*Look, before I start this post I HAVE TO brag. Which is kind of like having to bake, with fewer pans and flour. No shade on Mark S. who still wrote my favorite Amazon review, but this one…. this one is not a good review. It’s the review I’d have dreamed of if I knew this was possible! REVIEW OF SARAH HOYT’S NO MAN’S LAND. I’m not sure how I deserved this. I’m sure I’m not worthy, and all I can say is “aye, aye, captain. Working on Orphans of the Stars as much and as fast as I can” -SAH*
Vibing History
There are things I seem to have been appointed to scream out in the desert (by whom is a good question. Perhaps a superior power. Perhaps my subconscious. I don’t care. Whatever it is is much smarter than my conscious mind and seems to come to accurate conclusions on insufficient data, so I listen.)
So I’ve spent my time screaming what I think is obvious in the face of overwhelming opposition. Though some of them the rest of the world seems to be coming around on. One of those is “The population is NOT exploding. Paul Ehrlich was wrong on this too, as on everything else. What we have are incentives to over report. The real danger is population dearth. The only real wealth is human beings and human minds.”
But there are others. Oh there are others, and some of these I scream in the face of my own unalterable pessimism. And the thing is, although the pessimism shouts back that all is doomed, so far the optimism has been correct. Whether I’m like the man falling from a high building, passing the fifth floor window and going “So far so good.”is way way above my paygrade. And I likely won’t find out in my lifetime, even if I live another 40 years, which is unlikely but possible.
Because what I’m saying is not that the fight is DONE and everything will be rainbows and flowers from here on. That has never happened in the history of humanity and never will. Humanity is forever on the edge of a precipice. All we can do is catalogue the good, the bad, and hope that our descendants keep good trends going or combat the bad.
However, these my inner voice thinks is true:
In our current fight, we have already won. What remains is mop-up which, as we all know, is the most dangerous portion of the action, because the enemy has nothing to lose and will go all out to take even one of us.
We — potentially, there’s a couple of big inflection points ahead — stand on the very edge of a mountain of achievement that will take us to the stars, make us a multi-planet species and make our descendants healthy and wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Which in turn will create more achievement, because that’s how it works. (And no, it won’t be paradise. No paradise in this sorry world where world means this universe.)
Everything is upgef*cket and will need to be rebuilt in the next 20 years. Everything: Physical infrastructure, education, institutions, our transmission of our civic culture, the rebuilding of faith in our churches. AND don’t get me started on the rest of the world. We might be able to do it. I’m not sure about them.
AND the dictum meeting with even more resistance than those: Stop blaming and beating the young. And by young in this case I mean 45 and younger. Every generation complains about inheriting a broken world. They didn’t in fact inherit a broken world. Neither did we. Neither did Cain and Abel to use metaphor. The world is no more broken than it’s always been in this our vale of tears. THEY DID HOWEVER INHERIT AN EDUCATION SYSTEM AND INSTITUTIONS THAT CAN’T BE TRUSTED. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.
Look, all of us, even people my age (this isn’t saying much as I came after. More on that later) were badly educated for the world as it is. This is because since the eighteenth century or so the world has been changing faster than the culture, mostly due to tech, and the whole process is accelerating.
I, for instance, took a degree in languages and literature which yes, would have given me instant entrance into a teaching profession (in Portugal) and since I’m insane and came out with seven languages and at the top of my class in most (except German, and even there I was in the top ten. I just hate German. It’s too organized for my brain.) supposing I got a personality transplant, I could have become a diplomat of some sort. (This was what mom, G-d rest her, was holding out for. It’s like she never met me. In answer to her hopes, my brother drafted a newspaper article from 2030 where I’d been declared Persona non grata in every country in the world, including Portugal.)
But the degree wasn’t actually designed for any of that. What it was designed for was to make me “an accomplished young lady” who would shine in the marriage mart. Because it was established that long ago, and universities in Portugal were very slow to change in spirit. (And yet a bunch of Marxism had crept in, mostly through literary analysis. No. It’s no more valid there than anywhere else. The people who maintain that the theory is wrong but “still valid” for this or that are actually saying “So the theory that there are cows on the moon is complete insanity, but still good for NASA mission planning.” Come again? I must be hearing wrong.)
This is normal. This is bog standard. This is what we always went through. And part of the reason when young we think the world is broken for us specifically. Because we’re young we trust what we were taught and are angry and bewildered it doesn’t match anything.
My kids generation and later (I COULD have kids who are now forty five, if I’d got started early and if my fertility were higher than that of your average rock in the desert) had a particular cross to bear though that was much worse than that.
When I said “I came after” I meant it had already started in my generation, though we had it slightly better due to societal inertia. This is good and bad. Good, because we can understand how effed up things can be. Bad because we who are now grandparent age have internalized “everyone goes through this. They just need to fight harder” and then blame the young more. Which is very very bad, because the system has corroded further since our time and because if we were ejected into a world that was fast-setting jelly holding us down, they were ejected into a world that’s quick-set cement and with fewer resources than we had because education has also decayed further. Oh, no further than that. Let me tell you as someone who taught her kids around and after school, I saw some decay in what they got, but didn’t realize how dire things were till I met their friends. (Look, my kids are genetic, compulsive over achievers and tend to associate with their like. This means I’ve met the creme de la creme of their generation at least in their circles. The depth not just of their ignorance, but what they learned that is bizarrely possibly even intentionally wrong is unfathomable. You stare into it and the abyss answers back “Wut?”)
And every one of these kids now entering middle aged is still struggling more than we did in our twenties, because all of American (and we’re still the best of the west) society has been weaponized AGAINST them. They weren’t allowed to take crappy teen jobs to build resilience AND defray their college expenses AND give them a resume. (My kids made up jobs, but it wasn’t enough. There is no such thing as a paper route at 12 anymore. There isn’t even mowing the lawns for money. There isn’t EVEN a lemonade stand, because if they catch you they’ll fine you within an inch of your life.) We treat them like lepers and blame them for what they don’t know. AND to put the cherry on the cake, the project of our (spits) “elites” for the last fifty years has been to outsource their jobs to foreigners either legal or illegal, either here or offshore, because it’s cheaper. It’s not that the kids expect to come in at middle management. It’s that there is nothing but the crappiest, most weaponized against humans jobs (Retail, now, where you don’t even know your schedule day to day but you’re still required to keep it, blindly, regardless of other commitments, even family and classes. No, it’s not just the kids whining. Ask some of the commenters who are very much adults and stuck in that how much fun it is.)
Then there is the “came after” thing. Look, I knew that I — already — didn’t have the education my dad or my brother had. And it’s not modernization, since that hadn’t hit in Portugal. I was born in sixty two at the very end. (No, not a boomer, for this and many many other reasons.) My brother is almost ten years older. My brother went through school in the same elite set of schools (his was the boy’s side) I attended later. (Mom maneuvered into it with faked addresses, etc. It was public school but it was also where most people went into college. Not a lot. It was by grades on a final, national, blind graded exam. But about 2 to 3% of our high schools made it in, compared to 0.5% of the general population.)
My brother learned Latin and (I THINK) a modicum of Greek in high school. Mathematics through Calculus. Serious physics and chemistry and all the rest. He came out of high school with an education our recent college graduates have no way of touching till maybe a Masters degree.
I came in well, he was advanced faster, so a full 10 years or more later. Latin was gone. Greek was gone. Only French was taught, we had to fight for me to get English. The rest? Cutesy things like sociology (Scientific Marxism really. Yes, Weaponized Envy Fantasies) had been brought in. The rest was still there. And I still graduated from high school with what would now be a “general knowlege” (Whatever they call those) college degree.
However, even back then, at the dawning of the eighties, I knew I’d only been educated to about my brother’s Middle School level. I KNOW. I read his books. (And tried to learn, but like all autodidacts I have holes the size of the grand canyon and don’t always know where.)
What happened? Well, I didn’t find out until I was reading a book on the “educational revolution” of the sixties, which I’d picked up at a bargain bin, because it was a couple of cents, and I read everything.
What happened was the boomers. No, not throwing shade on those of you of that generation. This was “activists” plus the bizarre idea at the time that the youth cohort would keep increasing, be a force in politics, and we should APPEASE them now, instead of making them learn and work. (You see this in Heinlein’s novels. I don’t remember in which high school students were striking for higher pay and no homework. Yes, satire, but it tells you what people at the time expected of the future.) Turns out the “Student revolts” of the sixties and seventies weren’t all anti-war or for the transmission of lice among the unwashed. They also demanded and got a watering down of the curriculum, the retiring of strict professors and well “Credentials for nothing and our degrees for a lot of money but no effort.” The truth was the colleges were, of course, cool with that. because more money, less work, more power to bureaucrats.
The “revolution” propagated downward, particularly as a lot of the graduates of those times became the teachers my generation got in middle and high school. (Which explained the plague of “Call me John. I’m just one of you. You’ll teach me more than I teach you” we started getting hit with in sixth and seventh grade, and which MULTIPLIED.)
Wait a minute, Sarah, you’ll say. You were in PORTUGAL. How did that propagate? Are you really going to ask that? For my entire life — my parents’ entire life and dad is in his late 90s — the future has come from America, and everywhere has decided whatever America did was the thing to do (all while hating America. Humans, amiright?) For illustration see covidiocy. And also foreigners tend to do it harder and more stupidly. When America Sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia.
So I know what it’s like to be ejected into the world half-taught. And husband and I had to fight his parents to get them to understand the “get a job, be loyal, they’ll be loyal in return and you’re set for life.” We came into the work force in 1980. Most people got jobs after a long period of working crappy temporary jobs. Thing is there were A LOT of temporary jobs (this was largely before outsourcing, so that was the hack to exploit people at lower wages.) And retail was not scheduled “at need” by computers, so you got your schedule a week or two even ahead. Pay was crappy, but the jobs were predictable. You could navigate two or — when I was in retail I had a friend who did this and so did her husband. For extra difficulty they also coordinated it so that one of them was always home with the baby at any given time. Heroes, both, but this isn’t even possible now. Now it would take a daily miracle — three retail jobs.
On top of that these people, adult citizens, who vote, were ejected into the world with absolutely no understanding of fundamental realities of life, like biology, history and economics.
“But they could learn” you’ll say. And I agree. They could. The amount they’re TRYING to learn is sweet and overwhelming and will bring a tear to your eye, honestly. Not all of these kids, of course (the killer of Iryna Zarutska is the age of one of my kids, after all) but by and large, the decent kids of these generations are fighting like heck to patch up their knowledge and learn what should have been their civilizational birthright.
This is very easy when it comes to things like “how to repair a toilet flush mechanism” or “how to cook beef Stroggonoff” or even “how do I maintain my lawn.”
For other stuff… well, as a mostly autodidact the biggest problem is you don’t even know what you don’t know. Latin and Greek, say are easy to figure out you should know, so you could read the foundational texts of the West in the original. Learning is a little harder, because all languages are harder in isolation. (It has occurred to me I should start a study group for these on Discord. It might help me.) But the other stuff? Do you know how many times I think I’ve researched something to the Nth degree for a book, and then a beta (Or, heaven forbid, a reader after it’s published) says “Sarah, your entire second half of the book is impossible. Don’t you know that x y z didn’t happen like that/works like this?” And no. I’d never stumbled on it in years of research, and honestly had no idea I was even missing it.
When it comes to things like history though (or economics. DEAR LORD economics) the ground shifts. Yes, there’s a lot of information and 99% of it is poisonously wrong. And they came out of school without enough information to know this is crazy cakes. AND with a ground in, bone-level distrust of the institutions that taught them or employ them.
I’m now coming across videos by thirty somethings on youtube who think Tartaria and the mud floods were real and really happened and are being covered up. This is not a joke. PEOPLE BELIEVE IT. And not stupid people.
Which brings me to the point of this post, over two thousand words in. We keep saying they weren’t taught history, but this isn’t true. They were taught history. That’s why they’re in a permanent panic about Nazis and completely missidentify what Nazis were and what they did.
Look, if you don’t live with a computer person: there’s a new thing called Vibe Coding, aided by AI.
I’m not going to diss WELL DONE vibe coding (Yes it exists, and I really am not dissing it, you can sit down Matt and Ian.) My husband assures me there is such a thing (so does ESR and he should know.) and it saves you time and is amazing.
For the rest of you: it is where you give the AI code instructions in plain languate, then use the code given. (This is grossly simplified. Again, sit down Matt and Ian. I’m not TEACHING vibe coding. You want to explain it better, send me articles.) It is best applied by those who understand code, because they can see where there are bits that do nothing or are just bad, and fix it.
It’s disastrous in the hands of those who don’t know what they’re doing.
The kids, and by kids I mean anyone younger than 60 were LARGELY (in the US there remained pockets of competency) taught vibe-history.
I was, but only for the twentieth century. The rest was much deeper, though honestly I don’t even know if I was taught it deeply in school, or it just felt that way because by the end of middle school I’d run through my father’s considerable historical library both fiction and non fiction.) When I came to the states I found an incredible emphasis on bullet points, dates and names, with absolutely NO understanding of what was behind it. You learned the “points” of the declaration of independence, but not where the ideas came from, why they were codified that way, what the opposition was. NOTHING. I believe this was because it was the early eighties, and it was easier to grade multiple choice, so teaching was mangled to fit multiple choice. (I could be wrong.)
OTOH I suspect the 20th century vibe history was intentional. I remember learning that the Nazis were racists. That they killed “inferior races” (And Jews. even at the time I remember a long argument with a teacher on “How the heck can they be considered either a race or inferior. A few brave souls in my form backed me. This was in Portugal.) that they wore impeccable uniforms and were all about the public order and cleanliness. And that Nazis preferred blonds. That they had death camps. That they were very hard on criminals (defined as anyone who disobey them.) AND were nationalists. They were evil.
Meanwhile, the communists were the opposite of the Nazis, and wanted everyone to be equal and free, loved all races, and were the good guys.
Yes, the holocaust was mentioned. (Not soaked in, as it was for my kids, but mentioned.) BUT note that it was all a bolus.
Since this was vibe-history with no context, you exited school absolutely convinced that any two of the Nazi characteristics was the road to hell. If you dressed impeccably and were blond, you were probably a Nazi. If you preferred to date blonds, you were a Nazi. If you favored order and justice upon criminals you were a Nazi. If you admired the military and read military fiction or bios (guilty) you were DEFINITELY a Nazi. And if you loved your own nation, its culture, its customs, its people? NAZI. Dangerous Nazi, as you were probably just waiting to exterminate everyone else.
Meanwhile the Communists were kind of like hippies with fewer lice (maybe.) They were into free love and hated no one, and just wanted everyone to be equally rich and happy. THIS DURING AND AFTER THE STALIN PURGES.
The reason this was so badly vibe-taught-history was two fold. What the Nazis were and what they did was the result of ideas — particularly state control, eugenics and state planned economy — which were everywhere at the time. The allies were slightly less tainted than the Nazis and hadn’t reached terminal state. (Looks at Canada and Great Britain who are getting there.) You couldn’t teach how the Nazis had become what they were without indicting FDR. So instead you pointed at other, incidental characteristics, and screamed. If that failed you pointed at Hitler and said they’d elected (doubtful, it’s more complicated than that) a madman and that’s what put them over the top.
As far as I know, this is still taught exactly this way. The kids have no way WHY the Nazis were objectionable. They just know they were and these characteristics accrue. Which is why so many of the young and the infantile old lose their minds every time we have a President who loves his country or works for the benefit of his people, and double lose it if he dresses well, or is married to a blond.
Because they know nothing but the code they were handed and which they don’t understand, of COURSE they think Trump is Hitler. To understand why he isn’t they need a short course in real history.
They need a course that makes them understand that given a state for whom citizens are possessions of the state, it always ends the same way and in the same tired old atrocities, whether they call themselves Nazis or Canadians. If the state thinks of citizens as objects to be manipulated for the benefit of the ever more controlling state, sooner or later eugenics creeps in (I’m looking at you Possessed Spain) and starts batch killing the old, the poor, the lame, the weird, and yes, any minority the state designates evil-bad according to what hat the state put on that morning. No madman needed. That mind set seems to make everyone a little mad and glad to sleep walk into hell.
And this is the problem. Of all the horrible things we’ve done to the young, teaching them Vibe-history is the worst. (And now it goes all the way to the prehistory and the mythical communist, matriarchal pre-history for which there not only isn’t any proof, but there’s plenty of evidence against.)
They’re navigating this world by maps painted by a madman with his own shit on the wall of an asylum.
They don’t even know what they don’t know.
The miracle is not that so many of them sound insane. The miracle is that the MAJORITY doesn’t. For that we must thank their innate distrust of institutions.
So what can we do? Teach. Teach as much as you can, by every means you can, patiently, gently, as respectfully as you can.
Yes, we’re old and tired (even those of you in your thirties. This timeline ages a sane person) and this is a very difficult job. It’s much easier to set fire to everything and hope paradise emerges from the ashes.
I have bad news. We’re here because people have been setting fire to everything for a hundred years. At this point, it’s hard to reach beyond the ash, the cinders and the radioactive cultural waste.
More fire will do nothing except make it harder.
Yes, you can walk away. Sure. Why not. You can wash your hands of the human project and walk away.
BUT you are as human as I am. If you value any shred of humanity, or our potential, of our future, and want our descendants to have a chance? Teach.
I’m not asking you to bring an history book to every casual encounter, or to go on a long-winded rant as I tend to on this blog.
I’m asking you to try to put in a word of truth and perspective. Here and there. As opportunity offers. And if you can, incorporate it in your art, your writing, games you create, anything really to help the medicine go down. No, not preaching, just the world view.
Truth has a force of its own. And the generations after mine are starved for truth. DYING for it, sometimes literally.
Stop calling them bad names and stomping on the hands trying to grasp the top of the cliff. Help them up and teach them how to stand.
So they can walk into the future.
According To Hoyt 
In addition to that, the “educated idiots” throw around the term fascist without knowing what fascism was and How It Was Different from Socialism/Communism.
One European Idiot (not on the Bar or here) talked about countries that didn’t hate Putin enough as fascist.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The only thing worse than an Educated Idiot is a Credentialed Idiot. 😧
Fortunately, I served my sentence in Public School just before Jimmeh created the Department Of (Mal)Education by decree. Today, colleges have to give high school graduates remedial courses in arithmetic I learned in the 5th grade.
We are drowning in Weaponized Stupidity.
———————————
Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.
LikeLiked by 3 people
On educated idiots and/or credentialed idiots:
When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling in his seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of the gathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated at one of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded with Kwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. He was a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. He knew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system, 23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22.8 Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around Gettler Beta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsating variable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Beta orbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn’t believe there was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was.
— H. Beam Piper, Oomphel in the Sky
LikeLike
… and your chicks for free.
Sometimes we are all in Dire Straits.
LikeLiked by 5 people
/cues up mom
Chicks are free?
Are you kidding?
My crazy daughter with all the kids won’t even follow my amazing advice and hatch kicks, and they are like ten bucks each!
She just needs to hatch laying chicks, these prices are insane!
(only half joking, my mother has done this rant a few times….)
LikeLike
I would note, that yes Matt and Ian are correct to make some assertions about ‘done right’, but Ian basically apprenticed under an expert instead of going to university.
University courses on programming are instructed by PhDs and grad students, and it is absolutely possible to get a PhD in a ‘should be able to teach programming’ field, and still be unable to teach it.
re: articles, Chas Martin’s ‘Old Programmer Notes’ helped me out a ton a year or two back, but on a bit of conventional programming that I had never learned, and which has been helping block me for at least a decade.
Vibe history, adn vibe economics, are hurting more than just the young men.
One of the know how bits for good vibe programming that I am missing is writing specifications.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Matt — Dan’s oldest nephew — is a self taught genius. I should introduce him to Ian, really.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The world will never be the same.
LikeLiked by 1 person
ABSOLUTELY. And it will be glorious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Damn it Sarah! I read a third of the way through any one of your posts, and I want to comment on it. Then I read the next 2 paragraphs, and I want to comment on that instead. And it goes on.
I learned in business to never send an email with more than one question that I needed an answer to. If I did, I only got the first question answered and the rest were ignored. So I had to send 4 emails instead of one. My un-twittered mind rebelled, but I learned to rein it in.
So first, congratulations on that great review. We’re all (well most of us) writers here, and we know how great it is to read someone writing about our work who actually gets it and likes it. Super bonus if they got that inside joke that I dropped on page 137 just because it amused me.
LikeLiked by 3 people
German is crazy. The verbs of each dependent clause must be collected to the end of the sentence and then placed in order there to be reconstituted in your mind at the points where they belong. And yet, Germans still insist on writing paragraph-long sentences. If you had to learn to keep all that in your head to comprehend every sentence, you’d understand why there are so many German engineers and scientists. It’s like crosswords and logic puzzles just to read German.
At least Martin Luther made sure they got the spelling simple, unlike our own bat-guano mutt of a language. I learned to spell German correctly in two weeks. English? Seventy years and counting. Spell-check help me! English is the only language I know that has separate words for the thing that you eat and the animal that it comes from because of 1066 and all that. The French nobles ate the beef, the Anglo-Saxon peasants raised the cattle, und so weiter.
LikeLike
I can’t comment on English. I fell in love with it in three months, and have been madly in love since. So I find it easy. Misspellings? I misspell in SEVEN languages. All of them. It’s my brain, not the language.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I took French and Spanish in school and had no problems. I learned some German on my own, to the limit I could in those pre-internet days. And even a bit of Japanese, at least in Romaji and Kanji. (which would be basically illiterate, but at least spoken Japanese is very easy for native English speakers)
Italian stopped me cold, though. It looked like a warped fun-house version of Spanish, and I never could get past the “you’re just pulling my leg, right?” response to it.
LikeLike
Huh. Wonder if people applied that to the Clintons and I missed it?
As for teaching, here is where I put in my two cents: https://carolinefurlong.wordpress.com/2026/04/06/feral-tropes-a-listicle-for-spotting-feral-tropes-bad-boys-bad-girls-catting-around-and-how-bonding-works-for-the-uninitiated-part-13/. Anyone is free to share links and/or drop a comment whenever they want. Leave no man behind, right? Consider this some useful materiel!
LikeLiked by 1 person
No, because they were crypto communist therefore “good” DUH. (Rolls eyes.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah. Makes sense. :rolls eyes:
LikeLike
I am either the last boomer or the first Gen X’er (I feel more like an X’er for sure). I see signs of a revival all around and most of the younger people I know are pretty solid. Tell me if I am old fashioned – what I really long for is some leadership! So much of the history I read revolves around leadership, people who showed physical and moral courage in a time of crisis, people who saw the future and convinced others to follow them. Examples include George Washington, Chesty Puller, Ronald Reagan. Trump may be dramatically better than the last few presidents but he is a horrible leader. He’s more like chemotherapy – he’ll kill the cancer off but will also a lot of healthy cells and make you sick for a while. Much needed but no vision for the future and certainly not convincing the middle or the left to follow him. So is the desire for a leader childish or is that leader (or leaders) coming soon?
LikeLike
We needed Trump, or someone like him. Someone to plow through and expose the rot and BS. I like Vance. I like Rubio. They will do great on their own merits. But they needed someone to be the Bull in the China Shop, to break things, first. They (or someone) will still have to deal with Iran, etc. But it will be a different Iran.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I was always a gen Xer. They didn’t absorb my year into boomers till the late 80s.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Trump is NOT a horrible leader. Don’t fall for the razmataz. He’s doing a lot of sensible things behind the strange flash.
BUT Lord, I wish we could finish Iran. We’ll be here again in two years. He’s better at not listening to stupid advice this term, but still. I don’t know if what he’s hearing is real.
Also,, no, the longing for a good leader is human. However, I have a clue for you: Most leaders are ONLY great in retrospect.
Even P.J O’Rourke called Reagan “his dumbness” during his second term. Think of that when you think Trump ain’t doing well.
LikeLike
The “Baby Boom” was originally 1942-1947-ish. Then it got extended out into the 1950s, and then the early 1960s, and I’ve seen endpoints as late as 1965, which would likely have been the *children* of the original cadre.
The term has been stretched until it has lost all of its original meaning, and now means “old people we don’t like.”
Vox Day is one of the outspoken ‘anti-Boomers’, including supporting euthanasia. He was born in 1968. At this rate he’ll be a Boomer himself soon enough.
LikeLiked by 1 person
US births peaked in 1957 with a short second wave through 1961. They began to decline rapidly after 64/65. So they date the end of the boom to 64/5. IM technically a boomer by that measure being born in ‘62 and the wife, born in 66 a Gen Xer. But I’m an eldest child and she, by a large margin, the youngest. Her childhood experiences align more with the baby boom than mine do. The boomers got the Beatles, Woodstock, and Vietnam. I got Disco, Ford to City: Drop Dead, and Iran. they had growth, we had relative decline. The boomers saw everything built new, I was in the last of the tranches before they started to wind down until the boomers bred and caused the echo boom, which is now unwinding in its turn.
That said, I did learn the word F-ck, from my father, at Sloatsberg Service Area gas station on the NY Thruway coming home from upstate during Woodstock. MY Da did not like hippies at all, my mother had been cooped up “on vacation” alone in a small cabin with three small children during the torrential rain that accompanied Woodstock along with the Flu epidemic that was raging, My da had been working and came up to pick us up. HIs welcome was NOT very friendly and the car ride was silent other than my younger sister bouncing off the roof of the car, as she did. Still, it’s nice to know exactly when one learned to swear, not many people can say that 😀
LikeLiked by 1 person
My dad– 1950– was in half-empty classrooms and is STILL annoyed at being grouped with the baby boom.
LikeLike
Congratulations on the excellent review. Much better than the one I left for each of the three.
Vibe programming. I can see where the new options are helpful, even though not programming anymore. Can also see where they are a massive pitfall if one does not know what they are doing. As I said with UPG (Universal Program Generator – For C, for Falcon handhelds, after Symbol and Intermec were dropped): “For non-programmers of C. Not for non-developers who don’t know what a stack is, and why stack overflow is bad.” Last release compensated for those who tried. At least the one path that caused stack overflows (what they were doing was NOT recursive programming). Longer term? No idea. I got cut in the downsizing not long after (to be *fair, “my project” was done, no upgrades forthcoming, and downsizing due to bankruptcy).
The one-employer, at the same job, forever? That is long gone. Few get to stay at the same type of job these days. Retail, maybe. Hubby stayed with the same employer, same job, for 35 years. But not without lack of work stretches every year, from a few weeks to months. I didn’t. Was lucky that the second job type stayed the same, but definitely not the same employers. Even my sister who worked for a major tech firm for 25 years, wasn’t immune. Same employer, until golden parachute (1st layoffs ever!!!!), but she was applying and interviewing different jobs every 18 to 24 months. Nieces who now work for a major corporate retail provider out of Portland (gee, who might that be?) are doing the same. Sure, same “employer”, but they are applying, interviewing, and changing jobs, usually under “restructuring”. So far that has mostly meant raises for them, but lateral moves to keep their jobs is possible too. At least I had 6 years between job interviewing (last job was 12 years). Note, I despise job interviews.
(*) Not that at the time I wanted to be “fair”. Nor did I appreciate that if I’d had hung on a little longer that the job I did get, finally, I probably wouldn’t have applied for. They only used an PO Box for the applications. Not even a company name. But, off long enough so, “What the heck. Can’t be any worse that the other ghost applications.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Your reviews were GLORIOUS and I am very grateful.
LikeLiked by 1 person
When I started as an electrical engineer at a large semiconductor firm in 1974, the rule of thumb for EEs was 3 different employers in the first 5 years, with the third more-or-less lifetime. I was a process engineer (sort of chemical engineering) for a few months until a recession forced me into the same department’s product engineering slot. Quit after a couple years (department boss was infamous for his management by tantrum), and went to another semi company. About 2.5 years later, a headhunter called and I went to HP. The job kept evolving, but was largely product, with a strong emphasis on test engineering. Got caught in the Dot Com bust circa 2001, did a consultant gig for most of a year, then retired.
A close friend decided to job hop a lot. To my recollection, he had 8 different employers in the 13 years of his career, with each switch entailing quitting for better money. (He said. Dunno if correct.) He managed to get fired from his last job, and then discovered that his resume was radioactive with a side order of toxic sludge. AFAIK, he was the only person who was surprised. He went off to get an MBA, and discovered that his “wide” experience didn’t outweigh his job history. The last time I heard from him, he was behind the counter at a Burger King, living in a homeless shelter. Sigh.
LikeLike
Yes. My “job hopping” was technically frowned on by interviewers, until they asked for former job references (I had former colleagues for references). The polite, “Yes. If you can find someone to call.” Okay with IP, it was call the southern state’s corporate office for employment verification along with “moving out of the PNW” (and most PNW not advisable) “not an option”. I didn’t “jump” jobs. Jobs went away because the company or division went away.
LikeLike
Tartaria is a kludge to fill in the knowledge gaps due to the fallout from the Finno-Korean Hyperwar. Prove me wrong. ;)
LikeLike
You’re a baaaaad man. Go to the corner for fifteen minutes without a book.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Seriously though–and this is purely a tangent–I’ve always found those “False/Hidden History” idea fascinating. Utterly batshit when taken straight, but fascinating. (For some reason the Rooskies like to go armpits-deep in that thinking. Not sure why.)
Maybe a response to how our civilization has been repeatedly wrecked and rebuilt beyond recognition over the past century or so? Could be a fascinating story idea in there…but you have plenty on your plate as it is, so I shan’t mention it…
LikeLiked by 2 people
I too find them fascinating, but tartaria was an open joke when it started.
LikeLike
It looks like we’ll never know why the Koreans dropped that asteroid on Recife. Brazil wasn’t even a combatant – at least not yet – but Recife is just a big lake now, and most of Pernambuco state is now a national park since the shockwave flattened everything within a couple hundred miles.
For that matter, we’re not even completely sure it was the Koreans who did it. It came from the direction one of of their asteroid mining operations, but they were still claiming it was just a random Tunguska Event and they had no responsibility for it, and why would they attack Brazil anyway? Then the Finns launched their big strike at Korea, and unless there’s some evidence to be found out there in the Belt, we’ll never know since both Finland and Korea effectively ceased to exist after that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Like birds, Finland and Korea don’t exist.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I’ve heard there was an Avengers storyline in the 90s where Vietnam ceases to exist. Yes, the whole country. I need to read it just to find out why.
LikeLike
birds and Ohio.
LikeLike
“THEY DID HOWEVER INHERIT AN EDUCATION SYSTEM AND INSTITUTIONS THAT CAN’T BE TRUSTED. NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT.”
-Word. Preach it.
“In answer to her hopes, my brother drafted a newspaper article from 2030 where I’d been declared Persona non grata in every country in the world, including Portugal.” – Mad cackling
“Retail, now, where you don’t even know your schedule day to day but you’re still required to keep it, blindly, regardless of other commitments, even family and classes.”
-Can confirm. In fact, they wanted me to come in today, despite the fact that I’d worked most of my available hours for the week (weeks end on Friday). We’re not supposed to go over 38.5, if we actually qualify for overtime it goes on our record and more than 3 instances can be cause to get fired.
The SECOND time they called today I said, “X called earlier, I said no, I have to be up at 4 AM tomorrow, so NO.” Up at 4 AM because of their next schedule, no less.
“And husband and I had to fight his parents to get them to understand the “get a job, be loyal, they’ll be loyal in return and you’re set for life.” ” – Yeah, my parents never did get that wasn’t going to work. And because we don’t even know our schedule day to day, sometimes, we can’t get a second job without risking losing both.
“When I came to the states I found an incredible emphasis on bullet points, dates and names, with absolutely NO understanding of what was behind it.” – This. I’ve had to self-teach myself SO Much history. Which, of course, means I don’t always know who’s a reasonable scholar and who’s out to lunch.
“I’m asking you to try to put in a word of truth and perspective. Here and there. As opportunity offers. And if you can, incorporate it in your art, your writing, games you create, anything really to help the medicine go down. No, not preaching, just the world view.”
Thumbs up Doing my best! I have stuff in the works, and currently mulling a UF fantasy where one of the characters grew up in a serpent-handling church. Because, among other things, there are reasons that particular faith was created in America.
LikeLiked by 2 people
From what I’ve seen, Costco is about the only retail giant, that is reasonable. Even at that it takes years to get on full-time. Home Depot is supposed (their own publicity) to be good, for veterans. There is a local chain, employee owned, that is supposed to be good. All three I’m listening to employees, and noting how many elderly starts and stay. OTOH all do have heavy turn over. Because of the working conditions? Time to get on full-time? Pay? The fact all are retail? IDK Out of all of us, my folks, my sisters, their spouses, my in-laws, only one worked retail (management, so counts?). His employer sure wasn’t loyal back.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Several years ago, I worked in the Corporate Headquarters of a retail operation (in Data Processing).
One of their “Corporate Phrases” was “Retail is a people’s business and we value our people”.
One of the “side jokes” was “we aren’t people, we’re Associates”.
Oh, upper management did a survey of their employees and found that employee moral was higher in the stores than it was in the Corporate Headquarters.
One of the “side jokes” when that was reported was “moral was lower because we had to deal with upper management. [Nasty Grin]
LikeLiked by 2 people
We had a WinCo open up in Flyover Falls this March. They hired a lot of people from other stores, with the Fred Meyer (Kroger) and the Safeway (was an Albertson’s) heavily hit.
Haven’t been in there for shopping (though my SIL in Nevada says the produce is great), but was talking about it with a couple of the cashiers at the large independent store. (Actually a tiny chain, Medford, Grants Pass, and Flyover Falls) Both told me (with quite a bit of pride) that none of their coworkers went to WinCo. I know that I see the same faces a lot at the independent, while Fred’s has had major turnover. (Part of that was fallout from the strike last year, but it’s accelerated.)
LikeLiked by 1 person
WinCo is regional, employee owned. Stores are too bright. I have gotten bad/moldy bread from them. There are savings over Kroger (Freds). But pennies, unless you buy store brands. Pennies do add up. Newest WinCo is across the street, by Petsmart, which is a stop anyway. So I could shop Costco, Petsmart, WinCo, Petmart, and Freds, without adding to the cost of running around fuel. But, that is too exhausting for me these days.
LikeLike
The big independent store has better produce (modulo bananas–Chiquita bananas here don’t seem as good as they were in Cali in the 1990s) than Fred’s. Will check out WinCo, but am likely to stick with Fred’s. The one here is half grocery/half department store, with housewares, electronics, and a whole lot of clothing. (It’s slightly different in Medford. At least one of them is lacking the general electronics section, but did have a partial aisle with cables. USB cables don’t last forever…)
First Tuesdays (senior discount), we’ll buy a bunch of stuff at Fred’s, but the rest of the month, it’s yogurt, maybe cottage cheese, and Dole bananas. I’ve learned to skip Costco bananas, and now baker potatoes. Trader Joe’s has much better baker potatoes, though the price is high. OTOH, the previous Costco purchase generated a lot of potato scrap for the compost.
LikeLike
I find so much to agree with in this post. They’ve been filling the kids full of bad, incomplete or just downright false history for too long. I tried to make sure my kids got a good background in actual history such as I was taught and added to on my own growing up. They came out okay and I see encouraging signs in a couple of my grandkids who like to search out things that they aren’t getting from school.
I’ve also noticed that a number of the kids I worked with, in particular the high schoolers and ones just out of school, in my last few years part timing at wally world seemed to be more independent minded and had a healthy dose of skepticism about anything coming from “official” sources. Such as the mass new media or public figures. Sure, there are too many who still fall into line with whatever they are told to believe but there are a lot who question things and want to learn more before committing to any current craze.
LikeLike
I don’t see that as an autodidact thing.
Did you know the Pilgrims discovered America? John Glenn was the first man in space? That sort of thing. How about George Washington and the cherry tree? All taught as absolute fact.
LikeLike
turns out George Washington and the cherry tree WERE probably true.
LikeLike
Elaborating, from memory:
The folks who wrote the original story were doing the “Talk to folks about George as a kid” thing.
The folks who ‘debunked’ it went looking for like historical citizenship records level proof, and didn’t find it.
Protip, the “story wasn’t circulated until 20 years after it happens” doesn’t work so well if it was a cute kid story for a guy who became famous.
LikeLike
The thought occurred to me during the no kings weekend waste that if Trump actually had designs on being a dictator or tyrant, he would have stayed in the Democrat party instead of switching to Republican. His chances there would have been much better.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The Democratic Party was already full-up with established nomenklatura, and Trump was just one of many billionaires who wrote checks to hobnob with the political class. Chances of him ever gaining political traction in the Democratic Party would have been slim.
After Hillary insulted him at that dinner, he basically bought himself a Republican nomination out of spite.
LikeLike
It was Obama that insulted him. IIRC, it was right after Trump made a fuss about Obama’s birth certificated during the 2012 election, forcing Obama to finally produce one (note that I’m avoiding the discussion over whether the certificate was legitimate; the important point is that Trump talking about it forced Obama to finally produce a piece of paper, which he had avoided doing up until then).
LikeLiked by 1 person
—
On the contrary, by the time I left high school in the 1970s, we were *taught* that. Well, maybe low-level management, but anything that looked like work or production was severely discouraged, as in “counseling sessions”. Except for forestry, which for some demented reason they were rabid about.
According to what was taught in my school, no job was worth having unless you were *some* kind of manager. I doubt it’s much different today; a friend’s adult daughter is a ‘manager’ at a fast food chain. She’s a manager. Every employee that lasts more than two months is a ‘manager’. All chiefs and no Indians, basically. Sure, it’s just a job title, but they’d probably have even more trouble filling positions without that label.
LikeLiked by 1 person
That’s hilarious. I was discouraged from Forestry. Hard. Six years, until I graduated … In Forestry. Too stubborn to listen, darn it. Not that I’m sorry exactly. I was not going into programming in the mid-’70s. Not even though I ended up programming. Not a chance; not in the ’70s.
LikeLike
I’m allergic to everything, and “outdoors” was not my preferred environment. Pollen, bugs, dirt, sunlight. On the list of potential careers I would consider, that would be close to the bottom. Yet they insisted my test scores showed “aptitude” for it. Not no, but NO.
On the other hand, later I found out everyone I knew had been “counseled” to try to push them into forestry. I’ve wondered if there was Federal money involved somehow, or if some forestry company had bribed the schools. Train up enough newbies to compete for the same job pool, you can offer rock-bottom wages, right?
LikeLike
I know the smaller timber towns were pushing forestry scholarships on anyone that made the grades. Since they were working seasonally for the USFS out of HS (a program), that made sense. Know of one who had a scholarship Fall ’75 (worked summer ’75 with them). Summer ’76, they’d already quit college (how long they lasted? IDK). One of my classmates, eventual apartment roommate, and one of my group for our final Forestry project class, had one too (off a different district). She completed (lost contact mid-90s).
LikeLike
My high school (I graduated in 1970) was huge (graduation class 1100), so had a wide distribution of intellects. I was in the not-quite-Honors track (“Superior”, they called it); no Calculus in Senior year, and the science track officially ended with Physics in Junior year. (AP Chem was available as an earlybird class. I passed–sleep sounded much better.)
Still, Sophomore year, I signed up for Drafting and Metal Shop. My advisor (who seemed to have gotten the college track kids) was horrified and tried to refuse. I might have needed my father to give the guy a clue, but I got the courses. Fit in well enough–I knew the punchline to enough dirty jokes to fit in. (Odds and Greasers? Whodathunkit, but it worked.)
LikeLike
Son ran into that. He was college bound and had the AP Chemistry, Physics, and Calculus. But he also wanted the current shop class. Everyone took it at least once. It was also the physical science class. Part of that class was building an electric go cart, that if they got done, got to *race the completed carts on the racing circuits, but they didn’t start until February. Seniors who took it as a shop class, started the electric carts in September and were ready to race by the first regional race. His HS was the only non-club team, as well as the only team who built, the majority (there were **two non-scratch builds) of the carts from scratch every year.
Suspended (duh) 2020. Is class restarted? IDK
(*) If had a driver’s license. Even tho not racing on streets (laid out course on parking lots). Big finale was the Portland Raceway.
(**) One owned by the instructor. The other by a former student’s family, who loaned the cart back to the class every year.
LikeLike
Re the Gulag and the purges not even being mentioned – the camps of the gulag archipelago were never liberated, so there’s no newsreel footage or video, and “The Gulag Archipelago” is not on any high school reading list I have ever seen. The huge number of people who got a bullet to the back of the head in the basement cells of the Lubyanka only ever had words written about them in Cheka and then KGB bookkeeping, and in CIA and MI6 debrief reports from defectors, never in any Hollywood movie or miniseries treatment that made it to screen.
The Party faithful in Hollywood made multiple “Nazi are bad, mkay?” Star-studded extravaganzas, but somehow neglected to make any “The Commies are bad as well, with a higher global body count, y’know?” to balance things out.
Breitbart said politics are downstream of culture, and leftist cultural capture skewed that Overton Window for the masses that don’t embark on multi-book rabbit-hole dives into history. With no mass market visual media, it might as well not exist.
This is why fighting cultural capture matters. The loons we’ve got running the writers rooms and executive suites of Tinseltown now are just the decayed remnant of the true believer cadre who assaulted and took the Hollywood Hills originally, and look at the dreck that yields. That matters because they position that window. They decide what scripts fail to get greenlit, and what gets hyped and signs the stars. So everything from the pure Soviet script agitprop of “The Day After” way back while RR was president to the scope of required “diversity” on what’s produced now is what the generations coming along first see and internalize.
The miniseries “Holocaust” was a monster event back in 1978, producing monster ratings. It could be greenlit and stars assigned because the Glorious Red Army liberated the Polish camps. “Roots” was another, showing how America was bad. But that miniseries production of “The Gulag Archipelago” somehow failed to ever be made.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Integrity is floating in the Pacific. Saying it was a textbook landing g.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Yes! Sometimes “boring” is absolutely magnificent.
Still be very interesting, some days down the road, to see what the Artemis II heat shield looks like, whether just toasty-scorched or with more mystery “popcorn” gouges (like Artemis I).
We’re back!
LikeLike
I was following the NASA livestream during the blackout period of the re-entry. Finally was able to breathe normally after comms came back.
I grew up with Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, but much prefer the SpaceX model. Let the exciting failures damage equipment and not risk lives.
LikeLike
It’s nice that there is some Integrity in government, even if only nominally.
Welcome home, Lunanauts. Arenauts next, please.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“In our current fight, we have already won. What remains is mop-up which, as we all know, is the most dangerous portion of the action, because the enemy has nothing to lose and will go all out to take even one of us.”
Even worse, the enemy includes members of an ideology that are convinced that burning civilization down will lead to the emergence of the glorious utopia. The true believers will be quite happy to sacrifice themselves if it means that they can take us with them.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts.
It says that women cannot ride stallions because they attack at the smell of blood. (From memory, I’m too lazy to find where Boychild has taken it; he’s been warned.)
I brought it down stairs to my mom, asked, she read it, and … er, I’ll paraphrase, no.
She did note that wild stallions will sometimes act like women on a gelding are a mare they can steal for their herd, but her best horse ever was a stallion. (He actually favored women and children for “can do no wrong”, but I digress.)
A lot of the resources we can access?
Were from before it was possible to go online and check JSTOR or something.
LikeLiked by 2 people
won’t appear on the news but there are massive protests throughout the Republic of Ireland now into their 4th day. Fuel shortages, higher prices, green nude eel taxes, the government refused any tax relief, farmers and truckers closed the roads. Police sent in, escalation, Army sent in, further escalation (several officers refused orders). Now the crowds are large and widespread. POlice vehicles are running out of fuel because all the fuel stations are blocked and the owners won’t serve them. The government is clueless as you’d expect and their climate change taxes go to fund a truly lavish patronage network. the dirty secret about the Republic of Ireland is how utterly corrupt it is and always has been from top to bottom.
Theres a very real chance of something more than disorder. the cousins I’ve spoken with are talking about the fact that the police re known to be tooling up and that the huge number of migrants are the underlying cause of as well as being at risk from any civil unrest. Everyone knows, but no one would say because it was social suicide to do so. There’s a large, vocal, concentrated, man-bun, woke commie class in Ireland along with a corrupt ruling class and a very corrupt police. Rumors are rampant. Ive gotten different stories from each of the three cousins ai talked to.
Police are, naturally, run by yet another lesbian with limited street time since there are no male cops left in the world who are qualified to hold high rank. Couple that with a working class that’s fed up, a police force unused to using arms, and an army divided against the state and civil disorder become possible and the probability of it shifting into something more becomes high. My study of civil wars shows utter incompetence among the police to be a key factor shifting unrest to war.
I’ll get updates in the morning and you’ll probably not see anything in the papers, but this is a big deal, so far.
LikeLiked by 1 person
There’s reports the protests are spreading. last report is Norway. Nothing will likely come of it, but the political map in Europe has been shifting since people are fed up.
LikeLike
There’s a remarkably stupid joke that goes “but the Protestants in the UK are competent, and can just take over, right?”
(I think that a sane competent military man in the UK would not conclude that now is a time to do something.)
LikeLike
Well said. We’re walking a very thin line, and the “kids these days” crowd doesn’t realize it. Yes, hard work and thrift are good, and yes, there are young people who need both. But I guarantee there are fewer of them than the people who toss around that advice think. And you lose someone forever if they’ve been giving it their all and your best advice is “Just try harder!”
That’s how socialism slips in through the cracks. “The system is rigged against you.” is more or less true. (Never mind that the socialists were the ones who did it.) “So take from the ‘Boomers’ who did it.” is an easy and pernicious next step. Young people are flirting with idiotic wealth redistribution ideas in part because they’ve heard so much bad, out-of-touch advice from their elders.
(There are plenty of youths who are jerks to the older generations, but indulging them isn’t as damaging. If brats badmouth their parents and grandparents, it’s annoying but not the end of the world. If curmudgeons drive the kids socialist by giving them bad advice, we’ve got a serious problem. It’s not fair, given that both sides of the argument are spouting a lot of nonsense, but the “Boomers” have a lot less leeway to be wrong.)
LikeLike
As someone who had a Boomer Mom and has a Boomer Dad, I can say that the ideals they grew up with during the ’60s are still going strong in his brain.
Get a job with the State of California and you trade job security for…well, a paycheck so crappy that I can’t find a room rental near work, let alone an apartment at the “third of paycheck” level.
And it’s an entry-level position. Again.
And costs keep going up.
And the E!Democrats and the E!Republicans have become the Uniparty, complete with the beaten wife who loves the fact that she has some power, sometimes.
…and the history people keep spewing at me resembles no history I’ve ever learned. Not even the Time-Life WWII books.
I really want off this planet now.
LikeLike