At some point someone on our side was maintaining that it’s silly to claim Nazis were leftist, because their approach to governance was more traditional and not at all like the Communists.

Me? I say it’s stupid to call something derived from Marxism, and that called itself socialism “right wing” — in the American sense — though the terms right and left are both inadequate for the battles taking place now. I also say that there is nothing more “traditional” than the end result of communism, which ends in a kakistocracy akin to capricious and not very smart tribal leaders, but with power over a much vaster land than most tribes. Which in turn causes a lot more deaths.

Leaving that aside, the “national socialists” — though the Nazis were a special and extreme case — did take a more traditional approach to improving humans.

Okay, first, let’s establish that most people who didn’t leave inside Marx’s head — that is all of humanity — understood and understands that utopia is impossible with humans as they are and have always been.

It is built into both philosophies derived from Marxism, the national socialists and the international socialists (but really secretly Russian Nationalists) the idea that humans must be improved.

The traditional form of this, appealing more to the national socialists, I guess because they tend to idolize farmers and pastoral idyll — as opposed to the international socialists who idolize factory workers. Note neither real farmers nor real factory workers are listened to by the so called “leaders”, these are just a philosophical ideal — is the approach taken by farmers from time immemorial, to improve the stock in farms.

The eugenics movement that was all the rage across Europe in the early 20th century, before the smoke from the death camps showed what a very bad idea it was, and which keeps rearing its ugly head was a manifestation of this. And it never really went away.

Early on it was brutal and clear. “Defectives” would be sterilized or killed, to put them out of general society’s misery. This would be done incrementally, till at the end of it, there would be, standing tall, an ideal humanity, which could be trusted to live in utopia, and– Bah. go read science fiction from before World War I. They don’t even try to disguise it.

The fact that they had the current lefties (who actually have a lot of happy fun eugenics ideas still, just buried) misunderstanding of culture for race, and looked at the end result of cultures as meaning some races are “defective” just made this all the more bizarre.

I don’t think I’m giving away any secrets when I say that Margaret Sanger formed planned parenthood to discourage the “inferior races” from reproducing. At the time, of course, this included not just black people, but everyone who could tan, and probably a lot of the Irish. And that part has now a definite “off” whiff in America. You see, it included the Jews too. And the GIs returned from WWII knowing exactly where that led.

But–

But it’s not the end of the eugenics project.

A lot of it in the mutated national socialism, like, say, in Portugal, the softer, gentler — spits — “will not feed you in batch lots to the ovens, but will make you very poor” version, which was also tried here by FDR (for the record, having read mom’s school books, not only did Salazar crib FDRs programs, he probably plagiarized FDR’s speeches. Bah.) still goes on.

Part of it is to discourage breeding. This crosses with the crazy insane bits of the sixties and seventies — from the left, psychology — which thought a society without sexual frustration would be utopia. Because it was repression that made you angry and mean, or whatever.

Okay, so, there is (still) a strong cultural push to screw a lot, but not reproduce. Both because this is supposed to keep the welfare classes (and if you’ve never found yourself in trouble, you don’t know how hard Welfare is to refuse — we did — or to come out of — some friends did) from reproducing (it’s not working, but that’s for other reasons) and because of our new idea of what makes ideal people. Ideal people, you see, are WANTED babies, and then coddled, watched, guided within an inch of their lives.

The number of times I’ve had someone explain to me that yeah, abortion to the day of birth is needed because not everyone is wanted, and therefore they’ll be born to a life of misery and be unhappy and probably criminals their entire life.

I’m here to tell you that I haven’t — yet — taken one of these “helpful” beings heart out through their mouths. Yet. But there’s always tomorrow.

You see, neither Dan nor I were wanted. Oh, he was. Until it was discovered — fortunately at the time this was impossible to do pre-birth — he was a boy. I just wasn’t. Mom had determined the way to wealth was to have only one child and lavish all resources on him. Don’t blame her too hard. After all the UN was making posters pushing that idea about that time.

And yet, shockingly, surprisingly, we’re both here, and even more shockingly, we’re both productive, happy, and the only type of criminal I am is “thought criminal” which should not exist in the US.

Further, anyone who looks at craigslist or other place where people list animals for re-adoption knows that no matter how wanted you are at birth, circumstances change. The number of breed dogs and cats being given up because the owners found out the having isn’t as much fun as the wanting. Or because an adopter died, got sick, or has to move to a place that won’t accept pets.

For children, let me assure you both the inconvenience and the changing circumstances, over 18 to 20 or 22 years (which seems to be as long as it takes — minimally — to launch them these days) are much, much higher.

So being wanted at birth is not something that determines trajectory in life. This is however something that is almost impossible to penetrate in the modern mind, and some of you are probably cringing that I dare question it.

Then there are various issues we test for, and which you’re encouraged to abort for. Look, I am not even judging those who decide to. I do understand the fears all too well, okay?

Every time I got pregnant, I compounded with fate for what defects I’d prefer. I know that sounds lunatic, but there it is. ”Blind? I can take blind.” Or “missing limb. We’ll figure it out.” Anything, anything but mentally defective, because I wasn’t sure I could bridge that or live with it.

So, of course, what we were told is that older son would be mentally defective and probably never be able to live independently — he says he’s mentally defective, because of the circumstances of the pregnancy. As for living independently, he tends to forget to eat vegetables if his wife doesn’t make him, but other than that he seems okay — and were encouraged to abort. That we didn’t was more that I couldn’t live with that EITHER, particularly after six years of infertility and having gone through a very difficult pregnancy and being profoundly aware that he was likely to be our one and only. (We got lucky.)

However I remember the fear, the struggle, and the convincing arguments the other way. I come not to judge, nor to condemn, only to say that it is a slippery slope.

Slippery? Well — where do you stop? Yes, a profoundly mentally deficient child will need life long care, and I know how difficult that is, and how much a parent will worry about their own mortality and leaving behind a kid who can’t survive on his own. Of such things are murder-suicides made.

But then, what is an handicap too profound to survive? What justifies abortion or, probably, in forthcoming developments, simply culling certain genes out? And how much is genetic, and how much is environment? I think we’re in the very infancy of genetics and much of what we think we know ain’t so. And culling for genetic defects would be stupid. Even if we knew more. Yes, I can explain.

First of all, though, I’d like to point out we don’t know what’s survivable, what’s a full life, what’s happiness — for others. You know that “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about?” Well “Everyone has a value you know nothing about.” Sometimes the value — I often think mine — is to be a negative example, granted.

However, I think I went to college with a Thalidomide baby. I’m not sure, because I don’t even know if it was distributed in Portugal. However, he had the characteristic lack of limbs, hands emerging from shoulders and either feet from trunk or severely shortened legs. I don’t know for sure, because I wasn’t part of his group.

His group? Oh, yeah. He had to write tests with his feet, and his mom came in on test days, to deal with that. However, the rest of the time, he was surrounded by a coterie of girls at all times, and he was one of the top Language students in my year. (Though I think his emphasis was Latin languages, so we had very few — and all amphitheater — classes together.) He was one of the student leaders, running for various student-political-leadership offices. (Not a communist either, so genuinely not stupid.)

I have no idea what happened to him after college, but I’d not be surprised if he were married with half a dozen perfectly normal kids, and working somewhere in the back room of an embassy. (Though frankly, because his mom looked upper class, he’s more likely to have one or two perfectly normal kids.)

The girl in my class who was educable mentally retarded was married to a boy with the same issue by her parents (and his parents) when they were in their late teens. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, but it’s not an unusual arrangement in traditional societies, even though you would cringe from it because, well, eugenics ideas.

They were given a place to live, and she cleans houses, while he does simple repairs and day laborer type stuff. Unlike what would happen here (likely) they were not sterilized, and no one realized (literally) that they didn’t know what caused babies until they’d had either four or five. At which point she asked and someone explained. At any rate, even though I’d have assumed that her issues were genetic (her people were welfare cases and not overbright. I don’t know about his) their kids are fine and at least two — I stopped keeping track after that. Or mom did, so I got no reports — graduated from college.

So it’s probably a good thing they weren’t sterilized, but it’s probably a good thing anyway.

You see, the eugenics project is based on a completely demented premise no one ever bothered to test: the idea that a very healthy body will create a very healthy mind, and a temperament such as that of the angels, knowing good from evil and choosing good every time.

It takes no more than a drunkard’s walk through history to know this is poppycock.

Yes, sure, a non-idiot ruler is preferable to an idiot one. But assuming at least vaguely educable and grounded, non-geniuses are less likely to run away with an insane idea and be unable to back track when it’s proven insane.

Victoria did all right as a queen, within her system, and having read a lot about her, I don’t think anyone would consider her better than average.

But not everyone is a ruler. And not everyone is going to work in a profession of high abstraction.

The number of people capable of high abstraction I think — note think, we don’t really study this or the effect of culture on this — is always a small percentage. And, mark me well, they are not inherently superior.

The number of people who score above 132 IQ in the Stanford-Binet tests is 2% of the population, give or take. And higher than that becomes increasingly rare. And above 165 is meaningless, because there aren’t enough at that level to establish deviations, since IQ is a statistical measurement.

It is also a measurement of being able to perform a certain number of tasks that correlate well with doing well in academic circumstances.

Because of the way the rewards were stacked in the last century, we — in the West, but really worldwide, as long as there’s some kind of technological civilization, however weak — have a strong prejudice for high IQ as being superior and the mark of the better human, and the one capable of implementing the best policies, to bring about “utopia”.

This is sometimes taken to the point that regions and people who test consistently badly are spoken of, on the right, as being inferior and should be discouraged from reproducing. And on the left as “needing help” to reap the benefits of society.

First, besides the point that a group-IQ tells you nothing about an individual in that group, because the true avis rara, those with IQ above 132 can appear in any APPEARANCE group (because appearance is very bad at following IQ, and we’re all mixed.) Second, counterproductive, because IQ is not a measure of worth, or even of fitting well/doing well in society.

In the comments blow-up here sometime ago, someone threw a hissy fit that perhaps the reason people with higher IQs who are in Mensa don’t do well in life as a hole, because they are “the type of people who join Mensa” not just high IQ.

That is a big silly, because the reasons to join Mensa are as varied as members. Yes, if go to certain chapters, you’ll think the purpose of the organization is to get together and talk about how smart one is, which would seem to encourage people of little accomplishment beyond IQ.

But– But that’s not the only reason people join. I belonged for years — till we moved, and for various reasons we dropped it — to a chapter that devoted itself whole heartedly to beer and bad puns. Because we were in what was then still fairly insular South and were most of us outsiders. Which meant, we had trouble making friends with locals. We didn’t speak the social language. And therefore the group was just a social group.

I’ve also known a lot of people along the years who join but never attend, because it’s useful for their resume/impressive for their bosses. In their defense, I got two jobs by putting in the line that I’d edited the Mensa newsletter. A boss who belonged, and one who knew what it was, were willing to take a chance on the girl with the accent and the foreign degree on the strength of that. So it’s a reason to take it.

Also, within Mensa, there’s a lot of variation of IQs. So even given “they’re all the type of people who join Mensa” if IQ had anything to do with success in life in general, you’d think the higher the IQ the higher the success. Note I always refer to my kids being “diagnosed” with high IQ. To the extent that people were successful in life in general, it seemed to be the ones who’d come in with the bare minimum to qualify. After that, results got worse.

The very successful ones (eh. We count. LOL) were also in professions of high abstraction.

Here’s the thing, there is a reason for the stereotype of the mathematical, or engineering, or physics genius who has to be told when a shirt is too small a size, or that they shouldn’t wear a wool pullover in high summer. High abstraction intelligence doesn’t correlate well with …. life. Because life isn’t abstract. It’s immediate, it’s small, it’s petty, it’s irritating. I can’t be the only person who sometimes wishes she could fast forward from waking up to being fully dressed and working. Or who lets dishes accumulate because they’re not interesting enough. Or who forgets to do the needful to lubricate social links, from answering emails from friends, to sending thank you notes, to– if you’re my friend and I seem to ignore you for months on end, I probably think of you daily, but am pursuing something that is taking all my mental resources and I forget to call or write. It’s truly nothing to do with you.

Or of course, I’m down in the depths of depression again.

Now, I’m not using myself as an example, though I’ve confessed above I test okay. But I’ve also looked around. I have eyes to see with. And I can see the obvious when it’s written in letters twenty feet high and made of fire.

Most of the highly successful people, in just about any field that doesn’t require high abstraction — including managing the people who work with high abstraction — are people who fall just short of that top 2%. In fact, most of the students identified as “gifted” by their teachers are not those in the top 2% let alone above, who are usually identified as “there’s something wrong with him/her” or “He/she is oppositional-defiant” are in the top 10% or so of intelligence. Smart enough that they look “really smart” to normal human beings, but still can read all the social signals, etc. And ping as “normal, just better.”

I always laugh when I read something about how China (It’s usually China) is going to increase IQs of every child born to 148 — it’s always 148 — because that would be the end of their regime, and probably not because the geniuses would question everything, though they might, but because the kids wouldn’t be able to do anything else but high abstraction successfully.

And on top of that, geniuses aren’t more compliant, more altruistic, and definitely not more agreeable or objective than the average human being. Again, mostly they just can make all the human mistakes, only faster and harder.

However, because of the bias in the culture, we do have eugenics ideas that cause real trouble in the real world. From trying to prevent the reproduction of those who aren’t geniuses, to welfare that amounts to hamstringing people we think can’t survive because of “low IQ”. And thereby the creation of a dependent class (a lot of them government workers, because the left thinks we need make work jobs for the unfit. The others just welfare) of one sort or the other. Oh, and the favoring of these people for promotion, etc, because the poor dears supposedly can’t make it on their own.

Which in turn is breaking every single field. Because every field needs competence of some sort. And choosing for any reason other than competence IN THAT FIELD AND JOB ultimately ends up in choosing people who can’t do it. (Looks at Harvard and clears throat. And do, please, realize that your medschool works exactly like Harvard. Sweet dreams.)

The point I’m trying to make is that despite our strong bias for abstract intelligence as being “superior” and despite our trying to encourage “superior” people in the understanding this makes the world better or reduces the burden on society (the only reasons for it to be a burden on society boil down to socialism) it’s not necessarily so.

By reducing the number of average or lower IQ people, even, who are allowed to find their place naturally, without “help” from rules, regulations and various forms of welfare, we are in fact destroying society.

Part of this is that humans can’t really be bred like sheep. We are more complex than sheep (or even cats.) Highly desirable characteristics come paired with highly undesirable ones. Or are negated in expression (something we’ll get into on the next post on this, probably Monday) because of nurture. Because they’re culturally discouraged. Or because there’s some defect that runs with it.

It’s a joke that extreme ADD is a diagnosis of high IQ. It’s not always true, but it often runs together. Is that due to poor training? Quite possibly, but training is highly individual and probably can’t be completely got around.

More importantly, I’ve noted among my fellow creatives (I hate the word, but it’s the best term) that innovative creation is often paired with neuroticism and the resultant type of history you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. Oh, also with auto-immune issues way above statistical likelihood.

What does this mean? Search me. It’s entirely possible that creativity in humans is like a pearl in an oyster. It looks very pretty, but it’s formed through pain and irritation.

I think if we tried to breed out, say, ADD, we’d find ourselves breeding out something we’re desperately in need of. (Or think we are.)

Also, because sometimes a desirable characteristic shows up as a throw back in an otherwise unexceptional or even completely moronic family. Leonardo DaVinci had a lot of siblings by each of his parents (separately so far as we know) and neither is known to history. And speaking of the illegitimate son of Ser Pero DaVinci, let’s agree the man had major issues which impaired his functioning and make it a miracle he accomplished as much as he did.

Human generations are too long for a sane breeding program anyway, or to realize that by doing it on the slow “convince them not to have kids” program we not only eliminated mentally slow people, but also creatives. Or people who are really good at plumbing. Or–

None of which stops the soft form of eugenics from going on. Which often turns into reverse eugenics, since welfare does pay per baby. And then keeps that baby ignorant, feral, and trapped in the soft mitts of the eugenicists, making everything worse for everyone.

Let’s not forget too that this form of soft eugenics can suddenly go weird and hard. Particularly now that the international left has adopted a lot of the ideas of the national left.

You have only to look at Canada to see a program of soft eugenics “with the best intentions” go feral. You start by offering and more or less pushing (hard pushing, trust me) abortions for defective babies (which includes, of course, unwanted ones, because “everyone knows” they’ll be criminals) and euthanasia for the hopelessly ill who are “just suffering uselessly.” Next thing you know you’re offering euthanasia for people who are depressed. And people who are just not that smart. And, soon enough, with a little advance of the forecasting ability of genetics for unborn babies, for kids who are just not that athletic, or will be prone to colds, or aren’t that smart, or by the by “just won’t be very pretty.” You know it, and I know it.

And then all of a sudden the smell of the death camps is upon us, and you’ll be shocked Pikachu about “how could we have got here? We had the best intentions.”

But a society built for humans needs to hold the individual human being, always flawed, always imperfect, as the center and measure of itself. It has, by definition, to accept non perfect humans, not to kill them or otherwise destroy them in the name of perfection which everyone assumes would be a) achievable. b) better for everyone.

Otherwise, it’s the unmaking of all that the West has achieved, and a return to famine and barbarism. Oh, slowly, by the scenic route, and perhaps with a drastically changed humanity that can never climb back up.

But an unmaking, anyway.

As much as in our intellectual pride we value the abstract “intelligence” of the “experts” the last three years should be a sound warning not to give them leeway, and to prize instead the battles no one sees, and the triumphs, too: the not particularly intellectual woman who is good at cooking and cleaning and keeping a nice home. Or who is good at looking after people. Or the not highly abstract-thinking-man who is an excellent brick layer or plumber, or anything else.

We don’t know what humanity will need in the future. The future is notable for not being here and not being known.

Let’s keep the vast variety of humans. We might need them later.

[Next up, probably Monday, Killing Me Softly on rebuilding humans from the inside out. (With understanding that as already shown in this post, both methods blend and socialists of both stripes end up adopting both, just sometimes one before the other.)]

The Peasants are Revolting by BGE

Those of us that get our news from the mainstream media may not know that working class people, mostly farmers and truckers, throughout Europe have been protesting the removal of fuel and other subsidies.  It started with protests in Germany where trucks and tractors blocked the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and has spread to (at least) France, Portugal, and Belgium.  It’s hard for me to have too much sympathy for subsidy hogs, but the reasoning, such as it is, among European governments for removing the subsidies is idiotic.  They didn’t determine (e.g.,) that the subsidies hurt poor farmers in Africa – they do, it’s a scandal – no, it’s the Green New Deal, you see.  Cow farts hurt Gaia and normal people just have too much to eat.  This must be, how do you say, stopped.

Les agriculteurs en colère. The protests spread to France, where farmer’s protests are a regular occurrence, and quickly escalated as the farmers closed the roads around many of the largest cities with tractor blockades and the occasional fire.  The farmer’s weapon of choice has been straw.  Usually alone, but sometimes used straw in the form of what the Irish call muck.  They’ve been piling it in front of government buildings and shooting it out of harvesters through the cities and towns.  In one case, enterprising abattoir workers dumped the waste from their day job in front of the local mairie. 

They seem to have been rather more thorough than their Canadian counterparts. The roads into several cities were blocked.  Ports were closed and life thoroughly disrupted all over the country.  There are pictures of empty supermarkets, but it’s not clear how representative they are.  Still, in what the French press is calling a political masterstroke, while the President of France was photographed enjoying a white-tie dinner with the king of Sweden complete with liveried servants, his new Prime Minister, who’s all of 35, looks 12, has been in office for less than a month, but he’s gay so it’s OK, completely capitulated to the farmer’s demands.  They do that in France, every year of two.  The German government has capitulated too.  No government can be trusted, but they’ve given way so far.

The situation escalated in Belgium where farmers surrounded the headquarters of the EU chanting Ursula, we’re coming for you.  They piled up straw and muck while the jeunes threw firecrackers – the press said explosives and incendiaries, but they were just firecrackers.  EU bureaucrats were trapped inside, and the police responded with water cannon.  There were reports of rubber bullets being fired, but I’ve been unable to confirm if this is true – we’ll come back to that.  The Brussels protestors seem to have been mostly Belgians, but significant numbers of Italians and French are reported too.

There are reports and pictures of roads blocked throughout Portugal and a delicious clip of tractors seeing off a police armored car in the Netherlands (it might be Belgium; the caption was Pays-Bas.)  Expect to see all the local governments capitulate sooner than later, the farmers know where they live.  The EU is different, and this is where it gets interesting.  The EU “has the organizing ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans, and the modesty of the French. And that’s topped up by the imagination of the Belgians.”  They are not accountable to anyone, and they are the true believers in this gnostic death cult that seems to have taken hold of the world’s managerial class.  They can be counted on to do something really, really stupid.  

The English language press is more useless than usual.  One expects that from the American press who couldn’t find Canada on a map never mind Belgium, but GB is just over the water and the entrance to France was blocked.  Not peak holiday time so they didn’t notice, if guess.  The Daily Mail, which is the best source for middle class wine-mom opinion and loves to bash the working class, has nothing on it.  The broadsheets mention it with the most detailed coverage being in the Grauniad.  They get it entirely wrong as you might expect, but at least there’s something.  The French language press is covering it, but they are party political organs, and the media isn’t trustworthy.  The German’s have more, but my German is dire, and I’m limited to the English versions, which often don’t align with the German language version. 

Our hostess asked me for links, which I cannot provide.  The press Is useless, and I’ve had to go into X to find out what’s going on.  It’s worth scrolling through and, for those with better language skills than mine, to find out what’s going on.  Sure, it’s unfiltered and not curated (snicker,) but that’s where the pictures are and pictures or it didn’t happen.  Find the tractors and the armored car, it’ll make your day. The 24-hour rule should prevail, see the rubber bullets above, but this is, so far, a popular uprising rather than a bunch of spoiled children.  The managerial class has had it all their own way for too long and maybe, just maybe, this is a step toward balance and eliminating this gnostic death cult.   Keep in mind that the German and French governments capitulated and as an earlier peasant revolt had it “when Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman.”

Humans always strive for perfection. It’s something in us. We can conceptualize perfection. We also know when and how we fall short, and in what myriad ways we fail.

To an extent striving for perfection in the individual is fine. To an extent, even, it is a — not unique but the degree of application is unique — part of the American character. When I first came to the US as an exchange student, I was startled at the EXISTENCE of a self-help shelf. Things on how to cope with brokenness, how to improve your performance, etc. ad nauseum.

Some of them were very obviously insane or infantile — I came over the first time in 1980, which is to say at the very end of the 70s when everything was infected with the pseudo-just-so-stories of Freudianism. (In fact, I’ve been reading a lot of books that came out late sixties to the early eighties, and it’s amazing how every author — every single one — dives into Freudianism to attempt to make the book “profound” or “literary.”) — but a lot of the techniques described still worked.

The techniques are usually behavioral, which, as an explanation for what humans are, for the human ethos, sucks, but as a way to modify and regulate your behavior for the inside works more or less unfailingly. (More or less. Humans can always invent new ways to fail.)

Note I said from the inside. From the outside… Well, every time a dog salivates, a Pavlovian must ring a bell, to paraphrase Heinlein.

Which brings us to the urge to improve humans from the outside. Those other humans. Yes, them, outside my head. While I might be falling short of my own potential, brother, what’s their excuse?

I mean, I won’t deny that I’m not a particularly charitable person. And I confess I suffer from intellectual pride. But there are exchanges one witnesses online — particularly between people we know both exist — where the only possible response is “I didn’t realize the baseline of humanity is mentally dead.” Particularly when one knows neither of these people are actually stupid by any other marker.

The truth is that raising kids who tested in the stratospheric line for IQ made me very skeptical of IQ as a measurement of any use for anything but academic achievement (And even then! For instance, until trained both sons scored abysmally in multiple choice tests, due to an inability to accept an answer could ever be “that simple” or “that stupid.” Instead they would try to complicate things and justify in their heads why an obviously and clearly absurd answer “must be” right.) Because while the kids — saltational development is a thing — could demonstrate some bizarrely high abilities, at the same time they could pull mistakes that you couldn’t even figure out how someone could make. And then I’d sit there, holding my head and going “And if these are the creme de la creme, how do other kids even survive?” (I have an answer to that, actually. Normal kids don’t get in half as much trouble, and don’t come up with half that many crazy things to do, that could either blow up the house or poison them, or whatever. It’s like raising my very smart kittens. It’s driving me bonkers. I’ve now raised fifteen cats, but none that got into drawers that are child-locked, to find twist ties to eat.)

Everyone seemingly is incredibly stupid at times. Geniuses just are stupid faster, harder, and from above, so to put it.

Come on, you know if you look back, there were entire periods of your life when you were convinced of something, or attempting to do something that in retrospect was incredibly stupid or at the very best misguided. (Around here we call it Sarah’s so called writing career. It continues, too.) But at the time you couldn’t see it, and what you were doing seemed logical. (To be fair, I’ve known it for some time. And it’s not logical, it’s compulsive.)

However, from the outside in, looking at other people, it’s easy to think you know exactly what they should be doing, what they should be trying, how they should be solving their issues and mitigating their trouble.

In my fifties, I finally understood mom’s most annoying habit. No, seriously, I’m now 61. I’ve been on my own since 22, so almost the time I was a child in her house, doubled, but if I mention I’m doing anything at all, from cleaning something to making something, I get advice as though I were about 10. And heaven forbid I’m having some problem, health or motivation or something, and mention it, because the instruction will be very minute, take hours, and tell me everything I’ve known for 39 years, give or take.

I understood it, because looking at my sons as they launched off into their own lives, the impulse to tell them what to do, so they avoided making the same mistakes I made was almost unendurable. You could see them tottering off to do exactly the most stupid things you did. And you wanted to physically reach out and redirect them.

It took a lot of self-control, and even more self-reflection to realize that no, it wasn’t my mistakes they were making, but their own. While sometimes there were echos, mostly because there is a familial temperament (depressive and anxious and neurotic as a shaved cat– like you’re surprised, right?) their path was not mine (thank heavens, even if both of them write) and their time is not mine, and the country they grew up in is not mine (We could ease up on the echoes of recent developments any time now, or why do you think my PTSD is keeping me up on the black-swan blind?) In the end turned out some of the things they were doing I thought were horrible mistakes, were not. And some of the actions I approved of based on my own experiences, might have been mistakes, and–

Now, these are our kids — speaking in the general — that we have that impulse about. And the impulse is often wrong. I know in the village, from listening in to the gossip of women, that half the “nice girls” women hoped their sons would marry were disastrous. And have of the “that whore” they did marry did turn out to be very good wives, and often very good to the complaining mother in law, as well. Yes, sometimes parents are right after the kids are adult, and beyond the obvious “don’t drink too much, drug too much, whore or waste money” but– It’s not often.

Almost all my friends were their family’s tragedy, taking a path that the parents didn’t like, and the extended family disapproved of. Often they were their own tragedy, balked of the initial path for some reason, physical, mental or just fate. Often they spent years lamenting the path not taken.

But in the end, we all came to a place where we’re doing pretty well, at peace with ourselves, and looking back, we can’t see it any other way. (Which is why the so called career still exists. That and because I enjoy writing more than having written.)

The point is….

Self-improvement is a grand and noble ideal if undertaken from the inside out. And it has been known to score some remarkable successes.

We often hear about them, and not just when someone is trying to sell you something.

Sure, about half of the prisoners who gave up drugs and found Jesus in jail will fall back into criminal behavior once they come out. Given what militates against them, from habit to the friends they choose, to the circles they’re used to navigating in, and the way they are used to things working, the big shock is that only half of them do so.

We tend to hear about the big transformation projects in movie-of-the-week type thing, and it’s always huge: the drug abuser who went clean and became a multi-millionaire entrepreneur; the alcoholic who went clean and became a philantropist, etc. etc. etc.

But those are not the most common transformations. In fact, I’d say those are the rarest, because they happen to people who had reached a level where saving themselves is almost impossible. It’s not one habit or one tendency, but an entire complex of them pushing them a certain way. And those are very hard to break.

The most common transformation will be the C student who formed new study habits and seemingly overnight becomes an A student. The basement dweller who wakes up one day and realizes he must stand on his own two feet, and starts reaching for everything and anything to make that goal happen, including putting in a lot of work. And similar cases, which we all know.

These cases we know and see every day, just about. We don’t fully remark on them, just treat them as “Oh, he finally grew up.” Or “Oh, she got serious.”

I’ve done this a number of times, with different things. Including fiction writing. I do really well with a regular writing schedule, and habits. This makes perfect sense, if you know I’m ADD AF. Habits or medication are the only ways to deal with it. But habits break, usually with…. moves, illness, various issues. Like, you go through two or three weeks of not being able to do whatever you made an habit of. So I will fall off the wagon, and have to reform the habit again. (I’m in the middle of this, which might or might not be perceptible from that side of the screen.)

The power of doing this is outright transformative. And therefore it gives people illusions.

“If I can change that much, I who am so superior,” okay, most of us know that’s BS, but self-obviously a lot of people don’t, “Surely if these mugs just did what I told them, and worked at it the way I tell them to, they too could be perfect. And then the world would be perfect.”

That is where the issue starts, because that’s not how any of this works. Habits imposed from outside are notorious for not sticking, if they ever take in the first place.

I think this illusion that you can change others from outside is one of the oldest temptations of mankind.

But in the twentieth century it became the illusion of nations.

More tomorrow.

This is not a post about writing, but it is a post about reading – or a post about fiction and reality, humanity and myth.

There is a way in which fiction forms our mind.  Shakespeare has, after all, been accused of inventing modern men with modern emotions.  Then, through the immense popularity of is plays, these character types, these ways to react to things… spread.

This is possible, though I don’t think it’s true, which is good because if it were it would make a very bad case against the bard’s legacy.  It is true that before Shakespeare there were fewer plays that were coherently organized around character types and character dilemmas that made sense to the modern man.

But I grew up in Europe.  I was taken to see art from the middle ages and before before I even had an idea of art.  I remember the medieval statues, their proportions all askew.  I don’t presume that Leonardo DaVinci and Michaelangelo invented the modern body and we all grew up to conform to it, and part of the reason I don’t believe it is that the ancients pictured bodies similar to our own.

Now, as with the argument with the Venus of Dusseldorf and whether it was porn or an accurate representation of women during the ice ages, it is possible to say that with Barbarian invasions, malnutrition and colder climate during much of the middle ages, it is entirely possible bodies had a totally different shape.  One does periodically meet a person walking around who looks like one of those medieval statues, just as one does, occasionally, bump into a woman shaped like the Venus of Dusseldorf.

In the same way it is possible that during the middle ages, while trying to survive, the idea of the individual mind and emotions counting for much fell right out of the culture.  (It was never as dominant as in our era anyway.)  Survival and times of scarcity always bring about a tightening of social norms to whatever the society considers “average” or “normal” behavior, sometimes with lethal consequences for the odd.  (One of the reasons it always puzzles me why Odds – people who don’t fit in our society – admire despots and societies of enforced poverty.)

Romeo and Juliet, and certainly Hamlet are not fully comprehensible unless we realize we’re watching the struggle of the individual against the group and that social obligations which were considered paramount.

But enough of Shakespeare.  As you know – or possibly, fortunate people that you are, don’t – you can say the words “William Shakespeare”, start me talking, provide me with food and water at intervals, and I’ll go on under my own power, with no audience interaction, for a day or two.  (Possibly more if my voice doesn’t give out.)

However, the fact that the very notion of Shakespeare having invented the modern human exists tells you with absolute certainty how much we’re aware of having acquired our notions of how the world should work from fiction, in all its means of delivery.

Fiction serves – or can serve – great purpose.  It can show things that otherwise can’t be seen in human life except in the very slow development of a whole life, clearly and in a minute, and through emotional delivery.  Concepts like deferred gratification or limited altruism (sacrificing for one’s kids) or even the ups and downs of a long marriage.

That is the problem too – It shows us what is slow and mostly internal as immediate and external.  Where fiction gives us odd notions – oh, all but the very “literary” sort, and that, I dare say might inform the minute moments of life, but will not (from what I read) give you a general thesis of existence (unless it is “Kill yourselves, all is lost” – the slightly more elaborate form of “Fly, all is discovered”) is the climax.  (You, the lady in the back row, stop blushing.  I didn’t mean that kind of fiction.)

Terry Pratchett whose works are, in a way, a meta-critique of our fables and stories pokes fun at this in (I think) Men at Arms (I always confuse it with Guards! Guards!) when they’re on the roof top and have a bow and one arrow and are attempting to hit the dragon on the “voonerables.”  The clinching argument is “There’s a million to one chance, so it’s a sure thing.”

Fiction operates on creating cathartic release.  As such, it requires a big climax for big stakes (or arrows) and a reward immediately after.  I try my best (because I have trouble believing it otherwise) to indicate there will be a long slog to set all right after the big climax, while still making it satisfactory to people.  But it’s not easy.  

I’m not criticizing literature (or other fiction) mind.  The other times I’ve written this sort of thing people get all mad and say “what do you want then?” – but I like literature fine the way it is.  I like the big climax and the big payoff precisely because they rarely happen in life.

On the other hand, it is important for the readers to remember that fiction is a representation, not the reality.  In reality, when you take the one in a million chance, there’s a good chance you’ll fail.  And even if you succeed and the dragon is gone, you still have to deal with all the crazy people who brought the dragon over and wanted to crown him king.  (The plot of whichever of the Pratchett books is mentioned above.  The covers I have are so similar I routinely confuse them.)

They’re not going to vanish over night; they’ll get up to ever more interesting stuff; and killing them is just not part of the game because it creates other problems.  (We all know what happens to societies that do that.)

So killing the dragon in real life would never be the all-encompassing solution it is in the Discworld  world (though Pratchett too hints at other issues, of course.)

There is a moment when I’m very ill – I don’t know if it happens to everyone – usually in the middle of the night, when I wake for a moment, and I feel the wellness below the illness.  (Just like when I’m getting sick, I feel the sickness beneath what’s as yet health.)

It doesn’t mean I’m well.  There will be days of feeling terrible still, and impatience with weakness, and sleeping far too much.  But it means I’ve turned the corner and I’m going to get well.

In real life it is somewhat like that, and when we throw fits and demand perfect and stark choices, we’re doing it because we want life to be a fairytale.  We want someone to offer us a choice between death or a bowl of ice cream with extra marshmallows, and we’re going to hold our breath until we get every last sweet mushy marshmallow.  We earned it, we deserve it, and we’re going to enjoy it.

I think this is part of human nature and fiction merely gives us an outlet for it.  In the same way I don’t believe Shakespeare invented modern humans, I don’t believe fiction invented the big climatic choice.  It goes back through our fairytales and legends – far back indeed.

But let’s remember that’s the only place it can be achieved, shall we?  The starkest choice you’ll get in real life is between sure death and less sure death (or whatever other evil you’re trying to avoid.)

So, you can choose between death and a bowl of ice cream that might be cyanide laced.  You can choose between letting illness take its course or feeling that moment of wellness and building on it, and taking great care and eventually after a lot of work, getting well. It won’t be easy.  It won’t be fast.  Recovery is not assured.

I’m an optimist.  I’ll take the chance.  And hey, cyanide tastes like almonds.

The first time I heard of deer-blinds — in this case a platform, up on a tree — it was of someone — a kid of 12 — dying because he’d been so still so long that a blood clot, formed from his position against the side, migrating to his heart and killing him.

Metaphorically speaking, I’m that kid, atop that duck blind. Only I’m waiting for the black swan to erupt.

Which is both insane and counterproductive. My watching for it or not won’t make the black swan erupt.

By definition a black swan is an event you can’t predict, which changes everything.

And part of me thinks that this obsessive — it’s interfering with life, because I have to check through the news so often — checking and watching is wishful thinking, because the depressive thinks we’re headed to h*ll in a hand-basket that’s already on fire. But part of me refuses to give up, and is hoping. Hoping for the event that turns everything upside down.

Except this doesn’t feel like hoping. Or waiting hopefully. More like….

Okay, so I went through a lot of fire-seasons in Colorado, some worse than others. Twice, we had the radio on all the time, waiting for the order to evacuate. Once a friend left our dinner party to rush home to pick up stuff so he could evacuate. (He didn’t lose his house, turned out, but it came this close.) And at least once, we had everything in the car that we absolutely couldn’t afford to lose, and our important documents in a briefcase, in case word came in the night. And took turns sleeping, so the other could be awakened.

This is what it feels like, though I be covered in fish and called Persephone if I have any clue what urgent action I’d need to take should the black swan take flight. Particularly since I don’t know where the black swan is, when it will appear, or–

Look, chances are it’s something really big, far away from me. My knowing about it the first five minutes will make absolutely no difference.

And yet, here I am atop the deer, duck, black swan blind, afraid to move or make a sound and startle it was it starts and —

Why do I think a black swan event is about to happen?

Part of it is “Because it feels like it is” and part is, because there have been a series of black swans flying recently. Actually a lot of them.

Some were sort of predictable, like the stolen election. I mean, given the lockdowns, but the lockdowns themselves, and the cascade of crazy that followed was a black swan. The Canadian — CANADIAN! — trucker convoy was a black swan. What is going on in TX is a black swan. BUT on a less happy note, 10/7 in Israel was also a black swan. And way, way, way back? The USSR falling. Just collapsing. The collapse was baked in, but…. like that?

Once black swans start taking flight, they seem to come closer and closer.

Digging deeper: A black swan is something you wouldn’t believe if someone told you about it before it happens. Sometimes, dream or nightmare, something you end up thinking you dreamed up, and keep trying to snap out of it and wake up.

So, why would they be coming closer: Well, because we’re living in an era of high instability.

Partly because of catastrophic innovation. And partly because the “blue model” — the centralized governance and society model slapped on the US by FDR and on the rest of the world at various points of the 20th century– is falling apart. It’s falling apart because it’s run as far as it could, and it’s starting to fail. A centralized model always fails, and this one lasted a long time, because it left bits of freedom around the edges. Less and less as time went on. Till it’s gobbled up almost all areas of innovation and privacy. Not all. Not yet. But it passed some critical point, and it’s falling apart.

The number of people telling you exactly what the curvature of bananas should be has grossly outnumbered the people who know how to grow bananas, or even how to make banana bread. At that point society can’t work, because the people regulating the curvature of bananas are starting to branch out to the ovalness of eggs. And no one knows — or is allowed — to do the essential. And things start collapsing. Combine it with the literal culture shock of changing tech, and you’re in unknown territory.

Most of us my age or twenty years either way have already changed our lives so much in our lifetimes that my having literally changed continents is a minor thing in comparison.

Oh, another black swan: A university president was pulled down and her record revealed utterly fake. And the ivy leagues are in the process of discrediting themselves.

So many black swans in the last 3 or 4 years, and coming closer and closer and closer.

And because the left is trying to play the 20th century communist revolution script, including trying to make people share their houses (they had to import destitute for that!) only none of it applies properly to the US and to current tech, or current popular sentiment, I keep expecting them to unwittingly provoke a massive convulsion, similar to the fall of the USSR or the tearing down of the wall.

Something that just happens, one day. Good or bad? Oh, it could fall either way.

Now, is it likely to have anything to do with me, directly? Or be something that an early warning could help?

Unlikely, short of us all having to run to the most distant member of the family, or his having to run to us. And both are unlikely for various reasons. Possible, but highly unlikely even in a black-swan event.

And yet–

And yet I feel like I need to stay vigilant and sit here and watch for the first signs….

Just up here, in the black-swan blind, watching the shifting darkness for movement.

And waiting.

This week our church bulletin had an added feature, and I’m going to bet our pastor, a working class boy, got it pushed on him and he thought “Oh, why not” and didn’t look too closely at it.

Because the church hasn’t given a hint of “praying for cease fire” or anything of the kind. if they had, I’d have left so fast it left a hole in the air. But this amid fairly innocuous questions and answers had a question about what was licit to achieve a good end. And amid a bunch of self-obvious examples, there was a stern condemnation of … wait for it… carpet bombing German cities in WWII, because killing people was wrong, no matter how good the end.

I’m fairly sure this is crazy cakes in most Christian theology, except possibly whatever the Quakers used to do the job. I’m also fairly sure they pulled this from the left hand of the underwear gnomes’ underpants in order to make a point about Israel and Gaza.

The point is that there are age-old answers to this. And while it’s true that it’s no part of Christianity that “The end justifies the means” it’s also true that there is an entire doctrine of just war.

And I’m fairly sure that defending yourself against a relentless enemy who won’t stop is a just war. Yes, there are things about doing the minimal damage to achieve your end. Looks sternly at Gaza: If more than the necessary damage had been done, Hamass would have surrendered by now. But it hasn’t.

Or Germany you know? While yes, a lot of people died in carpet bombing, no more than necessary died to stop the regime from killing a lot more. Because, you know, if Germany hadn’t been stopped, they wouldn’t have stopped. The fact that as they were aware they were losing, they just sped up the “final solution” tells you they would have tried to exterminate Jews from the world, as well as anyone who didn’t measure up to their semi-mythological standards.

The truth, actually is that national socialist — LIKE ALL SOCIALISM — is ultimately incapable of feeding even its own country. And in their extreme form, as fascism, the same as international socialism in its extreme form as communism, it becomes a ravening beast, just to keep its core supporters happy. So first, it has to devour more and countries by conquest. and then it has to start devouring people inside its own territory and expropriating them. Which is part of what Germany did, yes. And the USSR too, just not as openly.

And if it hadn’t been stopped, Germany would have killed a lot more people.

And on the same, point, yeah, we didn’t bomb “Innocent civilians” to stop the USSR (arguable about Vietnam, very arguable, but we certainly didn’t take the war to the USSR) and you know, there’s 100 million dead of communism, and the death toll hasn’t stopped yet.

It’s like the old argument over whether bombing Japan was good or evil. It saved lives. Was it “the end justifies the means”? No, because there is no optional evil performed for utopic, optional good. It is a distasteful, painful undertaking of a terrible duty to stop evil.

Yes, it would be better if good people could somehow wave a magical wand or say an incantation and conquer evil without having to shed blood. But until G-d himself chooses to put both thumbs and a full fist on the scales, we will have to do what we will have to do.

The carpet bombing of Germany was no more evil than a surgeon cutting into a person to remove the cancer is evil.

And what Israel is doing in Gaza is no more evil than a man shooting at the people trying to kill him, to make them stop.

If Hamass wants a cease-fire or peace? All they have to do is surrender utterly and give up the leaders responsible for the October 7 massacre.

Because if that doesn’t happen, what Israel will be doing is inviting a lot more massacres of its people. This needs to be finished now, or next time there won’t be enough carpet bombing to make it stop.

Allowing evil to rampage the world is not good. And pacifist — true pacifist — cults are either small, limited, and set in very safe areas, or are extinct.

The right to self-defense is G-d given and the most basic and fundamental part of civilized society, without which civilization cannot exist and without which nothing is left but savagery and fighting, everyone’s hand against everyone else’s.

I’m not impressed by those “theologians” who I think would do best to crack the source book now and then. And note the source book is not the New York Times editorial pages.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JULIE FROST: Cry Havoc

Nate Cassin, the alpha werewolf of Missoula, Montana, finds his little city has a big wolf problem when shredded bodies start showing up all over town. Faced with a hostile press and even more hostile hunters, he tries to protect his innocent pack of eight at the same time they try to track down two elusive killers in an area of 35 square miles with a plethora of hiding places.

He’s seen this before. And the hunters always, always go overboard and decide the only good werewolf is a dead one, no matter who’s actually responsible. His pack will be collateral damage unless he can find the enemy wolves—and stop their broken alpha—before they turn his hometown into a human buffet.

FROM CEDAR SANDERSON WRITING AS LILANIA BEGLEY: Distress Signal: A Short SciFi Romance

As Sumire reveals her secrets in an explosive climax, a young Patrolman finds that what really matters is taking him in hand and leading him towards danger. Now, he has a chance to prove himself… and find out what love really means.

FROM RACONTEUR PRESS WITH A STORY BY LEE ALLRED: Full Steam Ahead!

“In the midst of this danger, dirt, speed, technological changes, and social upheaval comprise the heart of steampunk. The old and new were in conflict, and the outcomes were uncertain and fraught with failures, making it a rich tangle of possibilities for characters to clash and collaborate within. ” – From the introduction by Bart Kemper, answering the question Why Steam?

Steampunk is danger, adventure, and technology with a flair for the dramatic and an eye for beauty. Join these 10 authors as they explore worlds of danger, daring, romance and steam.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: The Wheels Run Truly: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure

Two brothers fight for freedom. A lost colony’s governor strives to reinvent the feudal state. Can Martha’s sons escape to liberty and a future?

Thaddeus Dawe is a patient man. On a planet where only the valley of First Landing is fully terraformed, he waits for spring’s agonizingly slow arrival. He plans to take the colony’s last terraseeder to fortify a secret northern enclave outside the governor’s control. When the palace loses power in late winter, Thaddeus scrambles to save his and his brothers’ hopes for independence.

Peter Dawe suffers under another secret. When he receives his brother’s call to return from exile to save the terraseeder, Peter forces himself to disclose his long-planned departure to those who sheltered and befriended him, including the woman he wants in his life. None of that goes as planned, and he heads north responsible once again for too many lives.

With the terraseeder losing power, a promise he has yet to fulfill, and the governor’s men against him, Thaddeus fears the new chaos marks the imminent death of the essential terraforming microbes and the failure of the new world he plans to build. Peter has spent the winter learning skills for his brothers’ northern plans, but joining Thaddeus’ team puts not only his own life at risk, but that of the woman he gives up to friendship.

Can the Dawe brothers escape the governor’s dominion with the life-giving terraseeder in time, and with their friends and loved ones alive?

The Wheels Run Truly is the final installment in the gripping science fiction colonization series, Martha’s Sons. If you like driven heroes, deep bonds of love and friendship, and a fight for freedom, you’ll need to read Laura Montgomery’s thrilling adventure tale.

Pick it up now to reach for independence!

Lord Adrescu’s Blade: A Familiar Origins Tale (Familiar Tales)

A legendary sword, and the man who wielded it.

Lord Danut Adrescu returns to his keep to find a mystery and a warning. A battered young Healer who cannot speak, and a vision of battle with a half-bull monster. What links the two? And what ties them to his new sword, a battle-claimed blade made by the finest Italian swordsmiths?

A novella, 30K words.

FROM M. C. A. HOGARTH: In the Court of Dragons: A Peltedverse Collection in the Fallowtide Period (The Fallowtide Sequence Book 5)

Sweeping cultural changes sound very good on paper. But in the lives of normal people, even the ones who stand to benefit, those changes can be a challenge… one they might not have even asked for. In the Court of Dragons collects eight stories of the period after the events of the Chatcaavan War, focusing on changes both personal and widespread: old favorites return and new characters make their debut as we follow the effects of the war on everything from the imperial harem to the nascent Eldritch newsroom. What are the Faulfenza up to in the capital? What was the fate of the palace castrates? And who taught an Eldritch to… bungee jump?

This reader-commissioned collection includes stories written by the author at reader request. Come home to the Alliance with these tales of hope, renewal, comedy, and romance.

FROM MICHAEL HOOTEN: We Are All Enlisted (Enlisted Book 1

Peter Wright joined the Navy thinking that he could do his time in a nice, quiet billet somewhere on Earth. The Navy had other ideas. When the asteroid miners claimed their independence, Peter finds himself getting sent to space on a warship headed straight into the combat zone. He has to get used to everything: zero gravity, standing watch, and being the only Earth-born in his crew. And he has to be ready for the biggest battle the solar system has ever seen.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Lizzy’s Tail

A small, plush horse learns what it means to be real when a little girl chooses her and takes her home. Through adventures and accidents, Lizzy the horse becomes real to her little girl, Carrie, even though she is still a toy.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Lunar Surface Blues

The High Frontier is no place for foolishness, but nature can always make a better idiot.

Four years ago, Molly’s parents brought her up here to the Moon when their work brought them to Shepardsport. In the time since that move, she’s earned her place here and a seat on this field trip. Only one problem — she’s been given the worst possible EVA partner.

A pencil-necked dweeb with an attitude, Benji wants to be one of the guys. But his stunts keep putting them both in danger, and the adults keep blaming Molly.

When Benji gets in over his head, can Molly save him before it costs both their lives?

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: seat

I’ve been looking for a way to write about the small private tragedies, for which we each blame ourselves, but which are in fact part of a system that more and more militates against humanity and — in our place, in our time — particularly against young people, and even more particularly against young males.

And then I was reading Francis’ Turner’s Post yesterday and this jumped out at me:

And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.

The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.

And that, right there is the issue. The rules that are signed with much flourish, and which sound so good on paper, have monstrous effects down the road. And yet, the people raised on the previous set of rules don’t know where this is coming from, and are shocked and surprised, and always, inevitably, attribute the problem to the wrong thing.

Mostly, it gets attributed to “kids these days” but unless you have kids, these days, you don’t know how they are bound. And even if you do, you might not realize it, because all you see is the infantilization of a generation, and not that they, themselves, aren’t the ones doing the infantilizing, but all those “good rules” and regulations and laws are doing it.

I realized about 10 years ago that my son’s generation was about 10 years behind where we were. In their mid twenties they were doing things we did in our teens. It was disconcerting. And even I had no idea why, other than too much regimentation in school, too much of a never end of button counting, and not enough room or freedom to think or be on their own.

Since then…. I’ve seen more. And a lot of the reason they are younger than we were is that the entire world is geared not to let them grow up. I mean, let’s be glad that — unprepared or not — they’re legal adults at 18, or people would be denouncing them for walking alone down the street, without an “adult” at 25.

There’s also… adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century. In the past, sure, people were children, and people grew to be adults, but there wasn’t this protracted time period where they were adults in size and at least some ability, but weren’t allowed to be adults: they weren’t allowed to earn or spend, or make their own decisions, for years.

The earn or spend thing is important. Kids used to grow along with their tasks. Read Tudor or colonial memoirs, and you find four year olds looking after cows or horses, or learning Latin, or other unlikely things even for twelve year olds in our time.

Mom went to work at 10 and started getting a salary. It wasn’t much, and 90% of it went to her parents’ budget. But she was working, holding down a job, doing things that were maybe not at adult level, but could lead to it, eventually, if she applied herself. This was normal for her generation. In my own generation, amid the working class, most people went to work at 10. Heck, amid the middle class, most people went to work at 15 or so, after 9th grade. Were they more mature than the rest of us that went all the way to college?

I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. Of course, with my intellectual pride I looked down on them but now I understand they were managing a very difficult job, which at the time I could not have done.

I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college.” (That last is a giggle as it has two impossibilities. Finding a job that pays enough after college which has a lot of make-work expectations, and making a full-time middle-class salary, which is what college costs these days.) Two Jobs. At 16. The difficulties in giving work to 16 year olds, increasingly restriction of hours, etc. combined with chaotic scheduling in the only unskilled jobs remaining (mostly just retail) means that until recently none of them could find A job. Let alone two. And the recently was during Covid. I haven’t seen so many little 16 year olds cashiering, or serving at tables recently. And that’s because most people I’m seeing are around my age: I guess unemployment is biting hard.

But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college, 22 or — more likely, as most degrees (remember make work?) are taking 6 or 7 years — 24, with absolutely no job experience. Which means their applications aren’t even looked at. Not seriously.

Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friend of friend. Through knowing someone.

This is a bad sign, because it’s how Portugal functions, and it is not in any way shape or form meritocracy, which in turn contributes to other things falling apart.

But more and more what I’m seeing is young people hitting their mid twenties lost, and doing this, and doing that, and trying this and trying that, and nothing ever gels. To make things worse, they don’t have the habits mom had by 10, because they haven’t been allowed to acquire them.

There was a similar generation — one, while here we’re well into two — in Portugal, where unemployment was so bad (the generation before mine) that most people weren’t “established” on a path till their mid thirties. I’d guess about half of them never got the knack of it: of the day to day of working, fulfilling the work duties, just…. the unglamorous day to day that makes us adults.

It’s particularly hard for boys. What places there are seem to be given to girls. Who also, usually, have better grades — though when I saw their work…. never mind. let’s say there was little difference, but everyone is afraid of discouraging girls, so the Lady’s A is a thing — and therefore on paper look much better.

Meanwhile the boys are quietly drowning.

Note, I’m not speaking for my boys here — they’re doing okay. For their generation, they’re doing amazingly and are almost precocious — but being the mother of boys, I got to know a lot of boys. Oh, girls too, but a larger number of boys. And for some reason our friends who had kids also had a lot of boys. Again, girls too, but a lot of boys.

The boys are drowning. And these are not unmotivated or stupid young men. The whole thing about a lot of brain function being inherited? Our friends aren’t exactly slackers and ne’er do wells. In fact, we often anchored that pole in our group, by virtue of my being a free lancer.

But the boys are spinning in circles well into their thirties, looking for a place to belong, looking for something to do where they add value, where they can be adults.

And here’s the thing: it’s pretty much society wide. Yes, some kids go to trade school early and escape it, but those are the kids turning 18 now, who saw older brothers and cousins and children of family friends be destroyed. But kids five to ten years older, by and large are still spinning.

The scale of it precludes personal failings at the route. It’s more … well… let me see, stuff against under age labor, a lot of illegal immigration, undercutting the bottom wrung of jobs, the de-industrialization of America cutting out the type of jobs available to the young and unskilled, and– well, yes — mandatory minimum wage, making it prohibitive to hire someone who might not work out.

All of these things sound good. But they snowball and they roll, and they make it almost impossible to break into the job market. Now, add in everything designed to give women a leg up, because, you know, we’re all victims of the patriarchy and….

Years — decades later — all of these come home to roost. And they’re not chickens, so no one notices. They quail, maybe. Or sparrows. No one will notice till they obscure the skies, like the sparrows returning.

Instead, each family — and probably each of the young men — thinks of it as a personal failing. ”It’s my fault. I shoulda/coulda/woulda–“

But the game was rigged. It wasn’t their fault.

It’s kind of like, on a smaller front, at one time I realized our washer was running continuously, and yet I was falling behind on laundry. And when my husband complained and asked why I didn’t do laundry, I fell apart. I didn’t cry — I only cry when I want to kill something and can’t — but I fell apart, and started trying to explain that I was always doing laundry, but–

So he went down and looked at the times. Each load, in the low-water washer, was taking 2 hours. And we were a family of four, with two kids in sports and other stuff that caused dirty clothes. It was mathematically impossible for me to catch up with wash. (Yes, we changed our washer. It’s now only one hour, which is still too long, but I have to do extra rinses, because of my skin stuff.) Until he did that, I thought it was a personal failing.

I’m sure there are other instances, where we think we’re failing, but it’s a stupid regulation, an idiot rule, catching up with us. Years or decades later.

Only it shouldn’t cost entire generations. And more importantly, we should be aware it’s not PERSONAL. It is, quite literally, systemic. It’s only our remaining individual responsibility and shame keeping us from realizing it.

In Clifford Simak’s They Walked Like Men, there are aliens buying the Earth. (Now, the money counterfeit, and the ending has two holes you could drive a mac truck through, but never mind those). They are buying it piecemeal by buying houses and businesses. And the people who sell for amazing prices, don’t realize that there’s nothing to buy. That the money they got is literally worthless.

A big turning point in the story is when people realize their old homes are vacant, and just move back in. Just realizing there’s something going on and they’re NOT ALONE is enormously empowering.

To the young people out there: you are not alone. You didn’t do this. You didn’t give up adulthood. It’s not a massive personal failing.

It was done to you. A lot of well intentioned (and some maybe not) rules and regulations, supposed to protect you and be “nice” just met in an utter tsunami of crap to destroy your life.

It’s not your fault. You’re not alone. The game is rigged. But that doesn’t mean you’re not needed. You should in fact show the f*ckers that rigged it a thing or two, by getting around it.

Quickly, before they ban gig work and entrepreneurship. Figure out what you can do and do it, no matter how small or stupid. Then build.

And the rest of you: figure out the people who think it’s all their fault, the broken down Atlases trying to lift the world, and go lend a shoulder and a hand.

And while we’re at it, let’s cut through all the stupid, counterproductive legislation and regulations. In this and in everything else.

With a chainsaw.

DIEing in Nice Red Tape by Francis Turner

In which I partly agree with David Brooks and Mark Edmundson

Thanks to Stuart Schneiderman1, my attention was drawn to this NY Slimes column by David Brooks (it’s an archive link) in which he points out that there are a lot of bureaucrats in government and business and they seem to mostly subtract value rather than add it.

Brooks in turn links to an article by Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia. In that article, which I read as a rational lefty in the process of being red-pilled and fighting to maintain his delusions, the prof tries to explain that the DIE bureaucrats at his university are nice people who are trying to make the world a better place even if they do so by means of mandatory DIE in academic annual reports.

… I had just learned that there would be a new aspect to our annual reports. We would be asked to tell our overlords how each one of our activities contributes to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Teaching? How did it advance DEI? Scholarship? How did it help speed DEI on its way? If you get an honor or an award, you are to say how it contributed to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Outside consulting: did it do any DEI duty? And what does the university mean by Diversity, by Equity, by Inclusion? The university doesn’t say. There are no official definitions out there to consider. 

So I had a lot to tell my friend about administrative interference with academic freedom. I didn’t want the university deans and DEI enforcers setting the agenda for my teaching or my scholarship, or for anyone else’s. At the same time, I couldn’t really argue with my friend’s observation: the people in the dean’s office and the DEI enclaves are decent sorts. I like them…

DIE is one of those things that sounds nice and which no one should complain about, but which is in fact built on a lie. Edmundson, as a self-confessed Bernie Bro and literature professor, may lack the desire or the tools to prove it, but it remains the case. But I digress, because Edmundson does show some signs of detecting the over-reaching problem

The good people who came up with this notion are — without knowing it, I suspect — softly tyrannizing us. They are also softly tyrannizing themselves. And what they are up to isn’t only a university matter. It is happening in corporations, medical centers, primary and secondary schools, foundations, and NGOs. Surveillance and discipline, carried out almost exclusively by good people, are becoming pervasive.

Now again, we can perhaps question whether DIE bureaucrats are good people or not, but they undoubtedly see themselves as good people who are doing all this for our good. Moreover each one is a good little cog in a machine.

Instead, we find ourselves within a web of power whose influence is everywhere and whose center is nowhere. And who administers this power? Not the king, or the duke. And not even — this will matter in what’s coming — the president. Power is now administered by everyone in what we might call an administrative position. The ones who design, vet, and disseminate the mandatory work surveys; the ones who have a hand, or just a finger, in getting the annual reports out to the workforce, whether a faculty or a corporate population; they are the ones who evaluate the students for intelligence, grade them for performance, collect data on their likes and dislikes. These administrators of power include marketing people and advertising people and public relations people — all the people who count and characterize, and whose work manages to shape the lives of their subjects.

All these people — most of whom are no doubt good people — are watched and counted and measured in turn. Do some have more disciplinary power than others? Do some have more surveillance power? Maybe — but it probably doesn’t really feel that way to any individual. They are just doing their jobs. A certain amount of such bureaucratic calculation and observation is critical to the functioning of a mass society, certainly. Yet I think the collective effect of these jobs done by good people is more discipline. The collective effect is less freedom. One is observed more. One is judged more. 

[… very very long …]

In truth, there is no center of power to take possession of. If Trump wins the next election, the forces of discipline, which are deployed by no one, in the interest of no one, will continue to compound themselves. The college-educated will get to push more of the buttons, but they too will be subjects of discipline, constantly evaluated, scrutinized, regimented, and regulated. At least they will feel as though they possess some power and some dignity. The non-college group, by contrast, will stroke many fewer keys and see that their lives are being run, though they will think they are being run by those goddam liberals, not by the disciplinary regime. They will not recognize the power that expands for its own sake and functions, finally, for nothing and no one. Its only interest is its own blind growth.

This is the problem. And this harks back to Brooks and the death of 1000 papercuts.

The real problem is that DIE is embedded in bureaucratic administration. Administration makes regulations, some of which (e.g. DIE discrimination ones) are bad and most of which are merely questionable, but which end up making it harder to get things done. See the rant above about documenting whether your job helped the DIE cause. DIE is just the cherry on the cake of red tape that is strangling productivity and creativity. But the key point is the thing that various UK Tory ministers called the blob is in charge. It’s the administrative stuff, some of it government bureaucrats, some of it NGOs/charities, some of it organizational HR departments and so on. Each one of them come up with an idea that adds just a little more straw to the camel’s back. DIE edicts are just the last few straws before the poor camel collapses.

Then there’s Richard Hanania’s recent post2 on why DIE wokism won’t kill safety, which is, IMHO, overoptimistic but in the middle recounts an incident where bureaucracy gratuitously makes things worse and no one can fix it. This is what happened when in the mid Obama era the FAA decided to unilaterally make a change in pilot hours required to qualify as a commercial airline pilot:

In this particular case, we have if anything too much “merit” when it comes to hiring pilots. The US used to require only 250 flying hours before an individual could earn their license. After a crash in 2009 that doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with the amount of training the pilots involved had received, they upped that number to 1,500, making the US a global outlier.

And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points out, prior to the 1500 hour rule, pilots typically had about 500 hours when they first sat behind the controls on a commercial flight and they were mentored over the next 1000 or so by more experienced pilots. This system worked just fine, and is in fact the system still used everywhere except the US and commercial airliners do not fall out of the sky on a regular basis. But now, in the US, would-be pilots need 1500 hours before they can start which radically limits the pool of potential applicants and raises the cost because if not military they have pay for that 1500 hours of flight time out of their own pockets.

The problem is that the effects of this rule change take years to be noticed (most of a decade I believe in this case) by anyone outside of a few subject matter experts who get blown off because “it’s for the children” or whatever.

This is all, IMHO, an expansion of Parkinson’s Law of Bureaucracy

DIE in fact meets one of the related laws too – the triviality one:

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as “bikeshedding,” is a phenomenon that occurs in organizations when a group of people spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing and making decisions about minor or insignificant details, while neglecting more important issues.

DIE is a classic bikeshed. It allows people of low competence and limited knowledge about the major subject manage to take up the time of others doing nothing of relevance. But because it is something even low competence people can have a viewpoint on they can argue about it, while decisions about the actual functiomn of the organization require rather more knowledge and competence so they shut up. See for example the Afrochemistry chick

Or the Johns Hopkins HR chick, though she may be just evil (or stupid, or both). Having said that she actually has a significant academic publishing record (far more significant than that of Gay, C – to pick a diversity hire at random) and many of them are about diabetes and seem (at a quick skim) to be reasonable. Mind you some appear to be less high quality:

Measuring Structural Racism and Its Association With BMI

Structural racism has attracted increasing interest as an explanation for racial disparities in health, including differences in adiposity. Structural racism has been measured most often with single-indicator proxies (e.g., housing discrimination), which may leave important aspects of structural racism unaccounted for. This paper develops a multi-indicator scale measuring county structural racism in the U.S. and evaluates its association with BMI.

etc. ad nauseam

I haven’t read the paper, but I’m pretty sure it’s blaming racism for African Americans being fat. Probably because African Americans are poor wittle children with no agency who are forced by the ebil white patriarchy to eat a poor diet and not get any exercise. I may be exaggerating, though I’m not sure because how else do we read the original explanation of ‘privilege’ that said that it was something white, male, cisgender, middle class people had. In other words male normies.

For the most part these people contribute nothing of value to their organization, but they need to justify their salaries and existence somehow so they attach themselves to the DIE bandwagon and play the RACISS card in order to show their power and authority.

And I have a slight tangent to insert here. A lot of the useless bureaucrats, both inside government and outside in corporate HR, NGOs etc., are “minorities” or “women” or were otherwise affirmative action/diversity hires picked for their original job mostly on the basis of their skin color, gender etc. with less concern for their ability to do a proper job. Originally there may have been a decent excuse for this, back in the 1960s/70s – which is, I remind you, HALF A CENTURY AGO – but that excuse should have been tossed some time in the 1980s or 90s. I don’t have statistics or indeed much beyond anecdata but I find it noteworthy that we are seeing the issue now as the affirmative action hires of 20-30 years ago, probably hired back then by other older affirmative action hires, now bubble up to the top of their organizations and then cock everything up in ways that cannot be swept under the carpet because they are the visible face of the organization (see Gay, C as the perfect example).

The other problem is that these people, who are in fact generally of less than stellar competence, have found that they can’t get jobs designing bridges or aircraft or computer games or indeed much else that requires actual intelligence and knowledge. Neither can their children [and yes ladies and gentlemen and little furry creatures from Alpha Centauri, IQ and executive function are in large part heritable characteristics, with another critical influence (not) being in a female single parent household]. This, they assume, has to be due to “structural racism” and/or “the patriarchy” because they can think of no other reason why precious darlings can’t get intellectually stretching jobs.

But returning to Brooks, DIE is just the visible tip of the iceberg that is the problem. The real problem is bureaucracy in general, the fact that people who have a real job to do must jump through pointless hoops of (electronic) paperwork before (or after) they can do what they need to do and they have to attend meetings and training sessions that at best waste their time and at worst actively assume they are all bigots in the process. Those who have a real need to solve have to navigate pointless levels of semi-automated phonetree or level 1 customer support people before they can talk to an actual human who has the power to fix their issue.

Or perhaps just the knowledge to tell them that the issue cannot be fixed with the current product because some idiot government efficiency mandate has made it at best semi-functional.

And going back to Hanania, the corrosion of woke may not have yet showed up in the statistics but it is certainly present in everyday life. I know, for example, of a number of people (some of them probably readers of this) who deliberately choose older white doctors as their primary care physician. Who likewise search for (generally older) male tradesmen for repairs and the like. And so on. They have made choices that mean they avoid the dangers of a woke diversity hire being involved in their life and harming them through incompetence (or malice). They tend to buy used older stuff or commercial stuff to evade idiotic energy etc. mandates that make their dishwashers at best semi-functional. Likewise many now fail to have flight cancellation issues or to be groped by the TSA because they no longer fly commercial airlines. Who no longer work for large corporations with DIE HR policies. Who no longer watch woke TV or read woke magazines. And so on.

The blob of bureaucracy is there and growing and it is absolutely making things worse. See dishwashers. And DIE.But DIE is as much a symptom of a bureaucracy that wants an excuse to expand as it is a cause.

Japan is different

In many ways Japan has skipped the general encrudification. Japan has a reputation as a pretty bureaucratic place and that is true, but the bureaucracy in Japan has not grown like it has in other places. Just as prices in yen have barely increased in 30 years, so too the bureaucratic load. Indeed in certain respects Japan has actually decreased the bureaucratic load – various pointlessly low speed limits have been removed, for example, and (after some teething troubles) the entry process at airports has been significantly streamlined post wuflu with everything done via a website/app that you show to the nice immigration or customs agent.

[Note that you still need to queue but that’s due to the volume of tourists seeking to enjoy Japan as a cheap, safe tourist destination. Also as someone who once bought the most expensive beer of his life in Tokyo I find putting the words cheap and Japan in the same sentence to be bizarre, though it is true.]

Flying domestically in Japan is not as good as it was in the US in the 1990s when you could board your plane 15 minutes after parking your car, but it’s also not the hour plus long gropathon that is the current TSA experience – unless you fly at peak periods but then proportionally the time is less than US equivalent peak periods. Moreover you don’t have to show photo ID, you don’t need to take your shoes off and you can carry bottles of booze (or microphone stands) in your carry on bags.

In healthcare there has been no Obamacare and thus no requirement that your health insurance support this or that fashionable thing. You get to choose your own doctor or hospital and for the most part you and your doctors determine your treatment plan without having healthcare bureaucrats – either government or corporate – arguing over whether it is appropriate. The price will generally be clear too, as is what you will be expected to bear as copay, and if you don’t like it you can ask another clinic if they’ll do it for less.

In some areas – e.g. construction – Japan is actually notably freer than other countries. Zoning rules are much broader, buildings just need to meet safety standards (which is likely one reason why the recent 7.6 magnitude Noto quake killed less than 300 people total) and anyone can turn their home into a shop or other small business (or vice versa) with no way for a government busybody to stop it. Noah Smith had a recent article about the “California Forever” new city project3, where he mentions the zonings for mixed use residential / commercial / light-business as a positive but any Japanese bureaucrat would be scratching his head and wondering why this was special.

It is true that large Japanese companies remain horribly bureaucratic places where mediocre performance does not necessarily lead to lower pay or slower promotion, but they have not got worse, except for a notably increased propensity for wearing face masks post wuflu. If it took a year to make a decision in, say, 1995, it takes a year to make the same decision today. There’s no additional friction and just as in 1995 once the decision has been made it is implemented promptly.

As well as masks there are mutterings about “eshicaru” this and that and “essudeijiizu” (ethical and SDGs) but in general this is froth. In part this is because even government bureaucrats mostly believe in customer service. Yes Japan has plenty of mostly pointless bureaucratic stuff to do but as long as you stay on the track of everyone else the process is clearly documented and you carry bits of paper from bureaucrat A to B to … and end up with the permit to do what ever it was. Indeed if you expect to deviate from the standard track but tell a bureaucrat first, the bureaucrat will likely help you fill in the right forms / provide the right supporting documentation etc. and all will be fine.

Aside: Japanese bureaucracy only gets nasty when you don’t get prior approval and then act all huffy about it. It’s much, much better to ask for permission than forgiveness and if you did fail to get permission, an attitude of deference bordering on groveling will often result in you being let off with a warning as long as you write your apology letter properly.

The Solution

It is unclear how to solve this problem without mass disruption. In fact it may be hard to solve it even with mass disruption. But the key to the solution is to take an axe to the entire bureaucracy not just the twigs that are DIE and ESG. Almost certainly the Milei approach is required. A chainsaw that cuts down branches and all the ivy, brambles and other overgrowth.

The key to recall is that Parkinson’s law is a ratchet on the bureaucracy, so you have to both repeal 80% of the regulations AND fire (at least) 90% of the bureaucrats. Do not reassign them, just fire them. There are almost certainly entire government departments (Education, HUD…) that can be entirely replaced by a small outsourced call center, if that. Others, the EPA comes to mind, need to be pruned radically and have most regulations in the last 25 years revoked. The FDA, FAA, SEC etc. probably need more careful pruning but I’m sure that a significant reduction in regulations and manpower will be easily achieved.

And so on.

How to choose which bureaucrats to remove? Well a simple first wave is everyone that has showed up to the office fewer than three days a week in the last year, call it under 150 days in total. That’s likely to be about 75% of the government bureaucracy. And if that impacts other bureaucracies than the ones that need to be cut then those get more firings as required.

Once the government bureaucrats are fired, the next is to go after the NGOs that get government funding. Simply pass a law that no non-profit can receive government funds. Most of them will be doing useless things like DIE training so there’s no loss. Of course if you word this right that will include most of the universities. That’s probably a positive, but it may be necessary to include carveouts for actual scientific research, but it seems reasonable to require that universities that accept research funds comply with a few rules that will likely remove some of the faculty as well. It is probably beyond the (federal) government to remove administrators but state governments almost certainly can for state funded universities. There probably ought to be a maximum non faculty staff number/ratio to undergraduates that is approximately the number of such staff in 1999.

Some sample rules

1. (Undergraduate) entry requirements must be objective and compliant with US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc., with subjective choices only taking place in the case of objective ties.
2. Any researcher who receives government funds and fails to produce sufficient raw data/methods to enable replication shall be required to repay the funds. If the research doesn’t have any raw data/methods it isn’t research and shall also not be acceptable

After that the chainsaw needs to go to corporate HR departments. Almost certainly the lack of required regulations to comply with (thanks to the chainsaw above) will help most organizations decide to remove chunks of HR drones in the interests of larger bonuses for CxOs because of greater profits. But a stick, in the form of a reminder that US non-discrimination laws, Supreme court rulings etc. mean that diversity hiring is generally illegal and could open the company up for prosecution would probably help.

If the US is lucky, the next US president will take a leaf out of the Milei book. In other countries it may be too late.