A Blasted And Empty Future

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sometimes while I’m here, in the evening chair, in the family room, writing my blog post and doing instapundit, my husband watches a movie. Ranging on what the movie is, this can range from distracting because I watch it or parts of it, to infuriating.

Elysium was the second kind. in fact, it was so bad that about halfway through I went upstairs to bed because otherwise I was going to just start screaming at the TV and not stop. The reasons were many from worldbuilding — LA looks like the bad parts of Mexico city, there’s nuns who raise orphans who aren’t orphans, everyone speaks Spanish, except the designated oppressors who speak Africans or English with a South African accent, and who also inexplicably seem to always know where the hero is, or something.

ANYWAY, moving right along…..

Perhaps the thing that infuriated me most was the harping on the “overpopulation” and how there are so many of us that we’re destroying the planet (and that’s why the rich moved to a space habitat.)

It infuriated me for several reasons:

First, even demographers are finally talking about “catastrophic population crash” taking overpopulation as gospel is insane. Yes, I know the movie was done a few years ago — I don’t know how many and I’m too lazy to look it up — but even then they should have had an inkling of a glimmer of a thought that perhaps the “population bomb” wasn’t precisely coming true. For one, because all the predictions Ehrlich ever made about it (or anything else) failed. In fact, a good way to predict the future is to look at whatever Paul Ehrlich says and believe the opposite. In that, he might be invaluable.

Second, Population exploding to the level they posited in a still recognizable future might be — for real — impossible for the simple reason that people who don’t exist can’t have kids. I note they had some inkling they weren’t seeing this gigantic population explosion around them, hence why everyone in the overgrown LA favela spoke Spanish. Also probably the reason for the nuns. I didn’t understand the Spanish (I could have, but would have to slow it way down) and they didn’t translate it in subtitles, but I wonder if the nuns were there to give the idea of those horrible Catholics who reproduce like rabbits. At any rate, not only is this idea that Spanish speakers (Or Arabic speakers, or–) are reproducing like rabbits and that if they keep it up they’ll destroy the world one of the oldest lies of eugenics, but the premise is also almost certainly completely wrong.

It’s hard to tell, because no one does accurate numbers not even us, and we’re practically autistic in our obsession with numbers, but everyone who pokes closer panics, because population does in fact seem to be falling worldwide, and people of all races and creeds are having fewer and fewer children.

Crappy cultures seem overpopulated only because they are so crappy they can’t provide even for the few young people they have.

Third – All the problems they attribute to overpopulation are not overpopulation, but the problems of crappy cultures. In the brief snatch of world-in-action, few have jobs and there is no societal trust or respect for private property. There’s nothing to an “overpopulated area” that causes that. Yes, in the seventies it was believed it was inevitable with higher population densities to get out of control crime, and lack of security and– But Rudy Giulliani and others proved it was not inevitable. It was a choice. It was Democrat culture choosing to mollycoddle criminals and punish the law abiding. Apparently the Democrats love that choice because they are making it again. But again, it has nothing to do with population density. It has to do with crappy government and crappy culture, and encouraging the worst in humans.

Just because you set the world on fire again and again and again, it doesn’t mean the world is particularly flammable, only that your beliefs make the world burn.

Now, why did the population thing get under my skin to that point? Well, mostly because it is probably the most important fight of our time.

All the problems we used to think were caused by overpopulation: the loss of wealth, the inability to feed everyone, etc. are in fact problems in low population. Because the highest resource of humanity is humans. We are clever apes, who can engineer our way into anything.

Oh, as a side note, before I go on with this, the movie made much of the fact that Elysium — the space habitat — didn’t allow the Spanish speaking, favella-dwelling poor in. This was of course evil and racist. But in fact if the culture of the poor was what was shown in the movie, the habitat couldn’t let them in. Because they’d just make it the same as they’d made of the Earth, and nothing would be improved. So this whole thing was an argument from pointless and counterproductive compassion.

But to return to population and our real issue, which is a lack of people. And since people create resources, by finding them or producing them, a lack of resources with it. The economy doesn’t work when the next generation is markedly smaller and the one after that even smaller than that.

There is also a psychological side. Humans work for the future. And the future of humans is other humans. Part of the reason socialism kills slowly is that the generations rely on the state, not each other, and while young people think “why bother” and don’t have kids, but kids are needed for the state to provide for the old, and more importantly, to give adults a sense of the future.

I think if we survive this bottle neck, we’re going to find that our subconscious has a need for a certain number of kids just around in the environment, kind of like I found out through the lockdown that I needed to see strangers. That the one day a week Dan and I drove around and did museums/zoo/went to dinner with friends made a huge difference and foregoing it made me spiral down into unending, bottomless depression, because something in the ape brain, something inarticulate and possibly inarticulable (Pshaw, totally a word) made it so I had to see a certain number of strangers every so often or I’d think that I was alone in the ice floe, left to die, or something.

In the same way, I think we’re going to find we need to see a certain number of young people/children. And we need to live with/around a certain number of young people and children.

If you think of when our instincts were set and what child mortality was set, I suspect that number is fairly high.

And this morning, while talking to an online friend about cats and why they are so necessary to so many of us, and why their deaths hit us so hard, I realized that’s an indicator.

It’s not disputed that cats have kind of hacked us into taking care of them — or we hacked them — by changing their features and sounds so that they mimic the look and feel of an infant to our back-brain.

Cats have always been with us, and some number of us always found them irresistible. But it’s also undeniable that their popularity is growing all over, and that people not only have larger numbers of cats, but treat the cats increasingly like children and get more and more attached to them.

I realized to my discomfort sometime last year that I need young cats around to feel even vaguely optimistic, in fact.

Well, think about it, in the times when our back brain was programmed, I’d be, if not dead then the tribe matriarch, whose main value would be to mind the kids while the parents hunted and gathered and to impart to them my dubious wisdom.

So I probably need sixteen or seventeen kids around all the time, most of them the toddling ages — too old to be carried by mommy while gathering too young to help and not run away.

The cats are perfect for this. And if it were just me, since I don’t want to open a daycare, they’re the perfect hack. And I’m from one of those weird families that always adored cats. (Also a consistently relatively low fertility family, which might tie in.)

But more and more of humanity’s sanity might be riding on their fuzzy butts. And no matter if Engineer-Indy is engineer, cats are not the future of humanity.

We’re in deep, deep trouble. And evil pieces of propaganda blaming more humans for all ills possible — but mostly imaginary — just push us deeper into trouble.

Maybe it’s time our overculture got — or was given — a clue, and stopped killing us softly with their bullshit.

254 thoughts on “A Blasted And Empty Future”

    1. More incentive to become a wildly successful author and have millions of willing groupies, in that way I can help repopulate the earth. Snark.

      We all need dreams to keep us moving. 😎

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  2. I watched Elysium, too. Every couple of minutes I grumbled, “That’s stupid, that’s stupid, that’s EXTRA stupid…”

    And at the end, I saw that Jodie Foster was the hero, while Matt Damon was just some dumbass running on Feelings. Elysium didn’t have the resources to ‘help’ the vast hordes of ‘Oppressed!’; they would just overwhelm the systems and wreck Elysium, which was the only hope for the future.

    ———————————

    When the means of violence are restricted to the government, and criminals, it soon becomes impossible to tell the difference.

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      2. I kept watching “Elysium” and I pretty much knew how it was going to end-they’d reveal that they had the resources all along and the inhabitants of Elysiyum were just being greedy and could have shared all along…

        (Ignore the fact that the ships were clearly emergency services vehicles, intended for disasters.

        (Ignore the fact that Elysium should have been smart enough to make a condition of employment access to the magical medical pods, which makes the jobs much more valuable. This could have been tied into the plot in the form of Matt Damon’s character getting fired and losing his benefits and not being able to get treated…

        (And ignore the fact that you’re giving a psychotic FRP guy in the form of Kruger all that gear and didn’t install some kind of kill switch…)

        I’m tired of these stories. Far too tired, for far too long.

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        1. Perhaps SAOB (Stupid And Offensively Blatant) needs to join ROFL, ESAD and a myriad of others as part of the lexicon… :twisted:

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  3. Hm. Perhaps you should be reading your stories to children, at libraries perhaps, or as a visiting character at daycares or kid camps, especially if you have something YA focused. Darkship Kids or the Junior Youth Front of the USAian Revolution.

    Recording those for resale would be another potential revenue stream.

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        1. Oh, come on! What kind of kid wouldn’t like to read a book with passages like, “The bullet came out of nowhere and obliterated his skull, splattering the Hollywood star in bright-green-glowing blood.”?

          😃😃

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              1. Oh, yeah. I PROBABLY didn’t write THAT line. I might have. Look, it was actually 50/50 and kicked back and forth like 5 times. I don’t remember that line is more accurate.

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                2. One thing in Guardian that surprised me by its absence…Julie would be attracted to Owen because he’s tall. Tall enough for her to wear high heels and not tower over him.

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                  2. i.e. when I could I wore high heels even when it made me taller than my husband. It’s just not part of my mental map.
                    Given how tall I was at 5’7″ for Portugal IN MY DAY I always assumed I’d marry someone shorter than I, so I don’t think about it.
                    Yes, I lost 2 inches. Yes, I could explain how, but pregnancy, water in the joints, eclampsia, blah blah blah. Also, people in Portugal are taller now. Take your vitamins, kids.

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                    2. Ummm…”short for my height”. Is that like “According to the height -weight chart, I’m not overweight, but I *am* 8 inches too short”? 😉

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                    3. My brain works differently than that. I’ve never found high heels appealing on women (or men, for that matter). On the other hand, women taller than I am are a supernormal stimulus for me; I’ve always been a little sad that women tend only to be attracted to men taller than they are. (Though C and I are within half an inch of the same height, I’m glad to say.) None of this is the result of any sort of reasoned or even conscious decision; it’s just how it is.

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                    5. Apparently I’m the same height as Dan! So I don’t think I would register to you as “shorter,” and you wouldn’t trigger my Vorkosigan Syndrome.

                      A couple of years ago I read about some study that found that the average preference for men was a woman four inches shorter, but the average preference for women was a man ten inches taller. That seems like a coordination problem: the 5’2″ woman is attracted to a 6′ man, who’s attracted to a 5’8″ woman, who’s attracted to a 6’6″ man . . .

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                    6. My wife (then girlfriend) were always a sight in College. I claim 5’7″ although that is probably due to rounding errors :-) . Wife is 5’10”. Hey I got the runt of the litter her sister is 6’1″ and brother is 6’3″. I can’t say I had a particular fondness for taller ladies, given the lack of interest the fairer sex showed for me in my youth my tendencies favored accepting anyone who didn’t immediately tell me to hit the road :-) .

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                    7. I’m 6’2″. I hit 6′ between 6th and 7th grades. All through high school, I ended up with short girls. Not that there weren’t tall girls around. In fact, the girl I consider a mentor in photography was very close to 6′ tall. But the lesson I did learn through it all that the old chestnut “Everybody is the same height lying down.” is quite true.

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        2. I sucked at reading for kids.

          Read everything in the house by age 10, then got into arguments with teachers and librarians for the next 8 years. Got saved by relatives book shelves and some friends of the family that dumped their huge collection on my aunt when they went overseas.

          The worse thing we do for kids is dumb their content down for the below 80 IQ. Let those children lick windows and eat dirt of their favorite flavor.

          Then again, I got in trouble for reading Frederick Forsyth and John McPhee to my nieces at bedtime. “What’s kneecapping?” and “Can we steal nuclear materials?” are questions my sister didn’t think were appropriate. That’s why she raised liberal pussies.

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          2. LOL! I was reading Tom Clancy and Ian Fleming by my preteen years. Learned very quickly that some questions were better left to Google and Wikipedia rather than Mom & Dad.

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    2. Most of my stories aren’t for children. And I’m not good at writing for children. But I do have a plan to do weekly readings. Should already have started, but I am arranging the space to do it in….

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  4. Our overculture overlords have never gotten away from the desire to do eugenics in one form or another. After all, if Jenkins in the shed can breed dogs to specification, why can’t they breed <i>humans</i> to specification?

    The overpopulation “myth” is built on this idea, and deliberately <i>not</i> understanding the issues of what is going on in quite a few places.

    There are a lot of beautiful cultures out there, but many of them are barely able to support themselves without someone <b>ruling</b> them, in the medieval sense of the term (i.e. “pay us our tithe and we won’t burn your shanties to the ground-or let other people burn them down”). Maintaining a culture like the United States or most of the Western world (before the Woke took over) isn’t conductive to a feudal ruling class.

    Hell, just take a look at what happened during COVID. Most places completely shut down, but in many places in the US…they didn’t. They either ignored the “learned experts” or figured out workarounds that did <i>something</i>. It was hilarious to watch them try to chase these people down and what they did.

    I suspect that our biggest mission now is teaching all these people a better way of life and holding them to it. And exporting American ideals and responsibilities to their home countries.

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      1. We may have to import some, if only to show them exactly what they’re working towards. And a few that we’ll have to keep because there is no way to fix where they are without the sort of atrocities that get you talked about on CNN if you’re not a Communist nation.

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    3. Paul Erlich: “There are too many people we have to get rid of some!”
      Also Paul Erlich -a crochety old man with no useful skills who has managed attach a great deal of dislike to himself for his nasty narcissistic control-freak misanthropy.
      Yeah guess who’ll be one of the first to go.

      Also the same people who fantasize about exterminating of all those dirty brown poors for the environment are the first to scream and accuse you of racism when you protest against importing all those same people to your neighborhood. Figure that one out.

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      3. I have and have had two words for Mr. Erlich and his ilk ” You first“. Honestly to some degree we’re getting that as the religious (all flavors) tend to reproduce while the brahmandarins are busy snarking at breeders and messing about with 57 flavors of gender where really only “gender” the “cis hetero” types reproduce. Biology/ Mother Nature really is a nasty one that way.

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  5. “The highest resource of humanity is humans.”

    Well said.

    Maybe I’m just sentimental in my old age, but I smile every time a little one cries in church or makes a run up the side aisle. Having been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic church, I’m in the process of becoming an Orthodox Catholic, and, in our small church, we have 3 families with 4 little ones all under 10 (and one family with 20 kids, but many are adopted). Also despite Orthodoxy’s long-instilled refusal to proselytize, we have 8-12 catechumens at any one time and have inducted several dozen since I’ve been attending. Turns out all you have to do to grow as an Orthodox church in America is conduct your services in English. Who knew?

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    1. The Reader would have that be ‘The ONLY resource of humanity is humans’. And he asks himself constantly why TPTB want less of it – and doesn’t like the answers.

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    2. My younger Orthodox Catholic friends and co-workers each have 4 or more children. Plus the local church is growing due to the issues in the Roman Catholic Church. Plus it has an awesome Lebanese food festival every year that attracts people.

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  6. “Because they’d just make it the same as they’d made of the Earth, and nothing would be improved.”

    It would cease to exist, because space is a hostile and unforgiving environment, with nowhere near enough tolerance for that level of idiot.

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    1. Yup. Which eventually is what happens to Elysium, I think. Been a while since I looked it up. Very bad and dumb movie – I think only Snowpiercer might be able to compete on that level. As far as recent films go, anyway.

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      1. Oh, yeah, Snowpiercer. “Global Warming caused an Ice Age!”

        And the only hope of survival is a magic perpetual-motion train. And the tracks will last forever without maintenance. And…

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        2. Yup! The Japanese anime steampunk zombie apocalypse series made more sense. At least the trains needed and got shown receiving maintenance. Oh, and the zombies were more believable than the global cooling brought on by Global Warming (ow, that breaks the brain).

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          1. Global cooling being brought on by global warming is actually settled science. No one has even seriously tried to dispute it. The models were done in the 1940s and 1950s, you can search Ewing and Donn and find the research, and the Harpers article is quality. (Not putting in links because away from computer to release from spam trap.)

            Briefly, to get enough moisture in the air to provide enough snow to cause glaciation, they modeled that it would require an open arctic ocean.

            This is why I was asking about undersea supervolcanoes the other day in that other place, because I think one of those might be able to provide the moisture without the open arctic ocean and fix one of the problems with the existing theory, that because of air currents it only provides for the moisture for one North American ice sheet, not the other.

            Global cooling happens fast–current evidence is under a decade.

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            1. People trying to convince us that humans are changing climate in a major way, never ever mention Ms Supervolcano nor Mr Large Meteor.

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            2. True, but the rate implied by the movies is excessive, even for glacial advances. Mountain glaciers can gallop. Continental glaciers won’t swallow NYC to the top of Lady Liberty’s chin in a decade.

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              1. Maybe, maybe not. In a positive-feedback process, such as the snow-cover/decreased albedo one, it could happen a helluva lot faster that you’d think it could; 50+ feet of snow *every* winter, increasing each year, with little to no melting off in the (short) summers, can add up pretty quickly. A mile of ice over Boston in a century isn’t outside the bounds of possibility.

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                2. The movie had ten years from the onset of glaciation to half a mile thick in NY-NJ. I don’t think even the Cambrian snowball hit that quickly.

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                3. A mile of ice over Boston in a century isn’t outside the bounds of possibility.

                  —-

                  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering the “Bulldozers for Boston” program didn’t work out.

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                4. (1) the “scientists” have adjusted the data until in all honesty it is nearly impossible to know which way the climate is or isn’t going.

                  (2) Fifty feet of snow over the winter is going to get cleared off the streets, and if it didn’t melt by the following winter would compress down to five or ten feet of ice. A mile of ice is going to take a millennium, not a century.

                  So stop worrying about ice and start thinking about crops. _That’s_ the danger the next several generations will need to address.

                  And even sooner, the current idiots who are attacking agriculture are trying to kill us all.

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                  2. You probably already know this, or something similar to it, but– one of the sources for the “normal” temperatures before the 90s or so is forest service fire watches.

                    My mom worked in those, and spent a lot of summers visiting friends working in them.

                    One of the things she’d do is show up the day before they were supposed to turn in their temperature readings and help them write down something that sounded plausible….

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                  3. (3) Their pre-industrial ‘baseline’ temperatures are taken from the last half of the Little Ice Age.

                    The first thermometers were invented in the late 1600’s, and the first reliable/accurate ones in the 1700’s. Temperatures from before then are nothing but guesses.

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          2. I wanted to love that one, but the best I could muster was liking it. Something about the characters didn’t quite click for me. But it was entertaining, which is more than I can say for Snowpiercer.

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          3. Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress indeed made much more sense. Take late Bakumatsu just before Meiji society, add zombies. Everything else was realistic!

            Down to, yes a lot of people are abusing the current power structure – some of them because they’re evil, but most of them because they are justly terrified of what will happen if it fails.

            Seriously, if I had to be dumped in another world, Kabaneri is not the worst. Very bad if you’re unlucky, but the laws of physics reasonbly apply!

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        3. If they have a means of generating energy indefinitely, couldn’t they warm up the planet that way? Or move into space? Live at the bottom of the sea? Or any number of better options?

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          1. Consider how many countries have serious problems that are completely solvable, yet fail to even attempt to solve them. The usual reason is “government.”

            One example of problems-not-being-solved is the Inca, who used humans and animals to carry goods about their mountainous domain. Even though they had decent roads and knowledge of the wheel, the usual implication is that they never thought to use wheels for anything other than children’s toys.

            I’d bet my last quatloo every single Inca who shuffled along with a load on his back thought about using wheels, but some government functionary had decided that wheels were not to be used for that purpose, and had an army of thugs available to chastise any slackers who got caught using them.

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            1. To be fair, in the areas where the Incas were, wheels could move things very fast. In a downward direction. There’s an awful lot of vertical in that region, so maybe it wasn’t so much needing of wheels as needing of sufficient braking power.

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      2. Snowpiercer couldn’t get made today. It portrays eating bugs as a bad thing. /s

        I’m willing to forgive it the improbable premise, just because “last train at the end of the world” is a cool image, but the politics were just painful, especially because of how much they depended on said improbable premise. If you’re doing exaggerated social satire, which is where the movie wound up going, you shouldn’t draw attention to the realism your setting lacks. And rehashing “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” was not the narrative triumph the movie seemed to think it was. Wasted opportunity.

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  7. I’ve said for years that Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith had a debate…and Adam Smith won. The problem being that 150 years ago, a 7th grade education was adequate to enter the world of work. 75 years ago, a 12th grade education was adequate. Today, it’s college or trade school that is needed. The capital investment to rear a child to independence and true adulthood has gone up immensely.

    Solving this may be the biggest challenge of the 21st Century. 

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      1. Depends on the curriculum. Heinlein pointed out 40 years ago that you could get a good education in the U.S., but the colleges were equally happy to hand you a diploma in Useless Studies for paying four years of tuition.

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          1. Best choice (and even they have been radically tainted post 2010’s) are engineering schools, the kind that they have technology or polytechnic in the name. These schools do NOT offer degrees outside Engineering, Science, Math and (maybe) business. Avoid schools of this sort that are TRYING to add Liberal Arts Majors (I am Looking at YOU MIT and RPI). In most engineering schools the Liberal arts are viewed as support departments. The money makers are the engineering disciplines, Mechanical, Electrical/Computer, Computer Science, Civil, and Chemical. The politics of the Liberal Arts departments are kept IN their own departments and requirements are limited to 1-2 courses a semester in the first 2 years and reduce in Junior/Senior years. However, when Engineering schools aspire to be Universities they start to let the Liberal arts departments have power and the liberal arts folks feeling that they are/have been ignored (perhaps justifiably so) start adding hordes of requirements. This is rpad paved with good intentions and as usual it leads straight to hell as do all such paths.

            Take a suspicious look at any Engineering school/college in a general university. There will be salary envy (of both the professors and graduates) from the Liberal Arts side and so that side will try to impose requirements on the Engineers. If the engineers are treated as second class citizens run do not walk to the nearest exit. If the engineering hour requirements do NOT exceed the general requirements by 2-3x same thing.

            Pure liberal arts schools have turned into indoctrination centers for the Brahmandarins. This is particularly true of the “elite” (i.e. Ivy league and their western and southern counterparts) schools. Their 3/2 plans with Engineering schools are pipe dreams and as likely to succeed as a Unicorn hunt. A Sophmore (and sometimes Freshman depending on major) engineer at an engineering school will be WELL into the introductory classes for their major. A student transferring to an engineering school in their Junior year for the 2 part of a 3/2 will be doing ALL engineering classes for their 4 semesters. This is presuming they can get all their classes in (prerequisites are a bastard here). It also presumes they know how to study for engineering courses, modern life at a liberal arts school will NOT force you into the study habits needed for the drinking out of a firehose that is an engineering education. Some of Dante’s levels of the Inferno would look far preferable to the 4 semesters needed to complete an engineering degree. Most will take 5-6 semesters, if they succeed at all. Go here 3/2 or not and you might as well sell your soul to the Elder Gods, that at least will have some short-term profit.

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            1. “that are TRYING to add Liberal Arts Majors (I am Looking at YOU MIT and RPI).”

              I knew the philosophy major from MIT. Yes, he somehow managed that back in the mid-90s. Yes, I once discovered that another person knew him by that simple fact.

              Anyway. Completing an engineering degree in four years is difficult, though not impossible. Trying to shove that into two years is only going to lead to many long-term students.

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            2. Classical liberal arts had some positives.

              The modern counterfeit does not, and is fundamentally in conflict. Arithmetic, geometric, harmonics, and logic. These are in mathematics, and mathematics has a theoretical conflict with critical theory. So, liberal arts is gutted of liberal arts, and its skin is drapped over a mishmash of dysfunctional ‘rhetoric’ and ‘grammar’.

              If professional engineering survives at any university (and about that professional law and professional medicine raise questions), it is interesting how long that will hold.

              My view is that tertiary schools are best split up into different independent schools for every academic field. Let the bad fields live or die on their own merits.

              I’m suspicious of bachelor’s programs with any general ed content, because that means in house instructors from other fields at the school.

              The engineering schools get their faculty from schools with doctoral programs in engineering. It kinda seems to require knowing the inside baseball of faculty politics at the school to understand whether or not it has been compromised by that route.

              I’m probably just too gloomy, and too much a doomer.

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              1. There are politics withing the various Engineering discplines and amongst them. Basic rule of the universe, where there are 3 (possibly 2) or more people there will be politics. They fight over money and resources. But by the nature of engineers you tend to get fewer folks that just want the power. Not none, just fewer.

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              2. And the classical Liberal Arts went off the rails when they decided that there were NO objective truths just subjective ones. Engineering has less of this as the laws of the physical universe don’t care what you think. Thats why my own field of Computer Science is sliding into the mire. You can get away with pretending there are no objective truths although some parts of the field (for example calculating efficiency of algorithms) have enough rooting in an absolute truth that you can’t totally ignore reality.

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                1. That’s the advantage of my specialty. Flight Test. Which is objective truth weaponized…and turned loose on the test team. And the sky will try very, very hard to kill you.

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                  1. Yup, Flight test (Air or Space), Submarines, and to some degree shipping all have reality imposed on them by the Physical Universe. Mother Nature doesn’t give a rats patootie what you think, how you vote, what your pronouns are, what you’re plumbing is or the degree of melanin in your skin. She’ll kill you just as dead no matter what if you screw up. To Steal from Niven and Pournelle, “Think of it as Evolution in action.”

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            3. Agree 100%. I went through the Virginia Tech Aerospace & Ocean Engineering program 1980-85. It took 203 quarter-hour credits to graduate…about 36 of which were not math, hard science, or straight-up Engineering classes. In theory, you could do it in 4 years…but it was really a 4.5 to 5 year program. Which required 70+ hour weeks, the deepest possible committment. 

              FWIW, I focused the non-technical electives on History, picked up a minor in that. Entertaining, and most useful in keeping snotty Liberal Arts students in their place.

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              1. State school. School of Forestry 204 hours to get degree. Don’t remember how much non-math, science, and forestry classes required (it has been 45 years). Could get degree in 4 years (3 terms) if one took average 17 hours per term. Difficult to do in junior and senor years with labs that took one off campus 5 to 6 hours on Tuesday or Thursday. Add in the 3 hour chemistry, and other forestry, on campus labs, it became difficult to take more than 3 classes a term, easily 12 to 15 credits. I finished in 4 years + 2 terms. Which included a non-credit term working my junior fall term. My last term had no forestry classes, and only one requirement, the other two classes were to fill out the 204 hour requirement.

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          2. Yes. The amount of mandatory stupid/anti productive classes required to get your degree is taking over the productive time. And my boys graduated 10 years ago. Doubt things got better…

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            1. Same with our son. He graduated 12 years ago. Saw some of it in late ’70s when I graduated in ’79. But not near as bad as subsequent graduates. Agree. Doubt it has gotten better.

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          3. Yes. The amount of mandatory stupid/anti productive classes required to get your degree is taking over the productive time. And my boys graduated 10 years ago. Doubt things got better…

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    2. That would not be so much the case if the high schools, and for that matter the elementary schools, were still educating anyone.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Less the case, yes…but the point remains. A 7th grade student of 1870 might be equal to an 8th grade student of 1950, a 9th grade student of today…but that level of education is not adequate for a 21st Century technological civilization.

        The capital cost of rearing a child to self-sufficiency has gone up dramatically, and it’s reflected in the birth rates. The real question is how we reduce the costs to the point where we can get the birth rate up to at least replacement levels.

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        2. If I remember the structure correctly, it’s closer to a 5th grade education in 1930 was a little bit of college in the 60s and at least an Associate’s now.

          The educations offered don’t have anything to do with what is needed for a technological civilization, it has to do with the schools being used as daycare to subsidize more workers in the workforce… which keeps getting more dangerous, so you have to keep finding better adn better jobs to afford a safe place, and that means you have less resources for kids.

          Which is why most folks having “lots” of kids these days take routes that work outside of public schooling.

          It would be helpful if a lot of the weight was taken off of our shoulders, yeah– especially stuff like how expensive it is to get a car that can fit more than two car seats, or the ever spiraling safety and childcare requirements.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. Reason’s series Great Moments in Unintended Consequences covers how CAFE rules led to SUVs over station wagons, but they haven’t yet covered how child safety seats also reinforce the SUV dominance.

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        3. To explain, whole word reading produces a bizarre parody of literacy. you can read simple texts with words you’ve memorized, like pictographs. but get out of of that, and words that start and end in the same letter are the same. Which means their writing often resembles word salad, and people who are absolutely smart and articulate in speech produce essays that appear to have been written by a terminal schizophrenic.
          I think that’s at the root of the plagiarism cases of college ADMINISTRATORS.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Yes. I taught myself to read phonetically before I was in kindergarten, and could read fluently in elementary school. I used to sit in the advanced reading group in my classrooms and suffer through the other “advanced” readers painfully going through their reading books word by word. That was in the 1950s, one of the heydays of look-say or whole word reading.

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            2. They still taught that way in the 90s and presumably today. They now call it “whole language” but their cry is “guess, guess” and they say if you learn by sounding out “you won’t know what the word means.” True that. But that’s why we have dictionaries.
              I got so mad.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Not long ago, I finished reading the French version of one of my favorite books. I had to look up a fair number of words. But with very rare exceptions, I could read every sentence as a sentence, and ask myself “What does that word there mean?” or “What’s that grammatical construction used for?” I’d pause a little on some sentences, but I grasped them AS sentences.

                On the other hand, I’ve tried reading books in Classical Greek, and I have to puzzle over a lot of words, and to painfully identify where words fit into the syntax. I have to decipher each sentence. It’s so slow that it’s nothing at all like reading English.

                I have to suppose that people who struggle through text, word by word, must be having an experience of the latter kind and not the former. And perhaps they are being taught by people who never became fluent in written English.

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                  1. The academic English I’m comfortable with actually has a huge number of Latin and Greek loanwords. Ideally you don’t mix them up. And ideally you use the correct plurals: datum/data, medium/media, octopus/octopodes, rhinoceros/rhinocerotes . . .

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                    2. Yes, that’s the correct way to say it. If you want a mass noun you can use “information” instead.

                      But it’s a lost cause in the computer industry; the treatment of “data” as a mass noun with no plural form has the sanction of usage there.

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                  2. English is German, with greatly simplified grammar and a truckload of French words. Great language (ask the Esperanto crowd, you’ll get some surprises).

                    Liked by 1 person

              2. Beg pardon, but if you can sound out a word, you can often get at the meaning. We were taught root derivations for words in 9th grade.

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          2. English is a phonetic language. There are several sets of rules for words from different sources, making it somewhat difficult to teach. So the teachers get lazy and teach ‘whole word’ bullshit.

            Language is a tool. They’re teaching kids to use it the wrong way. It works as well as teaching them to turn screws with a hammer.

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              1. It’s even easier when you have computers that make it into games, and will repeat it until a human would want to scream.

                Which is why my slow reader is only about half a year ahead of public schools.

                Liked by 2 people

          3. Ah, I’ve wondered about the more egregious spelling errors I’ve seen in comments (usually elsewhere; for some reason, ATH and MGC seem to have a curious amount of literate people. :) :) :) ).

            OTOH, tyops ‘r us. [grin]

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Not sure what you mean by “literate people”, but I’m a terrible speller that knows “that word isn’t spelled correctly”. [Crazy Grin]

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              1. I’m happy that the search engine does a quick and dirty guess when I make a WAG at spelling a word. (It ain’t scientific…) There are some words (largely Greek in origin) that defeat my abilities to memorize the spelling. OTOH, the Latin and Germanic words usually(!) don’t cause problems. I took three years of German in high school, and the Latin came via osmosis.

                Some of the most creative spelling seems to be in comments on Insty and also on Gab.

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                1. I see a lot of incorrect homonyms. I used to blame that on spell Czechs, but it seems to be a lot more common now than it used to be.

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                  1. Yep, I did that downthread with “there/their”. I know better, but I’ll blame Trump Putin Biden my fingers. Either that or I’m not braining today.

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                2. search engine does a quick and dirty guess when I make a WAG at spelling a word.

                  WP or OpenOffice spell checkers often won’t give me even close to the word that I am misspelling, but I can do a google search, and it seems smarter. I can usually see why spell checkers are stumped. “Alzheimer” is a good example. Correct word I pulled off of google. Note, it was way down the list. WP I get “Altimeter”. There are times I stump google too. At which point, I restructure the sentence (or drop the comment, if that isn’t possible).

                  My problem is I often can’t correctly pronounce words I read. I can’t come close to spelling words I don’t pronounce correctly, or if they aren’t spelled the way they are pronounced.

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                  1. pronounce correctly

                    Aye, that’s a lot of my problem with French and Franco-adjacent words. I tend to use German pronunciation rules, and the results resemble a 42 car pileup on a foggy freeway.

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          4. I have a young relative who learned to read that way, and her early attempts at texting were a sight to behold. A random word generator would have made more sense.

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            2. On the other hand, it makes it a lot easier for LLM “AI” to pass a Turing test. Word salad is word salad.

              Back some years ago, I realized that much of the email I was receiving couldn’t pass a Turing test. And that was before txtspk.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. I got on a spam target list when I joined an online group (which I almost never use. Sigh). Some of the emails are almost worth looking at, but many of those looks like a Kalama speech (to borrow from Jerry Pournelle) translated into Swahili and retranslated into English.

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        4. I think you seriously underestimate the gap. I would suggest that a seventh grade student of 1870 might well be superior to a college student of today. I have talked with a friend of my wife’s who is a college professor; she says that she and her husband (also a college professor) have given up including essay questions on exams for their freshman and sophomore students, because they simply are incapable of responding to them satisfactorily. Instead they give multiple choice questions. I assume that if they simply failed students who couldn’t write essay answers they would come under pressure from their administrations.

          See the remarks of OGH.

          Liked by 1 person

          3. That, and multiple choice questions are trivially easy to grade by hand (and some districts use a form of OCR to do it by machine) while essay questions require that someone actually read the student’s response, which requires a considerable amount of time and effort.

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            1. Many years ago I wrote a story about a little boy who “couldn’t ” read. At the end the mother asks the teacher how well SHE reads.

              “Why bother, when computers understand voice commands?”

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          4. In addition they don’t actually teach kids to write by hand these days. Granted, printing isn’t much slower, but judging by my sons, the printed “writing” is still pretty darn hard to read since they don’t practice it much. So that makes essays even more problematic.

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            2. This seems to be changing. My son is in 3rd grade and is learning cursive. I plan on aiding and abetting his keeping that up. His handwriting has improved quite a bit. I THINK this is related to some studies coming out, right about the time that folk were lamenting lack of retention of information, that handwriting helped. 

              Liked by 1 person

              1. That’s about the right time to teach it, too. What kids learn before age 10 seems to stick with them for life. After that it starts to get harder to learn and you lose it easier.

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              2. Interestingly enough it is putting the information on something that does it for me. Whether copying it in margins, or writing on paper, or typing it in. If I were in school these days, I’d be typing it in on a laptop. Seriously. Can type a whole lot faster than I can write. Sitting there and “absorbing it”? Nope. Generally that is nap time. Class or meetings. Have to be doing something. In HS that was reading fiction, still absorbed the material. College, that didn’t work so well. But then neither, initially anyway, did taking written notes. If only because reading said notes handwriting was dang near impossible, and my handwriting is generally legible and decent, even now. My last classroom was spring ’89. Laptops? What are they? (Sewing machine sized “computers” were available in ’90. I had one for work. Portable? That is debatable.)

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        5. I have an entrance exam from late 1800’s to enter high school. The math, chemistry, and geology is more akin to a junior college student in each particular field. Sure, they didn’t have overviews of computer logic, or biochemistry, but modern high schools are more like overviews you’d read in a popular science mag in the late 70’s. (Not popular science mags of the 1950’s which would actually include schematics of creating your own electrical gadgets.)

          IMHO overview classes give overblown self evaluations that the student knows the material when all they know is some broad nomenclature.

          See, I realize how poorly educated I was in high school and how dumbed down everything was. But I’m also weird in I love textbooks. Modern textbooks are huge yet full of fluff. Early 1900’s textbooks are thin, don’t have pop graphics or side notes in bright colors, but the text is dense full of info.

          The upsetting truth is most jobs don’t need 20 plus years of education to perform. This was a way to a) water down the material for to level learning and b) keep those younger generations for competing against older workers who were slot fillers.

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          1. Concur on the textbooks. I have in my library a mid-1950s World History text. It’s a clear, readable overview. If you want depth…allow me to recommend Will and Ariel Durant’s work. (Which is also the mother lode of Heinlein’s philosophy)

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      3. Yes. When colleges have to require “catch-up courses” in basic Reading, Writing, and Math because the High Schools don’t teach enough students those skills … The system needs to be gutted and reworked from kindergarten up.

        Liked by 2 people

          1. A multitrack school room, akin to one-room schoolhouse might work. Mixes age groups, without causing too much problems of putting young kid all alone amongst mostly adults.

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        2. In the public schools of the last 20 years or so one of the big issues is around mainstreaming. To explain when I went to school in the 60’s into the 70’s we were “tracked” that is split into levels on the basis of performance starting about 3rd grade, 2-3 levels up to 5th grade, 4-6 on through 8th and thence to business, College Prep and advanced courses as suited for High School. Today there is essentially no tracking other than in math (starting at 7th grade) where the pre-algebra split occurs. There are two ideas here 1) The better students help and act as exemplars for the other students 2) there is not the feeling of being in a low track (and yes although that was supposed to be hid it was well understood who the high performing classes were when I was a kid). Idea one harks back to the one room schoolhouse model where the elder kids would help by tutoring the younger ones when they had time. The second is just unadulterated DEI nonsense (and I didn’t use the word I meant to avoid offending our resident half-bovine). The first doesn’t work, mostly because there is NO expectation of effort/results from the less capable students. So their attitude runs the gamut from indifference to outright belligerence, And teachers are NOT permitted to use most forms of discipline (even non physical ones) and by 7th and 8th grade the students know it. So we have a Harrison Bergeron situation with the annoying jerks acting as a dead weight to those that really want to try. In the old days those jerks would have been piled into the misfits class. Not perfect but at least we weren’t slowing down/contaminating thois that want to cooperate.

          Oh and any form of competition/comparison (which boys love/thrive on) is squashed unless it is the girls or some one of the “underprivileged” classes who excel in which case it is praised to the high heavens. No wonder the average White male even with (or particularly with) high capabilities just sits and shuts up to survive waiting for the moment they can go home, whip off the 15 minutes of homework they were given, and then dive into the various forms of escapist release such as video games and similar. Their world is nearly as colorless, joyless, and unpleasant as that of Winston Smith.

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          1. Do not get my aunt going on current main streaming results. The anti-discrimination was not intended to main stream disruptive to classroom students. What it was intended for was to prevent the school district from forcing physically disabled but otherwise mentally bright and behavior capable daughter, into special ed warehousing. She required an aid to physically assist her (spina bifida birth defect, confined to a wheel chair). The law has been subverted, per aunt’s opinion/ranting. Plenty of experience too. She got her teaching credentials, after daughter passed, and taught for 20 years.

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            1. One of my players back when I lived in San Diego was a middle school teacher. From what she said, I gathered that the schools were putting kids who were incapable of learning into her classrooms, that she was expected to pretend that they were learning the material, and that much of her job was coaching the kids so that when No Child Left Behind exams came around, as many as possible of them could get through, whether or not they knew anything. I don’t quite so how that left much time for actually teaching . . . but I don’t know if the public schools aspire to do that any more.

              And that was a decade ago. I expect it’s gotten worse.

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              1. One of the kids in elementary school with younger son was a drug-baby with an IQ of… 38? The school “mainstreamed” him. His aid did the work for him. He “graduated”. In the meantime, his tantrums and just out of control behavior disrupted the entire classroom.
                His grandmother who was his guardian took him out just before the end of fifth grade to send him to a school that actually would teach him according to his IQ and needs. you know: dressing and feeding himself and bathroom needs.
                The school instead pretended he learned, and disrupted the learning of every other student for this.
                Actually the school pretending to teach is what they do for every other kid, too.
                I often say I homeschooled my kids around school. In retrospect I wish i hadn’t sent them to school. I was so terrified they wouldn’t know how to deal with normal people. But I think they’d have been better adjusted.

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                1. school pretending to teach is what they do for every other kid, too.
                  I often say I homeschooled my kids around school. In retrospect I wish i hadn’t sent them to school. I was so terrified they wouldn’t know how to deal with normal people. But I think they’d have been better adjusted.

                  Same. Some exceptions. Especially once into specific middle school and HS classes where the main streamed and poorer students did not sign up for. Seriously, we got accused of ham stringing him because of the tutoring, teaching him how to learn, and extra curricular activities.

                  We did interact with home schooled students between Kidsports and scouts. Maybe it was just the families in question (probably, one family definitely), but dealing with normal people and well adjusted, they weren’t.

                  Liked by 1 person

                2. I suspect you would have exposed them more to adults. And I’m convinced that teenagers need as much exposure to adults as possible. Most of the kids are pretty good, if you can cut them out of the pack.

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                3. “The anti-discrimination was not intended to main stream disruptive to classroom students. What it was intended for was to prevent the school district from forcing physically disabled but otherwise mentally bright and behavior capable (students) into special ed warehousing.”

                  THIS. It was also intended to ensure that students who had learning disabilities such as dyslexia, which could be overcome or compensated for with a little help, weren’t just shoved off into special ed warehousing.

                  We homeschooled our autistic daughter for a couple of years but when I lost my job and both of us had to go back to work that came to a screeching halt and she had to go back to public school special ed. She had some good teachers in middle school who actually gave her homework, and she did learn some useful things such as the American Sign Language alphabet (which she still knows), but by the end of high school it was obvious they were just going through the motions.  Fortunately she was never disruptive and never seems to have had any issues with bullying, etc.; she never complained about going to school and always looked forward to it. I think she got out of the system juuussst before things started getting totally crazy.

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                  1. Not everywhere. But too often physically disabled, blind, deaf, dyslexia (numbers or/and letters), were shuffled off to special education classes when parents could not afford alternatives.

                    One alternative in Oregon was the Blind/Deaf boarding school in Salem. Do not know if it is still running with integration. I have a different cousin who attended here. Blind and partly deaf (measles during pregnancy). Her parents (love them, but) were not capable of doing home schooling even if this had been an option in ’60s and ’70s. Her additional “handicapped” is she is definitely her paternal grandmother’s granddaughter. A misfit in a rural small hobby farm family. All 3 children faced “if it isn’t mom or dad’s hobby, tough”. Which was horses, 4H, gardening, the ranch, fishing, and hunting. To be fair to aunt and uncle, they went out of their way to insure they had a piano for their middle child to practice on when home from school on breaks. No one else used it. Not something they could easily afford either, not with paying for the boarding school.

                    The physically disabled (spina bifida) cousin her parents would have been able to do the home schooling, no problem. Most the reasons she was able to use a wheel chair and go to school with just a physical aide was because of all the work her parents did. Not only early reading and math, but a number of the physical developmental options her dad cobbled up because nothing else was available (RR engineer). She couldn’t crawl. Modify a shop floor wheeled platform. She scooted everywhere. Strengthened her upper body so she could manipulate a wheel chair when she was older. Back brace with leg braces to strengthen her legs? Custom that dad built. That is just what I remember.

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            2. The nominal goal is to give the students the education suited to the student. If they can be mainstreamed AND make significant progress (Wording is wrong, Elder Daughter would have the precise wording she’s 8 year teacher with all the certs) then they will/must be mainstreamed per Americans with Disabilities act from 80’s. If not they should NOT be mainstreamed they must be provided with suitable accommodations. Schools HATE to provide that because it is expensive as often there may be an aide or two per student AND a teacher or two usually with some serious specialization. Especially in a smaller (Say less than 1000 Students all grades) system the burden of these students eats the budget. In addition a LOT of newer teachers don’t seem to understand that there are some students who will never get too far beyond basic self care they’re just too limited (Likely our hostesses example student with the limited mental capacity).

              Similarly ESL students are an immense expense, often they are moved to regular classes too soon and the aids to help with the language barrier are not funded or available. Instead of working FIRST on language competency for ESL as soon as they show minimal language competency they’re dumped in the main body.

              Finally the most disruptive (quite literally) are the ill behaved students. Often the teacher can not discipline them in any reasonable fashion without risking being fired. The parents don’t care or are so busy keeping food on the table that it makes no difference, The principal(s) just cover their backsides and try to not have large numbers of suspensions or similar which then damage their chance to advance. Here we are truly in the Crazy times that Col. Dubois in Starship Troopers warned of. And of course there are a fair number of teachers who are either mediocre to downright bad and have the stupid “liberal” low expectations that amount to saying certain groups can’t achieve even though there are those among the groups that clearly DO try and succeed.

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              1. “Often the teacher can not discipline them in any reasonable fashion without risking being beaten to a bloody pulp or worse. 

                FTFY. And there are too many examples to list.

                Liked by 1 person

              3. Cousin (’67 – ’80) did not benefit from Americans with Disabilities act from 80’s. They got her into main classrooms by aunt being her physical aide (took some legal wrangling on top of that).

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          2. I maintain the way to fix public schooling is to make it less about socializing and more about actually teaching– which will require teaching classes based on ability, not age.

            This has the advantage of functionally putting folks who cannot or willnot learn in some location other than with folks who are trying to learn challenging material. (Assuming teachers who actually teach, which is another issue.)

            Liked by 1 person

  8. A few years ago, I read a Liberal Critic who was complaining about Liberals not being able to write optimistic stories of the future especially stories about “How Liberal Values Will Create Good Futures”.

    Of course, if Liberals believe that All Possible Futures will be Terrible, then they have “good reasons” to not have children. :mad:

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Because when the Liberal Values they believe in create shitty futures, they blame it on other people and not their own ideas.

      If your Great Ideas create shitty futures, and the Eeevul Ideas you hate create better futures, maybe you need to reassess your categorizations.

      Liked by 3 people

    2. I personally applaud liberals for not having children and then watching them become bitter old people without hope. A just reward for Liberal losers. That’s why they get so angry when they see a large conservative or religious family. They made the sacrifice to save the world so that religious and conservative families can take over, aint life a bitch liberals.

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    3. A few years ago, I read a Liberal Critic who was complaining about Liberals not being able to write optimistic stories of the future especially stories about “How Liberal Values Will Create Good Futures”.

      And here I am the other way around. In “Big Blue” I had Kaiju vs. Lovecraftian Horror. Humanity should have been totally out of its depth, completely unable to do anything other than make futile gestures. And yet my characters kept insisting on finding ways to do things that are at least a little bit effective and, in the end, playing a significant role in the outcome.

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      1. DESTROYER: “Pitiful. Can this world do no better than you as their champion?”

        BRIGADIER: “Probably. I just do the best I can.”[shoots alien with his revolver and it explodes]

        — Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Dr. Who S25E01, “Battlefield”

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          1. The series was trending very Left at the time, but the Brig still managed to get a Crowning Moment of Awesome anyhow.

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            1. Yeah, one of 7doc’s episodes (The Happiness Patrol?) was supposedly made to topple… Margaret Thatcher. So I guess the villain in that episode was supposed to be her or something… or at least the caricature the voices in the writer’s heads created. *snicker*

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  9. Dang, you’re giving me the opportunity to post links, like this one: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2024/03/06/villainous-monologues-they-may-be-more-common-than-you-think/

    And this one, too, because at least cats/kittens are alive. Digital/”virtual” children? Nope, not alive. Not at ALL: https://open.substack.com/pub/carolinesnewsletter/p/mad-about-madness?r=q3lc4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

    There’s an anime series called Avenger which is set on a dying Mars. It’s dying how? The people there stopped having children ten years back. They rely on “dolls” – robotic toys – to simulate the experience and treat them like real children. This on top of Earth blowing up, a colony ship desperate to land there blowing up, a refugee from said ship finding the ONE young girl born in the past ten years….

    I don’t want to live in that future. I really, really don’t want to live in that future.

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  10. I’m pretty lucky I guess in that I can turn my brain off for a few hours and enjoy almost any movie, no matter how stupid it is, as long as it isnt boring. I knew Elysium was stupid while watching it, but I could just sort of read something while it was on and just enjoy the shiny scifi gadgets. The last time I turned off something off in anger was The Last of Us on HBO. On the whole it was a pretty enjoyable show. I knew there was leftist-stupid propaganda in the show I could see that, but I didn’t turn it off until they got to Wyoming and the only survivors colony that worked proudly declared itself “communist”. At that point I lost patience.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I can’t turn my brain off. So any science fiction on the screen is painful.

      The furthest I’ve got is into “The Expanse”, but they totally blew the timing on interplanetary railgun sequence, so it got turned off. It would have been so easy to film correctly and add more tension, but they took a short cut and farked it up.

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    2. can’t do it any more. Maybe some fantasy or SF would do it, but even some reading yanks me out. The “That’s not how it works” lady is often my spirit animal.

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    3. Question: Is The Abyss any good? I have one of my semi-annual cross-Cascades trips in a couple of days. For various reasons, I seldom watch movies at home, but I’m mostly through The Two Towers, and I’ll actually have normal eyesight this trip. (The other one entails serious eye dilation. Reading is right-out, but I can’t watch movies for longer than 90 minutes at a time, ever. Shrugs.) OTOH, I might finish TTT and would like something to start afresh. Since $SPOUSE isn’t fond of SF movies, I’ll catch it solo. If not, I’ll dust off the Independence Day DVD and laugh at the alien computer hacking.

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      1. The 1989 movie The Abyss is good. Ocean Abyss. Something I don’t mind re-watching.

        Don’t know about the 2023 The Abyss and coal mine.

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  12. The rich move to a space habitat so they can perpetually look down on us peons. IIRC the movie came out about 10 years ago.

    Granted, the cure for many of our crashing population ills is to bring in more people. The problem is acculturating them into a traditional productive American ethic, and not the liberal Democrat one. Opening the flood gates as Biden did, without a massive deportation project (assuming Trump gets elected) is going to cause massive problems over the next 40 to 50 years, and result in a less secure, less wealthy, less prosperous, and more internally violent nation.

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    1. And of course it’s crap like this which is the reason the wokists want to hamstring Elon Musk and anyone else who wants to have new frontiers.

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      1. It’s the Crab Bucket worldview writ large. If something like Elon’s rather Heinleinesque worldview works then all the Harry Hairshirt crap they’ve been doing was for naught. So stop that stuff before it makes them look like the raging ignoramuses they are.

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    2. “[…]and result in a less secure, less prosperous, and more internally violent nation.”

      I’m pretty sure Biden’s puppetmasters view that as the desired outcome.

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  13. Leaving aside the fact that the left never admits error, there are far too many salaries predicated in the notion of overpopulation for there to be any public recognition that precisely the opposite is the problem. I think a fair bit of the DC stupidity around Hamas comes from a recognition that no more Hamas means no more jobs for the Hamas management crowd — that and their basic stupidity and malice.

    Yesterday’s gospel mentioned that the poor will always be with us, and given the number of people employed to alleviate poverty, Our Lord didn’t need His omniscience to say so.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Reframe it as “population change” or “population instability“. Bonus points if you can fig leaf an explanation for why the collapse was caused by the catastrophic overpopulation we’ve clearly been experiencing for the past (checks notes) five decades now.That gets it out into the public square without ruffling as many intellectual feathers as underpopulation. Of course, then you have to put up with the overpopulation crowd crowing “I told you so” and trying to set bad policy in the other direction. And you’d need stronger medicine for any field that’s seriously invested in overpopulation, as opposed to the ones who just parrot fashionable memes.I guess the question is whether our institutions doing an about-face would actually help. At this point, and given their track record, maybe not.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. (Well, there were paragraph breaks when I wrote it. Once more:)

        Reframe it as “population change” or “population instability“. Bonus points if you can fig leaf an explanation for why the collapse was caused by the catastrophic overpopulation we’ve clearly been experiencing for the past (checks notes) five decades now.

        That gets it out into the public square without ruffling as many intellectual feathers as underpopulation. Of course, then you have to put up with the overpopulation crowd crowing “I told you so” and trying to set bad policy in the other direction. And you’d need stronger medicine for any field that’s seriously invested in overpopulation, as opposed to the ones who just parrot fashionable memes.

        I guess the question is whether our institutions doing an about-face would actually help. At this point, and given their track record, maybe not.

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      2. The universities are acknowledging - quietly panicking, actually – about what they call a demographic cliff.

        It’s supposed to hit them with declining enrollment in about… three years, now.

        I’m very disappointed to learn that my alma mater’s enrollment is holding steady, thanks to immigration to the state. I’d hoped they’d start having more budget problems and have to cut programs.

        But no, they’re holding on with a death grip to the grievance studies programs and trying to metastatize those through all the other programs so that it still infects the university even if the state legistlature forces them to give up the dedicated programs.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. My alma mater and former employer of nearly 20 years is holding steady too, as far as I can tell. (I could be wrong; I’m no longer in higher-ed, and I don’t pay much attention these days.) In any case, having personally experienced the American university system’s accelerating insanity, I have no sympathy to spare. I hope it falls off that demographic cliff and dies. A fresh start would be a grand thing.

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          1. The University of Redacted used to get a certain amount of favorable publicity: (Professor X was awarded the Nobel Prize for Y, and so on). Now, it’s getting “favorable” publicity for grievance activism.

            About a dozen years after graduation, the alumni association found me (and that alone is scary in hindsight) and I belonged for a year or two. Since alum events distant from the school entailed parties (AKA, “Watch the introvert cringe.”) and watching dreadful football games on TV (had enough of that as an undergrad. The flashcard section was fun…), I let it lapse. Close to 40 years later, they haven’t found me again (though since I’m “privileged”, they might not have bothered), if they did, I’d respond with a Hell No.

            I haven’t looked at enrollment figures for U of R, nor for the private U where I got my MS. The latter was woke (at least for undergrad/law, but not for STEM) back in the ’80s, so I expect the usual results.

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        2. My alma mater has hit the cliff and is in free-fall.

          When my husband and I attended this small, liberal-arts college about thirty years ago, there were a little over 1400 undergraduates.

          There are now a little over 600 undergrads.

          Because the majority of the faculty are tenured, they still have enough faculty to teach a student body of around 1200 undergrads.

          A family friend is well-connected to the college. He’s giving us the behind-the-scenes look, and it isn’t pretty. Apparently the college is having to dip into its endowment to make ends meet and keep the lights on.

          The faculty haven’t had a raise in three years.

          They’re very upset about this and are talking about going on strike.

          Obviously, none of them are Accounting or Economics professors…

          Apparently those professors don’t understand that the only thing that will happen if they go on strike is that the college will close sooner. Their jobs will go away, and there aren’t very many other jobs available in the immediate vicinity for people with a Ph.D in Labor Studies or French History…

          It would make me laugh, if it didn’t make me want to cry.

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          1. It takes a heart of stone not to laugh at Progressives getting the obvious* result of their actions, Unexpectedly!

            ((*)) Obvious to everybody other than Progressives.

            Like

    2. There is never any interest in truly ending something that is making so many so much Money/power/etc, and much of it will never end because Humans. Racism can’t be cured because then everyone would ignore those making their living off it, and there will always be some a$$#ole out there. “The Poor” is much the same, with different vectors. Many Homeless are not poor and homeless because economy, but because of metal issues and life choices. When it gets close to resolution, someone will gin up more to maintain relevance, even if it means changing the meaning of things.

      Liked by 1 person

  14. If it is healthy for adults to have a certain number of children around, then why do we have retirement homes, nursing homes and retirement communities?

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    4. Another reason is that people have been persuaded to self-isolate away from families, in part because families don’t have houses large enough for grandparents, parents, and kids together. Yet another is how much longer people live with medical conditions that need care, care that is very, very hard to provide when husband and wife both feel the need to work full time outside the home. (When one grandmother developed dementia, she would not have been safe at RedQuarters, even with 24-7 nursing and family present.)

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Can confirm.

          One reason I avoid my biological relatives is a “hey how are you” postcard we got from the more distant ones years back that had, among other incidents mentioned, one of the relatives waking up with another relative’s hypodermic needle against their neck.

          I had my own brushes with death, though not quite that close.

          I know Hollywood likes to play up the image of the “sweet senile old lady”, but IRL some of them decide you’re Responsible For All This and try to kill you.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Dementia also frequently means waking up at night, sometimes every couple of hours, loudly asking what time it is and what day it is. My paternal grandmother lived in our family home from the time I was about 6 months old until I was 13 and in the last few years she lived with us she would do this quite frequently. Mom was a stay at home mom but it got to the point where she couldn’t deal with it anymore (she was also getting sick from diabetes) and so they finally moved grandma to a nursing home where she spent the last 3 years of her life. Dad was still working full time and me and my brother were still in junior high/high school so there was no one else to take over.

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  15. That movie had terrible world building on SO many levels. The economics were horrible; only a Marxist could have come up with that nonsense.

    Someone may have mentioned this already, but when you have the kind of robust AI and automation they have in that world–the main character worked in a robot factory–you don’t have the kind of grinding poverty they showcased there. It’s just physically impossible. Perhaps the poverty came from robots taking all the jobs–but if that happened, you’ve replaced labor with capital, and that makes everything DIRT CHEAP.

    Not to mention that in order to build Elysium, the rich people had to PAY people to do the construction–or else they had to buy robots to do it. Either way, that money would have been spent on Earth, since there do not appear to be any robot mines on the Moon or anything.

    The economy in “Elysium” is impossible.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The economy/social structure in Star Trek is also impossible. But isn’t not a primary focus of the show or essential to the plot and can be glossed over with copious amounts of handwavium.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. That replicator. And later the holodeck are major game changers. However I saw Starfleet as a way to get those pesky Type A’s out of the way.

        Like

      2. Starfleet is the only naval organization in history in which ships somehow continue to run with one and only one Chief on board – the original NCC-1701 Enterprise with Chief Kyle, and the Enterprise-D with Chief O’Brien.

        The only other rating is apparently Yeoman.

        I mean, really. Talk about unrealistic.

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        1. The crew size of the original ship was supposedly about 400 souls of which 380 seemed to be disposable red-shirts.

          The lack of rigor and hierarchy made the “ship” aspect of the series laughable, but it seems to fit within the universal aspect of story telling to limit the cast to principle characters, some guest stars, and the rest are the chorus/backdrop.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I’m trying to do a SWAG on the crew size for the Enterprise show. Before the Season of the Xindi, I’d guess 100 would be an absolute maximum, and more likely as low as 40*. I recall them adding crew (assault troops) for that season, though the red piping on their uniforms was a mostly clever way of identifying them as redshirts.

            ((*)) Hmm, from this morning’s Cdr Salamander post on the LCS, that was the crew size for those. Timing of the show and the LCS fiasco was similar, too.

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            1. Oh, don’t get me started on LCS…

              Having said that, a relatively small crew makes sense. I’m going that direction with my Space Guard novel, if I ever finish the thing. Crews are weight, volume, and cost. But a crew gets reduced from the bottom up, not the top down. I’ve worked on acquisition reform demonstrations, seen the same thing happen. You cut the low-level positions, the OJT openings. 

              And you must have enough people to move, sense, and fight, all at once.

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        2. There were a few “crewmen” on Enterprise 1701 and addressed as such. They usually wore coveralls in red or blue.

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  16. “Maybe it’s time our overculture got — or was given — a clue, and stopped killing us softly with their bullshit.”

    Cluebat. The Cluebat of Doom, in fact.

    They’ll never stop until they are stopped. I’m hopeful bankruptcy will be sufficient to get their attention. Not impending bankruptcy either, the real deal where a contractor comes in and sells their freakin’ office chairs on eBay.

    A hopeful sign is what’s happening today at both Hertz and Boeing, the Big Guys are all getting fired. Those corner-office boardroom bastards with their iron rice bowls have all been fired at Boeing today. It was described as a complete decapitation of the company. CEO of Hertz was fired for cause after the rental car company couldn’t rent their 20,000 Teslas.

    Hoping for the same to happen to MouseHouse and the rest of GroomerWood, publishing, newspapers, TV and etc. I’m doing my part by not buying their crap. I buy crap from Japan instead.

    My reaction to the Narrative as it has been delivered these last few years is to write the following:

    -Artificial robot people who LOVE their humans and love looking after them. Love it. Not because they have to, either. No Frankenstein BS here, they can do whatever the F they want.

    -Humans who marry their artificial robot people and treat them like A) people and B) people they want to have families with. (Nanotech. Handwavium for the win.)

    -Alien artificial robot people who treat Earth as the happy fun holiday planet where they come to hang out with the crazy biocreatures for a laugh, get married and have offspring with them. (Nanotech can fix anything ~:)

    -Strange visitors from fantasy realms who want to settle down with the crazy Human men and have a whole hockey team of kids with them, right away, please and thank you. Commitment and the truth being the two things they can’t get at home.

    You get the picture.

    Because when was the last time you read ”mainstream” SF or a fantasy where the characters were driven by Truth, Honor, Duty, and Family? It’s been a long damn time for me. David & Leigh Eddings, I think. It’s literally the most subversive thing I could be doing.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Along those same lines, I look at the things I find to read in webnovels, and I notice five of the ones I am keeping up on involve the main character building up a set of followers that they improve.

      -Girl reincarnated as a dungeon who just wants to be friends, and teaches her monsters to be unique individuals.

      -Litrpg with a girl who gets pet dragons, who are quite delightful, and surprisingly gender roled so far–first male dragon is the main fighter, who is very protective of her.

      -Iseki reincarnation story where the main character is literally a teacher, and the lessons get plenty of screen time.

      -Iseki/litrpg where the main character is a tree, and does very tree-like things, while relying on his adopted daughter and other minions to protect him.

      -Scifi story with nanite ai people, where the main character’s first two ai children are building battle moons to come rescue her.

       

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I went with battle planetoids. Coasting over from the dark side of the moon.

        Have you read David Weber’s ‘Armageddon Inheritance?’ Battle moon. ~:D

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  17. My oldest son is 32 and his fiancee 30 and are childless with a very expensive condo. They recently acquired a couple of very nice cats. I thought to myself “that will probably push the possibility of grandchildren off a couple of years.” Sigh.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. I had only one child who turned out to be autistic and almost certainly will never marry or have children of her own. I really, really wanted more kids but husband said no because it was “too stressful” raising the one we had, and now it’s too late to do anything about it, so I guess I failed miserably in that department.

    However, we did recently have a stray cat turn up at our door who turned out to be pregnant. We had been talking about getting a cat for some time and I had been watching videos of mama cats and their kittens for entertainment. This cat was extremely friendly and clung to us like glue, so we took her in, and she gave birth 11 days ago (4 healthy kittens and 2 that were stillborn). We plan on keeping one or both of the female kittens as companions for mama and rehoming the male kittens.

    It amazes me how well mama cat is taking care of her brood completely on instinct, without benefit of kitty Lamaze classes, feline lactation consultants, cat psychologists, or a feline Dr. Spock or What To Expect When Kitty Is Expecting manual. If only humans like me still had natural instincts that worked that well (I tried to breastfeed our daughter but failed for reasons I still don’t understand). Caring for mama kitty and babies (and also holding the two stillborn kitties) is also making me think a lot about doing more to protect human life from those who would casually toss it aside. Can’t help but wonder how many people who go out of their way to rescue pregnant mama cats and dogs wouldn’t think twice about advising a distressed human mama to abort?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. We only have one child too. Not for the same reasons. Just note that birth control was cheap ($0 spend by us or insurance, after first year). Inability to get pregnant (or at all, after our first was born) or carry to term easily (before one successful pregnancy). I too struggled with natural feeding after the first 8 weeks. Supply didn’t keep up with demand.

      Seeing the supply VS demand with nieces too. All have had to go with supplementing. Also a trend with nieces is using infertility treatments. The one who has had to use in vitro had a problem with harvesting. I think they got 6 eggs, but two weren’t viable. They’ve used two, for two successful pregnancies. They are planning on using the remaining two. Will NOT destroy, or donate for another to use, or stem cell research. Do not get her started.

      Liked by 1 person

  19. I should add that mama and kittens will of course be fixed at an appropriate time because there really is an overpopulation of stray/feral cats in our area. However there is not exactly an overpopulation of humans in our area (the town we live in has a population of about 475 and shrinking).

    Liked by 2 people

  20. I don’t know the last movie I watched.

    Hubby watches a lot of them after I go to bed. 

    He will only watch with me if I take a vow of silence before hand so he can enjoy them without MST3K commentary.

    If I have to stay silent I’d rather not watch.

    OTOH, I watch YouTube gardening videos without his input because I don’t like to see my dreams crushed. So we’re even.

    Liked by 1 person

  21. I sang at a community worship service hosted by a denomination that likes kids. Really likes kids. There were all ages and sizes, most pretty quiet (babies are going to be babies). It was fun.

    When I was in Poland, it took a day or two to get used to seeing children all over the place. Germany and Vienna have so very few kids out and about that I’d come to associate “lack of kids” with “Europe.” Nope. Even outside of Vienna, there were more Austrian children than I remembered noticing before, likewise Moravia. Hungary seems to be between Germany and Poland in terms of abundance of knee-biters.

    Liked by 2 people

  22. A good friend complained to me that her son was contemplating marriage, and his girlfriend was eager to get married and start having babies. However, she said, her son doesn’t make a good salary (he works in a lab drawing blood) and therefore they can’t afford children.

    So I took her on a hike, which we both love to do, and I talked to her ceaselessly up and down that blasted mountain. Children are not that expensive. (It’s a Marxist lie that they are.) Children are the greatest blessing, and she will love being a grandmama, and so what if they’re poor? Their children will have you as a grandmother and you can spoil them! (Shameless pandering now.)

    So, the kids are now engaged, and the wedding is in October. I hope they jump the gun a little bit and she’s a glowing bride with a baby bump. I hope I had a little bit of something to do with it. Now I’m going off to be a horrible busybody to my nephew, who needs to get a second baby up on the scoreboard…

    Liked by 3 people

    2. Children *are* expensive! Harrumph!

      You need carefully-vetted daycare right off the bat, which costs a fortune. Then you need the paid advance-placement preschool. And designer clothing, so they don’t feel out of place. And then private schools, which are no joke. Toys, a few hundred a month or an allowance, a decent cell phone, and the opportunity cost of all the time spent ferrying them back and forth to soccer, football, yoga, etc., plus the expense of the away trips, and of course support for “the team.” Add in dental work, implants or plastic surgery after puberty, more designer clothing, then a car, and a good college, not one of those crummy state universities…

      Like

      1. Don’t forget the breast augmentation when the girls turn 18. At least I’ve read that there are communities where that’s a thing . . .

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  23. 🎯 dart night, last week a ton 80, this week who knows? My one night excursion into normal male behavior and a social setting.

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  24. Every time I see some clueless type online spouting off about a “dying planet” or “depleted resources”, I want to scream. Instead of people understanding the environment better, decades of this doomer propaganda has rendered a lot of people sub-moronic on the subject.

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  26. I’m going to warn that if you’re going to read Ehrlich, do it as an adult. I can attest being browbeaten with his stuff as a child is one factor in why I cannot stand much in the way of people, including children.

    (One factor. There were and are several others. Including, mostly, for some incomprehensible reason, people think I like children…. and proceed to dump responsibility for them on me. But I can’t discipline them, oh no, never, I’m not good enough to be allowed to do that….)

    (Yes, there was one time I ended up telling a person, “I’m sorry I offended you. The next time I see your child approaching a potentially unfriendly and dangerous dog I will definitely not do anything to stop them.”)

    Liked by 2 people

      1. I cannot get over the fact that 1) most people assume that any dog out in public is a “safe” dog, and 2) most people assume that their darlings would never hurt, annoy, or just step wrong and have a strange dog react accordingly.

        No. And no.

        On top of that, 3) most people seem to have no idea how much damage a dog can do in seconds.

        But no. You go ahead and make a formal complaint that I “had an attitude” for telling you to watch your child, the kid kept going after the dog and the dog looked nervous….

        Like

        1. Me to every parent that lets their child climb chain link fences. No matter where.

          To child. “Get off the fence.”

          Parent. “I said my child could play on the fence.”

          Me. “Fine. When the emergency services are called, because you let your child get injured, I have no problem telling them you told your child it was okay to climb that fence.”

          Parent. “That never happens!”

          Me. “Tell that to your other child’s coach. He is blind in one eye from climbing on chain link fence as a child.” *

          Parent.

          Parent to child. “Get off that fence!”

          Dogs and strange kids. Do not get me started. Me and every service animal handler. Service dogs are trained to a T. Problem is every handler covers “what if” and, generally, do not want to let kids pet. 1) Distraction to dog. 2) “What if”. Doesn’t not stop the entitled. My service dog is on the small size. I have been known to grab the handle on her vest, lift her up, and walk away, with the entitled yelling. Let them. Also have been known to use as a training/reward, her, and teaching, them, moments. I am rarely in that big of a hurry. If I can spare another team who does not want the interaction, I am willing to teach proper manners. Have been overhearing more and more: Parent – “That is a service dog. Ignore it.” to children. Music!

          ((*)) When he was 4. Tore the iris. Back of the eye is fine. Now the iris might be able to be repaired. In 1956 not an option. Children’s eyes are continuing to develop at age 4. He has limited sight, just fog and images. Very light sensitive. We have looked into having the iris closed so the light sensitivity would be reduced. But even with advances the possibility of what is called “sensitive reaction” of the other eye was too high. Be one thing if a chance of gaining sight in the bad eye even now at 72. But there isn’t.

          Then there is BIL’s nephew who sliced his hand open because mom let him climb on a more modern chain link fence. Kid, now an adult, still has the scar. No, I did not spare her the “what could have been” to stop the “ha ha so stupid, won’t allow that again”. Nope. The point was to scare her so that she’d know how flipping lucky her child had been.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. Heck, I got a decent amount of damage from a dog doing what would have been a normal interaction with another dog. (Huskies. The things they do to each other depends on thick skin and fur. Similar issue with cats and the level of unintentional damage they can do.)

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Similar issue with cats and the level of unintentional damage they can do.

              Hubby and our last feral Buddy. No way can I trim Buddy’s claws. Must semi-sedate him with prescription we have from veterinarian so he can be crated and taken to the clinic. Not happening except for annual visit. Hubby bleeds easily. All Buddy is doing is playing or flexing claws. Not viciously taking swipes. Even our cats who I can clip their nails, doesn’t take much to accidentally get scratched deep enough for me to bleed. I don’t bleed as easily or profusely as hubby (yet). Hubby’s problem is two fold, age (thus “yet”) thin skin, and blood thinner medications.

              Liked by 1 person

        3. It’s common that some people (generally the very rural) will bring there dogs to town when they’re shopping in Flyover Falls. (We’d do the same when we went over the Cascades when two of our dogs were not-quite house trained.) So, there’s frequently vehicles with a partly open window and a dog expressing its attitude. On rarer occasions, there would be a dog or two in the bed of a pickup, keeping an eye out for a) it’s master and b) intruders.

          Most dogs like me, but I have no desire to put that to a test for dogs in vehicles. I say “hi” at a distance. I’m also aware that my hearing sucks rocks, and a quiet growl might get lost in traffic noise in the city. We don’t do dog parks. Kat-the-dog has plenty of space to run around in, a couple of neighbor dogs on the other side of the fence (or road), and $SPOUSE prefers to stay home with Kat on market days.

          Liked by 1 person

          2. We don’t do dog parks either. Except for leash training Outside the fence well away from arriving or leaving dogs. Our residential yard is large enough for my smaller dog to run leash free. Plus long distance (ish) leash walks.

            When I **participated in pack walks (all leashed, 6′, or less, no retractable leashes) there was no dog to dog interaction – No “meet and great, dog to dog.” Walked single file. Did exercises so that dogs safely passed one another, walked between two stationary lines, etc. Public park venue. Most the dogs were there because either very young (had all shots or was *carried), or considered reactive. Reactive to unfamiliar noises (got to experience bikes, strollers, electronic scooters, skates), people, and, in particular, other dogs. Pack walks were to teach handlers how to handle the sudden either known or unknown triggers. In particular to avoid dog fights (that reactive). We were there to teach my dog how to handle sudden scary reactions of the other dogs (look to me, attempted flight is not appropriate).

            While on the pack walks the pack would encounter others with their dogs. More often than not owners would ask if their dog could “meet and great”. Response “NO!”, firm and loud. “My dog is dog friendly.” Second response “These dogs aren’t!”

            ((*)) The newfie (Newfoundland) puppy was a hoot. First week they had a front baby pack for him (already bigger than my dog Pepper). Weeks after that, until fully had shots and was semi-leash controlled, they used one of those newer collapsing canvas gear wagons. Their second newfie. They were not making the same mistakes they’d made with their older dog.

            ((**)) 2020 put a stop to the walks. Started back up, but limited in participant numbers. Given our reasons for being there (part of it social for me), do not want to take up a spot.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. After a certain amount of doctoral dithering, I’ve finally been given clearance to get an arthrogram for my sorely mistreated knee. The gotcha was that because they’re sticking a needle in the joint*, they insist on somebody else driving. This time, the neighbors will do the job, and I’ll buy lunch and a box-o-salmon for thanks (don’t wanna know the cost of commercial medical (or just plain taxi) transport between $TINY_TOWN and F-Falls). 40 miles one way. Whee.

              OTOH, there’s a good chance they’re going to be doing semidrastic things to that joint (cue Hilda from tNotB), and we need to be able to send Kat over to a neighbor dog for a few hours. Time to schedule a Bordatella shot for her. Then we can see if two dogs who enjoy running back and forth along the fences (across the dirt road) will get along in contact. If that doesn’t work, the other neighbor has a Lab who likes to touch noses with Kat when they’re both out together. All of these are females, so that makes it a bit easier. I hope.

              ((*)) Any jokes about Hilda Sharp are appropriate, though I’m not a nice girl. Nor a girl. :)

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  27. One thinks of The Children of Men as an example of a society without any children at all.

    There are people who cannot have children, and those that choose not to for various reasons. But within those that choose not to, there seems (at least in American society) to run at least one vicious streak of not wanting to because children (and marriage, perhaps) is an inconvenience to their lives and their ability to live them the way that they want. Which is fine from the sense of people that do not want children should not have them – but it then raises interesting questions about about the future of things like involvement with children (why should those that have no children tell those that do how to raise them) and how support networks will function not across generations but within a single generation.

    Liked by 1 person

  28. The magic medbeds were where I checked out. They didn’t even try for “we can’t treat everyone, we’ll use up the magic beans that makes the medbeds run” because that would mean the revolutionaries would end up doing the same exact thing as the previous overlords, medical rationing and death panels and denials for those not worthy, and send in the death robots to get rid of those hoarders and wreckers and kulaks.

    Revolutionary utopian distopianist writers would have to decide, I guess, if their magic bean pie is finite or infinite. This dumb movie says the pie is magically infinite, but those meanie ancien regimists were just meanies, release Madame Le Gullotine! Yay, another rolling head!!

    But everything about their world building says their pie of envy is finite, else why would the huddled masses not just magic their own beans? Steve Wosniak and Bill Hewlett and the rest were not aristos.

    So a magic beans limit means the after-the-revolution magic beans medical shuttle road show will last about a week.

    But hey, fast CGI utopia montage of curing the sick, fade to credits.

    Dreck.

    Like

    1. The requisite know-how is still available on Earth; why don’t they just build their own?

      Of course, that’s like asking why the Mexicans and South Americans don’t just generate their own prosperity instead of leeching off of us. They have the people, they have access to the same information we do, they have the natural resources, why don’t they make use of them?

      Same answer: Crab bucket.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. But imagine a movie where the intrepid heroes jump through all the plot hoops, find and connect the earthbound person with obscure knowledge with the compute power, or the lab equipment, or the vat of bean precursor, and they succeed – so they send a message to Jodie Foster up in the orbitals: “Hey Jodie, look! We made our own magic beans! And we cured the cute little girl ourselves! We don’t need to trade with you any more! Enjoy eating asteroids!!”

        Like

      2. And from the moviegoing perspective: Which would you rather see: A movie that celebrates the crab bucket, lets pull those achievers back down, yay another rolling head; Or, one that celebrates those who do the American thing and think laterally, escaping the whole bucket concept by doing something totally innovative and disruptive to the residents of Space Station Versailles-1, leaving them irrelevant?

        I know which one Hollywood produces, I know which I’d rather watch, and I know one of these things is not like the other.

        Liked by 1 person

  29. I very rarely get growly, put the foot down, absolutely no way in hell with $SPOUSE$. One of the times was when she floated the idea of moving to an “adult community.”

    It doesn’t matter that the kids running around the neighborhood aren’t my kids (or, durn it, my grandkids) – I would lose several years of my life without their presence.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Our street and the blocks on either side of us are entering the “no young children” phase, again. Was there when we move in (the family with small children moved when they took in their orphaned nieces and nephews because they needed a larger home, 3 bedroom was not going to be large enough for 8 children under 8, and they could afford to). Stayed that way until across the street moved in, and started a daycare. Over the last 15 years homes have been overturning (grandma died or moved out into hospice) to families. But those families are now growing up. One salvation. We can see the grade school from the house. Looked like we were going to lose that, but the district only cut one grade school (demographics, down almost 1000 in k – 5 age group. See my street. While yes, might be because no kids being born, or families not moving into the district because homes not available in the district.)

      Liked by 1 person

  30. I find myself fearing that the DemocratParty preferences for destroying high-trust societies are like the monetary principle of bad coinage driving out good.

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      1. I may be a bit too phlegmatic about the situation. OTOH… I have lived through people doing their absolute worst to destroy trust on the small scale. And I’m still here. In large part because of books that demonstrated there can be another way.

        America has the Constitution and the Declaration. So long as those words exist, we have a chance.

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  31. What really annoys me is that the director of that clearly loves cool stuff like futuristic weapons and powered armor. His aesthetics are neat. But his politics are stone stupid.

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  32. I found Elysisum boring AF and I turned it off. 

    I prefer dogs to cats. Dogs need us. Cats just tolerate us. I respect that, but still prefer dogs.

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    1. Tell me your experience of cats is cartoons without telling me your experience of cats is cartoons.
      Yes, there are cats like that. They’re not the majority, not even close.

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