 Americans who live in homes that are older than 300 years. Which is interesting given you had stone masonry, brick and concrete even back in the 1600’s, but yet you built almost everything out of wood and still do.

    Europeans who visit America always point out how cheaply American homes are built; pine timber frames with sheet rock walls and tar shingles roofs. Poorly built, poorly insulated with cheap single pane windows. It would be interesting to visit Los Angeles or Boston or New York in 500-years and see what’s still standing. Most likely they’ll look like larger version of Bodie, Nevada.

    American architecture and construction was never designed or built for the long term, especially not for the plebs.

    Stone walls on concrete foundation –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSespWN5Pds
    Notice how our roof tiles are interlocking –
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KpMfHjCSM
    Strong, secure and well insulated windows –

    • Karl, Americans don’t do craftsmanship well. It’s all about cheapness and quantity. You’ve driven our cars right? If plastic could vomit it would look like the inside of a Chevy. It’s about stuffing our fat American faces at the Chinese buffet and then taking a “back pill.” We do have better plumbing though. Those old European houses have toilets wedged in strange places. They don’t flow well either, as they’re not designed for modern living. It’s hard to get your three wheeled scooter into one of those old houses.

      • Excellent point. Our houses are poorly made crap, but our plumbing is immeasurably better. And it may be just me, but I insist on a proper American-sized refrigerator. I’ll happily take other German appliances, but not the fridge!

        • The size of the fridge has more to do with how we shop. Unlike American grocery stores, we have very few canned or frozen goods. Germans, and most Europeans, go shopping at the grocery store two or three times a week, buying only what we need for a few days at a time. We don’t haul four shopping carts out of Costo and pack our refrigerator-freezers with frozen pizza 🙂

      • Keep in mind anything build prior to the 1900’s was never designed for indoor plumbing. Which is why my cousin has house that’s 362-years old with a WC that about 5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. . It’s like a bowling lane with a throne at the end. 🙂

    • Upvoted the comment.

      Eli Broad, big Democrat here in LA, built many of these homes and made a fortune. I lived in one. Almost every homeowner had to file insurance claims for water damage due to broken copper pipes. I could write about the door and window construction as well.

      • KB Homes have always been the worst. And built by illegal subcontractors of subcontractors of subcontractors…I walked into a model years ago and the handrail came off the stairs. Is Eli Broad a jew? I had to get that ball rolling.

        • Broadberg? Broadstein? Broadblum? I dunno.

          But now he supports charter schools, even though he is lauded for “charitable” contributions. He still built crappy homes.

    • However one only need look at Europe’s to find that even today, hundreds of thousands of us still live in homes that are over 500-years old.

      Paradoxically, part of it is actually a lack of engineering skill: they were wildly over-engineered, since they didn’t know how to calculate load-bearing stress and such, so they erred on the side of safety. Some Medieval cathedrals have columns that can carry more than a hundred times the weight of their actual roofs, which is why it’s often the last building standing after an artillery barrage or an air raid.

      Today, buildings are built with as little raw materials as possible.

      • You can have your house built out of any material you want, even gold. If you can pay for it. You won’t get a stone house for the price of a frame.

        • Alright, let me amend that: today, you don’t use more materials than necessary; you don’t design a beam to hold twenty tons if it’s only going to carry two.

      • Every home I’ve seen in Scandinavia (AirB for most of this trip) has been built old-school, rock-solid. Hardwood & stone, not CA-style drywall & pressboard, like someplace people want their kids to raise a family after they’re gone. Putting jeets in places like I’m staying is a travesty.

        • We spend a lot of time indoors, so a quality house is very high on the priorities list.

          And another thing: concrete homes are considered low-rent; most people would rather live in an 1900-era apartment in a brick building, with dodgy plumbing, creaking floorboards and a broom closet bathroom than a spanking new, concrete one with all modern amenities.

          What all proper Danes aspire to when they establish a family, is a “murermestervilla”, a “master mason-villa”, ca.1880-1950, so-called since it’s what a wealthy mason would build for himself. Functional, discreetly upper middle class, showcasing the mason’s skill but avoiding ostentation as to not get in trouble with the Law of Jante.

          They’re all slightly different, but here’s a typical example:

          https://www.danskeboligarkitekter.dk/fileadmin/_processed_/e/c/csm_Thingvalle_510_5b7a59702b.jpg

    • The muslims will turn your “wonderful” homes into shacks soon enough.

      You expose your ignorance when you talk of the US. In the colder climes, they build with brick and stone. In the warmer parts they use wood. Homes built before suburbanization were of much higher standards, than afterwards.

      Europe is an old man on a bench, in piss stained trousers. So please don’t lecture us on *anything*.

    • Why don’t you tell us how spacious European homes are? Some of them are as large as 900 square feet! The average German has the material quality of life of a person in Mississippi; i.e. Europe is a big step backwards from here.

    • Some truth to what you say, but there are “first period” (17c.) homes, built by settlers that had to clear the land first, using available tools, local materials, and labor that still stand. We also have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. What counts as construction “code” in New England is meaningless in SoCal, and so on . . .

  25. Tragically, I think there’s a disjunction between the invention side of materal life and the consumption side.

    I’ve read a lot of accounts of inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. For them–and even just reading about them–it’s an epic adventure of discovery, determination, and vision. The joys of their efforts constitute a substitute for religion.

    (For today’s topic, religion is the elephant not in the room, if you see what I mean.)

    Unfortunately, once production of these amazing innovations is routinized, then for their consumers they become part of the passive, vacuous, loneliness-causing, obesity-causing vulgar modern culture.

    Daniel Boorstin’s fascinating book The Americans: The Democratic Experience is actually a history of America’s practical material culture–blue jeans, milk powder, microwaves, and all sorts of other things. (The top review at Goodreads is a decent TL;DR: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976112.The_Americans_Vol_3)

    Every single innovation is a heroic story.

    And yet in the long run it all led to the obese pornographic dystopia we live in today.

    The story of materialism is sold as a comedy, but in fact it’s a very dark tragedy.

  26. If you’ve never seen what an actual parasite looks like, look it up on the internet. That is what the elites have planned for the untermenschen. The homeless camp in LA is a success story (in their view), not a moral or ethical debacle. Those formerly human people have been fully morphed into their parasite end-state, where they now serve as dependent minions and slavishly vote for Progressive politicians in order to assure their place at the host. A parasite has only one survival option, bloodsucking.

    • I took a car up to a weekend car show at the Petersen Museum a year or so ago. I had to hope my rig, used to trailer the car, was still there and in good shape, parked a block away for the day, a stone’s throw from a homeless tarp/tent camp. The museum is impressive, but I won’t go back. I have no intention of rubbing shoulders with such a crowd living a only a block away.

    • All the world as a Congo refugee camp in North Korea, only much worse, with Aztec temples.

      That’s why I keep losing my sh*t here with the religiosity, apologies to those I offend.

      As Britain was used and cast aside, so shall we be. China was cultivated for a reason.

      Soon.

      Locusts don’t build, they only move from one field to the next. Their only spiritual motivation is Hunger.

  27. I respectfully disagree. The current ‘ructions’ (nice) are about demographic displacement, and *reaction* it has precipitated. The vacuity of materialism has been noted for some time and the ennui resulting from it as well, so the extent to which a new less-materialistic culture is emerging, it’s doing so in the context of a recognition that non-material things — such as culture, custom, tradition, social trust — are *more important* than ‘stuff’. ‘Stuff’ and behaviors are the *anchors* for these immaterial things that are now taking prominence. On another note, ‘wealth’ is far too nebulous a term to make sense of civilizational options, such as large public works. Every civilization has to decide how it will invest its resources to create abundance in one ‘sector’ and scarcity in another. Civilization at its most basic level is the human practice of creating ‘safe space’ for human beings. After this has been accomplished, humans begin the time-honored practice of accessorizing their spaces. Without ‘matter’ we have nothing. Without ‘spirit’ our ‘matter’ controls us. ‘Conservatives’ fear ‘White identity politics’ because it will make Whites harder to exploit and manipulated *as a class* and one of those exploits is ‘buy more stuff’.

  28. Imagine all my possessions,
    I wonder if you can.
    No need for greed or hunger,
    Yet I pursue them all I can.

    Imagine all the people living on the
    Right side of the Tracks….
    You may say I’m a dreamer,
    But I’m not the only one.
    I hope some day you join us, and
    The world will live as one.

    Imagine conversations with my brokers,
    I wonder if you can.
    Beef or Dairy cattle to diversity my portfolio,
    In case of a down turn or a muddling of plans.

    Imagine all the people living just like me.
    You may say I’m a dreamer,
    But I’m not the only one.
    I hope some day you can join me, and
    Achieve enlightenment on the Upper Westside…

  29. In a typical-length blog-post, Z conveys what it took author Peter Brown 792 pages to get across in “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD”

    In a nutshell, pagan displays of wealth like arenas, aqueducts and temples were acts of civic virtue and status, truly a tribute and monument to great things and by association the great man who provided them. They were status symbols, not wealth symbols.

    Brown argues that famous renunciations of wealth in Christian history were a syncretic variation of this – the rich person gained status and honor by endowing the Church with their wealth and living in (relative) poverty thereafter, usually in a monastic community, basking in the reflected glory and dreaming of the fine palace they’d enjoy in Heaven. Renouncing your treasure on Earth was the literal down-payment on your transcendent real-estate.

    Notably few of these grand divestments were anonymous, not only because feelz & virtue-preening but because, practically-speaking, transferring that much wealth in a responsible fashion took a lot of time and logistical assistance in Antiquity. Word got around even if you weren’t trying to peacock, and almost all of these heavenly investors were trying.

    https://www.amazon.com/Through-Eye-Needle-Christianity-350-550/dp/0691161771

    • We don’t always see eye-to-eye and I recall a brief spate of heated exchange that was not badinage; but I have to admit you are one seriously well-read dude (sincere kudos) and your heart seems righteous. I am curious about some of your recent comments about Norway. Have you decamped from SoCal; or were you merely extending a Scanza-related visit?

      • No hard feelz – I don’t grudge long. Extended Scandza – staying in Scandinavia until Christmas or so then a few weeks in St. Petersburg then back to HelLA.

  30. A great column, Z-man, which I believe advances arguments you’ve been leading towards for some time now.

    A question I ask Rightist friends who lament the loss of the “good old days” is: Even if you were able to turn back the clock, what is the kind of society you would want to live in? Is the culture of barbecue dads and soccer moms really so admirable? Or the grind of the grey-flannel-suit era? Or the social life centered around bars and drinking?

    Each of these has something to recommend it, I suppose; and material prosperity is a blessing never to be taken for granted. But they are at best *parts* of a human life, not the whole. To return to one or the other past status would only return us, eventually but inevitably, to our present dissatisfactions.

    OTOH, it’s a serious question whether ANY societal arrangement can bring the satisfactions people long for, or whether those satisfactions are mostly for the few, and experienced apart from the culture of the mass.

    • Politics does not fulfill us. This was once the teaching of general philosophy courses, if the professor was partial to spending a few weeks on Plato/Aristotle.

      The senescence of Christianity has left the West with nothing to offer its hundreds of millions except sex and material goods. It hasn’t been enough and now they are turning to political activity. The reaction to this is just amping up, and I expect there will be a confrontation sooner rather than later. If left unchecked, people with nothing else to do with their lives than engage in gossip and slander for emotional validation and satisfaction will destroy everything — there’s no end to it, ever (they never retire to the farm), and the more they are left unfulfilled, the more homicidal they will become. One week it’s “Putin,” the next it’s “white nationalism,” then “MeToo,” then “the Kurds,” then “Ukraine.” Who knows what it’ll be in March or April?

      Meanwhile we are being looted and invaded while this goes on, which I suppose is why it’s encouraged by the MSM — I think these impeachment hearings are on every television station including the Home Shopping Network as I write this. It is *imperative* that we continue to be distracted, and continue to be driven into rage, up to the point where we’re fighting with our neighbors in the driveway over things that are 2000 miles away and — if the smartphones were to stop working — we’d immediately realize are total fantasies with no bearing on actually-existing social life.

    • The WW2 generation were generally decent people, who understood what degeneracy looked like. But they didn’t really know how to live. All instant cakes and baloney sandwiches. There’s a reason so many of the women became barbiturate poppers and started reading Betty Friedan. The bored housewife was the first casualty of the modern era. There’s a reason the Stones wrote “Mother’s Little Helper.”

      • Hmm, but how much of that is “future shock”? I mean, within a generation we went from absolutely needing women to work all day, every day keep the living space from degenerating into a dirty dog house to having a bunch of machines that allowed the work to be cut to a sliver.

        • True. Once you had the machines doing that, the leisure time exploded. Leisure created the situation.

          • You don’t even need to walk the cat any more, she can hitch a ride on the roomba for cat entertainment purposes.

          • Freed the ladies up to work in the owners’ factories and bureaus, so they could spend their new independence on daycare and those now necessary machines.

            Our girls won nothing.

      • When time travel allows us to assassinate a historical figure, I vote Betty.

        Crazy yenta had it all, including kids and a tall, wealthy husband with a big c**k, that she threatened to cut off.

        Never enough, why was she touted as an alpha female leading the femme parade.
        “Salon activists, follow me!”, cried Friedan and Steinem, the Mad Avenue asset and the CIA asset.

        Feminism was a psyop along the lines of the Laurel Canyon hippy freak ‘revolution’.

        • (In short, the hippy revolution came from one place, Laurel Canyon, the lights leading it in music, movies, and Californy culture were all kids of military intelligence agents.

          Oddly, the Colombine shooter kids were also sons of mil intel, as were most bowlers following that event. Culture. War.)

    • The level of your culture is also important to your religiosity and overall happiness – they’re mutually-reinforcing. Just like fertility, high aesthetics seem to correlate with religiosity.

      Russia has one of the great cultural and artistic traditions of Europe, but it has largely stagnated from 1917 forward, at least compared to its Golden Ages. Both atheistic Bolshevism and “post-Christian” Yeltsin-era neo-liberalism produced an imitative mass-culture and crashing birth-rates and life expectancies.

      God(s) & Beauty are vital cultural roots which have been largely strangled and overgrown by the roots of Science and Prosperity. As a result, the modern Tree of Life is looking more and more like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.

  31. Having the reserve currency, and therefore having decades to consume using artificially low interest rates exacerbated this problem. The dollar as the reserve currency of the world created a supercharged economy in the first 30+ years, then created the deep pools of liquidity to finance and leverage that prosperity for another 40 years. The homeless in LA, just like everywhere else, are crazy and drug addicted. Not all of them of course, but they’re the human refuse of the end stage drug culture in an end stage democracy in an end stage economy. And this is nothing. When the economy cracks you’ll see the real homeless, and they’ll be people like all of us, but who just over leveraged themselves and lost their jobs. This will be seen as the most artificial place ever created, as morbidly obese people with glazed over faces drive through WalMart aisles on rascal scooters. To save a society you must first have pride in that society. How can anyone take pride in this? Who can find beauty in an auto-tuned Taylor Swift song? You need a lobotomy to even listen to it. Our country has become a cultural used condom. An over-leveraged Applebees full of meth addicts. I would rather have it burn than save it, as the aftermath will have a more centered people.

  32. The so-called greatest generation gets credit for weathering the grinding depression, without embracing communism.

    They did step over the Communist line a time or too. That’s when the socialist Ponzi scheme known as Social Security was created.

    Wait, you might say, isn’t that an expression of compassion or concern for one’s fellow man? Nope, it never was. It has always been about getting free stuff.

    The increasing instinct to give out free stuff from the government and pretend it represents charity or compassion is actually the opposite. It pushes the hard, unpleasant parts of charity onto bureaucrats, and it gives a false sense of virtue.

    That’s why the rich people in LA do nothing — they’re already paying their taxes, they’ll tell you.

    Also, when you have to help the poor directly, you become responsible for the effects of your efforts. When you know the people, you can see who genuinely needs a hand and who is grifting you.

    • The idea that “I gave at the tax office” is a huge psychological crutch that helps globoshlomo short-circuit the high empathy levels of Whites. All but the most spergy lolbertarian Whites would have a much harder time ignoring systemic squalor but for this (((One Weird Trick))).

      • Government takeover of things best done locally and privately is poison. Here in California, PG&E is a disaster of a monopolistic big-business skimming operation for the highest corporate executives, but the state and local governments are salivating over, and getting their elbows out, to compete with each other to take over parts of the PG&E infrastructure. The opportunity for huge levels of government graft and skimming is simply palpable. Opportunities like this one don’t come along every day, if you are a high government official. The level of service, and collateral damage along the way, is sure to accelerate in the future, but those government officials will push out their private industry counterparts to take over the skimming game, and amp it up to eleven. This also shows the basic convergence of government and big business, when you get down to the little-guy consumer level. The targets of outrage will change, but the results will be mostly the same. One difference is that the harmed people in the Paradise Fire are suing the bejeezus of privately owned PG&E. The public takeover will block that avenue of redress.

      • Charity should, of course, be on a personal or religious or community basis . . . however, in the current year, I most definitely do claim “I gave at the tax office” when asked to donate for school supplies (for all the pajeet/han/mestizo students) or “the hungry” (the fat Negress who just got her nails did enjoying a free Thanksgiving dinner) or whatever the cause du jour is. I saw some stupid nice White housewife holding up traffic yesterday and giving money to two Negros holding signs and I wanted to slaughter her. I have had it with grifters and the lame/lazy/merely incapable and yearn for some truly deserving White people to help in some way.

        • I most definitely do claim “I gave at the tax office” when asked to donate for school supplies (for all the pajeet/han/mestizo students) or “the hungry” (the fat Negress who just got her nails did enjoying a free Thanksgiving dinner) or whatever the cause du jour is.

          Well, of course you do. That’s the behavior the system incentivizes.

        • Take from the Empire everything you can. Give them only what you must.

          We’re dissidents now, not patriots.

    • I upvote this comment.

      I believe in charity and low taxes. Some will keep their money and screw the charity. I think even Jesus was perplexed; I know that I am. We are coming to the point that we will be forced to help each other out, which is fine as long as we can give the tax collector a big middle finger. The best movement this country could ever have would be for millions of people to coordinate in a show of unity and not pay taxes to the beast. If a few do it, they suffer. If many do it, the government can’t do squat.

    • Soc Sec means the kids no longer had to stay on the farm. The were free to go work for the factory and bureau owners of the big city.

      Cloward-Piven: break it so you can remake it.
      (Overwhelm with demand.)

      The key is, get your forces in place before you break it, that they will promise to bring back order amidst the panic.

      • Mechanization had been changing the nature and manpower requirements of farm labor for decades before SS. What SS did do for both rural and urban families is help break down the web of family obligation. It was just one of many 20th century bodyblows to the family.

      • Feh.

        How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree) dates from World War 1 well before social security.

        Given a chance nearly anyone will move to the city, have since the Middle Ages maybe earlier and probably always will. Farm work and I’ve done it is drudgery and while cities are shite, they also offer opportunity and often easier work.

        Now I’d like to be a country squire myself but most people like what cities offer and we don’t need that may farmers anway.

        Economic policies from the dawn time simply make no sense in a world with heavy automation, computers and technology.

        Getting rid of the welfare state would not make more babies , it would just increase increase savings among the working and middle while decreasing consumption and probably the number of babies among the working and middle classes as well.

        There is a caveat to that

        Now if you make American more homogenous and closed to new people, well given enough time, a century or two, we’ll undergo a catabolic collapse and revert to a lower tech base and a more rural population.

        This will not increase the total do to population density issues with rural living but it will be a more moral population of farmers living in a much lower tech world.

        As far as some magical high tech, highly urban , moral, highly fertile society, probably not possible. Urban life distracts men and women, makes babies too expensive and automation degrades wages.

        However a far more homogenous society run by a government that protects beauty and culture shrinking or growing would be a far better place to raise kids and if any place has a chance of making it past the hump, that one does.

  33. “The generation that built the American empire, also built a society in which everyone knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”

    Yes. Now today, everywhere Boomers and Xers are complaining about those pampered, entitled, pussified Millennials… maybe they should be asking who created the Millennials….?

    Sure, most Millennials are just as described, but they didn’t ask to be helicopter parented, they didn’t ask to be protected from all unpleasantries, nor did they ask to be spoiled rotten. The Boomers and we Xer’s did that.

    You can’t create a generation of spoiled brats and then point at the spoiled brats and scream “It’s all your fault!” Indeed, such behaviour belies that the Boomers and Xers behaving this way are themselves spoiled brats.

    The WWII generation did a great deal of complaining about their hippie spawn that took over the country in the 60s, but again, who created and raised the hippie spawn?

    Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

  35. The soaring popularity of Yoga is in proportion to the decline of a spiritual vision for Yoga is an attempted escape from the collapse of culture.

    This is nothing new – as The Old Testament tries to teach us in the history of Israel Every man did what was right in his own eyes

    Secular history has repeated the pattern discernible in the history of Israel –

    Suffering
    Repentance
    Blessedness
    Luxury
    Pride
    Disaster
    Suffering

    Secular America is now on that same cycle but it remains stuck in Pride, awaiting the disaster that will lead ineluctably to suffereing.

    Sadly, protestant America has no concept of repentance as the Judaised Protestants who founded America took wealth as a sign of their election and America has, like a snake shedding its skin, cast off what remained of Christendom

  36. Maybe some reading of Pat Buchanan is in order. Pat – among others – has pointed out that the Western world attempted to commit suicide during WW1. After the war – with all of it’s pointless carnage – there was a distinct falling away from the belief in God. This happened in other countries as well – but there are a couple of books out there detailing how the loss of an entire generation of males made for a British society where women went into positions and assumed power they never had before.

    If you believe what was detailed on Chateau Heartiste – then you know that women trend towards much more materialism than men do. So it is perhaps pretty easy to connect the increasing materialism of the West – with the increase of societal power of it’s women – which came around probably in large part because the West kept taking it’s most virile and capable men – and dumping them into holes in the ground and burying them.

    There’s a good article over at Unz about how the Allies conciously killed off German POWs after the war was over: http://www.unz.com/book/john_wear__germanys-war/

    The Morganthau Plan envisioned Germany as a backwards pastoral farming nation. Seems sort of a hard goal to achieve – as long as there are ANY German men still left alive, or German women left alive – birthing German men. Perhaps this explains the current day effort to inundate Germany with Africans?

    Think of it this way: You’re a Western male who is at least semi-conscious of the state of the world you are living in, and the RECENT history of the nation you live in (we’re not talking about ancient history here). Your house is full of pictures of dead relatives (all male) – and your nation is full of rememberances and memorials for the MILLIONS of dead.

    Are YOU going to just continue being stupid and believing in a God – that quite obviously hasn’t done his damn job, or are you going to take advantage of all the cool cars , computers, guns – whatever makes you happy?

    Look – when I was 18 the Soviet Union still existed. The newspapers ran stories pretty frequently about how we could all die in a nuclear conflagration. I had been studying WW1 and WW2 history – since I reached a birthday counted in double digits. Growing up – I watched the Vietnam War on TV – and even as a child had some perception of the utter waste that war was, and how the previous generation was PISSED about being drafted into a senseless war.

    And yet I still had to go sign up for the draft when I reached my 18th birthday.

    So are you telling me I should have just continue to believe in a power structure – and a country – and a religious world – that had created that shithouse mess? Or should I maybe go live it up a little – because tomorrow I am very likely going to die?
    (It was later revealed BTW – that in 1982 the US and the Soviets almost did make the Cold War – hot )

    The materialist problem of the West – traces back to at least WW1. Which was (yet another) failure of the elites.

    • As with most things sh*tty in America, I’d mark the calendar around the Civil War for when consumerist cancer ran amok. Reconstruction & the Gilded Age kicked it off, gas-canned by New Thought & the prosperity gospel hucksters who multiplied fruitfully around then.

      WWI was a definitely a money war according to Pat in “Republic” – newer guys to Our Thing, read “Great Betrayal” and “Republic” (which he wrote as one super-long book originally) if you want the best intro to DR domestic and foreign policy. They’re definitely part of the foundation for all that Pat’s a paleo more than Our Guy

        • “1851? Compulsory Government schools in MA?”

          Forcing the hated Papists to build their own schools, as they were forced out by the relentless Prot curriculum.
          Many of those Papists had already been starved out of their own country, Ireland.

    • WW1 losses are exaggerated: Britain didn’t lose an entire generation of males.

      The Eisenhower order was a terrible decision but did not represent Allied policy or even US policy.

      The Morgenthau plan was not implemented, on the contrary German industry was protected by the Allies to the extent Britain and America diverted economic resources to keep German workers and factories operating.

      • Eisenhower and his enablers should have been court martialed. His attempt at genocide was taking place while we were preparing charges at Nuremberg.

    • Not to oversimplify things, but if Britain wasn’t hell bent on maintaining unrivaled global hegemony, despite the obvious reality that it was not possible, there probably would not have been a WWI or WWII.

      Saddest part is, for all its hare-brained attempts to keep Germany (and France let’s not forget) down, Britain lost the empire anyway, but only after inadvertently destroying Western Civilization in two horrendous world wars. All for nothing. For less than nothing, really.

      The ultimate kicker is that Germany and France were the least of Britain’s concerns. As far back as the early 1800s Hegel said the 20th Century would belong to the USA and Russia. None of the elites wanted to see that. By 1945 Europe was occupied by the USA and USSR, and the British Empire got thrown into the dustbin of history.

      Jolly good show, chaps!

  37. “A simple way of seeing this is the fact that Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood and the center of American popular culture, has a homeless camp in the center. Estimates say it contains 70,000 of our fellow citizens. Yet, the super-rich who run the city are not concerned in the least.”

    Not only are they not concerned, we are right on schedule! The ‘blueprint’ for a while now has been Brazil and we went from inching closer for decades to the downhill rapidly growing & accelerating snowball you see today. The ultra HAVES and the ultra HAVE NOTs and nothing in between. If you want to see what the future looks like according to (((central planning))) it will look something like what is below and we get closer every day as eradication of the middle class continues apace:

    https://nextcity.org/images/made/sao_paulo_income_inequality_1400_933_80.jpg

    • Can’t see your image, however the point is well taken. There is a part of Los Angeles called Silverlake. If you drive Silver Lake Blvd. north and proceed under Sunset Blvd., the entire length of the bridge below Sunset, about fifty feet, is permanently occupied by bums living in tents. Go about a hundred feet further north and you see modern recent home construction on the west side. These homes go for close to 1.5 or 2 million dollars. Imagine paying that to live literally a stone’s throw from a dozen insane and utterly unsanitary street people. And so you know, Silverlake is a highly prized address, full of well-paid bugmen. You can view this underpass on google maps and it looks devoid of this. But on Apple maps you can see all the tents. Meanwhile the mayor of Los Angeles has recently said LA is a model for a city addressing the homeless.

      • See also downtown San Diego – $2500/mo for a posh 1BR but the minute you step out the door you’re basically in a bad mash-up of South Beach & Skid Row. Nice ballpark, though – if you don’t mind wading through puke & schizos for about 15 blocks.

        Brag about your address to your friends as you barricade yourself inside after work every night for the Bugman Special of Uber Eats & Netflix delivered lukewarm & made to someone else’s order by the third son of a Persian cab-driver for a day’s white-collar wage.

        No wonder Mama Cass choked herself on that sandwich.

  39. There is a longing out there among many whites. They know something is wrong, despite what the TV, movies and the MSM tells them. They want community, a tribe, a place to belong.

    To discover whites proud of who they are is horrifying to many whites but a drink in the dessert for many others. These whites don’t know what they are looking for but they know it when they find it. We need to give them that purpose beyond material goods. What greater purpose can you have than to save your people (your family) and your culture.

    • Speaking of all of this. I think that it’s time to start a Z Club in the Northern Virginia area. There has to be a bunch of us around here. The question is how to do it. How do you create a private club with a public announcement?

      (Btw, any infiltrator would be sadly disappointed by our club. It won’t be political, though I would like to talk about ways to help the local communities – all races, of course. Want to help young men find a purpose and to know their history.)

      • +1 on the Z Club. Would agree with the comment above that some Millennials and Gen Z appear to be eschewing the modern consumerist (bugman) lifestyle. Have not really seem much data on the topic, however. Although if you are not forming a family and focusing on cultural values worth preserving does it matter?

        • Pride in yourself and your history will make you want to continue that people and culture. The family and kids will come, but these young men will need to let their prospective wives know their feelings about their people and history, i.e. she understands that counter-education will be part of their lives.

      • Nice try fed.

        You probably are a fed being in nova but that’s a good question I’ve been thinking about. I think it just takes IRL action and interaction at places likely to be infested by people in our thing.

        And to be honest I bet there are plenty of feds in the same boat asking the same question….

        • Exactly my issue, especially in NoVa which is fed central. (My guess is that feds prefer NoVa over the Maryland suburbs but who knows. God knows I have enough neighbors with security clearance.) A fed or just some liberal DB working for one of the countless DC-area NGOs wouldn’t exactly have to travel far to join our meeting.

          Maybe it can’t be done here, which is too bad but understandable. I’m probably not going to join a political campaign. Community groups are good, but it’d be nice to start with a core group already intact.

          Was hoping someone might have some way to square the circle.

          But you’re right. I have to assume that any group is compromised in some way, either by a fed or, more likely, just some guy who disagrees with us. That was my point about the group not being political. Never talk politics until you’ve known some guy for years, know where he works, knows how he talks to his kids, etc., i.e. he’s definitely one of us.

          To me, that’s how you do it. The group can’t be political – at all. Assume Big Brother is watching you. Assume I’m Big Brother. I sure as hell would assume that you are. The group would be about helping people, making your community (and by community I mean the more generic definition) better.

          Just help people and get to know members over long periods of time. The feds or Lefty types aren’t the great actors of our time, nor will they want to waste time on a group that isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.

          Again, maybe it just doesn’t work via this forum. Fair enough, though I’m not sure how much more dangerous it is to meet up using this forum than it is to go to a Mencken or AmRen conference. I’d just assume that AmRen had feds at it.

        • Btw, a fed would never try and have us meet. I’d assume too many legal issues. But I wouldn’t put it past some Lefty group trying to do some expose on “suburban Nazis.”

          • “Btw, a fed would never try and have us meet. I’d assume too many legal issues.”

            Thanks for the laugh,

            When have the murderous thugs ever been constrained by “legal issues”?

          • True, but it would have bad optics for them. I’d still argue that the bigger threat would come from non-government types.

            But like I said, I assume that every group has someone who will stab you in the back and dox you. I wouldn’t trust someone with my real opinions until I know where they work, see how they talk to their kids, what they do on the weekends, what they watch, etc.

            It’s tough to keep up the act for years. They’d slip.

          • IRL, likely very difficult to square the circle. Yes NOVA is literally fed central. Almost easier to show up at a large conference where you know there will be feds but you will have the benefit of a large crowd.

      • Btw, I was kidding about calling a club a Z Club or having any name for it. Just trying to figure out how to get people together in the real world. Looks like it not possible. Will stick with being a part of community groups and keeping my eye open.

        • No, getting together with people is always a good idea. Man, the social animal and all that. All of your other caveats and qualifiers apply – in spades. One problem is that NoVa inhabitants are already atomized; ain’t no community here. So you’re talking about creating something that mostly doesn’t exist.

          Now others will say that plenty of organizations and clubs, groups, and teams exist already. But I’d like to join/form a group that I was reasonably certain didn’t exist just for the sake of destroying everything I hold decent and sacred. So it’s a real problem, sure.

          Cooking club? Form a band? Hiking group? Something?

          • It just seems a waste. There’s a lot of talent around here, but we have to slowly search through other venues hoping to find one person similar to the commenters.

            It’s like we’re search for a needle in a haystack while there’s a pile of needles is just sitting there on the other side of a fence.

            But I get it. We all have a lot to lose and announcing our intentions over a loud speaker isn’t exactly staying in the shadows.

    • “ What greater purpose can you have than to save your people (your family) and your culture.”

      Citizen…from those hated creators of Western Heritage, a passage from “Horatius at the Bridge” may be in order here. Well worth reading in full. Genius like Thomas Babington (Lord Macaulay) sadly no longer exist.

      …
      Then out spake brave Horatius,
      The Captain of the gate:
      “To every man upon this earth
      Death cometh soon or late.
      And how can man die better
      Than facing fearful odds
      For the ashes of his fathers
      And the temples of his gods,
      …

      Required reading in school in a different time and nation.

      • This is what needs to get to young people. I see it with my kids. The schools, the media, everyone is taking away their past. Without your past, you’re defenseless.

  40. A lovely Lilith in one of my more Faustian relationships once observed that “poor people care about people, middle-class & nouveau riche people care about things and old-money rich people care about status.” Being a natural born gold-digger, she was a shrewd observer of the modern condition and what made people tick, especially the rich.

    Steve’s a middle-class guy at heart. He sees social conflicts as a struggle for stuff, not for solidarity or status, the latter of which he particularly derides (e.g. Jewish country-club obsessions and Dindette hair-hate).

    If a mosaic-image of Petronius’ Trimalchio (“Satyricon”) came to life at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades and Uber XXL’d to the Skid Row center of LA, even this ancient De Sade would be disgusted by the shallow callousness of our nouveau riche. To men of Trimalchio’s class, the state of the City was a reflection on them. Street-sh*tting madmen aside, most of LA is just plain dirty. No one bothers to clean much in major portions of the city and as Queen Ann has observed, the white plastic bag may as well be the Mexican national flower. Even a Trimalchio would see this as direct evidence of a pride-less, debased elite.

    Our Third Founding America will need some of that pagan civic virtue and noblesse oblige. Home-growing and schooling our future nobles is going to be a hard project. We’re starting from scratch and the instruction manuals are all at least as old as Machiavelli’s Prince.

      • IIRC, we had to read that in high school. I had a Latin teacher who was a Classics fanatic and several Lit teachers who were very old-school. Hated it back then but read that kind of stuff for fun now. Those broads were right after all.

    • That’s exactly the thing about community. In a real community, people will not allow the ugly and the perverse in their midst, as it reflects on everyone.

  41. “The theaters built by the Greeks were an important part of their cultural life. The plays and festivals reinforced the cultural values that made Greek life possible.”

    Television has played that part for us, for the past 50 years. But the TV shows, which were produced and edited by a small cohort of leftists, were not reflecting our culture, but changing it; we willingly lapped up cultural garbage created by misfits, weirdos, and psychos. I recently caught a couple of episodes of Lassie, and the contrast with any current TV show is amazing (and frightening to see).

    My point is that we no longer need to build huge edifices to house our cultural rot, but we can do it virtually and electronically.

      • 1971 is significant. That’s when the Rural Purge occurred. TV shows Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies,Mayberry RFD, Lassie, Hogan’s Heroes, all cancelled. Later on Gunsmoke, Bonanza were gone. All wholesome shows.

        • That’s correct, the Left was in ascendency in the media and we on the Right sat back and watched, unknowingly, as to what was happening. Hindsight they say is 20/20. We should have paid more attention when this phenomenon on media was called out. It was termed at that time, a “vast wasteland”—but it was worse, much worse.

          I remember coming home from University on break and hearing my Grandfather (he lived with us in his declining years) say that he had to be home no later than 7 p.m. to watch “All in the Family”. I asked, what is AITF? He said it was about a bigot and his Son-in-law. I was intrigued. We watched the show together.

          I remember watching my Grandfather laugh at Archie Bunker, but now I realize he was really laughing at himself. My Grandfather, WWI veteran, was always closer to an Archie Bunker in values and ideas than the Son-in-law, “Meathead”. But Archie Bunker represented the bad guy and was held up to ridicule night after night.

          An old Jewish prayer goes something like, “Lord make my enemies ridiculous”—and so (((they))) did. And here we are.

          • I remember watching AITF with my parents when I was a kid. After ingesting few episodes my mother said about Archie, “He’s not wrong, you know.”

            After having seen the depredations of the Chicoms firsthand, then narrowly escaping them on literally the last boat out of Shanghai to Taiwan, working nine years for an American government agency in Taipei (to perfect her English and save money to take care of her own mother — the rest of the family had been lost along the way), then coming to the US to complete her final two years of college, Mom had few illusions about the left. A summer spent working in New York City left her with few illusions about vibrants.

            There is something very wrong when a woman born in China is more able to spot and call out the lies and propaganda fed to us than many heritage Americans.

          • Yes, there is something wrong as you say. But it’s oh so common. Seems you have to come from nothing to appreciate abundance—material and political. Heritage Americans are all too often fat, dumb, and lazy.

        • You just know that if they remade Bonanza today, the Cartwrights would be working for Hop Sing to make the Ponderosa a green, sustainable enterprise dedicated to veganism and either Hoss or that purty Little Joe would be struggling to express xer’s transexual awakening. Of course it goes without saying that one of the episodically repeating guest characters would be a powerful black lesbian whose wisdom would be unimpeachable. And that’s how the West was won, kids…

        • “That’s when the Rural Purge occurred”

          I live in MeTV land ..
          ALL those shows are still on 24/7 here ..

    • When I’ve lived on boats in SoCal the only broadcast TV has tended to be very old-school fogey networks like MeTV and the like. I’m more of a Rockford Files guy if that’s my Overton Tube selection but I have noticed how 1950’s-early 1960’s TV was still trying to put some high culture out there. Reversion to the mean + reversion to the green took care of that by the 1970’s. Dutch is right on the Normal Lear era, too. TV used to be kind of a ghetto, low-class thing to Hollywood types so it wasn’t as pozzed at first, but if we build it, (((they))) will come.

    • You need to include movies and the pop music industry as well. Look at the way idiot progs rush to play Imagine by John Lennon after terror attacks in Europe. That is our culture to them, most people today of any age would not recognize most classic works of music or art of historical significance. Appreciation for traditional high culture was steadily eroded by the pop culture industry during the 20th Century.

    • The basic difference between today and 100 years ago is that today’s American personality is essentially a construct of media controlled by people who have a very specific and destructive agenda. The person of 1919, by contrast, was a product of a culture that was still mostly local and traditional. The lesson to be learned if anything survives the media age is “tell your own stories and sing your own songs or someone with bad intent will do it for you.”

  42. Zman has been crushing it lately! Ours is an age of nihilistic materialism. Nothing short of a spiritual reawakening can save us now.

    • True and that’s how I ingest today’s blog post. However, I can’t help thinking whether we have a chicken-egg situation here when we discuss cause and effect. We talk of acquisition of stuff, but the 20th century was the century of invention of “stuff”. Easy to be a person of ascetic bearing in a world of limited alternatives. But after WWII, with the mastery of mass production, electronics and communications breakthroughs, credit, we were off to the races.

      I still remember living in my first home, late 40’s, early 50’s design. Closets were no bigger than the towel closet in my current master bath. And when I was young, such size was sufficient. My mother had basically two or three dresses, Sunday’s and one for every other day. I had a few shirts and a couple of pants. Clothing was expensive, we were poor (relative to most everyone today). We had what we needed however. I don’t remember wanting for anything or desirous for what others had, nor do I remember others having anything that I did not have.

      Somewhere, somehow, we went down the wrong path.

      • Correct.

        Actually, depending on the times, you guys were doing very well. In my neck of the woods, back in the fifties, if you had a 700 sq. ft. home, that was upper-middle class. The high rollers might have had one car in a tiny one-vehicle, dirt floor garage in the back yard.

        It was like that for my Grandmother – I can still smell the grass and gasoline for the lawn mower. She herself was always perfectly presentable and smelled like leather and perfume.

        Poverty is largely as state of mind, perhaps. Today’s average negro welfare slob has it better than my grandparents did and all they can do is complain and bitch about Whitey.

        • Worse, today’s welfare slob lives in poverty and outright filth, worse than animals in a barn. When I was growing up, even folks in trailers were clean and tidy. Poverty was never an excuse for uncleanliness. If that’s a Western value, then I’m all for keeping such in whatever society we develop from here out.

  43. Our current metapolitics, both Left and “Right”, views people as merely economic units.

    We need a better way.

    • Their vision is humans as interchangeable economic units, living in little pods, stacked up on top of each other in urban areas among other “units” of all races from all over the world, obediently working and shopping and watching netflix and of course, all having the same “woke” opinions. That’s the goal.

      • The nihilism of the bugmen wants to destroy the ties of kith and kin and subject everyone to the hive. I’m no particular fan of Roosh V, but one take-away from the collection of his “national tour” videos is how much every big city in America is marked by a bland, gray similarity while the small towns of middle America still preserve noticable cultural distinctions that are nevertheless grounded on shared bedrock values. As his tour concludes (21 of 23 venues), he is visibly exhausted physically, mentally and spiritually from what he has experienced.
        For a great take on the poisonous fruit of nihilism in America today, check out Severian’s insights at Rotten Chestnuts: http://www.rottenchestnuts.com/a-tyranny-of-nihilism/

    • I like Hunter Wallace’s terms of “progressive liberals” and “conservative liberals”. It’s all neoliberal. I would favor a kind of – what to call it? – civic nationalist socialism. Something without the LARPers in red armbands and Nordic supermen.

  44. Why should our rich, upper class care about poor people in America? Capitalism has raised millions of Africans out of poverty. And why should men in America get college scholarships when Afghan girls can’t go to school? The morality of America is the morality of the left: fuck your neighbor, you’re helping the Human Race(tm).

    When the sewage systems have rotted and the mob rips them out of their homes, they will scream “but I built a well in Africa!”

  45. If we care to understand the idea of individualism in that too many put it above culture and community it tells us all we need to know about our current state. Pretty easy trap to fall into when culture and community are almost nonexistent or discouraged by the Marxist progressives.

    • That’s the thing, we have no larger community now. The homeless live in the center of town both because people who don’t live next door don’t give a rip, and also the family and close-in community (relatives, neighbors, close friends) used to take it upon themselves to either get these people help, a cloistered existence somewhere off the street, or shame some of them into straightening up and flying right.

      Theatres and arenas used to be built by communities to add to the public weal and ennoble the patrons. Corporations and individuals doing such things took it upon themselves to mimic these roles and responsibilities. Over time, such constructions often came to represent the egos of the builder and financier. It is a spectrum thing, Jerry Jones in Dallas is not 100% ignoring the larger community. But Soldier Field in Chicago and the Coliseum in Pasadena were civic projects, with no visible private egos on the marquee.

      The root of all of this is the atomization of the community into fragments. Which tells you where the solution lies. These things must always be done bottom-up, and can’t be legislated top-down. The gibs/don’t give a damn mentality has just been a parasite accelerating the atomization process, and the cycle needs to be broken.

      • Perhaps we don’t give a rip about the homeless because it is all so old and continuing. The answers proposed have been tried over and over again and the problem remains. One gets tired and moves on.

        I know this is harsh. But, here where I live, most of the “problem” is with males who are drug addicted or mentally unstable. The courts repeatedly have struck down any societal ability to arrest and incarcerate such individuals. It seems to be their right to live and die on the street and our responsibility to put up with it.

        In the desert areas in and surrounding my city, there are dozens of homeless camps. And God help you if one starts up close to your suburban home. You will be providing them with access to water and in severe whether, shelter. Not to mention the occasional theft of “necessities”.

        • In a real community, the relatives of those homeless people would have been shamed by the community into doing something about that son or nephew that can’t or won’t take care of himself. In a real community, the remaining homeless would not be allowed to set up shop anywhere near people’s homes, by threat of severe physical violence, ignored or aided by the local constabulary. In a real community, breaking and entering, under these circumstances, would be met with a quick and justifiable homicide. We don’t have many real communities anymore.

          • For as much as I laud Whites for empathy and trash the Asians for lack thereof, functionally the Asian shame-culture results in fewer elderly & disabled Asians being warehoused, more living with family who care for them than in White culture which relies on feelz alone.

            By forgetting the face of shame we have forgetten the faces of our fathers & mothers.

          • how will these homeless locusts’ “family” shame the community being devoured (by the locusts) when they are all from out of state?

            I say relocate all the homeless to Puerto Rico and let them eat FEMA left-overs.

            Oh, love the person bow-hunting them in SF.

          • Dutch, I completely agree with your take on the erosion of community; but the problem of homelessness in CA is not a homegrown one. Statistically, we have 25%+ of the entire nation’s welfare caseload. If you are going to be poor, lazy and ignorant, why not do it in sunny California? Anecdotally, my northern CA city is a destination for homeless drifters who’ve learned that they can get cheap tar heroin here and free food practically 24/7 from a local mega-church that blithely believes it’s doing God’s will. Our reputation for charity is so widespread that more than one state prison provides newly paroled felons with a bus ticket to our city. These scum are the undeserving poor, the drugged and thieving rabble that need to be driven out into the wilderness to suffer a Darwinian pruning.

          • A real (unpozzed) community would block the bus loads from coming in, and buy lots of one-way bus tickets out for the undesirables. A real community would keep cheap tar heroin and free food away from the menu choices of the transients.

            Of course, a pozzed community gives you all the rot along with a community consensus on doing all this stuff. Which is why I usually preface “community” with “real”. The pozzed community is a simulacrum of a real community, but missing many essential elements of a real community. Which is why a lot of people fail to understand the power and importance of establishing “real” communities, that clearly reject the elements of the pozzed community that poison the well.

  46. America is like the middle-aged fat wife who sits up in bed all morning in her dressing gown eating chocolate bonbons and reading her Harlequin romance. Sooner or later she’ll sicken and die a miserable death.

    • Sooner or later she’ll sicken and die a miserable death.

      Sooner or later we all do. And that includes nations, culture and all.

      • Speak for yourself, CB. I plan to live fast, die young and leave an unidentifiable corpse.

        Ok, so I’m not young anymore. Not that fast anymore (‘cept when I ski). Still think I can manage the third part.

    • Heh, I remember a riff from some comedian comparing the US to Elvis; came out of nowhere, took the world by storm, had a resurgence, died fat on the toilet…

  47. I once had a Gen X guy tell me: “the guy with the most toys at the end wins.” He also billed himself as a sort of Buddhist, believe it or not, and lectured people on the advantages of a brown rice diet etc.– when not helping run a particularly rapacious ad agency. To me, he epitomizes what this article is talking about — someone dedicated to the meaningless pursuit of “things” — who is also desperate at some subconscious level to find some spiritual value in his life. It is increasingly obvious that we must choose between short-term material goods (cheap I phones, etc. )and cultural freedom. Brexit, open borders, all the crap, most of it boils down to that basic choice. But we do have the choice and we can spread the word — albeit very, very slowly.

  48. To members of the “greatest generation” who were adults in the 30’s, I give very little credit. The 20’s were prosperous times, when the inevitable recession hit, they threw it and their freedom away for leftist class envy and FDR’s nonsense promises. The Great Depression was entirely self-inflicted BECAUSE they embraced socialism (if not full-blown communism). The rot had started back then.

    • I’m curious.

      Do you make a distinction between leftist socialism and rightist socialism?

      I ask because over the past few years I’ve learned of, and begun studying, Germany’s remarkable rise out of the Depression after uncle lampshade’s gang of merry misfits were voted into office in 1933. Their economic policies shouldn’t have worked according to the “experts” but they worked really well.

      I now make a distinction between types of socialism. What do you think?

      • There is a lot of debate, most in the negative, as to whether or not uncle lampshade’s economic policies really worked. Recall they were only in power 6 years before the war. They immediately imposed very harsh rationing right at the beginning of the war. You might want to check out a book called Into the Darkness by Lothrop Stoddard, who as a fan. It’s called into the darkness because at night, no light could be visible. No street lights, dark curtains, no stop lights, nothing.

        Given the very short period uncle lampshades was in power before the war, I think it is very much an open question as to if Germany would have slid back into depression without the war. Let us not forget that they brought utter ruin to Germany and teamed up with non-whites to make war on white people.

        IMHO, the only reason people care about Nazis today is because the Jews.

        • A nationalist and truly conservative version of socialism seems like a valid alternative to capitalism given what globalism has brought, to me at least. Maybe I watched too much season 2 MITHC though.

          Nation over markets. America first and foremost. That kind of thing.

          Needs a better name than NSism though.

          • The abuse of social programs in the US makes so many whites think these things are bad in and of themselves. It really is annoying to be in the supermarket spending your hard earned money while Tanisha with her 5 illegitimate kids in tow whipping out the foodstamps to pay for a bunch of junk-food. They are seen as wealth transfer vehicles from whites to diversity.

            Now the Indians are getting in on the gibs with their usual fraud and dishonesty.

            People in Europe had no problem with this type of thing because they never had to put up with this kind of stuff. They weren’t paying for the sloth lifestyles of people who hate them.

      • Their economic policies shouldn’t have worked according to the “experts” but they worked really well.

        They ran a massive deficit. They’d have experienced a sovereign bankruptcy if they hadn’t happened to stumble across some under-utilized gold reserves lying around their neighbors’ basements.

    • As I’ve gotten over Libertardianism, I’ve come to view certain things FDR did as very positive and worthwhile.

      Specifically, the CCC and WPA built structures that still benefit us 80+ years later, while giving young men a sense of purpose and cohesion.

      This is one example of seeing people as people and not interchangeable economic units.

      • Having actual jobs would have also given them a sense of purpose without binding them to the state. But FDR spent the 30s systematically destroying the economy while erecting the welfare state we have now instead of families.

      • It’s called “alignment of interests”. Good things can be accomplished by arguably less-than-good methods and it all works out fine in the long run. The wealthy and the government used to have a much greater fealty to the alignment of interests with the middle class than they do today. Big government/small government is a separate argument from the practical results.

        The alignment of interests between Mussolini and the Italians made the trains run on time.

      • “This is one example of seeing people as people and not interchangeable economic units.”

        Can you explain?

      • Problem is the courts have pretty much killed this type of workfare. 30’s for all its faults was a different country. People only wanted a job. If they were talking about rights, it was only the right to make a living and have a job.

        Today? Well not so much. You have right to the sweat and toil of your neighbor, i.e., welfare in its many forms. Your only responsibility…well nothing I guess. 🙁

        • Part of the problem is that the modern economy is far more efficient and that efficiency destroys jobs. The arch example, Craigslist nuking newspapers but there are plenty more.

          The Internet means it almost impossible even for popular bands to make money off selling music which is something that many people could do into the 90’s

          In the broader picture by FDR’s era less than half of people lived in rural areas.

          The UDSA notes this

          In 1900, just under 40 percent of the total US population lived on farms, and 60 percent lived in rural areas. Today (2016 edit) , the respective figures are only about 1 percent and 20 percent.

          This decline really took off in 1940 which is partially FDR’s policies but also part of the improvement in manufacturing and a shift to manufacturing economy.

          Now post industrial and with easy shipping and outsourcing that we need many less people to do actual useful work so in order to keep the system up we create junk jobs and put people on the dole. 40% of the damned GDP is now government and its nowhere near the upper bound (my guess here) of 60-70%

          This problem is greatly exacerbated by automation and efficiency.

          Every time say your favorite eatery saves a few bucks on wages putting in a kiosk means that the guy that would be well integrated into the capitalist economy now isn’t so much.

          The smart thing to do since our society is incapable of self correction would have been to allow a healthy population decline , a few decades at below replacement fertility would make labor and jobs meet in the middle.

          Of course The Chamber of Commerce, Money Junkies , The Democrats , Big Church (worse offenders Catholics, Lutherans, LDS) and so one would rather destroy the US than allow this to happen as they can’t adjust to a healthy rational population decline.

          In the end if the Dissident Right takes real power and repatriates lots of people , this will only buy time.

          They will probably have to cram down a lot more mandatory holidays, blue laws a smaller work week, closed borders and a whole lot of populist and illiberal economic rules if they want people, especially a population that will probably be more urban (safer, more free cities mean more people want to live there) , to have kids.

          If we allow the Libertarians, Muh Liberty Types and Economic Liberals to infest our movement or allow the idiots who can’t understand that no economic policy from a hundred years ago fits an automated world to interfere, nothing will be done.

          Even worse it may not even work as the US went below replacement during the great depression without abortion, birth control or easy divorce.

          I guess if we manage a Dissident Right society and we can’t get large families do to cities and the work , we can at least allow the population to decline. A homogeneous US with closed borders and a shrinking more moral population would be fine and will right itself in time, once acceptable paying work and population meet.

    • Back in the olden days when i was a reliable consevative and believed all the fables of Buckley and Friedman I shared your hostilty to FDR and his programs. But now I understand that outside the extremes like Maoist communism and unfettered, sell your daughter into prostitution Capitalism, the system isnt as important as the demographics. For instance, what FDR style program have the Nordics, pre- diversity, not been able to make work reasonably well (and been pretty darn happy with the more egalitarian societies they built)?

    • Blame the rape victim mentality is alive and well I see.

      You know back then, the average American lived in small towns or did subsistence farming, IOW they worked their asses off, No safety net, no nothing for many. When the GD hit it was of no fault of their own. They just got by one day at a time.

      The urban factory worker didn’t have it much better.

      Neither group had political clout just like it is today.

      And BTW both Communism and Nazism were seen as valid alternatives to capitalism during the GD. Though Communism was never popular among the working class, it was always popular among the college educated whites and even more-so among intellectuals. Basically the same class that the DR is trying to appeal to.

      As for FDR he made a lof bad mistakes – but hindsight is always perfect and you know that. He did a few things right like Social Security, WPA and CCC to help keep unemployed busy in useful work. The thing is FDR was always terrified of another Kingfisher showing up and leveraging that mass of pissed off unemployed whites into a army to overthrow D.C.

    • “The 20’s were prosperous times, when the inevitable recession hit, they threw it and their freedom away..”

      I dunno Drake. I think most folks didn’t live the Great Gatsby or Hearst lifestyle. Most folks that relocated to the urban areas got a mean but slightly livable wage existence during the “roaring 20s”. For my kin the 20s meant they could buy one whole bolt of fabric to make dresses for all the girls in the family and the roof was tar papered. The Depression meant flour sack dresses and caulking an abandoned rail car for shelter. Dirt poor to third-world poor for them.

      I’m always leery of condemning generations of the past. The loathsome George R.R. Martin does have a succinct phrase for the peasants in his books. “The small folks.” It’s fitting. No power, no vision, no autonomy and cast about forces greater than themselves.

      My people were crackers and Appalachians. Always distrustful of “the Federals” but war jobs were money, the Gov’ men passed out goodies like fools and they took em up on it, and well I guess those Nazis and Japs need fighting b’for they come o’er here and get all rapine and whatnot.

      We can blame the 19th Century folks for not seeing that war technology exceeded tactics and slaughtering Ourselves wholesale. The dawn of the 20th century generations for allowing France to guarantee a redux of Great War. The Greatests for opening the immigration flood gates and the Boomers for .materialism and Apathy. Pretty sure we’ll reap the scorn for encouraging decadence and cowardice in the face of deranged social engineers.

    • They were infinitely better than their children and grandchildren. Decent and tough as nails,modern people are rubbish. Watch an old movie

  49. It is worth noting that the current generations in control and ascendance, the Millenials and Gen Zers, both seem to eschew the drive to buy more stuff. Of course their urge to “have experiences” and Instagram them concurrently is just as damaging, as anyone who has discovered a that a favorite outdoor secret spot is covered up by morons taking pictures of themselves.

    Its all so tiresome.

    • Prosperity = Weakness, decadence, and ultimately collapse. Same as it ever was. What will the “Soi-Boy Generations” be given “credit” for?

      • Can a civilization be prosperous and not degenerate? I hope so, but I do have an affinity for the Spartan existence.

        Must we renounce prosperity?

        • That probably depends on your definition of prosperity. People with a place to live along with food and shelter can probably be called prosperous at least in most respects.

          • Studies show that after basic food, clothing and shelter have been obtained, anything above that does not make people happier. One study put the amount at about $70K per year for a standard US household. No one believes that though. It seems to be hardwired into our bones that more stuff will make us happier.

          • I believe them. Having a bunch of Walmart junk is not going to improve your life. Not to mention we have to throw so much of it in the trash because of how poorly it is made. Nothing lasts anymore.

          • Agreed. Stuff is so poorly made it cannot be repaired anymore. Unreal. Iv’e stopped buying China one trash can at a time. Buy American. Remember how we pushed that meme? If I can’t afford something that is made right, built anywhere but China, I probably don’t really need it. Working hard for your food, clothes, shelter, and, (used to be able to say), private property, is all you need to be happy. More than that and it becomes strife ridden. We have been so busy in the Cash Cuisinart of keeping up with the Jones’, we forgot to take time for culture. Too busy showing off huh?

          • The problem, at least for many of us, is that we don’t want stuff. My family doesn’t. We want land, and privacy, and the ability to learn and acquire new skills and become more self sufficient and anti-fragile. That all takes money – a good deal more than 70k a year.

          • I’d love to have more land – and privacy. Not sure if this dynamic applies across the entire country – but here in New England property taxes make it very expensive to have large areas of land unless you can designate the land as a farm (means you have to work it) or in some of the northern states you can designate land for timber growing.

            Just having a large plot of land however – quickly makes your property tax bill unbearable without having a pretty significant paycheck coming in.

            And the better portion of most town budgets – goes to the schooling system. So if you’re looking to have privacy , and don’t want your kids indoctrinated in the latest whims of globohomo, you’re doubly screwed because you’re going to pay thru the nose for having that land in your name – and you’re STILL going to pay even if you don’t put your kids into the local public schools.

            The lefties have essentially locked you into the system – or at the very least have locked you into paying for it.

            God help you if you try to make an argument about not having property taxes or drastically reducing them – you’ll get all manner of lefties and righty cucks screaming about how you want to raise stupid kids, you don’t like roads – and you want the whole town to burn down.

            Last night on one of the locally produced item of interest shows – they had a segment about a massive arson spree that Boston had back in the early 80’s. This was shortly after a thing called Proposition 2 1/2 had passed (Prop 2 1/2 limited property tax increases to 2.5 % a year). And the news story made a point of talking about how firefighters had been laid off – and how all the usual statists were screaming their heads off about how they were being reduced to only RAISING property taxes by 2.5% a year.

            What the arson spree turned out to be – was a number of police and fire who decided they needed to show the public how much they were needed – by burning down something like 300 buildings – sometimes as many as 7 in one night.

            So either pay more property taxes plebe – or we’ll burn your building down.

            Signed

            Government Employees

        • The more spartan Spartans did, after all, defeat the more prosperous Athenians. Mandatory military service? Was it helpful to force the Boy Scouts to admit girls? Is it cruel to walk a mile to school instead of taking the school bus?

        • Renounce excess not prosperity. Our corporate run society celebrates excess – materialistic gluttony if you will along with greed and jealousy are considered virtues.

        • LOL.

          Go ahead and try that – and see how far it gets you.

          Why not start with having a conversation with the average American about how we should get rid of the Fed – and go back to “honest” money , so we’re not financing all of the wars and the “prosperity” with debt and Judenbucks.

          Then follow that up with a conversation about how we shouldn’t be financing all of the levels of government welfare – with deficit spending.

          I don’t think we’d be anywhere near as prosperous – if we simply went back to having to pay for things instead of relying on debt.

          Martin Armstrong has written extensively about how empires degrade their money over time – so that the elites can keep spending to keep themselve in power. In the past – they’d dilute the gold and silver content of their money. These days they can just degrade the value of money with a keyboard.

          The effect is still the same.

          And the impetus behind doing it – is still the same.

          Simple honesty would stop a lot of this in it’s tracks.

        • No. But to have both you must have a moral leadership that is opposed to degeneracy and has the power to fight it.

          China does so they might manage to become rich and powerful and manage the degeneracy.

          Even ignoring the inverse morality of our Baizuo, the US has a strong Libertarian and grifter spirit and it may literally be no longer possible to have prosperity and morality since no one trusts one another or is capable of the moral control self or otherwise required.

          Take for example architecture. If I told most Americans that the government should ban foreign architects ,all brutalist and modernist forms and in some areas require certain types on a national level, they’d freak.

          However if you don’t do this, degenerates and grifters will get into that system and wreck it. Just as they did.

          we don’t have a good way to allocate power, to know where it properly goes and no real sense of a nation, other than an artificial post WW2 bubble and as such can’t force change.

          One people, one nation, one idea. E Pluribus Unum can go suck an egg.

          If we are able to or willing to set rules, sometimes harsh and unpleasant ones and ensure they are followed with consequences for not doing so , we can stay prosperous .

          Otherwise the same lack of order than fills our streets with excrement will impoverish us and only breaking away can result in better health.

          And trust me, the system won’t let go easy, loss of status and loss of money means they have to face consequences and for that lot, nothing short of the fires of hell is worse than that.

      • Carl B.,

        Perhaps the depredations and impediments increasingly heaped upon young white males will be the catalyst breaking the prosperity/weakness/decadence/collapse slide. Those Millenials and Gen Z youths that don’t become incels or sociopaths that is.

        I also wonder if the blame heaped upon the Boomers will also be visited upon Gen X parents like myself by our progeny? “Dad, why weren’t you in constant combat against the anti-male feminists, the anti-white progressives, the perverts in entertainment, the poisonous academics, the foreign hordes jumping the border, and the treacly God-forsaken clerics?” Where is my birthright country, Dad?”

        I guess I’ll use the same excuses Boomers use. I was living and figuring things out. I did my best to tell you about the right path even when I didn’t follow it myself. I kept you in schools and organizations that insulated you from the cultural rot as best I could.

        I don’t know how that excuse is going to fly. God will forgive us but our children and grandchildren may not. If they build something from the sh*tshow we’ve passed on to them and chose to damn us for their stuggle… then I’ll rest a little easier in the ground despite the damnation and scorn.

    • my niece sort of has this travel bug and she proceeds to get and stay hammered for the duration of the trip. the selfie is a foregone result

      • Travelling is fun… but compulsive “travelling” (doing drugs and having unprotected sex in hostels) is just stupid…

        They say travelling makes people less racist. Well, after visiting Europe I became far more racist, in fact a deeply avowed racist after seeing the destruction the Negroes and Arabs were causing. It’s a testament to the massive willful blindness of whites – how can any sane person NOT be racist after seeing that???

        Go visit Europe now while you can….

        • >>> Go visit Europe now while you can….<<<

          Go visit the Hudson Valley before it completely turns into Puerto Rico. Go visit Northern New Mexico while it still has some of the founding criollos living there. Visit Arizona before it becomes a cartel war zone. Visit Utah before they all marry negroids to show what good little globalists they are.

          I’m sure there’s plenty of other suggestions also.

          • “Otherwise the Hudson Valley is very nice.”

            I didn’t downvote you, but from a local, a few thoughts.

            The town of Hudson is and has long been a shithole. If you have to pass through, suggest you remain in your car.

            Kingston is a great place to observe outdoor wandering meth addicts, if that’s your thing. I think they are less evident in the colder months, perhaps they migrate to warmer climes or Seattle.

            Chester is trying to keep the “Kiryas Joel Experience” from expanding its West Bank, er, Gaza, ah, settlements within its confines.

            The Red Army had its flag of conquest, the Red Banner. They liked to arrive, plant it, then rape all the women. Small Hudson Valley towns have a flag of conquest, this time using the almighty dollar – instead of tanks and artillery to conquer. But if man-on-man PDA and the female version is your thing, New Paltz and other communities are ready, willing and able to cater to your every desire.

            Tarrytown? That’s just part of what used to remain within the boundaries of “Yonkers”.

            If you want to see natural beauty in New York, keep going north until you bump into the border of our Communist neighbor to the north – Canada. Stop, remain within 10 miles of said border. Look around, meet the people. Nice people, awesome country. DO THAT before the crooked rulers of the State ruin it all.

            Forget the Hudson Valley, it’s over.

          • I’m in brooklyn, the furthest north I can get lately is Bear Mountain.
            When I was young I would bicycle-camp all the way up to Sacandaga lake. Used to go to Mt Tremper and points west too.

          • HomerB
            I lived in the Beacon\ Fishkill area for five years in 90s right after IBM laid off thousands. Got a one bedroom co-op apartment for $10k. How are things looking in Dutchess County?

          • Huh. I was unaware of this Kiryas Joel of which you speak. Let’s see what Wikipedia (yes, yes) has to say.

            The [Satmar Hasidic] village abides by strict Jewish customs [… As of the 2000 census] the racial makeup of the village was 99.02% White, 0.21% African American, 0.02% Asian, 0.12% from other races, and 0.63% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.93% of the population.

            Gosh, but it sounds to me like monocultural Kiryas Joel desperately needs some diversity and vibrancy. Perhaps it needs some taxpayer funded “public housing” to facilitate that. And a few thousand Somalis and “Syrian refugees” to occupy that public housing. Plus it would only be fair if the condominium buildings that the Hasids are putting up for their own people set aside, say, 20% of the units for diversity purposes. Surely there are lawsuits, many many lawsuits, that could be filed toward the noble goal of enriching and diversifying their community.

            Any thoughts about ganders, gooses (sic) and sauce are purely coincidental.

          • Insofar as it makes sense to “work within the system” at all anymore, this kind of lawfare is where it’s at. What should the “agenda” of the DR be? Well, we probably can’t have our ethno-state before the country goes Road Warrior but how about a simple agenda for right now – hurt the elite, hurt the people who did this to us. Using their own weapons against them adds to the hilarity. I can even think of a good dog-whistle slogan along the line of MAGA – “make the bastards pay!” – MBP!

          • “During the 2000 Senate campaign, first lady Hillary Clinton visited Rabbi Twersky and his wife in New Square while running for the U.S. Senate and received nearly 100 percent of the local vote. Twersky was invited to the White House in December 2000 and secured commutations for the criminal sentences of four Skver hasidim, who had been convicted of defrauding the government of more than 30 million dollars to benefit the educational institutions of New Square.”

            Well, that there citation is from that amazing information source, ‘we need your coffee money’ Wiki-propaganda-media. But they do put it right out there, how the ‘system’ works and for whom and by whom.

            Dutchess Country, like nearby Putnam and Westchester = massive taxes. In fact, even the glorious Upstate NY region I speak to – is burdened by super high taxes, for the home one buys. Look up some of those $75,000 houses upstate – and marvel at the $8 grand a year in taxes – only going up, up, up as those terrible rich people leave, and more $$ is needed for that Newsom-of-the-East, 2nd generation ruler around here – voted AGAINST by 65 out of 72 NY counties last guber election – Cuomo.

            I have plenty of ex-IBMers as friends. IIRC, the local governments had the local gun shops closed on days when they announced the latest giant IBM layoffs. Not to worry, Chinese Lenovo bought their Thinkpad® and other computer lines – AND there are lots of bargain-priced foreigners that can code.

            Brings me to a recent anecdote. Was invited to play some tennis at the home of a local Indian-born, affluent 40 year old guy – friend of a friend – all in tech. The guy just dropped big bucks having a tennis court put in – to go with his huge house. Two Indian guys, me and my other American buddy. We get done, and these humorless, affluent Indians, with their expensive crossovers … are chatting about their kids. Sons. I ask a simple question: “Are you letting your wives raise your sons?” They both look at one another, nod. We guys talk a bit more, gets to some of the things I did with my sons. Alpha, richer guy Indian says, “that sound like what they call toxic masculinity…”

            I look at not American nouveau riche guy, and since I had mentioned that two of my sons are volunteer firefighters … said, “well, if your house was burning down and your kids and woman were in there, you’d be damn glad some of that toxic masculinity showed up to save their asses.”

            No response by the otherwise humorless, dry guy. Me and buddy head to cars, he, an IT, successful gamma of the harmless, means well variety says, “we gotta play with these guys again…” Me, I say nada … never setting foot there again. Just hope the kiddies don’t play with matches when they try on mommy’s bra and panties.

            Living as I do in the Occupied Territory of NY, my business and other dealings bring me in contact with elites of all stripes. And I can skin suit easily, because of my appearance, and manners – so the ‘men’ that cannot open the hoods of their own expensive cars … do not know they are dealing with a guy that is not their own, er, ‘speed’.

          • The 2 big cities have been enriched, and the small cities are full of marijuana dispensaries. Despite this, the Plains States are where it’s at, IMHO

        • Dindus, Hindus & Abus stand out in Norway like bloodstains on a white linen tablecloth.

          It’s visually jarring to scan a tram-crowd full of vikings & tall, willowy blonde 6+’s*, then spot a hijab’d koala-lump-urian or a beak-nosed Turk, much less a coal-black bulbhead.

          * fugs are very uncommon here, and I live in SoCal for comparison

          • “SoCal for comparison”

            Heh. I flew in and out of LAX a few weeks ago, and texted the following to my sweetheart as they were buttoning up the plane:

            Oh, getting through “security” was a freak show. The stereotype of LA being full of gorgeous but stupid people is false. It was ugly stupid people.

          • LAX is basically Ingle-hood + all of our transiting vibrants. Not even fair to a sh*thole like LA to be judged by that crowd.

          • “Not even fair to a sh*thole like LA to be judged by that crowd.”

            Well, fair enough. Last summer, having an hour to kill before an evening flight (and no constructive ideas left after two long days of meetings), I drove up to Venice Beach, and sure enough, the most incredibly beautiful “California Girl” straight out of central casting — a vision of slender, long-limbed athleticism, tanned gold, with sun-bleached blonde curls tumbling to mid back — rode by on her beach cruiser bicycle. So that memory partially balances out the Squatemalans, meth heads, and huge black women with 50+ inch bottoms going through TSA on my last trip. But only partially, and not enough. On the plus side, at least my seat mate this time was a normal-sized woman without unpleasant body odor. The prior trip I uncharacteristically coughed up the $95 for “even more space” and ended up next to an overweight man who absolutely reeked of spoilt ghee. By the time we landed I also smelt of rancid butter, thanks to his fat arm continually straying into my space — and onto me. This was doubleplus extra not good seeing as it was a redeye flight and I had to go straight to the office on arrival.

            Oh, here is some commentary on “LA” by my favorite fictional Canucks:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Elj3tfMA4

          • I’m a Norwegian Air fan now – the only diversity I had on the whole flight here were a couple of well-mannered well-groomed Asian fams. Quite a few Asians here, FWIW, chatted up a Korean waitress last week w/family in HelLA, helped me with some of my still infantile Norsk vocabularly. Fellow Ice People don’t trigger me like Sun People up here.

          • Trust me, that was my first thought. Just trying to maintain our customary high-toned conservatism around these parts. Tea pinkies up, y’all.

          • Well yeah, leave it to me to bring the conversation straight down into the gutter. On the other hand accuracy and precision of language is important as well.

          • No, not too late to visit Cape Town, just that you have to bring your own water supply. Pretend you are camping. 😉

        • Europe is becoming a museum; the legacy culture remains for now but the caretakers are replacements. Tourists pass through, visiting the buildings erected centuries ago. It’s like going to a Disney park: representations of a bygone era or fantasy but not the current reality.

          • Steyn called the shot & pocket on that 10 years ago. A future where a few token English concierges and corporate spokesmen are all that’s left of British Empire.

            I’ve discussed with Our Guys here the idea that America might need to be the “Ark” for Whitey someday. Thankfully they’re not ready to give up on Europe, because we have a long way to go to build that Ark over here yet.

    • I’ve seen extremes both ways with the youngsters. Some willing to live in shoe-box apartments to get the “urban experience”. I’ve also had interns who drive nicer cars than me – leased or financed with 5+ years loans versus mine I bought with cash.

      • No chit! And I don’t know what to make of it! I am following a young man on OyTube who fascinates me. He looks and sounds like a soyboy. His schtick is that he bikes across the continent in the summer on a fat bike – a mountain bike with ludicrously fat tires. He literally will ride from Alaska down to the lower 48 and tool around there – living outdoors the entire time, carrying only what he can on the bike. In winter he literally lives in a minivan, kitted out with solar and diesel heating. He works in the winter to finance his biking and hiking in the summer.
        I don’t know if I should admire him for having the stones to live like that, flipping the bird at consumerism as he does… or be contemptuous of his unwillingness to accept and embrace the responsibilities of starting a family.
        The way things are going I lean toward the former rather than the latter…

          • >>> Historically, 50% of men have no offspring: they’re genetic throwaways<<<

            Or a huge source of potential converts

          • Exactly. A lot of those “throwaways” and “extremes” are just taking what they see as the best option. If I knew in my 20’s what I know of where my dating life would lead, I would have made some serious changes much earlier. It’s been fun but there was no future in it.

        • John these tubers are not anti-consumerism. They simply consume a different source of things to fuel their wants.

          Would he quietly and anonymously embrace a hand-to-mouth spartan life if nobody was watching?

          These live in the now types tickle the fancy of escapism but they will not escape an unplanned future.

          The idea of living with less stuff is not a bad one, but I know several of these people, some 20 years later when they have no savings, no career, questionable social skills, sparse real life connections, but all kinds of wants and needs, and it is not so glamourous.

          Just because the things of the young exist in the cloud does not mean they are not things, with actual costs of acquisition and maintenance, existential weight, trade-offs of opportunity that show up one day for payment, disposability, and the swollen synapses firing for moar dopamine.

          As mentioned before, even their travel – their “experience” is not about the joys of that place and time, but one of consumption and production of material to be consumed (poasting selfies) in a costco of ego.

          I’ve stood on the shores of unpaintable beauty and observed these bugs crawling all over each other and the landscape to make the photo while actual experience passes them by in its entirety.

          Reminds me of my boomer hoarder mother who would rather sit among the piles of a lifetime of things than to enjoy the simple moments with her grandkids.

          Same illness, different manifestation.

          • What a great post, ST.

            I dunno about my guy on OyTube. He is definitely a marginal character, or at least, his Tube personality is. And yes, I can see his future being one of poverty quite easily. My daughter is pissing away her youth the same way and it drives me nuts.

            In my life I have tried to split the difference between boomer consumerism and the live-for-the-moment X’ers and Millennials. I still ended up with a house full of crap that I should sell and de-clutter… but like your Mom, I can’t seem to bring myself to do it. My boomer parents and older brother are 10 times worse than I am. I drive them nuts the same way my daughter drives me bonkers. They think I should be running new RV’s and have a lavishly appointed house like they do, and sell my soul for it the way they did. Unfortunately I never caught the boomer gravy train with the cushy union civil servant jobs and gold plated pensions so I have to be careful with my money. I have no debts, and while I am not rich – I do have savings and thank God I’m free. Or as free as I can be.

            I am predicting our feckless millennials may have the right of it though. Our financial systems are on the brink of collapse, they HAVE to fail. When that happens everyone is going to take a hit – and the debt free millennial may be better off for it. I am stacking metals (including brass and lead) and keeping a large portion of my savings out of the banks. Something stupid this way comes, and who knows who will pay for it and who will skate. I learned finances from my depression era grandmother and I will stake my money on her teachings rather than that of the boomers, X’ers or millennials.

    • It makes me cringe to see it. And it is everywhere. A simple dinner out reveals an acceleration toward something that is getting more difficult to imagine.

      The more time and space I spend away from that culture, the more of an affront it is when I have to step into it for a moment.

      There is a gauche ugliness to it; the clumsy theatrics of their public personas like so many B actors in an overproduced novella.

      They can’t hide the panic, their anxiety, the constant spiritual grasping at straws and signaling of the hip-cool-woke. No wonder they are on pills.

      The Zed and Mill gens are not as much eschewing the drive to buy more stuff, but rather the drive to sit atop the stuff. Because the social depreciation is so rapid that accumulation is not worth the effort.

      For them, the speed at which the stuff translates to status is much greater than ever before. But this cuts both ways. The whole charade is at light speed. You are only as good as your last post.

      But there is also the point that they are not ‘settling down’, which is to say building careers, getting married, and making babies in the same way as before.

      They are rootless, transient, highly mobile, and atomized. Adulthood is boring and thus will have to wait until ‘someday, not soon’ (Kids?) which has been the favorite line of women’s online dating profiles for quite some time now. Even well into their 30’s.

      Those are all sold as benefits in our ‘gig economy’. Gotta stay nimble. And if you have stuff, you need to monetize it.

      This all makes that digital ether that much more appealing to them.

      They don’t get photographs developed and frame them on their walls; they post them and wait eagerly to get paid.

      • Screwtape,

        Nothing to add except a note of appreciation. Particularly good posts today, Sir. Good observations.

      • You should compile your commentary, ST. I’m serious. Throw it into a random blog of yours at the very least. I’d be a reg’lar reader.

      • Good points. Everything is switching to a rental rather than ownership model. Like most consumer traps, it looks like progress – you can enjoy great stuff & services for very cheap, but the hook is that you own nothing. As Z has pointed out before, you feel the hook only when your refrigerator or your car flashes “access denied” because you’ve been caught sh*tposting on GAB or you “punched down” at work.

    • Although there is more “stuff”, much of the stuff is not of substantive functional difference from previous “stuff”. Case in point, currently I’m replacing my light switches in the home with “smart” switches. Basically, the old, “dumb”, switches would continue to work for another 20 years—but I’m bored and needed a project.

      The interesting part is finding a solution that allows the old tried and true manual operation to remain, but allows some benefit of communication among the switches. Having to access your cell phone to type on/off commands or yelling “Electra, turn of my lights” is ridiculous.

      Perhaps our newer generations (those not weaned on Star Trek episodes) are figuring this out as well?

      • Can anyone explain to me why on God’s green earth I would need or want an internet-connected refrigerator?

          • BTW, first thing I saw after setting up my new mesh wireless network was my damn LG refrigerator wanting to “join”. WTF? I had this fridge for damn near 10 years and never knew it was “smart”.

        • >>>Can anyone explain to me why on God’s green earth I would need or want an internet-connected refrigerator?<<<

          Shut up and eat your maggots, goy

        • The real reason is so BigTech can track your eating habits and sell that info to other companies like the one you get your health insurance from and who then will have a reason to jack your rates up or cancel your policy.

          The same applies to NEST and similar hi-tech gizmos. Amazon is positioned with it’s line of big brother products to not only know what your likes and dislikes are, who your friends and what you guys talk about, to what you eat and where you drive to and visit with.

          This is a governments wet dream – Orwell on Steroids and you can understand why the Feds are quite happy to get into bed with Google and Amazon.

      • Plus, you get people you don’t know monitoring your house through your smart devices and using them as nodes in botnets. Exciting!

        • I am gobsmacked by this willful blindness to the surrender of privacy. I have a genX friend who is race realist and probably politically aligned with Our Thing; but he insists on bragging about acquiring his illegal (in Mexifornia) .50 cal rifle within earshot of Alexa. I made the conscious decision to keep him in the dark about the depth of my commitment to DR until I can convince him that Amazon tech is not as cool as he believes.

          • I’m still at a loss to explain how these devices actually improve one’s quality of life. The tasks they accomplish are so simple that avoiding them seems to plumb the very depths of sloth.

          • You can show off your tech BS knowledge to your other techie friends. Status signaling.

            I remembered about twenty years ago on vacation with the brother-in-law (big techie type). He had one of the first GPS car navigation systems, which at that time needed to connect to his laptop in the car.

            Damn thing never worked right. First gas station, I bought a standard road map. From then on the trip went a lot faster, since we never pulled over for him to make the software work. I’d just pass him, and he’d have to follow me.

          • Actually, that’s something we do need to stock up on – lots and lots of paper maps of everywhere. We’ve never relied upon GPS and I don’t plan to in the future, either.

          • 3g4me,

            Yes, do. They are becoming harder to find. Wife and I were often out of cell range while traveling through the Ozarks, parts of desolate Texas and New Mexico high desert. At one point I had enough of Google maps having mental meltdowns and popped into a gas station for a map. Two gas stations, three convenient stores and an auto parts store later I found some at a truckers gas station. If I had one more pimply millennial clerk ask me why I didn’t just use my cell phone maps.. I, well, nevermimd.

          • The harder-core preppers point out that paper books could be vital in a major collapse scenario, maps too. A lot of us into camping have hard-copy maps but if I lose power for long, all my books are going to be gone. Good thing I have a decent memory, but much will still be lost.

            The ultimate anti-fragility is an oral tradition like the Balkan bards who science says reflect Homeric tradition even today – also the ancient Celts & Germans. “Book of Eli” for all its cheessiness & negrolatry showed how to beat both fractured power grids and loss of languages amid a hard collapse.

    • Said Millenials will be ‘buying less stuff’ because the older generations, in their wisdom, caring and unconditional love SOLD THE FUTURES OF THEIR OFFSPRING – so they could enjoy those lofty pensions, academia jobs …. while the ELDERS compare notes about the values of their homes, portfolios.

      The luxury auto business? Once the youngins come of age, consider it dead. And similar enterprises. Old folks now getting their asses wiped by glorious PoCs? Consider them lucky – the youngins gonna euthanize grandma.

      • Homer, nonsense. Plenty of poor Boomers out there. As for the ones now ending their “reigns”, as I’ve pointed out before, the largest inter-generational transfer of wealth is now occurring. Bloomberg estimates it to be about $62T when all is done.

        You make the same mistake as many do when you compare the wealth of Millennials with Boomers—age within cohort. Millennials are in their poorest phase—as were Boomers—in their 20’s and 30’s, while Boomers are in their absolute wealthiest phase in their 60’s.

        However, it’s no great shakes being in your “wealthy 60’s” since actuarial tables give me a lot fewer years to enjoy such than I’d like. Want to trade places? 🙂

        • Well, not being a Boomer, but interacting with people of different ages and situations, via business travel – I have attended services in towns where there are lots of low income elderly. Can’t say I know all that many middle class older folks ‘transferring wealth’, no matter what Nanny Bloomberg publishes – to kids once the nursing homes get done thrashing their life savings.

          If you trade places with me, are you going to do the brake job on my wife’s truck? I have the rotors and pads already, you know how to back out the calipers, and I think one of the brake lines is about to blow, so please get the one I mark with the yellow masking tape out, flare and replace. Plus, I need some shingles pulled up around my fireplace, there is a leak coming from around the flashing that I cannot get the exact source of – did some carpentry up there when I re-roofed the place myself – looks like I have to dig in see what the issue is. I built a new hawk, but it looks like water is still getting in during windblown rain.

          I will miss the feel good I get from breaking my ass – will I get the same thing if I have to spend 8 hours in your cubicle, plus the 1:45 each way in commuter traffic?

          Jess pulling your leg. Shit, didn’t know you were a double amputee!

          • I still have some leftover clutch pack from when I rebuilt my Econoline’s automatic tranny ( i hate it when you’ve got leftover pieces and you don’t know where they go);
            Do you think they’ll fit in her truck?
            I’ll toss my 40 foot ladder on the van’s roof, if you need any help with that damn roof.

            Pleased to meet you.

        • Boomer bashing is rubbish, Boomers suffered from immigration, downsizing, outsourcing, AA, union busting etc. They manned up and did the best they could. It’s called survival and none of us modern people know what real hardship is”the black plague”?

    • Walk into any Millennial hip eatery and you might as well add an hour to your wait. They spend more time taking pics of their meal than eating it.

    • Saw a millenial idiot yesterday standing outside a crap bakery holding up a crap cake in the light to photograph it. A crap pastry, zombies!

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