It’s a cool dark night in California and all the lights are out. Sloping rooftops dotted with solar panels gleam even more darkly than usual. The air is still and not a single breeze stirs even the lightest wind turbine. Somewhere out in the darkness Diablo Canyon, the aging nuclear plant, still running, is keeping what power there is on. The Northern Chumash or as the media insists on calling them, the Yak Titu Titu Yak Tiłhini, are demanding the territory which would make them California’s second nuclear power. They might prove to be better guardians of keeping the state’s power on than the Democrats. The white liberal man has had his chance.
The great westward drive that began with Lewis and Clark has been steadily rolling backward. Southern California is filled with moving trucks headed to Arizona, Texas and Nevada. Those who can afford it, fly to Florida. The Russians were here once and then the Spanish. The American presence in California was more comprehensive and lasted longer, but may one day leave sagging Wells Fargo banks and decrepit mini malls filled with sushi places and nail salons the way the Spanish left their names and their missions up Highway 101.
It’s a beautiful country, but so is Afghanistan and any number of otherwise unlivable places. Every other visit to a store seems to end with a shoplifter boldly walking out with a few items in hand. Sometimes a cashier, usually young and male, shouts futilely, “Hey, sir” into the wind. A few older women, cashiers and customers, mutter about how it’s hurting everyone. A manager says this is the new normal. No one connects it to the coming elections. The media tells them that the madness is a social phenomenon, a response to inequality, the pandemic, and climate change, and they never bother to argue. Just go on and vote for Karen Bass and Newsom.
While the police are nowhere, security personnel in tactical vests carrying far more firepower than they could possibly need are everywhere. Many of them are current or former police who found that private security pays better. Others may be immigrants who barely speak English. Like most Third World countries from Mexico to Iraq, California has a rising private military that watches over everything from grocery stores to houses of worship. Liberals complained about the militarization of the LAPD, but this is the militarization of everything.
We think of Third World countries as poor, but they’re not. Visit Karachi, Cairo and Jakarta, or even Baghdad, Gaza, or even Kabul, and you’ll see great riches and even greater poverty. The problem with income inequality isn’t that CEOs make two million times more than their employees do, it’s that there’s nothing in the middle. The middle class makes a society sane and livable. It gives people something to reach for rather than beating their wives or knifing their neighbors in the dark. The bourgeois is civilization. Without the middle class, there’s barbarism, a crude hierarchy and the rule of force.
California, always in the cultural vanguard, is losing its middle class faster than the rest of the country. The middle class made the state’s cities sprawl into vast stretches of spaghetti freeways, lots of surprisingly affordable houses whose garages spawned the technological revolution that changed the world, world class universities whose engineers went to work for the state’s defense industries, and beyond them the orange groves and horse ranches, and the hills just made for hiking and riding.
Without the middle class, California is a vastly wealthy and endlessly poor Third World state, blessed with great landscapes and no one to fill them with except gang members, day laborers, welfare recipients and assorted immigrants who will move on just like the Americans have. Inflation and recession are only accelerating the inevitable migration. Third World migrants are coming northward and American migrants are going east. “Go west, young man,” Horace Greeley’s advice, no longer seems so sound anymore. And no one except aspiring starlets and engineers dorming eight to a room in hopes of hitting the startup or stardom lottery are taking it.
California was as far westward as most Americans seemed likely to go. Now Americans are moving eastward to a new manifest destiny of decline. The migrations of the last century that reshaped the country are being reversed. People are leaving the cities. Black people are retracing their migration from the South to the Northeast. Americans are leaving California to immigrants from Asia and Latin America. The nation’s history is coming unwound, running in reverse like an old film reel, which leaves us perilously close to replaying the Civil War.
There is something about the state that invites big musings and bigger dreams. But there’s little to dream about anymore. The defense industries are moribund, the orchards are starved of water, the entertainment industry is just another side venture of the tech industry, and the tech industry is beginning to flee the mess it helped create. And you can’t just run an entire state on being a place where rich people can enjoy seaside views if they can stomach the crime, the taxes, and the madness. Southern Europe is already full of places like that. And Greece, Spain and Portugal don’t have a booming future.
The trouble with California, like New York City, is its grandiosity. Building skyscrapers and rolling back the desert gave people the sense that anything was possible. But the horizontal and vertical towers of babel were only receptacles for civilization, not civilization itself. Men and women came to big cities and big lands to reinvent themselves and went mad instead.
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” George Orwell complained in The Road to Wigan Pier.
California, like most major cities, is run by those people now. But it is in the tarnished state that they let their wildest and maddest dreams roam. California, for Jerry Brown, would be a spaceship. It’s a spaceship now in a decaying orbit with a crew quarreling over how to distribute legal marijuana franchises to achieve equity between racial groups, union members, ex-cons, transgenders and the politically connected. Not that it matters because everyone is still buying the old-fashioned illegal pot.
Orwell could hardly have imagined this dystopia. It’s more Aldous Huxley, an Oxford graduate who died in Los Angeles of an LSD overdose on the day of JFK’s assassination. Huxley narrowly missed seeing the brave new world that was coming. The decadent intellectuals drugged out of their minds and the savages roaming beyond did not take long to show up in California. And the rest is history and current events.
“We will get our energy from the sun,” they declare. “Houses for the unhoused,” they clamor. “Money is just an idea,” they insist. “Crime is a social construct invented by white supremacy.”
What happens when people lose their sense of meaning and purpose? They sit on the beach, look out into the ocean, blind themselves with gorgeous sunsets and go out of their minds. Sanity is a function of responsibility. We are only as sane as the tasks we set ourselves. Sanity means getting up in the morning and knowing what you have to do and why you have to do it. It’s also reality, maturity and adulthood.
If people in their thirties and forties act like teenagers did a generation ago, it’s because they live like teenagers. And in tent cities strung along under overpasses, there are people in their fifties and sixties, strung out, staring madly, who never grew up. The smelly unshaven Peter Pans will never grow up. They will shoot up, get high, get stoned, get drunk, catch diseases, kill each other and die. And as a compassionate society, we will spend billions of dollars enabling them to destroy themselves. Then we’ll get all our power from the sun and change our genders.
There have always been two Californias. The state of working people, farmers and builders, engineers and truck drivers and the other California.
“My own belief is that California has a unique place on the planet. It’s been a place of dreams. We can pursue a path of benign energy,” Governor Jerry Brown once said.
People aren’t meant to live in dreams. After a while they turn into nightmares.
In the darkness, an electric car emitting a spaceship sound whooshes past. Somewhere in the night a crazy laugh rings on and on. A billboard advertises app-based marijuana deliveries. A naked man is holding a giant pot leaf in front of his crotch. The crazy laughs breaks off into sobbing and cursing. A free magazine lying draped over a dying bird of paradise bush advertises a drag queen act.
We live in the land of dreams. Mad, idiotic dreams. And those dreams are killing us.
The postmodern soma of the lotus eaters isn’t just something you snort or shoot up, it’s in the culture. Utopia is in the air, the water and the cloud. And like all utopias, it’s a dystopia.
A delusional nightmare that people are fleeing the way that they did from the Soviet Union.
Delusions, like all viruses, kill the host. The Left and its culture wars are a grand delusion. Unlike class warfare, which for all its evil and folly was rooted in real issues and in human nature, the postmodern culture wars are the deconstructionist fantasies of perpetual revolutionaries who live in imaginary utopias. After repeatedly failing to realize a classless society, their new utopia will also get rid of gender, technology, the family and borders.
That is not the work of people living in the real world.
But for now, the power is occasionally on, there’s sometimes food in the stores, and the system hasn’t collapsed yet. Reality is harsh, but the 72 degree weather keeps it at bay.
There’s still time for one more walk, one more breath and one more sunset. And tomorrow? Just follow the moving trucks and the great migration from the land of dreams back to the real world.
The question now is “how can this be reversed?”
And the only answer to this question is “let the people fix it themselves”
Governments the world over have spectacularly failed to fix any of these problems, where in the world has improved these last 30 years? Only places where the government is small and doesn’t interfere with regulation after regulation.
people first have to jettison the stream of lies and the political machine running things
no real sign of a majority getting behind that, though there’s been some progress in San Francisco
maybe things need to hit bottom
I think you guys need what Margaret Thatcher had in the 70’s and that is a split in the democrats party. The British Labour party split along the communist/socialist line. The Labour party ended up communist and the Liberal Democrats were closer to the centre.
From what I can see from this side of the Atlantic it would not take a lot of persuasion to have the same thing in the Democrats. All it will take is to pin the leftist elite communism on a few high profile individuals, we had Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and someone on the reasonable centre ground. We had Roy Jenkins.
The Dirtbagocrats are united in their goal of a one party country so I don’t think it’s possible to induce a schism. For example, these are people who enforce social issues most of them detest just to gain power. Very few of them actually want tranny tyranny, abortion up till the moment of birth and after, a ban on internal combustion vehicles and so on but they support those monstrous policies anyway because they’re united in their desire for absolute power. More importantly, they know their economic policies are detested by the majority of their own stupid constituents but impose them anyway. Opposition to Bidenflation and the invasion of illegal aliens are far and away the most important issues for the public majority but the D-Bags don’t care. They’ll do anything, say anything, support anything, oppose anything and F over anybody to gain power. They’re united in that goal.
Yup. Nancy is a good example.
and even moderate Dems are willing to support any insanity as long as they’re threatened with the specter of whichever Republican they’ve decided is the new Hitler
Philosophy is the answer. Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. And this is no quick instant fix. It took 150 years of philosophical disintegration from 1781 when Immanuel Kant first published his attack on reason, “The Critique of Pure Reason”, for Germany to collapse into the abject irrationality of Nazism. But the way to the complete insanity of Nazism had already been prepared by 5,000 years of religion and mysticism.
Objectivism is only 50 years old and is fighting against 5,000 years of religion and centuries of secular unreason. Not to mention that unreason, mysticism, and magical thinking are the default modes of the human mind, we are born magical thinkers, and for many the temptation to return to magical thinking and a world ruled by magic is always there. It may well take centuries for Objectivism to become the dominant philosophy of the West but there is no other way.
“The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
I think CA has had more than enough selfish hedonism and conceit.
A flawed philosophy sadly, nobody buys the selfish virtue message, no matter how many times you and Rand’s followers explain it. Selfishness is not seen as a virtue and never will be.
This is the number one problem with philosophy and academia, they know what is right, they’re the experts but we know how the practical world works.
In Atlas Shrugged its the brains who go on strike and the world is led into chaos. That is at the heart of her philosophy but it’s a fantasy, we need both brains and practical application.
Not only that but the so called technocrats are incompetent and most of them are dumb. Most of the people with brains are in the working class and so are most of the practical thinkers. The soc called technocrats with brains and practicality are the selfish ones who are busy ruining society and the country for personal gain.
Rand was a selfish skank (check out her photos and lifestyle) and her philosophy is a sham she used to excuse rank hedonism, as you know. Definitely a fantasy. The world she depicted in her novels doesn’t and couldn’t exist.
“Philosophy is the answer.” Yep. And while you and your buddies are sitting around gazing at your navels the blue cities are going over their cliffs, beset by murder, property crime and corrupt leftists running the show.
You will always be a childish ineffective idiot with nothing to offer to anyone. And as the centuries pass you and silly philosophy will be long forgotten.
What THX 1138 said!!!
Which is what, exactly? Selfish behavior imposed on the public is what caused the horrific mess we’re in.
“No one connects it to the coming elections.”
Yeah. The price of gas at the gas stations locally (NorCal) has been skyrocketing. Someone on the local group complained “Why is that allowed?”
Get it? She never heard of free markets? Supply and demand? The price gas stations have to pay to get that gas? She thinks government controls prices?
A couple of brave souls timidly stuck their toes in the water and tried to hint at supply and demand and such, but quickly disappeared after getting blasted by the others.
Etc., etc.
Oh, yeah, I remember now. They called it “price gouging”, and where to report it.
Get it? Calling in the government to set prices at the gas station, etc.
Not to mention that there is a big movement locally to ban new gas stations, never seen an explanation that that would drive up gas prices, except in my own comments.
Amen, AA.
“We wouldn’t need gas stations is the government just bought everyone an electric car”
Exactly. My pet idea of the last few days, watching the locals ride motorcycles to save gas, observing the greatly diminished amount of vehicular traffic due to the skyrocketing gas prices, almost everyone in this semi-rural area driving used cars or keeping their current cars until they are old and bedraggled, if they can’t afford gas, how are they to afford $40,000 for a new electric vehicle?
I noticed this morning in my emails that down in the SF Bay Area they have installed a lot of electrical vehicle charging stations. But what about areas further outside the large Democrat cities? It’s just crazy, a high percentage of electric vehicles in the big Democrat cities and nearby, a lot of older model used cars in more rural areas further away.
That’s what the Bidenfltion administration is shilling, you know. That oil companies and gas stations are price gouging. It’s amazing that anybody is stupid enough to believe it. Gas was cheap under greedy President Trump but high as F under Saint Joseph. How people that stupid succeed in life is beyond me.
Right.
Yet you continue to live in the land of the eloi, where your missionary activities, admirable as they are, are to no avail. Why not come East (or Midwest) to the lands of sane folk?
Few people realize that gas prices are based on how much it will cost the station owner to refill their tanks, not how much the gas in them cost. They have to stay ahead of rising gas prices, or they can’t refill their tanks.
Those people near you will end up wondering why they’re waiting in line to fill up their tanks, and why that gas costs more there. It’s like not building new power plants or water reservoirs, while importing millions of illegal aliens, and wondering why there’s not enough water or power. I saw where California restarted four gas fired power plants in the Sacramento area. No need for the politicians and bureaucrats to suffer.
Great article, with the analysis of the middle class, etc.
I started being a fan of the middle class when my friend came back from college in Oregon spouting Nietzsche and dropping phrases like the “petite bourgeoisie”. I don’t remember which side he was on, but when I found out that the Communists were against the petite bourgeoisie, that made me a fan of the petite bourgeoisie, whoever they were 🙂
In my understanding, the “petite bourgeoisie” are the middle-to-upper middle class, typified by small shop owners, small businessmen, and tradesmen. The left has always hated this group because the left is comprised of envious elitists who do not think the common man is worthy of any of the pleasures of life. These were the people targeted by the Covid lockdowns and whom the “great re-set” is targeting.
Leftist elites want a monopoly on the good things of life, and we see that playing out before our very eyes. As they use the bogeyman of “climate change” to strip us of our rights and lower our expectations and our lifestyles, the globalist elites continue to live in luxury and fly their private jets to the conferences where they lay their plans against us. I use the phrase “lay their plans against us” deliberately, because H.G. Wells used that phrase to describe the Martians in the opening pages of his novel “The War of the Worlds,” which some have viewed as an allegory of the war of human elites against the rest of us, or of technocratic civilization versus the rest of the world.
So, grubs and locusts and skateboards and public transportation and two-room apartments for us, steak and mansions and electric cars and private jets for the elites, to whom we are supposed to be eternally grateful for the few things they allow us. And we have Super Bowls and “reality” TV and Tik-Tok to keep us distracted. The celebrity magazines pretend that we are all on a first-name basis with Ellen and Brad and Oprah and Meghan, giving us the illusion that we are somehow part of their world.
The real elites responsible for Western civilization’s advanced technology and unprecedented, highest, standard of living in human history are the “Giants of the Intellect”. I would say there are about 1,000 of these giants on whose shoulders we in the West stand. Men like Aristotle, Euclid, Newton, Edison, Einstein, Tesla, Pasteur, Ford, etc. The rest of us, including people like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, are ordinary men and women by comparison, incapable of revolutionary, paradigm-shift, ideas.
What the political, power-lusting, power-wielding, “elites” don’t care to realize is that advanced technology is the product of free minds. Destroy liberty and you destroy the necessary condition a genius requires to do his thinking. Frightened and threatened serfs don’t produce revolutionary technology. Communist China like Soviet Russia produces no revolutionary, paradigm shift, technology, it begs, borrows, or steals it from the freer West.
A totalitarian state results in a collapsed, stagnant, economy.
“Nothing can raise a country’s productivity except technology, and technology is the final product of a complex of sciences (including philosophy), each of them kept alive and moving by the achievements of a few independent minds….
The enemies of the Industrial Revolution—its displaced persons—were of the kind that had fought human progress for centuries, by every means available. In the Middle Ages, their weapon was the fear of God. In the nineteenth century, they still invoked the fear of God—for instance, they opposed the use of anesthesia on the grounds that it defies God’s will, since God intended men to suffer. When this weapon wore out, they invoked the will of the collective, the group, the tribe. But since this weapon has collapsed in their hands, they are now reduced, like cornered animals, to baring their teeth and their souls, and to proclaiming that man has no right to exist—by the divine will of inanimate matter.
The demand to “restrict” technology is the demand to restrict man’s mind. It is nature—i.e., reality—that makes both these goals impossible to achieve. Technology can be destroyed, and the mind can be paralyzed, but neither can be restricted. Whenever and wherever such restrictions are attempted, it is the mind—not the state—that withers away….
Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away — the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice gather into gems.
She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men’s urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgement of the factories’ value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they’ll never produce so little but that the man with the club won’t be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit — that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit — that men that live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are — that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People’s State of India.
She saw what they wanted and to what goal their “instincts”, which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation — and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow.
Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state — indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer.” – Ayn Rand
equating Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg with Aristotle, Euclid and Newton is quite the paradigm shift
it’s like classing Taco Bell and Starbucks with the invention of the steam engine
Yeah, Bozos and Zoidberg have just a bit more in common with snake oil salesmen, Jim Baker and Don King than with three of history’s greatest minds.
I see you’ve come to appreciate the promise of the suburbs. Where else can working class people have their own miniature estates surrounded by verdure? Hopefully “the other California” won’t turn them all into shanty towns surrounded by ordure. There are plenty of those here in San Jose but it isn’t the norm.
I don’t think the other guys will totally take over and ruin everything in CA but maybe I’m too optimistic for my own good. They’ve ruined entire neighborhoods but I can’t think of any cities they’ve entirely ruined yet. Many normal people want to keep what they have and won’t leave. The scumbags in the State Legislature and the moneyed interests they collude with won’t leave unless they’re dragged out, that’s for sure.
But for years people have been — erroneously — calling the likes of Gates and Bezos geniuses. And like the Hollywood starlets of old, these rather average people believe their publicists and think that they have the right to rule the world. They are deluded, but the masses who worship them are at least in part responsible for their delusions.
they centralize control at the state level and press down using bureaucrats, activists and officials working in tandem
there’ll be lots of smaller and less well-off areas that they just won’t pay attention to, but I’m not sure anyone is really going to escape in Califoirnia
if you worship the free market like it’s an idol, then it makes sense to compare Bill Gates to Isaac Newton
So are you the paradigm shift guy we have all been waiting for? The guy who cuts and pastes the work of others. Some how I think not. You are about as imaginative as a snail.
He’s monomaniacal when it comes to that skank, Ayn Rand, and her selfish claptrap, that’s for sure. We have a surfeit of elfish “technocrats” and along with our government “representatives” they’re responsible for all of America’s woes, even the current crime wave and “woke” tyranny.
We are all Kulaks now. They, in their own agrarian economy, were the petit bourgeoisie.
Exactly.
Every week or so, I post a link to Daniel’s writings on my Facebook page.
Few ever read them. Even fewer comment or “emoji” them.
People don’t want to know what is happening in their world. They think that it doesn’t affect them (“that’s just California! Nothing to do with us!”) but as the homeless swell every city, as the cops are vilified and/or defunded in favor of “counselors”, as schools in towns with populations less than 5,000 flagrantly and proudly teach multiple genders and “clean energy” instead of facts and science, the liberal dystopia marches into our neighborhoods and homes – while we watch Twilight and Game of Thrones and muse about what we would do if only…
The freedoms and responsibilities of America are as dead as the founding fathers. All is waste and want and dependence, setting us up for the final takeover “for our own good”. Don’t worry – there’ll be plenty of roaches and grasshoppers to eat, and they’ll be good for you!
Yeah, they have used the same or similar techniques to those they used to take control of the California government to take control of the national government.
people have been trained to follow trends in herd-like fashion
and they don’t want to hear about a crisis until it takes over their lives
we’ve seen this with 9/11, COVID, etc
people react when it hits them, they lose interest when it doesn’t.
Coming soon to a location near you (except for the weather).
Good one!
“People aren’t meant to live in dreams. After a while they turn into nightmares….
What happens when people lose their sense of meaning and purpose? They sit on the beach, look out into the ocean, blind themselves with gorgeous sunsets and go out of their minds. Sanity is a function of responsibility. We are only as sane as the tasks we set ourselves. Sanity means getting up in the morning and knowing what you have to do and why you have to do it. It’s also reality, maturity and adulthood.”
Which is why I have to ask Jews, Christians, and Muslims why do you want to die and live eternally in a mystical, unreal, utopia? No effort, no work, no challenges? Socialism is mystical religion stripped of the supernatural, after-life, elements, but keeping the rest of the mystical wishing and dreaming intact.
“If every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time? Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty; in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is….
Let everyone, then, do something, according to the measure of his capacities. To have no regular work, no set sphere of activity—what a miserable thing it is! How often long travels undertaken for pleasure make a man downright unhappy; because the absence of anything that can be called occupation forces him, as it were, out of his right element. Effort, struggles with difficulties! that is as natural to a man as grubbing in the ground is to a mole. To have all his wants satisfied is something intolerable—the feeling of stagnation which comes from pleasures that last too long. To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence, no matter where the obstacles are encountered; whether in the affairs of life, in commerce or business; or in mental effort—the spirit of inquiry that tries to master its subject. There is always something pleasurable in the struggle and the victory. And if a man has no opportunity to excite himself, he will do what he can to create one, and according to his individual bent, he will hunt or play Cup and Ball: or led on by this unsuspected element in his nature, he will pick a quarrel with some one, or hatch a plot or intrigue, or take to swindling and rascally courses generally—all to put an end to a state of repose which is intolerable. As I have remarked, difficilis in otio quies—it is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
You make it sound as if jews, Muslims, and Christians do nothing but lay around dreaming of paradise, letting the world rot. In fact, Judeo-Christian civilization was one of the great drivers of science and learning, even during what is incorrectly called “the Dark Ages.” The art and architecture of religious civilizations make much of the work of our atheistic, secularist society look like the junk that it is. The Christian religion – in particular – has devoted vast resources both to education and social service, with particular emphasis on the poor. Jews are known for their vast contributions to science and learning, and the golden age of Islam produced some great thinkers. Books by Rodney Stark – among others – have made this perfectly clear. Your self-centered layabout and playboy is more likely to be an agnostic or atheist than a devout Christian. But you prefer your world of broad stereotypes and cliches.
Yeah, to me, religion is mostly focused on what I can do in the here and now.
The “Golden age of islam” is a fairy tale.
Yeah, their contributions came from the remnants of the civilizations they destroyed, until the last embers were extinguished.
“People aren’t meant to live in dreams. After a while they turn into nightmares….”
If you had your way we would all be living in your objectivist utopia. What regular work do you have other than whining about Christians and Jews and posting a lot of Objectivist spam.
People want more than a life of drudge and work now matter how satisfying it may seem on temporal level. Your version of living and dying and then there is nothing seems pretty pointless. Sounds a lot like you.
“The middle class makes a society sane and livable.”
I remember in the 5th grade – in about 1961 – our teacher drew two simple diagrams on the blackboard. One was diamond shaped, with a broad middle tapering to two points at the top and bottom. This, she said, represented the economy of the United States, with a large middle class and relatively few in the extremely poor and extremely rich categories. The other diagram was a triangle, with the narrow top broadening to a wide base. This, she said, represented Third World countries with a few rich, many poor, and a small middle class.
In the decades since then, the American economy has gradually been losing that diamond shape, looking more like an hourglass, with quite a few wealthy, a shrinking middle class, and growing poverty at the bottom end. This has coincided with the increasing influence of the left in all of our major institutions. It is heresy even among many conservatives to say this, but one of the main drivers of this change was to get most women out of the home and into the labor force. This concentrated more wealth into fewer households (the highly educated and prosperous tend to marry each other), depressed wages, and created an unprecedented demand for that expensive institution known as day care.
Excess immigration – much of it illegal – has also put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on the cost of housing, with the results we see today.
it allso helped that their policies made a single family income increasingly no longer viable by killing manufacturing jobs and creating a whole lot of administrative positions
factory workers stagnated while the liberal college girls went into HR and its myriad spinoffs like diversity and equity
top corporations use third world foreign labor but upper middle class administrators
A shipping company decided to relocate from the CA coast to Nevada. From there it trucked it’s goods to the coast and then loaded on ships.
It’s telling that the company found it cheaper to be based in Nevada while also incurring the added expense of trucking goods several miles.
(If you can find out the name of that company, please share.)
“top corporations use third world foreign labor but upper middle class administrators”
Not just big corporations, but many smaller businesses. I had my roof done a few years ago, and the estimator was white, but all of the actual roofers were Hispanic. A couple of them couldn’t speak English, but the lead man could. As far as I can tell, three years later, they did a good job.
Based on several other roofing jobs I’m aware of, that occupation now seems to be almost 100% Hispanic, and I live in the Seattle area, far from the southern border. Fast food is also largely Hispanic.
Yes, roofing and all construction work is lucrative, even at the reduced wages the illegal aliens and legalized border jumpers are paid. It used to be much more lucrative for the workers, of course.
Department of Transportation jobs are the same, American supervisors and administrators with well compensated border jumpers doing the labor. The owners of landscaping companies, who are mostly from South of the border nowadays, likewise make a good living.
The invaders are NOT taking jobs Americans don’t want, not even the dish washer, housekeeper and fast food jobs, which all used to be done by Americans and still are in the few areas without enough invaders to take all those jobs away from Americans.
I have experience in all those jobs both as a manager and laborer.
This deliberate suppression of wages is very bad for Americans and so long as there’s a steady stream of illegal aliens it’ll continue. If the supply of cheap labor is stopped, wages will go up. But I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know.
Yup. Well said.
Yes. Much of the construction industry and not just in border states.
What manufacturing there is, is increasingly immigrant too. And not just Hispanic. A lot of Somalis, other ethnic and racial groups, food service industry, forget about it
And you will hear small businessmen, no matter how conservative, often tell you that they don’t want to hire Americans
Correct. I didn’t mention all of the factors that got us where we are, and exporting many of our best jobs has been a big part of it.
Export as many jobs as possible and import as many laborers as possible. It’s one of two things Dirtbagocrats and RINOs work together on, along with graft.
A good friend of mine spelled out what he felt was behind the “women in the workforce” phenomenon fifty years ago. In a nutshell, he claimed it had two objectives. The first was the destruction of the nuclear family. The second was lowering the standard of living among the “middle” class. He foresaw the raising of children by the State and the diminishing of the value of labor (two incomes necessary to maintain a household instead of a sole breadwinner). He saw, back then, what many of us refuse to see even now. Sadly, we have been lured into a sense of accomplishment by moving to the suburbs, surrounding ourselves with the newest toys and neighbors who act and think like us to “tailgate” with during football season. We have good credit scores. We look to the government to fix everything that threatens our comfort level. Even though, deep down, we know we are on thin ice we carry on suspending disbelief to the point where it will take a total collapse to open our eyes.
Ronald Reagan had it right and we see America abandoning God and gone under.
Bible taken out of schools, ethics out, morals out, civics out, life of babies out and
evil rising to a pinnacle. November may be the turning point away from evil, if not
the days of Noah will drown the Godless in their own company without good people.
Pray.
Some Christians think that it will be “The Fire Next Time”, which kind of looks like nuclear apocalypse or perhaps another major extraterrestrial strike. Whatever the Lord intends for us, it is an unfortunate fact that the innocent will suffer along with the guilty.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion (DATED – NOW NEARLY $50 BILION) on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. STEVEN BALDWIN
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute
has testified before a Congressional committee
that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for
murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in
2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates
were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los
Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang,
were illegal aliens.
Thanks for this and your previous comment. Illegal immigration continues to be a major problem that government chooses to exacerbate rather than ameliorate.
As the middle class moves out, all that’s left are the haves and have nots.. The new slogan is not “Go west, young man”, but, go at your own risk..
go only if you have a plan to be one of the haves and then get out before one of the career have nots takes an interest in you
What makes you stay there, Daniel? I have some dear family members who stay in Pico-Robertson even as their children grow up, marry, and stay on the East Coast in Orthodox neighborhoods. I understand their attachment to the community that has been their home for four decades, but I wish they would sell their house while it still has value and come join most of their children.
I know that the David Horowitz Freedom Center has its offices in LA, but can’t you go back to working remotely and move to someplace reasonably sane?
how many sane places have frum communities?
frum communities tend to be wedded to cities and their suburbs which are invariably liberal at best
the number of frum communities in a conservative city or county are few and usually quite tiny
Israel?
Sooner or later, you know, it will be time to come Home.
צום קל וגמר חתימה טובה
One point about Huxley taking acid when he knew he was about to die, that’s a common theme for believers that psychedelics are the path to God, they want to be on an intense acid trip when they die.
I wouldn’t want to go out in a drug induced delirium. I wonder if it would carry over to a possible afterlife, even without a physical brain?
If I have to be conscious when I die, I want to face it with a clear mind, fearful or not.
It’s impossible to OD on LSD, by the way. If Huxley did, it’s because it was cut with something toxic.
Yup.
Huxley took 100 micrograms or 200 micrograms, I think. 300 micrograms would give a very heavy trip. I don’t think a lethal dose is known, I tried to look it up just now. Cases where like 550 the normal dose was taken weren’t fatal. More likely to die from jumping out the window than from overdosing 🙂
I once thought I knew what the lethal dose was, but it was so much it would be enough to kill a horse from overeating 🙂
Daniel, this was excellent. Thank you so much.
thank you
I was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Malibu.I spent the first 39-years of my life there.Now,when I occasionally visit,I cannot recognize the place!!!!!