The Good New Days

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’m so tired of people writing things about the current, not very good, pretty bad, etc. state in the country, and diagnosing the problem pretty well in saying we have an educational establishment indoctrinating people to hate America; and information/entertainment educational complex that lies about the past on the regular and stirs up idiot group grievances with neo-Marxian fervor; corrupt politicians; power concentrated in the hands of a well connected elite.

And I’m following along, nodding, completely agreeing, and suddenly they start on their solutions. And my head hits the desk so fast I give myself concussion.

Because the solutions are always things like: invite your neighbors to a barbecue. Join a neighborhood group. Turn off the internet. Touch grass. Shop only locally. Listen only to local news.

I think part of the problem is that I’m not nor have I ever been a conservative. It’s a peculiarity of America that “I’m for the most individual liberty” shoves me firmly on the right. And I read way too much history to try to destroy all structures in the belief the new ones will be perfect. Because you know, I might be temperamentally a Sans Culotte, but I know what happens when Madame Guillotine is well fed.

So, since I’m not allowed to burn things to the ground and play fast and loose with society — mostly because I was raised with a sense of history and morality — I instead am half in love with the future, and forever studying the trends and the technologies for the ways they can be used for liberty.

And guys, guys, guys? We live in an age of wonders, an age that promises to give back to us what the Industrial Revolution took away, but better, and deeper, and more interesting, and with us having longer and healthier lives to do things in.

Look, yes, I could give a barbecue for the neighbors, but what the actual hell? This idea you have of neighborhoods where everyone has kids about the same age and brings them to the barbecue, and they all have similar interests is probably from your parents’ childhood, transmitted in their stories and the stuff you read as a little kid.

This type of thing made sense when there was one big industry in the area and people worked at certain levels, and lived in stratified neighborhoods. It is prime industrial age mass living.

You’re now sulking and telling me that it was a happier and better time.

Sure. I didn’t say it was hell. And your great grandparents would tell you stories of tiny villages where, after work, the villagers got together and sang hymns. Think of all the togetherness! They were exhausted, underfed, probably by our standards filthy, but they had TOGETHERNESS.

Well, excuse me, I lived in a village growing up. And while I miss some things, sometimes, if you think for a little very Odd kid it was an ideal environment, you’re out of your ever loving mind. In fact, it wasn’t an ideal environment for anyone, judging by the epic fights and factions. Because people in point of fact had very little in common, and were together by utter necessity, which means that the group enforced absolute conformity and you couldn’t escape.

Then the industrial revolution came in and ratcheted things harder. Because mass production requires standard consumers. And it requires people who live all concentrated in one location. And if you don’t think conformity was enforced and would kick at any of us who are a little different, you are looking at it with the eyes of childhood.

Sure, there were good things going, though most of them were because the culture remained from previous eras and the vile progs hadn’t started working at it yet.

However, opportunities were… lacking. You could have any color provided it was the color they sold. You could read what everyone else read. You could watch what everyone else watched. You could work in the neighborhood factory.

But the real poison was that you could read and watch whatever they wanted you to.

What you’re feeling now, about the current era is due to the fact we’re in the middle of catastrophically fast change, and everything is unstable. I will give you that humans don’t like that.

But the really bad things, like the current situation, have nothing to do with that. They have to do with the evil being spread by the vile progs through the mass-communication things they still control. Including education.

They wanted to change society to their own deranged template and by gum they almost managed it. Until the internet broke their little — eh — red wagon.

Without the internet, without distributed information, Hillary would just have finished her second term, and we’d be under the boot of some horrific commie mediocrity.

Without the internet, the young wouldn’t be able to create their own paths to success, escaping the channels the left poisoned and the institutions and the industries they corrupted.

And without the internet, ladies and gentlemen, I probably would have given up and be dead.

Sure. The group that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was in was crazy. Many such cases. Sure, those people need to get out of their crazy surroundings.

But here’s the thing: even in the good old days crazy people found each other. Look up follie a deux and find out how many criminals were activated by their lover, their friends, whatever.

Modernity isn’t terrible. The new technology gives us the opportunity to find those who get us. And to create our own paths to success.

It is inverting the damage of the ever centralizing 20th century (And wasn’t that a time of hugs and kisses. Do you want me to give you the butcher’s bill? And yeah, it had pockets that were decent, but the way it was going sooner or later the butcher would have come for each of us.)

The good old days? Were good in spots and if you fought to make them good.

The bad new days? Are good in spots, and if you fight to make them good.

The good new days have the advantage of having a lot more tools at our disposal; of greater health; of more freedom to innovate.

You want to go and touch grass, go. But don’t forget to check your favorite blogs for the news. Or x. Or–

And yes, you can have barbecues with the neighbors (I think mine are feds! No, seriously.) if you want to. I’m not a raging extrovert. I’ll have my local friends for dinner, but not the neighbors. They’re the ones who asked if our son was our servant when we moved in. (He tans. Really dark.) In their defense they (the non-feds) are about 90.

But don’t throw away the blessings of the modern age.

Be aware of possibilities opening up. And don’t curl up in the fetal position dreaming of the old days.

The new tech is the best thing that could have happened to liberty lovers. It single handedly stopped the boot that would have stepped on the human face forever.

Sure, there’s still work to do. But we can do it.

Don’t hate the tools. Learn them.

Then make them serve the future you want.

Welcome to the good new days.

175 thoughts on “The Good New Days”

  1. This makes me think of Charles Cockell’s “freedom engineering.” He’s an astrobiology professor with the University of Edinburgh who writes a lot about the need to take individual freedoms into account in engineering in outer space.

    He observes that between spacesuits and the need for contained habitats, people’s freedom of movement will be curtailed in ways that would make the worst Earth dictators envious. Outer space, in fact, may be more “tyranny-prone” than we would like. The natural environment will not provide oxygen, water, or food. The external environment is immediately lethal. Potential isolation from Earth could restrict settlers’ access to information, and curtail economic opportunity.

    He thinks we can use engineering to mitigate the potential for tyranny. With centralized control of resources, the design could give someone greater opportunity to control those resources and thus other people. Cockell suggests that freedom engineering would multiply the means of production, diversify providers of vital requirements such as oxygen, and create the opportunity for overproduction of each vital requirement.

    (I think he’s reinventing capitalism from a rather unique angle; but then he’s Scottish, so maybe Adam Smith’s ghost has been whispering to him).

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And this sort of “freedom engineering” should dovetail nicely with “create lots of storage and redundancy for all truly vital functions” — or what two of my characters call “engineering for abundance.”

      There are other consequences too; like basic modularity (“if it’s not field repairable it’s defective right from the factory”) and avoidance of proprietary or “fully autonomous” devices and vehicles except for the most trivial / least vital functions (“no Johnny Cabs on Mars”).

      (Yes, I’ve been staring at what a real Mars colony might look like, and how its people might think, for some time. For a rather insistent Earth-invades-Mars story, but also for, well, “‘A City on Mars’ really ain’t all that.”)

      Liked by 1 person

  2. When I got to the bit about the barbecue, I was “What?? No,no, that WAS my childhood!” OK, well, not exactly, I was thinking of the yearly ‘neighborhood’ (Think a couple square miles) pig roasts gathering all the ‘local’ farms, and we roasted a HOG. At least 4 large farm wagons laden with food, all of it SO good, because all the farm wives/moms showing off their favorite/best dishes. At that age, eating every hour while playing games IN the barns, around the barns, in the trees. Usually at least a baseball game, sometimes badminton and usually horse shoes and quoits. Then a gospel sing sometimes with a professional group leading. Yeah, OK, being an Odd in THAT neighborhood wasn’t always fantastic, but the pig roast was always HEAVEN. I doubt it has survived to THIS day, though I would love to be proven wrong.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Lamb (mutton) barbecue. Because Uncle (first great-uncle, after he passed, uncle) raised sheep … Extended family, both sides of their families, and mom’s folks and siblings, and a few neighbors.

      Meat cubed and “cooked”, first in lemon, and other juices and spices, for a week. Then on the coals, for various degrees of “done”. (Seriously the marinate mostly “cooked” the meat, just some of us preferred it hot, not cold.)

      Hasn’t been any since 2000, when their youngest was killed. Miss her and the barbecues.

      Liked by 1 person

  4. There are still wide swathes of territory in real life which are still civilized, and it is possible to have pleasant interactions with other relatively normal people. I did jury duty, yesterday (fortunately released at mid-morning…) I got to the enormous jury holding room in time to snag a seat about three-quarters of the way back, between a Muslima in hijab, a young woman with a nose ring and extensive sleeve tats, a near-to-retirement high-school teacher hoping to catch up on grading papers … and in front of a pleasant gay teacher of music. (who mentioned his husband and their cherished pet dogs once or twice.)

    We all carried on a very pleasant and civilized conversation, ranging over the advantages of memorizing things like the times tables, gozintas (___goes into ___ so many times) poetry, reading books and conversation with others face to face v/s social media and constant attention to screens, how the covidiocy wrecked so much of teenagers’ lives in the last few years, and how we all survived and coped through Snowmagedden … in between being briefed by one of the county judges, and several bailiffs on what to expect in the course of doing our civic duty. A random collection of people on a Tuesday morning – but all very calm and civilized.

    Yes – get out and touch the grass. Talk to people about ordinary concerns.

    Liked by 4 people

  5. Growing up in a blue collar suburb of Detroit in the 1950s wasn’t bad. Most of the men on the block either worked for a car company or in a related industry (Dad worked for a steel company that did construction materials). One minor exception was the guy who was an IRS agent, but bottom rung type.

    Lots of kids, and there’d be a dozen or two gathered in various places, like when somebody got out the Slip-n-Slide, or (rarely, because decent beaches) at a backyard pool. Don’t recall neighborhood barbeques, but coffee-klatches? Yes, many. Lots of stay-at-home moms.

    It was a culture shock when we moved to another metro area in 1960, in a ‘burb filled with junior and midlevel executives and families. I got identified as the class Odd (there were a couple-three of us), and it wasn’t a happy time. (Not sure why I didn’t stick out as the Odd in the blue collar neighborhood, but there were more things to do as groups of similar aged kids.)

    I sort of identify the ’50s as more pleasant than the ’60s because of that move, knowing full well that major changes were going on beyond the neighborhoods. FWIW, the old blue collar ‘burb still looks decent; it’s managed to avoid the worst of the Detroit disasters. OTOH, haven’t set foot in there in well over 60 years, so I’m going from Google/Bing Streetview.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. RCPete, I knew there was something I liked about you. I also grew up in the 50’s in Detroit although mine was a more urban neighborhood. My father was an engineer for the auto companies. As a kid, I had no idea what my neighbors’ dads did for a living, but it was lots of big families and stay at home moms. We played in the streets and whatever nearby construction sites there were. That changed for me in 62 when we moved to “the wild unsettled land” of California.

      Like

  7. “What you’re feeling now, about the current era is due to the fact we’re in the middle of catastrophically fast change, and everything is unstable. I will give you that humans don’t like that.”

    Russell Kirk made that point in The American Cause, adding that radicals (lefties) tend to like using times of extreme change to push through their ideas. :glances around: It fits: “Get off Discord,” “The Internet should be regulated,” “phones are making your kids antisocial.”

    The answers to those statements are No, to the degree criminals are prosecutable, and the kids are feral thanks to the school system and – what was the term? “Soft parenting” or something? Either way, when dad is trying to be son’s best bud/equal and not son’s dad, you have a problem. One you can blame the internet for all you like, but that is not where the root of the issue lies.

    The internet has its uses for good – lots of them. Before anyone allows the usual suspects to shut it down or regulate it to death, maybe they ought to investigate those uses. Besides, have you seen the price of food? Or the (lack of) safety of some neighborhoods? Emails may be more cost effective and safer than a barbecue at this point – to say nothing of more effective.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Yeah, I hope the people victim blaming Iryna Zarutska for her lack of situational awareness, or the people who didn’t intervene to help for cowardice, will read and reflect on their role in keeping us passive… but I doubt it.

      https://redstate.com/eli-shepherd/2025/09/24/hero-at-11-the-boy-who-stopped-a-school-shooting-and-got-expelled-for-it-n2194288

      This is about more than one Michigan school board’s idiocy. It’s about a culture that’s raising kids to be passive, not principled. We don’t reward bravery; we penalize it. We don’t teach judgment; we outlaw it. And then we wonder why the next generation hesitates when life demands courage.

      America used to celebrate young men who took risks to protect others. Today, we expel them.

      Liked by 4 people

      4. Dude. She is now the template for suicide by mass transit. She did dang near everything wrong.

        Your whining “don’t blame her” gets people killed. Blood on -you- hands if you are seriously saying no duty to self protect, to be aware, etc.

        Stop being an -ass- about this and ponder how much damage -you- are doing with that bullshit.

        No, one does -not- have a reasonable expectation of safety walking around with ones head up ones ass. That is -stupid- even if the dang trolley is -empty-, because hazards exist no matter how much some folks pretend blissbunny is a viable outlook.

        Stop. Making. Things. Worse.

        Like

        1. In these situations, I try to draw a distinction between blame vs. responsibility.

          Blame implies she deserved it or at least invited it. No one deserves or invites one’s own murder, except in the diseased minds of predators. Iryna Zarutska is not to blame for getting killed.

          She was, however, responsible for ensuring her own safety, and being (for whatever reason) unaware of risk factors and completely lacking situational awareness *did* get her killed. Pointing out her error is justifiable and could save some lives.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. That is what I am trying to convey.

            Spent much time assisting women dealing with college level predation, and then later exiting abusive relationships.

            Like

      5. By the way, I neglected to ask. How is the spouse doing? (hopefully not misremembering details) Out of the woods?

        Like

    2. Blow your neighbor’s minds.

      “Why yes, that young man is my servant. He’s my son. You mean you didn’t bear any children to take care of you? Oh, you poor dears, how do you ever get by?”

      It’s better to be a hard-assed, but fair, father, than it is to be your kid’s buddy. they may not like you by the time they graduate or leave home; but I suspect the respect and admiration for you will return by the time they’re 30 or 40. Funny how experiencing life changes a kid.

      Liked by 2 people

  8. Sure, there’s still work to do. But we can do it.

    Don’t hate the tools. Learn them.

    Then make them serve the future you want.

    This truly is the grand strategy. Because finally, the tools really are pretty much in place, or are about to be. Electricity, for instance, let manufacturing be decentralized (not tied to a source of water power or whatever), there’s an old (1940s?) article calling it “New Tools for Democracy” I once read — but so many other things were either centralized or center-out (like J-Kimmel’s TV).

    Alfred North Whitehead said “It is the business of the future to be dangerous; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties” (“Science and the Modern World” which is worth reading more of). But it’s also our business, all of us, to help do that. Though sometimes the centralizers, or the re-centralizers, will not like that very much.

    The smirky wreckers at the UN yesterday thought they were creating an obstacle. Trump turned it into a springboard instead. It can be done.

    Look at space (500 Falcon 9 launches now and roaring upward, Starship self-financed through Starlink, and Rocket Lab and Stoke Space and…). Commercial space is simply a fact now (and at last). (An F9 launched 3 major NASA missions just this morning. Routinely.)

    Even “AI” as likely the most overhyped thing there is now (positively and negatively, from the dizzy “our last invention” crowd to the Yudkowskian apocalyptists), underneath all the frothy utopians and doomsters, can do so many useful things, and can be so much more decentralized than “Grok it all” or “Chat GPT is my research department” makes one think.

    And even right here at According to Hoyt — even with all the bulletin boards and Arpanet groups of the past, would any of us have expected this present community to exist, even twenty years ago?

    The old song said it right out loud: These Are The Good Old Days!

    Liked by 2 people

    1. The Reader notes that Starlink and hopefully future competitors are a game changer with regard to internet access. You can now have high bandwidth, low latency connections pretty much anywhere on the planet. This is a key enabler to future decentralization of both businesses and individuals.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Pretty nice for hikers, too. There was a recent case linked on Insty where a Girl Scout slipped into a ravine and got a concussion, and Starlink-enabled emergency backcountry texting meant that they had S&R out there in half an hour, not half a day or more for people to hike out and back in.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Just saw an article about upcoming ‘Tesla Phone’. Opening claim was ‘no monthly fees!’ I don’t know if that part will be real, but a phone running on StarLink would be pretty cool. Supposedly, buy it for ~$800 and you’re good till it dies. We shall see.

        Like

      1. In my case, those near death (or at least concussion generating) experiences were in 7th and 8th grade. I left for a very oddball private High School ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammonasset_School Now extinct, killed essentially by the excessive wokeness of its 2nd and 3rd headmasters) as 1) Local High school was garbage with dumbed down science and math (almost a la Have Space Suit Will Travel ) which would ruin my chances of an engineering or science career and 2) four more years of abuse and I would have likely either killed myself or my one or more of my abusers even more detrimental than poor education to any college. Was it my best time ? No, but was it several orders of magnitude better than my middle school experience? Hell Yes.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. I had a teacher in high school who said: “Anyone who tells you that this is the best time of you life is lying.” I’m kind; I usually add on “or amnesiac.”

        I also, when mentioning this to teens, add on that everything smooths out in your early 20s without anything exterior changing, just because your hormones during puberty are awful. And I keep doing it because the teens usually get a look of relief when they find out that a. they’re not crazy, this really is extreme, and b. it has an end point.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Are the hormones really stronger, or does it just seem that way because they’ve never felt anything like that before? Do they get weaker, or do we just get used to them?

          Like

              2. Ooof, that sounds sucky indeed.
                That one I don’t know if they’re higher, or just that the interactions get borked, but I have heard of the perimenopause oddness.

                I do know that male hormone charts are this nice little “spike up, then gradually drop down” and that female are more like “uneven swelling of peak-of-cycle vs bottom-of-cycle levels, goes up and at least on average drops”.

                (complicated because of the number of really good studies on the variety of female hormones, and their interplay, is so badly done that it took decades for folks to realize the “all the girls at college synchronize their cycle” data was messed up by THE COLLEGES PROVIDING THE PILL FOR FREE, so most of the gals were on synchronized hormone therapy)

                Like

                  1. Same.

                    Had a doctor that suggested it was a clear sign I had hormone issues, so– I should go on The Pill!

                    …since she’d gotten borderline abusive when I refused every time prior, I went digging, which is how I found out about the sampling issue.

                    Like

              3. I seem to have problems more at night. (Fingers crossed.) Interesting switch with hubby and I. We have an electric blanket because he couldn’t stand the weight of blankets I needed to be warm. Even with that I used a light weight afghan or quilt on just my side. Now? I barely use a sheet, especially in the summer. Haven’t turned on the electric blanket on my side in a decade. Hubby? Used to sleep hot. Now can’t get warm at night.

                Asked the doctor about hormone treatment, which mom and both sisters did. They had artificial menopause due to hysterectomies. Asked doctor if it helped long term. Answer? Not really. Just put it off.

                I didn’t bother with the drugs.

                Like

          2. I think of it as calibration runs. The hormone swings are wilder simply because the body is trying to find its balance, so it’s sending more than it needs at certain times because it doesn’t have the ability to set the gauges right yet. And seriously, it was, while not quite a switch, a very short and abrupt period where everything clicked into place.

            It’s not unlike what happened to me in terms of running. I did track my frosh year, and the coach kept telling me to open up my stride. But I couldn’t. Physically, my body didn’t want to do that. And a few years later, when I ran for something and my stride naturally opened up, I realized that puberty hadn’t finished yet and my proportions were… out of sync when I was in track. I’m pretty sure the hormones are the same, because one day they just work the way they’re supposed to. (More or less.)

            Liked by 2 people

    5. Discussed this with Eldest yesterday. She was thinking over Might-Have-Been for if she’d gone public school, and I had to try to explain why yeah, there’s some folks who remember school as the best years of their lives…and that’s sad. It’s so incredibly young.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “…there’s some folks who remember school as the best years of their lives…”

        They peak at 17-18 and it’s all downhill from there? High school trophies prominently displayed? Yep.

        Liked by 1 person

    6. I call it “the Dark Times” myself.

      I’ve heard me described as being about 2 degrees out of plumb. You’re nearly there, but every son of a b1tch is trying to “adjust” you, like you’re a picture in a gallery. If it was 10 degrees they wouldn’t even try, but for such a tiny deviation they’ll be -relentless-.

      University was great. I loved it. Nobody in my face over homework, deportment, demanding class participation, no bullying, girls would talk to me voluntarily, it was awesome. (You can tell how long ago I went to Uni from that.)

      High school is kid-jail. Even the architecture is similar.

      Liked by 1 person

  10. People forget why the ARPANet (the original internet) was invented. It was invented as a distributed locus of command, so that no strike on a centralized point could take out our ability to respond. Of course the laws of economics dictate that power eventually centralizes for efficiency’s sake, but like our Constitution the structure of the internet remains as a restraint on that centralized control.

    Sure Amazon controls 90% of the book market, but because it does it was able to destroy Trad Pub which, not so long ago, controlled 99% of the book market. Because we’re odd, we’ll always be only the 10%, but as GB Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

    It was always the well-heeled gentry that objected so strenuously to the “horrors” of the Industrial Revolution, but did they ever consider why the peasantry flocked so willingly to the sweat shops in the city? It was because life on the, oh so nostalgic, highly praised farm was the very epitome of “nasty, brutish, and short”. Henry Ford, in his own greedy self-interest, did more to upend the sweat shops than Samuel Gompers ever did. Samuel Kier did more to save the whales than Greenpeace ever did.

    It is because we’re from “the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” that we remain the last, best hope of mankind. Our biggest split, and our biggest fight has always been with the self-satisfied aristocracy, or as Lincoln so aptly put it, “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” It was because the American South was founded and populated by the surplus sons of the British aristocracy that it formed itself on the basis of that culture instead of the ethic of the American frontier or the “big shoulders” of the industrial North. Why do you think the world of Gone With the Wind seems like it could so easily be juxtaposed with Regency England? The Democrats’ lamented paternalist Confederacy with its “honor” and its duels and its stilted manners and its disdain for all those “deplorables” and even its minority of those sympathetic to the plight of the poor ignorant workers (that the majority of their class preferred to keep poor and ignorant) is a direct descendent of Lord Hoohaw and Sir Umptysquat from the decadent royalty of Good Olde England.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. Indeed, that silly old song from my grandparents’ generation, ‘Brighten the Corner Where You Are,’ is a decent strategy. You just have to know you may not get to see the broader effects of your actions.

        Like

        1. Or Ozzy: “I don’t want to change the world; I don’t want the world to change me” 😄

          Damn. Ozzy actually is from some people’s grandparents’ generation these days. 😲

          Like

      1. Yeah, that’s more the Iron Law Of Bureaucracy. Along with the tendency of those driven to seek power in the first place being driven to seek ever more power once they’ve got some.

        Centralization becomes inefficient when the central command structure can’t collect and process enough information fast enough to make rational decisions. As we are currently seeing with our hideously bloated governments which have grown too big and complex to control themselves, much less the whole economy.

        Liked by 1 person

    4. Re: The article – yeah, that. I once calculated that the infamous ‘hockey stick’ rise in CO2 promulgated by the alarmists amounted to the width of a mechanical pencil lead placed on an American football field. Including the end zones. If you look at the last 10 mm of the field as the alarmists did, yes it looks super scary. When you look at it compared to the whole field, it gets lost in the noise.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yeah, over the last 200 years it’s risen from 280 parts per million to a whole scary 400 PPM. Or, 0.04%. Thing is, 200 years ago we were in the middle of the Little Ice Age when CO2 was anomalously low. 400 PPM is more of a return to normal than The End Of The World!!

        Of course the Glowbull Wormening Alarmists have taken the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age as their climate baseline. We’re supposed to panic because the climate is warmer than it was during an Ice Age. They want to return us to the days when the Thames and the Seine froze over every winter and thousands of people froze to death.

        With the rise in CO2, the world has gotten greener. Satellites show that plant growth has increased 15% over the last 40 years. Makes sense; commercial greenhouses add CO2 to make their plants grow better and use less water.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. So, what is the C02 level now compared to when jungles dominated the planet? When the dinosaurs roamed?

          Answer: “OMG. Human climate change is causing the next ice age!!!” reeeeeeeeee

          JIC – sarcasm

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Carboniferous era, that layed down the coal fields, had oxygen levels above 30%. We cant breath that long term.

            That was also the era when nature developed rigid cellulose, but not rigid cellulose eaters, so the stuff piled up miles deep in swamps and forests. Normal decay fungii couldn’t keep up.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. It was lignin, that allowed plants to make wood out of cellulose.

              Once upon a time, some mutant plants started producing lignin, which enabled them to grow taller than the other plants. Soon (in evolutionary terms) their descendants became massive trees. They grew, died, fell down, and piled up because nothing on Earth could break down lignin.

              It was 50 million years before some lucky germs mutated and gained the ability to produce lignase. The world was a smorgasbord for them and their descendants, a massive feast no other organisms could eat.

              But some of the dead trees had already been buried under layers of sand, mud and clay, excluding the oxygen the new bacteria and fungi still needed to grow. Over time the dead trees were buried deeper and deeper, subjected to intense heat and pressure and converted into a form of high-carbon rock.

              Some bacteria might have produced lignase before that, but with no lignin to break down, there was no advantage in making lignase. The trait was not conserved in their descendants.

              Which is why we have coal. Also, why there will never be any more coal. All because of lignin.

              Liked by 1 person

    5. I followed the link and read a few additional posts on your blog; greatly appreciated your “Why I’m a Christian” article. (I recently came back around to Christianity after 30+ years of being agnostic.) But that atheist replying to it… Wow. Just…wow. Every once in a while I almost forget how breathtakingly arrogant and small so many examples of the type can be. That’s a man who “knows” everything and understands nothing if ever there was one.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Heck, half of what that guy wrote was self-refuting. I got curious and took a look at his blog. You know that meme with the doggo looking at a computer, and the caption says, “What interesting things does the internet have for me today?” and the next panel has him looking blankly at the reader, saying, “Good Lord…” Exactly like that. Libs of TikTok material.

          Liked by 1 person

  11. Barbecue?

    Last year we hosted several parties for various groups of friends, family, office mates, and neighbors. Did at least 8 briskets, several pork shoulders, some choice treats, various ribs, countless sausages and tube steaks. Slowed down a bit this year due to schedule conflicts.

    We know all all immediate neighbors and a good chunk of the surrounding neighborhood.

    However, I’m elated to work from home due to good technology and the threat caused by bad technology, but I keep my physical exposure to the world outside my bubble limited and treat it as a different tactical frame.

    Love my personal peace, but understand the need to connect for key events and people.

    Besides winning elections and restore The Republic, we really need to re-invent the whole education system. It really is a feedlot full of ordure.

    Like

  12. I suppose it’s like the distinction between science and scientism. Science is good, scientism not so much. Modern versus modernism would seem to be similar and don’t get me started on moderne, which is so ugly they had to use a foreign word to sell it.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. You want to see some Scientism, you should check out the Canada Ministry of Health on acetaminophen today.

      #OrangeManBad, acetaminophen good, and never you mind what the science says, you peasants.

      Elbows up!

      Like

      1. boggles

        or something. I’m a little tired to figure it out more accurately.

        I read the press release on that, after I saw Bee saying stuff.

        They said two things. One, this particular minor cause of autism /might/ have a chemical remedy. Two, ‘we don’t really have a good alternative for pregnant, it is about the safest possible, but try to use a lower dose’.

        My dudes. I certainly don’t endorse or agree with everything RFK might say about autism.

        And probably Trump over hyped things, or something, for some reason.(1)

        In terms of policy changes, it came across as about minimum level of fecklessness or insanity.

        Now of course I don’t have a complete and encyclopediac knowledge of pharmacy, and bioeffects. Nor am I any sort of specialist in mechanisms of autism. So, maybe there could be something subtly wrong, but given the whatsit, there is some sorta statistical mumbo jumbo that says this is as much bullshit as the bleach, as the fish tank cleaner, etc.

        (1) I think Trump probably wanted the idjits to scream over this, instead of leaving an opportunity for people to talk about changes in Russia policy.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The Canadian federal health establishment seems to think we have all forgotten how they covered themselves in glory during Covid, going so far as to BAN both HCQ and Ivermectin. Both still banned, I do believe.

          So now here we are, and they’re -recommending- something for pregnant women that is suspected harmful in the USA. And which the manufacturer of the big brand everybody knows DOES NOT recommend be used during pregnancy. And hasn’t since 2017.

          You should see what they’re doing with their pet pew-pew ban. It’s a work of art.

          Like

      2. Dunno about any connection to autism, but I’ve known for years that acetaminophen overdose is extremely toxic. Heard tell that one guy took 40 Tylenols, was rushed to the emergency room, and croaked. At autopsy, they found his liver had turned green. I have stuck to aspirin and ibuprofen in moderate doses since then.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Basically, there are a maybe a lot of autisms, and hearsay and or gossip implicates inflamation experiences for a lot of onsets.

          Human brains have a lot of function. Human social behavior is enormously complicated, and uses a lot of elements of the brain.

          So brain damage is interesting, and in some cases there is recovery by routing through other functioning areas.

          If brain damage is randomly distributed, then in an adult it may impact social function, but there may be enough social skills learned to compensate.

          Inflamation during a developmental period, could prevent or delay learning the whatever social skills. So the brain inflamation hypothesis makes sense.

          Beyond that, all medicines are poisons, and toxicity is in the dose.

          Large doses of all over the counter drugs are a known way to die, and people have been attempting suicide that way for decades. Maybe the emergency interventions there have improved, that is specialist knowledge that I do not have. I imagine they have improved.

          It sorta makes sense that a during pregnancy exposure to an inflamation related drug /could/ cause some damage, and the ‘inside the mother’ period is probably when some of the wiring for social happens. The other hypothesis is that a young child who is part way grown can get some of the damage from a too high OTC or prescription dose, and this other chemical can promote healing.

          (Foxfier is probably right on the ‘used to treat fever’ and ‘correlates to damage caused by fever’. When my brain is not practiced on a topic, and is working inefficiently, I may make a lot of this sort of stupid oversight.)

          My issues with RFK is I doubt we have true apples to apples data across generations, and also I think the sorting/classifying methodology has changed. I somewhat also buy the hypothesis that formal manners functioned as a coping mechanism that made autistics much less apparent.

          Like

      4. Well that worked. Lemme try again.

        I don’t know if there is a connection with autism, but some of those idiotic dingbats popping [#BRANDNAME] like candy are going to die. Acetaminophen is severely toxic in large doses.

        Heard tell of a guy taking 40 [#BRANDNAME] some years ago, was rushed to the emergency room and croaked. An autopsy revealed that his liver had turned green.

        It’s called your liver because without it, you don’t. 😛

        Liked by 2 people

          1. Has that shown up besides the “post on TwiX says someone called her aid said so” level evidence?

            Remember how the TidePod Challenge was supposedly killing people, but the only one documented was way after it became famous for killing people and was an attempted suicide.

            Like

            1. Not that I know of. The woman posting about the “23 or 25 week pregnant” woman who chugged the stuff to make a point (and ended up more or less dead), per the poster, is a nurse administrator (sounds like an RN who oversees other nurses). I have not seen anything else yet.

              Liked by 1 person

          2. Yep, one of them chugged a bunch of [FamousBrandNameAcetiminophen] and died. Poof. Done.

            I feel bad for her mother and father. That’s gotta hurt.

            I don’t hear much from the Usual Suspects feeling bad a girl died for their propaganda. Maybe I expect too much?

            Like

      5. The connection between “mother took the only thing you are ever allowed to take during pregnancy” and the kid being diagnosed with autism has been around for a while.

        I suspect what the end game for this is goign to be, is looking at little things like “did the mother have a high fever, and that is why she took the one thing you’re allowed to take?”

        Which, in turn, is going to identify that a lot of what’s diagnosed as autism is brain damage.

        Such as from a high fever.

        Which is what they’ve been screaming “antivaxxer” about for folks who noticed that when their kids who got sick after being vaccinated they were suddenly told that wasn’t brain damage, the kid had just always been autistic and they didn’t notice.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. :waggles hand:

            It was “contact your doctor if nursing or pregnant”, with my I think ’18 pregnancy the obgyn wanted me to physically come in if I had any sort of fever. (That doesn’t function with several older children and no support network.)

            Which would make the correlation with “took Tylenol, has child with symptoms from high fever” even stronger.

            Like

            1. For those wondering, when I stated “you do not have the resources to have me and five kids in here, would it be acceptable to follow these printed guidelines from my prior doctor?” I got the Magical Permission to treat a fever without a certified authority.

              Liked by 1 person

    3. Then there’s “post-modernism” — which sounds like either “whiter than white, brigher than bright!” or low-grade time travel, but which looks and smells like a dumpster fire behind a tire factory.

      Even the French have a saying, “trop moderne!” — too dang modern!

      Like

  13. You do belong to a “neighborhood group.” Your church would qualify, wouldn’t it?

    It’s a good idea to get to know the neighbors. A neighborhood barbecue or potluck every once in a while helps a great deal, unless you want to knock on everyone’s door. When you have real world problems, you can’t run to another state for immediate aid. It’s also good to be able to identify someone who’s not a neighbor.

    For us, buying local helps to keep local stores in business. I shop both locally and online.

    The danger with online social media is that the algorithm steers people to different places. I tried to find Q. I failed, likely because I didn’t engage with social media in patterns that lead to Q (or whatever other destination other people end up at.) I suspect that unstable people are more likely to be delivered to bad sites. I also suspect that this isn’t anything that the algorithm’s programmers could predict or stop, because it is an emergent property of social media.

    Read the Wikipedia entry about the 764 group. My adult son told us about these groups after the Minnesota event. If you have teens, it is important to know that 764 is reportedly active on Roblox and Minecraft. The answer isn’t to block the internet. However, there are evil people using the internet, as well as good people.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. Look to the past for cool things to try!

    Like, weirdly, almond milk. That’s actually very old, older than our word for milk, and did you know those recipes that are a pain in the tukus because you need to boil the milk but not scald it, you can substitute in almond milk?

    Approach the past like an American. Find what is good, or at least fun, and see if you can find a way to use it. Maybe you’ll get other folks to try it, too!

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I love almonds but always balked at the idea. How the **** do you milk an almond? I suppose I should look it up to see what it really is and how it’s made…, but laziness is my default mode.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. milk allergies in our house so the wife uses almond milk all the time. Need to adjust recipes but it Fills a need very well

        Like

      2. It’s some 800 years too late to be upset at white liquids being known as “milk” or “milky,” even if the American Dairy Council does think that folks are not drinking milk because they’re stupid, rather than because the blue milk tastes terrible.

        [pushes Ag Rant soap box off to one side]

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I can always count on you guys to educate me (or at least amuse me). Thanks for that. Turning frozen peas into pea butter sounds tempting especially since I’m a recently illumined Orthodox Christian, but, as a widower, I’m not really a cook. (I was the sous chef to my wife’s brilliant culinary adventures.) Fortunately my pastor instructed me to ease into the whole fasting bit by just starting with abstaining from meat. Last year’s apostolic fast unfortunately coincided with my whole trip to LibertyCon and back. I had to tour the South without drinking alcohol or eating barbecue…, aaaaarrrgh!

          Liked by 1 person

          2. Good. Serves the man, after all.

            Even though we do have all these cool middle ages recipes…in practice, if you weren’t where olive oil was the poor people food, the fasting from milk and such was usually excused.

            Because the SPIRIT is way more important than the appearance!

            Liked by 1 person

        1. My goto is salmon fried and soaked in coconut cream, both of which I can get easily from Trader Joes. I know if I were following the full fasting rules, I couldn’t eat fish either. Oddly, because in New Testament times shellfish were considered worthless, I could legitimately have all the lobster and shrimp I want and be compliant. That’s cheating too of course because it doesn’t include the proper phronema. ;)

          Liked by 1 person

    1. And it’s getting more and more difficult to have a BBQ with what those Doctors will allow you to eat…. 😇😏

      Like

  16. BBQ with the neighbors? National Night Out is good at least for that. If properly done, can also familiarize neighborhood with ‘their’ local law enforcement, and the LEOs with the neighborhood.

    Once a year is better than none.

    Like

    1. Given recent events, I’m pretty happy with local law enforcement staying far away and minding their own business. Given that they’re not on my side.

      Canada, right?

      Like

        1. It certainly is, and today I FINALLY heard somebody repeat what I’cve been saying for quite some time. Several years.

          Jasmine Lane on Overopinionated said my line: This is not a mistake. This is not incompetence. This is The Plan. This is what they have decided to do.

          I can only say Thank God for Donald Trump and the USA.

          Liked by 2 people

  17. “…the group enforced absolute conformity and you couldn’t escape.”

    Yeah. Which makes it -super- fun for those of us who can’t really do it right, no matter how hard we try.

    When you’re an Odd, even when you know all the rules and follow them zealously, you look funny. You move funny. You talk funny. The differences are subtle, but Normies zero in on them instantly.

    Normies spend pretty much all of their thought and attention on fitting in. They’re -experts- at it. Odds, we’re thinking about space pirates or some shit, so our virtue signalling isn’t sharp enough.

    Result, more than a few ancestors on the rural side of the Phantom family didn’t get married and lived at the family farm pretty much their whole lives. Or they bought their own farm with a sibling/cousin/whatever and carried on that way. Childless spinsters and childless bachelors used to be a very common thing. Like 10% of the population common.

    City side of the ancestry, not quite so bad because the surveillance system wasn’t quite so absolute. Odds could meet up and form families and ‘get along’ okay so long as they didn’t get too creative or uppity with the Oddness.

    “Because the solutions are always things like: invite your neighbors to a barbecue.”

    If I want to see a “neighbor” I’ll go to the store. That’s about all the interaction with Normies I can stomach these days. Living out in the sticks of Hooterville is great because nobody bothers me. I do my little thing here, I cut my grass, I wave at the next-door guy as he drives past. All good. Proselytizers and busybodies know not to open the gate, that’s extra good.

    The suggestion “invite your neighbors to a barbecue” is so all the Normies can get back to their enforcing conformity bullsh1t. They actually have those around here, occasionally.

    Nightmare. Like being a greyhound at a rabbit convention.

    Liked by 2 people

      2. It’s like being a Ferrari or a superbike and everybody else is a Beetle. They get there, but it takes them forever and I’ve already moved on five towns down the highway.

        Not to mention they gang up and clog the road so you can’t go fast, seemingly out of spite. Possibly just because they’re f-ing slow.

        Normies. Can’t stand ’em anymore. Since Covid.

        Liked by 2 people

  18. Growing up in rural central MN, I was aware of some same-sex ‘cousins’ cohabiting in the area. Being of a fairly uninquisitive age, I didn’t think too much about it. After we moved to The Cities and I started learning about the birds and the bees, my Mom clued me in to the fact that most of these couples were actual couples and that the cousins facade was a polite way for everybody to just get along.

    Like

    1. SOME really were just cousins, or siblings living together. Or even just friends.
      Our tendency to sexualize everything is very much a blind spot of our times. At one time, when we both thought we’d be spinsters, best friend and I were arranging to rent an apartment together because we were 21 and wanted out of the parents’ houses, and one of her siblings was willing to sublet as he moved up.
      Our calculations (how much money each of us brought in, the rent, and if we could count at eating at each parent once a week) were much like a young married couple’s, but never did I look at her with lust or have any interest in bed sports, and I’m completely sure it would never occur to us if we lived together 40 years.
      We had the same music and book tastes. I didn’t mind her practicing guitar, and she claimed the privileges of first reader. It would have worked and been much better than living with parents forever.
      In some ways I’m sorry we didn’t get to do it for a year or two. I think it would have made my first years of marriage easier.
      BUT she up and married three months into the planning. And I married six months later. So, it wasn’t meant to be. :D

      Like

      1. The couple that adopted Anne Shirley, “Anne of Green Gables,” were a brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. This is fiction but the fact that the Green Gables farm is run by such a pair is treated as quite ordinary in the books. This is set in fictional Avonlea on Prince Edward Island circa 1900.

        Like

      3. “Our tendency to sexualize everything is very much a blind spot of our times.”

        Oh yeah. Like I said, these were relatives of mine. I’d have heard the scuttlebut I’m sure, as time went on and people passed away. Like I heard as an adult that two of my mother’s cousins, sisters who lived with their ancient mother, were completely crazy, and that’s why we didn’t visit them much. They could only hold it together in front of us kids for an hour or so, type of thing.

        Different time, different way of life.

        Like

    2. The church we attended in Nebraska had two pair of “good friends” who drove to church together. Kid-Alma didn’t blink, just like I didn’t blink when a later school buddy introduced me to “My uncle and his travel friend.” Were they a pair? No idea, not my business, and I wasn’t old enough to worry about things like that.

      I vehemently agree that society has way over sexualized too many things. I’m sure some people thought my grad-school buddy and I were a pair. Nope, we’re both straight, just had a lot of common interests and struggled through the same classes together.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. :waves hand:

        My husband and I were “totally obviously going at it” back when we weren’t even friends yet, much less dating.

        Because we didn’t go out and do stupid things with stupid people in stupid places, so were around the same crowd a lot.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. Same.

          Hubby stayed overnight before we were officially dating. He was helping with a German Shepard who turned out to have salmon poisoning. This is helping cleaning up not only 80#’s of dog, but the bathroom and kitchen, and keeping her clean. All. Night. A friend helping. We’d been part of the same group for 3 years.

          Liked by 1 person

  19. Our block really was a neighborhood in the idealized sense, although we never had a big BBQ together; everybody was too busy with church socials or school festivals or town parades, but we certainly knew everyone, because the post-war development tract housed a lot of my parents high school friends, or relatives of other friends. So the kid pack ranged up and down all day long playing together.

    “the cousins facade was a polite way for everybody to just get along.”

    The single-lady cousins, or finishing-school chums, usually raising horses, were a staple of English fiction. Among the voracious readers who were my “neighborhood” in high school, none of us ever wondered anything about it.

    We led a rather sheltered existence in the 1950s and 60s.

    There was one marginally analogous situation on our block, the guy who lived with his grandparents. I don’t remember anyone ever even speculating on what had happened to his parents, at least not in my hearing. He had an older sister on the next block that we knew about, and he visited often to see her kids.

    Sometime in college, my parents let it slip that she was his mother.

    All the grown-ups knew. No one cared.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yeah. Mother gets ‘called back East to care for an ailing relative’. Brings daughter along to assist. Five or six months later they return, and Surprise! Mama had an unexpected late in life pregnancy and daughter had a new ‘little sibling’. My favorite great aunt.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. One of my beloved’s cousins got pregnant, gave the child up for adoption. Later on, she married but they were unable to have children. And then, one day she got a phone call…

        She got to be a grandma, her son got an “extra,” parent. He loved his adopted parents, and he loved her. Win-win.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Sister’s oldest is adopted. When niece met her bio-mother, and three half siblings (one who is older but was not adopted out), all three individually told her she was the “lucky” one. FWIW, her husband adores the adoptive parents, despises the bio-mother. I’ve met her (bio-mom) at family events (wedding, baby showers, but interestingly enough not the great nieces birthdays), I have no personal opinion about her.

          Like

  20. In the pre-silicon Santa Clara Valley 1960s suburbs, everyone was roughly the same age, parents and kids, because my entire development was built in 1963, and vast swaths of orchards had been transformed to 60×100 lots with little houses from 1950 or so onward, to accommodate workers in the defense industries with families. And being this is California and these were “starter”-sized homes, most all those families had moved here from elsewhere in the prior five  years or so. That meant no old established families, basically a top age limit on the age of most kids, and really no singles or couples without kids.

    That uniformity which local kid Stephen Spielberg views with such ambiguity from movie to movie was an accident of postwar circumstance, the swaths of baby boomer kids (and the ones after 1957 or so who get lumped in – all the other named generations are a decade, not randomly 18 years, as if my riding my bike around during the original Summer of Love between first and second grade is exactly the same as those who experienced the hippie chicks and draft protests in their late teens). The normal mix I see now – some younger kids, some older, some teens, some couples with no kids, and some older folks like me hanging in there – was notably absent here during my youth.

    Like

  22. So, way back in the day, some of our anthropology bros were talking about revitalization movements, or ‘ghostdancing’.

    Culture under stress, repeats the actions it perceives as having been succeessful during a perceived period of past success.

    Lot of the historic examples discussed were of a relatively stronger culture, and a relatively weaker culture. Weaker culture stressed, did things, seemed otherwise irrational, and maybe expensive and useless.

    It was speculated that you could have a situation in a society with multiple cultural factions, and two or more cultures could be stressed at the same time, and ghost dance.

    Fairly evaluating such a situation might be one of those things that needs a broader view, and hindsight.

    I could totally cherrypick a bunch of false positives going back twenty years, where I discard context to go ‘totally irrational, must be a ghost dance’.

    The contemporary intelligence analysis of everything as ‘current events’? Doing that right is a long investment in a bunch of alternative models. Being in an “I’ve been doing this for thirty years” position, and not overlooking a newer behavior or way of thinking? Where that newer behavior or way of thinking requires a new model that scrambles the organization of one’s previous models? Might need some humility, and commitment to continuing observation.

    (Which is to say, some of what I hear described could fit two ghost dances. But at least the ‘my’ side stuff could actually be variation in personal environments, not simply nostalgia. I am prone to nostalgia, and the slice of politics I supposedly belong to makes theoretical sense as being prone to nostalgia.)

    1. I dunno.
    2. We shall see.

    Like

    1. This is how I view the Turning theory (according to which we’re in a Fourth Turning, see book by the same name). They probably have a point. They might possibly be right. I think it’s cherry picking data with hindsight – but that’s mainly because I find the theory far too deterministic, verging on psychohistory, for my taste.

      Like

      1. It’s cherry picking data in hindsight. And it’s “what it looks like in what was written about it.” Not how it was while happening.
        It makes me froth at the mouth.

        Like

        1. I basically concur.

          There’s a usual cycle that shows up in engineering, and other places, the sinusiod and the damped sinusoid. Vibrating springs, for one.

          Thing about some springs, simplified to 1D, they have a neutral point, and on one side there is a force pushing them the other way. Vice versa also. Very related to stability.

          You can talk about the literal state space of a damped sinusoid system, which is maybe velocity and position. (Caveat, I’m only now maybe properly learning state space representation, and I haven’t had the spoons to look at, eg, mass spring damper systems.) (State space is a matrix equation model, that involves derviatives of certain variables.)

          Electromagnetic waves have that cyclic quality (some of the time, due to sampling), basically because of the cross product terms in the electric and magnetic field equations.

          Turning theory is maybe like a state machine (different concept than ‘state-space’), with an ordered flipping between the (IIRC four) states. (At least, if talking discrete events.) Anyway, this is not only something that would need to be fairly deterministic, and memory based, but also naturally true of aggregates. In my philosophy of treating human behavior as most fundamentally individual, this is obviously a very questionable proposed model.

          History is necessarily data reduction. Only some claims are well preserved in the first place, then historians select from those.

          I’ve forgotten what the key thing to say here was, or how to say it concisely.

          I think it more likely that turning theory is an artifact of data reduction/cherry picking and theory obsessives seeing models everywhere.

          Like

  23. Our new Pastor is from Uganda. As good and holy, prayer, of a priest as you could wish. He is also VERY traditional and weekend Sunday Masses are filled with Latin, Greek incense and traditional hymns (if he has to sing the himself because the choir doesn’t know any)

    He caused a minor tizzy last Sunday when he told people NOT to pray to be poor but instead to pray to become rich honestly and to have the grace to give generously to those without.

    He said that coming from a very poor country, he knew that actual poverty was no grace at all, but the ability to give freely from your plenty was a grace indeed.

    He also explained the difference between poverty of the spirit and starvation.

    A distinction lost on many, judging by the comments later. Apparently half our parish are commies judging by what they think of someone who can afford more than they.

    None of them would miss a single meal if they gave away most of their money.

    Sorry if this is off topic. But I was really convicted by what he said and it matches what our dear hostess says about people here having no actual idea (not us, we get it) how the rest of the world lives.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. I have an intellectual appreciation for the absolute holes that make up most of the planet, and the horridly squalid conditions in which the majority of the people there live, but I have no interest in learning about that first hand.

      The government here in Glorious Gavin’s Bear Flag People’s Republic, on the other hand, seems dedicated to converting the Formerly Golden Now Singed And Still Not Permitted For Rebuilding State to a third world hell hole. One can only hope they are as incompetent in that project as in everything else.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. You can hope, but the making of a hell-hole is absurdly easy; poverty and squalor are the default human condition. It’s raising a society above subsistence dirt-grubbing that’s hard. Any bunch of idiots can destroy a civilization; only the competent and industrious can build one.

        You can have a civilized society, or you can have mob rule. You can’t have both.

        You can’t restore a civilized society by pandering to the mobs.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. I was just listening to an interesting interview of a religion/history prof. At the end, he broke into some thoughts that were unrelated to the topic (mostly), and opined that religious communities living under vows of poverty could live off practically nothing.

      Which is nonsense. Even the desert hermit monks had to get or buy a fair amount of supplies, once it was more than one or two people foraging for themselves. They wove quality palm mats (and hats? IIRC?) as trade goods.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. Plus, the pet media kept asking her really hard questions, like “was she getting enough sleep?” which is one that her ghostwriter writes stumped her.

          Frankly her word salads are because she is just perpetually stumped by life.

          Liked by 1 person

  25. I wrote an article for L. Neil Smith’s Libertarian Enterprise called “The Turner D. Century Gang—or, Why I am Not a Conservative.” I pointed out that in the “good old days” a lot of conservative types idealize, dental care was—at best—primitive, medical care was not-so-hot-so, cars were a lot less reliable and more prone to blowouts, there were only three networks and nothing good on any of them (that is, if you lived in range of transmitters) and there was nothing to do.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Before electronic ignition and fuel injection, cars used to be pretty temperamental beasts, and needed a whole lot more regular maintenance. Remember tune-ups? Setting points, regapping plugs, fiddling with the carb mixture, and all the other little fiddly bits that are the main reason I’ve been able to stay well away from any vintage cars – I use to have to do that all the frelling time just to keep the darned thing running, I don’t have any interest in doing it as a hobby.

      Like

      1. And setting the timing! And then trying to figure out why the darned distributor moved somehow when you were tightening bolts so you had to set it again!

        Like

        1. And now, if a single automotive chip gets hit with a single cosmic ray particle, scrambling a ROM entry somewhere, the whole automotive system becomes inert because you cannot adjust anything yourself. It just deadlines with a helpful error code. “Error 601”

          And since no one understands it anymore, they are dependent on expensive others to service the thing and keep it running. In times of hardship, you cant just do it yourself for almost anything.

          That isn’t a good tradeoff in a fragile world.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Eh. There are tricks to deal with Single Event Upset issues, which is why one company I worked for had devices on every single Mars lander past around 2000.

            And automotive electronics are really very hardened these days, since the first ones had to live in the same engine compartment as points and relays and other electronically noisy stuff, as well as live happily on other-than-clean electrical power from alternators designed just after WWII. The only “it actually happened to me” story I’ve heard where an automotive ECU became bricked was due to the reporting person trying to flash it to a new configuration using stone knives and bear skins.

            If fiddling with it every weekend is your thing, you go. Modern cars are appliances.

            Like

            1. I will tell on myself and say that I have two old trials bikes, with carb and points, and a new adventure bike with electronic everything.

              The trials bikes are at the shop being “tuned up” because I could not face doing it myself. The adventure bike is having the wheels ridden off it most days, it just keeps going and going.

              Liked by 2 people

    2. Tires! Modern tires are amazing! It helps that modern roads are good, but even my childhood roads were decent but everyone had to know how to change a tire. I don’t even know where the jack in my car is – I assume there is one since it has a spare tire (underneath where its bolts are now probably permanently rusted on).

      Liked by 1 person

      1. We know where the jacks are for our Santa Fe’s. Not sure where the spare resides (there is one for each). Our last truck had a tire go flat. Got the jack out. Could not budge the spare tire down. Called the insurance provided “help”. You know the professional? They couldn’t budge it either. They put air in it. I was able to drive it to Schwab Tires, they pulled the nail/staple and patched the tire.

        Son’s car does not have a jack. It does not have a spare. He’s had to use the insurance roadside service for tow to Schwab Tire, get a new tire (first time, *second time there was a “spare” at home so we took that tire to Schwab).

        (*) Couldn’t get the same tread on the new tire. So put on new pair with new tread on the back. Second tire to go was the old tread type, so “spare” could be used. Now he’s looking at getting different wheels which will allow taller and sturdier sidewalls. White Hyundai Veloster N, manual shift.

        Like

      3. While we were out on the back roads in Wyoming last year (jaunting around one week-end while serving a mission at the Mormon Handcart site), we totally blew a tire – the sidewall separated at the hub all the way around, on both sides.

        AesopSpouse pulled the spare out of the back, jacked the car up, and discovered that our spanner, which had come with the car, did not work on the lug nuts that came with the “new” tires put on some time in the past.

        We resigned ourselves to hiking back to the last place we passed, probably 5 miles, when a car pulled up, the driver hopped out, listened to our tale of woe, and pulled out a four-arm spanner that had a matching end.

        Problem solved.

        You tell me the odds of being found in the WY outlands within 10 minutes of being stranded. Roll the dice again: it was another Mormon couple visiting historic sites in the area.

        We got a new spanner.

        Like

        1. 100% believe.

          What are the odds of your 4 year old having a bike accident in front of a vacationing pediatrician?

          Or your 68 year old husband tripping and falling (save the camera!!) in front of 4 vacationing emergency nurses?

          Both in national parks. Not in wilderness sections. However where cell coverage non-existent, and both where emergency help by vehicle is not close. Neither life threatening (lots of blood). But in case of kid, he was professionally assessed before being moved. Hubby should have been but he was up and moving before the professionals got to him (you think arguing with a 4 year old is a challenge? You naive soul.)

          Like

  26. And, impressively neat headline picture. Sort of “Welcome to the New Egyptian Ballroom, one of our foremost attractions here at the Grand Canal Hotel at Valles Marineris Under. Enjoy our 1930s and 40s retro-dance festival night, twice monthly!” (28 day months, not the 37-ish kind.)

    And if we ever get an “AI” image generator that can make that picture from that prompt, then we’ll really be getting somewhere. (I doubt it’ll be done anytime soon with current technology, for some fundamental reasons. Like where do they get the training data to expand the range of available output, correlated with text, to do that. I’d expect the actual prompt was impressively and madly more detailed than that, and see “clankers almost won’t do Ellyans right” too.)

    Like

  27. FWIW.

    The hotel we stayed at in Jackson, WY had a interesting concept. Interior courtyard with gas fire pits. Strong incentive for guests to socialize from 7 PM, non-host bar (yes, alcohol was being consumed, just not by us) and hosted, by hotel, somores.

    We ended up having conversations of conservative vs not (all conservative, even the younger local couple whose parents were visiting). Both the other visiting couples were from the NE US, one recently moved to Florida. The Oregon conversation went like this.

    They brought up that fuel was much higher in the NP areas than at home.

    Us. “Not compared to Oregon. Seriously. Fuel cheaper in both Yellowstone and Tetons. Going to be worse, thanks to our ‘lovely’ governor.” (To be fair there were pipeline problems at home. Down some now, but still more.)

    Had to point out that “Lovely governor” was not a compliment.

    Got asked why not move out of Oregon, to say Florida.

    Pointed out Oregon does not have Humidity. None. Noted, we lived within an hour of the coast, half an hour to either mountain range, west and east, an hour (ish) to mountain pass to the PCT and wilderness.

    Got asked about how the ocean was for swimming. Pointed out swimming was not done in the Pacific from N. California north. Not without a dry suit. Unlike Florida there was no walking out on the continental shelf for a distance either. There isn’t one. It drops off deep really close to shore.

    Liked by 1 person

Comments are closed.