So, Once Great Britain is going to grant the vote to sixteen year olds.
Upon reading this a friend pointed out it was the opposite of the reason to give the vote to eighteen year olds. After all, eighteen year olds could drink, get married, go to war, but not vote.
I’ll note since that justification was brought up, eighteen year olds have lost the right to drink. And the fact that they lost it because supposedly their brains aren’t yet fully developed must, of necessity, cause one’s eyebrows to go up in questioning wonder. So, their brains aren’t fully developed, but they’re developed enough to vote? Of course, it makes us wonder about the other things too.
There is something to that brain thing, btw, but maybe not as much as we’d like to think. More on that later.
Meanwhile, of course, sixteen year olds can’t do any of that, and I believe in Europe must be enrolled by law in public education. They can’t have jobs. But oh, yeah, sure, let’s let them vote.
The truth in fact is that the impulse towards giving younger and younger people the vote, be they 18 year olds back then or 16 year olds now is a pet project of the left worldwide and it’s in pursuit of the same thing: people too naive and ignorant to know the leftist project has brought nothing but misery and death to this weary old world.
And while at it I’ll admit my immediate reaction was that eighteen was also too young to write, but that’s not actually true.
The actual truth is that any age is too young to vote if it is treated as the age at which you suddenly become an adult.
Adult is not something that happens when you hit a magical birthday. Be it 12 or 16 or 18 or even 21.
Heinlein mentioned decades ago that the problem for the law and who got to vote was distinguishing between forty year old children and 12 year old adults. He wasn’t wrong, as rare as those are. And without some test, we cannot, and the test needs to be absolutely unbiased.
So for voting we use an age delimitation at which “it is most likely people can.”
Unfortunately this leads us to think of the magical age, when people become able to do xyz.
In point of practice, what that has encouraged is not letting people do anything that would prepare them for the responsibilities of adulthood before that age. No living alone, no signing contracts, even trivial ones, no — and this is very important — working at all. Because that would somehow taint their childhood.
Okay, technically at least in some US states, people under eighteen can work. It’s just that in most of them the paperwork necessary to enable that job is more than anyone is going to brave, and the restrictions on the work more than any employer will want to deal with.
In the end, that is the problem. Not the age of voting. Not the age at which you’re magically “an adult.”
The problem is that if we pin our “they’re now adult” ideas to 18 or 21 or even, who knows, 35, in our minds that becomes the magical age of adulthood, and before that we must protect people from EVERYTHING that we’d protect a two year old for.
Adulthood is not a function of age or development. It’s a function of practice. Heck, when I first got married I spent the first year having anxiety attacks we’d suddenly be unable to pay our rent. Meanwhile my husband who had lived on his own for years took it in stride and was faintly amused by my terrors. (We are almost exactly the same age. He’s three months older.)
In the same way, my children were perfectly poised taking part in panels or speaking in public at 20 because they’d been doing it since their mid-teens, while I was a basket case at 35.
It is practice. Adulthood is when you can shoulder your own responsibilities, be on your own, and take the find out for your effing around. And getting there means failing a bunch of times before you shoulder it and stand under it. (And even then at times, you cry in the night and really wish someone was coming to save you.)
Look, I don’t have an answer for how to do this. There is an inherent difficulty in testing when people are ready to do X.
Take sexual maturity: people are sexually mature long before they can understand relationships or that relationships have consequences. Or even that older, more mature people can be unscrupulous perverts. So, changing age of consent to age of sexual maturity is a problem. On the other hand wrapping the kids in cotton to the age of thirty or so (just in case someone takes advantage of someone) gets us the authors of regencies having the gentleman ask the lady for “affirmative consent” before kissing her. (You only wish I were making it up.)
Yes, you can mitigate this by teaching young people that sex has consequences, and that there is no such thing as consequence-free sex. But then you run into the “if only everyone” fallacy. Because never is EVERYONE going to teach it, or be capable of learning it.
For something more nebulous take drinking alcohol. We’re told that people drinking alcohol before 21 will impair their brain development in some horrible way.
As someone from a generation and a country where I could drink if I could toddle up to the counter and ask for it, and where wine was part of the daily meal and Port Wine part of special days, I don’t think my brain is any less capable or developed than the brains of younger generations. Heck, until recently, mom told half joking of how while pregnant with me she had craved bread soaked in read wine and eaten a vast quantity of it every day. (Yes, sounds revolting to me too. Sounded revolting to her also, but not while pregnant.) Since this was not high-octane wine, I don’t seem to have suffered any bad effects from it. Meanwhile if you’re a woman your doctor will label you alcoholic if you confess to having one glass of wine a day with dinner. (No, I don’t. We couldn’t afford it so long I got out of the habit. BUT a friend made the mistake of answering that answer seriously.) And this is for full adults. Could we allow children to have wine now and then under their parents’ supervision? Probably. Would there be bad effects? Only if the parents are heinous, and if the parents are heinous, they’re getting it now.
I don’t have a perfect answer. As close to one as I can get it is that we should let people work if they’re able to. We should let people escape the public education gulag as soon as they can prove a certain level of competency, whether or not they’ve reached the magical age. (Yes, this will be abused. And? Can’t be worse than the high rate of illiteracy we have now, to be honest.)
And we should let people vote when they’ve paid their own bills and held down a paying position for a year. Regardless of age.
Until then, we are giving the vote younger and younger to people less and less prepared to vote. Or live.
Let the kids grow up. Most of them are trying to — desperately — but right now, short of becoming entrepreneurs, we make it impossible for them to support themselves or do what adults do: pay their own way.
Until the magical day when we expect them to automagically do all of it. Without training.
Batty BLOG FUNDRAISER 2025
Let’s get the bats out of the way, shall we? feel free to ooh and ahhhh
Moving right along…
This is the final day but one of blog funding.
The reason for fundraising and the reason bloggers on the right in general should fundraise:
Every blogger to the right of Lenin has paid the price in career, in wealth, in prospects. And that keeping us poor and meek is a great way to serve as a warning to others who would speak out. If you want to nullify the “warning,” consider donating.
Thank you to everyone who has donated.
If you wish to donate:
The Give Send Go is still active.
There is also paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) a couple years ago because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:
Sarah A. Hoyt
Goldport Press
304 S Jones Blvd #6771
Las Vegas, NV 89107
(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me physical stuff, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)
If you’re a substack subscriber and wish to continue subscribing, please do so. There will be earcs tomorrow.
Here I feel I must explain: No Man’s Land is FINISHED. It is also very very long. So I’m publishing it starting mid-September, in three volumes, published 2 weeks apart for the sake of the Amazon Algorithm. Starting in September allows me to put out the complete book as an omnibus (ebook format only, or the print will have to be tiny) in December. By which point there will be three volumes out.
Anyway, I will release e-arc of Volume one tomorrow, Volume two in two weeks, Volume three in another two weeks. The volumes are not stand-alone but thirds of a long story. In the meantime, the volumes will be going to the copyeditor, one by one.
Anyway, I have started the second story — The Ghost in the Ruby — but it will have to compete with my finishing other things such as Witch’s Daughter and Rhodes to Hell and the two, two Dyce books. Let’s see how many I can have out by Christmas, shall we?
So…. I guess that’s the other part of the funding. And we’ll see how it goes.
Oh, yeah. doctor’s appointment today: Thyroid is off again. Prescription has been increased.
Three other appointments remain, the first next week. I’m also in the middle of the largest auto immune outbreak since we left Colorado. I presume because of all the travel last month. If that’s the case, it should calm down soon.
Let’s hope so.
According To Hoyt 
I’d ship you a large carton of Good Health if I knew where to buy it. Please take care of yourself–as good or better care than you give the cats!
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Usually next to the Scotch, if the off-license place (or packie, or whatever the local slang is) has a good idea of decent whiskey.
Éire abú!
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“Let’s give the hip kids the vote!” ( Erm, Nigel Farage is one of the most popular people to follow on Tic Toc in the UK) Also the UK “Lets ban those under 16 from using social media, because they are too impressionable” (to fight Farage being popular on social media?)
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I am quite sure that letting 16 yos vote is going to backfire massively on Two Tier Keir.
I am, however, coming to the conclusion that banning children from social media may actually be a good thing. Two Tier is of course doing it all wrong but the concept is good.
The real problem is that Two Tier and his fellow statists don’t understand the need for teenagers to have rules they can break with limited harm. Whether that’s going to the pub at 14 and hoping to get served, smoking or something else. These people are absolutely under age X = child so wrap it in bubblewrap. Older than X = adult. Allow to do absolutely anything
And then they wonder why the young adults are having problems working out what is sensible to do
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their scale is so warped, but then they are mentally warped, so it comes as no surprise they are only consistent in being inconsistent. Too young to drink, old enough to vote, too young for social media, old enough to decide on “gender”(read body mutilation)
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My basic position is that blogs and forums had some good effects for me.
Now, I was also warned that the internet could be dangerous, and was potentially harmful, and I do think I got myself into stuff that was harmful for me.
In principle, I do not think social stuff on the internet is inherently harmful to developing minds.
I think phones are an interface that contributes to bad possible outcomes. (At the same time, the coms also have positive potential outcomes.) I think facebook or twitter style software interfaces, that reward constant ‘interaction’ and ‘engagement’, are very bad possible outcomes combined with smartphones. My desktop useage is hardly free of negative consequences for me, but I would be deeply beaten by hoses if I had allowed myself no mental freedom from the stuffs by having access while I am not at whatever desk.
I think the formal schooling and no childhood labor stuffs has the effect of tending to enforce a lot of age self-segregation, and that this is probably mentally limiting in ways that contribute to social media being used to more harmful results. Mixed ages on line are not inherently good environments, and nor are mixed age grounds in person. But, in general more breadth of human exposure probably moderates some of the effects of having so curated a set of role models in public educators.
Anyway, it seems like one of the appropriate rules of thumb is that I am a theory obsessive, and almost certainly am keying on to some narrow theoretical model for solving this complicated problme that I have not thought about for a while.
I’m cynical about youth engagement politics, but some of what inspires me to feel about that more deeply is the one mode of the dooming.
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THIS. I am typing this on an antiquated desktop circa 2004, complete with keyboard, mouse, monitor and tower. I can ONLY access the Internet via the computer, my phone is a dumfone. This limits my browsing severely, and that is a GOOD thing. While I’m cooking or cleaning or feeding the chickens, I am not connected to the Internet….and when I turn it off, it’s OFF. No battery.
Yes, the Biggest Library Ever is a great thing. I remember when research was paper. It took a long time and was restricted by the books, magazines, etc., that you had physical access to. For that matter, I met my beloved husband (married 14 years next anniversary) via online. But I try to avoid hours and hours browsing.
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I have a smartphone. It has FB, email, mewe, news, and ebook apps, installed. The social stuff doesn’t get used on the phone if we aren’t traveling, and my laptop isn’t being carried (since it also gets used to backup pictures, we usually have it).
EBook access is for the Hot Tub, “library sessions”, standing in (any) line (generally pharmacy, I do not wait gracefully). There are two reasons I am particularly active on social media. Here, service dog (SD) FB groups (even though my SD is retired from public access (she still alerts at home) because not ethical (IMO) to work her with her medical issues), and the FB group dedicated to the family private cemetery. Son and hubby use the smartphones even less for social.
OTOH none of us grew up with a cell phone, let alone smartphone, in our hands. Nor were the tethered lines the center of our social circles.
I’ve been noticing lately that a lot of teens who are allowed cell phones are being limited to not smartphones. They can phone and text, and who they can phone and text is limited.
To be fair that is a small sample of two, great-niece and great-nephew, my side (we don’t have contact with hubby’s side, ages ~15 to 24. Yes, could be great-great by now.) Others coming up but they are ages 1 to 6. Both sets of parents noted that the kids peers are also so limited.
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My wife and I have a graduated system, all of our kids now have phones (11, 15, 17). The oldest has a smart phone, the other two very limited feature phones. They get to upgrade to a smart phone with parental controls when they pass the Technician class Amateur Radio License exam. This shows responsibility, and so far only the oldest has done so (she is also now a licensed CNA and started working part time just after her seventeen birthday).
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My wife and I have a graduated system, all of our kids now have phones (11, 15, 17). The oldest has a smart phone, the other two very limited feature phones. They get to upgrade to a smart phone with parental controls when they pass the Technician class Amateur Radio License exam. This shows responsibility, and so far only the oldest has done so (she is also now a licensed CNA and started working part time just after her seventeen birthday).
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Hell no.
I’d be dead without social media as a teen.
It was the one place that the psychotic overculture of my area didn’t have a complete lockdown– the one place that I could give the faintest hint of a vulnerability, such as liking a thing, without it inviting that being destroyed (sometimes quite literally, such as when I was noticed to like a library book too much) to the sounds of general approval.
If you can fix that strangle hold, then maybe you can argue for trimming around the edges of “is this a good idea”. Not until after it’s not the only escape hatch left.
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I have to second this, especially since a lot of libraries are being gutted of anything “not hip to the current trends”.
If you’re in an abusive situation, you need some way to get information your abusers can’t control, just so you stand a chance of realizing “something is wrong here”.
That, and anything they know you like can and will be used against you. Yes, including the library books. After I’d worked my way through Nancy Drew and was going through Hardy Boys and was actually happy, my parents made sure a town library book got lost so I couldn’t go back there again, because I couldn’t afford the fine. (No, they weren’t going to pay it, of course not.)
Think about what it’s like trying to get through life as a kid when you can’t let your parents see the reference books you brought home from the school library for your schoolwork. Because things will happen to them.
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My kids were fine in social media. Shrug.
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I see the other side of it – kids trying to destroy each other on social media, causing all kind of problems at school, at home, and elsewhere, predators who took advantage of a vulnerable kid and warped the kid, perhaps forever.
I do think that young people need to be eased into online social activity. Start in grade school, perhaps, with lots and lots of fences and discussions (school? home? church/synagogue?) about the down sides. As they mature [not age, mature], then lower the fences and give them more freedom.
No, it is not ideal. No, it will not help the kids for whom social media and the internet are refuges and safety nets. I’m not sure what the ideal solution is.
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Deal with the kids trying to destroy each-other socially, causing issues at school and home, and predators going after kids in skin space, especially the ones who are in positions of authority that the kids can’t escape, first.
Not a dang one of those things didn’t happen to me, in non-social-media life. Those times I knew enough to complain, I was told that I was the problem for objecting.
The internet may have warped me, but it didn’t result in literal physical scars.
After criminal assault is not routinely covered up, we can start worrying about how the already fenced in regions of social media are a problem.
The problem isn’t the technology, the problem is the behavior that is allowed, promoted, and indulged.
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My brother has been giving my nieces a locked-down iPhone when they turned twelve. So far the two oldest have one. I’m hoping they will be okay and don’t discover X or similar. :-o
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my kids discovered politics. BUT that might be genetic?
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My brother is sadly rather prog, so they’d probably pick up that, alas. Plus I don’t want them to find my X account. :-o
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The first time I could vote, I’d already been in the Army for 7 months. For a while I thought the Starship Troopers model would work, but now I think of the many military members and veterans I’ve known through the years and realize that would cause its own set of problems. The younger vote idea has always been younger voters are liberal, but that may be changing, so it may turn on the parties pushing it. But seeing the future is hard…
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The big problem with the Starship Trooper’s model of enfranchisement is that you have a large portion, if not majority, of the productive population with zero say in how they are governed, or taxed. Granted, if someone did decide to want to vote, all they had to do was sign up for a term of service and survive to complete it. But the government was the one who decided when you completed that term.
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It took me a while to realize this, but the biggest problem with Starship Troopers is actually the same problem with human civilization in all their types: lizard people.
Lizard people are those people who will do anything to get power over others. They won’t join the Service for love of country — they’ll join it because they are willing to risk their own lives so they could get that sweet power to vote and run for office — and once they get that power, they’ll start using it nefariously in petty ways, both big and small, to keep that power.
This is why so many libraries and school boards are run by Communists — but because so much of their power is caught up in the little things, this is why the key to defeating them is stepping up and running for those little offices, or even just encouraging your neighbor to vote in an “off year” election.
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Now you’re touching on one of the biggest issues our town GOP committee faces. Merely trying to communicate with the “leave me alone” demographic costs some real money, hard-to-collect money from an even smaller demographic who hears and is willing to part with dollars for political reasons instead of spending it on beer and books. Getting those 3000 registered but not actually voting members in a town of 10,000 where the Dems come out to vote 3 for 2 of our voters, even though the count of each party registered is nearly even.
What wasn’t stated in Starship Troopers was the percentage of enfranchised that actually voted. I suspect that Heinlein, if asked, would have stated a voter turn-out of over 90%, which makes sense since they had to earn the right to vote, and it meant something of value to them, unlike the current U.S., where anyone born here and breathing (or not) automatically gets the right to cast a vote without doing much of anything.
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It took me a while to realize this, but the biggest problem with Starship Troopers is actually the same problem with human civilization in all their types: lizard people.
Lizard people are those people who will do anything to get power over others. They won’t join the Service for love of country — they’ll join it because they are willing to risk their own lives so they could get that sweet power to vote and run for office — and once they get that power, they’ll start using it nefariously in petty ways, both big and small, to keep that power.
This is why so many libraries and school boards are run by Communists — but because so much of their power is caught up in the little things, this is why the key to defeating them is stepping up and running for those little offices, or even just encouraging your neighbor to vote in an “off year” election.
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HOA’s …. Have you seen the YouTube HOA abuse videos?
I knew that HOA’s were evil before, but wow.
Even as we were looking desperately for a house to buy in ’88 (rental being sold out from under us, our offer was rejected, the odds of finding another rental with a German Shepard and 5 cats? Zip to None.) We vetoed a number of neighborhoods just because of HOA requirement. Would rather bought a property that was actually Eugene, or another with city, VS just county taxes, first.
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HOAs are fascist by definition. Public control of (theoretically) private property is a cornerstone of actual fascism.
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HOAs are the purest form of Libertarianism commonly in action.
A voluntary contract entered by adults (the property owners) for a shared goal, putting restrictions only on those who choose to enter it. (By buying a house under an HOA.)
I very much do not approve of most HOAs I have been familiar with, but that’s because their founding documents were far too open to modification; the best I know of are snow removal, trash collection, and shared area maintenance, and their founding documents specified that to expand beyond that would require a meeting of all members of the HOA.
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Inlaw’s home on the Deschutes river, south of Sunriver, near the La Pine State park, did not have an HOA for roads, etc. Instead they had a road district that dealt with plowing, road maintenance (gravel/lava rock), and a major bridge replacement (state, federal, grants).
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Chuckles. When we bought our place just outside $TINY_TOWN (not really a town, only goverment-type entity is the water for 30 odd homes), we discovered that the subdivision we were in had a nominal HOA. No signs that it had ever been implemented, but it was in the deed. Along with the worst acre in the 30 acre parcel, belonging to the HOA, but no taxes ever got paid.)
We got 13 acres (parcels assembled by the previous owner), so presumeably, we would have been the dominant political force therein. I can’t remember Sarah’s wording of the old tagline, but we relentlessly left everybody alone. (Well, one neighbor decided to spread lies, saying we never did anything with the shared pumphouse–since we weren’t spending money on the flowers she was decorating it with. Word got back to us, and we mentioned that I did all the electrical work when the pumphouse was rebuilt. Seems Mrs Nasty lost a bunch of friends over that.)
The property is (loosely) governed by the county rules, and being about 3 miles past the edge of the earth*, the rules tend to be invisible unless there’s some actual harm from violating them. It’s happened a few times, like the burn barrel a renter was using in the middle of a red flag warning. ODF** Was. Not. Happy. Could have been worse, USFS also has jurisdiction.
(*) As described by a town T-shirt.
(**) Oregon Dept of Forestry. Covers for the National Forest here, and did the sole fire admin before the local fire department annexation happened.
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High percentage of the HOA horror stories that caves the HOA is the usual suspects going after land outside, but adjacent to the HOA. Also turns out that the idiots are embezzling. Now if there is never any money involved. Whatever.
Technically our area is being “terrorized” by the city, since we are in the “urban growth area”, while still county. Rather the county has turned over all permit processes to the city. Sigh.
City will get us eventually. Where “eventually” is 62 years, and counting (that I know of).
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Flyover Falls has both an urban growth area as well as an air quality district. Until a year or two ago, air quality regulations pertinent to the district were applied county wide. Kind of annoying for people 25-50 miles downwind of the city to have to knuckle under those rules. Now, it’s more open, barring the county-wide stagnation incidents.
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Willamette valley as a whole has the same air quality regulations. OTOH being at the base of the valley, where the problems usually end up …
The 2020 fires really brought home why the stagnation and burning regulations went into the effect. Oh how quickly we forget.
Ironically some of the largest proponents against field burning, used the ban on field burning to solve that problem … If only controlled burns under timber, when it is raining, was allowed. Or an alternative found there.
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I think the British thing is not, “get naive youngsters to vote,” it’s the Islamic influence. Give more young Islamic males the vote, the assumption being they will vote in accordance with the holy rules of sharia and advance the cause of Islam.
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Maybe, but the democrats have wanted it here since the late 90s that I know of, and probably earlier.
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I benefited from getting the vote at age 18 (passed just before then). Even then I felt the counter argument to “They can be drafted or voluntarily join armed services at 18!” (Even then in Oregon they couldn’t drink.) Was “Then they shouldn’t be able to be drafted or voluntarily join the armed services at 18!” Naturally the latter was unpopular.
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The British elites ought to know better, but they seem to be all in on importing foreigners to keep the uppity peasants in line.
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Probably expect the bill to come due after they die.
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While some Idiots (in the US) are trying to lower the voting age, other idiots (in the US) are trying to prevent anybody under 21 from owning guns. 😡😡😡😡😡
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Same idiots, quite often
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Unfortunately all rational means of determining whether a person can vote (property tests, literacy tests) have already been widely abused via racial bias in this country, so we all know that’s not going to happen. Also we all know it’s not an artifact of the past, see my post about DEI and air traffic controllers. Of course the rationale for giving 18 year olds the right to vote was not just because of military service, but because of forced, active military service, ie, the draft. BTW I was mildly annoyed because I turned 21 the year 18 year olds were given the right to vote. As to any set of legal rules, I try to remember Andrew Klavan’s quote, “Our decisions about ourselves can be moral. Our decisions about society can only be practical.” Also see my essay on the futility of being anything else, see my essay on “What’s Been Lost”.
As to age of alcohol, my wife grew up with an alcoholic father and an abused mother who overindulged (by today’s standards that you mention). When she was a teenager, her mother offered to make her a drink as she made her post-work cocktail. Being a wise person, she realized she needed to stop when she found herself waiting anxiously for her mother to get home, so she could have that drink. I waited until I was 21 (despite alcohol being freely available in college), and I spent several years over-indulging. I’m very thankful that didn’t go horribly wrong for me. On the other hand I’ve met a man in a homeless outreach who blamed his alcoholism on taking Communion as a child.
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I had my first sip of whisky at age 12, I think. From dad’s drink with his permission. Yuk! Haven’t had another, ever (I’m 68).
Didn’t drink beer in college (don’t like the smell, let alone the taste). Still do not drink beer.
Social party underage drinking? Cups – let’s just say plants available got drunk (if plants can get drunk). I also tend to “lose” glasses. Pass the bottle? Pretend to drink. That backfired spectacularly. Got drunk enough, that I knew to leave the party. I got lucky. I suspect something else was planned (years later, so don’t give me props for that back then. I was LUCKY.) I have very little tolerance and I get MORE clear headed. Dizzy and sick (oh so very sick). Eventually will go to sleep, but on my own terms where I know it is safe. Only been that sick on alcohol again, that was on wine flip (watered with 7up/Sprite wine). At best, now, being overweight, I can tolerate either a hard cider, margarita, or short glass of wine, nursed while eating a meal. Otherwise, I do not bother.
Interestingly enough our son is the same way. Just does not care for alcohol in general. He admits to drinking while away at college. He came home really early a Saturday. Why? Because a commissioning party he was at he overindulged. Rather than drive home, he left his car at venue, took a taxi or walked home (would have walked there but was running late). He had to pick his car up from the venue parking lot by a certain time. So, picked it up, packed up laundry, and came home for the weekend. Company year-end/holiday parties the company provides free shuttles home. We drop him off. Even then he only uses the one free non-soda tag, and drinks soda the rest of the night. OTOH our son also has some examples of why never to drink and drive. His playmate and cousin (once removed) was killed by a suspected drunk driver (hit and run, caught but too late to charge with DUI), and a HS friend almost killed himself post HS drinking and driving (luckily no other vehicle or passengers).
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Had first whiskey at 8. Still love it. But I have a weird break: I can’t drink alone, and Dan doesn’t drink. It’s been YEARS since older son moved out. (And before it was like once a month. A drinking fiend I’m not.)
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If ever you come to the Willamette Valley, I will stand you your drinks. There’s a lovely whisk(e)y place in Oregon City I frequent. Frequently.
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:snickers: My mom drank whiskey highballs, and dad drinks PBR.
Yeah, the “have a sip” trick worked on us!
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When our children were toddlers, we were both students (thus broke). Our Friday night special was a home-made pizza and sharing a beer. No problems when our daughter had a sip from our shared cup – it was obvious how much she was getting.
Then I started home-brewing, and instead of a 12 oz shared beer, we were sharing a litre (33.8oz, or just shy of 3 cans worth). And we could re-fill our shared cup, so it was no longer really obvious when our daughter had more than that little sip we were OK with. What to do? Why, obviously, get her her own mug — and pour out all she could have to drink. We were likely the only family in the neighborhood where our kids had their own beer mugs before they started pre-school. (Our son got the same deal, a couple years later)
And neither have had any problems, either with mental development or excessive drinking. In my experience, a big part of drinking problems are cultural, not physiological
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$100 via Paypal … thanks for the good work …
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Thank you.
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Iowa loosened up our laws, and I still have zipped breathless to report when I find some place that actually has someone who doesn’t look like a college kid working.
Tickled pink by the Papa Murphy’s that clearly hired the entire football team to work there, though.
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Michigan just made it unaffordable to hire teens by jacking up minimum wage and of course the teen summer jobs went away faster than the other entry level jobs like bagger, stocker etc. and what positions are there are older people (sometime very much older. Our grocery chain here (3 stores locally, one up in Manistique) has a few teens on the Wisconsin side (I’ve bought beer/booze and the cashier has to call a manager as they are too young) but the Michigan store has only a few very young workers, and only one as cashier, and she is possibly over 21. They also installed self checkouts, because one older head associate can stand an monitor them. Often just one lane is open with a cashier, while I have gone in late, nearer closing and had 0. Self checkout only.
Used to have at least 2 at all times, even when slow and a bagger at each as well.
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Locally, same.
Very few young people working. If anything it is the SS crowd working. They have more take home, because they aren’t paying out their 7% SS, because over max retirement SS, even if they aren’t getting the employer 7% saving (or does the employer still have to pay that? IDK. Employer may be saving on insurance cost too.)
Why working? Some need the extra money. Some are bored at home. The latter don’t take guff from anyone. They don’t bother to engage … Hard on tyrannical/shrill customers or managers. It is fun to watch. Would I ever be that bored? Oh. Hell. No.
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Oh, gads, this gets funny on TwiX and such, too.
You have folks talking about a book being a “rape fantasy” and… it… just doesn’t have affirmative consent.
That’s it.
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You know the movie Say Anything? I once saw someone saying that Lloyd Dobbler was displaying stalker behavior. Because he tries to contact the girl after she abruptly breaks up with him.
In the context of the movie, the attempts to get back in contact with her last for maybe a week or two, after which he stops. But still the cries of “stalker.”
Anyway. Not so much IMO. (Also note that the movie features a high school graduation drinking party, which would have been illegal at the time the movie came out but not in the memory of the scriptwriter.)
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Haven’t watched the movie, but “attempt to make contact with someone who abruptly cut you off without any apparent reason” is bog standard suicide prevention.
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Giving the right to vote to the parasitic population is always going to be a very bad idea. (And no, retirees who saved and invested all their lives are not parasites, at least not until the government has stolen all their savings to give to the parasites in exchange for their votes, at which point they become victims.)
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Yes – acute observation that some are adult at the age of 12, and some remain children at 40… it’s a matter of what is expected of the young of our species.
The oldest grandson of our next-door neighbor worked from the age of 16 in fast-food; and was so responsible and mature that he was able to purchase a new car on his own several years later. (He is now married and has at least one child, whereas his two younger brothers are still … shiftless and hapless.)
I was quite blown away, when my own daughter (at 16 also) was selected for an international exchange program, and she and all the other local selected kids had to stand up and give a presentation. She was so poised, mature and confident, in comparison to most of the other kids. She would have been perfectly fit to have voted, at that age … but not some of the other kids, who were giggly and childish. It’s all about the expectations, and the innate character.
(I couldn’t drink a drop when I was pregnant – alcohol of any sort turned me nauseous and faint.)
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I was driving a farm truck at 12 and adulting long before voting age. And it was silly to me that I couldn’t buy a hand gun before age 21 while I carried one on duty in the military at age 18.
I also was one that could drink at 18, then they kept bumping it up one year per year till it hit 21. Which meant folks one year younger always wanted me to buy the beer. In retrospect, I could have leveraged this more for good and evil. :D
The most concerning aspect is that I didn’t figure out the true political/historical of voting until I was in my 30’s. I was just voting for a team. Also realized that most people were too lazy to vote and most voted for a team or at a whim.
Corollary 3 to Sturgeon’s law says “90 pecent of people are freakin’ idiots when it comes to voting.”
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Cousins (older than my son, 20+ years younger than I am) were driving huge farming combines as soon as they could reach the petals sitting in the seat and see out the windows. For the younger brother, that was age 9 or 10. For the older sister, around 13 or 14. She is a petite little thing even now. Same with the older children, and grandchildren. Except the grandchildren are not tall enough (oldest is 6). Younger cousin’s child will be too, but he’s only a year old.
Yes, uncle (slightly older than me) has 4 great grandchildren, and three grandchildren. Youngest grandchild is the same age as two of the great-grands. Actually 6 months younger than one, and only 2 months older than the other. Will only be about 14 months older than the great-grand twins expected Christmas 2025. Inter-generational strikes again.
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Reform should offer to return the school-leaving age to 16. Think about it, no downside as policy!
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Michael Pakaluk, who did translations of the Gospels of Mark and John, now has a book called Be Good Bankers, that is a commentary on Matthew.
The foreword is a philosophical defense of business, which is gentle and sensible. You also learn how Matthew’s Gospel resembles a first century accounts book for a household.
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Anyway… the amusing/interesting thing is that, if St. Matthew wrote his gospel in the Roman account book format like a “codex accepti et expensi,” that format used a relatively new invention, papyrus sheets bound into a codex.
(The first codices were made with parchment, at Pergamon, the big parchment-making city, and that dated back to the 3rd century BC. But it didn’t really catch on, outside of the accountant/merchant community.)
Merchants used very small papyrus codices or scrolls called “adversaria” to record the day’s figures as they happened.
Then you’d put all your figures into your account book. Receivables that came in were “accepti” and were recorded in the front of the book, and your payments to others were “expensi” recorded in the back of the book.
(What Pakaluk and a lot of other people have noticed is that the Gospel of Matthew is roughly divided in half, with parallel events in both halves. But the first half is mostly “profit”, and the second part is Jesus paying out, including literally redeeming humanity.)
So it’s possible that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel on codex pages, and probably that would be why Christians were so weirdly gung-ho about using codices for literature, Bible books, lectionaries, etc. Nobody else seemed excited to drop scrolls and start using accountant notebooks… so maybe St. Matthew was the guy that started the trend.
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Won’t solve the voting problem either.
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I don’t know; printing ballots on duct tape would at least have the virtue of novelty. :-D
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I just wanted to throw this out there: “competency for leaving” should be defined as “being able to toddle around and babble”, and the prerequisite for starting public education should be “able to walk, run, talk in complete sentences, read Russian novels, and do basic calculus like Lebesgue integration over functions of several complex variables”.
The kids who aren’t ready for public education can learn what they need by starting out at one-room school houses (where they can come in when they are ready, and leave when they have mastered what they need) and various private schools, online courses, libraries, etc.
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I just wanted to throw this out there: “competency for leaving” should be defined as “being able to toddle around and babble”, and the prerequisite for starting public education should be “able to walk, run, talk in complete sentences, read Russian novels, and do basic calculus like Lebesgue integration over functions of several complex variables”.
The kids who aren’t ready for public education can learn what they need by starting out at one-room school houses (where they can come in when they are ready, and leave when they have mastered what they need) and various private schools, online courses, libraries, etc.
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Mrs. Hoyt’s grandma had the answer: If you can’t or won’t have the law in every man’s own heart, then you’ll need a policeman on every corner.” Pres. John Adams had the hifalutin’ version. Wizards, amirite?
Since we don’t, and won’t, what’s left is arguing over the laws; who enforces them, if they’re enforced, and edge-cases. Made more entertaining, for Little Boots values of entertaining, by a vast swathe of said-argue-ers convinced that human nature is infinitely malleable.
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if we have to pick an age, I would vote for 67, having just reached that…
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Friday Meme Thing – Granite Grok
I’m feeling lazy today. Here’s the link. Peruse as desired.
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I have a theory that technology, particularly cell phones are bad for growing up.
When I went to college across the country, I was basically on my own. Oh, my tuition and room and board were all be paid by a combination of scholarships and parents, but if anything went wrong, I had to deal with it by myself. My parents could give advice during the once-weekly long-distance calls, but ultimately, I was on my own.
When my sister went to college a decade later, she had a cell phone. She called at least once every day, sometimes multiple times. Mom could literally talk her through any problem she might be having. And with so much stuff being online, there was a lot of stuff Mom could just do for her, that I’d had to do on my own.
I’m not blaming my sister—I’d have been begging Mom to help me all the time if I could have too—but the fact that I had to learn to deal with my own problems meant that I had my own apartment, paying rent and buying groceries, by 22, while she was still living in her childhood bedroom for her 30th birthday.
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I don’t think so on tech. Some use it TO grow up. Cell phones allowed us to let the kids walk around downtown on their own early teens…. So.
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Meh.
Son is still living at home. He works. He found his apartments, etc., while away at college. He bought his own car. He had a say on insurance (since living at home, adds a complication) since he pays his own. But he’s, um, frugal. He refuses to pay the outrageous rental costs. Especially since he’ll get caught by the feline distribution system. Been looking to buy. Housing costs have not dropped locally. Interest rates are insane.
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I went to college long before cell phones. Outside of short routine weekly or so (collect) calls, calling parents was reserved for IMPORTANT things. Senior year, three of had an “apartment” Phone? We found the land line would be about 35% of the rent. Don’t need one. My mom asked, “How can we get ahold of you”? “If it’s important enough, call the Sheriff and have him find me. If not, write a letter”.
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Also of the “no cell phone” generation. We got our first cell phone in ’90 when I went back to work because I’d be on the road, some. Hubby didn’t get his until we all 3 got one. We just swapped the one back and forth depending on who was on the road.
When I moved out of the dorm to the quads the phone, with very limited options, was the only thing mom and dad paid for. Summers, if they had to get a hold of me the called the district I was working at. I’d get the message either the next day (if evening) or when we came in for the day. OTOH they were out on the boat commercial fishing all summer so not like I could get them on the phone easily either.
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Does this dress make my bat look big?
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I have complete sympathy for everyone raising younglings these days.
It was much easier when mine were coming up. You could let them play outside all day with checkins for meals and the occasional snack. Unless they took a lunch with them.
We live in a very small town and adults just naturally rode herd on the neighborhood kids as they played. Shenanigans were either stopped in their tracks if said adult felt like it or reported to the parents of the miscreants. Parents would be expected to enforce apologies and consequences for stealing raspberries out of someone’s yard, throwing pinecones at passing cars, or getting into a fight with a smaller kid. Kids figured out how to stay hydrated since hoses were available in every yard and a polite request to the homeowner rarely was refused. If you knew the right houses to ask at, you might get a cookie and lemonade from the lonely grandma whose grandkids lived away.
Kids learned from their mistakes and were expected to be polite to all adults.
They were also expected to earn their own spending money with paper routes, babysitting, pet sitting, lawn mowing etc.
Chores were required as being a contributing member of household management and being entrusted with critical tasks was a sign of being a Big Kid and a point of pride in their abilities.
Now if you let your kids under 10 play in their own fenced backyard yard without adult supervision, never-mind, let them use a mower at your own home (the neighbors is right out) you could have a visit from a so-called child protection “expert”.
Humans learn skills from practice. It’s so unfair to expect them to know how to adult without letting them off the leash ever in their lives, then wondering why they are afraid to try the smallest thing on their own. Parents order for their older kids in restaurants, don’t let them work up to larger responsibilities and then it’s no wonder they feel the need to accompany them to job interviews and intercede for them with college professors.
Sad.
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Mentioned this a few days ago. Anyway a second video on how brilliant the opposition lawyers are. Not that we should take them lightly or underestimate them.
Video explaining how getting a national injunction on the Birth Right EO meant a judge ruled that fetus are humans and have standing. Oops.
https://www.facebook.com/reel/1028920772389153
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–
One of the comments:
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Off topic but current. Funny how Epstein is all over the place now and Gabbard has been taking flak. Makes you go hmm. That said, I wonder what the true Epstein deep state Venn diagram looks like. A circle, perhaps.
wonder if Gabbard found the smoking gun there too, which would explain Trump’s reactions
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Apparently so.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/jeff-charles/2025/07/18/tulsi-gabbard-releases-report-showing-how-obama-administration-concocted-russiagate-hoax-n2660609?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgl4dl334go
Release only credible Epstein documents.
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And
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/live-blog/trump-epstein-npr-pbs-doge-tariffs-immigration-live-updates-rcna218570
DOJ requests judge to unseal Epstein grand jury testimony.
In other words. The files may be on Bondi’s desk, but that does not mean all are credible or that all can be released because files are under judge seal.
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Isn’t it?
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Sarah said: “And without some test, we cannot, and the test needs to be absolutely unbiased.”
This, sadly, is a fantasy. It is at least as much a fantasy as “if only everyone.” An absolutely unbiased test to determine the franchise? Administered by -government-?
[sound of maniacal laughter]
Ahem. As I was saying, no. Not happening. Voting in a free country is a right possessed by every adult. Otherwise it’s not a free country. That’s just how it is.
As to people not maturing properly, first of all let’s remember that the definitions of “mature” and “properly” will be changed to suit whatever axe is being ground on whatever day. So you don’t let them do that. You pick an age, call it done and let the chips fall where they may.
Incidentally the drinking age was changed from 21 to 18 once upon a time in Ontario, 1971. Shortly thereafter, it was changed to 19 because all the Grade 13 highschool kids were heading over to the Red Lion for a liquid lunch.
In Alberta the drinking age is still 18, they solved the issue by getting rid of Grade 13 from high school.
The justification for this is, you can take a job at 18, you can sign a contract at 18, you can get married at 18, you can vote at 18 you can join the Army and go fight for your country at 18… but you can’t drink? What BS is that?
Amusingly, when weed was legalized in 2018 the legal age for buying weed was set at 25. Because of… reasons. So currently in Ontario you can join the army at 18 and fight for your country, but you can’t celebrate until 19, and you can’t buy weed to treat your PTSD until most of the way through your second tour at 25.
Because Canada is NOT a free country. They just like to pretend it is while maintaining strict control. Drinking at 18 is inconvenient for the teaching profession you see, and so it is not allowed. Voting at 18 is very convenient for the #Liberals, and so it is allowed. And so forth.
(The real reason the Age of Weed is 25 is because they don’t have an easy and inexpensive roadside test for it, so the cops can’t fine stoned kids for driving under the influence. Inconvenient for cops and insurance companies, and therefore not allowed. It doesn’t work of course, because they drive stoned anyway, but some schmuck in some department can say he tried. And that’s what’s important. >:( )
Now, as to the problem of declaring an age of adulthood, let us recall that the population maps on a bell curve for intelligence, ablility, etc. Meaning of course that half the people in the nation are below normal.
From where I sit, Normies are kinda stupid, and half the population is dumber than that. But should we let -me- decide everything? NO, we should not do that.
But the reason not to is interesting. Could I make better, smarter, less corrupt decisions than the morons we have running things now? Yes. (I think a dog rolling a magic 8 ball could do better, but I digress.)
But if nobody voted for me, nobody has any skin in the game. They don’t even have the illusion of freedom, so they have no ownership of how things turn out. They just blame -me- when stuff goes wrong. Disaster, every time it’s been tried.
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There’s a who bells the cat question in ‘by what mechanism would we correctly implement a technocracy’. (For sake of argument, ignore that I am discussing how to do a stupid and maybe impossible thing.)
I don’t think the process by which we make PhDs seems to be one that actually produces people who we can know have all of the answers for everyone. There is an argument that we can theoretically show that nobody can do that. There’s also the ‘by observation’ of noting how often the better PhDs are usually specialists, and only situationally useful.
(Generalism seems to be hard for everyone, and take constant curiosity and humility to avoid eventually having an unpleasant surprise from running into one’s current limits. Successful PhD programs (or even failed attempts), may make the tricky balancing of attempting to be a good generalist harder. And, of course, Austrian economics may tell us that if we have a generalist in ability, they are still ignorant in some ways for decision making over others, and also necessarily to not have skin in the game for every single game in the world.)
Anyway, even if doctoral programs were an urn from which we could produce people who genuinely knew what everyone else should do, a) there is still the problem of them persuading everyone else b) they don’t have the relative fighting power to coerce everyone by force of arms.
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“Anyway, even if doctoral programs were an urn from which we could produce people who genuinely knew what everyone else should do…”
Well, this is the problem isn’t it? Is there someone out there so smart that they know what I should be doing? Their knowledge is so perfect that they know better than me, the guy actually doing it?
Nope. This is why centralized management always fails, every single time. Because they think they know better, but they don’t.
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One of my characters: “We know we’re not smart enough to micro-manage the lives of 330 million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”
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Bingo.
I think this is a major result of Austrian economics, but I still need to go back and learn again what Austrian economics means, strictly speaking.
It is of course possible that I am enough below the top of the intelligence distribution that there are a half dozen different qualitative changes in how thinking works, spaced at some intervals, that I know nothing about. It is possible that this hypothetical would mean that I actually cannot make any shrewd deductions about what the real limits of human ability are.
It may be much more likely that people are pretty deliberately fooling themselves. That people who got the same numbers or worse than I did, made some different choices about perception. I’ve been unhappy, and not always very functional, and I’ve leaned too hard myself on ‘but I am smart’. A) there is no fixed formula for turning this one thing into happiness. B) ‘is it true’ is a way that I have successfully used to talk myself out of a lot of stupid insane stuff.
Anyway, mid-East patriarchy stuffs. Feminist ideology predicts that angry white men want to, and can force the implementation of, a male chauvinist set of circumstances much more extreme than the worst of what people do in the mid east. In particular, this stuff of men ‘managing’ their female relations.
To me, assigning management roles and managed roles by biological sex seems like a pointless fruitless recipe for unnecessary trouble. Maybe there are competent, observant, thoughtful people where the relationships and abilities just happen to line up so that a man can do an effective job of managing and leading their female relatives. It just seems like pain to me.
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George Carlin: “Think about how stupid the average person is. Then remember that half of them are even stupider than that.” :-o
What’s truly terrifying is that a ‘warm-body democracy’ might be the best we can hope for. That any attempt to impose some sort of voter qualifications would produce even worse results .
Of course, in a lot of Democrat districts, we don’t even have that.
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I agree 100% with the Alberta drinking-age logic, and have for years. Instead of an arbitrary number between adolescence and middle-age individually selected for each privilege of legal adulthood (smoking, drinking, contracts, voting, truancy laws, work limits, military service….), just set ONE age for most all of it—as we’ve enshrined the franchise at 18 by Amendment 26, there’s a legal Pole-Star for it—and go with that. The exceptions I’d make are for military service (leave SS at 18, but as now allow a 17 y/o to join with parental signature), work restrictions (14 with parental signature), truancy laws (abolish outright past about 12) and service members (if you’ve enlisted and completed IET—initial entry training, so Boot Camp & AIT for Army—then you’re legally an adult, even if still 17: just show your military ID). Smoking, drinking, mortgages, matrimony, you name it.
That’s my soapbox on THAT.
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Donation via PayPal has been submitted. Enjoy!!
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THANK YOU
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At least here in the US (I can’t speak for other countries), I think a large part of the problem is that we got a heavy, heavy dose of the Victorian period, and the cult of “childhood innocence” got burned in, very deep. Combine that with the fact that English does not differentiate—“child” can mean anybody from two years old to seventeen-and-eleven-months old. This leads to sloppy thinking—rules that are appropriate to pre-teens are applied to post-pubescents, and trouble ensues.
(“Childhood innocence,” my codlings! Innocence of what, may I ask—the Reichstag Fire? Children have committed every crime in the book except maybe High Treason. Look up Jesse Harding Pomeroy if you doubt me! A lot of kids are junior-sized sociopaths with fewer qualms than Dexter Morgan. But the “news” media are very reluctant to publicize their crimes unless, like Pomeroy, they’re uniquely horrible, so they slide under the radar.)
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Incidentally, while on the subject of growing up, I found something amazingly annoying.
The article is in The Federalist, written by the dreadfully serious Brooke Brandtjen “a writer and journalist from Wisconsin who focuses primarily on culture, politics, and religion.”
She begins:
“In 2024, a K-Pop star posted a photo of her Louis Vuitton bag adorned with several keychains, one of which was a plush toy monster, known as Labubu. Other celebrities followed suit, and the quirky, collectible characters became a worldwide phenomenon that launched the toy manufacturer Pop Mart to a market cap of $40 billion.”
Nice success story, or dark prelude?
Our new generation of adults has become deeply unserious. <snippage> Commitment has been steadily falling out of fashion for these younger generations.
All that from a stuffie keychain? She’s reaching pretty hard, eh? But then she says this:
When adjusted for inflation, average annual wages have risen steadily since 2000. Americans have moved away from the responsibilities of marriage and family life, but have gained more disposable income.
Emphasis mine. Because this is what we call a lie of omission. She forgot to say the part where after-tax take home pay has stagnated since the 1980s and fallen rather sharply the last 10 years or so, particularly since Covid.
No kid I know has more disposable income the last ten years. Most of them can’t get jobs. Because all the jobs kids used to do are now being done by 30 year old immigrants and “foreign students” at well below minimum wage.
She continues:
The result is a generation willing to blow their money on overpriced keychains rather than on their households. Labubus are a symptom of the culture’s sickness, as it is increasingly removing the importance of adulthood in favor of dwelling on childishness.
No, what we have is a generation who can’t afford a “household.” Or a car. Or car insurance. They live with their parents because they have to, not because they want to. Living with Mom and Dad as an adult is not fun.
What’s so annoying to me here is this fool of a woman going to such great lengths to try and squeeze a moralistic stance out of a key chain that she’s willing to lie like a Leftie.
This is the type of moralistic retardation we used to see in the bad old days when Christian radio stations would hold “burn your rock and roll albums” events. Oh no, girls collect cheap key chains because they can’t afford the Louis Vuitton bag, it’s the end of the world!!!
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Wait until she hears about Beanie Babies!
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He didn’t ask for it to be spread, the act didn’t exist, and the chain letter showed up in March.
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I had paper route when I was nine years old. I also mowed lawn, and, in the winter, I shoveled snow. When was 14 I got a job at the bowling alley. I worked on equipment I shouldn’t have been allowed to touch. At 16 I was working at a grocery store. Stocking shelves and bagging/carrying out groceries. Then I got asked to help in the meat dept. As a minor I was not allowed to use knives or power equipment. So what did I do? I started using knives and power equipment. Like God intended. Between dry goods and the meat department I was working 40 hours a week while going to school. It can be done. Graduated with an A average.
My grandkids barely work. I can give my grandson a pass. He has health issues. The granddaughters have no excuse. And they’re in their 20’s. They only work if they have to. Sad…
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Of course it can be done. The problem is that there are NOW no paper routes and no jobs for minors. So they don’t get used to it.
It’s not their fault. The times have changed and you have to fight to work.
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Unless mom & dad, or grandparents, own a business, farm, ranch, even the local complex near us (pizza, mini-golf, laser tag, bowling), you aren’t working. They stretch it for the seasonal work for other ranch/farm HS youth, essentially neighbors helping neighbors. But if the great-nephew wants to come to work, the owners hands are tied, unless the extended family has a financial and working relationship to the farm/ranch.
I mentioned this before. Option is gone now. There was a local tree lot associated with a Christmas Tree farm that used to hire scouts to work the lot, age 14 and older. Couldn’t touch the machines (shook, bound trees, attached tree stand) until age 18. The scouts could help hand saw trees, and carry them to the building, then help load trees onto vehicles. Scouts were not paid directly but instead into their scout accounts (tax and deduction free). Part of the money son used for 2025 National Jamboree.
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