Tag Archives: society

Dysgenic Amerika

06 Friday Sep 2019

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Nothing to see here, comrades.

The shrinkage in the marriage market is but a symptom.

“Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men–men with a stable job and a good income–make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs,” explains lead author Dr. Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, in a media release. “Marriage is still based on love, but it also is fundamentally an economic transaction. Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s educational levels on average now exceed their male suitors.”

It’s like there’s a dire shortage of adults. Oh yeah, there is.

We are losing crucial emotional and mental capacities for self-reflection, for wandering thought, for the ability to tolerate boredom. And that is the very definition of being a child — all id, out of control, demanding and needy and dependent. It’s poisoned our politics and our personhood, the terrible irony is this: Only we can fix it.

Correction: only the long, slow passage of time or war will fix this. Neither of these articles mentioned anything beyond the symptoms of the decline. The authors are likely incapable of understanding the root causes. They will fix nothing. Indeed, the fix is in. Like a plan or something.

PCR on the Matrix, the Hoaxes, the Hate

29 Thursday Aug 2019

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He’s on to something.

Like Russiagate, Saddam Hussian’s weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, and so on, we live in an orchestrated world with controlled explanations designed to keep us adhering to the ruling agendas.

Americans, indeed the entirety of Europe, live in The Matrix. I am getting tired of trying to get you out of the controlled explanations that control your mind. I am no Morpheus, and I can’t find Neo. As far as I can tell, the Western world is lost. The place of understanding is taken by inchoate emotions that the Zionists call “self-hating.” How can a culture that hates itself—hate that will be reinforced by the New York Times 1619 Project—survive?

He’s done a heck of a job for many years. Europe, I think, is salvageable. Indeed, Eastern Europe never succumbed at all. America, is another story, one maybe nearing the end.

But… So Interconnected…

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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The Millennials and the Z kids are lonely, in spite of (or because of) all that social crapia…

According to a recent YouGov survey, some 30 percent of American millennials say that they are “lonely.” More than 20 percent report that they have no friends; a quarter claim to have no close ones. Many even insist that they have no “acquaintances,” which should, one hopes, be impossible. But I wonder. For even younger people, in so-called “Generation Z,” the figures are even bleaker.

We can make facile jokes about avocado toast and baristas with degrees in cultural studies who spend more time on Instagram than they do in real-life conversations with non-customers. There may be a bit of truth in these caricatures. But I’m not sure we should find them amusing.

Hey, kids! Let this Xer set you straight – with a little Boomer lyrical wisdom:

The 5G Continuum

02 Friday Aug 2019

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I fail to see how 5G will really be any different than the mass effect we already have.

These ideas are not fringe, and have been actively pursued in the past by the presidents of MIT, Stanford University, Cornell and Harvard, and courses on this subject have been taught at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Clark, and MIT. Today, much of this teaching is guised under the label of scientific genetics, and the grand scheme of a planned and controlled society is not dead, but is being pursued under the new language of human genetics.

With the rollout of 5G technologies, which are not any real improvements in communication, an ‘Internet of Things’ will be structured to tie everything together. This is the basis necessary for the physical takeover of all systems, which when implemented, will allow for a completely controlled society. Humans will become simply economic units, and therefore expendable. This dystopian nightmare is just around the corner, maybe only a few years away, and must be stopped before it is too late.

This is not “conspiracy theory” or science fiction. It is now a fact of life. It is being pursued aggressively, and is being accepted more and more by an ignorant and comatose public. If mass resistance is not soon forthcoming, we will risk being doomed to a life of total control in a society consumed by worthlessness.

What? More cancer? Obesity? Alrighty, back to your screens, Eloi.

Guns in School: a Mark of Civilized Society

18 Thursday Jul 2019

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Dr. Walter Williams and many others have written about this very subject before. It bears repeating.

Here’s a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: “Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can to keep guns out of the hands of kids.”

There’s a problem with this reasoning. Prior to the 1960s, many public high schools had shooting clubs. In New York City, shooting clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway and turned them over to their homeroom or gym teacher. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice. In some rural areas across the nation, there was a long tradition of high school students hunting before classes and storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars, parked on school grounds, during the school day.

High school rifles: more elegant weapons from a more civilized age. No changes whatsoever…

The “Persuasive Design” Against Children and Humanity

29 Saturday Jun 2019

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The screens are zombifying the people.

These parents have no idea that lurking behind their kids’ screens and phones are a multitude of psychologists, neuroscientists, and social science experts who use their knowledge of psychological vulnerabilities to devise products that capture kids’ attention for the sake of industry profit. What these parents and most of the world have yet to grasp is that psychology — a discipline that we associate with healing — is now being used as a weapon against children.

“Machines Designed to Change Humans”

Nestled in an unremarkable building on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, California, is the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, founded in 1998. The lab’s creator, Dr. B.J. Fogg, is a psychologist and the father of persuasive technology, a discipline in which digital machines and apps — including smartphones, social media, and video games — are configured to alter human thoughts and behaviors. As the lab’s website boldly proclaims: “Machines designed to change humans.”

Fogg speaks openly of the ability to use smartphones and other digital devices to change our ideas and actions: “We can now create machines that can change what people think and what people do, and the machines can do that autonomously.”

Called “the millionaire maker,” Fogg has groomed former students who have used his methods to develop technologies that now consume kids’ lives. As he recently touted on his personal website, “My students often do groundbreaking projects, and they continue having impact in the real world after they leave Stanford… For example, Instagram has influenced the behavior of over 800 million people. The co-founder was a student of mine.”

Intriguingly, there are signs that Fogg is feeling the heat from recent scrutiny of the use of digital devices to alter behavior. His boast about Instagram, which was present on his website as late as January of 2018, has been removed. Fogg’s website also has lately undergone a substantial makeover, as he now seems to go out of his way to suggest his work has benevolent aims, commenting, “I teach good people how behavior works so they can create products & services that benefit everyday people around the world.” Likewise, the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab website optimistically claims, “Persuasive technologies can bring about positive changes in many domains, including health, business, safety, and education. We also believe that new advances in technology can help promote world peace in 30 years.”

While Fogg emphasizes persuasive design’s sunny future, he is quite indifferent to the disturbing reality now: that hidden influence techniques are being used by the tech industry to hook and exploit users for profit. His enthusiastic vision also conveniently neglects to include how this generation of children and teens, with their highly malleable minds, is being manipulated and hurt by forces unseen.

Weaponizing Persuasion

If you haven’t heard of persuasive technology, that’s no accident — tech corporations would prefer it to remain in the shadows, as most of us don’t want to be controlled and have a special aversion to kids being manipulated for profit.

Read the whole article – one of the most damning I’ve read in a long time.

And, this is nothing new. Hellywood has used similar techniques for decades to manipulate the populace.

Try the following one weekend or a vacation day: Remove yourself from all screens for 24 hours. No TV, movies, phones, tablets, PCs (not even for this blog!), or car consoles. If you can do it, even just somewhat happily, then you are immune to the brainwashing. If you can’t, and I suspect that 90% can’t, then you are addicted. It’s a literal digital drug. Like heroin but worse.

The Effects of (Really) Counting the SAT and ACT

26 Wednesday Jun 2019

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Steve Sailer opts for a potential “take it if you can” approach towards the end of a very good article on some new (if unsurprising) research about elite college admissions.

We live in an era in which we are constantly lectured that white males are always ruining everything for everybody else by their feelings of entitlement and privilege. But when it comes to fancy colleges, the opposite is true. At any above-average test score, 18-year-old white guys are less likely to attend a prestige college and more likely to enlist in the military, enter a trade, or go to a local non-elite Directional State college.

And, there’s still the Asians v. Harvard case. Me, I’m not so sure about the idea of reclaiming the Ivy League. He’s probably right – for now. Whether it will matter in the future, as with all the rest of these thorny issues, remains to be seen.

Disposable People on Disposable Ships

23 Sunday Jun 2019

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UPDATE: the following, original focuses on the “smart” littoral combat ships of the US Navy. An example of how well they work, with their smart new crews, was displayed Monday when one collided with a freighter parked in Montreal harbor. Why does the smart new Navy keep driving ships into freighters?

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The Atlantic examines the Navy’s “smart” ships, the LCSs and extrapolates to the wider, modern workforce.

And he discovered another correlation in his test: The people who did best tended to score high on “openness to new experience”—a personality trait that is normally not a major job-performance predictor and that, in certain contexts, roughly translates to “distractibility.” To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker’s formulation, people with this trait are less focused on doing things right, and more likely to wonder whether they’re doing the right things.

High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not terribly conscientious, open to potential distraction—this is not the classic profile of a winning job candidate. But what if it is the profile of the winning job candidate of the future? If that’s the case, some important implications would arise.

One concerns “grit”—a mind-set, much vaunted these days in educational and professional circles, that allows people to commit tenaciously to doing one thing well. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor, has written powerfully about the value of grit—putting your head down, blocking out distractions, committing over a course of many years to a chosen path. Her writing traces an intellectual lineage that can also be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which explains extraordinary success as a function of endless, dedicated practice—10,000 hours or more. These ideas are inherently appealing; they suggest that dedication can be more important than raw talent, that the dogged and conscientious will be rewarded in the end.

These trends are more prevalent in certain fields and in certain locations. I think they have the potential to change, for the better, how people are employed – giving more power to the employee. However, I don’t think that’s the future. Human (herd) nature will intervene, and there’s the robotic/AI/civilizational collapse think, proceeding unopposed. In the end, like the LCS sailors, most folks will have to abandon ship.

Lessons, if heeded, for far-distant generations.

Nuclear “Strategic Stability”

21 Friday Jun 2019

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If achieved, will rapidly give way to logistical collapse. Someone at the Pentagram knows this, paying attention to the alarming (if predictable) results of the analysis of Civil War 2.0 fallout. But the DOD still hosts a large cadre of idiots.

NUCLEAR weapons could still create “decisive results” and break stalemates during a war, Pentagon top brass have claimed.

The ominous new document – since deleted – is called ‘Nuclear Operations’ and suggests military chiefs could once again use the weapons of mass destruction to “restore strategic stability.”

Arms control experts say the doctrine marks a dangerous shift towards the idea of actually fighting and winning a full-scale nuclear conflict.

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the joint chiefs’ document states.

“Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

Whose commanders?

The odds of a meltdown, collapse, or terminal domestic war, the remains of America, are a near mathematical certainty. I think the odds of heavy bombing and/or artillery barrages hovers north of 50%. Can we add the odds of nuk-u-lar weapons to the mix? 10%? 20%? Let’s hope the rumors about tritium scarcity are true.

When it comes, the primary death toll culprits will probably be disease and starvation, rather than Mark 83s. However it happens, it will cut into these newly released population estimates.

The graying of America continues.

The national median age rose to 38.2 years last year, according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. That suggests half of the U.S. population is more than 38-years-old and half is younger. By gender, the median for woman is 39.5 while for men its 36.9 years.

The aging of America is widespread with 49 of 50 states showing an uptick in older residents. North Dakota was the only state to see a decline in its median age, from 37 years in 2010 to 35.2 in 2018.

“This aging (phenomenon) is driven in large part by baby boomers crossing over the 65-year-old mark,” said Luke Rogers, the Chief of the Population Estimates Branch at the Census Bureau.

A decline in birth rates is another reason. The number of U.S. births fell to lowest level in 32 years in 2018.

There were less than 3.9 million babies under age 1 as of July 1, 2018. This represents the smallest age cohort until age 64. The largest age cohort is 27-year-olds, making up 4.8 million of the population.

Bombs for boomers? That might be a strategy.

The College Basket Case

17 Monday Jun 2019

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As I’ve pointed out a few times before, the American education system is, by and large, broken, from kindergarten to graduate school. A new survey reveals the magnitude of the underlying issues facing the modern college student.

A 2018 survey at 140 educational institutions asked almost 90,000 college students about their health over the past 12 months. The survey found that more than three in five (63%) respondents reported experiencing “overwhelming anxiety” in the past year, while two in five (42%) reported feeling “so depressed that it was difficult to function.” Students also reported that anxiety (27%), sleep difficulties (22%) and depression (19%) had adversely affected their academic performance.

In the same survey, 12% of college students reported having “seriously considered suicide.” Another study, which looked at college students with depression, anxiety and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who had been referred by college counseling centers for psychopharmacological evaluation, found that the same proportion—12%—had actually made at least one suicide attempt. Half of the students in the latter study had previously received a prescription for medication, most often antidepressants.

Colleges are feeling the squeeze, with demand growing nationally for campus mental health services. A study by Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health reported an average 30% to 40% increase in students’ use of counseling centers between 2009 and 2015 at a time when enrollment grew by just 5%. According to Penn State’s report, the “increase in demand is primarily characterized by a growing frequency of students with a lifetime prevalence of threat-to-self indicators.”

This is a system terminally out of control. The schools and their students are mirrors, reflecting a changed, fractured, and fragmented culture and society. Our enemies have done their jobs well, over many decades. None of this will be fixed soon nor easily.