The Real Supply Chain Crisis

Note: Behind the green door is a long post on the Star Trek franchise. I have been watching these off and on for a couple of years and have some thoughts on how the series evolved foreshadowing today’s events.


A popular plot in science fiction shows is that the human stars of the show discover technology from an ancient race. In trying to figure out how it works, they set off a reaction that puts them at risk. They realize they have to figure out the ancient alien technology in order to save the day. Usually, the moral of the story is that humans are infants in the universe. They may have conquered interstellar travel, but they are nowhere near ready to handle the complex stuff.

It is a popular storyline in science fiction shows because it allows the writers to cook up exotic technology without thinking about how it works. The technology can operate like magic to make the plot happen. It also lets the writers do some finger wagging at the enemies of Hollywood. The white cast members are humbled to learn that they are not at the top of the humanoid hierarchy. Mostly it is just an easy way to grind out a script for a television series like the Stargate franchise.

This concept is not without some parallels in this world. There were people in the early Middle Ages confronted with the same issue. They inherited things like aqueducts from the Romans but lacked the social capital to keep them going. The ancient Greeks assumed the Mycenean ruins were built by a race of giants. They could look at the ruins and imagine what they were at their peak, but they had no idea how they were built or who had built them. It was beyond their knowledge.

America may be entering a similar period. One of the growing complaints in the dreaded private sector is the lack of talent. The mass media notices the labor shortage in things like retail and hospitality, but the real scarcity is upstream. Finding people with the cognitive ability and work ethic to fill important roles is not easy. Often the choice is one or the other. The person has the talent but is unreliable or they are reliable but maybe a click below what the position demands.

The main driver is demographics. The Baby Boomer swan song is upon us, and it is showing up in the payroll registers of American companies. The first wave Boomers are in the prime retirement range. Covid has led many to clock out early. The second wave is in their early sixties, so they are planning to wrap things up. Generation-X is a much smaller cohort, and the Millennials are not ready for prime time. The talent – work ethic dichotomy is very obvious with Millennials.

Of course, it is with Millennials where the glories of diversity appear. They are the second least white generation. The Zoomers are mostly nonwhite. That talent – work ethic dichotomy is exacerbated by “the tax”. The cost, in terms of human capital, in hiring the younger generation is much higher, which means the talent for other things is decreased even further. Basically the private sector is facing a smart fraction problem that promises to get much worse in the near future.

This talent shortage is showing up in strange places. College football coaches are not considered super-smart guys, but it is a challenging job. They run what amounts to a mid-sized business with hundreds of employees. They also have to master the complexity of a game that has reached its peak in complexity. Here is an example of one part of a college football playbook. Finding men with the required skillset to run a college football program is becoming increasingly difficult.

The solution in sports like football is to simplify things. This is the new trend in the game to reflect the demographic reality. Instead of complex passing plays the offense just gives the ball to a fast guy and lets him run around with it. One of the top young quarterbacks in the NFL is Lamar Jackson. He scored a 13 on the Wonderlic test, which is what you would expect from a janitor. Lamar is not working a Rubik’s cube in his off hours nor is he studying a complex offensive system.

The dreaded private sector is going the same way. Automation is the way to reduce the need for talent. Using robots is one way to do this in manufacturing. Another way is software systems to atomize and control the required tasks. In the office, software is doing more of the analysis and decision making. Dispatchers, for example, are being replaced by software that routes field personnel. Those people in the field have mobile devices that fill in the blanks of their knowledge.

Part of what is driving the ruling class is the belief that technology can replace those retiring white Baby Boomers. The dream of the multicultural paradise, free of white power structures, assumes the robots will take over from the white people. No one thinks much about who is going to code, operate and maintain the AI. That is the fatal flaw in the plan. There will never be a time when the machines become self-sufficient and anything but super-racist.

The fact is, there is no escaping the ramifications of the cognitive decline. We have created a society that requires an average IQ of about 97. The distribution of smarts provided sufficient talent at each layer of society. The smart fraction was large enough to carry the rest. Now that IQ has dipped below that threshold, we are starting to see problems like the supply chain issues. This is just the beginning of a systemic collapse brought on by the lack of social capital.

That is the real supply chain crisis. Each generation is supposed to build on the next but starting in the middle of the last century this system started to break. The Baby Boomers did not create enough replacements. Worse yet, they did not train them to take up their positions. The waves of immigration have watered down the system further, creating shortages that will only get worse. Soon, Americans will be like those humans in the sci-fi shows, unable to operate ancient technology.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


328 thoughts on “The Real Supply Chain Crisis

  1. I just finished re-reading the often-recommended science fiction short story “The Marching Morons” from ca. 1950. (Public domain, freely available). It’s typical of the epoch — campy humor, whiz-bang tech (rocket travel, of course), a far-fetched plot: a real estate investor who becomes an unwitting time traveller. But the story line is worthwhile, perhaps even if you don’t like the genre. The most salient (to this essay) aspect is one plot device: Imagine a future where the elite and intelligent have effectively been enslaved by the lumpenproletariat.

  2. “They also have to master the complexity of a game that has reached its peak in complexity. Here is an example of one part of a college football playbook. Finding men with the required skillset to run a college football program…”

    How about the required “skillset” required to run an English sentence or hire a copy editor? The playbook passage you pointed to is not so much an illustration of a complex nuance of the game as of ungrammatical sludge.

    1
    1
  3. I have thought something similar about politics.

    Many people making the rules don’t understand or appreciate what got us to the standard of living. They think the economy is a golden goose that churns along intrinsically and throwing more and more sand into the gears doesn’t hurt it. You see this with mandates put on employers, and taxes on businesses, and workplace regulations. They don’t understand how or why value is ever created, they just think it will always be there for them to extract. There is no appreciation of the conditions required for economic growth, in fact there is disdain.

    This is more an observation about democrats and “progressives” but the red team acts the same way most of the time.

    And we are beginning to see the whole damn thing starting to break.

  4. Amazing as usual. One addition. The baby boomers created enough kid. But they murdered one third of Gen Z.

    10
    1
    • Boomers will be long gone and you’ll still run into the “fuck you dad!” mentality directed towards them.

      3
      5
    • Did you mean Gen X? The US total fertility rate dropped below replacement in 1972.

      So looking at the figures, Gen X had good fertility for six years (1965-1971) and than another 9 years of low fertility.

      That low TFR stayed around but only large scale immigration pushed the Gen Y and Z larger.

      Now as to the “supply chain” our host mentioned. Its already here. California is ground zero. Mass retirement and mass flight of skilled labor has made it impossible to get a lot of work done properly.

      I know a large company, name redacted that lost essentially every single engineer in the L.A. region . The company claims to be youth focused but the media age is turning into Sun City.

      This is also exacerbated by the fact that the companies steadfastly refuse to increase pay so the new standard is “want more money? jump ship” and you are considered a chump if you don’t

      That makes it nigh impossible to create institutional memory or have company wide “good practices.”

      That utter lack of encouraging loyalty means its now also common for Millennials to just ghost employers when you are done working even leaving in the middle of a project.

      Th older workers than remain are baffled by this but they really can’t do anything other than as Cappy Cap likes to say “Enjoy the Decline”

      • I have blood relatives in CA, both sides of family. Some rarely-seen, I don’t know them very well. But two are lifelong suburban DC residents whom I’d known much of my life, stereotypical liberals raised in indifferent suburban affluence, who relocated to LA area relatively late in their lives. I love them, but honestly don’t know I’ll ever visit them again. It’s worth mentioning that their now-deceased forebears had “hard science” degrees and lifelong work in demanding fields. Of the kids who got diplomas, pretty sure nothing harder than fine arts 😀 At least they’ll have a nicer climate in SoCal.

  5. Im watching my company fall apart because white women insist on cramming black women into all of our marketing and our white customers are not buying it.

    26
    • Loved the tart shaking it like a stripper working a dive bar near the AFB.

      Reminds me of what the late Bobby Unser (RIP Uncle Bobby) said in response to Janet Guthrie showing up to attempt qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 in the mid-late 1970s:

      “You know what this means? These cars are too damned easy to drive!” 😒

      One wonders how long Ms. Thang would survive in air-to-air combat.

  6. Funny, but in year 2 of running a turnaround for a division of a F-500. When I went shopping for key lieutenants to run different work streams, ended up with a bunch of 50+ folks. Only ones with the heuristics necessary to get things done quickly. Younger folks substitute quantitative modeling and assume if the model has enough inputs the answer will magically appear. It doesn’t. Then don’t have the willingness to implement hard decisions.

    13
  7. Maybe the ape historians will remember us as we remember 3 generations of Greeks:
    Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

    • I’d pick Prodicus, Anaximander, and Heraclitus.

      If thinking apes still exist they’ll remember us as we “remember” the weirder pre-Socratics: almost not at all and mostly through others’ lies. That’s how Nietzsche and Marx already inhabit our minds & philosophies—and Foucault too, who still has living disciples (betrayers, mostly) but no one seems to understand at all.

      The books are still in the stores! Even the out-of-print ones are on torrents for free. And who reads them? Not us apes—and we’re probably the best apes ever…depending how much we’ve forgotten about the Neanderthals.

  8. With regards to the “Ask Delphi” bot; the bot is accurate. You ask a question, it gives a straight response based on the script of that question and nothing else. The author has a problem with this, because the bot is too honest/unambiguous about morality.

    The author is essentially complaining that the bot doesn’t give the answer teacher wants, it keeps giving the answer that IS. And that comes perilously close to puncturing the self-image and social-image the author wishes to signal.

    “Accuracy is bad, untruth is good.” should be the author’s tagline.

      • I don’t follow every development in AI, but my recent favorite racism alarm was the AI x-ray imaging app that was trained to read x-rays so well that it predicted race of patients with a very high degree of accuracy, reportedly being able to see features invisible to human experts. Why this is “racist” I don’t know.

        Although whitewashing (sorry, bad word choice, perhaps “airbrushing” is better?) science is nothing new, it is plumbing new depths. There actually are calls in the medical profession to suppress “racist” knowledge, even when there are clear impacts on matters of health. An example would be refusal to test (or treat) sickle-cell anemia in Blacks (the primary victims) because, hey, it’s “racist!” 🙁

      • A test. Low accuracy high precision is what they desire. If you follow my logic, you’re qualified to coach.

  9. Working with millennials reminds me of sitting on my grandparent’s vinyl covered furniture from the 70’s. I just want to get the hell off and walk out of the room.

    25
    1
  10. We deserve to exist because of IQ, attractiveness, industry, and You’ve lost the plot. There is no deserve, no justification by attributes or works. “Boy! are they going to be sorry after they wipe us out!,” and F. U. and No, they won’t.

    We are family, and we choose to support family. Would you ditch a 99.9 IQ son for a tenth of a point? No. We choose to survive, to flourish, mutual continuity.

    14
    2
  11. I’m absolutely seeing all of this as a late Xer in the workplace. I probably post the most terrible opinions on here about boomers, and all their shortcomings (they have so many). One thing I’ve never gone after them for is that they actually showed up and did their jobs, some in a a driven, manic, Hillary Clinton like way (many were mercurial, narcissistic tyrants, but their knowledge was top notch). They received a better foundational education. One that allows for math and writing skills. The Xers that went to private schools in the 80’s and 90’s, also have much of this (so few of us out there) but the public school ones are about as bad as the millennials. I’ve never had re-work documents from boomers, which all decamped at once last year and I’m now spending an inordinate amount of time red-lining millennial work products. I genuinely consider their feelings, far more support than any boomer would have given me, and they still consider me to be Satan for re-working what they do, which no one should ever show to a client. One of them even tried to one-up me in front of a client. I was shocked. I said “okay, the show is yours.” After 10 minutes I bailed him out when he didn’t know what he was talking about.

    28
    • I’m one of the private school gen X’rs from the 80’s. During my 20 year career in a highly technical field, I have dealt with the Boomers above me in the hierarchy and increasingly of late, the Millennials below me. I always end up effectively running every project, whether I’m officially in charge or not. The problem is, the Boomers don’t want to pay. Most of the companies I worked for had an entire office full of Boomers sitting behind desks, of which at least half were dead weight. It got to the point where I was making perhaps 5% more than Millennials with a quarter of my skills and experience and who literally couldn’t “last mile” a project if their life depended on it.
      I’ve gone Galt. I officially semi-retired to my side gigs last year, sold my house, and live out of an RV. Bills are 10% of what they used to be and I don’t need their hamster wheel rat race anymore. My phone rings weekly with companies begging me to come shepherd projects for them but the answer is now permanently “no”.
      Galt’s Gulch isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind. I understand Rand’s metaphor completely now.

      40
      1
      • Good for you!

        I’m installing a few pads with hook ups on my farm for people such as yourself.

        The freedom of retirement was like being on a boat for the first time, but one quickly gets their sea legs.

        • I’m sorry, I just can’t do the RV. I feel like one of those players in Squid Game that actually voted to come back. I keep looking at the big piggy bank above my head. Almost there.

    • Your observations are probably skewed by selection bias (minus the hard work thing, that probably isn’t impacted). The boomers you interact with made it, the younger millennials are still being selected out of the upper echelons of corporate america. So your observation could certainly be accurate, but make sure you are thinking about the populations of each generation your interacting with.

  12. Its hard to know if people are less talented or if there isn’t as much of an incentive to use your talent. Like if Ed Sheeran was born in 1951 instead of 1991 he might probably be Christopher cross. Likewise john mayer could have been robin trower. The problem is that type of stuff doesn’t sell anymore

    10
  13. I’ve worked for over 2 decades in a very challenging technical field that requires a firm grasp of mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, electrical and electronic technologies, as well as the physics and chemistry that make them all work.

    I’m at a place now where I’m starting to train a new guy, aka “the future” for my area of expertise, so that I can move on to something more management related in my waning years.

    It is a 30something black man. He’s been to school for this, but even the most basic concepts like “quarter amplitude decay” are lost on him. Yet, it will be me who is held accountable if he fails, because we have to hold their hands.

    Wish me luck, gentlemen.

    43
    1
    • This is code for, “Don’t ever board an airliner again,” right?

      You could’ve just blinked twice or something.

      19
      • Memebro

        First rule of survival; avoid crowds.

        Second rule; avoid Joe.

        I will pray for you.

    • Quarter Amplitude Decay. That’s what happens when your amp goes to 11, instead of just making 10 the loudest. Progress loves decay. Its how you know its working!

      Good luck with the dark future.

    • I feel for you in your attempt to train a black replacement.

      I am a boomer who worked for decades in the tech industry. I couldn’t train a replacement because they felt they didn’t need training. I was just an old accomplished guy who was in their way. This was the norm. Thre is a belief sponsored by all the “gurus” in the industry that nothing in the past is relevant to the present. Knowing how things have been done, what worked, and what didn’t work makes you stuck in the past. Every day is a brand new world.

      This approach provides top management with an excuse to get rid of older more expensive employees, frees young workers from the burden of needing to apprentice and fuels a growth industry of gurus to teach wide-eyed younger workers things that are common knowledge among their older colleagues

      16
  14. I am in a capstone course for my degree program and the entire class is structured around working in randomly assigned groups. One of my group members has an obviously arab name (never seen him, all virtual) and literally can not write competent english. His work is just a mishmash of “intelligent” corporate-esque words with terrible phrasing and punctuation. He doesn’t even follow assignment guidelines. Here’s a taste:

    “Our mission is to serve by equipping world class energy efficient transports being fastest, most comfortable and innovative business in the world”

    We let him turn in a paper separately and the White professor gave him a 78% while I got an 87%. This person is about to graduate and will be competing with me for jobs. Will his skin color compensate for his lack of ability in hiring? Why should I even work at a corporation when I will have to carry these people on my back, the same way I now have to in our school group (I have to do all the work).

    This is just a micro view of the macro issue the blog post is discussing.

    50
    • My entire life, when the instructor said, “We’re going to be working groups,” I groaned and wondered whom I will be carrying.

      37
      • In the late ’90s I split from my partner Mwanza on a capstone project in a STEM course because she repeatedly failed to show up for prescheduled study/work/status review sessions.

        I doubt I could do that now.

        20
      • I am a 56 year old high school teacher (private school). I am in year 17 of my teaching career. Two years ago we had a first year teacher who was still taking some of his teacher’s-ed classes. He was actually told in his training courses that ALL viable high school assignments are to be done corporately.
        This “kid” (he was 25) would give an assignment as a sort of objective to be conquered. The theory was that once the group got some sort of magical “feel” for the objective they would spontaneously gravitate to the part of the project that matched their “unique interests and talents.” This way there was no need for a group “leader”; rather, there were only “facilitators.”
        Well, you can guess that this teacher’s one-year career at our school was a total failure. The kids only wanted to play on their cell phones, and they didn’t have enough collective brains to open a jar of pickles.
        Group projects only work if there’s one smart kid who will carry the load. And teachers need to teach; the learned leading the ignorant.
        In my mind’s eye I picture a bunch of millenials sitting around in Silicon Valley offices doing the exact sort of “group projects” that failed so utterly at my little hillbilly private school.

        27
        • I was told the same thing in my college teaching career. And the sad part is, kids these days ™ love love looooooove them some group work. Back in my high school / undergrad days I would’ve crawled over broken glass to avoid it, but the new generation craves it. So much so that I had to put it in big blinking neon font on all my syllabuses: There is no group work allowed in this class.

          [Did they listen? Of course not. How do I know? Because I always had a control group question in all my exams. I was forced to give multiple choice exams — in a history class, this is how far we’ve fallen — and so I always had one question with the most ludicrous joke answer I could think of. But because exams were also required to be online, I could randomize the answer choices for each IP address that logged into the system. Invariably a few kids ended up choosing the joke answer, and when I went back to match answers to names, it was always a group of sorority girls who sat together in every class. They weren’t smart enough to figure out that the choices were randomized, so they’d just tell each other that the answer to #5 was “D”. It was awesome].

          32
          • I had a prof. who gave multiple choice exams. Each question had so many options (e.g., a-o with ” all of the above” and “none of the above” as well as various combinations) that you really had to know the material. At the start of the semester class met in a huge lecture hall. By the end there were maybe 20 of us left.

        • Schools use group projects to benefit the weak and stupid. Public schools resort to them frequently to game performance stats and socialize their attendees to the Hive. Private schools use them sparingly to teach their better-than-average charges what to expect in the “real” world. TPTB know that the reality Zman writes about here exists. It’s why the usefulness of standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT are being denigrated to the point of rejection. The Hive can’t tolerate >1 sigma right-of-mean outliers ala A Confederacy of Dunces.

          17
          • And don’t forget;
            “Didn’t have enough collective brains to open a jar of pickles”.
            Kudos to Strike Three.
            There are always gems in a Zman comment thread.

    • If you can, work for small firms. MegaCorp will grind you into the ground and promote less competent or incompetent non-whites.

      Smaller firms either hate that shit or can’t afford it.

      32
      • Correct. When I am sizing up a potential employer, the first thing I look at is their level of diversity. If some fuggin woman or vibrant is to be my boss, I take a hard pass. Not only will you have to do your own job, you will have to cover for them and pretend to like it, and be responsible for them when they screw up. No thanks.

        21
      • One would think so. However, in some fields (software) small firms are just as full of H1s and idiot leaders as everywhere else. Possibly more so.

    • Group projects were virtually unknown when I was a student. They’ve grown in popularity over the years as part of the feminization of education, along with everything else. Women like to engage in social activity, which is why group projects are popular with them. Real innovation rarely comes from people working in groups. “Designed by committee” is a common way to characterize a poor product.

      26
      • Solutions usually come from people who see in the problem only an interesting puzzle, and whose qualifications would never satisfy a select committee. – Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail

      • born 1964. Group projects were a rarity in school, and I always assumed the purpose was to let the smart kids know just how useless the dumb kids (who didn’t get called on much anyway) really were.

    • I had the same issue doing a Computer Science Master’s a few years back. Every group project included Arabs or East Asians with little to no English skills. Chinese students were frequently unintelligible in conversation, let alone in writing, and every single written component of a project I either had to do myself or rewrite if they did it. But even worse, they frequently didn’t actually understand any of the actual computer science and relied on coasting in group projects and cheating on tests and homework.

      I would claim to have benefited more having actually learned the material, but when it came to job interviews the same kind of dishonesty is what gets these people hired since they can easily cheat by having someone else perform a programming test on their behalf.

    • I am a school teacher.

      Lunchroom: Group work is clearly the superior pedagogical approach but we just don’t have time for it.

      Me: Tell me about your experience doing group projects at uni.

      Lunchroom: It was horrific! I did nothing and the Asian girl had to carry the lot/nobody else did anything so I had to do everything.

      Me: How come everyone here had an awful experience trying it, and have no time to “do it properly” ourselves in our classes, yet remain convinced it’s the best way to teach?

      Lunchroom: shhhh mate don’t let that get out or your career progression is sunk.

      Next day: No more chalk and talk and exams, group work is clearly superior….

      • I mean this nicely…what career progression is possible as a teacher? Merit distribution of the good classrooms? My mom was a teacher and the only pay raises possible were for longevity. So unless all these teachers are gunning for Asst Principal, what’s the point of worrying about “progression.” ? In other words, I never understood why my mom worried about her annual assessments because the results were the same, regardless if she got “meets standards” or “exceeds.”

        • Hey Milestone,

          I’m writing from Australia, and I work in a private school, which means 30% of our money comes from parents and the rest is chipped in by State and Federal governments.

          The heirarchy is as follows.

          Garden variety teachers.

          Team leaders. This is a way to give a little bit of cash for an area of responsibility, and testing for willingness to do more and interest in leadership. You might be the “Camps” team leader, or P-1 team leader.

          Head. You might be Head of Primary (P-6) or Head of Middle (7-9) etc. You are def on leadership track.

          Deputy. Now you stop teaching and spend your days in meetings/talking to parents of naughty children.

          Principal. Now you run the school and answer to the board.

          We also have “Corporate” which is the entity that runs mutliple schools like ours, so if you impress them you can segue out into officework with them.

          I always recommend to other teachers to climb as far as they can. With that many layers of chaps above you making calls, they are constantly cooking up things to make the teacher at the bottom’s life difficult.

          We’re not super-underpaid like US teachers, so there is good money in climbing.

  15. The good old days of solid, self reliance have been over for a while. That essential knowledge was somehow lost between the silent generation and the boomers. Those important skills of gardening, hunting, canning, preserving are mostly lost.
    Modern society has been far too interested in seeking a life of ease, leisure, and temporary pleasure.

    23
    • A lot of people are re-learning those skills, but it remains to be seen if it’s more than a fad. Possibly cause for optimism, at any rate.

      16
      • It’s quite possible that those skills will be required for self preservation within 2-3 generations.

        We should all read Little House on the Prairie books to our kids and prepare accordingly.

        17
        1
    • A couple of years ago, my daughter’s boyfriend needed a jump start at the high school parking lot. My daughter called me and I drove over to the school to give him a jump. When I arrived, he had just finished watching a YouTube video explaining how to open the hood of his car. He was a good kid and a straight A student. At his age, I could have disassembled and reassembled the entire car. Young males appear to have zero interest in practical skills these days.

      26
      • “When I arrived, he had just finished watching a YouTube video explaining how to open the hood of his car.”

        So much for those engineers putting a lever marked “HOOD RELEASE” or a tab with a silhouette of a car with a hood up on the drivers side of the dashboard, eh? 🤦🏻‍♂️

        “He was a good kid and a straight A student. At his age, I could have disassembled and reassembled the entire car. Young males appear to have zero interest in practical skills these days.”

        Well let’s call back to a post Z put up last week. At his age given the cars at our disposal we HAD to know how to assemble and disassemble a car just to keep it running.

        We lost a lot with the virtual world replacing The Real World ™. Guys and gals don’t need to drive a car over to someone else’s house or apartment to converse with them face to face. They just Zoom or Instagram or whatever it is the younger set does these days.

        Plus the days of a $750 “Transportation Special” (Thanks Tradin’ Times!) are dead and gone. In our day a ten or fifteen year old car was destined for a teenager, a demo derby, or the car crusher (Or all three fates). Today someone is probably using their 2006 or 2011 Honda or Toyota as a daily driver. And with the cost of new cars, LOATHE to give it up.

        So kids don’t know the difference between a slotted or Phillips Head screwdriver 🪛🤔. Nor do they want to.

        15
        • When I was very young and not playing outside in the woods with friends, my entertainment consisted of reading, building models, erector set, Estes rockets, RC planes, a Lionel train set, etc. These activities primed my young mind for the aeronautical engineering degree I would obtain as an adult. Children today spend nearly all their free time staring at screens. This can’t bode well for the quality of future scientists and engineers.

          14
          • Nerd 🤓 alert 🚨:

            I still build models, even if the smell of the paint and thinner drives The Lovely 😊 Mrs. to madness.

            I tell her I could:
            – Buy and build models
            – Drink the cash away at a brewery or distillery (or, um, drink MORE of it away)
            – Stuff the cash down a dancer’s G-string

            Airplane models it is. 👍🏻

            Amazingly, skills learned in scratch building, painting, and fixing kits comes in handy around the house too.

            I too wonder what comes next from a generation staring at screens.

        • (2001 Honda here.) But I’m not sure about the rest. Getting into our local Aggie-Vo-Tech HS is like getting into an Ivy. You have to have top grades, perfect attendance, no disciplinary infractions, etc. (Needless to say the usual suspects want to change all that because diversity.) So they may not be a majority, but those kids are still out there.

          • 208 F150 4×4 with a little over 400,000 miles. Been to every state except Alaska and Hawaii. I’ve probably replaced every replaceable part on it.
            The alternative?

            If you can find one, 2021 F150, same configuration,
            $120,000.00

            Un frikin believable.

      • It’s not as much zero interest as *there is nobody to teach them*. Literally. Their parents are clueless too. Just because *you* know how does not mean the vast majority do.

        This is one of the biggest failures of the silent and boomer generations – they failed to pass on the skills by *teaching*, AND they outsourced all much of the work that teaches those skills to china, or brought in mexicans to do it, instead of teaching their own kids.

      • Hang out with homeschooled kids.

        Even (small town) public school kids who really want to *make* something and trust that you’ll be a proper elder for them and not screw them over.

        Ca ira.

      • No excuse for not finding the hood release (this thing called an owner’s manual helps). However, once you open the hood, compare the crap under the hood of a 2019 model car to that of a 1980 model. I recall being able to see the ground beneath the car back then. Not sure if water can even get to the ground in the newer models. Plus it’s all so cramped you need ring size 2 fingers to get to anything.

    • “The good old days of solid, self reliance have been over for a while. That essential knowledge was somehow lost between the silent generation and the boomers. ”

      I’ll posit that the days of solid self reliance started dying off when people who worked with their hands were looked on disdainfully (“No son / daughter of MINE is going to get their hands dirty!”). I think being literally “Hands On” in your work conditions you to seek out and practice those hands on skills you list, and others. Also, folks in the past were a little tighter with their cash than today. Why pay a plumber or electrician when I can go down to the local hardware store and get the parts myself?

      I was lucky that my father let me tag along and help him with basic tasks around the house (simple plumbing fixes, simple electrical work, painting, drywall patching,,etc.) Put me in good stead when I bought my first home in my twenties and did a lot of fixing myself.

      The Lovely 😊 Mrs. was STUNNED I could replace the garbage disposal without needing to call a plumber. And replace faucets and shower heads. 👍🏻

      I know my limits, and call professionals if I’m overmatched, but most people call a pro and end up paying $2-300 for a fix they could’ve done for $50.

      19
  16. You’ve just touched on the tip of the ice burg. Imagine when the 88% of the white commercial pilots* drops below 50%. Followed by doctors, engineers and other STEM majors. Without civil engineers and people willing to do the work, you can kiss all of FJB’s infrastructure programs good-bye.

    A colleague once showed me the US Occupational Job Outlook** which described US jobs in demand. Back in the 80’s, every type of engineer was listed in the top 10 if not top 20. Today, they don’t even exist under most new jobs or fastest growing occupations. Almost none of the jobs they describe below require an advanced university degree, let alone a high school education –

    Most New Jobs –
    1. Home health and personal care aides
    2. Cooks
    3. Fast food counter workers
    4. Software developers
    5. Waiters and waitresses

    Fastest Growing Occupations –
    1. Motion picture projectionists
    2. Wind turbine service technicians
    3. Ushers, lobby attendants, and ticket takers
    4. Nurse practitioners
    5. Solar photovoltaic installers

    * https://www.zippia.com/airplane-pilot-jobs/demographics/
    ** https://www.bls.gov/ooh/most-new-jobs.htm

    12
    • I wonder if, 75 years from now, human flight will even be possible except for jumping from a decaying skyscraper. Maybe the Chinks will be able to sustain the technology.

      17
    • Uh, the, “infrastructure,” bills are just looting operations to fund new and existing NGOs tasked with further undermining the US.

      19
      • I beg to differ. We have high-speed rail in California! I can still see the half-completed column that blocks the road from my house.

        12
      • From what I’ve gleaned, the amount designated for bridges, roads, sidewalks, waste disposal, even lefty-loved public transportation–you know, actual infrastructure–is below ten percent. You are absolutely right about where the money is going, although some of the skim goes into the pockets of senators and MoC’s. GOP’ers “reached across the aisle” and got a fist full of dollars.

  17. We aren’t facing a dearth of intelligence. We’re facing a society that is dying of late-stage cancer, its organs turned against themselves. Its schools thwart education; its factories consume, not produce; its hospitals want to make people sick; its armies welcome the invader; its banks are thieves; the prisons are emptied of criminals and refilled with innocents; and the government obeys its rulers. Coming soon, trucks will not be allowed on roads.

    Talent and demographics cannot make that end well.

    45
  18. The biggest problem is that you have lower intelligence people in charge. They don’t even see the problem. When you have people running the show who, A. think people are interchangable the blank slate and, B. think lowering standards to achieve parity won’t affect quality, you’re lashed to the wheel of doom.

    A healthy forward leaning society requires that all manner of niches in the system are filled. The niches cannot be filled with different people chosen at random. Think of it as an ecosystem, you can’t fill a predator’s role with a prey species. Similarly you can’t fill a scavenger’s role with a predator.

    35
    • “When you have people running the show who, A. think people are interchangable the blank slate and, B. think lowering standards to achieve parity won’t affect quality, you’re lashed to the wheel of doom.”

      Right! But the notion that that people can be randomly assigned to perform any function isn’t just found among “equity” theorists. It’s almost as widespread on the political right … including, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, the dissident right.

      A cliché on “our” side is that anyone should be able to do home repairs, fix their own cars, pull their food from the garden, etc., etc. This is exactly human interchangeablity elevated to a principle. It denies that each individual is naturally good at some things, bad at others, while another’s talents can lie in a completely different direction.

      Public schools and academia are awful under current conditions. The fact remains that some people are fit for intellectual or scientific pursuits, while some find their level in the trades. Neither is better than the other, but they are not the same.

      Thus the common advice to “be a plumber because the rewards are greater than getting a college degree” is simplistic. It may be generally true in today’s economy, but we need to find ways of enabling the population to use their particular abilities, rather than urging many of them to fit positions that are wrong for them.

      • Yes, and the phrase I hate the most is “go start your own small business.”

        The number of people who have the talent for that is very small.

        A vastly greater number of people are better suiting to fulfilling their potential as a part of an organization that respects and values their contribution

      • You have just described in great part what one 80s author called “The White Collar Hoax.” Dating at least back to my parents (WW II generation), it was still worthwhile to “work your way through college.” The problem is, that over a couple generations, the degree has been watered down to the point of near-worthlessness, in many cases.

        As we all know, the value of higher education was democratized. To some extent, this was to the good: the GI Bill. But as our society liberalized postwar, there was the inevitable slip in quality. First, grants for bright but penniless students. With time, especially when job quotas required credentialed people of color, standards had to be relaxed, hence grade inflation and social promotion. Also the proliferation of worthless degrees: A 4-year degree in golf course management? Yes, it really exists. Choose your own crazy example. But the point was, of course, to get D’Antoine or Lakeesha a piece of paper that, hopefully would get him or her hired, at least if he didn’t have any felonies. We’re probably nearing the bitter end of this egalitarian fantasy, with once-reputable institutions starting to drop any admissions tests (ACT, SAT) at all. Short of societal collapse, the logical endpoint is when universities turn into de-facto diploma mills, giving a sheepskin to anyone with ability to pay, regardless of actual performance or perhaps, even to attend any courses.
        This is the case in several nations, and explains in part why the USA attracts so many foreign students.

  19. So a few things:

    Firstly, no where is this decline seen more than in the trades. We used to have white kids that were smart with their hands pushed into these trades. Not only are kids discouraged from “demanding” manual labor, but there are fewer white kids to boot. The average age of a plumber in my area is late 50s. I work as a carpenter/general contractor (my second job), and you wouldn’t believe how many hack jobs we fix from illegals that had no idea what building codes are. My favorite was a recent set of stairs that had different rises on each step (6”, 14”, 11”). Homeowner basically just got the guy in a Home Depot parking lot for cheap money. When people need houses to be framed and wires to be run in the future, who going to do it? I foresee many more house collapses, fires, and problems in our future.

    Secondly, your point about football is very relevant in New England. We had two all time great minds in football with Brady and Belichick. However, numerous veteran or talented receivers kept coming in and couldn’t understand the complex offense. The common theme on talk radio was that they needed to “simplify” the offense because few new guys couldn’t understand and succeed (other than a slew of white slot receivers, rob gronkowski, and a couple of above average IQ black receivers). This extended past Brady as well. Cam Newton, a league veteran and star, couldn’t grasp the offense. Mac Jones, a rookie, came in and was teaching cam the playbook in Mac’s first training camp.

    35
    • Kids that come from the LAUSD to our union apprenticeship program can’t do simple math. We spend the first year teaching high school math grades 9 to 12 to them. They have a diploma that says they can. But that’s ok because the companies have come up with apps in the smartphone that tells them how to fix the machine once they plug it into the motherboard.( AI)?. Occasionally I have to test fire systems in commercial and residential building. The last few test I had to witness were conducted by little brown men from Home Depot’s outer perimeter. Before lightning the building up you have to contact the fire department to let them know it’s only a test. 9 time out of 10 they don’t, and the hook and ladder shows up. That used to piss the firemen off. They would even write a nice big ticket ( fine) to the owner. Now they don’t care anymore. They’re happy they’re not putting out another hobo- junkie campfire next to the freeway, thank me and drive off

      21
    • Interesting, they went from Cam to Mac. And success came back.

      Totally OT, I’m a Greek-American too. Any Greek restaurant suggestions in Beantown metro? By the way, huge Habs fan, but I always loved the Bruins as rivals, actually rooted for them over Vancouver in ’11, loved Timmy besides. Alas the league is not what it used to be.

      • At least half of *all* restaurants in MA are owned/operated by Greeks (except perhaps Asian ones, although I wouldn’t be surprised.)

    • I didn’t get the Aaron Rodgers thing mention by a black guy, the only vaccine-hesitant person in the room. All the others gobbled at him like turkeys, black, brown, and white.

      I just saw a pic. Now I get it.
      The unvaccinated Mr. Rodgers is white, and rather redneck looking.

      (I heard not one thing, not ONE, about the science of immunology or virology. It was all social pressure, like outraged hens.)

    • I’ve heard IQ was the real problem with Kaepernick. He was a hot-shit athlete, but they needed to use a super-simple playbook for him. After a season or 3, all opponents had reverse-engineered that playbook and could predict exactly which plays were going to be run.

    • The problem to me is that the normie gets hack work and doesn’t understand why. That’s the part that boggles the mind.

  20. Extremely insightful. My fields of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, derivatives of Medicine, are already showing the effects of diversity, ie dumbing down of young doctors. It does not bode well.

  21. So, are we to become “Brazil del Norte”?

    Having any of you spent time in Brazil? It might be worth spending some time there to get a taste of what it will be like here, say, 2040-2050. I’ve never been to Brazil and never have had any interest in going there.

    I’ve noticed that Brazil has become a punch-line in terms of those videos you see on Flyheight and WorldStarHipHop in terms of its social dysfunction.

    • There are a couple of Brazalians on Gab who post in English, and despite the many, many issues with the country it does have one thing going for it: it is a country. Brazil has been Brazil for hundreds of years, it’s not like they woke up one day and discovered the place was completely different.

    • In my previous life as a Bankster I spent a decade as a Private Banker in NYC catering to the Latins. I spent a material amount of time in Brazil. By definition it was the top end of the 1% and their life was comparable to the rich in Paris, Geneva, Singapore and Sydney. In Brazil a fair number had, as the ultimate source of their money, some bent deal with Government- same as Mexico, Argentina etc. Interestingly we stopped doing business in Venezuela when Chavez was elected, the middle class on up of Grifters had their grip on the oil money severed and a lot of it dead end up with the peons; No wonder he was hated in DC, imagine if that caught on.

    • Karl, that’s a pretty intruguing statement. Can you give us any more info on your imminent departure?

      Will they still have electric guitars and amplified vocals where you are going?

  22. Is it safe to assume that there are layers of the military insulated from the effects of imposing diversity quotas and anti-white activism? Not the sub fleet apparently. But is there at last some layer that can be relied upon to act with at least as much rationality, intelligence and foresight as was had up through the 90’s? I know it isn’t saying all that much but at least they didn’t actually initiate a nuclear exchange. The only reason that’s true is that the elite wouldn’t be insulated from the effects but still, at least they were able to grasp the basic realities involved and come to terms with them. The visible leadership of today is a pants-shitting dementia patient at the top surrounded by a cabinet/cabal of wild-eyed radicals while the senior military leadership seems to be composed of by-definition mentally disturbed trannies and enthusiastic anti-white activists with no other demonstrated competencies. I would think the clear and present danger to the world at large, never mind the nation, would justify extraordinary corrective measures. Measures that would be welcomed everywhere but the international banking circles.

    18
    • Our future is probably some East Indian-type military where unreliable gear is laid up in the hanger waiting to be repaired by crews who don’t know how to fix it, so that they can eventually be manned by crews who don’t know how to use it.

      • Maybe they will become like mascots or old time statues of Gods.

        Each side will tow their rusting hardware to the battlefield by hand on a cart to display to the other side their technical superiority.

        The have at each other with hand axes. The winner gets to tow away the losers technology to set up as spoils of war
        and to add to their own ancient magic.

      • The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, by Lionel Shriver, seems to me to a pretty good forecast of what’s up next.

        It’s not pretty, the finance side looks about perfect.

        I highly recommend it.

    • The Capitol Hill cop who shot Ashli Babbitt, Michael Byrd, is your layered military in a civilian context. Byrd actually is a tad bit better than his military counterparts. Random drug screening of the JCOS would yield some troubling but horribly surprising results.

    • I would guess if there is any group where diversity reqs will be waived it would be the nuclear forces, since nukes guarantee that no matter how retarded the rest of your military, your nations’ borders won’t be invaded. We had far more reason to invade Pakistan than Afghanistan, yet we gave them billions instead.

      In all other branches, the #1 issue is loyalty to the Left, not competence. By that metric, our military is getting better and better due to diversity reqs, and so those reqs won’t change.

  23. Pre-Boomer here. Watched the Boomers wreck the company I worked in. The only smart guy in the bunch died in harness and it took the rest of the tools five years to destroy the business. It was like watching willful children.

    21
    4
  24. Love the concept of “the tax”.

    For example, when standing in line and a Hispanic girl (with pronouns on her name tag) is struggling to explain to the 80 yr old Laotian man why his expired coupons won’t work for an item he doesn’t even have in his cart, and the “manager” is a frumpy 40 something single mom (college degree, natch) is too busy stocking the shelves to help because no one else will do it, the white guy in line looks at his watch and thinks:

    “Diversity is truly our strength. Diversity is truly our strength.”

    52
    • This happened to me a year ago, trying to pick up a pizza at Domino’s on the day of a local sportsball game. The entire operation went so haywire that nobody was getting their pizzas. A large, angry mob congregated in the pickup area watching the meltdown occur, the staff being a melange of vibrancy. At one point, I calmly said to all within earshot, “this is our future.” I saw a lot of furrowed brows and nodding heads.

      34
    • I was travelling this weekend. The voices over the intercomm at the airport were hard to understand. Do they purposefully select the employee with the poorest English skills to make announcements?

      Riding the shuttle to the airport. The driver is clearly from South Asia. He is trying to explain to a waiting crowd that the bus is full and another bus will be following him. His audience cannot understand him.

      I shake my head with a bitter expression on my face.

      24
    • fucking asians and their weird coupons and their weird credit cards, holding up every checkout line with their one item on a saturday morning. old white people are only a little better…

  25. Well, it took a few years, but I finally am one ahead of a Z-man missive. 😉

    Son works in a large company’s engineering section. He heads up a group and we often talk about new hires. This of course leads to discussion of the decline in available talent in engineering applicants. Last discussion was concerning two recent hires and their “performance” in the position. Unacceptably subpar. So much so, they are resented by their peers and have been nicknamed: “can not do” and “will not do”. :-). Yes, they are known by these monikers—better than their first names—in discussions.

    Our talks lead inevitably to lectures on “smart fraction” theory and the general state of intellectual decline in the USA. But abstract theory always takes back place to hands on experience. National cognitive decline is real.

    35
  26. Exacerbating the IQ deficit at the higher levels of the economic structure is so-called “affirmative action.” The vast majority of corporations and institutions would rather hire a Hutessa with an IQ of 100 to run the show than a Blue-Eyed Ice Devil with an IQ of 125. The problem, therefore, is not just sociological but ideological. The West is simultaneously dying a natural death and committing suicide.

    44
    • Yep. AA hiring is the “barnacles” on the economic ship of state. You need to hire so many of such, and then hire competent workers in addition to handle their work! Then you pray that you can keep them “busy” while not engendering a discrimination lawsuit.

      The pool of workers from the “talented tenth” was used up long ago, while the decline in IQ of the general population proceeded unabated—and indeed exasperated by turd-world immigration. As Dutton recently put it, “the difference in population IQ means that today’s typical college professor would have been yesterday’s high school science teacher.” 😉

      33
      • And as diversity-seeking western companies syphon-off so many of the brightest Africans, the sub-Saharan IQ declines even faster.

        19
        • The diversity gluttons are creating a brain drain that will ensure that so-called “developing countries” never will. And this gets to the heart of what these people are all about; they care far less about helping PoC than they do about harming whitey by killing his civilization.

          22
  27. In 1994, the film Stargate showed based White men taking out vibrant kangz and a tranny in their flying pyramid with 9mm pistols, MP5 submachine guns, and a nuke:

    https://youtu.be/_q36_9BaH4g

    Later, the series Stargate SG-1 showed less based men allied with some kangz, though they did point out firearms did just fine versus vibrant raygunz:

    https://youtu.be/NjlCVW_ouL8

    Yeah, stronk womyn, and all that, but watch her flinch when MacGyver sweeps her with the P90 barrel at 2:36.

    Seems like a keeper to me…

  28. As is usual with links from Western Rifle Shooters, here is a column that notices part of the problem but completely omits the critical factor of race from the equation. Yes, people are fed up; yes, people are underpaid; but a lot of the problem is moderately intelligent Whites trying to communicate with incredibly dull and intransigent non-Whites on a daily basis. Anyhow, here’s the civic nationalist’s version of today’s excellent post: https://wilderwealthywise.com/the-take-this-job-and-shove-it-economy/

    11
  29. I’m an automation and control systems engineer, and I can tell you business is booming in my field.

    10
    • Their was a big automation project at one of out facilities a decade ago and, I think because it was time critical, they brought in the only available guy they could find, from the U.K. (plant was in the U.S. Midwest).

      This gets to the point raised by Z that I see on a constant basis: yes these magic machines built by the Japanese can do wonders, but finding someone to program them is difficult to say the least (and just forget about trying to find a full-hire employee to fix them).

  30. And we shouldn’t forget the “welfare safety net”: which enables the least intelligent to not just survive, but to thrive: to out-reproduce the rest of us.

    When the smarter a person is, the fewer kids they’re likely to have, cognitive decline is inevitable.

    34
    • When EBT cards and paper gibs cannot purchase or obtain food and hard goods, the welfare state will be meaningless.

      15
      • That’s all it would take to trigger massive race-riots: someone hacking the system so that EBT cards suddenly don’t work.

        11
        • Due to political realities, scarcity rather than loss of the EBT cards will likely lead to food and hard goods being unavailable. These will not be like the Astroturfed BLM/Antifa riots, either.

        • Happened in Georgia 10-12 years ago. Welfare money drops were postponed from a Friday to the following Monday (if I remember it was caused by a glitch) and the usual suspects howled. News reporters flocked to the scene to record black moms angrily demanding “my money!” and lamenting how their children were going to starve. Two days delay. Their money. Where to start on how many ways this is a powder keg of stupidity, hubris, and ineptitude?

          28
    • I brought this up in a post on Friday, but it’s relevant here as well. The welfare safety net is certainly a piece of the puzzle driving high breeding of low IQ and low breeding of high IQ, but it’s not the whole thing. The western idea of strict protection of intergenerational property rights has a built in bug, which is a declining fertility rate, especially amongst the wealthy (a suitable proxy for intelligence). Sparta faced the same issue with no welfare state. If you have a lot of wealth, you want to leave your heirs as well off as possible and divide it as little as possible. However, however if you have nothing, then it doesn’t matter if you have 1 or 10 kids. None of them are getting anything. Z brought up the idea of heavy inheritance taxes. Heavy inheritance taxes, with substantial reduction of income tax could incentivize hard work while also taking away the incentive to have few children. Meanwhile the lower income tax would give increased financial ability for high earners to have more kids.

      2
      6
      • Another “fix” batted around is that all the estate loot always passes to the first born (and I think as they were pitching, the first born son at that).

      • Oh Please.

        Of all the reasons people aren’t having children.

        “I want my child to inherit my domain undivided”

        Is not one of those reasons

        4
        1
        • Yeah I found that a bit dubious, too.

          However instituting (or re-instituting, for those places like Britain who used to have it) primogeniture wouldn’t reduce the amount of money available to the Trust Fund contingent, but it would reduce their numbers somewhat. Could one clueless heir with a net worth of $500 million do as much damage at 2 @ $250 million? It’s worth a try…

    • All living organisms, including you, have two necessary duties, to eat and to reproduce. Anything else is just a complication. Failure to eat of course means imminent death. Failure to reproduce means a biological death farther down the line. If every member of the species fails to reproduce there soon is no member of that species.

      There’s nothing intelligent about failing to reproduce, in fact it smacks entirely of selfishness:

      When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable.
      Oswald Spengler; The Decline of the West

      4
      1
      • How wrong you are. We can see from statistics in every western society (and increasingly in Asian societies as well) that the more wealthy an individual, the fewer children they have. Primitive people, as you put it, have litters of kids because they barely have a pot to piss in. Heirs are getting zero money anyway. In fact, their hope is that one of their 10 kids becomes rich and becomes their retirement plan. The wealthy and intelligent want to leave more to their heirs so they can continue to build wealth. This is a fact today, and it’s been a fact in previous empires and times as well (as I said before, Sparta specifically comes to mind).

  31. There’s an anime series called “Girls’ Last Tour”, set in a far future (sometime around the year 3200), in which a long war devastated mankind’s ability to produce and maintain new technology, leading them to eventually turn to ancient (by their standards) weapon designs because those were the only things they were still capable of building. Thus the war started using futuristic giant robots armed with laser cannons, and ended with them using new-build P-51 Mustangs, Kettenkrads, and bolt-action rifles, because mid-20th century technology was all they could keep going. It’s an interesting take on this theme.

    Generally, as civilizations collapse, there are four stages to what happens to its technology. First, they can continue to produce existing tech, but are unable to come up with anything new. Then they can no longer produce existing tech, but can manage to keep maintaining what’s already been produced. Finally, they can no longer keep maintaining their existing tech, and watch helplessly as it succumbs to the weeds. In the fourth stage, centuries later, men from a new civilization show up, hack through the forest surrounding what was once a great city, find the tech that the old legends said existed there, and try to piece together how the ancients built it.

    “I am the grass – I cover all.”

    23
    • I’ve read, IIRC, that Romans operated glass factories in Britain. Then the Romans left, and the locals stopped making glass. (I suspect that they exhausted the firewood supply, but that’s just a hunch.) Then they forgot how to make glass. Then they forgot that glass could be made; they forgot that it ever existed. Modern scientists look at some of the “jewels” of antiquity, and say “hah! It’s just colored glass.” In doing so, they ignore the sophisticated supply chain need to produce clear, colored, glass!

      Wheeled transport requires smooth roads, which require maintenance, which requires organized labor, and a system of taxation and/or tolls to pay the labor, and security forces to hold the funds between collection and payment. A wheeled cart is but the flower of a deep-rooted plant.

      34
      • one of the natural assets of colonial america was all the timber here. they (britain) would make glass here (fueled by all that nearby timber) and ship that to the uk.

  32. “Soon, Americans will be like those humans in the sci-fi shows, unable to operate ancient technology.”

    If there was a flaw in the “documentary” Idiocracy, it was the fact that the people of that time were so stupid they would be unable to maintain the technology that had been created for them and would have been in caves instead of buildings. The ruins of the buildings would have collapsed long before. But, we don’t have to worry about that. Da black man will have created new and greater technology by then. Honest! They just need to be patted on the back and have movies and TV shows that show them how dey be Kangs.

    19
    • “Idiocracy” was based on the Cyril Kornbluth story “The Marching Morons”. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm

      The flaw in Idiocracy was Mike Judge completely removed the concept Kornbluth had: the society the 20th/21st Century man awoke to in “The Marching Morons” was underpinned by a small, overwhelmed group of geniuses who took on multiple roles to keep society going. In Judge’s story, those geniuses would’ve died off generations ago before Joe thawed out.

    • Along with the reinforced concrete succumbing to moisture within a century, all that computer technology they still have in the movie would have been lost due to blown caps in the power supplies and electric motors in fans and disks wearing out.

  33. I’m thinking that the en-stupid-ization of America is part of the plan:

    Part of denigrating Whiteness, is denigrating the higher intelligence which characterizes Whites as a group. Part of celebrating “diversity” is implicitly downplaying the importance of intelligence.

    The deliberate dumbing-down of America is happening on many fronts:

    abolishing advanced-placement classes and schools;
    bringing in more and more lower-intelligence immigrants;

    encouraging mixed-race coupling, which lowers the intelligence of the kids they produce;

    encouraging ignorant Blacks to disparage educational achievement as “acting White”;

    encouraging the hiring of Black school teachers in order to address the gap in Black-White educational achievement;

    diminishing the average intelligence of colleges and grad schools by admitting more non-Whites;

    denouncing occupational fields which require high intelligence as being “too White”;

    celebrating the replacement of Whites by affirmative-action hires which put people of lower intelligence in their place;

    media elevation of stupid people like Ibrahim Kendi, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden;

    and the insistence that the most important qualification for any position is being woke.

    Meanwhile, the disproportionately-Jewish ruling elite is still mostly mating with their own kind, while encouraging these practices which gradually reduce the intelligence of those they’re ruling.

    They recognize the fact that stupid people are easier to fool, and easier to rule.
    .

    33
    • Bill: All true, and yet . . . don’t fetishize IQ (that’s Sailer’s job). Per numerous studies, East Asians have higher average IQs than Whites, but they tend to lack the independence, curiosity, risk taking, and individualism of Whites. These are cultural factors that stem from genetic factors, and not easily altered by international migration patterns.

      Whites may be more intelligent than blacks and browns, but self confidence and community have been criminalized and/or bred out of much of the gene pool. Without the natural instinct to defend oneself and one’s people, let alone the natural desire to dominate and maintain one’s own territory, Whites will not survive – whatever their IQ.

      33
      • This is an important point. Man is not measured by IQ alone and the attack on culture has had a devastating effect on the heritage population. We are the first cohort that experienced total ideological war. We were evolved to respond to a hybrid of physical and psychological warfare, with a heavy emphasis on physical warfare. The ‘dinosaur’ taunt may be exasperating when it comes from populations who haven’t been dealt our hand, but if we don’t evolve to the new environment, we die. On the other hand, collapse of our society re-selects for the hybrid model, so there’s that.

      • I agree: There’s more to survival than just being smart.

        And those factors you mention explain why— despite not having the highest average IQ— pretty much all of the achievements which collectively enable and inform civilization as we know it— in exploration, science, technology, government, philosophy, the arts— have been accomplished by Europeans.

        And surely that’s why taking pride in being White, and identifying with our White heritage, is demonized as “White supremacy”, and why GoodWhites are encouraged to kneel in humble self-abnegation to sacred Blacks like Floyd and Kendi: to destroy our confidence, and make us guilty for our sin of being demonstrably superior in so many ways.

        16
      • 3g4me,

        And yes: we can recognize what’s happening as psychological warfare aimed at Whites, with the deliberate intention of destroying our confidence and shared sense of community and identity.

        They know they won’t be able to succeed with many of us, so they’re making a special effort to inculcate ‘White guilt’ in upcoming generations.

      • One thing that I have tracked over the years of my noticing is the decline in general curiosity. Its a tangent of both IQ and culture. While it is innate it also needs to be cultivated.

        Modernity, with its answers to everything in your hand, seems to have dropped the virtues of curiosity along the way. Curiosity is now “Googling”.

        In the same way, community is now used for everything from yoga studios to sodomites to entire populations of joggers. Everything but our people is a community.

        Kids gathering around an ant-hill or watching a butterfly hatch or taking apart and putting back together things from around the house doesn’t seem to continue past those wonder years- if it still happens at all.

        The cultural decay has seemingly displaced curiosity and free play/exploration with mastery of objects and following instructions.

        The speed of progress and the increasingly black-box nature of everyday objects and tools further distances us from that innate sense of wonder.

        I know it takes IQ to make the modern world tick, but what I find far more disturbing than some IQ drift is that lack of curiosity and pursuit of wonder and an actual community of people who nurture that.

        I felt the same way years back when everybody had a hard-on for STEM because “tech” was going to solve the culture rot.

        It was also going to solve the gynocracy’s war on boys by encouraging all boys to leapfrog the “soft” studies into STEM to get good GloboCorp “tech” jobs so they could hang onto some status in the coming sexual dystopia. Instead of identifying and fighting the actual enemy we continue to make the enemy some part of us that must be changed. Funny how now its all about the trades. All in under a decade. And yet we still grasp at straws of progress.

        Anyhow a super smart hive of spergy IQ bugmen might be able to run the modern world, but its not the one I want to live in. We need dreamers, builders, maintainers, fixers, and operators alike who are taught to value their gifts by sharing them with their people for their people.

        30
        • Screwtape: I was browsing various homesteading videos on youtube, and there’s a couple who moved from Las Vegas to rural western Arkansas. I don’t particularly like or watch their channel, but scanning through a recent episode was illuminating. Their only child, a son, used to spend all day either at public school or home alone playing video games. Now he’s outdoors almost all the time, playing with others, and he’s a much happier child.

          This speaks to so many different things – the need human children have for social structures, the need for physical as well as mental development, the need for the natural world. And the parents were happy their son was happy, but never really delved into why his life had so changed. Oh, they blathered on about how ‘nice and friendly’ everyone in Arkansas was, and I’m certainly not discounting that. But no mention of what sort of demographics their old Las Vegas neighborhood or son’s school might have had, no consideration that perhaps human communities are not designed to scale up indefinitely.

          And as an aside, the first thing these parents built upon their move to rural land was a stand-alone ‘game room,’ with a tv and video games because that’s what they like to do ‘as a family.’

          Sigh.

      • IQ Fetishization has a few more adherents, including Scott Adams. He recently opined on that frickin’ genius Mayo Pete, who is so much smarter and better trained. No mention of how bad direction can offset misdirected IQ, leading to a Faster Ruination metric.

        4
        1
  34. I see this in my job field, it’s going to be a disaster.
    The corporate rulers of my company assume automation will fill the gap left by retiring baby boomers and in some cases that works but as the Z says who programs the software and who knows what to do when things go wrong?
    Aswan the Afghan or Latisha the African?
    Maybe Karen the Branch Covidian?
    Don’t think so.
    It’s going to be a slow downtrend into third world pockets all over the West.

    30
    • “Machine learning and AI will solve it”, says manager Karen with a BA in sociology as she waves as her hand to dismiss the concerns.

      The South Asian people around her in the boardroom grin and clap, praising her originality and creativity.

      22
      • I see this a lot with extremely stupid people.

        When faced with a problem outside their capacity to understand they assert a technology they also do not understand (that may not even exist) will solve the problem. Other similar stupid people then accept this as a now fact, as they can’t understand either.

        The other side of this is that a problem that is proving difficult to solve will be replaced with a goal that is significantly more complex in order to try and induce a more complex solution, which in their mind will somehow be easier to achieve.

        This latter is extremely common in software teams with incompetent programmers and managers.

        Although I see this all around in industry/government.

        13
        1
        • trumpton: Excellent point. Spot on re stupid people seeing intelligence in the unnecessarily complex. For example, standard untalented tenth word salad, or pajeet programmers.

    • They’re overestimating the capability of automation.

      In my plant they’ve tried to use robots to assemble the complex mechanical packages of our products and it’s been an expensive failure every time.

      Now, they’re trying to set up this very expensive semi-automated camera tracking system to keep the bottom-dollar, six-month contract mestbots in line.

      Yeah, good luck with that.

  35. Outstanding post on the perils of species-wide cognitive decline. Now address the seminal issue and connect the dots.

    Why is “brain power” in decline? Modern technology and affluence has replaced our ancestral natural environment with an artificial man-made variant in which real hardship and existential threats have now become extinct. IOW, the evolutionary culling mechanism for elimination of the stupid & weak is now kaput. And if this pathology continues unabated, idiocracy will increase until a colony collapse occurs and natural fitness selection is reborn.

    Or, our betters will simply try to “solve” this problem via artificial genetic manipulation; which in some cases will resemble cattle breeding and in others will consist of direct DNA rewiring. Will this “work”? Who knows? Will you be in the sheeple herd or the select community on Mt. Olympus?

    17
    • TomA,

      Indeed! Western welfare-state democracies have succeeded in reversing the upward trend of evolution: for the first time in human history, the least capable are not only surviving, they’re thriving: out-reproducing the rest of us.

      10
    • Interesting comment that seems to refute the general opinion in this neighborhood. You’re saying that cognitive decline is most evident in the most advanced societies, because natural selection no longer applies to the chances for reproduction. Any idiot can survive, maybe even prosper, in a modern, pseudo-capitalist market economy. No wonder the dopey next-door neighbor drives a Mercedes and sends his kids to a private school.

      Wouldn’t that seem to indicate that the future belongs, at least in some way, to a society and its progeny that has been faced with adversity and managed to overcome it?

      Actually, if one believes that white, northern Europeans are the intellectual apex of the human race, and you are one, what’s the problem? Isn’t it best to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind? Or are white, northern Europeans being put to a disadvantage by being surrounded with mental defectives?

      Maybe this is how the fifth century Romans looked at the situation. “We might as well leave Britain, those clods are too stupid to know which side their bread is buttered on. And the Germans, they’re just savages.”

      6
      2
      • “if one believes that white, northern Europeans are the intellectual apex of the human race, and you are one, what’s the problem? Isn’t it best to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind?”

        Whites would indeed have the advantage – if our governments weren’t taking our money and resources and giving them to vibrants to help them breed.

        • Then there is the aesthetic question. Even if being the one-eyed men confers advantages, do we really want to dwell amid the ugliness concomitant with large numbers of PoC? I certainly don’t. Being bombarded with rap, tatts, and piercings is more than far enough down that road.

          • So true. Whites of northern European descent are never criminals, can’t be found in prisons, don’t sport tattoos, play or listen to obnoxious music, are always safe drivers and never engage in burglaries, always graduate from high school and never use marijuana, meth or other intellectual stimulants.

      • Thoroughly overcoming adversity produces the affluence, comfort and security that breeds cognitive decline. The smart cease reproducing, through democracy they create policies that subsidize the reproduction of the Very Dumbs, and the Very Dumbs do, indeed, reproduce. Then, once cognitive decline passes through a threshold, civilization collapses, the subsequent attendant misery selects for intelligence, the intelligent reproduce, the Very Dumbs die en masse, and civilization blossoms again. It’s a cycle, and there is no known method to arrest it before the next collapse.

      • Whites are at the apex precisely because we overcame adversity; the last ice age. And we also survived each other, as 2k+ years of almost constant war selected for a people that would cohere into a high producing society.

        Being surrounded by mentally defective coloreds was an advantage, as we were able to take their resources and put them to work (as some would call it, ‘colonialism’.) The problem now is that we aren’t surrounded by them, we are infiltrated by them, thanks to our traitorous (((elites))).

  36. America is on a crash diet. We’re cutting dead weight, whether or not that’s the plan.

    Fine with me. I’d rather rebuild than continue this beast system anyway. Plenty of talent out there that simply was of no use, because making things better wasn’t the point.

    17
  37. Paging Joseph Tainter. Joseph Tainter, please pick up the white courtesy phone. Joseph Tainter, the white courtesy phone…

    For those who haven’t read The Collapse of Complex Societies (Z Man has mentioned it a few times before), I can’t really recommend it, unless you’re a professional archaeologist (I’m not, and therefore a lot of it went over my head). The “for dummies” version, though, is essential reading. He says that the “collapse” of a complex society like the Western Roman Empire in many ways represents a rational choice on the part of people in it, as the cost : benefit ratio of maintaining the existing structures was negative, had been negative for a long time, and was only going to go deeper into the hole. In that sense, it wasn’t so much a “collapse” as a “restructuring” or a “retrenching” or whatever business-speak you want to use; a local re-adjustment to less complexity, in line with what the people could handle.

    And who knows? AINO might sink into Brasil del Norte without massive bloodshed. Not the way I’d bet, but it could happen…

    25
    • Or an unconscious choice. If you think of a nation or a civilization as an organism, survival is instinctual.

    • “as the cost : benefit ratio of maintaining the existing structures was negative….”

      That was the case with the British Empire, it was a money-losing proposition long before the Brits pretended magnanimity and shut it down.

    • Since I’ve been beating Tainter’s dead horse at every chance, I refrained from posting in this vein, but glad you took up the whip!

  38. I never got into football but when I have watched it I was able to admire the skill and talent it must take to quarterback. Those guys remind me of starship captains. When I heard about the need for more black quarterbacks I knew it was over!

    20
    • Running QBs are on their way to becoming interchangeable cogs, similar to the how running backs have become commodities during the past few years.

      NFL defensive players are simply too large, strong, and fast for any NFL backfield players to endure that level of defensive punishment for more than a few years.

      I tend to agree we’ve probably seen peak white QB. Notice how the NFL altered its rules to improve QB protection and extend the longetivity of guys like Brady…

      • Funny, the running QB is more like what the position originally was, i.e., a running back who can throw accurately. It’s only since the 80s, really, that the passing game was honed scalpel-sharp. And even then, Peyton Manning would’ve been a freak.

        It’s the RPO that’s made the position less intellectually demanding by keeping defenses guessing. I predict you’ll see more undersized fronts who can overcome the element of surprise with speed and athleticism, which will cause offenses to adopt a power running game, which will cause defenses to beef up their fronts, which will eventually bring the game back to precision passing. Or something like that.

  39. Now that IQ has dipped below that threshold, we are starting to see problems like the supply chain issues. This is just the beginning of a systemic collapse brought on by the lack of social capital.

    Causation-correlation.The supply chain issue could be explained easily by Taleb or anybody else that spends some time thinking about it. It’s a system so complex that it’s particularly vulnerable to unanticipated problems, not the average intelligence of the society in which it operates. A lack of intelligence, however that might be defined or measured, isn’t what kept the medievals from using the plumbing techniques developed by the Romans, it was a dearth of knowledge, a very different thing. The idea that corporations could depend on access to a narrow canal in an inhospitable land whose ownership is problematical was a solution to transferring valuable goods across the globe was the product of people thought to be highly intelligent. This strategy wasn’t dreamed up by some shepherd or peach-picker. The problem is that the more complex the society becomes, the bigger the problems with inevitable failures. The entire Harvard faculty can’t come up with the solutions to the global supply chain failure.

    4
    11
    • In the early 90s, Denver built a new $2B mega airport and the “smart people” decided that it needed a high-tech automated baggage handling system. In theory, this system would use robot carts to move bags from the plane to the correct pickup carousel with little-to-no human involvement. Tens of millions were spent on an elaborate infrastructure and new-fangled software to run the system. It failed miserably, and twice more they attempted to “fix” it at an additional expense of tens of millions. Each time, it failed more miserably. Finally, after another expenditure of tens of millions, they switched back to the old-timey and low-tech man-driven cart system.

      A lot of the supply chain problems in the US are due to a lack of competent men who are willing to move things from Point A to Point B. It’s not so much a problem of managerial intelligence as it is a dearth of men who roll up their sleeves. You simply can’t run a modern economy with only soy men.

      29
      • My biggest worry is what happens to infrastructure where the breakdowns won’t be limited to just cost overruns and aggravation (which are bad enough) but also in potentially catastrophic loss of life and limb. What happens when the population can’t maintain a nuclear power plant?

        16
        • The design, construction, operation, maintenance and decommissioning of nuclear power plants in the US is under the direct control of the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, much of the manning of which is veterans of the Navy, major users of nuclear power. The actual hands-on labor is provided by low-bid contractors with a “normal” work force.

          All of that activity is enmeshed in a web of rules and regulations that make it perhaps three times as expensive as work on a fossil fuel plant. Most of the work is the same except for fuel rod changes.

      • That is a good case study of engineering gone wrong. IIRC the problem ended up being, as per usual, a small issue, but the complexity of the system amplified it into a massive failure point.

        Part of the problem as I see it is that the environmental constraints that correct for these kinds of errors resides not just in the top-heavy brains vs brawns, but the top-heavy budget.

        These public works often birth these errors because the environment of free money does not incentivize or force a bottom-up brawny model of efficiency but rather a model of poky political contract harvesting.

        Our whole economy is rife with capital over purpose. That airport makes sense when you consider that getting planes in and out and bags and people off and on those planes is secondary to the objective of building for the sake of building.

        Plus the secret cloud people city beneath the airport was the real project. A few lost bags was required to bury the 2x over budget bunkertown. But the murderous blue stallion with demonic red eyes was just the cloud people rubbing it in.

        18
        • Screwtape: My friend described and showed me photos of that airport and it’s absolutely bizarre. My husband then had to travel there on business and found the photos true to life. Add in the various ‘ceremonies’ the European Union has conducted and even if one thinks they’re merely taking the piss, Satanic is the only definition that suffices.

          11
      • The real problems of the Denver Airport are all due to being built on an ancient Indian burial ground. It’s not chaos theory, it’s angry spirits.

  40. The old man (silent generation) is/was a super structural engineer in the aerospace/defense industry. He retired 20+ years ago. EVERY year he (and his work friends from his generation) gets calls from a companies to help fix one screw up or another. He started out asking for outrageous money, thinking they would leave him alone, and they’d pay it. Now he tells them no, and they still call.

    His group is dying off, and there won’t be anyone to fix their screw ups.

    33
    • But,, but but…wait, I thought there were legions of black women, sharp as whips, ready willing and able to step in to perform those complex calculations. I mean, didn’t you watch Hidden Figures? They built that, lol.

      25
    • Construction guys get those calls, too. Newer hires can’t or won’t do the work so older and more skilled guys are begged to come sort things out. Some younger workers stick with it, so the smarter ones with drive have bright futures.

      You can see the same dynamic play out in other skilled trades. Young guys in their 20’s pulling down six figures, not sharing fleabag apartments, not sweating out student loan repayments. That is often because they listened to dads, older brothers, uncles and others who thought for themselves, counseled against the fads and got them into legitimate endeavors. Being an underwater welder isn’t for everyone, nor is being an operating engineer of heavy equipment, but it can be very satisfying.

      14
      • The average gross annual pay for a journeyman union pipefitter is in the neighborhood of $80K. This is after 4 or 5 years of apprenticeship.

        Projects like a nuclear shutdown require more workers than most companies normally carry on their payroll. More men are hired specifically for that project and when it’s over they are laid off. Companies know that these redundant workers, subsidized by unemployment benefits, will be available for the next contract. Imagine if Microsoft or some other big tech company had a couple of slow days and management decided to lay off a couple hundred employees. When a university lets go of a couple of tenured professors it’s big news in the papers, the world is coming to an end. No professor has as much practical knowledge as a pipefitter. That’s why guys like that are hired to fix the prof’s furnace. The society would get along fine without Noam Chomsky but suffer from hypothermia without his HVAC repairman.

        10
  41. Triumph of the Will isn’t just a great propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl but a commentary on the happy marriage of brute force, early 20th century tech., and the desire to do great things. Those dams were built in less time than it takes nowadays to write, let alone approve, the environmental impact statement such an undertaking would entail.
    We stand on the shoulders of giants; unfortunately, the continued effects of downward social mobility has reduced those giants to mere mortals, and the multitude to pygmies. Without a cause, without a frontier to conquer, intellectual, physical, and spiritual vigor stultifies. When the collapse is cataclysmic enough, the cycle will begin again.

    26
    • There’s a lot of talk here on a regular basis about this “cycle”. AINO will keep degenerating intellectually and culturally and the other White nations will continue imitating its every foolish decision making appropriate substitutions where the recipe calls for ingredients they don’t have. I’m told the Swedes make a delicious Detroit Frosted Shitcake using Somalis instead of American blacks. They just call it a Malmo Mud Pie. Eventually it will all break down into mass starvation and genocide and then the few survivors will rebuild something like what we have/had.

      The problem I see is that technological society may have been a one-shot deal. The whole thing kicked off in a big way just under 200 years ago (at least in terms of the ability to mass produce advanced tools and goods). This was powered by fossil fuels mostly laid down in the carboniferous period about 300 million years ago. It was made possible both because the climate was much warmer then and lignin (the protein that makes woody plants woody) evolved before anything could break it down effectively. Yes, trees were the original indestructible pollutant. This stuff isn’t really gone in spite of what “peak oil” alarmists say but it is gone from almost every place where fairly low tech extraction methods still work.

      So these Übermenschen (thanks Leni) of the future are going to have a hard time getting the lights and water back on no matter how high their IQs. If the population crashes *enough* it might be possible to just “mine” things like whatever tank farms and oil tankers were still full when President Dwayne Elizondo Kamala Harris mandates Brawndo to be used for all irrigation purposes.

      I suspect Elon Musk’s seemingly mad Mars gambit may be his own version of this “contract to a few technological nodes and then re-expand” scheme, located safely 30,000,000 miles from the nearest place to swipe your EBT card. Don’t worry I know life on Mars will be horrific – 1/3g gravity, no fresh air, every exit sign reads “certain death”… Still, it’s not hard to imagine that it might be preferable to living in a Rio style favela with the dubious advantage of brutal cold blasting through the cardboard walls. It may also be a freer life than the opposite extreme of high density bugtopia our owners have planned for the “lucky ones” who get to press the buttons after the Great Reset.

      The best option of course is to position ourselves to carve some territory out of America’s zombie corpse when it rots a little more. Those could become the technological nodes for future re-expansion. The Europeans could then be told to start thinking for themselves again and reassured that they can feel free to kick out the Africans and Arabs without worrying about getting smacked with sanctions by a self righteous America still trying to force its Yankee Utopia on the world.

      13
      • “The problem I see is that technological society may have been a one-shot deal. (…)”

        I suspect that you are correct. Barring a significant nuclear energy breakthrough, our era of cheap, plentiful energy resources will come to an end, and with it, all of the technology that said cheap, plentiful energy has been able to provide. I first had thoughts along these lines, oh, a decade or so ago – that we were already at, or at least very near, the technological peak of human civilization. The babies born in the last decade or two, and perhaps this one, MAY be spared the worst of the descent; though that’s far from certain. The babies that will be born in the 30s, 40s? I think it’s a much safer bet that they’ll be staring down a energy, technological & civilizational decay / collapse within their lifetimes.

        If humanity gets through that, it seems the only outcome is a reversion to .. 17th? 18th? century level of civilization. At best. Probably not until after a lengthy period of wars, dark ages, rapid population declines, etc.

      • Sure favellas suck but only proles and animals are free.

        Living on Mars will be worse than slavery . 100% of mandatory Neuro Link brain implant and if possible computer control.

        That or you could always you know learn about this mysterious thing called organizing to a common purpose and simply taking what you want.

  42. We are approaching a tipping point where we no longer have enough people who are productive and creative to offset the ditch diggers and retail clerks. What is worse, we are seeing the watering down in professions that once were mostly immune from this. The current cohort of medical school students is a poor imitation of the classes from decades ago, no longer is it the best and brightest that get into the “best” medical schools but now being diverse and meeting the very minimal qualifications is what gets you into Harvard Med.

    38
    • Arthur, the last time I saw it reported (which must mean something in itself) more Suffolk U. Law grads passed the Bar Exam on the 1st try than Harvard Law grads. (Suffolk used to be a commuter school that now caters to rich foreigners.)

      • For a long time Harvard grads have been notorious for failing the bar. It was a common joke when I was in law school 12 years ago, I’m assuming it’s still a thing based on what you wrote.

  43. I don’t see the brain drain in the top positions so much. It’s the middle and even upper-middle tier where you see the issue, which isn’t surprising because those positions are far much numerous.

    It’s the district manager, project manager, hell even the guy running the local AutoZone. In my little world, the firms are most definitely having trouble finding entry level talent. These jobs aren’t for the top 20 college grads who are on the fast track. These are jobs that would be handled by reasonably bright but not superstar grads from decent state university business schools. (I’m one of those types so I mean no disrespect to them.)

    Basically, 115 to 125 IQ people who show up on time and generally do their work. These are the backbone of a society that functions. If you don’t have enough of them, society no longer works, at least not for everyone.

    What could happen is something similar to South America. Parts of the society are first world while other parts are second and third world. You don’t have enough of those 115 to 125 guys to make the whole society work, so they are used for the parts of the city and businesses used by the rich.

    46
    • Citizen: Those guys are the only reason South Africa has yet to totally collapse into utter mayhem (although it’s not far off). The question is just how much self interest versus community spirit will motivate that cohort of Whites? Thus far experience seems to indicate that they will take the money and protection offered by their non-White rulers and live as fairly contented kept men.

      At least in South America they generally live and work and socialize among their own, and even so ever so gradually that upper class is degrading as well (plenty of “white” South Americans with 10-20% non-White genetics). As others have noted here before, if capable White tradesmen went on strike, they could take this country down in a minute. That’s why, in addition to taking their own side, White people need to learn to value White community and solidarity over mere individuality.

      20
    • The first problem is that there are simply not enough white people to fill those jobs.

      The second problem is that white guys in those entry level jobs get screwed over. Constant diversity training, screeching and stupid white females above them, dull and lazy third world coworkers. The white females will keep promoting other females at the expense of white males. Trying to climb the corporate ladder as a white male these days is either pointless or not worth the headache.

      Alot of the white guys with skills seem to be oriented towards trades, or working at smaller family owned firms. I know that I plan to get out of the MegaCorp for a smaller outfit at some point.

      The third problem is that a huge number of young white kids are getting very bad advice. They are told to “follow their passion” instead of finding a field that pays. Alot of white kids are graduating with debt, no useful skills, and are just working minimum wage jobs. Foreigners have already mostly taken over STEM. I remember how my psych electives were always a sea of white faces while my main STEM classes were a sea of brown faces.

      FWIW the white guys who graduated STEM are doing fine financial even if most corporate environments are crap. But there’s just not enough.

      Diversity hiring and a poor culture among whites makes the problem worse, but ultimately changing demographics are absolute and there are mathematically not enough white (smart) people left.

      34
      • There’s absolutely a move by white guys to work for smaller firms where they can avoid the diversity crap. I see it all the time.

        They’re not stupid. They know that they have no future at megacorp and that, even if they did, it would be a nightmare day in and day out.

        31
      • You bring up some excellent points that I am living in my everyday life. I also work for “MegaCorp USA” as I call it, and am currently putting off our mandatory Inclusion and Diversity Training course as long as I can (25% of my annual review is weighted simply on attending this White-people-are-Evil class). Currently have feelers out there to smaller, privately held companies. My boss, a feminized white Gen X’er, is fully on board with the indoctrination. I know the Director of HR (white woman, of course) and I can’t even get out of this going thru her.

        I’m not a genius but definitely at the higher end of talent in middle management and I see a consistent attitude amongst my true peers that it’s time to jump ship.

        15
        • It happens all the time in the businesses that I deal with. Guys start out at the big firms and get to their late 20s or early 30s and they’re out.

          Some are just entrepreneurs, but it’s happening at a much higher rate than I remember. The move is always to their own business or a small business.

          Now, the very top guys stick around like in the past, but I suspect that they get to avoid a lot of diversity crap.

    • The problem with South America is that it illustrates the level/stage of dysfunction Z-man described where there is a small pool of “talent” to keep some of the stuff functional, but not enough to develop anything new. What they get technologically, they buy from the first world. When the first world goes, they sink a step lower on the evolutionary rung. Of course, there is always China…

    • Problem is the rich are insane and evil. I don’t think anyone with any skills would want to live in the hive . Its not even pleasant for enforcers which means warlords have a batter than average chance of having control

      You may own that factory on paper, even run it but you are paying off cartels or militias or whoever you only keep it while they think its more profitable

      Rich people in the current era don’t make much of anything useful. Its quite possible no one will want cyrpto or anything else they peddle

      . I don’t think anyone would trade a rotten apple for the latest ta nehisi coates epistle or at that point even software will just be “bodged together open source on old hardware.”

  44. Lamar Jackson may be a dim bulb but his physical advantages compensate. Mainly, his eyes being on the sides of his head. Like with Oprah, there is no sneaking up on him. He literally has no “blind side”. This opens up all kinds of options. Might as well be a 12th man.

    That said, I have been on a team in which the coach favored raw physical attributes over smarts and the “intangibles” like heart, intuition, commitment, and drive. In the short term the brute force can carry the day. And in this case it worked for him because the nature of the competition was short term.

    But this came at the cost of the culture and spirit of the team. The goodwill and brotherhood gives way to deficits being paid by teammates and a mercenary culture. The hidden gems never get a chance to shine. Taking risk accumulated downside because no amount of creativity, finesse, or heart could displace the dark stars.

    There are many workplace parallels. Short term prioritization, disincentives toward risk-taking, stifled creativity, resource drainage on diversity hires, demoralization, etc. So the smart guys drift into the middle. Why build when you can broker? Own when you can arbitrage? Manufacture when you can license? When the culture becomes a sitcom about nothing, making money from nothing will draw the talent.

    30
    • Why work for an anti-white megacorp that insists on face diapers and clot shots when I can sit here and make good money playing footsie with the juice farmers?

      4
      1
  45. something tells me that in 20 years mexico will become first world white majority country.
    In a decade or so there will be nowhere to run from diversity in USA/Canada, all states will become california. Sure, a lot of whites will go rural, but not all of them are willing/able to do that.
    They’ll run to mexico similarly to how californians are currently fleeing to texas. That country already has a sizable white population & almost no dindus in it. Corporations & their capital will follow.

    21
    2
    • We visited Cabo recently and three different times when I was making small talk with Mexican workers they asked where we were from. “Chicago” I replied. All three times the persons eyes got real wide, with a spooked look, like no way they’d ever want to live in a dangerous place like that.

      24
    • sentry: Not enough Whites. A lot of South Mexicans have more than a minimal % of sub-Saharan ancestry, and the racial mix varies throughout the country. Even in the Mexican state with the highest percentage of White ancestry, the average is about 65%.

      It ends up being a numbers game. Sharing a country ultimately ends up meaning sharing genetics, and without a constant infusion of fresh White genes, that upper class degrades to 75-95% White genetics, and the mix does not remain static. Someone like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who is of entirely Italian descent, becomes increasingly rare.

      12
    • With caveats, this could happen due to the decreasing fertility rates in Mexico. It would work only if Whites carved out their own state because otherwise there would be dilution of the blood line due to inbreeding with the native inhabitants.

      I disagree that distinct White states will not be carved out the of the United States and Canada, though, given the enormous geographic areas involved. These will happen following collapse and weakened central governments unable to prevent schisms. The furious push to impose a CAMP OF THE SAINTS option on the United States and Canadian heartlands indicate TPTB are aware this is a distinct possibility.

      11
      • The thing about CotS push in the heartland – what’s to keep the enrichers there? Once let loose, no doubt they “migrate” to urban enclaves.

    • WTF? They-and every other Latin American country-could have surged ahead while the US was embroiled in various unpopular conflicts, yet they didn’t. Why?

  46. Can’t remember when (easily more than a decade ago), I sent an email to La Griffe du Lion – the Zorro of statistics and, I believe, the creator of the Smart Fraction theory. It might have been around the time James Watson was, well, Watsoned, but it was definitely when someone was getting taken down by the mob.

    Anyway, I offered him a sort of apology. I told him that when I first started reading him, I had thought that his cloak and dagger routine to stay anonymous was a bit over the top. I told him that quite obviously that I was wrong and that he understood our current society far better than I did. And then I thanked him for his work.

    To my complete surprise, he answered. (I was that I had kept it.) Not surprisingly, his reply simply said:

    E pur si muove.

    Classy guy.

    26
  47. Sobran and Sam Francis used to talk about how minority enmity toward whites was ultimately driven by jealousy. You see a Nordic goddess parading down the street, or a Michelangelo painting while your inner city school’s touring the museum, and then later than day, after sitting in your housing project and waiting for your mom to come home and pluck the roaches out of the cereal box to feed you, you storm out of the apartment and stalk the subway tunnels, waiting to find some honkey you can push in front of the train, because you’re jealous and angry and at some level know what they’ve been telling you about racism and slavery doesn’t quite explain your lot.

    That’s troublesome enough (if you’re white and on the receiving end of the enmity and jealousy), but now here’s the kicker. For decades the diversity’s been told, and been telling themselves, that the only reason the world hasn’t been a peaceful, racism- and strife-free paradise is because of all the whiteys around. When it becomes impossible to pretend whitey still runs things, and everything from roads and bridges to black vs. Hispanic tension becomes worse, it’s going to hit them like an atom bomb: things were much, much better with whitey in charge. They’ll miss white-run America, but won’t be able to bring themselves to say it and it will make them hate us and themselves even more. I don’t want to think about what the rage is going to be like then, or what will happen to the primary targets of that rage, the remaining whites who, like South African whites, will live dispossessed in the shadow of people who hate them and have free license to hurt and kill them.

    My dad’s a boomer and we’ve had a conversation along these lines several times.
    Me: At least you’ll probably be dead before it gets really bad.
    Him: Gee, thanks.
    Me: You’re lucky, Dad.
    I think he knows it, and regrets his part in helping it get this far. He thought he was fighting racism and prejudice in the 60s (and trying to get laid). What he’s done is slit the throats of his children and grandchildren. And still I can’t quite hate him because his generation were mostly fools, not malicious.

    56
      • That’s true. With wisdom come great sorrow. Once I learned about HBD, I realized that something worse than death would come to me eventually—my genetic extinction.

    • The second amalgam (immigrants roughly between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s) will be hard hit. They are running the show with the radical faction of the first amalgam (i.e., Heritage America radicals) and a coalition of heritage blacks and incoming third amalgam immigrants. As go statues of Columbus so goes their nation.

      The focus on eliminating Whiteness will eliminate them as well. The clustering of all Caucasian peoples in the United States into one undifferentiated mass is an interesting maneuver by the radicals. It obscures the fact that heritage Americans are now a distinct ethnic minority and arguably have additional rights (both in national and international law) by virtue of being minorities. We see if this plays out in the legal and political arenas.

      14
    • Thank God we have the likes of you to set things right.
      If your dad did all that then I hate him too.

      3
      4
    • Joey Junger,

      Yes: the “Racial Reckoning” is not about equality, it’s about revenge: driven by envy, jealousy, and anger at the demonstrably superior achievements of Whites.

    • Not as much as you would think. In fact, there has been a weird brain drain of sorts in technology. Starting in the 1990’s, tech firms stopped hiring natives to do entry level work. Instead they shifted to low cost South Asian and South East Asian workers, who could do the work but would never advance beyond the basics. The result was a starving out of the development system. This is show up today in the shortage of technologists who are well rounded in tech and other areas like business, finance, manufacturing and so on. You still see a lot of old guys in these roles as a result.

      35
      • Being in a project which consists of German Engineers and Indians, the difference is very stark. While most of our Indians are competent, they don’t hold a candle to the least competent of the Germans.

        31
        • It is the narrowness that jumps out with South Asians. Those Germans not only know their role, but their role in the big picture. This is lost on the South Asians.

          17
          • That’s it exactly. I know a guy who has hired his fair share of engineers in the past. His complaints about NE Asians and, now somewhat, South Asians is always the same.

            They can accomplish a straight-forward task as long as it doesn’t require them to deviate whatsoever from the plan. They can’t adjust, can’t think about “why” their doing what they’re doing. It’s just not in their personality.

            The NE Asians seem either incapable of doing this or terrified of making a mistake. The South Asians are either too stupid or too lazy.

            It’s a problem in itself, but it’s also a problem downstream. As some point, you need some of these guys to move into project manager positions, but they’re completely unsuited for that job, which, of course, requires a larger understanding of the project and how the various pieces fit into an even larger plan. You also need to be creative and think on your feet.

            The NE Asians and South Asians seem to be particularly ill-suited for these roles. White guys shine at them. The problem is that they are simply fewer whites guys out there.

            All kinds of infrastructure – airports, construction, ports, distribution centers, etc. – are going to effected by this talent drain. Maybe AI can make up for some of the loss but not all of it.

            At some point, you need a guy who understands how things work and can manage people to get things done. Those guys are going to fewer and fewer on the ground.

            22
          • My IT Manager told many cautionary tales about those guys. Firms wanted to shave a few bucks and outsourced, where the competent guys, and they were virtually all guys, got to train their replacements in exchange for some severance. The new guys could barely function outside their narrow sphere and didn’t understand risks.

            The lucky ones were kept on longer because boards started to realize that they had underestimated the complexities. A fella could make a few bucks shorting that type of company.

          • Its logical. Hiding information is the norm in most non Western societies .

            If I share my skills with you, in essence my work is worth less and I am taking money from my own pocket.

            This is the Arab army problem. The old US Army encouraged cross training so our guys could do all kinds of things.

            Arab armies , well you are assigned the machine gun that is all you will do. You might not even know how to clean it .

            Throw in the fact there is no loyalty past tribe and you have the recipe for disaster,

            This will be our future too as younger Whites are adapting the same mindset.

            They way of things makes large scale projects amazingly difficult and we shall see more and more simplification.

      • You can find any old programmer off the street for a web page or database. I work in manufacturing and it’s hard to find PLC programmers, let alone great ones, to work in automation and design. The programming is much simpler than regular programming, but it requires a larger knowledge. You need mechanical aptitude coupled with programming and electrical wiring, along with a willingness to get your hands dirty.

        16
      • I’ve been a programmer for over 20 years. This is true. I worked at a very large tech company for a long time. I remember when we started farming out everything to India and China. The developers were morons. They needed an instruction manual spelled out for them on how to problem solve and build things. It was laughable. The end result of this was atrocious, bug-ridden software that provided little to no customer value, and those customers have since left for greener pastures. Said company has been on its way out now for quite a while, it’s just so big it’s taking a bit of time.

        I still have some friends there. They’re in management and they are not allowed to promote or hire white males any longer. In one case, they interviewed a black applicant for an engineer position. The guy could not complete the most basic of coding challenges that they use in the interviews. Upper management told them they had to hire him anyway and it’s been a disaster. Not only is he unable to do the work, but he has dragged down the entire team with him.

        “Diversity is our greatest strength”. That’s the line we’re fed. Where is the data for this? I’d love to see the comparisons between racially “diverse” teams and their white counterparts.

        29
        • “Diversity is our greatest strength”. That’s the line we’re fed. Where is the data for this? I’d love to see the comparisons between racially “diverse” teams and their white counterparts.

          Assuming that anybody has been brave (or rash) enough to keep such records, I think it’s safe to way that they will never see the light of day.

          • V.P. Dan Quayle is credited with first publicly uttering our now most sacred national shibboleth “Diversity is our strength.”

            Given in 1992 when speaking about a speech he gave in Japan, when they told him that they thought their homogeneous society trumped the US diverse one (this as the ashes of LA were still smoldering after the Rodney King riots)

            A moron who couldn’t spell the word “potato” gave us “DIOS”, something that, if you politely questioned at any HR meeting, would get you fired and banned from polite society forever.

            13
        • I’ve watched my firm hire Puerto Ricans who have admitted to cheating on their college exams.

          The guy who mentioned this in the group wrap-up for that round of interviews was black.

          Clearly, HR had to step in and defeat that black white supremacist.

          10
        • The expression unofficially (but in reality) really refers to the strength of the tactic for disruption of the existing society. Diversity is our strength is the motto for dividing is our method of conquering.

          • People should ask exactly who is the “our” in that phrase referring to?

            The phrase may well be true in that respect.

      • I was able to extend my career as a s/w engineer at least 10 years, because of this effect. my highest hourly rate (contracting) was my last year of working.

      • Its a wise play. If you want engineering , you must pay for it in money and social capital. We won’t so we do without.

        Also what good talent remained in the computer biz ended up well let’s quote Jeffery Hammerbacher “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

  48. Assuming the plan for a “Great Reset” (cover story Time magazine, Nov. 2020) is true, the global elite planning this haven’t thought it all the way through. Crashing an economy that will have less qualified workers for vital jobs will be a disaster.

    Add in their plan for us “to own nothing, and be happy,” and they’ve eliminated the motivation for young people to tackle challenging well-paid jobs. Do the global elite not realize they’re also reliant on the workers they seem to hate?

    20
    • The ‘Great Reset’ isn’t about GDP or production, it’s about creating a New World, the likes of which have never been seen before. It’s not along the lines of “Wealth of Nations” or “Das Kapital,” but rather the Georgia Guidestones.

    • There was an article in the Guardian a while back, they allowed comments, it was amazing, leftists love idocracy too, but it’s obvious that they don’t understand it

    • David Wright: I think it’s more Harrison Bergeron, myself. While Vonnegut didn’t really deal with the racial angle, the envy and rage and ‘equalizing’ of everyone and everything, monitored by the womyn in charge, is spot on.

  49. I’m there. I cannot read my paid for posts of yours behind the Subscribestar paywall on my Android phone. I go SS, I log in, and it it sends me a code to complete the process. I then go to my email, I get the code, I go back…well I don’t go back because once I go to my email to get the code the Subscribestar window is gone. Thank God I’m not looking for drinking water!

    However, I was able to answer the first question of the sample Wonderlic I took:

    1. The eleventh month of the year is:

    Granted I guessed this month but that counts too right?

    • There is a way to turn that off. If you post this question in the comments, others will explain how it works.

    • Turn off two-factor authentication and you won’t have an issue. Similar thing happened to me

      • But…but…but…I don’t want to pass through any credentials that may allow freeloaders :>) to read Z’s special writings! Actually, thank you. I didn’t know if that feature existed and quite frankly I was just to lazy to look for it. I would just settle for reading the posts on my Windows machine beside my dog and not in the car awaiting an oil change. However, I do have the Gab app and that is a great time killer when waiting for something or another.

  50. “The fact is, there is no escaping the ramifications of the cognitive decline. We have created a society that requires an average IQ of about 97. The distribution of smarts provided sufficient talent at each layer of society. The smart fraction was large enough to carry the rest. Now that IQ has dipped below that threshold, we are starting to see problems like the supply chain issues.”

    The IQ thing is problematic.

    The Japanese, reportedly, still have higher-IQs and their cognition appears to be as strong as before, yet, they stand on the brink of racial oblivion.

    Why?

    What kind of ‘intelligence’ is this that prevents them from making families?

    Surely, ‘intelligence’ needs a new definition.

    12
    1
    • The Japanese Constitution was written by their conquerers to create a docile society. Once the rot is institutional, it trickles down and destroys a people.

      The decline of Japan is a testament to the power of American cultural rot.

      29
      • Same thing happened to Germany; the Allies – in their fear of them – demonized the Prussian spirit & knocked too much of it out of them.

        23
        • The allies would have gone full Morgenthau plan if they thought they could get away with it. The first couple years of aftermath was essentially that.

          22
          • No they weren’t. The British reduced their food consumption(rationing continued post bellum) to increase the protein in the German diet.
            Industry was also encouraged by the Western allies.

      • Sorry, bud, but that was 70+ years ago, and yet demographic declines/shifts are happening across the first world. Plus the Jap reaction to Covid was nowhere as draconian nor stupid as America’s. My point isn’t to defend our East Asian buddies so much as to point out the Western penchant for liking ratios of 1:4 finger pointing, i.e. the “1 finger pointing, four pointing back at you”.

    • Muhammad,

      While IQ has been shown in numerous studies to correlate strongly with success in life, intelligence is not the only factor involved in innovation and accomplishment.

      There are other personality factors in play, which explain why Asians, who have higher average IQ than Whites, haven’t out-achieved them: curiosity, the urge to explore, being comfortable venturing outside the herd.

      20
    • “Surely, ‘intelligence’ needs a new definition.”

      Why? The current defintion works fine. The problem the HBD people run into is thinking IQ is tool universally applicable to everyone without taking into account local conditions. IQ is a just measuring tool, not a the end-all be-all explanation for everything nor something that is more than what it’s not.

      I live in Japan and feel like the demographic crisis is somewhat overblown. I’ll admit I’m not even that confident in that, just a feeling the outside world may force sudden change on the Japanese and encourage a boom of sorts. Wouldn’t be the first time. If you’re looking for a people well on their way to acting out “Children of Men”, look at the South Koreans. Realistically they could be gone by century’s end.

      The problem you run into, and other places particularly where whites are involved, is that the modern world does a helluva wrecking job on forming traditional families and having kids. It’s not merely porn, the Jews, or what have you, there’s no impetus to procreate. Why? People live struggle-free lives for the moment. They have to invent bullshit to get worked up over; like Covid.

      19
        • There’s a theory that this may compound, i.e. the 100 million strong, though aging, society inherits a 120 million strong country which is disproportionately expensive so they have fewer kids, rinse-lather-repeat.

          There is, of course, nothing but their own determination that is keeping them from arresting the cycle.

        • once the population drops a little, family formation becomes easier and voila! equilibrium is reached.

    • I’d say it has more to do with having 126 million people packed into a hilly island the size of Arizona than anything cultural. If in the future they go for ‘lebensraum’ in Asia as they did a few decades ago I bet their birthrate will rocket back up. Hmm, that sounds like a good idea for a novel.

    • Japan is grossly overcrowded with 4x the density of horribly overcrowded California.

      Its rational to have smaller families until the nation can support them.

      Problem is that people move to cities and the problem continues. Also logical there is no work in small towns and villages.

      Its also very much a matter of social carrying capacity . In order for people to have children in modernity they need steady income and time enough to raise them.

      Neither of those are extant in Japan , you either have no income or no time and that won’t work.

      Our societies simply can’t support family formation. We won’t pay the costs, won’t build stable business structures, won’t spread work into smaller areas and avoid automation . So for the last 50 years or more no developed nation has many babies.

      Short sighted businesses seeing lack of consumers and lack of cheap workers flooded many nations with foreigners rather than adapting . In that sense the native “conservatism” and inflexibility of our systems is our own downfall

      Long term though if we can get enough land for us and us alone, its not a bad situation . The population will decline to what it can support. That is a positive thing all in all.

      Thinking Georgia Guidestones, the population sentiment isn’t entirely wrong (its closer to a billion that can be supported) problem comes in some one thinking they get to decide .

      Nature though? Well its all good.

  51. Mike Judge painted this picture beautifully in ‘Idiocracy’, the hospital and courtroom scenes playing out today in real time. He made a blatantly conscious effort to whiten nearly all of the cast, other than the smart, sassy leading ‘lady’ and POTUS.

    10
  52. Among things that cannot be named, this is showing up with repairs of the massive hydroelectric dams built in the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest back in the Thirties. Many of the dams are damaged and need repair, and some represent imminent flood disasters to the cities and communities downstream. The Corps of Engineers and others seem at a loss as to how to correct the problems. Even a generation ago, there were skilled and talented, mostly White, engineers in abundance who could devise plans to divert water and make repairs. Those men are mostly gone now. Many of their children and grandchildren either cannot follow in their footsteps or are leaving the psychopathology of the centers where they are most needed.

    I cite this example, and there are many others across the spectrum and a range of industry, because the claim the United States no longer can go to the Moon–which I rate as mostly true–distracts from the real dangers from the Human Capital Scarcity, which grows each day. It will get worse. In fact, Agribusiness is as dependent on skilled labor as electrical engineering and basically no one can fill jobs there, either, while independent farmers disappear by design and circumstances beyond the control of TPTB. A common misconception is Agribusiness has eliminated the need for labor, and while true as to the grunt work, it is absolutely false as to the skilled components.

    Energy, food and durable goods will become increasingly harder to obtain, even with massive imports, as White men die off or relocate to local communities to become self-sufficient and divorced from the psychopathology of Clown World. Shanika and Luttrell can run and dance, but most cannot feed or clothe themselves and heat their homes. What good is an EBT card when there is nothing it can buy? Equity, hell. We are about to experience the greatest inequity in human history, and while much was planned, the reality is what was not planned is about to make the lives of even the Clouds a bitch.

    29
    • Even a generation ago, there were skilled and talented, mostly White, engineers in abundance

      They didn’t need to come up with thousands of dollars to pay the salaries of an increasing army of university faculty and administrators. Whose idea was it anyway that corporations should require prospective employees to spend the time and money supposedly required to fill engineering positions before they were even hired? It makes more sense that these companies should identify their next generation of skilled employees when they are still in their formative years, hire them and educate them for their future roles in their own institutions or ones financed by them.

      There must be scads of individuals with the intelligence and talent needed to keep the technological ball rolling that simply couldn’t afford to make the mortgage and car payments of university diversity deans. In a country that supposedly extols the virtues of the market economy, one of its biggest businesses is education, which is socialistic in every way and at every level. And doomed to failure.

      19
      • Tom asks, “Whose idea was it anyway that corporations should require prospective employees to spend the time and money supposedly required to fill engineering positions before they were even hired?”

        There was an important court case, Griggs vs. Duke Power Company, which ruled that companies cannot give IQ tests to employees because blacks do poorly on those tests. This was in 1971. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1970/124

        This ruling is the reason that everyone had to go to college to get a good job, because a college degree was a proxy for a high IQ. Ann Coulter has talked a lot about this court case and its effects.

        19
        • Companies still use IQ tests, but nowhere near as much as they should. Mostly what they do is counter the results with outreach programs.

          • If so, how do these companies get around the Griggs ruling?

            Do you dispute that the Griggs ruling had the effects that I stated?

          • I think it did have an impact, just not as sweeping as many have assumed. I used to do pre-employment testing for large companies. The most common test was Wonderlic, but I used WISC and even Stanford-Binet. Basic math and vocabulary tests were also used. For management positions, we had a set of self-assessment tests that were basically the Big Five. I forget who made them.

            I tested and scored thousands of people.

          • Google “Microsoft interview techniques”. There are many ways to give what amounts to a proxy for IQ test.

        • I’ve taken aptitude tests for several jobs. No idea what you’re talking about here.

          • Al, I only know what I’ve read.

            I am a software engineer, where all day interviews where they try to kill you in multiple ways are common, but I’ve never taken an aptitude test.

            I’m not disputing your experience. I’m trying to square it with what I’ve read about Griggs.

        • IQ tests aren’t the point. There are many ways to determine suitability for further education that are used today all over the world. Tests of high school students for college admission are a continuing source of hyper-stress for Asian parents and children. Grades in primary classes are important, teacher evaluations mean something, attendance, too. These were once important here as well but now teachers are required to pass all students so their feelings and self-esteem aren’t damaged.

          Ultimately, unlike in more “primitive” societies, the US culture doesn’t wish to allow “failure”. Everyone must be successful, at least in their own mind. Bad decisions must not be allowed to ruin lives. Unwed teen-age mothers must receive tax payer subsidies so the kids can grow up like other kids and the mommy and child isn’t an inconvenience to her parents. When the government pays for something more of it is made available. College tuition loans that can never be repaid because the borrower is a waitress must be forgiven, in the sense that the loan is repaid by the government.

          • Tom: “IQ tests aren’t the point.”

            Tom remains the loyal opposition on this site. I can’t think of any more replicable results in the social sciences than IQ tests.

            I still can’t get a clear position on what he advocates. All I can discern is that if it is pro-white then he opposes it.

            He is against everything that most of us are in favor of,

          • Tom seems to be talking about non-US schooling. Perhaps true, but I don’t see much of that here in K-12 in our non-White areas. Achievement—and measures thereof—is a joke. Heck, school system after school system are abandoning traditional grading and evaluating testing. Such is inevitable when society dictates everyone is the same and differences are the fault of the system.

        • I think they are still allowed to give aptitude tests like coming problems, or the old school simple machine test I took a couple years ago during my failed detour to NJ.

      • I asked a Master HVAC technician (business owner) if he might be interested in taking on my son as an Apprentice. He said “No, every time I’ve tried to train an apprentice, he’s left my business to work for someone else. I’m done with that.”

        I didn’t see the point in asking him if maybe he didn’t pay his tech’s enough to stay. Maybe his small business really couldn’t compete with the bigger firms in the area.

    • Jack Dobson: “Energy, food and durable goods will become increasingly harder to obtain, even with massive imports, as White men die off or relocate to local communities to become self-sufficient and divorced from the psychopathology of Clown World.”

      Going Galt even if not by conscious design. The results will be the same, and I really cannot pretend to feel empathy for those who will suffer under and be bewildered by it.

      • Whites are Going Galt to some extent now, largely at the margins but increasing in numbers, and it more a matter of economics than personal choice. I also have no sympathy for those who live deluded lives, particularly now that signs of rapid decline are unmistakable.

        My biggest concern is something analogous to the first three or four winters in the Soviet Union will take place as looters and marauders span out into the countryside to try to commandeer food stuffs and hard goods. The first targets, of course, will be leftwing Whites within urban enclaves who will be reduced to begging in the areas targeted for plunder. No tears will follow if lead has to be plugged into those types if they become aggressive for the first time in their miserable lives.

        • I highly doubt that urban youths will only go after the left wing. Pretty sure they’ll be going after liberals’ left wing, right wing, and both drumsticks.

    • ” … what was not planned is about to make the lives of even the Clouds a bitch.”

      ” ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.”

    • the short and inevitably disregarded answer is government needs to get out of the way between the buyer and the seller. Stop making so many rules regulations fees and fines. There’s a huge pool of untapped white talent but the government has basically denied them the means to survive in any practicable way–Hire Felons! I am not optimistic about the near future (next 5 years), we have no viable competent new candidate for next President, there’s no way we can hire and train 60,000 new truck drivers immediately, we are hamstrung by government from starting new businesses here to compensate for foreign made medicines, clothing, machinery and appliances. I live in the least restrictive state and I see it all around me, it’s like people are so focused on just getting through today without imploding that they cannot face trying to contemplate or even plan to survive and thrive 5 years from now. God I despair..

      • Our problems are not economical. To purse economic solutions is to be misled.

        The single most sincere message from the free market is, “import cheap labor.”

        Sweden did socialism just fine before immigration.

        Having said all that, I still favor as free a market as can be sustained under the governance of an ethnostate. The guy who invents a better mousetrap should be rich.

        Nonetheless, I’d rather be in socialist Sweden than libertarian Somalia.

      • The problems of regulation are not a bug, they are a feature. There is no legislating a solution, as it is the legislatures that are intentionally creating the problems.

  53. Yep, between the good intentioned but ultimately idiotic egalitarian civil rights legislation, the even more idiotic immigration legislation coupled with idiotic (though fun for a while) feminism has doomed this (former) country. A lot of us hope for a rapid collapse, but as Z has said, will most likely be a long slow and infuriating deflation. Fun times ahead for sure.

    16
  54. This is my pet theory for why everything is California is breaking down, from forest fires, lack of electricity and water, horrible traffic, and so on. The state is something like 37% white.

    12
    • It’s still that high…? Not being obnoxious, I thought I read somewhere it dipped below that a long time ago.

  55. We have created a society that requires an average IQ of about 97.

    South Africa continued to function as a first world country with a 10% white ruling class.

    There is a lot of ruin in a modern nation. The end is nowhere in sight.

    11
    2
    • I think the missing point here is South Africa was designed from the start for a small highly intelligent white minority to rule over a black majority. If you compare how they evolved as the black population grew compared to American cities like Detroit and Baltimore, this stands out.

      28
      • Good point, although Detroit and Baltimore already look like Bantustans from what I’ve heard. They even have separate judicial systems, it seems.

        6
        1
    • South Africa can limp on because the global economy, that is America, can help them limp on. What’s about to happen is that the central pillar of the global economy is wobbling. If America goes, Europe can’t take up the slack of feeding Africa with grain food aid.

      That’s a lot of Blacks going North. Which throws Europe into chaos.

      If America can’t buy Cheap Chinese Crap thats the two largest economies in tatters. It also frees up China to enforce all those territorial ambitions.

      Let it burn.

      12
      • If America goes, Europe can’t take up the slack of feeding Africa with grain food aid.

        If America goes, we have a lot more serious problems on our hands than global famine. Grain is not the problem, you just cut down more rainforest.

        8
        2
        • How do they cross the Sahara without the help of the European traitors ferrying them about?

          Bantu migrate very slowly on their own. They arrived from West Africa down into South Africa only about the time the Dutch got there and there isn’t any really difficult obstacle to navigate.

    • Well, that’s the question isn’t it.

      And it’s not just South Africa. What about California or Texas or New Mexico? All have seen whites fall to minority or near minority status, but they still function. Sure, they’re a lot crappier than they used to be, but most whites still get along reasonably well.

      White people even move to Texas so it can’t be that bad.

      Now, obviously, the non-white immigration to those states has been mostly Hispanic (and Asian for California), so the threat to whites is much lower. Whites seem fine being the rich guys in a second world countries populated by Mestizos.

      There’s also the fact that middle-class whites could escape California so their hand wasn’t forced.

      But, yes, I look at California, Texas and Mexico and wonder if whites will ever wake up. Now, how South Africa functions is a complete mystery to me.

      • S/A only functions in some areas. Most of the rest are just ignored, some money is thrown to big men and infrastructure and its left to its own devices.

        It basically has a few 1st world cities a few 2nd tier ones and the rest are typical Africa.

        Now California from experience is imploding. It was and kind of is super rich so its going to take a long time, maybe decades but power and especially transportation are becoming super dysfunctional.

        Problem is expertise is vanishing, skilled labor had fled anywhere but here and its becoming impossible to keep large projects going, get good medical care, travel any distance at a reasonable rate and so on.

        Its simply not possible to teach anyone of any race any high complexity skills.

        A stubborn unwillingness to quit by oldsters out of some misplaced loyalty to the job is keeping things running after a fashion but sooner or later the mid septuagenarians and yes octogenarians will die of old age. They have few replacements and none are especially skilled.

        A friend of mine told me that basically no one under 40 is in trades and when the rare young unicorn pops up they are unable to do the job and when they get past that not psychologically constituted too it. I think he used the world wussy but its beyond that.

        This doesn’t mean Armageddon. Its just means Brazil 2.0

        The caveat to that is if/when the Leave Me Alone Right decides to fight or a collapse happens. That will accelerate things faster than even COVID and may end up in all manner of ways, most of which are highly unpleasant and will result in no more USA

  56. A silver lining. Any day now, my shrewish, sanctimonious shitlib mother will be going into a retirement home staffed by low wage vibrants.

    What goes around, comes around you old bitch. It’s your turn to reap the benefits of diversity.

    34
    2
    • Ouch…harsh! I hope her assets are trust protected so the gubamint don’t rape and pillage to cover the nursing home costs. This way they can be passed on to you :>)

    • Glen: Unlike many others, I can empathize with your sentiment. I physically and emotionally separated from my mother many decades ago, so my feelings are not nearly so raw as yours. I remind myself that living well is the best revenge (and I have the blessings of a wonderful husband and a merciful Savior). I send my mother “thinking of you” cards every month or so (we live over 1000 miles apart by my choice), but I will not mourn when she dies.

      10
      • glenf’s indefatigable rage is a source of warmth for many. a hate so pure it’s sweeter than love.

        14
      • Good for you honey–sometimes in order to save yourself you have to cut your losses and move on, like selling a stock thats tanking. Don’t be that abused wife that thinks well this time he really will change-he promised! Distance yourself but always be willing to reconnect if the person changes, if not just remember any good things about them that you can..

      • Exactly, 3G. Great advice as usual. Like you said, keep it civil, and keep it frosty. And when that old bat dies – I am buying a round for the house.

        Maybe I won’t do that, enjoying the misfortune of others is not civil…but I will not mourn her passing either.

    • haha i will lift a glass to her soon to be cornholing by a bantu night attendant. “he mrs tallyman, tally me banana”

Comments are closed.