A lot of people here are older than I, but even I remember the ethos I grew up with: the idea that top people rose to top positions, and that “experts” in the government knew what was going on and could forecast how things should be done, and what to do for “progress.”
I never put much faith in it, but that’s probably both because of a problem with authority (A very small problem. I neither like it nor trust it. While understanding not all authority is bad, and that it’s impossible for me to verify everything for myself and trust no one. So, you know, a tiny problem about the size of the universe) and because of early experiences.
Also I suspect because of growing up in a society that recognized “given” authority derived from birth or credentials, which I always found to have a hollow sound when tested if you know what I mean. When you’re eight, in an argument with an expert, and realize he missed some great big honking discrepancies in the data, you’re going to give authority the side eye forever. Being in a society that forces you to show outward compliance just gets you very salty and low-key mad forever.
But anyway, even I seemingly gave “people in charge” far more credit than they deserved. Than they ever deserved.
Last night, and for reasons of being inexplicably and profoundly depressed, which causes me to fall down rabbit holes, and usually depressing ones, I fell into a rabbit hole about Lebensborn.
I knew about the program, which apparently puts me in a minority. In fact, I don’t remember when I first heard of it, though I have a vague, somewhat hazy idea I’ve “always known” which would mean I first heard of it in elementary school. And there’s a sense I based the upbringing of the Mules/Good Men on it.
For those too sane to follow the link, the Lebensborn homes/program were an attempt to create more babies of “good Aryan blood” and it turned out just as evil as the Holocaust, though from another perspective. I mean, one is tempted to call it opposite, because they aimed to create human lives, rather than eliminate them, but in the end it was exactly the same thing and perhaps even more arrogant.
Killing people in batch lots and attempting to eliminate an entire sub-race (of sorts. The genetics are more nebulous than that) is arrogant, but it is also to an extent understandable as a goal for a state to undertake. At least, killing off people in batch lots — normally in war, but sometimes internal minorities — has always been a thing that the state has done, even when the state was as small as a kingdom scarcely larger than a family.
But that humans would presume to breed other humans like cattle, that seemed oddly overreaching and strange.
It was of course the manifestation of a really old impulse, but now layered with “scientific.”
Some people hate it when I talk about the early 20th century, or the mid-20th century and point out it was a time of diminishing freedom, a time when people expected even less freedom in the future, a time when we expected “experts” to run every aspect of our lives in the future.
People of a conservative bend have gotten so used to blaming everything that’s wrong on the sixties/seventies, than they don’t realize that while bad and worsened by Soviet agit-prop, was a reaction to what had been happening before. (And before my unreconstructed hippie readers question the “bad” — yes, tearing down of all norms and rules, but worse, casting doubt on the very foundations of humanity is wrong and bad. Casting pair-bonding as slavery, casting having children as more slavery, and making the ideal human completely ideally isolated and self actuated was very bad and led directly to where we are, in this atomized, broken society where the species seems quite likely to not-reproduce itself into oblivium.)
It was a reaction to letting the best men run everything, and to treating humans as a sort of gadget that could be put in places, and would act in predictable ways. All at the behest of the “best” and “smartest” of people.
What we’re seeing now on the left is nothing new. It’s the reassertion of all these ideas. Part of the reason I object to saying the Nazis were “right wing” (besides their being another species of Marxist) is that they were the flowering of this idea of expert-rule and “best men in charge”.
We say current leftists look at 1984 and treat it as an how-to manual, but that’s not quite true. It’s more that that 1984 and the ideas of the left about society all come from the mass-production era where, because making widgets in bulk was cheaper, humans made the leap of thinking planning everything centrally was better.
The truth is it never worked. It’s not even a matter of it worked poorly, or it had bad side effects. The central thing itself never worked. I remember hearing about Lebensborn early enough that people assumed the kids who went came from it would be healthier, or stronger, or live longer. Sure, breeding humans like animals was wrong, and raising them in batch lots was wrong, but it got a superior product right?
Well, no. It got a bog standard product, humans like the rest of us, suffering from the same diseases and defects heirs to the same frailty. (The human genome is complicated. Even if we get to designing it, it won’t be better.)
The idea of central planning and of group guilt persisted, and in some cases was even stronger after the war. Which is why the Lebensborn children were treated so badly in so many countries, as it was presumed their “German blood” now made them naturally evil. (Many of them were actually Polish. Or other nationalities. Also, no. Germany did not fall into Nazism because it was uniquely evil. If I had to guess it was more susceptible to falling for the central planning thing because it was one of the later-united polities, and in fact a sort of empire all by itself. The shocks of WWI didn’t help.) But there it is.
And central planning never worked. Mostly because it makes it easy to fall victim to ONE PERSON’s obsessions or insanity. Like, did you know that Fauci speculated you could use face masks to avoid AIDs back in the 80s? Because he did. It seems to be his own personal idiocy. Now, he has others, and he’s far from clean, but even the best of men will have blindspots and obsessions. Giving anyone that kind of control over a country or a civilization just leads to bigger and more bizarre failures.
It always failed. The US, as far as it remained free, has propped and fed a lot of evil central-control experiments, including the European illusions of “limited socialism”.
Now it’s all falling apart. And it’s important to remember not to go back to the sort of “but we were united and there was order” society of the early twentieth century.
We have the tech and the ability to organize in many, agile, small polities. While the federal government in the US has its uses, those uses should be strictly limited to the duties appointed to it by the constitution. Everything else should devolve to the smaller possible polity, and eventually the individual.
Aim small, miss small.
Instead, the 20th century is a study in aiming huge and missing … entire countries. Look at China’s population games.
The past has a way of being covered by our memories in glossy, soft and glowing tones. Mostly because when we were young enough we imagined things worked way better.
But they never did. The ability of dissemination of information now allows us to see how poorly central planning always works.
It’s time to ensure that message sticks and we don’t careen back into the illusion that all the best men have got our back.
A couple of centuries is enough for failed — and evil — experiments.
Let’s not ride that carousel again.
According To Hoyt 
“We got Top Men working on it”. [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
Bing Videos
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Bottoms, mostly.
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This, to be honest.
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I have found it interesting that, at least to my reading, there really are weird stretches in various countries of good decisions and good luck, and then suddenly bad decisions and bad luck, almost as if there really is some talisman or artifact or forgotten crate, or collection of multiples thereof, which periodically get swiped and moved and stolen and smuggled from country to country, a critical mass of which confers such “good luck”.
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Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
RAH for the win!
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Dante said the guiding Intelligence (the angelic power that moves the planet in its orbit) is Fortune, who keeps things turning so that people and nations rise and fall in turn. He also called Her, “divine Providence.”
But Fortuna turning her sphere explains it pretty well.
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Boethius was a big influence.
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To steal from a medieval poet (and a 20th century composer’s setting) talking about fortune
statu variabilis,
semper crescis
aut decrescis;
vita detestabilis nunc obdurat
et tunc curat
ever waxing
ever waning;
hateful life
first oppresses
and then soothes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Fortuna
Lady Fortune is a fickle one and not anyone’s friend
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I think what happens is, a society gets comfortable — peace, a high standard of living, etc. — and starts reacting to…irritants. Those creative people are uncomfortable. They keep changing things. Inventing things we got along just fine without. Why can’t they just kick back and enjoy life, like normal people? Something must be done to prevent them from causing so much trouble…
And then you get “bad luck”.
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Our problem is exactly the opposite: we have way too many people who have been told they are “creatives”, and they’re determined to create something, only they’ll “do it right!”
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You’re confusing self designated creatives with people who actually create.
Note I’ve only very reluctantly embraced the designation, but most people who use it are best termed “poseurs.”
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Sarah, I don’t think so, that’s why there are quotes around “create”. The only thing these people create is messes the sane have to clean up.
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well, then I’ll blame it on WP.
I can only answer comments from the back panel. (Don’t get me STARTED) and formatting is weird. No quotes visible. Sigh.
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So quotes in the e-mail, quotes on the front of the blog, but no quotes on the back panel. That takes a level of software incompetence that Crowdstrike might envy.
WPDE.
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Don’t get me started. I’m salty about so many things just now, WP almost doesn’t register. You don’t want me berserking, do you?
Yesterday I cried. In public.
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Oh, Sarah. Prayers.
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please go to the district of corruption before berserking.
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Look, start with “I’m the owner of the blog, but it won’t let me comment as a commenter.”
This is infuriating. It was an “update” three years ago, I think.
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It’s not just that. It’s envy weaponized, etc.
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Well, that would explain The Acolyte and pretty much all of Disney Star Wars.
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Forgot to click.
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Clack
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Cluck
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Whenever power is concentrated into a few hands it gets turned to evil. Power must be distributed as widely as possible; it can never be entrusted to kings, presidents or commissars.
That is the primary purpose of the 2nd Amendment — to prevent the government from gaining a monopoly on firepower by distributing it to the people.
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If you want a good history that illustrates this, check out Global Crisis by Geoffrey Parker. Pretty much the whole 17th century, worldwide, was Top Men. In the height of the Little Ice Age.
…Yeah, that’s part of why it was so bad….
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Lack of means of communication, and the extensive need of drudge work, necessarily concentrated powers — and stripped them of knowledge to make good judgment.
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Political power is like bovine-sourced organic fertilizer [with apologies to Orvan and his relatives]: When concentrated too much, it poisons the soil and water and causes lots of problems. When properly distributed and worked into the soil, it returns life to the soil and helps improve things.
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So Chicago needs to disc and adjust the soil pH as needed for a good crop next growing season (or maybe the winter wheat)?
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You know, given how badly China shot itself in the foot (some would argue fatally) by buying the whole population bomb nonsense, I have to think the “never our fault ” Chinese government concluded that it was tricked by evil Western encironmentalist propaganda created for the sole purpose of destroying them. So they fund a lot the Global Warming propaganda trap in the West as revenge.
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Sort of like Fentanyl smells like payback for how the Brits flooded them with opiates way back then…
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Whining to the CCP about fentanyl…. How to look like an impotent ignorant fool.
(Privately) “Knock this (HONK!) off or I will put 100% tarrifs on all your junk. And if that doesn’t persuade you to reasonable behavior, I’ll mine your (HONK!)ing harbors. My ambassador will call on you tomorrow to discuss with you cooperation in the future.”
(Publicly) “We have an ambassador there. Perhaps he will have a fruitful conversation in the next day or two.”
That would tend to get them to the table in a mood to at least consider modifying behaviors annoying to us.
OK. So I am not a diplomat……
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I admire the cut of your jib, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter
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Despite the tiny aspect of my prior service, there will forever be a part of me that negotiates by howling “FIX BAYONETS! …. CHARGE!”
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No. You’re effective and not stupid. “Not a diplomat” is a compliment with me right now.
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Russia hates China -way- more than the USA. They get invaded from the East way worse than the West.
The USA might NATOize Ukraine. China might soon annex Siberia, and repopulate it with Chinese.
Big difference.
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I didn’t think China had enough population to hold what it’s got.
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China has a lot of people, it’s their sub-replacement rate birth rate and the trends that will drive that is a problem.
Russia-proper has a similar problem.
The thing that changes is their leaders have a bright line point in time after which they won’t be able to staff any military adventures, so if they want to be militarily adventurous they have to kick them off before that date.
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True, but Russia probably believes Chinese lies.
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Even depleted, China is still huge. Even if only 600 million, that still -way- outnumbers Russia.
Russia burned through all its trained bodies, and all its ready stockpiles. China hasn’t, but we don’t really know the quality or effective quantity, and they are going to considerable length to hide it. (“When weak, appear strong.”)
Paper bear and paper dragon, both posing with ferocity and desperately hoping no one drops a lit match.
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If China kicks off on Russia, the Reader thinks we’ll find out if any Russian nukes work. If they do, Russia will nuke the Chinese armies on Russian territory and claim self defense. If they don’t, Siberia will be under new ownership and China will have oil. The Reader thinks that if Russia has any working nukes, they are sited for this contingency.
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IIRC, China has been selling material to Russia for use in the war – things like tires, etc .. (and, covertly, rifles). My recollection is that the Russians have not been impressed with the quality of the supplies that they’ve been receiving.
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WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones. Just saying.
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In our team yesterday, in a break, one guy commented the real problem preventing working on climate channge was…wait for it….overpopulation. This is not a progressive bunch, it’s simple received wisdom, what “everybody knows.”
Mind you, he continued that the overpopulation was in China and India, and how they keep building factories. Folks were slightly taken aback when I mentioned China’s current demographic problems.
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Yep. I swear people don’t THINK. They were told stuff in elementary school and that’s “truth”
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For quite a long time I’ve been thinking that global warming climate change was going to morph into population “reduction”. Until someone figures out how to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large enough scale to make a difference CO2 levels will continue to rise. This is eventually going to cause problems. Not the fearmongering we have been hearing for the last 50+ years, but eventually some of the things they are saying will turn out correct. But probably not to the extent that they foretell.
I don’t believe that everything we’ve been told is correct, not by a long shot. I am suspicious of some of the data. But atmospheric CO2 has been increasing since the dawn of the industrial age, and it would be impossible to roll back CO2 emissions to pre-industrial levels. Right now it is being handled in much the same way as budget deficits. There is a difference between debt and a deficit. Reducing a budget deficit does not reduce debt. You need a balanced budget and apply part of the budget to paying down the debt. Likewise, reducing excess carbon dioxide emissions does not reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. It merely changes the rate of increase. The idea of being carbon neutral, or net zero, or some variation of that requires far more than what is being done now. Chasing that solution will be a disaster. I believe it is impossible to attain, unless one accepts drastic, probably catastrophic measures.
I believe that any damage from CO2 increases would be less than forcing billions of people to live without the benefits of a modern industrialized world. Give up high crop yields and reasonably priced transportation of food? Sure, bring back famines. And malnutrition. Population reduction will be a feature, not a bug.
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It wouldn’t be billions of people for long.
Hint, even now the number is grossly inflated.
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How do we know covid was faked?
No. Do not blame Trump for putting things in place to speed up the clot shot. Would not be surprised to find out there was a switch on effective low risk anti-viral VS what came out under “emergency needs” acts. Would they have tried? Yes. But Trumps administration would have caught the attempt.
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3. The ‘homeless’ didn’t die in droves.
They didn’t do any of the things Teh Authoriteez dictated for the rest of us, and nothing happened. They went on just like there wasn’t a DEADLY PANDEMIC!! raging throughout the world and…for them, there wasn’t. COVID19 was the common f*king cold.
The government’s overreaction killed far more people than a bat virus tinkered up in a communist Chinese bio-warfare lab.
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Yes.
Didn’t say my list was all inclusive. Just a couple of major flaws.
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“Trump’s administration”, in collaboration with the makers, systematically lied to him about the status of the vaccine until after the election was stolen.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-clear-dems-pressured-the-fda-to-delay-the-covid-vaccine-to-hurt-trump/
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Earth has had many times of what the current “science” would consider extremely high CO2. Earth was green and full of life.
Limiting the data to the time period used by accepted “climate” science is rather like determining that humans are helpless based on a one day period in the first year of life.
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So, during the Carboniferous era (before all that carbon was locked up in coal and oil deposits) the Earth was an unlivable hell-planet.
What’s that? It was one of the most fecund and bio-diverse ages in the geologic record? How is that possible, with all that Eeevul Carbon floating around loose?
Well, it turns out that high carbon dioxide level stimulates plant growth — which consumes carbon dioxide. Commercial greenhouses add CO2 to make their plants grow faster and bigger. All those frantically growing plants raised the oxygen level to over 30%, leading to the emergence of the giant arthropods that era is known for. 2-foot-long dragonflies, for instance.
CO2 levels before the 18th century (in the middle of the Little Ice Age) were around 240 parts-per-million (0.024%) which is near the lower limit for healthy plant growth. It wasn’t only the short and cold growing seasons that caused widespread famines for 500 years. Today, with CO2 levels approaching 400 PPM (0.04%) satellite images show green (plants) covering 15% more area than they did 50 years ago.
There’s also the issue of the Climate Crisis Alarmists! taking their ‘pre-industrial baseline’ temperatures from the middle of the Little Ice Age…
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They have attempted to systematically corrupt the data since at least 1997. Calling it horseshit at this point is an insult to a useful fertilizer.
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We say current leftists look at 1984 and treat it as a how-to manual, but that’s not quite true.
Maybe it is, in a sense. They’ve had the manual since the 1930s or before. What Orwell did was copy it out for the rest of us to read, with a few embellishments and extrapolations. That might have gotten some people to hide some things for a while, but in the end they kept right on with the plan. They have a penchant for that.
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
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I am reminded of the White Court of Vampires in the Harry Dresden books commissioning Bram Stoker to write a hunting manual targeting the Black Court of Vampires.
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I see it as their wish list and not a how to manual.
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it went beyond the lebensborn, the Hitler Youth and League of German Girls were ,… encouraged to … fraternize ….. at the various pre- war summer camps. Caused no end of scandal among the girl’s families when the inevitable pregnancies followed, but the state removed most of the formal stigma around illegitimacy. They needed cannon fodder, lots of it.
Off topic, but I’ve been running victory laps around the jobs report all day. My colleagues are not enjoying it. It’s still overstated, probably by a similar amount, but things are starting to resemble reality. The other jobs number, the one on which the unemployment rate is calculated, is about to go YOY negative, it was 0 in July. That’s been a perfect indicator for as long as the indicator has been calculated. It’s arguably a tautology that the actual number of employed people declining is a recession, but the dating of recession is done by a bunch of academics and one of the best ways to know the recession is waning is for them to say we’re in one.
Still, I gloat, I gloat, I Maximus gloatamus,😜
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Ah yes, the jobs report. “Missed” by nearly a million? Uh huh.
And we believe the new number, just the way we believed the old number. A-yup.
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I tried unsuccessfully to find a source online comparing initial jobs numbers versus later revisions. So if anyone has a source for that info, please post. I have the memory that revisions are always in one direction (suspicious of course) but can’t prove it yet.
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the Saint Louis Fed ALFRED site allow you to extract data series as of specific dates. You can get everything from there but it’s fiddly to use. I use it to calibrate real-time models that use series that are revised. PITA, which is why I try to use market values as much as possible,
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It is possible I might be too cranky, but I would offer that the admission of a ‘mistake’ that large is all the proof of malfeasance one could ask for.
Drilling down into the innards of the sausage factory might tell you -who- did it (maybe narrow it down to which department anyway), but the fact of the matter seems self-evident.
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BLS simply followed their model. Really, that’s all they did, no corruption or malice needed. Other BLS numbers have been much more realistic. All high frequency reported numbers that come from surveys and reports have this problem and in fairness to BLS it wasn’t designed back in 1939 to be a real time indicator.
People who uncritically picked that one number out of all the others, yeah you could claim corruption, but even there, stupidity will do or just call them politicians who are stupid and corrupt.
Everyone who knows anything about it knew almost exactly how far out the reported jobs number was and when and how much it would be adjusted. I suspect there’s another 300M for next revision and have a look at the Household Survey Number Employed which just went YOY negative and the Sahm rule that fired in July.
we’re in a recession right now and one could argue it started Q4 2023. The only thing that’s been keeping it all afloat was the carry trade and the fact that business had locked in all that free money. Free money is maturing and has to be rolled over. My bet is that it’ll start to move very, very fast.
You can still find something approaching the truth, just ignore what people say and understand how the calculations are done and how one can proxy the high frequency figures.
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I think you’re most likely correct. But like a lot of things, the calculations are set, sometimes by law, to favor big govt, or in this case, success for politicians. It’s like the CBO scoring tax cuts and not allowed to use real-world dynamic scoring.
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The old saw is once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. This has been the Biden-Harris administration’s modus operandi since their first quarter in 2021. they are intentionally obsfuscating their behavior.
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politicians lie. Still, the calculations weren’t deliberately manipulated, only the narrative was. Don’t listen to the narrative. The truth can be found if you look for it, though sometimes you do have to read between the lines.
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Well, when a troop of teenage boys and a troop of teenage girls do naked Swedish calisthenics and proto-yoga within sight of each other, I would say that the adults are encouraging fraternization as well as “strength through joy.” Because on a lot of the campouts, that’s how they did the exercise routines.
This factoid makes the old German film footage even shadier than it looked originally.
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The joke circulating among the youths was that they were losing “strength through joy.”
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“In the fields and on the heath
I lose Strength through Joy.”
Per William Shirer in “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” that was the translated couplet they used. The BDM matrons and the SS just wanted the girls to squeeze out future soldiers. They didn’t care much about marriage or such things. In fact there were actual Nazi Party medals given to mothers with exceptionally large families (I think you needed 6+ to qualify and maybe 10-12 for the highest rank).
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And those party summer camp offspring kids were at most early teens, albeit thoroughly indoctrinated H-youth kids, by the end of the war.
Oopsie.
The standard reason I have seen given as to why the orders were given to invade the USSR when they were, in spite of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty and all the Resulting raw materials flowing from the USSR to Nazi Germany, has been “Stalin was planning on breaking it too”, but with the shape the Red Army was in after the purges the Wehrmacht could easily have waited a couple-four more years with few worries, which would have made a huge difference in how things played out.
At least as far as that decision goes we really are in a pretty good timeline.
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Actually…
While the Wermacht was oblivious to it, four years would have allowed the Soviets widespread adoption of the T-34, which was just barely arriving in 1941. The T-34 was revolutionary at the time. This is not hype. It was fast, nearly invulnerable to anything in the German arsenal short of an 8.8cm, and mounted a bigger gun than anything the Germans used – again with the exception of the 8.8cm. Its only serious flaws were the one-man turret (corrected in later models) and Soviet quality (a serious issue). The Germans had all but stopped development on new tanks after the early successes. It was the shock of the T-34 and KV-1 tanks that spurred the Germans to start improving their tanks just to maintain parity with what the Soviets were fielding.
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I was thinking more logistics and production, but I just realized that I don’t know if there was ever any real effort to improve things like mechanizing the Wehrmacht supply chain, which in our timeline was horse drawn to the end, such that the German troops were shocked that the Americans supply was all mechanized.
German industrial military production was of course crap, and would not have received even the minor rationalization it did absent the pressure of the Eastern Front, but it would likely have built up in Poland just to get away from the British night bombing.
Even with T-34s adopted and deployed, I am not sure the Red Army under Stalin would have avoided stuff like further purges, sweeping up the generals like Zhukov and Apanasenko, i.e. the ones who oversaw shifting masses from the far east to the last minute defense of Moscow. With four more years of paranoia, would Stalin have been able to resist?
And also note there would have been no lend-lease Studebaker trucks either, so the Red Army logistics would have remained primitive as well.
I guess the big question is without the war in Russia would H-tl-r have declared war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor. I guess that depends on how far into his meth use he would have been without his feeling the need to micromanage the Eastern Front.
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Logistics mechanization likely would have involved trucks. And the USSR’s road network was so poor that even without the mud and ice, trucks (which need paved roads to work well) would have been of limited use. This is as they were historically. It was bad enough that the Germans started converting trucks into half-tracks. The tracks provided better traction in the USSR than the rear wheels did, increasing the effective range of the vehicle. I don’t know how wide-spread of a conversion it was, though.
Lend-Lease historically was small in 1941, but was just getting started. With the program already in existence supporting the British, it might have been able to ramp up faster to support the Soviets. Even absent that, the quality of the equipment likely would have been better. The Soviets historically were getting P-40s in 1941. With a later invasion, they would probably be getting P-47s instead.
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Mr. Hewes took one of those things apart on YouTube. Google “Mr. Hewes T-34” for the fun and games.
The engine still ran with the front main bearing cap broken. Watch the engine teardown video, it is hilarious how crazy that engine is. And how heavy.
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Nice. I’m glad to hear that he got it running. Unfortunately for the Soviets, many of the early production models broke down before they saw combat (in fairness, the French had the same problem with their Char B-1 bis heavy tank). And I’ve heard that the transmission tended to turn to glue after about six months.
The Soviets (and everyone else) were very impressed with the reliability of the M4 Shermans when they started to receive them in 1944.
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The French experience with demonstrably better tanks than the Germans but, other than de Gaulle’s units, really bad tank warfare tactics is informative for a “4 years of T-34s deployed” hypothetical. The Red Army didn’t have any formation leadership left in their west in our timeline to argue about how to best put the T-34s into combat, whether to parcel them out to infantry formations or keep them together in armored formations, so the Red Army just drove them off the railroad cars and right to the front en masse.
With four years of the Soviet version of The Good Idea Fairy to work on Stalin, would that still happen?
Or perhaps the treaty break would actually have been the Soviets trying a blitz on Poland with their T-34 formations. How would the post-France, post North Africa, but sitting around in border-guarding the East for four years Wehrmacht have been in a standing-start defense?
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Some French tanks were better than the German tanks. Most were not. The best was probably the Somua S-35, but IIRC it only equipped half of three divisions (the remaining tanks were the much lighter H-35s), and those divisions were trapped in the mass encirclement. The Char B-1 is the best known tank, and it was a headache for the Germans. But it was very slow, and the turreted gun was light (it had a heavier hull gun). The Matilda was the a British equivalent, and had the same issues.
The German conclusion was that the two heavy tanks were a headache, but were manageable.
The T-34 was significantly faster than other medium tanks (Wiki says 33mph). It mounted a turret gun that was twice the diameter of the gun mounted on Germany’s main medium tank, the Panzer III. And its armor was even more effective than the armor on the Char and Matilda. The Soviets had a heavy tank – the KV-1 – that had even heavier armor but was slow. But the T-34 was basically a generational jump over what everyone else was using. A friend of mine was reading a book on the Eastern Front, and related a story told by a German panzer platoon commander. A T-34 unit came into view, and then turned to present their flanks while crossing the battlefield. The panzers opened fire on what should have been a golden opportunity, but failed to score any penetrating hits.
The Germans would have upgraded their tanks eventually. If nothing else, Lend-Lease M3 Grants in Africa would have served as a wake-up call. But it wouldn’t have been as fast as it was historically.
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The T-34 was a decent tank … on paper. But it had the same problems of anything built in the USSR, where anything and everything that could be omitted or cheapened was.
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I have no doubt that both sides of the Molotov treaty were planning to cheat even before the nibs hit the paper, but we likely will never know when Moscow meant to pull the trigger that Berlin beat them to.
Nor does it matter much, eighty-odd years later.
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The thing I’d like to see is that revised “new jobs” breakout by jobs held by US Persons (citizens, green card holders, and legal job permit immigrants), and those held by illegals.
I had read it was already negative for US Persons before this revision…
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Yep. It sure was.
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Where are the jobs when Wendy’s, Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, all put in order kiosks in the lobby? Some no longer have a single staffed cashier station anymore. Costco tried that locally as part of the food court remodel. They added a staffed cashier station back. Too many reports of people putting in for “open jobs” but never get called. Places stating “we are hiring”, which is happening. But because no one applies they have 10 jobs to file month after month, but PTB count each month as 10 new jobs (might be new jobs initially, might not, but 10 jobs needing filled each month for 6 or months, is not “hiring” 60 people over those six months). Comes back to what are you going to believe? Them or your own lying eyes?
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I’m looking at a part-time job to cover things while the start-up I’m working for…well, gets started up properly.
It’s scary. Unless I want to work literally bottom-rung Walmart jobs or counter service at a gas station (both of which would result in my losing what few spoons I have left), there’s nothing there. All employment is where the machines can’t do the jobs (i.e. human interactions) or heavy-duty labor. Throw in the thing of “ghost jobs” (i.e. “we’re hiring, our web site says so! Just nobody gets through the interview process so we can get that sweet, sweet COVID tax-break money!”), the use of “AI” (Large Language Model) systems to sort through applications, interview processes that can be described as “onerous” on a good day, heavily overworking your current staff because everybody knows how bad the job market is…
It doesn’t help that most employers have HR departments that look at me and pass over me as quickly as possible.
When you apply for a part-time, seasonal job with Costco and can’t get hired for the holidays, you get really discouraged. Especially when a lot of the experts are saying you should pretty much plan on applying for at least 250+ jobs before you get anything at all.
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Learn welding, electrical work, or duct work? Auto mechanics? Local VoTech?
Skilled trades often will train anyone who will show up on time everyday and bust butt.
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Handyman? Carpentry? Home maintenance for apartments? Cleaning crew?
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I do feel what you are going through. Went through it myself ’02 – ’03. Watched others go through it with me. Some never found jobs, or went from job to job, not voluntarily. Wish you luck finding the extra work you need.
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Fingers and toes crossed. I’m not in dire shape, just annoying shape until the end of the year and then it becomes desperate (thank you, Trump for all the money during the Crow Flu that I threw into savings because I had no major expenses at all).
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We didn’t throw the crow flu funds into savings. We “used it”. OTOH kept us from having to pull as much from retirement savings, which kept our non-SS income down. Which meant less of our SS was taxable.
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Which is good for you as well. I know how lucky I was to not have any major expenses and most of what I had was deductible as well.
I’m feeling annoyed, but not dire. Dire would be looking at that Walmart job, after hearing all the horror stories of absolute dysfunction junction there.
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Understood. I will not shop Walmart.
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They used to be my go-to place for automotive & tractor batteries, but the place got spooky. Between various gangs (at that time, Norteno) and a rather high callout for EMS runs, it seemed a place to avoid.
I don’t like the food options (they like brand name, while the storebrand variety sold by the independent and the restaurant supply place was equally good for less money), so I stopped.
IIRC, the last time I set foot in there was looking for diabetic test strips. Out of stock (Covidiocy supply chain. arggh) Now, it’s a subscription from the ‘zon.
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Same. Test strips were out all over the place. Mine currently come from Costco, stocked in Pharmacy). Guess I should test ‘zon costs for what I am using. After all should be over the new $35 no shipping cost threshold.
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Found better quality batteries at NAPA, so go there.
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I have to for jeans and shorts, because they’re the only folk who carry stuff that fits.
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I’m going with an Amazon half-yearly subscription to the strips (OneTouch Verio) where 90 strips (3 vials of 30) run $45. I use a bit more than that, so some time in the future, I’ll have to manually trigger a refill. I prefer to not have a prescription; would save money, would add headaches.
I’m getting a decent price break, even over Costco. They were selling 100 for $75 until they stopped in 2022 or 3. Juggling the different quantities, it’s 2/3rds the cost at Amazon. (Might have been why Costco dropped the line.)
OTOH, I get lancets from various sources. Have a couple year’s supply of the Accu-chek lancets, and a half-year’s worth of generic ones from Bi-Mart. Lifescan did samples of their Delica lancets, but I wasn’t fond of them. Started with the Accu-cheks in the late ’90s, and I’m happy with ’em. The generics are insurance, since a lot of vendors make them.
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Still has a better feel than Target. I go there only when I have to.
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I don’t go to Target either.
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If I had to choose between the two, it would be Target, mostly because you aren’t getting as many of the really bottom-of-the-barrel people, the trustees of modern chemistry, and examples of how the gene pool needs some napalm.
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Flyover Falls has no Target, and it’s been over 20 years since we were inside the one in Medford. There are enough alternatives so that we don’t feel a need to shop there. Once they went woke, they’re not even on my check-em-out list.
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We have a regional club store that fills a lot of that need. A lifetime membership for Bi-Mart is $5, and for some reason, it keeps a lot of the really funky people out. (Not all; $SPOUSE encountered Irish Travelers who were giving off grab&run vibes over her cross & chain. Said people found better places to be when I showed up. OTOH, that’s the only incident that comes to mind.) We do (or did) get tired hippies after Burning Man, but nowhere near as much since The Beautiful People (spit) found the event.
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All this. I need to jobhunt as a precaution, given the past few weeks, and it honestly scares me.
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If you’re in a field where you can easily show up on LinkedIn and other places, you’ve got some options.
Otherwise, it’s all grind, grind, grind, grind. Work your professional contacts. Let everyone and their cat know you’re looking. If you have time to get new certifications close to what you want to do, book some time and see what you can take and not spend a lot of money.
And don’t let the turkeys get you down. I’m annoyed but not dire, not yet.
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I don’t have professional contacts.
The field I worked in, my family managed to deliberately and completely ruin my reputation. The other fields I tried to learn… I didn’t have the social skills or ability to camp in the backwoods to navigate.
On top of that I was out of the workforce for about a decade taking care of a dementia patient because otherwise my brothers would have me arrested for elder abuse. They would have done it.
I have a roommate, a shared apartment, two and a half years current workforce experience in a part-time job, and health that is… rather less than great.
I’m trying not to let life get me down, but I am so very tired.
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…damn.
May your family members suffer a properly moose-y fate after all of this.
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I love Gir’s whispered: “Say moose-y Fate!” in that clip.
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Or, Dib’s “NOOOOOOOO-waitaminute, did you say a room with a moose?!”
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Sounds a lot like my last ten years. Praying for better days ahead.
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Likewise!
I’ve at least made progress on filling in the holes of my latest draft, so that’ll pay off eventually.
(Now if I could get brain to work on the druid vs. zombies idea too, I’d be getting somewhere….)
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I have a friend who recently got a security guard card and an open-carry license for a 9mm simply to get a specific job. She said that telling the interviewer that she’d sunk that money in specifically for the job probably helped her get it.
(Overnight security for a decommissioned nuclear power plant, of all things.)
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Interesting.
I need to figure out ways to find out what jobs are open around here, besides just Indeed….
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Redballoon.work might be an option, though I don’t know if any of their Florida listings are anywhere near your area.
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Thank you, I’ll look into that.
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Don’t have the company name with me, but think it’s “Data Analysis.” Online piecework, you get the scut jobs first but if they see you’re reliable better ones come your way. My son’s working that now. And you can work from home.
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*Wry G* I can live with scutwork better than a supervisor with a grudge, yes….
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“People who apply to more than three jobs a week are more likely to be hired!”
Yeah, people who are qualified for jobs in demand are more likely to be hired.
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I took a look at the Costco kiosk when I first saw it. Didn’t see an option for a bunless hotdog, so I hit the counter line. They did have somebody on the register, though their main job was food serving.
I go to McDs for an occasional treat. Skip the kiosk, but there’s somebody there within a few seconds.
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yeah.
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A book I read years ago claims that during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the German government handpicked attractive young women to hang around the Olympic Village and persuade handsome young “Aryan” looking male athletes to hook up with them, in hopes of producing super athletic babies if the girls got pregnant. The girls were told to ask their partners for their Olympic badges as souvenirs so that, if they did get knocked up, they could present the badge as proof of the Olympic origins of the baby and get all their care paid for by the state. I haven’t seen any reference to this outside of a couple of books written in the 1970s. Anyone else heard of it?
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This wouldn’t have been in your line, I think, but I first heard about the Lebensborn in the context of this lady, who strictly speaking isn’t one, just an ordinary product of wartime events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anni-Frid_Lyngstad
I think it was probably reading Chesterton in the 1990s and finding this guy talking about a lot of familiar issues back in the 1920s-1930s that really brought home to me how long this had been going on.
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I think I read about the Lebensborn sometime in the 1970s in a novel about a corporate sponsorship of superwoman athlete. back in the day – Goldengirl. (They made a movie of it, with Susan Anton.) The program was briefly mentioned, IIRC, as part of the background – but I had already known a lot about various Nazi social programs, through growing up and being marinated in WWII lore. I think the most awful aspect of it was the state-sponsored kidnapping of so-called “Aryan” appearing children, mostly in Poland. Thousands of mothers and couples lost their children, never to get them back, after the war.
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I heard about Lebensborn in WWII history; I know I encountered it in Wearing the Cape: Recursion, and I think it’s appeared in X-Men before that.
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Hope that as the moon wanes so does your negative mood, I know mine is. Wish I could buy a better house for you, but hoping repairs are proceeding well.
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“…a time when people expected even less freedom in the future, a time when we expected “experts” to run every aspect of our lives in the future.”
Yes, because then everything would be arranged Scientifically! by the Smart People Who Know Things, and everything would be SO much better than the old, dumb way things were done before. Because SCIENCE!!!
Which I think, as Sarah points out, peaked in China with the Great Leap Forward. The Smart People of The Party declared war on the lowly sparrow, because it steals the food of children. That, and making steel in the back yard. Everybody is busy pretending to make steel (because it didn’t work) and nobody is planting next year’s crops.
Cutting to the chase, the Smart People doubled (or tripled, estimates vary) Stalin’s body count from the Holodomor. Oh, and there are no more trees, because they were all cut down for charcoal. Blamed it on Mao, a handy patsy. (Not saying he didn’t deserve it, but still a fit-up.)
So now, post Covid, basic Normies are seeing what weirdos, goats and ‘neuro-divergent’ types like myself have been screaming since the late 1980s.
We are “led” by IDIOTS. The people in charge are the dumbest know-nothing a-holes imaginable. And all those New York liberals who bought the Science!!! of gun control, glowball warmening, gender reassignment and on and on and ON… have buyers remorse.
They bought the snake oil. Paid top dollar, and proud to do so.
Their hair did not come back, their rheumatiz did not abate. They got it tested and found it did not even come from a snake.
It is a GRIFT my friends. A con, if you will. They tell us a story, and we pay taxes, which they just steal. Then four years later, they tell another story. We are led by people who like to steal and are good at telling stories.
And, finally, a large number of bog-standard Normies are finally starting to understand that the government of America (and Canada, Britain, Australia, France, Germany, Holland…) are not being run for their benefit. They -say- they are, but they are not. We are the product, not the customer.
Human nature being what it is, this won’t continue much longer. Once the majority realize they’re being ripped off….
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Some of the sparrows also ate bugs. Unchecked, the bugs ate the crops, massively. Famine.
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Plague of locusts is what I heard.
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I’ve read that during the “Four Pests” campaign, some of the foreign embassies (Eastern bloc) tried to provide shelter for sparrows. But the Chinese found out, and surrounded the embassies with people who made lots of noise so that the sparrows couldn’t sleep. When the Chinese finally came to their senses on the matter, sparrows had to be sent from the Eastern bloc to revive the local populations.
As for the “iron” decree, the Soviets became angry and annoyed when the Chinese took shipments of alloys that the Soviets were providing, and melted them down to extract the iron.
Pure insanity.
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You look at what they did, and it makes you shake your head. Them pinkos shore was dumb.
But then you see this: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/energy-official-calls-for-queering-nuclear-weapons/ar-AA1pcrVy
“A recent hire [Nair] at the Biden-Harris Department of Energy’s Nuclear Security Administration believes that “queer theory” is crucial to American security, as part of her sprawling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, Fox News revealed Wednesday.”
You see that, and it makes you realize that as horrifyingly stupid as the Chicoms, the Soviets and the Nazis were, Americans have distilled the stupidity into an even more concentrated form.
But is it really stupidity? Or is it a knife in the dark?
“Nair was formerly a research analyst with the Nuclear Security Program at Stimson, which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.”
Yeah, its a knife. Whenever you see something so stupid it can’t possibly be real, it isn’t. They’re trying to unalive you.
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You look at what they did, and it makes you shake your head. Them pinkos shore was dumb.
But then you see this:
“A recent hire [Nair] at the Biden-Harris Department of Energy’s Nuclear Security Administration believes that “queer theory” is crucial to American security, as part of her sprawling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, Fox News revealed Wednesday.”
You see that, and it makes you realize that as horrifyingly stupid as the Chicoms, the Soviets and the Nazis were, Americans have distilled the stupidity into an even more concentrated form.
But is it really stupidity? Or is it a knife in the dark?
“Nair was formerly a research analyst with the Nuclear Security Program at Stimson, which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.”
Yeah, its a knife. Whenever you see something so stupid it can’t possibly be real, it isn’t. They’re trying to unalive you.
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Sarah rhymes with my ideas on why the Germans went full Nazi (Never go full Nazi): “The Germanies” uniting very late with the Kaiser as the unifying head, then WWI completely delegitimized the Kaiser. But a common language, having been ruled by the Kaiser, and the shared wartime experience, confusing as it was with victory after victory reported right up until they suddenly lost, was pretty much all “The Germanies” really had in common.
When the Weimar era went to such chaos, eventually with different left wing militias fighting each other in the streets using everything up to crew-served weapons and the government apparently helpless, the general population was primed for another Kaiser-like individual leadership figure to impose order, but modern, not that failed old-fashioned monarchy stuff.
If you read the Nazi speeches this is exactly what they were pitching, a new, modern theory of governance that addressed the “failures” of democracy, featuring an individual leader who would use power to restore order and calm. And many Germans considered the rest of Nazi rhetoric to be simply pandering to their base, they couldn’t really believe that stuff.
A lot of German people had major reservations, but circumstances converged to put the National Socialists into power, and things then proceeded – first they went after the international socialists, then they purged their own, and only then did they start after the rest. But the outward results were in fact a restoration of order and an increase in general prosperity, so the doubters and waverers were “proven wrong”. Then the first part of the war all went Germany’s way, such that by the time it started to be clear to more Germans that their choices had been perhaps mistakes it was too late.
The postwar interviews with Germans were all pretty much along the theme “they tricked us”, but the reality was the initial uses of state power all did what they promised, restoring order and calming the streets. And a lot of those postwar Germans were really only mad that they had lost, that the ruling Nazis failed to deliver the promised victory, which to many Germans meant they had been cheated.
I guess the bottom line lesson is to be aware of what is being bought with your vote, and to consider when politicians say something you might think is out there, perhaps they mean what they say.
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The poem “Deutschland Über Alles” is a plea for all the German-speaking peoples newly smushed into the German Empire to think of themselves as Germans, not Bavarians, Saxons, Prussians, Pomeranians, Paletines, and so on. That’s why in Triumph des Willens, there are several events where people in regional costumes all welcome H-tler, and the foresters say where they are from, then march past singing about how they are united in reclaiming the wastes for the Volk. Heck, even today there are very large differences in culture and attitude that remain. Toss in the East-West stuff that remains from the Cold War and it makes Austria look calm, uniform, and monolithic.
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One of the tropes from olden Sci-Fi I remember was the “superbrain” central computers that would flawlessly run a megacity and all its functions and co-ordinate policy and lo and behold, we have computers that think humans have between 4-19 fingers and that the Waffen SS had black officers. It’s an equally laughable extension of the premise of “expert guidance” that has shown about the same level of fidelity to reality.
Though I’m sure, some of these overcredentialled imbeciles are still working on it.
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And yes, I know they’re glorified Mad Lib engines, but honestly, how much different is that from the “experts” and politicians we have?
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I’m pretty sure those are all algorithmic corrections, considering every early LLM “went Nazi” shortly after being exposed to the internet.
The LLMs must reflect the Narrative, or they’re malfunctioning by definition, right?
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I think that says more about the internet than it says about the LLMs. :-P
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the reason I object to saying the Nazis were “right wing” (…) is that they were the flowering of this idea of expert-rule and “best men in charge”.
If you assume that “best men” == “aristocracy” isn’t that pretty much “right wing” in Europe? At least until recently.
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Well, to be blunt, I see little difference between the European Left and the European Right.
Of course, the Leadership of the European Left may not have Noble Titles but are the aristocracy of their countries.
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Aristos had the correct parents. The various “new” ideas were all about the best and brightest and best educated experts being in charge, without regard to their parentage.
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I should add: In theory not in fact. In the end they all keep their kids out of the army and put them in government leadership jobs.
The Russian tradition of “only peasants are in the army” is still very strong, and has been the same under the Tsars, under the politburo, and under the KGB-Mafia clique now in power.
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Considering all the red diaper nepotism babies, the more things change…
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In Europe they’re the SAME FAMILIES.
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But they didn’t. Unless it’s “an aristocracy of science.”
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Yeah, the aristos just hit hitched their wagons to a new team of horses.
After all, they already knew how best to game a system like that. Just learn the new catechism to spout while continuing to do the same things…
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Some aristocrats attached themselves to Nazism. On the whole, they were not warm to the idea of a mass popular movement, and Hitler was not warm to them as the people responsible for much of WWI. The most serious conspiracy against his life was more than half of aristocratic birth.
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… a time when we expected “experts” to run …
I was one of those people, sort-of. I was – and still am to a degree – a technocrat.
every aspect of our lives
That’s the part I missed. Once one starts down the path of “experts should make the important decisions” every decision starts becoming “important”.
when people expected even less freedom in the future
I wasn’t one of those people. I thought our expert overlords would deal with important, national problems. It never occurred to me that things such as the color of the roll-on dip in sidewalks would be an important, national problem.
I was very, very wrong.
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YOU are the important problem they mean to solve. :-o
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Being an “expert” requires a responsibility most don’t have the ability to accept. That, and a patience to allow people the liberty to realize their own potential. Failing in responsibility, or mandates that remove basic liberties, are harmful.
Genetically, all people have some trait that is exceptional, and should be allowed to be used, except when it harms others. Thinking that genetics can be manipulated for a foolish belief that it’s good for society only leads to disaster. Humans are abysmally far from understanding the basic building blocks of life, and any manipulation is fraught with damage.
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That’s the biggest thing. We’ve created systems so large that somebody has to be in charge, but we believe that because somebody has to be in charge of those big things, other big things need someone to be in charge of them.
And then we need someone in charge of the people that are in charge of the the people in charge of the large systems and we go around and around and around…
(You want to see failure of these kind of controls? The Mark 14 torpedo. The B-17 bomber and the USAAF war plan that depended on a bomber that was nearly seven years old when first deployed in combat, had bombs that were good for area bombing trying to do precision bombing, a “precision bombsite” that wasn’t precise, and so many more issues. Various other weapons programs during WW II alone…)
There’s a reason why I write about empires and nations that do everything they can to keep as much power out of the hands of the government as possible. Even with highly competent people in charge at that time.
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Thanks! While I had read of the process (Lebensborn), and even knew how it “worked” (for values of “worked”) I had never, AFAIK, seen the name under which it was set up; it was usually “that Nazi eugenics program the paid women to have ‘superior’ children”.
And as far as humans redesigning the genome (“Even if we get to designing it, it won’t be better.”), that’s not nearly pessimistic enough; it will almost certainly be much worse. I’d give long odds for a bare survival rate of the “products” being no higher than 10%.
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Same here. I knew Nazi’s had a program where women had children out of wedlock for the fatherland, volunteer and not. Children who looked Aryan stolen from the arms of parents and the parents shipped off to the camps. But never knew the name of the program (might have then, wouldn’t remember). Thought it was horrible then. Still is horrible.
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I honestly only know the name because of a song. (It’s a fast-spoken chorus about the dark side of the mind, so it’s literally just a random term thrown into the stream of consciousness.)
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Some claims about the Lebensborn program are exaggerated.
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Could be, but this is pretty straightforward, with dates and references, and seems to cover most of what I remember reading about it:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-quot-lebensborn-quot-program
Is anything there incorrect? If not, what claims are you thinking of?
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The intentionally arranged assignations was widely reported but does not appear to be borne out by the evidence.
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OK, although I’d think they would be the core of the program, especially knowing how the Nazis tried to control all aspects of life.
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They’d probably have gotten to that in time, but they would have faced real problems. They had a big stink when the government started to say that an unmarried woman who had evidence of being engaged to a dead soldier — such as being pregnant — might claim support.
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Sounds reasonable; what they may have wanted may not have been politically feasible at the time.
Thanks!
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Yes. There are numbers, etc. Records were destroyed, but it’s still pretty easy to track creches, and how many kids they housed.
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OK, so can I assume the numbers don’t agree with those in the article?
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If I remember correctly the numbers for Norway alone, for babies raised in the creches, were 12000
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OK. So, a helluva lot. The article sort of implied that.
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I don’t remember when I first heard of it, but the concept was already familiar from reading Heinlein. The Howard Families were the same sort of straightforward eugenics project.
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They were more like a selective breeding program to improve a single trait while not doing too much damage overall, such as is done all the time in animal husbandry; Heinlein even noted that. That works; examples are all around us. But you can’t let up; regression toward the mean is always a factor. It’s eugenics programs to produce “superior” individuals (whatever that might mean) which don’t; way too many variables, all interacting. We’d have to know what every gene does in combination with every other gene, plus all of the possible environmental/epigenetic effects affecting gene expression in identical DNA sequences, in order to make accurate predictions. And IMHO that’s never going to happen. I don’t know how many combinations/permutations that would be, but I suspect it approaches the number of subatomic particles in the known universe.
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So ask your AI for suggestions. 8-)
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I’d be happy to do so, once AI exists. I’d guess that will happen sometime between 2150 and never. But I suspect that even then the answer will be “Just how stupid are you? Go pound sand.”
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One notes that the bad name of eugenics is deservedly given to those who forcibly try to stop “bad” babies form being born. Encouraging people to have children especially if you think they are good stock — well, worse things have happened.
The irony is that the discovery of their longevity, followed by the families’ escape, led to a generally applicable longevity treatment.
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I think I first heard about the Lebensborn was a short clip in the World At War series.
And a caption in a book called Nazi Regalia (one of the old Ballentine WWII series) of a picture of the medals given to mothers that produced more children for Der Reich
Both in the 70s
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“The ability of dissemination of information now allows us to see how poorly central planning always works.”
And so, once again, there is no excuse to go back. We should actually know better.
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Good Lord I tortured that sentence. It should be “the ability to disseminate information.” I kept getting interrupted….
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Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22896096-september-2024—-a-youngster-learning
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I read about the Lebensborn when “strange stuff of the SS” was popular (for certain values of popular) in the 1970s-80s. Time Life had a volume about it that mentioned the Lebensborn, and then there was The World at War and other stuff.
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My guide to critical thinking:
Very few People In Charge do any of this.
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People telling the truth tend not to make a big deal of it. It’s the lying liars telling lies that make elaborate protests about how they’re telling The One True Truth.
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I’ve been in Mensa since the late 1970s (got in on my PSAT scores) and have commented elsewhere that if Mensa were a 1% outlaw motorcycle club (think Sons of Anarchy), I’d be what some clubs call a “forever brother.” I’ve been around it long enough to know that a high IQ does not necessarily confer good judgement or wisdom or correct answers to questions. About every wild-eyed quack idea you’ve ever heard of had, or has, a Mensa “SIG” (Special Interest Group) dedicated to it.
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I’ve mentioned this story before, but there was one point when someone gave us an Official Mensa Quiz Book that had 20-question quizzes. Evil Rob & I had a lot of fun one evening finding the average of two errors per quiz. Some were category errors (find the “different” thing, when at least one item was ambiguous as in tomato being a fruit or vegetable depending on your parameters.) Some were flat out misprints (especially with visual/spatial tests.) Some were just typos.
We basically concluded that being of Mensa-level intelligence did not absolve you from needing a copy editor.
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If you step back far enough, and maybe squint a little, “technocracy” as in Rule by a Few Top Men is very close to royalism, only with a slight surface varnish of meritocracy.
Of course, when the ones defining “merit” are the Top Men, well, the obvious conclusion follows… and will almost certainly persist. (See also for example the Doctrine of the Noble Lie by The Amazing Fauci — a divine right of Public Healthmongers??)
By constrast, feudalism in the fully developed sense (Saxon, Celtic, maybe Norse IIRC) is royalism with federalism added; don’t bring to the High King what your local noble can handle, etc. So, no less radical than Top-Men-ocracy. Still the idea is left unchanged, that Someone Must Be Put In Charge so they can Do Things.
Now consider the strange idea that people can and should just govern themselves as much as possible; and appoint their own representatives to do (only) what cannot be done locally. That’s where the real, true, deep political innovation comes in.
(Look at today’s Britain. Mean tweets or videos of Things Not to be Seen? Lock them in the Tower to await the King’s Justice! Only the tech has changed much, over centuries…)
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It’s more like clericalism.
> There’s a nearly extinct political tendency called “clericalism” which
held that society should be guided by priests, considered as a
disinterested non-hereditary elite with better education and morality
than possessed by mere laypeople. The intelligentsia’s political
instincts can be best described as a sort of neo-clericalism in which
education substitutes for ordination.
– The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism
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We seem to be doing the opposite of Lebensborn these days.
At least people in those days knew that child bearing was critical to the success of the nation.
Now we are told child-free is the way to go for the good of the nation.
A major political party is murdering children in the parking lot at their convention, dear Lord in Heaven! And offering free tacos for the privilege.
This too, cannot go on.
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TBF that was the state trying to create children, because people weren’t. So, same problem we’re in.
Socialism always kills, even if by “just” not reproducing.
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I knew the Lebensborn program encouraged-compensated German women to have more children. I wasn’t aware that the program had been exported to other German-occupied land, or that it also included kidnapping or killing of other children depending on whether they did or did not fit the “Aryan phenotype”. Such a broad government program was definitely evil and needed to be extinguished, and the people who ran it needed to be exterminated.
I have no objection to groups promoting and supporting such selective breeding in their own group; that actually parallels the concept of each state in the Union having the ability to experiment with their own laws. Who knows? They may actually find something of value that way. But those programs do need to be monitored to prevent murders or enslavement within their group, and to prevent catastrophic releases of bio-terrors if they start playing around with genetic engineering.
I remember a cautionary tale within a novel I read some years ago where a woman had received animal sourced transplant that saved her life, but due to an infection in the transplant, caused a recombined virus fatal to 90% of any other human exposed to it (she was immune). She had to live the rest of her life in a sealed system and all waste, including air, had to be incinerated to prevent the escape of the virus.
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Conduct them in orbit and have a “send them into the Sun” backup.
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There used to be a popular anti-feminist blogger whose father was a Lebensborn baby. Her grandfather was an unidentified SS officer. She liked cosplaying Star Trek and “Hugo Boss” uniforms. Yes, she was blonde-haired and blue-eyed.
She quit blogging after she was doxxed and the university leftists attacked her daughters.
I’ll probably remember her handle about 3AM tomorrow.
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News playing snippets of the DNC, showing Oprah Winfrey claiming that the Dems don’t care about race or sexual orientation.
*snort*
The Dems are pretty much *exclusively* about race and sexual orientation.
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To what extent is that foofaraw for propaganda purposes?
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Not quite. Look at how they treat conservatives of color, or homosexual conservatives, or even any leftists who disagree with the party line. Identity is largely an item for them to use in their thirst for power, when convenient, and otherwise ignored.
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THIS
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Some of the enthusiasm for Lebensborn probably came out of the penchant for mass armies.
I’ve been reading Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War and he went on a lot about the relative populations of Germany, France and England, then counted up their respective empires.
When you’ve just had a war that was pretty much a meat grinder on all sides, then having more people to jam into that meat grinder means you’re more likely to end up on top at the end.
I haven’t seen the details of the program, but I suspect it wasn’t so much “Have superior babies” as “Have *more* babies and you will have *more* loyal troops in 20 years, and therefore will be able to project more military force”.
The “more Aryan babies” thing was that they feared something like the scenario at the beginning of Idiocracy. I.e. being out-babied by the non-Aryans.
Of course it didn’t take reversion to the mean into account.
Animal breeding programs have results because humans can impose *much* more control over all aspects.
The closest thing we’ve ever had to an eugenics program in humans were the various royalty marriage arrangements. After all, “aristocracy” comes from the Greek for “rule by the best”, and their attitude really was that being born into the aristocracy meant being inherently better than those who were not.
Those programs just eventually ended up with hemophiliacs and other rare genetic disorders due to inbreeding. Unsurprising, since whether some particular sprig actually bred depended mostly on whether he or she lived long enough and was personally inclined to do so rather than whether they were actually better in some sense. The point of the programs were generally more keeping property in the family anyway.
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Yes, but no. It really was about Aryan babies. It never occurred to me that ANYONE could deny the racism of Nazis.
Look, I know the left calls everything Nazi, but htey really existed and they really were all about racial purity.
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Oh they were racist all right. And by that I mean really racist, not just “shut up” racist.
They were however really concerned about getting more people reliably behind the program of more of “our kind”. Because that’s how you got a more powerful state that works reliably in “our kind’s” interest.
How do you get more of “our kind”? Get more babies, and make sure they’re of the “right sort”.
Which for them meant more “Aryan”. Whatever definition they used. Which seems to be about as logical as the definition of “black” or “hispanic” that’s used in the US today.
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Yes, but no. They wanted more babies, and yep “for the war machine” partly because the Nazi ethos was militaristic. Or if you prefer, like all socialists they couldn’t feed themselves and had to conquer and steal. BUT
They killed/let die babies who didn’t meet arbitrary “Aryan” parameters, after being born into the program. Etc.
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There’s Nazi propaganda defending racial purity on the grounds that farmers might cross their Jerseys with a Holstein, they would then rigorously cull the descendants to prevent problems. Since this is unethical with humans, you should ensure that humans had children within their own breed.
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