JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
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History will probably record that America’s Baby Boom generation threw one helluva party; Gen X was left with the sorry task of cleanup crew; and the Millennials ended up squatting in the repossessed haunted party-house when it was all over. On behalf of the Boomers, let me try to explain and apologize.
We came along at the end of history’s earlier biggest trauma, the Second World War, following the hard stumble of the Great Depression — which, by the way, for those of you unsure of chronology, followed the First World War, an epic, purposeless slaughter that utterly demoralized Western civilization. What a set-up for my parents’ generation.
My stepfather, the man who raised me, was an interesting specimen of that gen. Fresh out of college in Boston, he joined the army, became a lieutenant, and by-and-by found himself trapped in the German offensive through the Ardennes Forest, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Unlike some WW2 vets, he was willing to talk about his experiences. His most vivid memory was the difference between the sound of American and German machine guns. Ours went rat-a-tat-tat, theirs went zzzzzzzap, he said, like you couldn’t even detect the interval between the bullets coming at you. It scared the piss out of his men, not a few of whom were cut to pieces. My stepfather merely caught several chunks of shrapnel in his arm and thigh, and was still on the scene when Germany finally surrendered in May, 1945. He was awarded a silver star for valor, but never bragged on it. (My mother barely participated in my upbringing, but that’s another story.)
He went straight to New York City when it was over. His gen’s victory dance was to get straight to work in the economic bonanza just revving up — because the war had happened elsewhere and all our stuff was intact, ready to re-start, to make and sell anything under the sun to the shattered rest-of-the-world, and lend them money to buy it — quite an opportunity for young men highly disciplined and regimented from their recent travails of war. My stepfather became a classic Mad Man, as in the TV series, working in media, publishing, and PR, a hard-drinking cohort of mostly military vets who would knock down three martinis over lunch with clients (a nearly inconceivable feat, actually, when you think about it), but that showed what the war had done to the soldiers who survived. He died from it at barely sixty, and from smoking two packs of Camel straights a day, another habit of battle.
We Boomer boys had his war as movies and comic books: Sergeant Rock and John Wayne on the beach at Iwo! We had all the fruits of that postwar bonanza. We had Disneyland, the 1964 World’s Fair, the Carousel-of-Progress, and Rock Around the Clock. We eventually had a war of our own, Vietnam, but it was optional for college kids. I declined to go get my ass shot off, of course.
You have no idea what a fantastic bacchanal college was in the 1960s. Let the sunshine in! The great anti-war protests gave us a chance to pretend we were serious, but, believe me, it was much more about finding someone to hook-up with at the teach-ins and the street marches. The birth control pill was a fabulous novelty. We ignored the side-effects — especially the social side effects that led later on to an epidemic of divorces and broken families. When you are a young man, sex is at least half of what you think of minute-by-minute. I was on a campus where all you saw were waves of nubile, joggling breasts coming at you beneath those sheer peasant blouses (which, you understand, suggests that the women were in on it, too, being every bit as incited by their own frisky hormones).
Personally, I was not altogether on board with the hippie program, though I let my hair grow. A lot about it gave me the creeps — the lurid posters of Hindu gods with elephant heads, the dumb-ass “Hey, man,” lingo, the neurotic sharing of everything from clothing to money, the wooly armpits, the ghastly organic cuisine…. I mostly eschewed drugs, never dropped acid, and smoked pot infrequently due to a chastening episode of frightening paranoia early on. Anyway, after Charlie Manson’s caper, the whole thing lost its luster and by the early 1970s there wasn’t much left but sideburns, and by then many of us were in an office of some kind.
Which is probably where things really went off the rails. The Boomers should never have been allowed in those offices, especially the ones within ten miles of Wall Street. That’s where the cleverest among us came up with the signal innovations that have now wrecked the world. The corona virus is a very bad thing, for sure, but it’s really nothing compared to the deliberate wickedness that engineered the so-called financialized economy — a supernatural matrix of something-for-nothing swindles and frauds that purported to replace actual work that produced things of value. The great lesson of the age was lost: the virtual is not a substitute for the authentic.
And now the Boomer geniuses of finance are scrambling frantically to hurl imaginary money into the black hole they have opened with their own reckless wizardry. But black holes are nothing like ordinary holes. They are unfillable. They just suck everything into a cosmic vacuum that resembles something like death — which, in its implacable mystery, may just be a door to a new disposition of things, the next life, the next reality.
Of course, not all of us Boomers worked on Wall Street or in its annexes, but we did more or less go along with all that wickedness because we never really made any earnest effort to stop it. The Dodd-Frank bill? Don’t make me laugh. Maybe it’s just impossible to apologize for the mess we left behind after the party we enjoyed. I’m not a Christian in any formal sense, but perhaps only that kind of fathomless, unconditional forgiveness might avail. I am sincerely sorry.
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I Rode The Baby Boomer Gravy Train: https://youtu.be/th3m4coEzXk
Nice H-truth, I did listen to it.
Apologize for yourself JHK you could have made other choices. Some of us did. While you are at it perhaps you could advocate for reparations too. Demand equal rights for Visigoths; after all, they did not get a fair shake either.
The weak passive attitude of being sorry for stuff all around that you did not create or agree with. (I guess in JHK’s case he agrees with it, I do not) is crazy. But I’ll go further that that. It is immoral. Two faced-apologies accept our current situation. The attitude acquiesces to a tolerance for injustice. An apology does nothing to set any wrongs right or make any effort to change things. it is another symptom of the sick nihilism of our times. It is declaring oneself to be a zero.
‘Personally, I was not altogether on board with the hippie program‘
Speak for yourself JHK. I am part of your generation and you have no right to apologize for me with this PC bullshit. I was with the program, and I still am in many ways, sorry if you are not. I want things different than they are. I’d rather fight back than take on someone else’s crimes and and take on guilt that I do not deserve and which actual perpetrators never felt. I have not done anything wrong.
K-Dog — Obviously, your reading comprehension is defective. It is overcome by the bile you marinate in. I’m going to leave this comment up, but I’m not a gracious dumpster for your intemperance, so consider this a warning. — JHK Admin
“State federal and social security tax was 40 percent so every xtra dollar I made and my second job 40 percent was gone and that’s with the three kids so I don’t I can’t really see where I took advantage of the system but maybe you could point that out to me.” — Htruth
That says it Htruth, I will not take on the guilt of the rich or the privileged. I’ll apologize when someone shows me where I took advantage of the system. Like with you they would have to look for a very long time.
Perhaps I should apologize for burning midnight oil and bettering myself. Apologize for never having student loans and working my way through school with part time, and at times, a full time job. Perhaps I should apologize for saving money and never financing a damn thing that I did not have to.
KDFP — Because your other choices are horrible.
I fully expected you to respond. Thank you for that. I remain unabashed and pleased you wish to discuss this. I really do believe the apology is nihilistic and thank you for leaving this up and respecting my point of view.
You used to give speaking tours and you were shut down because you dared to stand up against politically correct speech. Good for you. The world needs more intemperance.
Has our generation done wrong, of course it has, all generations do. It is the circle of life. But now blame must be put where blame belongs and it not fair to blanket all boomers with it. Some of us have been mad as hell for a very long time. Some of us refuse to stop dreaming that things can be better. Blame must be put where blame belongs.
I’ll respect the apology if it is from personal points of view. But you were raised in New York. I was raised in Minneapolis. The people who comment here all have different experiences and faced our oppressions in different ways. I opt out of the group apology.
Nice meltdown, Snowflake!
“Of course, not all of us Boomers worked on Wall Street or in its annexes, but we did more or less go along with all that wickedness because we never really made any earnest effort to stop it. The Dodd-Frank bill? Don’t make me laugh.”
At the end I, upon reading for comprehension admit there is a disclaimer of sorts. A weak one.
Future generations blaming the boomers, ha. Who is complicit with what is going on now! Who is at fault! It is not a single generation which is complicit. It is an entire culture should we care to generalize. Snowflakes, Boomers, Gen-X and all. But the truth is that easily identified bad apples are at fault and their malfeasance is ignored.
The main group you belong to K-Dog is that of the self-righteous dickheads.
Your coughing on me, get back! I want my six feet.
Listen, there’s folks dying out here. You all need to take this sh— serious.
Actually if someone is coughing six feet isn’t far enough.
….and for those who don’t die of this virus the suffering will certainly make one wish for death. This account of a healthy 42 year old woman’s battle with it is very sobering….
https://www.statesman.com/news/20200403/my-job-was-to-cover-coronavirus-pandemic-until-i-became-part-of-it
I couldn’t agree more with you. I’ve been reading this
“ Disgusting degenerate” dogs comments now off & on for a number of years. he is one self-righteous self-centered egotistical far left piece of garbage.
Your moma MontanaMan.
Well, everyone’s moma should be off limits for joking and degrading. Unless of course said moma is known to wear or have worn army boots.
Easy, big Dog; it’s all hippy good. All of us have a right to our own emotions just as you do.
~toktomi~
No its not and if you were in front of my face you would not say. Easy, big Dog; it’s all hippy good.
You would find out it is not before you can blink.
@K-Dog
Going straight to guns, eh, Mav?
Why are yappy little dogs so dang nasty?
They would almost be cute if they weren’t so brain-blitzed insane when they don’t have a real bone to chew on.
Too much inbreeding since their ratter days, I guess.
You the fella that brought that sex offender, Guy, to town. Maybe that explains some of it.
blink blink blink
You really don’t want to pursue this cuz you have way too much vulnerability spread across the internet from your ego self-stroking. It makes such good salt to rub into your exposed wounds. Now be a good boy and piss off before you get pissed on.
Oh, on second thought, never mind cuz I won’t be back to this particular thread again seeing that I don’t really give a sh/\t what inanity you are capable of.
I’ll catch you, perhaps, on James’ next posting – or not.
As always, i could be wrong! But my story still outshines yours, but that’s only because I’m smarter, not necessarily better, than you.
I’ll give you a little hint about which direction the moon orbits the Earth. Cognition is not about knowing anything; it’s about discerning differences. But you wouldn’t understand that if I pureed it and spoon fed it into your yappy little canine mouth.
It has been fun and as usual, “made myself laugh”. [Ferguson]
~toktomi~
“cuz you have way too much vulnerability spread across the internet”M/i>
You are rude. I’ll kick your ass. I notice you tag team and prefer to reach out around someone else when you throw a punch. In this case CC Ryder. You don’t get lower than that in my book. My vulnerability? Go for it. Tell me what you are going to do dickweed.
You don’t get to insult, be rude and then say you won’t be back next week. Put up or shut up. And what are you going to do when I don’t stay down. You started this to be clear.
The main group you belong to K-Dog is that of the self-righteous dickheads.
Quit trying to give me the virus and making me sick.
A self-righteous dickhead I am not. I’m a contrarian and you are a tool. You call me self-righteous because you are intolerant and you see your way as the right way; besides not being able to spell contrarian. I get it, so go away and stop boring me.
I called you a dickhead, because you are. If JHK is going to delete this chain I expect he will be fair and start with the first comment in this chain which says dickhead. That would be yours if you are also ‘cc rider’ I suspect you are.
If you are are not the same under a different name it does not matter. To me you are both anonymous specters one or two who insult because you are hidden and because you can. If you could be easily identified like I can be I’m sure your courage to insult would melt away like an ice cube on a hot Hawaiian beach.
I hear you. Last week JHK was writing, ‘gee, so sad, but poor people are gonna die, that’s just the way it is’. No compassion whatsoever. This week, he writing all apologetic, like he’s scared for himself. I didn’t realize Kunstler was such a big pussy.
I’m seeing peoples inner pussy coming out all over the place. It ain’t pretty.
The well-known Australian permaculturalist David Holmgren has also written an apology from the booomers. He too got defensive kickback in the comments: https://holmgren.com.au/the-apology-from-baby-boomers-to-the-handicapped-generations/
I do not like War Movies if they glorify war.
Lost too many relatives to the military.
Been following JB?
Vietnam, I went. Should have gone to Canada but was too young and dumb. But, Vietnam flushed me out of the matrix and I saw reality. Welcome my friends to reality.
When you folks returned from nam we were impressionable 10 year olds. We watched them spit on you and that “demonstration” glued my eyes wide open ever since. In that regard above all others, thank you for your service.
“Service” to whom? Unless you mean in the husbandry sense.
When you were in Vietnam in the late 60s I was sitting at the Penny Farthing coffee house in Yorkville Toronto listening to hippie poets recite poems, and folk musicians sing & play the latest hit parade.
I was attending folk & poetry sessions at the Penny Farthing from 67 to 70, and I was a mere child of the 60s getting toted around to writers’ homes & photocopy printing shops in Toronto.
I wanted Nixon strung up by his buster browns when I was 10 years old. I knew Nixon was pure unadulterated social & financial evil when I was 11 and watched the SOB close the gold window in a bait & switch for petrodollar supremacy. He claimed it was temporary at the time.
I’m tail end of the baby boom generation and got nothing but table scraps and humiliating impoverishment both socially & financially from the disadvantageous vantage point of intractable poverty and low wage serfdom in contradistinction to neofeudalist bankers on Wall Street.
Professors of the hippies that wrote Rules for Radicals & heterodox Marxist means of toppling the system of parasitic vulture Capitalism never had the wherewithal to achieve their stipulated goals whereas I did not have that difficulty whatsoever.
Toppling a rigged & corrupt Casino Capitalism only required the rope of Entropy to guide it purposely into position to accomplish the task itself March 10th 2008 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time NYC.
Distributional collapse systemically has occurred in Macroeconomics, Finance, International Trade, Dry Bulk Shipping, Day Trading, Money Markets, Carry Trades, Commercial lending, et cetera.
Blowing fat tails on myriad distributions poised to collapse under any sort of systemic stress points is to be expected given the size of populations & infrastructure that undergirds the weakest points of system flow.
Reality can be mathematical & statistical.
I’m still a child of the 60s at 60.
RW
Say RW you are quite the wordsmith yerself there.
Just hanging out on Jim’s blog makes me inspired to write less mechanically as I usually do. Picking up on the art side of writing is what I’m learning from Jim. And thank you for the compliment.
Most days I think my writing really sucks.
RW
Being a decade+ older I learned grammar, syntax & parsing pre high school which then showed me why it mattered before I left at 15..
It helps make cri-de-couer outpourings comprehensible even to those who can barely string words together in the off-licence.
Matrix. Yes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7PKRjrid4
Blue Pill. This is what the $2T “stimulus” offers. To return to the illusion of reality. Record stock market. 3% unemployment. Cruises, leisure, etc.
Red Pill. This is where CV and our government’s response(!) will take us. The “actual” reality of the US economy and fake financial system. Once the illusion of wealth and prosperity are gone.
How we got to the current situation is something to ponder.
Facing the “red pill reality” is the question for today.
BTW: if you want to see a stat that illustrates how steep the “road to recovery” will be….consider the TSA daily screening:
https://www.tsa.gov/coronavirus/passenger-throughput
Our economy has just suffered a heart attack, so will Mnuchin’s $2T de-fibrillator supply the juice to……?
If reality is to be taken into account, nup.
One of the best, most penetrating essays by Mr. K. Kudos and commendations to you, sir.
I am a formal Christian with much more to ‘apologize’ for than not resisting my boomer generations’ excesses. But, I do stand in awe at what we have done. The collapses of those excesses are catastrophic, to say the least. As said, virus is nothing in comparison to the financial and economic rout that is full on and will not be stopped by more debt.
Life will certainly not be the same going forward, much more real and honest. Some will do well, but most will suffer the consequences. It will be interesting to see how my own grandsons fare, probably not so well.
Our grandchildren will be forced to pay that debt one way or the other.
Debt is borrowing from the future to have stuff now. Well, tomorrow has arrived and the Boomers are going to die, leaving the mess behind.
That is our sin.
The debts are not payable.
When we finally face that fact we will be close to the climax of “growth” that has been the central theme of civilization for several thousand years. We have been fruitful and multiplied until the earth is brimful with our species. People are thrashing about like Jeffers’ fish in a net looking for some way to keep “growing”, but there is no exit.
Nature bats last.
“Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
powers–or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls–or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;…”
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-purse-seine/
The jubilee is coming, Epicur. The shutdown has shrunk the economy by, say, 20%. Thats a catastrophe, but if everyone were adjusted 20% down, not so bad. The problem is that the debt still demands repayment from people with 20% fewer assets now than in January.
Unless we repeal democratic voting, we have created an even-larger dispossessed Group than we had before electing Trump. The candidate who talks to that large group proclaiming the Jubillee will win 50 states.
That, or we convert to Islam and ban usury. That was the 7th-century solution, and one major reason behind the rise of Islam.
The Day of Jubilee…
What about people who have paid their debts … do they get a refund?
Brh
The Laborers who were hired at 5:00 got just as much as those who worked from early morning. They complained to the Boss. He said, I have not cheated you, friend. You’re getting what we agreed to. If I want to pay these men as much, what is it to you? Is it not my money to do with as I wish?
Do you know who said that? Christ. Pretty mind blowing, eh? His Idea of Fair is obviously different from the American one. Perhaps another saying of his helps explain it: To whom much is given, much is asked.
You don’t like it, but you see, you’re not in charge – even of yourself. Did you purchase your body? Your mind? Got a receipt? More fundamentally, Did you create yourself?
St Paul says, You have nothing you have no received. Been luckier? Thank Him. Stronger? Thank Him. Smarter? Thank Him. Better character? Thank Him. You say you worked on your character? Who gave you the motivation to do so? Thank Him. Hint: You do have the right to have some self esteem too. Thank Him for helping you attain the right to have it. As you know, it’s different than just being a bullshitter or an arrogant guy with a big hat and no cows.
BRH: no refund, and I’m REAL close on paying off my mortgage too.
At some point you’ll only be able to own what you can hold on to, or defend. I aM not liking that latter situation.
Worse even than that. We die with blood on our hands. We are responsible for the many deaths that will come of this. We have murdered our children and grandchildren; all those who will die in their multitudes by way of violence or starvation or social upheaval, just as surely as if we’d put a knife through their hearts with out own hands.
Unlike our host, I put most of the blame for the destruction of families and the poverty of women and children on the rise of feminism. At least, by the time this is over, that ism, along with most of the rest of them will be dead, as well.
Blame it on men for letting go of power. The same thing happened in Ancient Rome and had begun to happen in Greece before its conquest. Women are not meant to have power and to vote. They must be controlled. It’s both and art and a science.
Due to the women seeking equality we have greater voter rights, Social Security and many of the blessings/technology brought on by war and wealth post WW2. Rome and Greece got nothing.
No, we have lower wages and since women won’t marry anyone beneath them, we have sterility. Women do marry – the State is their husband if poor. Career Women marry their “careers” and cats.
A wife has no interests apart from her family. Thus the Husband’s vote is her vote too.
Very true, and that’s why Trump will win in November. Simply put, white women are not going to vote against the interests of their husbands and sons, and do not want to see them f#kked over by some miserable PC matriarchy.
Brh
Trump will win in Dec,: Of course he will that was baked into the cake when the democrats threw it to Biden,Biden will be a no show in Nov. and they had to have him or one just like him in order to maintain the corrupt system.!!!
I bet you’re not married or have a girlfriend.
Bravo, Draupnir.
Not the most PC expression of the truth, but truth nonetheless.
So women are now responsible for their own poverty and that of their children because they wanted out from under the thumb of the patriarchy? I call BS on that theory.
I’m sorry, Helen, but I saw the whole thing and lived it too. When Gloria Steinem dies, I hope they bury her with a stake through her heart and fill her coffin with wild roses. “God grant she lie still” should go on her marker.
When I was growing up, my father supported a family of five, bought a house and always owned a car, on a laborers pay. I never wanted a career and expected to have a life fairly similar to my parents. I expected to marry, maybe work until I had a child, then concern myself with the very important duties that revolved around the home.
During the hyperinflation of the 70’s my husband’s paycheck finally couldn’t be stretched enough, and I had to go to work. The women’s movement cheered us on. We could have it all!! Right. After I paid for daycare, there was only a pittance left in my take home pay. The government certainly benefited from the additional taxes, but my children and I suffered terribly.
Hell is waking up in the dark on a 40-degree-below-zero winter morning and going out to start the car I shouldn’t have needed, before dragging an unwilling four-year-old out of her warm bed, forcibly dressing her, and hauling her to a daycare to have her childhood overseen by indifferent strangers. My commute was never less than an hour and I only lived about ten miles from my place of work. Then I spent eight-and-one-half-hours doing mundane, soul-killing, unnecessary paperwork of no importance to anybody, before turning around for my hour commute home. My children got about two -and-a-half hours of me, and it wasn’t the best of me that they deserved.
The patriarchy looked pretty good to me.
What happened to the hubster? Kick him to the curb?
Men protested with Hefty started personalizing garbage bags as men that women threw away with mocking endearments. But we all knew that Hefty knew their trade and that many women had just that attitude.
So why protest? To stop if from spreading even more! To stop approving of the darkest aspects of the feminine soul! To shame them if possible – since that is weapon number one in the control of women. Once you get going with it, women are the first line of defense since women love to shame other women.
Whose? Mine? He’s gone now, but we were married for thirty years. Being old school, he exempted himself from women’s work and bragged that he’d never changed a diaper.
3Women lost it when they wanted to walk ten paces ahead of their husbands.Now we will see just how well they do when the bottom falls out and they get the chance of a lifetime wearing the trousers instead of the pants.!!!
Victimizing women en masse by castigating their lot in life as destroyers of families via feminist writers like Steinem, Friedan, & Rand indicates a lack of understanding of Feminism or Feminist perspective of gender stereotyping & gender victimization over time & historiography.
China’s only female Emperor Wu was a Feminist dynasty before it became fashionable.
RW
I’m satisfied with my imperfect understanding of current feminist philosophy. Never a rabid subscriber I can only go by my personal observations over the past fifty or so years. It looks to me like feminism works brilliantly for the few who want a well-paid career, a family of cats and vicarious relationships with romance novels, though I tend to wonder how satisfying most of them find their lives. it is a disaster for the majority, and men have been damaged too, and have lost their way.
And your class is going to pay for that sin by not getting paid back. That’s the Jubilee.
To put it more positively: “You” came to this world with the obligation and the privilege of Giving. Not giving is not optional. If you won’t do it of your own volition, it will be done to you nonetheless.
“You’re” smarter than other people in these matters. Brag on that as you will. It’s simply only part of life. There’s more.
In an early context it was said that the living will envy the dead.
Dang it Jim, I thought I had more time before your world made by hand arrived. The media will never cover this current essay you wrote. I am reading your current book, I loved the sections about some of the commenters on this site. We are holding steady at our western New York hospital, a group of 12 are going to NYC, and we are all trying to stretch out our PPEs. BUt me no worries, as you say it’s all good.
“Dang it Jim, I thought I had more time before your world made by hand arrived.”
I doubt that Leviathan is finished yet. Even if the economy collapses, as long as humans exist in such large numbers the beast will live.
That is the thing Epicur, by itself corona is only a tragic decimation.
But the stock market was rising on a mountain of bad paper and sugar plum wishes. We have to crack rocks to get oil to eat with and yet our population grows. Aquifers dry out and dams silt up. An insect apocalypse is upon us and the beauty of the world dies. A madness of don’t worry be happy is the popular delusion and all people do is want more.
The Leviathan is not finished yet. It will kill you with its death throws.
That would be “throes”.
You wouldn’t believe how far his words carry. Deep into Red State Patriot territory and beyond into White Nationalism.
Godspeed, Roccofire. Those of you on the medical end of things during this crisis are truly brave. My hat’s off to you.
Thank you Daddyotis.I appreciate it, and will share it with my e.d.obs unit.
You’re all doing a fantastic job, roccofire. This year’s cohort of medical students here have missed their graduation (and their exams) and are being sent straight on to the front line. Talk about a baptism of fire. I expect it’s the same over your way. Good luck to New York. And take care of yourselves, if you can.
Your Trojan efforts are a finger in the dyke – too many people have too low a resistance to any damned thing, due to a century of breeding the less fit.
Even the Black Death(s) only (sic!) killed a third of the population.
As with war casualties in Iraq – they survived horrendous injuries which in Vietnam killed them.
Anyone who took the hippie trail to India realised before they’d left sanitary Euroland that growing up in aspetic conditions was not conducive to good health.
Few didn’t succumb to Dehli belly or worse.
This current C19 might be considered a reset but worse will follow.
Decades of abuse of dumped, out of date or faulty antibiotics in the Third World has given us resistant strains of diseases long forgotten in the Gilded West.
Pre WWII people died of dental abscesses or scratches whilst gardening – if those who follow us aren’t scared witless they haven’t read the memo.
Wow, well put Iananna.
You mean when people like George Harrison, Richard Albert, Steve Jobs, and your local hippie from down the street, travelled to India for a supreme spiritual experience, all they really got was ‘Dehli Belly?’
Brh
Good essay.
I could argue with parts of it, perhaps, but I won’t, because the gist of it
holds a lot of truth.
I agree that this article is one of Jim’s best since I have been on CFN. It’s ultra difficult to comment on Jim’s forthright objective truth given how revealingly honest it really is. I think when writers think this contemplatively in a mature fashion we are all left pretty well speechless by the degree of honesty it projects.
As a rhetorical writing tool honesty is certainly an excellent device to utilize where appropriate.
Mature veteran writers like Jim can push every single reader button we have in our repertoire of tactical knowhow, methinks.
RW
He is a pro. The sheer number of published books attests to that. And some of his books will last a long time, 50-100 years from now still in print and being read, specially if his forecasts and prognostications are proven correct.
I can’t afford his books yet. Some day I will find them.
RW
Try op-shops (goodwill?) – I found World Made by Hand for 50cents a month ago.
When such shopping was allowed, pre lockdown.
When shall we enjoy such freedom again?
The Brazilian government and President classified the staged pandemic crisis as “a matter of fantasy”. At least he understands that this is a staged commie coup. The same satanic Vatican commie coup that is responsible for your commie educated “boomer generation” fscking up everything you touch. You people are too stupid and “allergic to conspiracies” to see what’s in front of your nose. And that’s why you are so easily led by the nose.
“Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus”
==
Die already and clear the fsck out of this world. You and your whole rotten generation.
disease fatality rates and birthrates are so high in Brazil this is hardly noticeable to them.
Right, and disease and fatality rates from cancer in the Western world are so low, they’re not even worth talking about. When one in two people contracts cancer, is that even statistically significant, dude?!!
it takes decades for most people to develop cancer and die of it.
Not with the help of chemo and radiation. Then our good doctors can have you dead within a year.
See, the skill of satire is that it must not be OTT, ie half sane.
Fail.
Very nice trip down memory lane this morning Mr. Kunstler. As it just so happens, I watched Once Upon A Time in Hollywood last night on the TV, a loosely fictional but surprisingly realistic Tarantino take on those times as well. In hindsight, I’d have to agree that the 60’s and 70’s – as groovy as they seemed to be at the time – were almost entirely delusional and set us up for the many ongoing failures we’ve experienced ever since. I wouldn’t forget the insanity of re-inflating the American Exceptionalism myth – largely borne out by the famed Military Industrial Complex – in the wake of Vietnam, which at the time at least, promised to cure us once and for all of our overwhelming preoccupation with all things military and empire. But it didn’t take us more than 15 years or so to get over that little fiasco, which just so happened to coincide with the advent of computerization and the aforementioned financialization of everything. Pretty good racket when you stop to think about it, for as long as it lasts anyway. But those times are over now. What will be next I can only shudder to imagine.
Loosely fictional is being quite generous. It pisses on reality so bad I have to say it sucks even if it is funny shit, which it is. The dude likes feet.
I knew that the world was “in deep doo-doo” when the progenitor of that puerile phrase announced, post Kuwait, that “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome”.
I hear Joe Rogan is jarred enough by the Corona measures to countenance a podcast with James Howard Kunstler.
Well, I admire Joe’s show, but I haven’t heard a peep from him or his peeps — JHK Admin
I grew up in the Baby Boomer generation too and I had to smile at some of your memories — especially the hippie culture that was as shallow as it was wide.
But the millennials might want to think about this also — only a very few teenagers had cars and now most consider this a “right”, there was no such thing as grade inflation — you had to actually earn an A to get one, and Freshman English was used as a wash-out course in college and it washed people out too and made no apologies for it. And most people growing up during that time had household chores and actually learned how to do practical things that have now been lost.
Every generation inherits the unsolved problems from the prior ones. The Greatest Generation saddled us with the atomic bomb and the possibility of annihilation. We didn’t solve that either.
The hippie culture took itself very seriously, and to some extent still does.
True, there are just fewer now. What I didn’t like about it then and don’t like about the millennial criticism now is the self-righteousness at its core. We condemned the Establishment but benefited directly from it with good student loans and government programs.
@SW
I would offer…
Of course there was hypocrisy – and other shit. There always is. But that misses the best of the movement, the endearing part.
There was a core that truly wanted to diverge from the rot, but they had no more power to enact that dream than a buck rabbit in the wild has over his actions under the spell of a doe.
I mean, what other generation in recent history ever screamed at the top of their lungs, “THIS IS BULLSHIT!”?
Ya really gotta judge the thing by the final act – bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang!
John King Panthers students Bobby Malcolm
“Party, is over, kids. Now, get back to work!”
Personally, I never fully committed – kinda like James, I guess. But I have never lost heart or soul to the temptation of leisure, and I am still in parity with the very gentle nature of the true hippy spirit – lucky, I guess, or maybe it’s the dislodged brain cells.
Ultimately, it’s all quite meaningless on this pale blue dot, a miracle of the Universe so nearly infinitely rare that even the cosmo-scientists cannot imagine. We endeavor at the whim of our mental model of world and nothing more. We don’t get to know anything, and it is therefore meaningless to insist on the realness of anything.
Aspire to nice. Speak honestly. Keep your word. Neither believe nor disbelieve anything. Embrace knowledge as an illusion.
I could be wrong.
~toktomi~
I am still in parity with the very gentle nature of the true hippy spirit – toktomi
===========
Please, tell me you are not one of those old hippies (65 to 70) with a straggly grey pony tail and one earring, caught in a time warp.
And wouldn’t 60s hippie icons like Allen Ginsburg, Tim Leary and Ken Kesey be surprised to find themselves, in 2020, the butt of derision and opprobrium, so convinced they were at the time of their roles in hastening in a new world.
Brh
https://youtu.be/yMG-Mi9I0-k
Yeah, but the music was great, unrivaled since. The music nowadays pales in comparison, imho. There are two sides to every story and then there’s the truth. Of course, this is a drastic understatement. There are as many sides to the story as the amount of people that lived then, probably more.
One must have a certain amount of leisure time in order to pursue other interests. Maybe this self quarantine era will produce some great art, or maybe some babies. Either way, vaya con Dios.
As for Kesey, he came from logging stock in Oregon. Check out “Sometimes a Great Notion”.
Oh I’ve read ‘Sometime a Great Notion’ daytrip,
And watched the film ‘Never Give an Inch’
The problem with Kesey as I see it is after Cuckoos Nest and STGN, he really didn’t do anything else. It would be is if Hemingway quit after Sun Also Rises and Farewell to Arms. Hemingway would be just another forgotten 20s novelist, like Louis Bromberg or Glenway Wescott. A few years back a bio came out about Kesey by Tom? Christianson … there was the acid all the way thru to the end, but it was the vodka coolers at the VFW in Eugene that did him in finally (age 66)
Brh
Sure. I looked up the biography: “Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD and the Politics of Ecstasy” by Mark Christiansen. 3 stars on Amazon (24 reviews), sales rank 2.5 million. Some raved, some said it sucked and was more about the “rich kid stoner author” than about Kesey. Was he flawed, sure, but for one year, at least, he was a hell of a wrestler.
Alcohol or any drug misused is probably bad. Ask Hemingway. Albert Hofmann lived to be 102. Probably not a big drinker.
Seen it, own it!!!
I had to laugh at your comment. No they wouldn’t be considered cool at all now that the heroes are sport figures, aggrieved celebrities, rap artists, and winners of The Voice.
No judgments was their laughable credo – about themselves and each other that is. Massive judgement on everybody else.
If these icons were alive today they would likely be behaviourally similar to what they were in the 60s. Kesey would be at Burning Man every year and Ginsburg would be hanging out with writers on Internet blogs whilst connected somehow to celebrity still.
Leary would be CIA director over Bloody Gina Haspel, frankly.
RW
And remember it was the boomers that made it possible for the current generations to have the stuff they take for granted, progress, right?
Akmofo says a commie generation. Bull! I was one that joined in trying to limit Communistic totalitarianism in the world. It makes me sick to see what the Commie globalists have done to this country, convincing nearly half the population that what we considered abhorrent two gens ago is now accepted polity. Even encouraged. When the current survivors of the crisis occurring now set up the next High, I hope they do not give up their liberty in the process. It took millennia to create the Founding Fathers and the Constitution to free the average Joe from domination. We could lose it in the next few years.
John,
Did you send your kids to public school? Did you support public schools? Congrats, you’re a communist. See what Marx prescribed for a communist society:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf
Point 10 on page 27.
Did you bitch about cities and speak in favor of suburbs?
You’re a communist. See point 9 on page 26.
Did you fight environmentalists seeking to protect land from development? Point 7 on page 26.
Support government ownership of roads? Point 6.
You get the idea. You didn’t have a choice about being a Communist, but you’ve been supporting societal goals laid out in the
Communist Manifesto all your life. Don’t be too hard on yourself about it. If we can end the Fed, we can undo much of this.
And have all private roads? They win again. Behind Communism is the Banks and Corporations. You don’t get that, right?
The answer is Socialism – not the bullshit compromise between Left and Right but National Socialism a la Eugene Debbs and Jack London.
I’m pretty sure that usury, which was such a horrible sin that usurers went to, I think, the8th level of hell in the Inferno, is at the base of all of it, Janos.
Another way around usury is Islam.
Is there something in particular I should read?
It is more than possible that Germany’s currency and trade systems explain more about the causes of World War II than the invasion of Poland. This was the opinion of the well-informed Hasting W. S. Russell, Marquis of Tavistock, and later the 12th Duke of Bedford, who was a pacifist and a monetary reformer. He wrote at the start of the war that it is
A war of financiers and fools, though most people, on the allied side at any rate, do not yet see very clearly how financiers come into it. . . . Financiers also desired war as a means of overthrowing their rivals and consolidating still further the immense power. . . . Hitler not only engaged in barter trade which meant no discount profits for bankers arranging bills of Exchange, but he even went so far as to declare that a country’s real wealth consisted in its ability to produce goods; nor, when men and material were available, would he ever allow lack of money to be an obstacle in the way of any project which he considered to be in his country’s interests. This was rank heresy in the eyes of the financiers of Britain and America, a heresy which, if allowed to spread, would blow the gaff on the whole financial racket.[21]
JS: Fascism and National Socialism are not taught because them make too much sense – in particular their economics. If they are too alien, try the Social Credit system of the Englishman, Douglas. And even some of our early Socialists like the two gentlemen stated above, would be horrified by what it’s become. I’ll send you the whole article if you really want to pursue this.
I guess I might look into Eugene Debs and Jack London. Is that the novelist?
Oh, dear, you advocate fascism? And HItler? I have, on conspiracy sites or articles, seen it said that he was groomed for his purposes by the elites. Also, I have a book called The Hidden Hitler that makes a good case for his homosexuality.
Ending the Federal Reserve was accomplished when Bear was murdered. The Federal Reserve has no more reserve than a typical id impulse of a child strung out on a sugar high, man.
RW
Federal Reserve is just a name that makes people feel good about it. Who or what is Bear?
Bear Stearns used to be a marquee Investment Bank Holding Company on Wall Street until the week of March 10th 2008 when they were murdered in the light of day to be sold off to JPMorgan for pittance on the share price in a firesale cooked up in the backrooms of Timothy Geithner’s office at the Federal Reserve.
Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz said his firm was ‘murdered’ post-M&A to JPMorgan.
Schwartz failed to name the murderer.
RW
I thought maybe you meant Bear Stearns. The whole thing doesn’t make enough sense to me. How could they sell Bear Stearns unless it was done legally? How did that end the Fed?
10+
My experience with marijuana has actually been quite similar to what JHK describes, although ‘paranoia’ is a rather benign term for what I experienced when I overdid the stuff. I still partake, occasionally, and I hear that different strains can produce mellower results. But to find out what works for me, I would have to smoke more of it, and I’m not much inclined to do so. A pity, because altering your consciousness is an adult pleasure, but a legitimate one. Alcohol is far more harmful, and I simply have no interest in any of the other options.
Turning to the larger picture, it was already clear that we had reached the end of a historical era, or in fact several, before COVID-19 appeared on the scene and made it definitive. In retrospect, the period 1945-2020 divides into three. While the Cold War lasted, there was the post-WWII economic high, which lasted until the oil shocks of the early 1970s and stagflation that followed. Then came the neoliberal era, which overturned labor power and the widely-shared prosperity that came with it, and began the great redistribution of wealth upwards and of jobs overseas. This carried on past the second great divide, the collapse of the Soviet Union, whereupon the USA enjoyed its ‘unipolar moment’. We’ve all seen how well that went.
And now neoliberalism is also well and truly dead. The shock of the pandemic is exposing the failure of supply lines, lack of preparedness, and the ill-suitedness of laissez-faire to deal with extrinsic shocks and sudden threats. Austerity? We’ve seen governments leap into action to shower money right and left to keep the wheels turning (or just to line their donors’ pockets). And if there’s one thing boomers have in commmon, it’s that they’ve been trained from birth to expect their needs to be prioritized. I’m sure the last thing they, or their still-surviving ‘Greatest Generation’ parents, expected in their old age was to see fearless leaders like the lieutenant governor of Texas volunteering them to hack out their lungs and die by the hundreds of thousands for the good of the economy.
The former world has passed away. A lot of players, good and bad, will be contesting to determine what comes next. Hang on tight.
Neoliberalism isn’t dead yet, Elrond. It just got a promise from the Treasury that it would guarantee 4.5trillion in debt through the Fed to keep it going. It will keep going at the cost of mass unemployment, until it breaks the next time. Then there will be even fewer assets of the lumpenproletariat to steal to bail it out. My guess is no more than 6 years.
Last year the us spent 630 Billion on Medicare for the same group of people on whose behalf we shut down the economy. There’s no pile of money to pay for Medicare; it’s extracted from the productive capacity of the population. That productive capacity has been reduced by quite a bit.
What makes you think that a much poorer country, run by Millennials who’ve been impoverished by the student loan scam that employs Boomer bureaucrats, won’t decide to cut off funding to the old people entirely? I think that’s a bigger risk than what the lieutenant Governor of Texas proposed.
DrTom, it seems to me that all services, not only medical, are produced by the productive capacity of the population. The difference between ‘production’ and ‘extraction’ is a matter of accounting — where the funds flow, on what terms, and especially who gets to take a cut. Many, many hogs are feeding at your health care trough.
The average OECD (i.e. wealthy, developed) country spent 8.8% of its GDP on health care in 2017. You guys, though, spend a whopping 17.8% of your GDP (as of 2015). And you’re no healthier – indeed, less so! US life expectancy at birth equals that of Czechia, which spends one-quarter as much per capita. Meanwhile the UK, Canada, Israel and Spain all enjoy greater life expectancy also with much smaller layouts (here’s the link).
In short, there are plenty of so-called ‘health care’ resources that could dry up and disappear, and yet leave Americans better off — if, that is, the goal of your medical system were to provide care instead of to fill shareholders’ pockets.
The notion that impoverished Millennials will avenge themselves on oldsters rests on the dubious idea that generations have agency. But these labels we put on cohorts of people born between this year and that are just that — labels. The divide between those 65 years or older and everyone else is likewise artificial, reflecting little more than what Lyndon Johnson felt was politically feasible when he created Medicare. The politics have very obviously changed. And it matters less than you think if a country becomes impoverished compared to what it previously enjoyed. People will always need medical care, period. No matter what the scale, there’s no reason why that care has to be administered on a for-profit basis, and very good reasons why it shouldn’t.
Very well said. Black Pigeon was saying the same. And he’s for the West and the Nation State.
Tom: It’s shameful to let Commies like Elrond be the only ones saying the Truth.
You do need to be careful about comparing all-Euro countries like Czechia with the USA,Elrond. Lumping in obese Hispanics and blacks with overweight whites in the USA does make us look worse than a country like Czechia. That having been said, I agree with you and with JHK: healthcare in the USA is a racket.
You’re desperately wrong about one thing: the filling of shareholders’ pockets. You can be sure none of the stock option managerial class will be paying back the profits wrung out of their companies at the expense of shareholders.
Call geernational labels only a label, but even if they are a collective hallucination, they can still drive the madness of crowds. I expect the younger generation to vote en bloc against the elderly as things get more mean. Call that an extrapolation, but I have a lot of young students, none of whom corrected any of the others using the term “Boomer remover” this week.
Your link is interesting, and cheers me. Cuba was richer than Japan in 1958, and has now become much poorer. From your link:
“In the 1950s the number of doctors per thousand of the population ranked above Britain, France and the Netherlands. In Latin America it ranked in third place after Uruguay and Argentina. ..lThe mortality rate was the third lowest in the world.[11] ”
Still, their healthcare system has not collapsed. La Revolucion did not destroy the progress in life expectancy achieved under Batista in the 50s:
5.5 years added 50-59; 5.5 years added 60-69.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CUB/cuba/life-expectancy
So even going Communist won’t kill us. That’s good to know. Unless, of course, we speak out against the State. Or are homosexual.
Perhaps I am wrong about the filling of shareholders’ pockets, DrTom. Certainly many, many hospital administrators and health corporation senior managers are enjoying second homes and sailboats, ultimately paid for by individuals and businesses paying ever-spiraling premiums. Those revenues might instead have been paid out as dividends, even to worthy investors such as pension funds.
But maybe I’m not wrong. And certainly not all investors are so worthy as a pension fund. Were you aware that around a third of hospitals in the US have outsourced the management and staffing of their emergency rooms to two companies, owned by the private equity firms Blackrock and KKR?
Private equity is the same business model that was personified by Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street. Everyone agreed then that it was a bad thing, but it simply never went away. TeamHealth, the Blackrock-owned firm, just fired an ER doctor for speaking out about the firm’s tactics which steamroll over patients’ efforts to stay in-network and then stick them with massive bills for out-of-network service. You can rest assured that Blackrock and KKR put themselves at the head of the line to extract their pounds of flesh.
Lastly, DrTom, I find it curious what you call “lumping in”. Surely every American is an American? Yes, demographics are often useful, but does anyone ever speak of “lumping in” poor, under- or unemployed whites, subject to opiate addictions, reduced life expectancy and other pathologies, with middle- and upper-class whites? Many of what are tagged as racial issues within the USA are actually class issues in disguise, and best examined through that lens.
Elrond,
When looking for a cause it’s best to eliminate sources of variance. So, removing blacks and Hispanics, who May have worse health outcomes than whites for any number of reasons (though I think Hispanics live longest if the three groups) including possibly racism and skin color blocking Vitamin D gives a better comparison. Ideally you’d compare results of German Americans against Germans,etc, so the effect is the country and health system, not genetics or other factors.
There was a very long article years ago about all the scamming in healthcare that convinced me: allow people to buy into Medicare, which does have pretty good cost control on paying for procedures. Your article just puts more nails in the coffin of the health system in Scamerica.
I do think there are parts of every system that should be subject to profit motives, and parts that should not. Where true innovation is possible, a profit motive can help. If it’s just maintenance work, a profit motive leads to the Management shenanigans you note,
You are describing the Reagan years as neoliberal. Huh?
The neo liberal era started post Reagan. The rise of the Deep State to dominance. Semantics!
Your evaluation of the times is right on and follows one saeculum of history. All four turnings are there.
No, it was the start of neoliberalism, implementing the ideas of Milton Friedman. Probably started under Carter, who first cut the cap gains tax rate to 28 or 20%.
Reagan turned the Republicans into a Johnny-one-note party: cut taxes (and patronize, but don’t do anything for, the social conservatives). Frankly, cutting taxes in 1981 was the right move: inflation had greatly increased the burden on people. Indexing tax rates was great.
When Trump was elected, it was a different need that struck people. Something like taking on all the rackets that have arisen, like healthcare. The R’s went back to Reagan and cut taxes again, and lost Congress in 2018: they just extended a racket, the stock-buyback racket that lets the professional managerial class live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of us. The Democratic candidates who won in 2018 promised to deal with healthcare; that was their winning issue. Instead, they did nothing and made it two years of impeachment, which nobody not in DC cared about.
Anyway, there’s a tremendous anti-neoliberal voting bloc out there, up for bids. Trump cannot capture it since the bailout that he threatened a Kentucky congressman about is neoliberal to the core. Don’t expect the Dems to exploit this opening, however.
Btw,the Republicans repealed indexing in 2017, replacing real inflation measures with chained CPI monkey business.
Perfectly expressed.
Roger Waters released “Amused to Death” in 1992. The miracle morphine track is interesting indeed.
Thanks Jim. Apology accepted. As a Gen-Xer, I have no love for the Boomers. They’ve been a plague on the rest of us for far too long. What I am about to say makes me a very bad Catholic indeed but my hope is that the coronavirus mostly takes them out. They’ve ruined everything, sucked up all the resources and they won’t die or even stand down (a.k.a Bernie and Biden). While I believe that generational trauma is a very real thing, I am unable to muster any sympathy for them. THAT is the generational trauma they’ve imposed on those of us who came after them: we are unsympathetic to the Boomer’s suffering and in fact welcome it. The fact that all their retirement accounts and pension funds are coming up zero warms my cold dead generationally-traumatized heart.
In happier news, Amazon is finally shipping me your latest book. Got the email this morning. So that’s something.
d
Having given up car ownership (after a relatively short term of it anyway) 20 years ago for the sake of your generation and subsequent generations, I fully expect to be tripped up some time on my way to the bus by someone just like you. Something which makes me think there’s little really to distinguish generations, other than happenstance, and it makes me wonder why I bothered. I wonder what kind of car you’ve got.
Perhaps I should just have spent my time flying hither and yon as well and enjoying the kind of holidays my daughter treats herself too.
But being born not long after the war to waste-not-want-not parents, old habits die hard. So if I survive Covid19 (which I realise would disgust you) I’ll carry on treading with a light footprint for my kids and their cohort. And yours.
BTW, I met a boomer neighbour this morning outside the corner shop. Her husband’s been off sick and stuck at home for six months following an accident (he’s 56), so he’s had no wages all that time. She’s self-employed – over retirement age but still working, because they don’t own their own place and have rent to pay. She does social care (probably minimum wage or not much more) for some of the old folks at the very modest retirement flats across the road, but she’s not allowed to go in there now, so they have no income, other that benefits they might eventually get from the government.
Her daughter’s a nurse. She told me this morning that the daughter and her colleagues had been spat at at the hospital by some young people who claimed to have Covid19 and blamed its spread on hospital workers.
The world isn’t black and white. And I’m not impressed by your Catholicism. Not at all, sorry.
I find that comments like yours often come from privileged youngsters, who haven’t spent that much time round very ordinary boomers, so think everyone is like their parents and their friends.
The Skorenzy character who writes on here is obsessed with British pensioners dying of hypothermia because of fuel poverty. He’s only interested in that because he has deluded notions about immigrants arriving off boats and being given fully furnished houses to live in.
But there are indeed pensioners who can’t afford to heat their homes. Or feed themselves properly.
Let’s hope Covid19 puts the greedy fuckers out of their misery, eh? Why should they expect a bit of gas and electricity after working their whole lives, probably for a whole lot less than you? They don’t have cars either. What kind was it you said you drive?
I drive a subaru cross trek which I paid for in full when I bought it. I have a car because I live in a state with no public transportation. I have no debt excepting my mortgage and I bought this house all on my own. It’s tiny, less than 800 sq feet, but it’s enough. I garden, can, freeze and make my own laundry detergent. Are those enough credentials for you? I work full time and have shitty health insurance, like many. My “foot print” is pretty dang small as well.
I love how you call me on my sweeping generalizations but then say “I find comments like yours often come from privileged youngsters”. Lol. What crap. I’m 49 years old and was raised in a family of 7 kids. I know how to do alllllllll the chores and spent summers working either on my grandfather’s farm or at my father’s fruit stand. So suck it boomer.
Cheers!
Comments like yours generally do come from the kids of the privileged nevertheless.
I don’t need your credentials. The Catholic ones are the least impressive. You haven’t learned much. You work full time? Goodness, how unusual.
Your generalisations haven’t stopped being gross generalisations just because you know how do do chores. And you’re not that far from being a boomer yourself.
Almost doesn’t count. 🙂
Well I hope your kids don’t start to hate you before you get your inheritance. That wouldn’t be nice. It would ‘almost’ be unpleasant.
If DJL was born in 1971, then he’s definitely an Xer. The cut-off varies, but the way I figure it, if you were born in or after 1966, Boomer you are not.
He’s 49. Boomers start at 55, according to the definitions online.
Whatever age he is he sounds bitter, twisted and envious. Yet another dent in anyone’s hopes of getting me to admire religious people. I hope his parents, if they’re still alive, don’t know what they brought up. Especially since, if they’re still alive, he wants them to suffocate to death.
Beyond words.
DJL, I wanted to buy a Subaru but my wife wouldn’t let me. She said only fags drive Subarus.
Yeah it’s not a cool car at all and it definitely has that unfortunate hippy association but it handles well in the snow which we get plenty of and it’s affordable. Also my mechanic said it’s the only car he doesn’t see come in “for stupid stuff.”
Yes, Suby the best deal out there. Many women love them, which seems to be their niche.
RIP, you have to admit your wife coming at auto brands from a unique perspective, if you know what I mean. If you grow up around Detroit Iron, Detroit Iron is what it’ll be.
Brh
People like you, great Admirers of their own “Virtue”, are for the Immigrants before their own People. And that’s both morally wrong and psychologically sick – like preferring other people’s children to your own. You don’t do that, but you do the former. You are sick and bad. Liberal Leftists go for the appearance of virtue not its reality.
” As a Gen-Xer, I have no love for the Boomers. They’ve been a plague on the rest of us for far too long. What I am about to say makes me a very bad Catholic indeed but my hope is that the coronavirus mostly takes them out…”
DJL,
What a curious comment. You impugn millions of people you have never met. You wish them ill for existing.
…and then justify your lifestyle as somehow superior, because you live modestly…and drive a Subaru.
How can any of the adults on this site maintain respect for your intelligence or credibility? You accept our Host’s apology? Perhaps an apology is not enough. He should die, as you suggested. Yes?
Farmboy drives Subaru with entrenched sibling rivalry for being left out by birth order in the family constellation. Predictably, DJL is a rebellious youngster in his family constellation and is likely behaving in similar fashion on Internet.
Later born children of family constellations are least rule abiding and most likely to eschew the behaviour of older generations due to familial slight whilst being stuck in a family constellation without escape.
Frank Sulloway wrote Born to Rebel about birth order and personality within a large family constellation.
Being the runt of a litter of 7 made DJL hypercritical relative to his peer group.
RW
“I drive a subaru cross trek – well yay you but do you know which end of a spanner to hold to repair it?
Or do you have the garage change your tyres?
Still not too late too get that Dodge Power Wagon, GA.
Lifted, 8 cylinder, 410 bhp, 4wd, 20″ wheels, gunrack, (holding a vintage .303 Lee Enfield rifle) large Confederate flag decal on the back window.
With a racing stripe.
Yes I realize in Edinburgh the cobblestone streets are but narrow lanes … but powering thru tough spots is what low gear is for … GA, seeing you behind the wheel of that beast will freak out everybody in Edinburgh, Scotland will never be the same.
Brh
Yeah, I’ll bear it in mind, if I survive the summer, brh. 🙂
Years ago I voted for a congestion charge (like London has but a fraction of the cost) to help keep cars out the city centre. Needless to say, ‘the people’ voted against it (who’da thought?). So we got lumbered with the tram project which became a legend (of incompetence) in its own lifetime.
Could have done with Walter on the city council…
Yeah, good idea, GA
Keep those Euro sh#t boxes out of central city.
More space for your Power Wagon, which will take up about 6 metro weeniemobile parking spots.
Brh
Virtue signaling
I don’t share your desire to see them suffer, but I understand on some level. My parents are similar. There are times where my father almost seemed to enjoy watching his children struggle, while sitting smug with his career and investments.
No understanding (seemingly) for how difficult the world has become for younger generations. As annoying as I find MIllenials and co, I can admit, they have it tough. Real tough.
They do. But do try to remember that all boomers aren’t like your father. Some of us Don’t Even Have ‘Investments’. Imagine that.
And what we have in the bank, we are keeping to help our kids. No other reason for having it and keeping it.
You have confirmed my perception that such comments tend to come from the kids of the privileged boomers, who seem unaware that they’re not the only kind.
My kids (not having been greatly acquainted with rich boomers) don’t want to see me ‘disappeared’. My daughter keeps telling me I shouldn’t be going to the shops, that her partner will drop shopping off for us after work. But I don’t want to bother her or him, and being married to a boomer (but financially er… damaged) medic working past retirement age and with ‘underlying health issues’, amid a shortage of PPE, we’re quite possibly fucked anyway.
That would be another two out the way. Yay.
Alba,
Take a look at this graph of excess deaths among 15-64 year olds over the last 4 years in Europe.
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country15.html
There’s an interesting UK anomaly, I wonder if you could shed light on. There has been no spike in deaths in the UK, except in England. Scotland is exactly on trend. Any idea why?
Btw, no need for you to worry about going out, the numbers show NO excess deaths over normal this year in the over-65 crowd in Scotland:
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country65.html
Note that Italy only now shows a spike as high as 3 years ago, and its dropping.
“Btw, no need for you to worry about going out, the numbers show NO excess deaths over normal this year in the over-65 crowd in Scotland”
I’m not worried about going out. I have to buy food and household stuff and I don’t have a car (and it’s impossible to get supermarket delivery slots unless you’re 70 or disabled), so one or other of us (which comes to the same thing) finds ourselves in a shop for something most days.
What I am worried about is my 66-year-old diabetic husband (with his consequently compromised immune system) going back to work on Wednesday and getting his first contact in the form of a high viral load from a patient, which seems to be the worst way to get it (and the way doctors are presumably dying).
And what he gets I get, and vice versa. So not much point in worrying about popping to the corner shop. He’s beginning to be of the opinion that we would have been better getting the virus from the bus or the shops first, than being battered by it at work as an introduction.
You would be wrong. We were lower middle class in Upstate NY, until my father got a new job, which entailed a move to the DC area. He did quite well there, but we were never more than upper middle class by DC standards.
And everything I have, I have worked for. I have never taken a cent from my parents.
Upper middle class is what I call privileged. Compared to the older boomers Janos mentions who can’t pay for gas or electricity.
Anyway, it wasn’t intended as an attack on you or yours, just pointing out generally that ordinary boomers tend to have children who know that ‘boomer’ doesn’t mean well off.
When you say ‘everything I have, I have worked for’ (I don’t doubt it) I don’t know why that makes you different from your father or his cohort, who would presumably say the same. And you’ll still have your inheritance, probably. Even I got a few bob that paid off the remains of my mortgage in my late 50s and helped me help my daughter with a loan to help pay off hers early (she’s already paid me back and insisted on it – she hates taking stuff for nothing).
Intergenerational solidarity is still around. And the boomer haters don’t know how many of the boomers have remortgaged their homes to help their kids get a deposit for a house. Over here the loosening of the pension regulations led to a lot of people who were approaching retirement taking a lump sum to give to their kids, instead of keep it all for their retirement.
I just get sick of people generalising, especially when it’s all about generating hate. Makes me think I might as well have bought that gas guzzler brh thinks I should buy and thought ‘fuck’ em’. 🙂
“boomer haters don’t know how many of the boomers have remortgaged their homes to help their kids get a deposit for a house. Over here the loosening of the pension regulations led to a lot of people who were approaching retirement taking a lump sum to give to their kids, instead of keep it all for their retirement.”
True, but a lot of boomers had parents who were total assholes.
If you buy a gas guzzler, get something European. American cars are still terrible.
Or give in a bit to frugality and get an M2.
Nah, I’ll be sticking with the bus, Nightowl. Even someone like DHL isn’t really going to make me say ‘fuck’em’. That would mean people like him have won.
My late (and ex-) father-in-law used to be as chauvinistic as most French people can be. He said the suspension on American cars was tooooooo soft, on British cars toooooo rigid, and on French cars juuuuuuust right.
“‘everything I have, I have worked for’”… not to mention an unknowable number of 3rd World serfs.
Did you understand Obama’s “you didn’t build it”?
As much as I want to see Obama locked up in Gitmo for his many crimes in office, I was not bothered by that statement.
His point was the we all get something from other people. I did not get to where I am entirely of my own accord at every single phase of the process.
Be careful what you wish for DJL. It’s always a bad idea to buy into the idea that we can justify our own cruelty and indifference to suffering b/c “they deserve it”. Only the top 5 to 10% have these glorious retirements and pension funds — most live on around $1000/month in social security that they’ve paid into all of their working lives.
And that same social security which I’ve paid into since I was 18 won’t be there for me but they’ll still get to enjoy what I’ve contributed.
But you, as a generation, will inherit their property. Lucky you.
With no gas to drive 50 miles to work.
People won’t be travelling 50 miles to work, Dr Tom. They’ll have to retrofit suburbia. 🙂
The lucky ones will have big gardens, which I rather envy them, since mine is shared with 7 other households and is too cold to grow anything but grass (+moss!) and some shrubs in the borders! And where would we hang our washing?!
@ga
Cabbage, lettuce, turnips and potato.
I started paying into it at 18 also. And while doing this we also paid taxes to support schools and build infrastructure. The Baby Boomers as a group did not destroy the world — the crooks who have the power and use it enrich themselves deserve the blame. By blaming an entire generation, a scenario has been created to allow them to blend into the herd and escape individual scorn. It’s a false narrative and the reality of most 65+ people does not resemble it.
I have sympathy with your feelings as I have a son-in-law who’s 49 and I see how hard he works for his family and you’re right — there will be few benefits left but not b/c people too old to work but not sick enough to die have hoovered them up. The House of Representatives (many of them young) took the first step to hand the 1% 4.5 trillion payday.
The pie gets smaller with every immigrant, legal or illegal. And they get many benefits White Americans do not get.
The Evil is simply too great for the mind to grasp. The Plan is for America to have 400 million people by 2050. Compare that with what we could have had: 220 million, 90% White. Which is better?
Only fools don’t know and they are the majority – which is why everything was taken from them.
Tend your garden.
I find it amusing that everyone thinks in order to survive granny must be tossed off the train.
Simply not the case the economy scales up and down as long as people are working and producing.
The problem comes from to many people in jobs that produce nothing like mine in IT or worse could work but choose to sponge off the workers on the government dole.
wah wah waaaahhhh.
….DHL
Depending upon whether our system falls apart or not, maybe it will be. And if it isn’t, that doesn’t make it my fault. Our world is messed up and has been messed up before. When empires go down things become worse for everyone. That doesn’t mean you should have such envy for people who happened to be born at an earlier point in the curve of decline. I started paying into SS when I was 15.
Baloney! The Boomers created the world that you have had for the last thirty years. All the stuff you had given to you started with the GI generation and expanded by the Boomers. If you could, would you give back all the stuff you have “inherited”from the Boomers? All those retirement moneys are allowing the Boomers to age without burdening you with their care. Believe me, that is a good thing as the Boomers are finishing supported their elders.
Your bitterness shows how much your generation was indulged by ours. Boomers never “expected” to get stuff as your generation has. We created “stuff”, you inherited it.
I totally feel sorry for the millennials, JohnAZ. They have an extremely difficult future (although not all of them – many are doing very nicely). And I worry for my kids who aren’t even millennials – and my grandson.
But what I find irrational is the implicit assumption that if the crunch had arrived 50 years later they’d have been the slightest bit different.
Finding yourself at the end of the queue when the sandwiches run out is sad. And unfair. But it’s not a sign of moral virtue unless you know for sure that had you been at the front of the queue you’d have saved some of your sandwiches for the people at the back. I have no particular reason to think that the morality, as opposed to the good or bad luck of one generation is that much different from another. That’s why I find it obnoxious to hate an entire generation of people, most of whose lives you know nothing about.
Especially when, as a generation, you’re going to inherit all that real estate that you’re jealous of. You may not get it when you want it, but you’re going to get it nevertheless. And I’ll be doing my best not to hang around once I need the kind of care that eats your equity and deprives your kids of a bit of help.
How much is that far-suburban and exurban real estate worth at a time of fossil fuel scarcity?
I agree you’ve got more of a problem in that respect than other countries, since you have ‘far-suburban’ while most of us just have ‘suburban’. I used to live in the suburbs of Edinburgh, which meant I could have walked to the centre in about two hours!
As much as anything else as long as it is properly setup.
Does it have a way to get water, food and power?
If not pretty worthless.
Worry is a wasted mental state.
The first world nations are in deep debt.
what put them there?
You mentioned this ‘Skorenzy character’ and his misplaced notions about the gravy train.
Okay, I ll bite, what percent of England [or whatever its called] is non White?
It wasn’t presented as an opportunity to bite. Do your own research. Start by formulating a question and a premise that make some kind of sense. But don’t count on me because I’m not interested, sorry.
Ready to explain why Britain and Europe in general needed tens of millions of Muslims? How does that factor into limited resources? And interest, care, and compassion are also limited. The more given to other people, the less available for one’s own.
That’s the Plan. They’re just deplorables anyway….
The theory I’ve heard is, because of a labor shortage driven by a low native replacement-rate.
Yeah, it’s bullshit because the influx continues even when unemployment is at 10%.
The Great Replacement is the priority number One with the Elite.
I see why other commenters think that you are a nasty bit of work.
To implode the system nothing more.
“I totally feel sorry for the millennials,”
Alba,
Feel sorry that their educations allow for such comment as DHL had the temerity to posit.
DHL hasn’t even got the excuse of being a millennial, EF. He’s old enough to have gained a bit of wisdom. And may have spent decades going to church. Jeez.
Maybe there’s something in RW’s diagnosis.
There are retired doctors – ‘boomers’ – who are at most risk from CV, voluntarily returning to work to lay their lives on the line, sometimes for people like him, when they could be staying safe at home.
What about all the debt the Millennials and Zers inherit from the
Boomers? You cannot just look at one side of the societal balance sheet, John.
As JHK points out, the building of suburbia has been the greatest misallocation of capital in human history. The boomers did not start that; we can blame FDR who cooked up FHA as a way to create work so we wouldn’t again face the mass unemployment of the Depression. It worked, until March, 2020.
Nice to have a definitive break point, actually.
If you haven’t read The Fourth Turning, do so. It gives the lived experience to the reader of what the 1950s were like, and why they made the decisions they did.
Once you do, you find out that the Boomers were essentially infantilized by a society that wanted to shield its children from the horrors it had seen in the Depression and World War 2. The older generation was perhaps excited to have a Peter Pan group that would never grow old, mostly because they could be exploited.
The Silent Gerneatipn, immediately before the boomers, has an interesting distinction: as a group, they will wind up paying no net taxes to the Federal Government. They paid no Medicare tax until 1966; and for years the maximum amount of Social Security they had to pay was $60.
Early boomers, like the Clintons, W, and Trump, were also beneficiaries, and they really don’t want to give up that privilege.
“Once you do, you find out that the Boomers were essentially infantilized by a society that wanted to shield its children from the horrors it had seen in the Depression and World War 2.”
True, and there was the nascent threat of nuclear annihilation to top it off.
I need to read TFT. That part about infantilzation explains so much…
Interestingly enough, TFT is a foundational work for much of what drives the thinking parts of the MAGA movement. Bannon has referenced it often.
Yeah, and that’s funny. Because it was written by a couple of left-liberals kind of fawning for the next FDR to take over the country in the next crisis and forge, I don’t know, an ever better nation.
But it serves as good social analysis. For me, anXer, it explained why I had felt that my generation was taking the short end of the stick. We were, and it’s sort of by design: having never been cared for by this society (1/3rd of Gen X, by some estimates, wound up in the trash bins outside abortion clinics), we don’t care about the existing order, and will support and guide the Millennials as they reforge the societal compact. So long as we stick it to the Boomers, in a sense by serving as pied pipers coopting their children.
The social history of the high in the 1950s is fascinating, a magical time. JHK today frankly reminded me of that in his personal description of the lived experience of the 60s.
The great shock for you, however, will be to read a book written in 1997 that in many parts reads like a history of the prior 20 years from today. One brief example: they even suggest a “Tea Party” May happen.
Interesting. I am a Gen Xer, too.
Definitely going to pick up this book.
“The social history of the high in the 1950s is fascinating, a magical time. ”
I guess it depends where you were. Where I was (industrial north of England) it was grey and there wasn’t much stuff. We still had a ‘utility’ sideboard and a ‘utility’ dining table from just after the war, for all of the time I lived at home. And if you got cancer you pretty much er… died. And when I say grey I’m not referring to the weather, which was perfectly nice a lot of the time. We didn’t have a car till at least after 1968 – and it was a second-hand one. Each one after that was bought older than the previous one, because when you’re on a very modest income cars are just a black hole to throw money into.
The 70s were about a desperately struggling manufacturing economy, plagued by low productivity (compared to those brand new German factories) and endless strikes, including the ones when rubbish wasn’t collected and the one where dead bodies weren’t buried. The 80s brought penury to swaths of boomers as their houses were repossessed when mortgage rates climbed over 15%. Poll tax riots too. Maggie Thatcher’s war with organised labour killed off swaths of industry, including the miners – most of them boomers, whose villages never really recovered, in places like Wales and the north of England.
As JHK pointed out, you guys were let off lightly. My parents were from Glasgow, which being a hub of industry and shipbuilding got it in the neck from the Luftwaffe.
Oh, and my widowed aunt’s boomer son from NYC, my cousin Joe, came back from Vietnam in a box. The second son ended up a vagrant on the streets, possibly not unconnected with how his big brother ended up – who knows? Neither of them went to college, which is presumably how he ended up in a box and not in a cushy office job.
Anyway, it strikes me that the whole boomer thing is every bit as much about class and geography as it is about age. You’ve got poor boomers too – you maybe just don’t mix with them.
And the only reason we were in England at all for all of my childhood was that my parents were newlyweds in 1949 Glasgow and there were 10,000 households on the city’s waiting list for a house or flat to rent after the war (they weren’t in a position to buy), thanks to the aerial activities of Janos’ best friends.
“Come, live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of peace and plenty, bed and board,
That chance employment may afford.
I’ll handle dainties on the docks
And thou shalt read of summer frocks:
At evening by the sour canals
We’ll hope to hear some madrigals.
Care on thy maiden brow shall put
A wreath of wrinkles, and thy foot
Be shod with pain: not silken dress
But toil shall tire thy loveliness.
Hunger shall make thy modest zone
And cheat fond death of all but bone-
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.”
Just came into my mind.
The books authors make the point that they’re talking about generations across the UK and theUSAm GA, but there’s a bifurcation at the American
Revolution. So we shadow English changes after 1783, but we are distinct.
We were a much wealthier country in the 1950s than the UK. One reason, as David Stockman points out in The Great Deformation, was that Eisenhower had the military stature to deal with and cut down the military-industrial complex, so we had a “peace dividend” that fed back into the civilian economy.
It was pretty much a boom from the moment the 1946-48 Republican Congress repealed a lot of Wartime restrictions to 1973. Why did they pass all that very expensive social welfare legislation in the 60s? The economy had been booming for as long as anyone could remember, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t keep growing: I learned that from TFT.
I had no experience of that kind of world, with the exceptions of the years from 1995 to 2000. The book isn’t about the UK but if you want to understand why slogans like MAGA connect with people, it makes things clear. That it was a unique combination of circumstances, including all that cheap oil discovered in the 1930s, that allowed us to plow under the near-suburbs and plant houses, is not something people make recognize, because they’re seeing the era through the eyes of the children they were, playing in newly built playgrounds and parks built to keep them safe.
I guess that’s the kind of black-white (non) thinking typical of doctrinare religious types? … such stupid generalization is typical unfortunately of those who are unable to think for themselves. MANY ‘boomers” refused to sell out and went into teaching, medicine, social work, writing (JHK) and many other altruistic pursuits, not having bought into predatory Anglo-Saxon capitalistic materialism, instead having retained some of the idealism that also brought us the environmental movement, civil-rights, equal rights for women, and many many worthwhile advances. Many were NOT brainwashed by Ronnie Raygun the the Greed-Is Good mantra. I suppose, then, that you’ll take a degree of pleasure in the death of your own parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, regardless of the worth of their lives then? You’re an angry and unthinking moron.
That rejoinder is to DJL’s vacuous post btw…
And they, fill with utter hatred for their own People and Culture, are the ones who have made other, poorer Whites into pariahs. You elected Donald Trump because the Folk had no one else to turn to.
You also filled up American will new people, peoples who will never assimilate. Nice going, sport.
DJL, your attitude is pitiful. I am 17 years older than you. I was looking forward to a reasonable retirement later this year after working for the past 51 years. I have a minute construction company which helps upgrade assisted living centers, and have been doing this for many years (though no longer as all such centers want to keep most out of the petri dish). So, I am a Boomer. This Boomer’s last ‘2 week’ vacation was 35 years ago when my first (and only) wife and I were married. The last time I did not sleep in my house was during Obama’s administration because its difficult to get away when you are responsible, full time, for your own employment AND have a responsibility for your client’s well being (ever had that responsibility??). And ‘assisted living’ centers don’t have just old people. I have seen many young folks decimated in auto wrecks along with the occasional ‘invincible’ younger motorcyclist that didn’t wear a helmet, and learned the difference between warm flesh and cold steel the unpleasant way. We never had children as she was nearly lost during her one pregnacy and I thought it would be irresponsible to raise a child and forfeit my wife. However, we have paid through the nose for the public education system and to think we paid to bring up children (and you have the mentality of a child) such as you with your “it’s all about me” fucking attitude. No wonder you live in an 800 square foot house, by yourself, no doubt. What woman would want to put up with you and your crap-ass attitude. I have no idea what the ‘DJ’ stands for but the L is definitely LOSER.
This is sick stuff DJL, and I’m sure that those who have been the real perpetrators are the same ones who put out memes like this generational fault for the gullibles like you to lap up. Isn’t if funny how the hatred has ramped up lately – women against men, black against white, sexual outliers against the heteros, and now the young against the old. That way they can keep people from getting mad at who they ought to be mad at.
As a Baby Boomer . I often get accused by Millennials of destroying the environment because we drove big gas guzzling cars back in the day. I always tell them those we the only cars we had to drive . the Japanese imports did not start until the late 70s . It was the same for everything else . We were young and were starting out using whatever was available to us. Now it is the Millennials turn . I hope they really can change the system.
the hypothetical free market is to blame for those cars. and we had more resources to blow through at the time than…any other country anywhere in history. on a per-capita basis.
I wonder, what if gasoline had been a rare commodity or more expensive in the US like in Europe and Japan. Maybe we would have had cars getting 40 mpg instead of 10.
We would have been forced to chose an architecture to somewhere.
That is largely media-induced. As is the destruction of the family.
Huh. The Volkswagen Beetle was on sale starting in the 1950s. Mine used to get pretty good gas mileage.
I had a few of those myself, Doc.
But it occurs to me those things were never too safe, and maniac that I was, I’m lucky I’m still alive.
My last one died when its brakes failed, BRH. That was scary. Good thing you couldn’t go too fast in them!
I’m not sorry for unibody construction and all the safety improvements in modern cars. I think they hit a peak about 2005; since then safety improvements have decreased safety, like the regulations that have made it near-impossible to see out of cars in all directions, supposedly to protect us in a crash,
Beetles had a unibody, the problem was not enough mass in the right palces and totally inadequate crush space.
“…the regulations that have made it near-impossible to see out of cars in all directions…”
That’s a personal peeve of mine, especially if I am at one of those intersections where I have to look back at an obtuse angle and the rollover protection blocks my view.
Gee my old LaSalle ran great.
Those were the days, boys were boys and men were men.
The Millennials are inheriting the remains of the catastrophe during the current Crisis. Their High is of their own making. I wish them success.
The only green car is one painted that color.
Teslas etc destroy an area in Canada where the mineral? for the battery is mined.
Tesla Inc is a welfare fraud.
“The only green car is one painted that color.”
True – yay!!
Although it is the case that electric cars have the benefit of improving air quality in cities and reducing the number of deaths and respiratory illnesses caused by diesel particulates. For such time as they can be maintained. And you still get the particulates from the tyres and the road, even with an electric car.
Can’t remember? Grandkids? Get them into “driving” rickshaws. They can ferry around important Muslim, Hindu, and Chinese dignitaries. They’ll enjoy seeing a White in that role.
Not sure whether I’d feel called to respond to that comment even if it made the slightest sense to me.
We have cycle rickshaws here during the International Festival and Fringe in August (cancelled this year of course). And Edinburgh’s damned hilly.
50 Old British Dialect Words We Should Bring Back | Mental …
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/59924/50-old-british-dialect-words-incorporate-conversation
Shiv is an old word for thick, coarse wool or linen. (Yorkshire) … Porter’s enthusiasm
Also from the coal-fired plants that often produce the electricity for them.
True, but they don’t tend to be in urban areas right next to where children are walking.
Particulates from yuppie wood-burning stoves are a major problem now too – and they’ve proliferated like a virus.
They were getting pushback for clearing a forest here in Germany for their new GIgafactory.
A court ordered them to stop, but they beat the order and are back at it.
Elon has assured us that it is no big deal at all as the forest was planted rather than “natural.”
So green.
Then the child moved ten times round the seasons
Skated over ten clear frozen streams
Words like “when you’re older” must appease him
And promises of someday make his dreams
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
Joni Mitchell
That song was covered by 40 or more singers, fast, and made her very rich.
Should she apologize for the green? I’ll say smoke em while you got em on that one.
I’ll say smoke em while you got em on that one. – K-Dog
===========
I was in ROTC at St Joe’s College from 1958 to 1962. We learned to march on a grass field next to a barracks-like building on campus. Our leader would yell “break time” and “smoke ’em if, you got ’em” (not while you got ’em). Then we were told to ‘field strip our butts and bury them.’
Odd the things that stick in our minds.
Millennial gen does not know Art Deco era classics or what a 49 chopped & slammed Merc is so their perspective on the environment has no basis in reality of automotive historiography.
Millennial gen likely would not like Top Fuel Drag Racing either given the nitro-methane & engine noise from the horse power.
This is why they said children should been seen & not heard.
RW
“The great lesson of the age was lost: the virtual is not a substitute for the authentic.”
This lesson is only now being learned – maybe.
“I’m very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I’ve made errors,”
McNamara said in Fog of War, an Oscar-winning 2003 documentary.
“I am sincerely sorry.”
Quintessential baby-boomer James Howard Kunstler said in his latest post. ?
At high school I never advertised my interest in books.I would prefer to get into car accident driving my daddy’s car than to acquire reputation of a nerd on top of my already being square aka L7.
Thanks again Mr.Kunstler for the “Geography of nowhere”
Also for those who matured in the 60’s I want to recommend 2 very penetrating books:
The Troubles: A Jaundiced Glance Back at the Movement of the Sixties by Joseph R. Conlin
The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam
by James Gibson
Both are scanned and uploaded to archive.org and James Gibson posted his lecture on youtube.
Great blog post today by JHK! A Tour de Force! Good Job!
As the ancient Greeks knew: Life is Tragic….
JHK has oft written that very statement, “Life is tragic” in this forum,
It’s interesting that the US government is only now releasing this information. They’ve known that the Covid 19 virus can be transferred by just talking and breathing since late January, if not earlier. Look at the extensive PPE equipment worn by hospital staff in Wuhan in late January. I wonder why the government “Experts” deliberately lied to the people?
“ (CNN)A prestigious scientific panel told the White House Wednesday night that research shows coronavirus can be spread not just by sneezes or coughs, but also just by talking, or possibly even just breathing.
“While the current [coronavirus] specific research is limited, the results of available studies are consistent with aerosolization of virus from normal breathing,” according to the letter, written by Dr. Harvey Fineberg, chairman of a committee with the National Academy of Sciences.”
Did they release the information that the number of deaths amongst the over-65 crowd IN ITALY is below that from three years ago?
Guess the virus isn’t so lethal after all. Too bad about that economy.
but what about > 65 year olds?
I assume you mean <65? Slight spike in Italy this year, not as bad as three years ago. See for yourself:
http://www.euromomo.eu/outputs/zscore_country15.html
If the country universally cited as the worst afflicted in the "pandemic" has no extreme excess deaths this winter, what does that tell you about the lethality of this thing?
(read about z-scores at that site if unfamiliar)
Once again we can tell you have no background in medicine… though for reasons known only unto you you need to feature “Dr” so prominently in your screen name- so, tell us again what field of study that was in???
After completing grad school I worked in Public Health for MD State Dept of Health/Baltimore for 7 years, some of which involved work in the area of pathology/epidemiology. The facts in Italy are other than what you’ve represented, so here are the actual facts:
Older adults appear to make up a greater proportion of cases in Italy, with about 37% of cases ages 70 and older, compared with 12% of cases in China, according to a paper on the issue of deaths in Italy, published March 23 in the journal JAMA.
I believe I will accept the facts that I read in my wife’s current issue of JAMA. The lethality of the SARS CoV2 virus is estimated at 2 to 5 times that of the so-called “ordinary” flu
Everything is being called “corona”, with learned officials like you ordering all deaths to be labeled thus, even on vague suspicion. Even if patients died from something else. With corona is now “from” corona.
Here’s a quote from Dr. John Lee, a British pathologist:
It should be noted that there is no international standard method for attributing or recording causes of death. Also, normally, most respiratory deaths never have a specific infective cause recorded, whereas at the moment one can expect all positive Covid-19 results associated with a death to be recorded. Again, this is not splitting hairs. Imagine a population where more and more of us have already had Covid-19, and where every ill and dying patient is tested for the virus. The deaths apparently due to Covid-19, the Covid trajectory, will approach the overall death rate. It would appear that all deaths were caused by Covid-19 – would this be true? No. The severity of the epidemic would be indicated by how many extra deaths (above normal) there were overall.
Here’s the article if you’re interested:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-#
SM,
Did they teach you to read graphs in grad school? Check out the one, FROM THE ITALIAN GOVERNMENT, in this story:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/whats-behind-italys-outrageous-10-mortality-rate-covid-19
Note the chart of over-65 deaths in Italy. There’s a baseline in black, and a red line that shows what the actual deaths were, above or below what was expected.
You’ll notice from that graph that deaths in Italy, disaster central, supposedly, have not yet exceeded the peak of three winters ago. Now, I will grant you that that is not an ESTIMATE in JAMA. It’s real data from official sources.
You take the estimate and I’ll take reality.
The disease may be worse than a flu, but it hasn’t killed worse than the flu season in Italy in previous years.
Btw, there’s no excess deaths of 15-64 year olds in most
European countries. There are a few spikes, but again: those spikes are below the level of three winters ago.
Again, that’s real data, not an estimate, so you can do with it what you will. Except deny it.
SM9000,
You’ll notice that the shape of the graph for Italy and China in the zero hedge article confirms what you said about elderly in Italy. Of course, the graphs bar patterns are the same: the lethality of the flu is much worse as you get older.
Dr Tom
“The disease may be worse than a flu, but it hasn’t killed worse than the flu season in Italy in previous years.”
“Of course, the graphs bar patterns are the same: the lethality of the flu is much worse as you get older.”
Sorry, I didn’t get round to looking too closely at your graphs yesterday in a question to me upthread (about England in particular?). I’m not a public health stats expert, so I would definitely defer to snarkmatic on such issues. All I can tell you about the English statistics is that it took root there some time before it took root in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland – and they have more and bigger cities. Also the figures are skewed by the high rates in London, much the same as they are over your way by New York. Sorry, I don’t know any more about it than that.
But on your first point about, the overall number of deaths isn’t really the point. I’ve been living with a medic for 15 years and I’ve never caught ‘flu from him from work, although I have picked up common colds. And he doesn’t wear a mask normally. And I lived with him for a decade before I became of the age to get ‘flu vaccinations. Neither of us can get a vaccination for this.
In all that time I don’t recall field hospitals having to be built to accommodate ‘flu victims or doctors and nurses in their 30s dying of ‘flu (or temporary morgues being created because it’s impossible to bury or cremate everyone when they die). As of yesterday, we’d lost three doctors – and we’ve only just started compared to Italy (where over 70 doctors have died), We lost two nurses yesterday (and one prior to that) – one was 36 and the other looked not much older. No underlying conditions other than three children each, now left motherless. So whatever the total number of deaths is overall, it’s just not the entire point. A quarter of UK doctors are currently out of circulation due to Covid symptoms and the continuing lack of an antibody test to allow them to go back to work.
Regarding your second point, young children are also vulnerable to flu, which they thankfully aren’t to Covid. However, we’ve also lost a healthy 21-year-old and a healthy 13-year old (who died and had to be buried without his family there – again, doesn’t happen with flu). They are outliers, but it can potentially get anyone, just not in the same numbers (for now).
Personally I’d leave it to the younger folks to decide the way to go, in terms of risking more infection by getting the economy started again, but you can say without question that that would decimate the health services (at least here) so maybe the only fair way to protect our docs and nurses would be to say no-one over the age of 18 gets to hospital for Covid and we can all take our chances (including the disabled?). If the powers that be could have sedatives delivered to us so that we can die less horrifically at home, that would be a bonus. Although maybe that would be too much mercy towards the vulnerable for you to stomach.
But then I’d have left the Brexit decision to the youngsters too since the risks of Brexit are overwhelmingly to their economic futures – but the Brexiters of your age and older overruled them.
Sorry, I meant ‘the have more and bigger cities in England.
Just letting it rip to please the anti-boomers may not please the misogynists, of course, since it seems to have a statistically very significant preference for male victims in its most serious form.
Be careful what you wish for.
GA,
In the USA, preventing deaths by shutting down the economy (in an economy where “deaths of despair” in reaction to the economic collapse after 2008 have been legion) has been the point, although here it’s gone to the juvenile inability to accept death that seems a feature of the culture here. )Mawkishly, Governor Cuomo said “if we can save one life, it will have been worth it.” I wonder if he will go comfort the widows of men who kill themselves because their lives have been destroyed by his actions?) We are also a commercial culture so preventing deaths in the most cost-efficient manner helps.
You point out that “71 doctors” have died with COVID in Italy. The Italian death rate is 10.7/1000. There are about 336,000 doctors in Italy, and their age is probably slightly older than average because there are no teenage doctors. That suggests that, if doctors die at the population average, 3595 doctors will die this year in Italy. Call it 3600, and you have 300 doctors expected to die every month, from all causes. Does that change the image of 71 doctors dying over the last month?
Since there’s no spike in deaths outside England (and specifically London), are they planning to put COVID patients into Wales and Scotland to distribute the load? Interesting how countries handle this. I’m in Westchester outside NYCm where we had over 10,000 infections and only 25 deaths the other day. Contrast NYC with 47000 infections and 1400 deaths, a death rate 12-15x the one in the county next door. It’s an interesting anomaly.
We locked down because we had bad information. Your Doctor Ferguson will be responsible for impoverishing more people in world history than any other: his panic-inducing report induced governments everywhere, except Sweden (and check their death rates; it’s not extreme compared to Norway) to lock down their economies and impoverish young people, to save, at the margin, effectively no more old people than would have been saved by a lockdown in the winter of 2016-2017. I’m not young, and not too healthy, but this strikes me as wrong, especially writing from a country where young working people are taxed to pay for the Medicare of retired millionaires. In the UK there is no such age-baseD differential.
Imagine, instead, a call to action issued by a head of state here: we face a crisis of suffering and death for our older residents. I’m commandeering college dormitories with elevators and moving them into them, if they haven’t got the virus. I’m forbidding anyone to have contact with them, unless tested. And I’m asking for volunteers from younger generations to serve as suppliers of food and needed supplies; to dress in full virus-containment suits tocome work for them; and to get COVID and get over it so as to kill it off in the population and prevent its spread. (That latter bit being the original UK plan, until Ferguson decided to immiserate billions and ultimately kill millions with poverty and bad science). That society would have built generational solidarity, so I wouldn’t hear young people gleefully calling this the Boomer Remover.
Instead, the same people who didn’t know to buy ventilators ahead of time, who never stockpiled masks against a respiratory infection (the first was recommended and ignored, because it cost a lot of money; the second is simple criminal incompetence, ignoring the experience of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea) are asking us to trust their competence and knowledge NOW. The numbers show no extreme excess deaths, despite the bad optics. The individual deaths are all tragedies, as Stalin would say, but the deaths of millions are statistics. Right now, the statistics say there aren’t any more deaths this year than 3 winters ago, and in fact fewer.
I do hope you’ll wear a mask, though. I certainly am.
How dare you not FEAR!
Have you thought of telling the doctors and nurses desperately short of protective equipment that they shouldn’t fear? Including the spouses of the ones who’ve already died?
You’re in a very fortunate position, Nightowl. I can understand that you can afford to be smug. Even smugger than usual. Maybe if you got a high viral load at your first contact and felt yourself dying after three days of wearing the same virus-covered mask you’d acquire some empathy.
Pretty sure I had it in December. The firm I work for has lots of folks traveling to China and Asia in general. Fever, headache, cough deep in the chest, strong burning sensation.
Took 2 months to go away; once I started doing Vit. D heavily, it was gone for good. Not pleasant, but no different than lots of other nasty viruses that go around every year. Stats I have seen so far would seem to bear it out.
The reaction from the media and the globalist system is what is telling. It is very real, likely not nearly as bad as reported, and being used for other ends, IMO.
Nightowl
I know this may come as a shock, but it’s not all about you and how it affected you (if indeed you had it at all).
Even 50% of people on ventilators are dying. And doctors and nurses.
Sorry for the unfortunate choice of words but your self-satisfaction and lack of empathy take my breath away.
Show me a field hospital that’s ever been built for flu in your memory. And crematoria running out of space.
Good. Stew in your fear.
No sensible answer. Ever.
If you don’t give a fuck about people other than yourself, just say so. In fact, don’t even bother, it’s understood.
Nearly everything you say is in bad faith. Which is why no one cares what you say.
NigIQwl
You forgot to close with your usual & customary smug “I win”.
GA makes more sense and displays more intelligence than you in even her briefest posts, while you sit, on high, vaguely intimating knowledge of high-flown conspiracies. You’re a pathetic loser.
And I will continue to be right. Because I have two major advantages over you: (1) A good brain (2) The ability to parse fake news.
I realize the playing field is not level, and insults can be lame, but your track record of both fake news and insults justifies just about any response.
Quiver more, Jello.
Your only real ability is that you can’t see past the end of your own nose, due to the hyperinflated ego in which you dwell, spinning self-congratulatory assertions of your intelligence. Yet so many your post hint at ridiculous conspiracy theories which utterly undermine your public-facing credibility.
A black hole is as bottomless as an opened human heart.
Generation Jones at your service. We accept your apology, finally. . .
Today’s excellent blog showcases Kunstler’s deftness at the historical narrative. Those of us who followed his cohort into college life in the mid-1970s sensed that we’d been stuck in the kiddie pool while the big fun in the deep end played out. We started our careers in a post-Watergate recessionary economy and never recovered.
It’s no surprise that all the mischief that JHK describes occurred contemporaneously with the computer revolution. Computerization involve grand, detailed, and often quite compelling abstractions of the real world. It is mesmerizing. Look at Facebook and Twitter; they are abstractions of genuine social interaction. Behold Alexa! Over the course of the last 50 or so years, we humans have learned to accept abstractions being as “real” as the real thing. Problem is, abstractions are not real, not “concrete”, to use a computer science term. So the financialization of everything is one of the bitter fruits of allowing abstractions to successfully be conflated with the real. I’ll leave it to the readers of JHK’s forum to articulate how money, also a great, grand, compelling abstraction, has assisted in creating this mess.
Interesting indeed is the relationship of the words money and virus. A quick review of Websters defintions of virus is enlightening thriugh the distractions.
A partial list of people organizations and things to blame for covid-19 or its spread: Batshit, global warming, Trump, feminism, boomer generation, international bankers, Chinese wet markets, big pharma, Jews, Fox News, Chinese bio research security policies computers, socialist medicine, Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, Wuhan and Hubei regional authorities (popular beef in Beijing), boomers, Hollywood celebrities, lack of preparation for a pandemic, Greta Garbo, Greta Thurnberg, nose picking, Chinese cuisine, planes, trains, automobiles, ineffective hand washing, spitting on sidewalks, drunk driving, not closing cover of toilet seats after use, cork bats, WHO, Bill de Blasio, urban lockdowns without curfews, , Rachel Maddow, breathing, aluminum bats, firecrackers, Neil Ferguson, insufficient social distancing, lineups in general, gas station hose handles, grocery stores counters, civets, park benches, touching one’s face, Chinese defective testing equipment donated to Europe, statistical models, Lysol, Chinese propaganda, Chinese opera, Chinese foot binding, (actually anything connected to China qualifies).
You forgot TV.
He forgot TV & XXX American Pornography too.
Thank God he’s not complaining about the marijuana legalization, or Bill Buckley.
RW
Excellent post!
Computer science is actually more abstract than mathematics. Mathematical structures evolved naturally from practical problems
and has seen a long evolution.
Computer science on the other hand exploded on the scene recently. There is a feeling there that complex working software can be stamped out of nothing (“greenfield”) by clever design and in principle in software development that is in fact possible.
It rarely works however as all refined systems are the result of evolution (e.g. the airplane), mostly it fails. That’s why you have so many systems and models of software development.
Software developers are also the most susceptible to believe in virtual
realities, parallel universes or that our current world is “an ancestor simulation”, a notion now advanced by some modern “philosophers”.
It has been said many times by many people that the finance house of cards was being barely kept afloat by the global shenanigans of the Elite financial types. As long as drugs, whoring of all sorts and slavery kept the ship afloat with minimal liquidity payments, everything was cool. What debt? What me worry about 22 trillion in debt, and much much more individual debt around the world.
Well, the piper has arrived in the guise of a little package of RNA. People need their money, the debt to survive. The government’s response is typical, let’s jack it up to 25 trillion. The Feds May be forced to acknowledge debt insolvency when the outlays doesn’t not spend well. Current data being exposed is already showing that the effect of the virus shutdown is worse than 1930. The Fourth Turning is starting to rotate.
I read a book a long time ago, a sci-fi about a future society that was dominated not by corporations, but by corporate advertising. Ads everywhere, senseless. Ads became the currency of the society, no value at all part of the overhead for all the corporations, the basis of all capitalistic activity.
In case you haven’t noticed using the internet, we have arrived at this point. Ads, ads everywhere, revenue being created by how many times an ad is watched on Facebook. Worthless trash that continues to frustrate users.
Oh, yeah, by the way. The financial house of cards was created by the Boomers as a way to magically develop “wealth”. But the next generation, the Xers invented the internet, and especially the corporations that exploit it with advertising.
Another potentially silver lining of the virus may be the collapse of this repugnant bubble of advertising. Talk about nothing for something!
“let’s jack it up to 25 trillion.”
You mean 30 trillion. Debt was at 23 trillion in the USA before the campaign to unemploy millions so they’d beg for a bailout. The bailout includes 2trln directly, nd authorizes the Treasury to guarantee debt issued by the Fed up to 4.5 Trillion, but only as a last resort.
To quote Ronald Reagan: “when the democrats tell you they’re going to raise taxes, but only as a last resort, you know that that is one resort they’ll be checking into.”
29.5 trillion. Add interest the rest of this year and you’re easily over 30, John.
I stand corrected. Thanks. Sickening isn’t it. I wonder if it is possible to give ourselves over to debt without drastic results.
BTW, watching thirty year old pundits on TV telling us about what is going to happen is actually hilarious.
And don’t omit the unfunded liabilities.
As the fantasy that economic “growth” will somehow outstrip the growth of credit is abandoned, we will begin the horrible task of disposing of “liabilities”, some of which are living, breathing humans.
When I talked to my cardiologist yesterday he reminded me to make sure my “Advanced Directive for Healthcare” (Living Will) is up to date.
Interesting times.
They’re too depressing to think about. At least with government bonds you can simply repudiate them, like Argentina has done. Then wait a few years and the suckers will line up to,give you money again, this time SURE that you will pay them Tuesday for a hamburger today.
Medicare you don’t get rid of.
Social security, by contrast, you CAN get rid of. SS is indexed to inflation using the same chained CPI (I.e. not real inflation) that tax rates use. Run inflation hot but not so that it actually shows up in Chained CPI and you deflate the value of SS benefits while increasing SS taxes. Combine this with the unpayable debts of Illinois for pensions and you realize: inflation is a way to not pay the Boomers without explicitly repealing anything.
That’s why I expect it, and soon, especially since the Boomers are now smaller in number than Xers, and also Millennials. They cannot vote to protect themselves much longer.
Dr. Berners Lee invented the Internet for the US Army under contract to build it as a spy network for the great unwashed masses.
Berners Lee is a prototypical boomer via age cohort, but exceptionally educated enough to enable him to get the contract signed.
Ok boomer meme is oxymoronic if we take a looksee at Berners Lee and the World Wide Web.
RW
Many years ago, the Wife and I went spelunking in an illegal cave near and around Yangshuo village near Guilin in Southern China. It was interesting, but only later did I realize that it was probably an illegal cave tour and probably very dangerous. The cave lights were bare copper wire 20 watt light bulbs linked together like half-ass Christmas lights. I’m glad that I didn’t take up the peasant guide’s offer to climb my fat ass down that narrow black hole “to see the underground river” which we could hear flowing in the opaque darkness below. Even when I think about it now, it gives me the creeps.
Anyway, I recall seeing small reddish hue bats on the walls of the cave. The Wuhan P4 lab researchers probably fanned out across Southern China paying villagers a few hundred Renminbi to harvest bats from the caves for their coronavirus research? Then, the researchers would likely very aggressively undertake all kinds of genetic research on the exotic bat pathogens so as to produce published papers to advance their academic and government careers? You know the drill: the banality of Evil. Enter Miss Shi Zhengli ??? of the Wuhan P4 Virology lab
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
I recall the boy scouts who died in a cave, trapped somewhere in a National Park.
They descended and the waters were so high they could not walk out and could not climb up –most did finally get rescued.
spelunking? is dangerous.
Honestly, I feel sorry for most of the boomers. There are many boomers I know who have been outright screwed by their contemporaries. (Most of these boomers were ultimately screwed because of the side affects of divorce court.) And the Hippie movement was basically nothing more than a fad that sucked up a plurality of the boomer population, that destroyed classical culture.
“Free love” how is that any different than free helicopter money government bail outs????
The Beatles, think what you will of their music, is the biggest baby boomer red USSR flag anyone can fly today, Gen-X, millennial, or Gen-Z alike. General Patton was right we should have kept going once we ran through Germany….. Only we didn’t have to run towards The Kremlin/Moscow, we had to just get a giant cane and pull the Beatles off stage.
Yes, Communism was funded by the Bankers to pull down Society (both ours and the Traditional and Fascist States) so they could rule in the end. Obviously the 60’s were funded by the them as well. A bitter pill for many including me.
Patton was sickened by the horrible way the Allies were treating the defeated German people. He was going to tell all when he got back – but he never made it back.
“…believe me, it was much more about finding someone to hook-up with at the teach-ins and the street marches. … waves of nubile, joggling breasts coming at you beneath those sheer peasant blouses (which, you understand, suggests that the women were in on it, too, being every bit as incited by their own frisky hormones).”
“Girls say yes to boys who say no.”
That was when the women took control of this country.
What young male wouldn’t prefer “hooking up” to getting shot at.
People really need to understand what “morals” are.
Yes, they’re connected with “morale”. Thus Putin doesn’t allow gay pride parades because they would demoralize the people. The People attack them and the Police come and help them – the People not the Gays.
Just so, White Men used to go out with shovels and bats and beat back Black Rioters. Today they (the Whites) would be shot by the Police at the behest of the Elite.
How things have changed! For the worse….
Thanks Boomer Liberals who didn’t sell out; who finished up in College and went onto to teach Treason, Anti-Racism (hatred for one’s own people) and Globalism at all levels!
And the Sell Outs savaged us in a different way. But they’re all brothers now! Antifa enforces what the Corporations want. So do the Cops.
Well said.
I can relate to what you are saying here, because while Boomers may have started the big blow-out, we older Gen-Xers were highly complicit in going along with it, spouting Reaganite received wisdom the entire time. I remember when I was a school-boy, the University of Wisconsin’s business school was the “happening” college of the university system.
For dysfunctional, bobble-headed social marginals such as myself at the time, we became very disillusioned and bitter that we found ourselves living in “the world that Boomers built” only to realize that the woolly idealism of the Sixties wasn’t really serious but the plundering, exploitive materialism certainly was. I think this really sent me into a huge tail-spin from which I never really recovered (though it also didn’t help that my upbringing was sloppy, inconsistent, and filled with bad messaging from the adults in my life and the wider society).
And looking back, I can scarcely *believe* that I held on so long to the notion that voting for Democrats would make anything better once I realized in what a serious predicament modern life and all its accoutrements really were!
When you are a young man, sex is at least half of what you think of minute-by-minute.
For pity’s sake, am I glad that’s over now that I’m coming up on my fifty-third Solar Return! (I never got to have any, but that’s entirely beside the point.)
Talkin’ bout my generation..People try to put us d-down just because we get around. The Who, 1965
Same place where the draft office got liberated “when i was young” ?
Sorry Alex P Keaton, you’re Gen X, and your packa tats n piercings did not invent the internet. Maybe moved a whole generation of pac man there but invented ?
What a concept
Looks like Jim has finally found an identity he can feel ashamed of. Yeah, some of us were creeps, some are red-neck bumpkins, some were SDS woke, some stoned all the time, some were lucky to become big-titted matrons, some hate big tits, some became tattooed Marines, some lesbians with a following like Lily Tomlin, some created a world empire after inventing BASIC interpreter for a desk computer. All are holy! All boomers are holy (though some admittedly more than others).
With so many choices why identify with holy shit?
Are you a big titted lesbian tattooed marine matron who likes Lily Tomlin, basically?
Good sixties type rant btw, A Coney Island of the Genitals and Heart.
Whatever happens next we had the good fortune to live during the golden age: GTO’s, Beatles, a job out of high school that could buy you a house, painless dentistry finally, paper routes and strawberry picking buses, sci-fi movies that actually frightened us, polite conversation when girls or adults or children in hearing distance, and the dawning realization that organized religion was quackery…couldn’t have lived during a better time. I’m only speaking for white people. Blacks and other minorities might have a different take.
An interesting perspective on the formative years of the “boomer” generation but one should keep in mind an older generation was still the one steering the boat in important ways. Kennedy was assassinated, King was murdered, foreign policy blundering was rampant, forests were clear cut, the financial controls were engineered to favor the non-boomer wealthy etc.
JFK’s biggest regret should be he didn’t try LSD.
I agree. LSD provided a gateway to higher consciousness that could have led the Boomers in the direction of life and wholeness. The real enemy of humankind is fear. The paranoia experienced when we smoke weed or drop LSD is simply the fear of letting go of our conventional assumptions on the nature of reality and permitting the world to be what it really is: stupendous, awesome mystery…
Yes, I agree.
But the Lucy the Scarlet Dragon rose from the deep and told me to turn back. This is not the way the dragon said: You have been here a dozen times and have seen all there is to see. Only posers go this way and you are called to be better. The dragon screamed. GO BACK NOW. THIS IS NOT THE WAY. The mushroom lies.
Mushroom = Id
Scarlet Dragon = Ego
Mushroom lies = Superego
RW
Interestingly cryptic.
Can’t quite get your entire meaning but reminds me of Baba dam Ras asserting once you get the message hang up the phone.
I disagree slightly in calling it a “gateway”.
I characterize it as providing a “Peek” and for many a brief glimpse the memory of which fades fast, possibly not even noticed.
The overwhelming flood of new perceptions it allows confuses some, possibly most, people.
I recall there were some who interpreted the vibratory state they perceived as seeing their flesh turn to worms. I was always interested in physics and could easily see how some would see things that way.
For most it was a ‘peep’ for some it was a gateway…
I don’t disagree that it opens up a portal.
Castaneda averred (via Don Juan) that dreams are the gateway to infinity.
Always have considered that has a good ring to it.
It’s only a gateway for those who are seeking…
You are right, that is a key point. Although I would omit “only”.
Sometimes people discover it without seeking. I’m thinking of someone clinging to a scrap of flotation after a shipwreck or…
@EvelynV
Acid strikes me as the key that unlocks “maybe” as the answer to everything, perhaps as close to “truth” as the human mind can ever get.
~toktomi~
Agree as well. Didn’t try it? Wtf!
It’s not too late, Jim….
JFK’s biggest regret should be he didn’t try LSD. – Eve
==========
I assume you meant JHK?
Maybe that chemical made it easy for moms to dump those baby Gen X off at day care on their way up the new ladder to
Comin a long way baby. You got your own cigarette too.
Our moms worried about those unwanted children, an entire generation raised by strangers. We knew they would have a bitch of a time compared to our cousin bigs sportin boss 429s and smokin the best grass. We played with creepy crawlers too. Boomers didnt do easy bake ovens.
Thus we 58-66 remain the silent forgotten ones who unfortunately later specialized in ritual suicide. Any wonder ?
Unless youre Jeff Jorgenson darpa dream and son of a bmx rider proving there are exceptions among every categorization.
I’m a Generation Xer. I don’t think that my generation was complicit at all. I once read a good book many years ago entitled “Generation X”, which described my generational perspective to-a-T. Generation Xers would prefer to just live out of a suitcase since they could foresee that it was all very impermanent.
Funny think is that we boomers felt the same way in the sixties and seventies. Our parents fucked the world up; we were gonna’ make it all good.
Two groups evolved, the Yuppies and the Hippies. One got on board, and the other dropped out.
“Funny think is that we boomers felt the same way in the sixties and seventies. Our parents fucked the world up; we were gonna’ make it all good.”
This Be The Verse
By Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
BTW, Philip Larkin was born in 1922.
“There is nothing new under the sun…”
Practically speaking the locus if what’s under the sun is a less than infinitesimally small space.
You know there is infinitely more.
BTW, Philip Larkin was born in 1922. – Epicur
=============
Not too long ago (maybe 3 mos or so) I posted a poem by Philip Larkin titled Aubade. It closely expresses my feelings about religion, God and the afterlife. The scariness of ceasing to exist. This poem comes to mind every morning around 5AM when I rise to pee (enlarged prostate issue) then get back in bed and the increasing light begins to light the edges of the window and I think about another day of a remaining fewer number gone.
I recommend Googleing up this poem to Green Alba and like minds.
Indeed, Q, I am familiar with it.
“Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon.”
Maybe even sooner than we thought. 🙂
Fingers crossed…
Love and Rockets, No New Tale to Tell,
Splat!
“Man hands on misery to man.It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.”
That’s exactly what I did. I got out of the corporate induced poverty of my childhood where I learned that skin color does not matter, “the money” will screw over anyone to make more money. To the big money we’re all slaves to be exploited, to death.
Mine was a glorious all-American childhood of holes in my shoes, my clothes, my teeth and my soul. My own Great Depression began with Dad’s stroke in 1958 and ended in 1973 when I got a job with the Navy in DC and finally got a decent salary to let me escape the grinding poverty of Baltimore, “the branch office town.”
Those 15 years were magnificent days of bill collectors at Mom’s door while dad lay crippled in his sick bed. Moving almost annually as we got kicked out of place after place for falling behind in the rent as Mom’s 25-cent tips didn’t cover much.
Poverty is searing. I will run from it forever. Our home is paid for, we have zero debt, even after the selloff on Wall St we still have a half mil in our nest egg. I add to it monthly. We have one car, a hybrid RAV4. We value every dollar; we have no toys like RVs, jet skis, status cars, second homes, boats, or other crap that are black holes into which you pour your money.
Not all boomers are created equal. Most of us fail to measure up to the minority of boomers whose conspicuous consumption and egotistical behavior makes the six o’clock news. Most of the boomers live very poorly, look at their pitiful retirements in crummy mobile home “parks” the new ghettos.
Born in 1948 I’m a bona fide boomer, but only on paper. We didn’t know what college was, it was for rich kids, not us guys at the pool hall. I knew the dangers of drugs and took a raincheck on that shit in the 1960s, a six-pack was rebellion enough.
I’ve watched assholes fuck up this country since Reagan, with the Laffer Curve and trickle down economics and tax cuts for the rich while roads rot out from under us and e-coli in the burgers. The bastards tell us about American Exceptionalism — but all I see is bullshit piled high and deep as the world laughs at us.
Lastly, “And don’t have any kids yourself.” You bet your ass I learned that lesson early, after my sister’s pregnancies, before the pill, before Roe v Wade. “Be fruitful and multiply” was one of the biggest lies ever told, mostly by religions who needed fresh meat to run the crusades. Religion is the main scourge of mankind. I never had kids and I never go near religion.
Happy fucking pandemic to one and all.
Be fruitful and multiply is the main reason we’re here. Having children is the greatest joy in life…
And extraordinary narrative of wisdom and sorrow. You obviously didn’t escape the poverty that crept from the outer into the inner, into your good soul. You escaped from the outer but not the inner. I grieve with thee, sharing your fate in my own way.
Sunburst, kids may be a joy to many parents, but I’ve talked to some struggling Moms who’ve told me they envy me and wish they hadn’t had kids; they are burdened, now and forever.
If I had kids I would be afraid for them and feel no joy at seeing them in this global economy that grinds all workers into the dust, including the highly paid tech bros in silicon valley slaving away 60+ hours a week to keep their beasts up and running.
Janos: We are all victims of centuries of divide and conquer politics and corporate vileness where we’re kept at each other’s throats so they can milk us for all we’ve got. I won’t play that game any more.
Everyone please be safe, I hope we all get through this mess.
Yes, as Harrington said: The War of All against All.
Most poignant example of many we saw by early 70’s. One neighbors little Gen X kid stuck out in an unusual way. Frustration so deep he would face a brick wall and literally bang his forehead repeatedly to re open the wounds over a giant lump. Uncle Joe Stalin in the makin
Older siblings were raised by mom at home before her liberation to an office downtown. Just as stunned. So we basically compartmentalized them into the same refuse container as Khe San survivors for financial expediency.
Nothing ive read or seen since informed me more of those poor unwanted kids future. The generation of day care.
They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.
Adrian Mitchell.
Hadn’t read that one, GA. Very true.
Thanks.
Yes Solo view, back in ’69 Boomers had all the answers, in 2020, we don’t even know what the questions are.
Were you born in sixties or the seventies? Because my observation was that most us “sixties babies” were totally down with the exploitive materialism thing, and the Boomers in Madison who were still hanging by their fingernails onto the mindset of the counterculture just hated us for it in a way that was often juvenile.
Even when I was an ignorant schoolboy, I really did have the sense about modern technological society that it was so much more fragile and impermanent than anybody wanted to realize. Perhaps I knew on some level that complexity = fragility, especially when complexity is made more “efficient” (IOW, short-term profitable).
One of the interesting points of the Fourth Turning is that sequential generations do not like each other much, but every other generation clicks. Think grandparents vs, parents. Think adolescence. Rebellion!
That is interesting. TGG, the Xers, and Gen Z all seem to be somewhat like-minded. Not scientific, ofc, but based on generalities this seems to hold water.
Millennials dislike Boomers in the aggregate, but they seem to like their Boomer parents better than the Boomers liked their own. From the small subset I’ve observed.
Hey Jim, I don’t think you owe anyone an apology. It is more the other way around. You deserve an apology from all who didn’t listen to you. I am about half a generation behind you, technically at the tail end the boomer gen. But I reject that membership. My father was too young for WW2 and too old for Vietnam. When I came of age there was nothing left but the vapidness of disco and the nihilism of punk(which I was somewhat amenable to). Dropped off in the ennui of “The Geography of Nowhere” I got my bearings more by reading your stuff than the pedantic Marxism and idiotic economics courses in college. It is 22 degs. this morning where I live. I will lite a fire in the woodstove with wood from the Juniper forest that I live in. I am eating lettuces from the garden these days. The Rhubarb is popping out of the ground and I have enough preseved tomatoes to last me until the next ones come in July. I have dozens of eggs in the fridge and I slaughtered a Ram yesterday. I am in good shape to withstand any coming economic dislocations and your influence as well as my turning over a shovel had something to with it!
You walk the walk. There is no better testimony than that!
Today I wiped with lettuce leaves, tomorrow romaine’s to be seen. … 🙂
Wiped your ass with lettuce? Bravo! Use hundred dollar bills too!
I guess it’s the “green” economy, eh. Who knew.
Slaughtered the Ram! How did he feel about that? Did you apologize and pray for his spirit as the American Indians (not Native Americans. Whites are the Native Americans) teach?
It IS good training for War though. Even in vegetarian India, the old Warrior Caste used to do so in the forest away from others for this reason. Or because they were hungry. And such protein does give a rush of strength.
I slaughtered around 50 animals in the past year. Chickens, rabbits, lambs. I don’t have any rituals. I am from a culture without religion, I am trying to regain it. Sometimes I compose something in my mind. Strangely the animals are in most duress by the capture and I feel the cortisone surging through my veins then.
Like the Warrior Caste, should the suburban zombie hordes show up, I think I might have some advantage there ;).
In terms of Behavioural Medicine & immunological response you are experiencing a Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis response whereby cortisol is released via HPA-Axis and not ‘cortisone’, you Bambi, Bullwinkle, & Rocky killer.
Try fishing instead, morbidly fixated Dude.
Jeffrey Dahmer slaughtered animals too at one point, eh.
There is a difference between psychopathic violence and the art of war, Warrior CasteBOY.
RW
@ laceration
Same here. My peers didn’t go to Vietnam, by the time we got to college it was all peaceful and quiet, I never did drugs, JFK wasn’t our President and all the rest. We still get tarred and feathered with the “Boomer brush” but really, we came of age at a very different time. I do remember the Monkees though; thought they were so cool! I missed out on the earlier “back to the land” movement but got around to it on my own and didn’t look back. I’m not apologizing for anything as I didn’t do it!
Ha the Monkees! We truly are from the same generation.
@Mountain gal
right on
I wish you were over here on my mountain and lookin’ for a partner. Looks like I’m going to have to go it alone which is impossible of course.
By this time in June there will be many billions of humans less alive on Earth than there are today.
~toktomi~
;-( . I pray they won’t. We won’t recognize this world if that should happen.
Lotsa peeps are “less alive” than my hamster but did you mean “fewer”?
Thanks Jim for the apology. You are the first person of the Boomer generation to apologize in a blog – at least the blogs that I read. I accept and appreciate it.
As a Gen-Xer, I agree with Pucker’s perspective:
“Generation Xers would prefer to just live out of a suitcase since they could foresee that it was all very impermanent.”
But then again, venuspluto has a good point. The older and/or richer GenXers were complicit in the debauchery and endless greed (ex: Bezos, Musk, et. al.). However, I grew up in a tiny studio apartment in NYC with my mom. I don’t need much to live in. I grew up walking around the city instead of relying on cars.
@Nicky
Of, for fuck’s sake, Nicky, if you need someone to blame for your miseries, blame me – makes about as much sense as your emotional cognitive meltdown to blame some phantom entity like Boomers.
I could be wrong but at least I have trimmed my contradictions.
I think.
~toktomi~
No need to apologize Jim. You have done as much as anyone to straighten things out and get us back on track.
Recently I’ve become aware that the WWI troops sang a ditty, “we’re here because we’re here, because we’re here because we’re here” over and over to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”. That’s troops for ya.
They only had weeks to brainwash hundreds of thousands of impressionable young men.
‘Since the Great War took place before electronic mass media (which started with radio only a few years after the war), Creel relied heavily on visual forms of media. Posters were especially effective. An army of artists “rallied to the colors,” as Creel put it, and were put to work under the “Division of Pictorial Publicity”. Artists such as James Montgomery Flagg, Charles Dana Gibson, Harrison Fisher, and Joseph Pennell churned out patriotic works that even today are artistically stunning. (The patriotic efforts of artists were also evident on the huge catalog of songs published by private music companies during the war in the form of sheet music). Flagg’s iconic Uncle Sam “I Want You” poster remains today one of the most recognized patriotic images in America.‘ https://www.historyonthenet.com/world-war-i-propaganda
C.S Lewis recalls being on the train after being called up as an officer. All the recruits on the train were talking about how it (WW1) was a gigantic fraud. Lewis was shocked, shocked! If they felt that way, they shouldn’t be going – classic thinking from a young and privileged man. Of course it turns out that they were right and he was wrong.
As Orwell stated a generation later, the proles often know things the educated class does not.
They did not appreciate the fraud was deadly. Now history repeats. Fraudsters rule and people sense that things are not right well enough. But people can’t understand that just knowing it is all a fraud is not enough. This cavalier error leads to a revenge via the second law of thermodynamics. Somebody needs to mind the store or it goes out of business.
‘classic thinking from a young and privileged man. That’s good.
Thanks. Entropy? Interesting. In one of Camus’ novels, A man is shocked that he watched someone drown, did nothing to help him, and felt fine about it. He realized that all his morality was outer. He felt fine because no one was watching him so “helping” wouldn’t help him and not helping wouldn’t hurt him. He consoled himself with the thought, “At least I know I’m a piece of shit. Other people don’t know that they’re pieces of shit!”.
But that it bothered him at all, indicates a nascent or latent conscience perhaps. A true psychopath wouldn’t have felt the shock of such realization.
Interesting,
When I was 13 I was with my uncle on the shore of Mille Lacs Lake in MN. A summer vacation at a fishing resort. Our family had rented a cabin on the east shore.
Everyone else had taken off somewhere eight people, my mothers extended family. Off to get supplies I think.
My uncle and I heard screams for help and my eyesight being eagle good could see a boat swamped with water in the distance. A tiny glint of aluminum fishing boat in the waves. The screams were faint.
I burst into action and my uncle a retired Air Force Lt Cornell was only half a second behind me. We had our outboard motor on our boat going and were out the quarter or mile we needed to be in no-time.
It was an elderly couple who were hanging on the outside of their boat to the gunwales. The water was cold and they were about to go under. They were not screaming any more and were white and weak. I reached for the woman but my uncle shouted, no get the dog. Inside the boat a small poodle was swimming. I grabbed the dog and put it in our boat. Then I reached for the woman who moved away so I could get her husband first. I pulled his dumb ass into our boat and then got the woman in. My uncle was manning the outboard the whole time.
They couple left the next day after being warmed up and staying overnight in their cabin. When I asked my uncle why get the dog first he said because if we had not got the dog first the woman would have given trouble and wasted time. Once my uncle Don said that I could see that he was right. Every second counted.
My uncle said, You really surprised me and I’m very proud of you.
About your man who watched someone drown. A latent conscience I agree. I do not judge this man who may have been frozen in shock and fear. My reaction was automatic but at other times might the switch not have been thrown. It could be. If true that would be something to acknowledged and work on getting over. Could Camus’ man actually have been saved or not? The physics of the situation do matter.
*********************************************************
I did some googling and damn I’m a smart dog. My tail wags. It was not a man who drowned but a woman who had jumped off a bridge committing suicide. There is much in that situation to have engendered fear. The story is ‘The Fall’. From Wikipedia:
Late one night when crossing the Pont Royal on his way home from his “mistress”, however, Clamence comes across a woman dressed in black leaning over the edge of the bridge. He hesitates for a moment, thinking the sight strange at such an hour and given the barrenness of the streets, but continues on his way nevertheless. He had only walked a short distance when he heard the distinct sound of a body hitting the water.
Clamence stops walking, knowing exactly what has happened, but does nothing — in fact, he doesn’t even turn around. The sound of screaming was repeated several times, [as it went] downstream; then it abruptly ceased.
The silence that followed, as the night suddenly stood still, seemed interminable. I wanted to run and yet didn’t move an inch. I was trembling, I believe from cold and shock. I told myself that I had to be quick and felt an irresistible weakness steal over me. I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too far…” or something of the sort. I was still listening as I stood motionless. Then, slowly, in the rain, I went away. I told no one.
Clamence wanted to run but had rubber legs. That is the giveaway. Fear killed the mind.
Some Kennedy relatives drowned yesterday in Chesapeake Bay, a tragic accident.
Also:
Clamence was sneaking home from his mistress. He had detached mentally making himself invisible small and autonomous. His way home was all about not getting caught and Clamence was thinking of nothing else. Clamence only saw himself as a body which had to get somewhere else from where it was at as unobtrusively and quickly as possible. Obligations of dirty business do that. He resented this dark woman who intruded into a moment he needed erased for other reasons. An excuse to how he got so wet did not spring to mind and he could not act. Clamence’s resentment chilled his heart. Events of life outpaced his emotions.
I heard about a terrible story from Idaho’s Priest Lake. A boy spent his summers there and it was the best part of his life. There was a real community among the people of the lake, with many summer people becoming full timers as they aged. He became involved with a beautiful girl, beloved by the community and more integrated with them than he was. During a storm, their boat when down and he couldn’t save her. For some reason, he was accused of murder even though it could never be proven. Decades later her body was found much as he described. No sign of violence. She drowned. Though vindicated, it was far too late. The People could not let go of their hatred and admit that they had been wrong. Their Coldness towards him would remain, an essential part of their dignity. Human, so very human…..
Kdog: Yes, that put a whole other perspective on it. He froze and then justified it, freezing his whole being in the process.
classic thinking from a young and privileged man – Janos
=========
Janos, I must tell you, you have a very annoying habit of declaring something as classic, or, alternatively, as vintage (see your comment at 6:51 pm) when it is often only classic or vintage in YOUR mind.
If I request that you cease this annoying habit I realize that you will only be encouraged to do it MORE often. Like your use of the word ‘anent’ or the phrase ‘is it not’ when the contraction ‘isn’t’ would serve even better.
I know your game, Janos. These are flourishes of rhetoric used to make yourself sound more erudite than if you used plainer language.
It’s just my style. I do take your opinions in these matters seriously – you told me the correct way to use the dash. I’m horrified in retrospect by what I was doing.
I’ve been using “Is it not” since remembering a notable sermon by a priest who loved and used it when I was a little boy.
I’m not sure but it’s possible your hatred of “anent” made me love it more.
Is it not is so powerful! Anent – so outre and unused! Is it wrong to give the English language a workout by using unusual word? Would you make a dessert and call it a souffle? A desert and call it peace?
What is the correct way to use the dash, Janos?
RW
As a boomer I think you painted a pretty good picture of what that era was like at least for some people. I never did drugs, just went to college and had a job working on a loading dock. I think only some of the con game that is American politics, finance, etc. can be blamed on the boomers. It goes back much farther with land grabs from native Americans, Mexico, and Spain during the trumped up Spanish American War. Woodrow Wilson started the Federal Reserve and gave us the income tax. All that money vacuumed up from American workers enabled the social welfare state and military-industrial complex bankrupting us today. The Great Dression like all such crashes at its root caused by an over-expansion of credit. Ditto 2008, and to some extent this one. FDR not wanting a crisis to go to waste left us with the soon to be insolvent Social Security ponzi scheme followed by Kennedy’s promise to go anywhere, pay any price in the defense of liberty. Johnson gave us Medicare, Medicaid, and a greatly expanded and utimately futile war in Vietnam. Reagan took the national debt over $1 billion for the first time, followed by over $20 trillion spent during the administrations of the next 5 presidents. At bottom, a lot of our prosperity is based on fiat money courtesy of the Federal Reserve, our politicians of both parties and the people who voted for them.
LJB gave us the 1965 Immigration Act. That was the end of middle class, White America.
This may sound fantastic but on my walk today I saw someone sleeping on the sidewalk.
He is a primitive, brown skinned, undocumented?
He was wrapped in an American flag.
Was it Jerry Rubin I hope? What an obnoxious character, going from the zenith of Leftist Obnoxiousness to being an asshole in a suit.
Haven’t heard about him in decades. Did he have an epiphany or did he just run out of gas? The loudest sometimes flame out early.
HA HA HA…Jerry Rubin was killed crossing the street near UCLA, long ago.
But LA has another ultra left Jerry Rubin, who was asked by JR1
to change his name, for big bucks, JR2 declined.
Surprised you didnt know JR1 is long dead.
Yeah, me too. Somehow I never heard. Maybe it was when I was just doing psychedelics and reading Indian philosophy. I scarcely listened to the news at all back then.
He was hit by a car while jaywalking and died from his injuries. Sadly taken from us at age 56 when he still had decades of hustling and greed ahead of him.
The idealistic JFK was all over the place politically. He even signed something about disarming America at one point, some Globalist atrocity. But he may have realized the Federal Reserve Scam and once having vowed to do something about it, signed his death warrant.
Life is a learning curve. Those who are learning will change their position as many times as necessary to align themselves with the truth as it unfolds before them. Those who are not learning will remain stagnant…
Life is a learning curve, I agree.
Ride the wave.
RW
Heee-Haw
He certainly doesn’t have to apologize, but I sure do appreciate it.
JFK not doing the boomer generation any favors by adding fuel to a fire that I would be happy to participate in if I was of a younger generation.
We are currently imploding the world’s economy for what…?
To try to avoid the death of a few million mostly old folks (including me) who are already about to take their dirt naps with or without corona virus and who if anything could have died ten years ago without any ill effects on society.
It makes me think of people who spend most of a meager life savings because a vet tell them their old pet dog is going to die of some kind of cancer that will cost them $5000 to have the surgery forestall.
There was a light side and a dark side to the boomer generation and the dark side came out on top. Some went into the peace corps, some went into wall street.
Dirt nap? Death is forever. Even if the soul survives, it won’t be you.
Me, I’m going to be cremated. Maybe travel will be impossible in a WMBH, but I’ve instructed my wife to scatter half my ashes along the ocean in Northern California, and half on Maui. At least she will get a nice vacation.
“Forever” is just a loose term. Time is an illusion.
“Soul” just a wishful projection by the ego.
“You” is the watcher playing with itself.
Perception is creation.
Consciousness permeates the universe.
The universe is an illusion.
“Foregoing self the universe grows I.”
Even if the soul survives, it won’t be you.
Sure it will.
At best it would only be the watcher’s memory of you. The you you are thinking of is less cognizant than a blind ant.
And what a proud ant you are!
No, he’s right. “Sunny” is most just a shadow of the Soul cast by the physical body, and those of other bodies (society) as they interact.
You are a “hand” in a poker game. The Soul is the deck. The personality (from the Greek “persona” or mask) is like those gloved hands that reach into bio-experiments in order to gain knowledge useful to the Researcher or Soul.
Do you understand now, Cloudy?
EvelynV,
Ha ha. Much as I deplore the silly scapegoating of the boomers, I have certainly had the thought that I can’t blame the younger generations (at least three) if they resent having their lives and finances and mental health ruined to save people who for the most part had already entered the death spiral.
Sellout Boomers on Wall Street and in DC were certainly the befinning of the end Jim. Hey, my Uncle Johnny air dropped supplies to your Stepdad at Bastogne from the Liberator he was co-piloting! Small world.
People, feel it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CICIOJqEb5c
RIP Bill Withers.
Withers transcended life with music that will never die. He was the best of the best of the best.
I noticed his passing too, Elrond.
RW
The hippie culture was mostly imaginary, created by Time and Look to sell magazines. Mr. K’s desription is that of the mainstream at the time. The average US citizen aged 69 is as ignorant of history and economy as they were in 1969. The Boomers created virtue signalling and they are still at it. The reality is that the Boomers are going to collect a just return on their investment in our nation. No investment – no return. A handful of eager entrepreneurs sold a heaping pile of BS to a willing and ignorant generation, who for the most part could not even spell proletariat.
from 1965 – Dylan
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with……..
I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
Gate of Eden – Dylan
The kingdoms of Experience
In the precious wind they rot
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
It doesn’t matter inside the Gates of Eden
Had I been any good at protest I would be dead.
Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, that’s what these Vatican commies at Davos built for their mausoleum. That’s what Europe is, The Magic Mountain, and that’s what these Vatican vampires want for the whole world. Robert Zimmerman and Leonard Cohen saw them in the shadows, because like me they knew their history. They didn’t forget why they were in captivity. They didn’t forget where Satan resides.
The Court Of The Crimson King: https://youtu.be/Aw_QgR-lcaE via
This album, along with Abbey Road (Beatles) and Seventh Sojourn (Moody Blues), is one of my all time favorite LPs. I am deaf in one ear now so I don’t listen to music anymore unfortunately.
How old are you akmofo? I was listening to Crimson King as far back as the late 60s…
How old is star dust? That’s how old we all are. 6000 years strong!
A geologist in the Nevada wilderness discovered the oldest living thing on earth, after he killed it.
https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/oldest-living-tree-tells-all/
You really think the world is only 6000 years old? Sad!
Zimmerman converted to Christianity and became Dylan. Or maybe he was Dylan first. Don’t know if he still is. Think he’d be cool with your bigotry in any case? Bet he isn’t.
Zimmerman recognized the Vatican in the shadows, but being of Jewish blood what he was blind to is the grotesque death he was surrounded with. The dead of the giant mental sanatorium going through the motions of life. The walking talking lizards that were crowding his concerts.
The only thing that animates you lizards, the only thing that brings you back to “life” is to cause death. And when you’re too exhausted and unable to cause death to others, you cause this death to yourselves. That explains Europe and its history. That also explains the constant incitement and encouragement to war in the Middle East by you Vatican vampires. War is good business, but it is much much more than that. Death is your lifeline to life. It’s like you inhabit a world that is not real. And now I understand your demented Hollywood movies. I now understand your mentality, your mental sickness, and your gruesome infatuation with the crucifixion and the cross.
I now also understand you fascination with and envy of Jews. You recognize them as living. You know they have the spark of life, a living soul, and you don’t.
This is vintage Akmo. You don’t need the Talmud – you embody it already!
I have eyes that see, a brain that functions, and the sensitivity of an artist. I can instinctively sense the truth, and can see where the lies are.
Why you deign to dither with us mere Mortals and Lizards, O holy one?
Experience. I needed to know and learn you in person. You are so alien to me and mine, I couldn’t relate and understand. Now I personally seen and understand you, the morbid numbness and coldness of your ghoulish existence.
Time to put an end to this zombie horror show. Time to let God do his thing and fossilize youz into stone.
Remember, Stone is sacred. I will be your Idol to be worshiped.
I think that this is genius–
While paupers change possessions
Each one wishing for what the other has got
And the princess and the prince
Discuss what’s real and what is not
I know this is not on track for todays post, but found it interesting and I had never heard about it. http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/?fbclid=IwAR2n2odgRPWl5TinrZbPVvHT_wcSYvTJELIhtf9d3fTXkCRryYzuvCYqfMs
“Personally, I was not altogether on board with the hippie program, though I let my hair grow.”
Jim, Let’s see the youthful hippie version of you. Post some pics!
Howard,
The pics have been up…have a look.
There’s something seemingly a bit Evil about this Covid 19 virus? It seems to have a hive Mind, and it can exploit the ubiquitous Schadenfreude in the society to further its spread. It seems to exploit youth’s grievances against the Baby Boomers and youth Schadenfreude at seeing the Baby Boomers suffer. That the US government appears to be an accomplice to its spread by initially publicly denying the importance of wearing masks, initially encouraging people to gather for festivities, the initial denial that it is airborne, etc. seems especially Evil.
Viral spread ensures market demand for a patented vaccine by BIG Pharmacology that survives on bioweaponized Corona viruses that are manufactured in BSL-3 & BSL-4 laboratories that are only in existence to manufacture absolute mayhem throughout society via Biowarfare between nations.
RW
Well, I’d like to respectfully disagree.
I’m a Boomer, born 1961, and I’ve led a pretty fiscally responsible life. My parents grew up in the Depression, were frugal beyond belief, and raised me to be the same. So are most of my friends. I’ve been debt-free for years.I have continually beat the drum for more fiscal responsibility in government my entire life. Unfortunately, voting is no answer, as the two sides of the Uniparty are too busy giving away free stuff to get reelected, whether it’s social programs or military spending. Most of us are not members of the upper 1% that do the stock buybacks and corporate buyouts, and have no input or control over them doing that.
Sorry, the problem isn’t the boomers. The problem is the Free Stuff Army that votes for a living instead of working for one. Granted, some of them are Boomers, but there are far more millenials and young people supporting Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s free giveaways message than Boomers. As Jim stated in his first book, “We have gone from a society that knew that there was no such thing as a free lunch, to a society whose primary objective is free lunches.” This is rapidly getting worse. I know of NO young people whomsoever that are speaking out against the fiscal insanity of Bernie Sanders and AOC.
Those of us that are fiscally responsible have little power against the overwhelming majority of the fiscally irresponsible. Blame the free lunch mentality of today’s society as a whole, not the Boomers.
Tractorguy
Two paws up tractorguy. The problem isn’t the boomers. The problem is a cabal of elites who enjoy the world without building it. A free stuff for me army that conquered our culture.
Yup, and they want to open the borders to get reinforcements too. And almost all Liberal are for this – that’s how radical they have become.
Coronavirus Racism is now a thing. Anyone who wants to stop open borders is just a virus. I say the same about those who want to open them.
Yes having rules that mean people coming in from abroad have to sequester for two weeks puts the kibosh on sneaking in. I do agree.
You want more immigrants to come into our wrecked nation and suck off the dying corpse?
How cruel you are, Gorthaur, Mouth of Sauron!
It is not I who is cruel. Do you deny that we have responsibility to the exiles of Númenor?
Yes, most drowned. A small cadre (the Chosen?) escaped and set themselves up, becoming Gondor. These God Men needed little help from any, being Supermen. They did ally with Rohan for mutual defense. And with the better class of Elves some say.
1 million BC: fire and combustion
5000 BC: agriculture
2000 BC: 0 + 0 = 0
1000 BC: a² + b² = c²
300 BC: infinitely many prime numbers
1700 AD: Calculus, classical mechanics
1850 AD: Electromagnetic field
1870 AD: periodic table of the elements
1900 AD: a + b + c = 0 (vector calculus)
End of Physics believed at hand,
Age of earth according to physicists: 100 million years
Reasonably small number of mathematical structures present
Universe has reasonable size (Milky Way only)
Now things start going wrong:
Economic and intellectual growth starts gathering steam,
vastly increasing complexity, fragmentation instead of unification
Telegraph in widespread use, much transmitted information is irrelevant
1900 AD: Radioactivity, atomic substructure
1905 AD: Special Relativity (basic observations dependent on state of motion)
1930 AD: Quantum Mechanics achieves degree of finality:
no interpretation, bizarre beliefs (parallel universes)
Loss of realism:
How the world behaves depends on wether it is “observed” or not,
Setbacks in mathematics, impossibility and undecidability proofs:
proofs of logical consistency impossible, proveability is undecidable,
truth is undefinable.
Particle zoo discovered.
Ridiculous activity in vacuum postulated:
virtual particles emerge out of nothing and disappear, have real measurable consequences
Size of universe expodes
Age of earth: 4.5 billion years
Boomers born into time of great Growth-Excitement:
production and consumption, complexity, theoretical entities, perceived opportunities
TV invented, becomes widespread,
vastly increased reach and sophistication of propaganda
(greatest effect on US since uninterrupted by periodic breakdowns)
Age of Image commences,
Perception more important than reality (is there even a “Reality”?)
The medium is the message.
Important mathematical discovery at University of Chicago:
economic preferences inferred from utility function (Savage, 1954)
Economics based on expected utility theory, mathematical methods spread in
economics, limits of applicability not appreciciated.
1962: behavioural sink discovered.
Western populations congregating in front of TV reasonably identified as in
such state.
Man on Moon, limitless future a certainty.
Boomers wound up to great emotional intensity at impressionable age.
Industrial agriculture reaches degree of maturity, food abundance.
Population increases to significant size.
Timeline of Club of Rome predictions falsified by subsequent developments.
Unquestioned belief in growth solidifies, becomes institutionalized.
Everything reported in terms of growth rates.
New food source discovered: growth (i.e. the future) can be eaten (Bond market).
Boomers move into managerial positions, unquestioned belief in growth,
thoroughly indoctrinated by propaganda from birth, accustomed to golden years of
expansion.
1968: ISO Standard for shipping containers defined.
First container ship spezialized for TEU (twenty foot equivalent unit) containers
sails with 768 containers.
Globalization gathers steam.
Black-Scholes formula derived.
Reaganomics, explosive growth of derivatives
Future is being devoured with increasing intensity (debt grows).
1984-2000 upsurge in stock market, cover story: internet.
Financial economy becomes increasingly fraudulent but nobody cares as long as stocks go up.
Musician and computer programmer Greenspan appointed Chair of Federal Reserve System
Invents “Greenspeak”: language without meaning.
Congress threatens SEC with defunding if interferes with “prosperity”.
Upper mangement and financial industry the prime beneficiaries of lack of scrutiny.
1990: Soviet Union collapses
Tens of thousands of workers fired, globalization gathers steam.
Redistribution of wealth commences.
2000: setback in Stock market, central bank intervention institutionalized.
2000-2009: real estate bubble: “flip that house”.
Peak oil theory spreads.
Global Warming enters public consiousness.
Wind and solar overspread the landscape.
Container ships reach capacity of 15,000 TEUs (standard shipping containers).
2009-present: real estate bubble blows up, massive central bank intervention.
European banks essentially permanently insolvent.
Central bank intervention increases to unheard of levels.
ECB buys one third of European sovereign debt, inerest rates fall into
negative territory.
30 year German sovereign bond reaches yield of 0.01%, 10 year yield goes negative,
1 year to -0.7%.
2020:
Various forms of hysteria dominate at different times:
Global warming: human extinction inevitable, possible as soon as this year.
Corona Virus: 80% of world population to be infected, 10% dead.
Economy to collapse, Age of the Clovis Spear Point 2.0 to dawn.
Oil to vanish, cannibalism the inevitable consequence.
Nuclear clock 2 minutes to midnight, Fukushima will kill us all.
michael, ‘The Machine Stops’
https://archive.org/details/machine_stops_librivox
Or as Zager and Evans and sang:
Now it’s been ten thousand years
Man has cried a billion tears
For what he never knew
Now man’s reign is through
But through the eternal night
The twinkling of starlight
So very far away
Maybe it’s only yesterday
A big thumbs up for EM Forster’s “Machine Stop”, written 1909.
I read the short story (barely 12,000 words) as a kid and thought that the world described sounded pretty spiffy.
Still haven’t got my flying car though. Not even an antigrav skateboard!
Cool summary!
If Germany had won, Von Braun would have gotten us out to mine the asteroids by now.
If Germany had won we would be at 4 degrees C of global warming already.
You forgot System International-SI & ASCII for Metrology which enabled Six Sigma Manufacturing that started in Japen to enable the productive capacity outsized by comparison with USA until the USA caught on.
Japanese taught American manufacturers how to manufacture stuff properly with the least amount of waste.
America would still be a backwater without Japan leading the way.
RW
Phew
A lot of work went into that post, I’ll tell you what.
A lot of work but what is he actually saying…
No point in playing a generational blame game. The problem runs much deeper than that. Humankind has not yet reached the level of maturity wherein we are able to consider our actions within the context of the whole of reality. Acquiring the capacity to do this is the next step in human evolution. How much suffering we are willing to pass through before taking that step is yet to be seen…
Nothing new about it, SBS.
In 1900 the dominant veterans organization in the US was the GAR, to a lesser extent the United Confederate Veterans (UVC). Both were very influential politically, the UVC in the south, the GAR nationally. At that time tens of thousands of US soldiers and Marines were being sent to fight in the Philippines, in the north 1899-1902, in Mindinao in the south 1902-1913. There were many combat casualties, many more deaths from tropical diseases in those days before penicillin. When they got back they were not accepted into Civil War Veteran associations, which caused much resentment across the generations. In fact men who served in the Philippines were not even considered war veterans and were not eligible for disability pensions from the War Department, which had been granted universally to Civil War vets by President Roosevelt early in his term.
The Philippine vets went on to form the VFW, which was very radical for it’s time in the beginning. Finally in 1922 their status was updated, which meant they could seek treatment in newly formed VA hospitals, and apply for disability benefits. Which was a good thing because many never recovered fully from the cases of malaria, dysentery, typhus, chigger and typhoid fever they picked up in the swamps of Jolo.
There always has been, and always will be, friction between generations.
Brh
One of the few good parts of Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” was his description of the atrocities committed by our boys, including a letter home where our boy boasted about how shooting rabbits was a good preparation for shooting Filipinos.
No doubt Zinn left out the Flip atrocities against our boys. Of course they were home and we were thousands of miles from home. So any equivalence is problematic.
Notice how Green Alba did not answer my question [she is on the front line, after all] and gave a snarky response.
t y p i c a l of her.
From someone who once told me his comment to me had been so vile that it had been deleted before I saw it, that’s a wee bit rich.
And perhaps if you didn’t try shoehorning race into everything, whether relevant or not, you might get a better response.
The only thing relevant to me today about race is that of the six healthcare professionals who have sacrificed their lives to the British people up until yesterday – I haven’t read any news yet today – there were three British Asian male doctors (religiosity unknown), one female Muslim nurse (photo with a headscarf), one black male nurse, and one white nurse.
My brother sent me a text wondering it the ‘Tommy Robinson types’ would have noticed that this existential sacrifice made so far on our behalf was so unfairly skewed towards our minorities. We reckoned probably not.
What a repulsive sentiment. Your brother is as bad as you. Whites often can’t get these jobs because minorities are favored. If these people so great, why didn’t they stay home and help their own? Or go back once they got their education here in the West?
Bollocks. They’re here because of staff shortages. Such as we have even more since the Brexit vote. And become the UK plundered their countries and taught them all English.
Show some actual evidence of ethnic minority doctors getting jobs ahead of someone who isn’t or STFU with your slandering.
Twisted fool.
So Muslims are going to become the majority in much of Europe (as all forecasts indicate) because of “staff shortages”?
The mind of a bureaucrat or commissar.
What goes on in Europe had absolutely nothing to do with me.
Pathetic attempt at deflection.
Get a life.
“So Muslims are going to become the majority in much of Europe (as all forecasts indicate)”
And that’s more drivel worthy of the Gatehouse liars.
I read a book called Fly Boys about naval aviators bombing Chizo-Jima Island. This was where Bush Sr. Was shot down, he was the only survivor of the raid, being picked up by a submarine. Anyway, all the other pilots landed on the island, were captured and cannibalized.
The intro to the book talked about the apparent cruelty of the Japanese during the war. The author’s opinion is that it was learned by observing the American’s treatment of the Filipinos.
Right. As if the Japs didn’t have their own traditions of Cruelty. Classic boomer beginnings of Political Correctness, or hatred of one’s own.
Well, they had those Krag and Springfield 03 bolt action rifles, had to give them a workout every once in awhile.
A lot of historical detail here ( you must hit the books a lot) but I don’t see how it relates to the point I was trying to make…
Sorry I’ve been known to go off in tangents, SBS.
One of the good things that came out of the late 60s and early 70s counterculture movement was the Findhorn Garden experiment. From this we have learned through cooperating with nature spirits it is possible to transform even a hostile, unfriendly environment into a veritable Garden of Eden…
If only Alba would learn from this and stop complaining about the barrenness of Scotland! Perhaps the barrenness is within her….
Janos if anyone seems bedded in a bleak landscape it has to be you.
With you I associate words like morbid, embittered, judgmental, brittle, delusional, odorous, lecherous, untidy, and fuzzy.
Although Alba lowers herself a bit to hang with folks like you she has a better selection of cross referential words to connect her with: wholesome, kind, respectful, tolerant, polite, incisive, confident, at peace with herself, and humble.
You’ve got enough shit for fertilizer, now you just need to actually plant something, even Fleurs du Mal. Don’t content yourself with wandering around your neighborhood spray painting roses black. Grow your own, lazy.
Evelyn, you are far too kind. I’d love to buy you dinner if we were both to survive the year.
And find ourselves on the same continent. 🙂
That would be lovely thing, but…
…we’d have to have an agreement, no haggis.
Yer on… 🙂
I’m coming too. Someone has to chaperone you two golden girls in case you two get into a spat – which is likely needless to say.
Clueless twerp.
“If only Alba would learn from this and stop complaining about the barrenness of Scotland! Perhaps the barrenness is within her….”
I have proved myself not-barren, unlike your good self. Try to be less obnoxious.
Scotland is not barren. Not all of it anyway. But I look forward to hearing about your efforts to make the Rannoch Moor bloom. Keep me posted.
Mr Google has provided me with its content, to help you on your way.
Inland water bodies (Standing water, Running water) (10%)
Bogs, Marshes, Water fringed vegetation, Fens (72%)
Heath, Scrub, Maquis and Garrigue, Phygrana (15%)
Dry grassland, Steppes (0.5%)
Humid grassland, Mesophile grassland (2%)
Inland rocks, Screes, Sands, Permanent Snow and ice (0.5%)
Actually no, leave the Rannoch Moor alone. It’s a beautiful but inhospitable wild space. And as it’s mostly bog, it’s a significant carbon sink.
Ah the moors, the moors! Beware the moors….
Have you read St Clair’s “Remote Britain”? It makes me want to take up with the pipe, buy some tweed, and start hiking.
You probably bought all of Castenada’s ouvre too.
Did you not notice that Findhorn was prime xtian B/S?
They only called them Nature spirits because the stoopid flight-from-reality types were a good source of income and fell for it.
Surely some revelation is at hand. I keep thinking that but it doesn’t seem to happen. I don’t feel particularly apologetic for my good fortune although I have had the best of everything–great parents, large loving family, a good marriage, a satisfying career, 3 great kids coping with the world as it unfolds. I have tried to do my part but I could have done more and better. People just don’t see things like I see them.
https://alabikedr.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-short-bio.html
I am hopeful that the current financial train wreck helps more citizens focus on Reality. My 35 year dental career was simply indefinitely postponed 2 weeks ago. I am old enough and rich enough to be actually excited about what’s next. I may have missed the opportunity for a top ten world golf courses tour or a Patagonia O-circuit hike but it has been time, for a long time, to “get Real”.
Love the blogspot! Yes, I see things pretty much the exact same way you see them.
RocketDoc, Thank you for the link to your page.
Perhaps things fall apart and the center cannot hold, but maybe not. It is only after all, a decimation. But whatever happens, I hope the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Completely.
We already know what rough beast is presently slouching in the WH.
Where Liberty dwells, there is MY country!
http://www.got-truth.com/docs/Where%20Liberty%20dwells%20there%20is%20MY%20country.pdf
Boomers were brought up encouraged to drink thick chocolate sauce and sugar-laden cereals…
Boomers were brought up watching Bozo the Clown on TV… only to later find out that the true bozos prowled the streets of the East Coast power centers every day and night with impunity but you shouldn’t call them clowns…
Boomers were brought up on omnipresent network TV shows filled with macho guys wearing cowboy hats and riding horses and smiling while driving an entire culture off their ancestral lands and stealing their dignity along the way…
Boomers soaked in their parents’ and teachers’ paranoia over something called Sputnik and that somehow because of it all our futures were doomed…
Boomers learned to fear shadows because Commies were lurking in the darkness and dwelled under every bed and around every corner and in the Nation’s Congress and every place else…
Boomers were brought up on ‘50s and ‘60s boy-and-girl groups singing in harmony coming through tinny transistor radios and extolling the ultimacy of the man-woman relationship and the Holy Grail of Marriage… only to learn that marriage was rarely a solution but just the beginning of a whole set of other big problems…
Boomers were told that “Questioning Authority” was bad and that “Authority” in forms of government and religion and your boss at work should always be trusted and Boomers learned too late that this kind of thinking was as much nonsense as believing that an overweight white-haired man in a red suit would reward you with riches if you just always did what you were told all the time…
Boomers foolishly wanted to believe that their kids and grandkids might have a better life than they did just as the parents of Boomers and their parents wanted to believe for their offspring…
Boomers… just wanted to live as free men and woman to pursue their hopes and dreams and make their mistakes without the damn drama that was going off all around them like deranged fireworks on a Fourth of July that lasted every day of every year and still hasn’t ended…
Boomers need to apologize? More like somebody needs to say… WE’RE SORRY, BOOMERS. YOU NEVER STOOD A CHANCE.
My Dad swore that one time he was watching Bozo and at the end the camera kept rolling to show Bozo, head in hands, saying, “God I hate those fucking kids.”
In the history of television gaffs by known television celebrity the most infamous case is “That ought to fix the little bastards”. I don’t know who said it so I’m off to Google it.
RW
The way I heard it was “That should hold the little bastards for a while.”
It was a kid’s radio show before the era of television.
I’m sure he meant it affectionately, but he was fired.
Sounds like Krusty the Klown, Bozo’s evil spawn.
It was Pinky Lee, y’all. He was a burlesque comic who wound up on tv in the early days. He wore the same suit that he used in his burlesque shows, consisting of a checkered suit, and a little hat.
He always started his show with a little dance while he sang: “Hello, it’s me, My name is Pinky Lee. I forget how the rest of it went, but I always enjoyed his show.
Anybody remember the Buster Brown show, with Andy DeVine and Froggy? Or Kukla, Fran, and Ollie? My how the time flies.
I remember all those. I think one of Pinky’s songs went, “Ho ho, hee hee, strange things are happening.”
“Plunk your magic plunker, Froggy!” (Froggy the Gremlin)
Ah, these are the antecedents of It, also known as Pennywise, the Evil Clown.
I just had an epiphany. I’ve been having them all day long. Freud’s “primary process” or dreaming was prominent in my dad. He would have a dream or fantasy, then work it into the past like it was an actual memory. What if he dreamed this, a projection of his own hatred of us kids onto Bozo because his life made him feel like a bozo?
I often though he would have been happier if he had never come to these shores. Instead of staying Ireland, he saw his new homeland overrun with Orcs, ultimately being driven out far from his friends and clan by them and by all kinds of other circumstances. Stuck with American brats who would never understand him or him, them.
Canadian Mist, a low rent whiskey, washed down with Coffee. Yummy.
Are you of Irish descent, Janos?
RW
Janos,
After all the years you’ve had to think about it and it still hasn’t dawned on you your dad was talking about you and the apparent sibling you have, or possibly a friend who was watching bozo with you, hard as it is to picture you having a friend.
Hell no!
We won’t flow.
A few boomer family members of mine have crashed with my sister to wait out this coronavirus pandemic. My sister and her boyfriend live paycheck to paycheck…
Anyway so when these Boomers went out to stock up on food they bought, shrimp, pork, lobster, Sushi, etc. Meanwhile my sister and her boyfriend were left with Ramen noodles. She’s snap-chatted with me over the past few weeks and our FUCKING BOOMER RELATIVES are cooking themselves a feast every night and basically wasting half the food.
When I confronted these Boomer relatives of mine, they had the gaul to say “She’s a slob eating ramen noodles and Chef Boyardi.” I told them “That’s what she can afford.”
they had the gaul to say… – dah ppt
===========
as they do in the land of the Gauls?
Maybe they had Obelix mouth the words…
‘Ils sont fous, ces ramens.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_NhDRNM1HN34/SP45wMy8J5I/AAAAAAAAAQA/PuytxiXMWNA/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Obelix.jpg
Do your sister and her boyfriend wear “kick-me” signs on their backs?
That is a pretty wild fantasy you’ve made up just to try to throw shade on boomers.
Why are lobster affording boomers riding out the storm in a hovel or rice paddy or wherever your destitute sister lives? Why would starving wretches let the food go to waste? What are we to make of you giving such a pansy ass response to such an egregiously horrible remark?
I suggest you rewrite your story.
That’s what I thought too. Sounds like the setting for some weird horror film where people get knifed one by one. Or forked.
Or a bad mishmash of the Oscar winning PARASITE.
It is more than wrong to blame the victims. I deny that many or most of my generation (1958) understood the things that went on regarding finance. I barely had the brains to vote till I was 30, at which time I rejected Clinton as a con man, because I could see it in the pores of his face, but did I know and understand the rotten legislation he passed that allowed monopoly of media, destroyed financial protections and sent too many people to jail? I did not. The working class was gutted, and they were gutted by the very people playing financial games on Wall Street – and now they should apologize? I do get that there is some collective guilt because of not lifting a finger to stop certain things. But they were not that easy to discern and it takes years to learn how things work in this world, and many people simply do not take an interest in such things. I rather more blame people in general for their willingness to go along with all our wars of aggression. That is easier to understand.
I understand, though, the impulse and emotion behind the apology. But, each generation takes part in stupidities. That’s the tragedy of it.
Well said sophia.
Have you read “The Sunflower”? Jews take a hardline on forgiveness. The author wouldn’t forgive a dying Nazi soldier for atrocities. He didn’t say anything, just left the room. Other Jewish commentators explained/agreed saying, You can’t forgive something done to someone else. Only the victim can forgive.
One of my favorite Hasidic stories: A famous but humble rabbi was traveling and treated very rudely by a conductor. When he got to his stop, he was met with by throngs of his cheering supporters and disciples. The conductor was aghast and came to him and begged forgiveness. The rabbi said, I cannot forgive you. You abused a poor, shabby old man. Now that you see I’m something else, you want my pardon. You did not offend me. Find some poor shabby old man and seek forgiveness from him.
I don’t say the above is the final Truth. But it contains truth. Very different from the way Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism handle the subject.
I don’t know much about forgiveness in Hinduism or Buddhism. But I do believe totally in forgiveness. Refusal to forgive is…unforgiveable. As a person who believes in reincarnation, one has to assume that one might have once engaged in some atrocious acts. And I want forgiveness for them because I want to progress as a soul and be happy. Thus I must also forgive. Thus it says in the Lord’s prayer. It is similar to “Judge not that ye be not judged.” I call that piece of scripture the Get Out Of Hell Free card because so few seem to have taken note of it or the profound promise implicit in it.
Those who deny forgiveness are simply not very developed in that realm. It isn’t true that only the victim can forgive, nor is it even true that you cannot forgive someone who has not yet comprehended their guilt. But in order for the forgiveness circuit to be complete, that is ultimately going to be necessary. but it was wrong of those Jews to say that because they can only forgive him themselves and the unfinished part is not their concern.
Yet I think that Rabbi was right in his answer. It was what that man needed. He was only sorry because he saw he had disdained someone who in the eyes of the world deserved more respect than that. But he needed a penance to teach it more deeply and that penance was to find an actual ragged old man and respect him.
I’ve seen videos of people forgiving Black murderers even before their loved ones were cold in the ground – the terrible power of the PC religion/ideology.
I like the Orthodox Christian approach – forgiveness is a great mystery that cannot be rushed.
And also my approach: Not even God can forgive those who aren’t sorry. And if He can’t, how can we? Is the servant greater than the master?
One can pray that they repent, certainly. But forgive? It is meaningless in my book. One can and should endeavor to put it out of one’s mind and not be destroyed by what they have done. That’s not “forgiveness” but mental engineering or meditation. I assume that some portion of the premature cases mentioned above are unskillful version of this.
From another angle: If people are too weak to hate, how can they be strong enough to love?
You know Janos, I had a son, and he was a wonderful young man of whom I was proud. He was murdered by three people, one of whom was black.
It has nothing to do with PC religion and I never once heard anyone say I should forgive them.
You have a point that in a way it is impossible to forgive if the person does not feel their guilt and does not seek forgiveness.
To be sure I want them to repent. But I know that I will forgive them one day, and I doubt that it will be in this lifetime. So, the forgiveness is poised, outside time, in limbo. In part, it awaits their repentance.
I do not hate them, nor have I felt real anger. Instead my grief was so profound and the shock beyond description, so that my main emotion was dismay and my feeling about what they did was that they are such low animals that they could not comprehend the person they looked at as a mark, nor the immense sorrow their actions would cause. It felt something like I imagine the parents of that 2-year-old who got eaten by an alligator at an amusement park must have felt that their precious little boy was eaten by a dumb animal who would have as gladly eaten very different prey.
Have I never done anything like that? Have I ever led a life of a low-life? I don’t know, but if I have I am grateful that I am at least more or less a human being now.
I can tell you I would rather be the mother of a murdered boy whom I loved as my handsome prince, than the mother of any of those three.
I’m sorry for your pain. I can’t even imagine. But from everything I gather, the loss of a child is the ultimate pain in this life.
You sound like you are handling it very well indeed.
Thanks, Janos. My motivation for telling you though, was the perspective on forgiveness.
I wonder what it was like when people lost so many of their children. Did they steel their hearts for the first couple of years of their lives so they wouldn’t grieve too hard when they fell ill and died?
I know Darwin didn’t take it well when a beloved daughter died at age 10. By that age, they most likely will make it so you can allow yourself to love them.
Good story Janos.
I’m guessing it was told to you at bedtime by your mama because she could see you, even as a child, were showing signs you were becoming a person like the conductor.
Yeah SBS, no sense in blaming. Can anyone here tell me when any generation throughout history has had as its focus the well being of the next one?
Did the Robber Baron generation? Did future generations fare well under Communist or Socialist regimes? Maybe some of the Scandinavian countries are at least going in this direction, I don’t know all that much about them.
What about the Greeks or Romans and the preservation of Empire?
You may have a future generation, but its well being is another question. What about Germany and Hitler and the ‘Thousand Year Reich’? Think about that one!
Maybe some indigenous tribes, primitive natives of the Earth?
Some are concerned about Climate change, but this is a global, cross generational concern, and is about the future of our children.
Here it’s been the veneration of Capitalism’s successive generations, the Boomers finally realizing that it was better to ride the money train than the freight train.
Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Can this continuing measure guarantee future generational prosperity? Of course not, but it can help if we act correctly on the answer.
Some of us have nothing to apologize for, but plenty to be angry about. We tried.
Dems did the most. FDR. LBJ.
Not any generation to be sure, but individuals within it. Theodore Roosevelt for one.
Another good one.
Still no toilet paper. CVS had a notice that “the truck” would be coming on Thursday, but no guarantee as to what it would have. Sounds real scientific. Maybe people followed “the truck” like sea gulls follow garbage trucks and scarfed up all the TP.
Will TP become our new currency after the Crash? Thank God I stocked up before this all began. I have a hoard that I protect much as the Dragon, Smaug has a hoard of jewels that he watches. But I’m going thru it. That’s the difference between jewels and TP. What does Smaug use I wonder?
Why do you need toilet paper to wipe your ass? Use the bottom of your shirt…
They make an affordable device called a bidet hose. A cheap one costs about $30, a better one for about $70. The main difference is the cheap one has a plastic hose inside a faux metallic flex hose, the better one a genuine flex hose. Don’t waste your money on the cheap one.
Having had one for over two years I’ve been able to watch the TP panic as a disinterested spectator.
So. I grew up in Madison WI, in jr high when you must have been in college, saw the aftermath of the Sterling Hall bombing etc. Basically was the little sister who watched those a few years ahead, too young to join in but still a boomer. But I watched all you guys and due to family things I was on campus on the less-riot-y days.
May I call bullshit here. This is pretty gross.
Then as now – Boomers are not a giant, pulsating, amoebic mass of unity. You talk like people do in high school,which truly never ends. In high school there’s the official culture, it embraces those on the top tier and those in the middle. There is always a large group of back-of-the-class,and shop kids who see through the bullshit. The engaged kids always think “oh they’re dumb” just like people perceive “Trumptards” today. This is to alleviate their own discomfort because somewhere inside they KNOW they are shafting and/or leaving those kids out. They have vested interests in keeping things going. What all Boomers get blamed for benefited only SOME of the Boomers and really fucked a large group of Boomers over. Pre-packaged downward mobility started pretty much the couple years after my high school graduation and by the late 80s was a juggernaut.
Those it was working for told themselves they were making ‘the right decisions” Remember the Networking mania? A cute way of saying “talk to your own kind only”. Insulate yourself, live in a bubble”. That was the start of willing and serious social bifurcation among the so-called privileged white folks. Big secret here – people who exploit are more than happy to eat their own race. It is not about race. It’s about MONEY.
If you were rocketing downward but were white you got contempt, same as any other poor class member. Do Read Ursula K LeGuin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.
Mad men need those people to step on to get to that elevated position.
There was a vast sea of BOOMERS who detested the bullshit in all its forms. Lots of them are probably at Trump rallies now.
Sorry, but on the surface (maybe he was a nice enough guy) we despised guys like your step-dad. We knew they were destructive, we knew they were making bank destroying us. We detested a whole lot of stuff to be frank. Certainly when Bush 1 and Bill Blue Dress set up NAFTA, closed the plants. WE detested, and OBJECTED.
Guys like your step-dad had thought of talking points to cover that though –
“The icky jobs will go overseas. it will be seen as a step up for those people as they develop stronger economies so it’s not exploitation but a natural and positive step in their developing nation growth. We here in the US will enjoy the mid-level and management class jobs and tech jobs that arise as a result of the boom that will occur. All boats will be lifted. Shut your ungrateful pieholes”
Working class people and family farmers KNEW this was a lie, but we all did not have Mad men on our side, we had no counter argument and so we had to eat shit.
Shit packaged by Mad Men. Wall Street, K Street, and politicians.
Now those of us Boomers in that group both get blamed for shit we were totally powerless to control or impact in the slightest, and then read crap like this here where we all are one, Boomers are Borg. And just like white melanin based guilt we have Boomer guilt.
People get sick of eating shit James. Your Dad had a societal excuse, being a man of his time for having done so.
You don’t have to.
But regardless, Thanks to Monsanto, ADM, Wall St and all of those types of Boomers, I have massive debilitating food sensitivities and hopefully NOT in these covid times compromised immune (pesticides in all our food you know Boomers fed that to other Boomers). So I just can’t eat this shit anymore no matter how well-packaged it is.
Fuck this whole essay. Oh wait, it arrives pre-fucked.
You’re a sharp thinker Mr. K. but you ALWAYS trip up on the same thing, the result of not leaving your classist bubble.
Jesus wants you to work on that. Christian or not.
I did not know about ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’. I looked it up and it is sort of like the children in the engine room who toil away to keep the train moving in Snowpiercer. Looks like a good story.
Insulate yourself, live in a bubble”. That was the start of willing and serious social bifurcation among the so-called privileged white folks. Big secret here – people who exploit are more than happy to eat their own race. It is not about race. It’s about MONEY.
A view from the classest bubble leads to trouble. The bubble is a drug.
You just can’t make this insanity up.
News @ 11.
https://www.infowars.com/gnarly-california-police-arresting-surfers-to-fight-corona-watch/
Lucky bastard got chest high Malibu all to himself.
Price of admission getting arrested and loss of board.
Why are the beaches closed, Ben?
One would think the warm California sun and salt water would be just the thing to bake out Covid 19 … add that to my Screwdriver Smoothie elixer and immune system booster, the virus wouldn’t stand a chance.
Compare that to southern NE today, cold hard rain, sky looks like it was dredged up from the bottom of the north Atlantic, 42°F, gloomy, damp … the kind of weather flu viruses thrive in and makes you feel there is no hope.
Howcum they didn’t mention the guy on the surf board they were chasing had recently murdered 3 people in a nearby cabana and slashed another surfer to steal his board?
The Event 201 scenario
Event 201 simulates an outbreak of a novel zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to people that eventually becomes efficiently transmissible from person to person, leading to a severe pandemic. The pathogen and the disease it causes are modeled largely on SARS, but it is more transmissible in the community setting by people with mild symptoms.
The disease starts in pig farms in Brazil, quietly and slowly at first, but then it starts to spread more rapidly in healthcare settings. When it starts to spread efficiently from person to person in the low-income, densely packed neighborhoods of some of the megacities in South America, the epidemic explodes. It is first exported by air travel to Portugal, the United States, and China and then to many other countries. Although at first some countries are able to control it, it continues to spread and be reintroduced, and eventually no country can maintain control.
There is no possibility of a vaccine being available in the first year. There is a fictional antiviral drug that can help the sick but not significantly limit spread of the disease.
Since the whole human population is susceptible, during the initial months of the pandemic, the cumulative number of cases increases exponentially, doubling every week. And as the cases and deaths accumulate, the economic and societal consequences become increasingly severe.
The scenario ends at the 18-month point, with 65 million deaths. The pandemic is beginning to slow due to the decreasing number of susceptible people. The pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease.
JS: That’s the plan, gang. It will be with us always and you will have to get vaccinated. Not a choice. Thus we approach Beast Mark Time the rationale well in place.
I don’t understand how you can believe a vaccine will save us. The current flu vaccines don’t work most years because they miss guessing which viruses to select for making the vaccination and the viruses keep changing. Our current viral enemy CV19 has already divided into two strains and is adding new ones every month. A vaccine for each strain that will prevent infection is a pipe dream, but because most people like to dream, pharma companies will make millions off our credulity.
DriverRob,
It doesn’t matter that the vaccine doesn’t work so long as they can buy our politicians and make it mandatory. Mission accomplished. And Janos didn’t say he wants a vaccine, his post was showing how similar the simulation was to our current reality.
Maybe cuz you have to start somewhere. Even if vaccines do not work 100% of the time for whatever reasons, they mitigate the damage that would otherwise occur.
Add to that the fact the technology in that area is improving at an accelerating pace, it might be better to bail than to just let the boat fill up and sink.
The corrupt and disgusting shenanigans of the pharma industry is an entirely other matter that in an ideal world would be dealt with harshly.
The researchers themselves are a dedicated collection of people who should be cherished and honored. To attack the effort as a whole is to blame the soldiers who die in the foxholes for the war.
I think that one should either make a serious inquiry into why some people don’t trust vaccines or just be quiet.
Should “COVID-19” be reported on the death certificate only with a confirmed test?
COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all decedents where the disease caused or is assumed to have caused or contributed to death. Certifiers should include as much detail as possible based on their knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory testing, etc. If the decedent had other chronic conditions such as COPD or asthma that may have also contributed, these conditions can be reported in Part II. (See attached Guidance for Certifying COVID-19 Deaths)
Steven Schwartz, PhD
Director – Division of Vital Statistics
National Center for Health Statistics 3311 Toledo Rd | Hyattsville, MD 20782
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-ICD-code-introduced-for-COVID-19-deaths.pdf
Janos , unless I’m reading these charts wrong the virus looks over hyped.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm
I’m no expert either. The accelerating curve is obvious, but as I post above, how much of it playing with definitions? What is left of the curve if that was adjusted to reflect what is actually happening?
Only someone learned in medicine and statistics could actually determine this, and probably not right now. And obviously someone not connected with the State or Private Industry that deal with the State.
And if there was such a one, how would they get access to the data they needed?
I think we’re in deep shit – in check and in danger of checkmate.
On the other hand, it has been suggested the low afflictions from corona virus in Russia is due to corona deaths being attributed to pneumonia only.
Jim from Florida: Tuning in? What’s your take on all this? You know more about the World than I do and I value your opinion greatly.
Yeah, yeah it was all so terrible. No it wasn’t. Sure, big, bad things happened beyond our control, but overall, how was your life over here as compared to a hundred other countries?
Sound like a bunch of old cranks. I’m not gonna moan and groan and I’ve had to scratch and claw like everyone else, maybe more.
I have no money to speak of but I still feel rich. From the malted milks as a kid to the nice bottle of wine now.
Was Vietnam, Iraq, outsourcing, fucked up? Of course. Thank God you’re still alive and that you can spend your time writing erudite critiques on our national failings.
So you’re a Boomer. Some would say, then grow the fuck up, and don’t forget that a lot of it has been good.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/coronavirus-victims-given-passports-people-21804944
Passports to go back to work or go to a park or even leave your home, perhaps? To be a citizen or even human?
They’re going too fast now, over-reaching. Not subtle enough. But we’ll have to make them pay for it with civil disobedience – even at the risk of infection.
Giv me your papahs!!
I was walking through the park and a herd of goats ate my papers. My phone too.
https://youtu.be/xcDvM3PdVsc
“Passports to go back to work or go to a park or even leave your home, perhaps?”
We can all leave our homes without a passport. And without a certificate. We just can’t congregate. Same thing in Russia where Putin has forbidden more than two people to meet on the street – and you seem enamoured of his KGB-ness even though he’s fixing to fix it so that he’s fixed till 2036.
Having a certificate to show you’ve already had it might help you get shifts at work. I can see that my grandson’s dad might find that useful since he’s on minimum wage. He works in a supermarket so it would be useful to know if he’s had it. His place don’t seem to be taking many precautions (Sainsbury’s are making more of an effort). A colleague phoned in to say his wife probably had it and they made him come in anyway.
Janos
You are something. The only sleazy websites I’ve ever visited are the ones I sometimes click on that you have posted. Following you around is like touring the sewer system of a metropolis. I’m guessing there are some places you’ve been that I would never go using a computer that could in any way be traced back to me. It gives me the shudders.
I post to the CDC below. So they are sleazy too or only once you arrive?
As for me: The King of Death once took Lord Rama on a tour of Hell. Everywhere they went, Rama could only see smiling faces and hear the cheers of the people. Finally he asked Yama, I thought you were taking me on a tour of hell? Yama replied, There can be no Hell where you are, Lord.
Rat Republicans still not giving stay at home orders. Ron DeSantis still allowing church gatherings as of yesterday. Kemp in Georgia just finding out spreaders can be asymptomatic. Hard to believe.
Kushner says stockpiles don’t belong to states. We need competition. Covid competition. Covid Capitalism.
Republicans: Wealth before Health.
Think of that as a good thing. When the smoke clears there will be a large surplus of used MAGA hats and bibles we can heap into a big pile and set fire to.
Stats for MA. the virus is equal across the board by age. All the fatalities are elderly and with pre existing or unknown conditions. I don’t get the unknown part. What no family around with a history or a primary care doctor? Why can’t young healthy people work. Get a little herd immunity going. We have 95 cases in my town. There is a hotspot. A low income apartment complex with a high percentage of recent immigrants. A few guys at the fire station have caught the virus on the ambulance and they say it was not that bad. Dipshit Chris Cuomo has it and I saw him yucking it up on TV with his brother Andrew about his “fever” dreams. He dreamed Andrew was dancing around in a ballet tutu.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/covid-19-cases-in-massachusetts-as-of-april-3-2020/download
Remember the phrase – “Creative Destruction”?
Best method for predicting the future – Think of the most insane, self centered and destructive possiblity your imagination can conjure. Wait.
Theater specific low yield tactical nuclear weapons. When you were under your desk in a room full of windows as a child practicing for a nuclear blast did you think someone your age in a similar class would come to the conclusion the above was a GOOD IDEA?
Did you get vaccinated against a cold this year? Didn’t think so. Why? No Such Thing.
Can’t count them as Covid19 death’s, they would have died anyway. No Shit Sherlock?
Go check the gate in your gated community that, should help rest your disquiet. Call a member of your exclusive club. Make an online purchase with your Platinum or Gold credit card.
Try to come to grips with the fact that at least 50% of everything you think you know is mere conjecture. Do you remember that model of the atom that was a few sticks and a few balls of different colors? Do you still think that is a realistic view of atomic and sub-atomic structure? Cosmologists are of the opinion our universe has no center, I know they are wrong. The universe has close to 7.6 billion centers right here on our home planet.
Save the fuckin money – “Here take a cookie. I promise, by the time you’re done eating it, you’ll feel right as rain”
Perhaps Wayfaring Stranger can post a list of all of the protests against the system populated by non-elite boomers between 1970 and 2000. You went along to get along, you should apologize to yourself for that mountain of apathy on your shoulder. However it is good to know that neither you nor K Dog are to blame.
Should have planned better…….perhaps the virus will target every asshole that ever muttered that phrase with an air of superiority.
and Janos is still spewing hate and everyone just accepts that, they just don’t have the nuts to send it from their IP and MAC address
The world has not changed, your vantage point has changed.
Truth is hate to those who hate Truth.
Creative destruction was a phrase coined by Theodore Rozak was it not? Where is the creative aspect in your post? What is more likely to lead to high level creativity optimism or pessimism? In that high level creativity entails wholehearted dedication to something I’ll go with optimism. The pessimist has already jumped boat…
“Creative destruction was a phrase coined by Theodore Rozak was it not?”
I believe Joseph Schumpeter is most identified with the phrase.
This alleged Chinese army doctor says that it is an artificial virus combining the high transmissibility of SARS with the tenacity of AIDS. Apparently, you can’t get rid of it, and it’s very problematic because it destroys the immune system. The draconian lock down and quarantine measures including forcing people to download tracking and monitoring cellphone apps may not work since a large number of people will be asymptomatic, and they will still be able to transmit the virus even if they’ve ostensibly “recovered”. He says that the initial wave in Wuhan was extremely lethal killing 30% to 50%. He says that the Chinese medical community is extremely worried. The Chinese official propaganda has gone into overdrive claiming that they’ve got it under control in China and everyone wants to believe that it’s true. As Hume said: Belief = the Desire that something is True and/ or Repetition or Confirmation through experience.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qtAhZRl5th4
On behalf of the Boomers, let me try to explain and apologize.
It’s a nice essay – well written and perceptive – and of course it resonates hugely with my own lived experience, like many others, being born in 1952, the son of an air-force WWII vet, and off to the University of Sydney (on a scholarship) in 1970.
And it’s a short essay this elegy, so of necessity broad-brush arguments are required, so it’s unreasonable to be too overly critical. But I do disagree with the basic tenet – that boomers as an age cohort have brought more evil into the world than good.
I just think this is fundamentally untrue. Obviously we weren’t there for the three truly great movements in Western civilisation – Reformation, Renaissance, and Enlightenment – but I do believe that what happened from the 1960s onwards was indeed a seismic shift, and very much for the better.
I first noticed in my first university year (1970) – apart from meeting a dizzying array of young males and females, it was clear to us (if unstated at the time) that we were brighter, sharper, more critical, more questioning … than any of our lecturers.
Even though they were only 10-20 years older than we were, they were – at a very fundamental level – dull, and could have come from any of the previous five or even ten decades. Many of our parents were the same, but without the tenured professorships at prestigious universities to come their plodding minds.
Some lightbulb went off in the heads of young baby boomers, and it hasn’t been extinguished yet. The social and political advances have been enormous, and in many cases have sustained and even grown:
– Women’s liberation
– Civil rights for minorities
– Aboriginal Land Rights (here in Australia)
– The environment movement
– Gay and lesbian rights
– Abortion and contraceptive freedom
– Advances in medicine, and aged care
– The liberalisation of most drug laws
– Prison and sentencing reform
– Higher education for a wider swathe of the population
– Huge leaps in arts, literature, culture generally
– Alternative lifestyle options (hippies etc)
– More opportunities for people of very modest means
– Financial support for a wide range of fields
Out of these have grown much more recent movements such as gender identity and climate change.
In terms of economic history since 1960, it is a much more mixed bag. And as GreenAlba has noted in detail, many of us who grew up in the 1960s were living in very modest circumstances indeed.
If JHK had a (step)father who was a Madison Avenue executive type, it sounds like it wasn’t exactly struggle street, and such an upbringing might colour his perception much more than some of us might like.
Millennials today (and even Gen X in the heady Reagan-Thatcher years) had and have much more materially than most boomers ever had.
In Australia, there is an oft-heard whine that housing affordability is through the floor, and whereas boomers could buy a house in the burbs despite modest wages, those forming households today cannot.
They can – if they wish to commute to the city from 40 km away, and quite rightly they don’t all want to do that. As James has articulated for years, the growth of car-based suburbia is the greatest misallocation of resources in human history – materially, spiritually, and culturally. But it was well underway by 1960.
On the economic front you cannot blame the boomers as a class … it is ahistorical and lacks any decent materialist analysis. The economic curve for the past 60 years has been driven by the rich and their political puppets, as it has been at least since the Medici dynasties ran things in Florence and Rome.
I would rather see an apology from Wall Street and the paid-for politicians, and they have wrecked the world, not boomers as a class. So in terms of offering an apology to the whinging spoilt over-pampered brats born since 1970 or so – please don’t include me in the flagellation gig.
Western culture has been on a downhill slide for a long time. Boomers had a chance to make a difference and build a genuine counterculture centered on life and wholeness but they failed to carry it through. This doesn’t mean they have anything to apologize for of course but it was a golden opportunity lost…
Western culture has been on a downhill slide for a long time.
How so – do you want to return to some Golden Age? If so, when might that have been?
It’s true, it’s true, the crown has made it clear
The climate must be perfect all the year
A law was made a distant moon ago here
July and August cannot be too hot
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here in Camelot
The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot
By order, summer lingers through September in Camelot
Camelot: Camelot
I know it sounds a bit bizarre
But in Camelot: Camelot
That’s how conditions are
There is no past Golden Age to return to of course. The ideal world lies in the future. The West is on a downhill slide because it has lost its spiritual roots, its connection with the cosmic center. All the things you list are fine and dandy (accept gay and lesbian rights. Homosexuality is a disease of the mind and should be treated as such) but unless civilization is centered on eternal values and ends it will eventually terminate in darkness…
Real question: Is that ban on Homosexuality in the Urantia book? If so, I missed it. Do you have chapter and verse?
Only mention in the Urantia Book that I know of is how Jesus wouldn’t go to the public baths when he visited Rome because of the rampant homosexuality practiced there. I can imagine if he did it would be to ‘clear the temple’ in a manner of speaking..
unless civilization is centered on eternal values and ends it will eventually terminate in darkness…
Thankfully, boomers took a different view: challenge everything, trust no-one over 30, and reject anyone spruiking “eternal values” … pull back the curtain and these verities are nothing but the propaganda slogans of the rich and powerful.
Darkness comes from things not changing – reform is the point of civilisation and progress. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … all that stuff.
Only mention in the Urantia Book that I know of is how Jesus wouldn’t go to the public baths when he visited Rome because of the rampant homosexuality practiced there. I can imagine if he did it would be to ‘clear the temple’ in a manner of speaking.
So I checked out the Urantia Book on wikipedia – th is extremely weird shit you’re into man. I think you need treatment.
Change into what Cargill, foregoing our freedoms and liberties and converting our country into a sordid Marxist sh#thole?
Only mention in the Urantia Book that I know of is how Jesus wouldn’t go to the public baths when he visited Rome because of the rampant homosexuality practiced there. I can imagine if he did it would be to ‘clear the temple’ in a manner of speaking..
Jesus Christ – assuming he existed – never visited Rome … where do you get this bulldust from? Why dumb yourself down?
Change into what Cargill, foregoing our freedoms and liberties and converting our country into a sordid Marxist sh#thole?
If you can’t imagine any possible society between the mad dog-eat-dog capitalist mess that you have, and say North Korea or Iran, then I feel very sorry for you.
Get out more and stop reading those wingnut alt-right sites.
You have the freedom and liberty to be poor, unhealthy, and under the heel of the rich and powerful … good luck to you.
The golden age was the pre-agriculture age in an unpolluted world full of great beats and wonder.
Great beats? Was that the Liverpool sound?
I blame Bronze & testosterone.
Well, SBS, ‘building a genuine counterculture centered on life and wholeness’ was the last thing on my mind. What I was most concerned with thru out the years was making a living and getting the bills paid. The rest of the generational bullsh#t mentioned by posters here was no concern of mine.
Brh
Yeah. You would have had to catch that faint gleam of possibility before you settled down. I was one of the lucky ones…
1974 was the end for the land down under.
Until then it was, Whites only can immigrate.
Do you know CHICK Comics [free bible tracts?]…early as 1970s they warned that the Chinese were teaching their young, ‘THAT LAND IS NEW CHINA’.
1974 was the end for the land down under.
Until then it was, Whites only can immigrate.
I am arguably the only person here who has lived in Australia for decades on both sides of 1974, with twice as much since that year.
I can advise that the years prior to 1974 were much more closed, insular, and in many respects drearily monocultural.
We had “The Sixties” in some ways – obviously the music, some Beatnik stuff, and some counter-culture – but compared to Europe and America, we were still pretty square right up to about 1968.
The Vietnam Moratorium movement among students and unions had a huge impact on the social contract – that’s for sure.
We were not “monocultural” in the strict Japanese | Korean | Chinese sense, because we had had a large influx of immigrants from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Lebanon, etc, in the decades from about 1920, and especially after 1946.
The far bigger impact in Australia – much more than the end of the White Australia Policy – was the Oil Shock; it hit us very badly. We went from a land of relative plenty (with one of the highest per capita incomes in the world), to a much tougher place, and an unheard-of unemployment rate of 5% – which has stayed with us.
The proportion of Australian who are of Chinese ancestry in just 5% – and many of those have been here for generations. About 40% of the 5% were born overseas – which is pretty similar with other nationalities.
Hardly a takeover, comrade, and I can assure you that the influx of people from Asia has made Australia a far more dynamic and interesting place. Come on down and have a look!
g’day, me too, mate.
The greatest generation had too much gravity…..
And if my mother’s cooking is representative, too much gravy to.
Cargill, this articulates what the apology left out. Some boomers brought civil rights and equity forward like they never had been before. Minorities and women can’t be so quick with a total dismissal of an entire generation. Rights came from somewhere and now minorities and women are as trapped in the matrix as white men are. Great treachery was had, opportunities were lost, battles were fought. The flagellating apology denies a rich history worth telling.
So, you 18 year olds were smarter than your professors?
Hahahahahahah!
The greatest generation of all time!
Not necessarily smarter (but in many cases we were) – just sharper and more critical, and not wedded to the status quo – and this was in a professional field that was itself going through considerable turmoil.
But anyway – we’re all fiddling at the edges with all this inter-generational angst and resentment. The real battle is between the (1%) haves and the have-nots – regardless of age. The rich and powerful must laugh at us.
Never trust anyone under thirty. And since Carguile and Co never grew up, don’t trust them either.
The young have Jordan Peterson, a poor excuse for a teacher.
Apparently the lobsters think he’s rightl.
I wonder which truly fundamental breakthrough the boomers have made in science.
I can’t think of any.
Well, there’s the computer technology and electronics.
These are technologies, the fundamental science was already developed earlier. I am not saying that this is no accomplishment.
Chip manufacturing is extremely difficult, compilers, operating systems and all the firmware are monumental accomplishments but in the engineering realm.
Electric universe theory. Discarding the Big Bang and getting back to the need to observation to back up astronomical theories.
Electric universe theory is very entertaining but is not a scientific theory. The Big-Bang theory gives a fairly complete picture with serious gaps — the electric universe theory presents some microscopic fragments without overarching picture, at least so far as I have seen.
Big-Bang theory doesn’t explain what caused the Big Bang or how at least one speck of rock whirling through space came to be encrusted with the complex, interrelated phenomenon we call LIFE…
Big Bang if not thoroughly debunked already is on the way out.
Science saying just give us one miracle and we will explain the rest.
So far it ain’t happening.
It was God’s ejaculation. The Stars, so many sperm….
Big Bang if not thoroughly debunked already is on the way out.
Why do you say that? From my understanding it is still 99% the established science, and being more “proven” with every improvement of telescopes and radio-telescopes.
No other theories are challenging it, that I know of.
Cargill
The Big Bang Wasn’t The Beginning, After All – Forbes
Top Ten Scientific Flaws In The Big Bang Theory
New Theory “Debunks” Big Bang Theory – Truth In Media
Big Bang debunked? New theory reexamines beginning of …
No Big Bang? Quantum equation predicts universe has no beginning
Cargill
Sorry those were supposed to be links. Highlight and search on them and they will take you to the pertinent article.
I wonder which truly fundamental breakthrough the boomers have made in science.
Check the ages of all the winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, and medicine since about 1985 … quite a few boomers in that lot.
While it is true that a lot of ‘fundamental’ breakthroughs occurred in the years between 1900 and 1960, that was primarily because we were coming off an incredibly low base back then – an almost total sea of ignorance and unknowns.
Nicely expressed.
The ‘nicely expressed’ was for Cargill, I didn’t realize my comment was going to appear beneath a hay pile of other comments.
Shucks I thought you were talking to me EvelynV…
well. If you are an optimist. It could be said America’s Corona measures are just a drill or test run. just practice In case we experience a more substantial pandemic. Or natural disasters that upset key infrastructure or economic patterns. Or big chunks of the internet regulating commerce and logistics/inventory fall apart.
Life is what you focus on. Focus on suffering and it fills the mind until there is nothing else. In modern society, others focus our minds for us via the Telly. Thus we are in a War against a new Virus and it is winning. Science Fiction.
Well then Janos,
for you life is ogling under aged girls I take it?
What’s wrong Evie? Are you mad about the Fleurs du Mal comment?
I love black flowers! I’d send you some if I knew your address. I’m sure you’re more beautiful than any 16 year old in your own way….
Sixteen-year-old? You were lauding the eroticising of 12-year-olds the other day.
Gag-inducing.
No, I simply mentioned the novel, Lolita – which you seem to think is some kind of pc diatribe, lol.
You’re the one who said she was 12. I don’t remember that, but you may be right. Not a pedo but rather a hebe or adolescent. Quite marriagable in some cultures of course. Shakespear’s Juliet was only 14 and her Dad was about to marry her off to a grown man, presumably in his 20’s.
She was 12. The book is about a self-justifying pervert who lies to himself. But has occasional insights of truth. Like when he hears her sobbing in despair after he’s soiled her. Again.
And it’s not what I think. Anyone turned on by that book needs to have a word with themselves. A pervert rocking a 12-year-old on his knee while he wanks off to her. Yeah… Go back and read it properly.
Well, I’ve decided to do my bit and pitch in to help my neighbors get through these troublesome times. I’m at home sewing sanitary masks. I searched around for some material, but I really couldn’t find much, so I was forced to improvise. I gathered some of my old Haines briefs, and started cutting away. I had some trouble at first, because the front had a slit in them, but I sewed that up, and they seem to work just fine. I was able to make two masks per brief, one from the front, and one from the back.
Some people might not like that slit in the front, even though I sewed it up, they might not feel protected enough. For those people, I recommended that they use only the ones made from the back side. Figuring out which ones are which shouldn’t be a problem, however, as the ones made from the back side are clearly marked. Just doing my best to help folks out through these trying times.
“I gathered some of my old Haines briefs”
wow, well I hope they won’t mind their faces wrapped in your old undies 🙂 but hey, if it saves somebody’s life, who cares what its made out of, right?
I hope they won’t mind their faces wrapped in your old undies – PeteA
========
…with those hash marks that just won’t wash out.
You mean skid marks…
I’d prefer the corona virus, but thanks.
Great visuals in this one, Jim!
My favorite writing is always about how a good writer can help the reader imagine scenes for themselves…so thanks
I tried to sign up as a patron today. Jim’s patron page asked for my name, address, and password. What password is he referring too?
Is it the password you use to login here to reply?
Oh, maybe. Yeah you’re probably right. I haven’t used it since the first time I signed in and forgot about it. Thanks…
You can also use used briefs as coffee filters. The coffee tastes great, although somewhat earthy.
Would suit that coffee that is filtered through a civet’s alimentary canal?
Give it an extra tang, maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_luwak
GA, I prefer the Black Ivory
https://blackivorycoffee.com/
“With notes of chocolate, malt, spice”
Haha! I’m glad I’m just a Rooibos gal.
Although I do love the smell of coffee roasting. Just can’t drink it or eat anything flavoured with it, which seems anomalous.
Wasn’t that a Sex & the City joke when the horse faced one had a thing for young spunks?
Based on the personal detail mentioned in the 3rd paragraph of today’s blog essay I am surprised it has gone unmentioned by the commenters here. Fact one, that Jim says he was raised by his step-father and fact two, that his mother played little part in his upbringing. From these tidbits I have to deduce that Jim’s mother and biological father split for whatever reason and then mother remarried. You would think Jim’s was a fraught childhood and yet he became a superior writer. Where did the tremendous vocabulary emanate from? The step-father? Did the name Kunstler come from the bio or step father. Was the Jewish religion a much played-down thing in his life? Was he bar mitzvahed?
He was probably compelled to develop an active fantasy life as a consequence of having a ‘fraught’ childhood, then at some point he began to verbalize his fantasies. He is primarily a fiction writer despite his excellence as a social critic…
A social critic
Like all these pundits on the myriad TV news channels
One difference, JHK does not lie or distort the truth about events and most of his predictions since he started in 2005 have come true. Listening to The cable news networks including Fox, is like entering Never, Never Land. Never unbiased, never accurate.
Like all these pundits on the myriad TV news channels – JohnAZ
========
Speaking of pundits, with all the terrible unemployment that is happening and the resulting doubts about if or how we will ever recover from this mess, there is one job that could not be MORE SECURE and that is financial/covid pundit.
I spend my days (Monday thru Friday) in front of a computer monitor on this CFN blog but six feet further away and behind is a decent sized TV tuned perpetually to the business show on CNBC. Most of the time I have it muted but sometimes an unfamiliar guest will be on and I want to hear their voice so I un-mute. If there is anything annoying about the guest’s voice such as ‘up-talk’ I will shout insults at the TV and return to mute mode. I may also un-mute If Trump appears for one of his tortured readings from a monitor while stolid sycophants (Pence, Kudlow, Mnuchin, et al) stand behind to lend support, having sold their souls for insatiable political ambition. My main purpose is to monitor the gyrations in the stock averages, interest rates, and various commodities as they relate to “Breaking News” (no matter how mundane, the news is always said to be “Breaking”) and this can be done without the sound on. But I digress.
Since the Covid pandemic hit and virtually no one could “go to work” in the traditional sense, this forced the CNBC producers to dramatically change the way the shows content is delivered to the public. Usually one pundit is directing things from their usual offices in NY and/or North Jersey while all the other pundits are in their homes. They all seem to have very nice living quarters with lots of book-filled bookcases, tastefully framed art and objects d’art. Technically the IT wizards have done a terrific job with barely a hiccup using, I presume, something like Zoom technology. It is all done very professionally. You never see a spouse walking by in the background carrying a laundry basket or a dog or an ankle-biter crawling across the floor. And their dress is business casual. These pundits haven’t lost a minute of paid employment as opposed, let’s say, to my daughter who works (or USED to work) in retail at Bergdorf Goodman and commute there from uptown via subway. Those days are over. She is scared shitless and now doesn’t set foot outside her apartment (she has a pre-existing respiratory problem) and her husband does everything. They are in the hotest of hotspots in the country.
This massive shift to working from home with a Zoomlike connection I believe has legs for the future, post-Covid.
“Did the name Kunstler come from the bio or step father. ”
Whichever, it seems to be a case of nominative determinism.
Q a high IQ can overcome a lot of adversity.
I am reminded of the dark side of the boomers. They were thieves. I lost a racing bike, a great radio, money, a camera, a favourite drawing of a country mill enlarged to 3 x 4 ft, drafting instruments,a semesters worth of net bar organizational charts if you please and an irreplaceable collection of LP’s. Some urban communes were filthy inhabited by filthy hippie mongrels. College professors who did not profess, with not one but two black eye bags under each eye, driven by acid and amphetamines. Some were violent, shoving me around literally; he’s dead now, for which I am grateful. Some say the alphabet agencies jump started the whole sordid drug culture mess to dumb down the unwashed masses. Considering their graduates of the money mafia, they have succeeded.
I am reminded of the dark side of the boomers. They were thieves. I lost a racing bike, a great radio, money, a camera, a favourite drawing of a country mill enlarged to 3 x 4 ft, drafting instruments,a semesters worth of net bar organizational charts if you please and an irreplaceable collection of LP’s.
Sounds like your personal security arrangements could have been a little better organised. But I concede that living in all those share student houses in Sydney and elsewhere in the 1970s did have its issues of dishonesty – there was very little money around at the time.
IOW, no different than any other generation in the history of the world, trypillian. Nothing special or unique about people born 1945-1965.
“Alphabet agencies jump started the whole sordid drug culture mess to dumb down the unwashed masses.” -trypillian
Very prescient, my friend. For example, I’ve always wondered why all those ‘rock’s musicians living in The Canyon neighborhood of LA County, were children of Naval, Army, Air Force and CIA officers, from Gram Parsons, Jackson Brown, Jim Morrison, David Crosby, Judy Collins, members of the Grassroots, founder of The Source … that’s just off the top of my head, the list goes on and on, and every one of them friends and associates of Charles Manson and other psychopaths of that era. It is curious indeed.
Brh
Linda Ronstadt’s father was a prominent defense contractor. Stephen Stills father was a career army intelligence officer. Main Cal supplier of LSD in Cal, Owsley, was the son of a governor of Kentucky and nephew of a US Senator. Brotherhood of Eternal Love LSD manufacturer in LA … sons of prominent Naval officers. Yeah, yeah, all just a coincidence.
Brh