22 Saturday Feb 2020
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on Fred on Microscopes and Civilization
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Mr. Reed wrote a dandy piece about the lost America and what helped make it special – dangerous scientific toys!
Microscopes. Chemistry, Reading. English grammar. Encouragement of intelligence. Spaceships. Robots, however misspelled. Shellac guns.
Cowboy boots and .22 rifles. Memories.
09 Sunday Feb 2020
Posted in Legal/Political Columns, News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Fred on China
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Fred Reed breaks down the differences between the US Empire and the stable, growing, and the proud and coherent nation of China.
In a democracy the rabble, sensing their numerical advantage, will always try to pull their superiors down. They will not make an effort, probably futile, to rise. A central strain in American culture is hostility to elitism, which means a preference for the better to the worse. The deep resentment of the superior leads to a celebration of inadequacy seen in affirmative action, the abolition of standardized tests and advanced placement courses for the bright, and the lowering of academic standards. We call this “inclusiveness.”
I suspect the Chinese call it “lunacy.” China finds its very brightest young and sends them to the best schools in China or the US. The notion that virtue requires that a country suffer mildly retarded brain surgeons or barely numerate physicists is peculiarly American.
Elections, inevitable in democracies, are a terrible idea. An election is a competitive shooing of fools in directions profitable to those doing the shooing. Democracy is thus a mechanism for the promotion of rogues and rascals. It works. America now has a most wonderfully ineffectual and embarrassing government.
The holding of elections–these being combinations of raffles, vaudeville, and popularity contests–every two, four, or six years ensures that the beneficiaries will concentrate their thoughts more on shooing than doing.
Mr. Reed must not be aware of the stellar events of say, Iowa, last week.
22 Thursday Feb 2018
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≈ Comments Off on The Boys: Cultural Questions and Answers
Two good stories today about the decaying culture.
The first, a very good Times piece by Michael Ian Black, a little confused on the effects of feminism, asks for help:
I believe in boys. I believe in my son. Sometimes, though, I see him, 16 years old, swallowing his frustration, burying his worry, stomping up the stairs without telling us what’s wrong, and I want to show him what it looks like to be vulnerable and open but I can’t. Because I was a boy once, too.
There has to be a way to expand what it means to be a man without losing our masculinity. I don’t know how we open ourselves to the rich complexity of our manhood. I think we would benefit from the same conversations girls and women have been having for these past 50 years.
I would like men to use feminism as an inspiration, in the same way that feminists used the civil rights movement as theirs. I’m not advocating a quick fix. There isn’t one. But we have to start the conversation. Boys are broken, and I want to help.
In the second Fred Reed delivers the answers, uncomfortable but incontrovertible; as he notes, “The causes can be argued, but the fact cannot.”
I think feminism plays a large part in the collapse of society in general and specifically in pushing boys over the edge. In my school years boys were allowed to be boys. Neither sex was denigrated. Doing so would have occurred to nobody. Then came a prejudice against boys, powerful today
All of this affected society in its entirety, but especially white boys. They are constantly told that being white is shameful, that any masculine interest is pathological, that they are rapists in waiting. They are subjected to torturous boredom and inactivity, and drugged when they respond poorly. They go to schools that do not like them and that stack the deck against them. Many are fatherless. All have access to psychoactive drugs.
Add it up.
Unintended consequences? Or part of the plan? Either way…
Norman Rockwell.
19 Thursday Oct 2017
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on The Dogs of War: Fred on Human Instinct
Says Fred Reed: It’s what we, especially in America, do:
As Washington bombs Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria, militarily threatens Russia, Venezuela, North Korea, and China, sanctions Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, Iran..one may wonder: Why?
Are wars about anything, or just wars? In modern times, a reason of sorts is thought decorous, yes: Ruritania is threatening us, or might, or does something wrong, or Ruritanians don’t think rightly about the gods. We must kill them. And yet everywhere in all times, almost miraculously, some reason for a war is found. It would seem that wars are not about anything, but just what we do.
Recently the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared to offer a prospect of extended peace. There seemed nothing left to fight about, at least on any scale. Yet the United States quickly launched a half dozen wars of no necessity and threatened others. Why?
Because wars are what we do.
It may surprise many people to learn of evidence for a genetic foundation of human behavior. This should not be surprising. Dogs form packs, mark territory, and bark furiously at strange dogs. So, it seems, do people. An empire is just the result of these canine instincts..
…
The instinct keeps on working. So well too.
Hey look! We’ve got ISIS on the run in Syria. (Us, or the Russians, hard to tell).
And, hey look! ISIS runs to EVERYWHERE else. Not really bad news; just more war for the future. Okay, so it may be bad news for people like this woman:
Tyler Hicks/NYT.
05 Saturday Aug 2017
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on Fred on the Lilliputian War Mongers
Some people never learn. Fred recounts:
When you have militarily stupid politicians listening to pathologically confident soldiers, trouble is likely. All of these people might reflect how seldom wars turn out as those starting them expect. Wars are always going to be quick and easy. Generals not infrequently advise against a war but, once it begins, they bark in unison. They seldom know what they are getting into. Note:
The American Civil War was expected to be over in an afternoon at First Manassas. Wrong, by four years and some 650,000 dead.
Germans thought that World War I would be be a quick war of movement, over in a few weeks. Wrong by four years and fantastic slaughter, and was an entirely unexpected trench war of attrition ending in unconditional surrender. Not in the Powerpoint presentation.
When the Japanese Army urged attacking Pearl Harbor, their war aims did not include two cities in radioactive rubble and GIs in the bars of Tokyo. That is what they got.
When the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, having GIs and the Red Army in Berlin must have been an undocumented feature. Very undocumented.
When the French re-invaded Vietnam after WWII, they did not expect les jaunes to crush them at Dien Bien Phu, end of war. Les Jaunes did.
When the Americans invaded Vietnam, having seen what had happened to the French, the thought did not occur that it might happen to them too. It did.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, having seen what happened to the US in a war against peasants, they did not expect to lose. They did.
When the Americans attacked Afghanistan, having seen what happened to the Soviets there, they did not expect to be fought to a slowly losing draw. They were.
When the Americans attacked Iraq, they did not expect to be bogged down in an interminable conflagration in the whole region. They are.
Is there a pattern here?
Pattern, schmattern.
17 Monday Jul 2017
Posted in News and Notes
≈ Comments Off on SJWs Attempt Convergence of the Hard Sciences
Not content with gender and hoax “studies,” and having taken over the legal education, they now move on to the research sciences:
Academics and scholars must be mindful about using research done by only straight, white men, according to two scientists who argued that it oppresses diverse voices and bolsters the status of already privileged and established white male scholars.
Geographers Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argued in a recent paper that doing so also perpetuates what they call “white heteromasculinism,” which they defined as a “system of oppression” that benefits only those who are “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” (Cisgendered describes people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.)
Mott, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Cockayne, who teaches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, argued that scholars or researchers disproportionately cite the work of white men, thereby unfairly adding credence to the body of knowledge they offer while ignoring the voices of other groups, like women and black male academics. Although citation seems like a mundane practice, the feminist professors argue that citing someone’s work has implications on his or her ability to be hired, get promoted and obtain tenured status, among others.
There is, of course and as noted in the article, a distinct lack of otherkin in the hard sciences. That’s not the point; this is all code for hating the “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” As for citations, if not for the foregoing evil white men, there would be next to nothing to cite. Fred Reed, two years ago, noted just a few of the accomplishments:
Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Roads. Buildings. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera.
Oppressive white heteromasculinism in action. Fred Reed/NASA/the Oppressors.
Rather than be thankful for the incredible groundwork, the SJWs attack the groundworkers. They always lie… I suppose it would be possible to live without the above-listed. People did so for thousands of years – in caves. Maybe that’s the final goal – regression to the Paleolithic.
“You’ve come a long way, baby. Now go back.”
09 Friday Jun 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Statuaries: Fred on Robert E. Lee on American Decline
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Please consult the inaugural column by Toadstool over at Fred Reed’s place. Toadstool writes in similar fashion to Fred; they may be related. This one is about how General Lee called out the modern Empire. Actually called it by that name.
“The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.” – Robert E. Lee
The column repeatedly calls for a return to the Articles of Confederation, to freedom. That would be a vast improvement to the current failed system. Most anything would be an improvement. We could still heed Lee’s warnings. We won’t.
Instead we’ll just keep taking down his statutes.
Begone! Civilized free-thinker! Right-think idiocy courtesy of ‘Nawlins, a filthy swamp of a town.
21 Friday Apr 2017
Posted in Legal/Political Columns
≈ Comments Off on Fred on America’s First Transgender President, the Hillary-fication of Donald Trump
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Fred takes note of the insane foolishness in D.C. as it concerns The Donald.
Hillary was on board with the Russia hysteria and the globalization and the immigration and so on. Trump could have screwed the whole pooch by getting along with Russia, so he had to be reconfigured. And was. A work in progress, but going well.
Too much is being asked of him. One man cannot overcome the combined hostility of the media, the political establishment, the neocons, the myriad other special interests that he has threatened. Mass immigration is a done deal. China develops and America, already developed, cannot keep up. The country disintegrates socially. Washington, always depending on war and its threat, faces a new world in which trade is the weapon, and doesn’t know what to do. The culture courses. The world changes.
Yet if only Trump showed some sign of knowing what he is doing, and could remember from day to day, if only he realized that wars are more easily started than predicted, if only he were not becoming an unbalanced Hillary.
Yet, apparently, he is.
Yes, a work in progress. And progressing very nicely. Tax cuts, they say, are coming. Just as Obamacare reform/repeal/replacement/whatever is coming along nicely … again … for the 90th time… Hillary is walking free. The terrorists are walking free. The judges and lawyers who support the terrorists are walking free. Julian Assange … is destined for prison. Goldman controls the economy and the currency. Bombs fall the world over based on lies. The swamp is thriving. No one has seen the wall…
There’s still a glimmer of hope left for this administration. But it’s a small glimmer and obstructed by the clouds and fumes of Mordor.
Fred did a great, typically-hilarious Fred job of showcasing the situation but he’s a bit late. I called this on April 7th.
MAGA can (could) still happen. But not with this crowd. Not with this government. Maybe not with this population.
Have a great weekend.
14 Friday Apr 2017
Posted in Other Columns
≈ Comments Off on On That White Privilege Thing
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App. State, civilization, Fred Reed, SJW, society, white privilege
Yesterday, I remembered once reading about “white privilege” at Appalachian State University. All schools, it seems, have a horde of SJWs hell-bent on pointing out privilege and whining about it. I though this particular story was interesting, because Boone. The resident multi-culti association put a display in the student center attacking straight, white, Christian men – all the rage, don’t you know.
I checked with their “diverse” school website and got a good chuckle. It’s nice that these hateful but generally harmless people are no longer confined to padded rooms in a hospital.
It was Fred Reed’s take on the matter, yesterday that made me remember the App. State episode.
Look around your university. Who do you see taking the hard subjects–math, chemistry, physics, engineering, philosophy, computer science? Whites and Asians…right? Are they the kind of people who complain constantly about White Privilege? You may notice a pattern here: Those who can, do. The rest bitch and moan.
How about your own classes? You are not blind. If you think for yourself, you can see who the smart ones are, and who are those getting a free ride. Usually, a free ride at your expense. Your professors will not want you to notice this either. The question is whether you have been so profoundly brainwashed that you cannot see the obvious.
Being very young, you will probably have little idea of the vast body of knowledge, won over millenia, behind all the things you take for granted. At your age, I didn’t either. It takes years to get a handle on things. It will be harder for you because your universities will discourage you from looking around you. But glance at the very partial list below (I paste from an ancient column of mine) to get an idea of what the white race has done over the centuries. You will never have heard of many of these things. And that is curious. While your nose is being rubbed into the virtues, often real, sometimes imagined, of other groups, your own race is seldom motioned except to revile it.
Euclidean geometry. Parabolic geometry. Hyperbolic geometry. Projective geometry. Differential geometry. Calculus: Limits, continuity, differentiation, integration. Physical chemistry. Organic chemistry. Biochemistry. Classical mechanics. The indeterminacy principle. The wave equation. The Parthenon. The Anabasis. Air conditioning. Number theory. Romanesque architecture. Gothic architecture. Information theory. Entropy. Enthalpy. Every symphony ever written. Pierre Auguste Renoir. The twelve-tone scale. The mathematics behind it, twelfth root of two and all that. S-p hybrid bonding orbitals. The Bohr-Sommerfeld atom. The purine-pyrimidine structure of the DNA ladder. Single-sideband radio. All other radio. Dentistry. The internal-combustion engine. Turbojets. Turbofans. Doppler beam-sharpening. Penicillin. Airplanes. Surgery. The mammogram. The Pill. The condom. Polio vaccine. The integrated circuit. The computer. Football. Computational fluid dynamics. Tensors. The Constitution. Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Homer, Hesiod. Glass. Rubber. Nylon. Skyscrapers. The piano. The harpsichord. Elvis. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. (OK, that’s nerve gas, and maybe we didn’t really need it.) Silicone. The automobile. Really weird stuff, like clathrates, Buckyballs, and rotaxanes. The Bible. Bug spray. Diffie-Hellman, public-key cryptography, and RSA. Et cetera at great length.
If you talk about these things on campus, you will be called a “white supremacist.” This is silly. But calling you a racist is an effective way of making you shut up. Do you want to be supreme over anyone? I do not. Yet other races are proud of their achievements. Why should you not be? Ask where they would be without electricity, sterile water, telephones and–well, just about everything.
Fred points out that bragging is inappropriate – as is taking abuse for nothing. A little humble pride in achievement goes a long way. Maybe the others will be motivated to get off their low horse and excel. Maybe…
Nothing to see here. Just mean, old, white men at work, exploring the universe. Fred / NASA.
Of course, if the Apple State-ling Gang was really serious about doing something to terminate modern civilization white society, then they would join this yahoo in Minnesota.
Or, better yet, they could support these causes.
Or they could just shut the hell up. I suspect that is the native reaction around Boone. But, of course, I think, suspect,and type from privilege. Wonderful, wonderful, white privilege.
17 Friday Mar 2017
Posted in Other Columns, Uncategorized
≈ Comments Off on Fred on Family (His) and Society (Ours)
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This is a must read for the Anglophiles.
Fred Reed, in one essay, explains both his family tree and the precipitous decline of a civilization.
We were part of a thing brief but of immense value. The literacy, the attention to language, was of one cloth with that of the English, whose mastery has never been equaled and seldom approached. It has lasted in the family. In evenings with my grandfather at Hampden-Sydney, a parlor game was to call out three numbers–“746, 2, 7”–page 746, column 2, seventh entry of a huge dictionary on onion-skin paper–whereupon the caller-out had to spell the word, define it, pronounce it correctly, and give the etymology.
Tidewater was in the current of the English stretching from at least Sir Philip Sydney through Lewis Carol, Milne, Galsworthy, Kipling, Tolkien, Churchill and a hundred others. A thousand others. This virtuosity is now lost beyond redemption as American society, once determined from the top down, has come to be determined from the bottom up. Can you imagine an American politician writing—well, anything literate, but especially the equal of Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking People?
But we were speaking of the curious continuity of families. Come the war, Charles Scott Venable served on Lee’s staff, and Andrew Reid Venable on Jeb Stuart’s. This was a continuation of the aristocratic sense of duty. Their country was being invaded by alien people and they, like Lee, like Jackson, determined to defend it. Both were graduates of Hampden-Sydney, as am I, as were my father and uncle.
After the war Charles Venable was an astronomer and professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia. My grandfather processed mathematics at Hampden-Sydney and served as dean. My paternal uncle passed the bar but chose journalism, my father being a mathematician. I am whatever I am–for years I worked my way through math texts because I liked them–and my daughters are, aside from being smart, a musician and an artist. One of them popped ninety-ninth percentile in math on some standardized test and was invited to attend a math camp. A weird continuity.
America is not, or was not, ever, a “nation of immigrants”, a “proposition nation”. Ronald Reagan and a thousand shrieking loony liberals and cuck apologists aside, this country was an extension of Old England. Until the early 1800s, this was a land of the English. For another 100 years or so it was a land of the English and those of European descent who closely approximated the English tradition and experience. It is only since 1966 that the character has changed. And the change is noticeable.
I have seen, firsthand, the change and decline. The Lovetts came to America in two waves. One assigned to New England and the Puritan settlements. The other, my closest kin, like Fred’s people, settled in Virginia. Unlike his folks, mine departed South for the Carolinas and Georgia.
My family history (much of it) strangely tracks that path Fred lays out, from at least 1066 and on-wards. It ends with me and my daughter in the 21st Century. My little girl was born into a society which somewhat resembled the one I witnessed in the 70’s and 80’s – a little.
I saw the changes as they unfolded. I would like to go back. Whether that is possible remains to be seen. If it is not, then damn it. All of it.
