The Amish "System" as a Model

When I was in high school my friends and I would sometimes laugh at the inconsistencies on display in the nearby Amish community, like the Amish businesses had phones but the phone was outside the premises. Or the Amish can ride in a car but can't drive it, etc... I still think a lot of those "rules" are nonsensical, but now see that the inconsistency is a byproduct of how their "system" works. Their leadership apparently looks at things on a case by case basis, so it's all a hodgepodge. They aren't striving for thematical consistency, but are trying to protect their way of life.

Some local Amish families use battery powered scooters, for example, but they don't ride e-bikes or bicycles in general. (There are communities of Amish that do.) I do a bike ride that follows a road that passes through miles of Amish farmhouses (and some non-Amish live there too). If I'm just riding an easy tempo though there, sometimes Amish kids will pass me on the scooters going maybe 15-20 mph.

Why is the scooter allowed and not a bicycle? I have no idea what the reasoning is, but there's at least some attempt to consciously pick and choose which technology and activity will maintain an overall way of life.

I'm not a fan of the rule-based, and hierarchical culture that implements those choices, but still it's good that an effort is made. The larger western society has a predatory system where access to any contrary wisdom or feedback is inhibited and children are trained to be a cog in the machine in the school system--or they're trained to be a predator.

It's actually pretty gross and weird. For example, girls are propagandized by the wedding industry and the diamond industry via popular culture, but there's no critique of the associated financial choices in the mainstream. There's young people who go into debt $30k for a wedding, which is nuts seemingly from "free choice", but it's really just a byproduct of grooming and propaganda.

It'd be good to just provide an active critique to so much of that poison to kids, but lots of parents and the school systems would be terrified to even think about such a thing. I guess there is some form of critique of societal insanity and the predatory behavior of corporations and the financial system, but it'd be rare for a young person to stumble into that sphere of info, I think.  

Local Politician Crime Spree

My rule of thumb is the governments of the world are composed of all the worst people in each jurisdiction. Whenever I imagine this rule might be faulty, some new story will pop up in the local paper that cements the idea in my mind again, However, I don't think anecdotal evidence is necessary to support this concept. There's much more basic and obvious evidence provided by the politician jobs themselves: who would want to do that boring shit and what would the motivation be to run for office to obtain such a position?

Let's take the example of township trustee. There are some localities in the US who can't find anyone to run for such offices, so they faux elect a dog or something but their roads get paved and the trash is collected anyway. In my township there's a professional staff that actually does all the road maintenance and contract management, etc... They have to be knowledgeable, professional people with a background in construction and management of construction projects while the trustees are often randos with no relevant experience, and a dog could do the job of trustee because the professional staff does all the actual work.

Trustees and other low level politicians or officers in the government frequently find some way to steal millions of dollars from taxpayers. It's usually discovered relatively easily through audits, but I'm not sure how much money is ever recovered. For example, in Chesterland Township, Ohio the clerk (elected office) embezzled $4 million dollars in the late 1990s through early 2000s, but I can't even find any news stories about how much money was recovered, so it probably wasn't significant. Also, any web searches for the topic are lost in the sea of similar corruption from around the country because it's so common.

One of my middle school and high school friends lived next door to a woman who was a long time township trustee. She was an alcoholic dingbat weirdo. When he was a kid, his family went to a pool party at the trustee's house and she poured a beer over his head while he was hanging out in the pool. I listened to her give an election speech one election year--she just rambled incoherently for a few minutes. She won the office because nobody else cared to do it.

A persistent problem for humanity is the people who are actually productive are robbed or exploited by people who "organize" activities. This problem seems to arise from the infantile mindset of most people and is built into the system.

2024 Election: Infantile Public

So far I saw one good youtube video, and zero good articles or headlines about the 2024 Presidential election. The youtube video is by the astrologer "Lavette". Here's a link.

My conclusion is political partisans are infantile, foolish people. There are boatloads of fools in the United States and the western world in general because any wisdom tradition the european people had was systematically murdered a long time ago, and perhaps it never existed in the first place.

I am not going to write about Trump and Harris, because the political candidates in every presidential election are just PR cutouts, or advertising mascots. It's weird that people don't realize this. Let's take the 2008 election of Obama as an example. Obama was a "change"/"throw the bums out" candidate just like Trump was in 2016/2024. However, Obama continued almost every policy of the Bush administration.

Hillary Clinton was Obama's Secretary of State. She was just another neocon as was Obama's VP Biden. She was the equivalent to John McCain, Mitt Romney, or George W. Bush. The change Americans wanted when they voted for Obama was never delivered, but apparently nobody noticed, well at least no mainstream voter noticed.

During the Obama administration, the US helped destroy Libya for some mysterious reason. Up to 30,000 civilians perished in that war--but that country is so chaotic that there's no official tally. Also, the US helped overthrow the Ukrainian government which led to the conflict there with Russia. The conflict with Russia is a continuation of the post cold War conflict instigated by the Bubba Bill administration.

Hillary Clinton, though, is sold to dumb as fuck infantile American women as some positive figure instead of a war ghoul and lifelong influence peddler. She made appearances on popular TV shows and was talked up by fictional characters. That "Hillary Clinton" character is like a Big Mac or Ronald McDonald. It's just an advertising vehicle.

The future of the US looks pretty bleak to me because the public is so foolish. You can see glimpses of the future by looking at Britain--a failed empire heading toward failed state status: a handful of inbred creeps control their government and feast on corruption, while the rest of the country slips into abject poverty. There are plenty of other failed empires to look at in the historical record; the pattern is similar no matter where you look.

Anyway, if the public doesn't grow up--really gain wisdom--we might face quite destructive war scenarios in the not so distant future. Will the dopes who went along with COVID suddenly figure out their leadership is evil trash? I doubt it.

The British Empire shows the trajectory of the US. Dumb as fuck "ruling class" elites will just suck the nation dry as scheme after scheme fails. No catastrophic, drop off the cliff scenario happened to the British people or economy either--it was more of a slow motion rot/decay that's still unfolding.

General System Failure

I recently watched an episode of "Walker, Texas Ranger" (1993) that was set on a plane. It reminded me that coach class in 1993 was basically like business class today. The seats were larger more comfortable and further apart, plus you would get a meal service, maybe two on a really long flight. Today, the seats are uncomfortable, crammed together and you might get a packet of crackers and 6 ounces of a soft drink as part of the ticket purchase plus the flights are generally completely full.

I had recent experience with flying because I went to Los Angeles for work a couple of times this year and unfortunately will make one more trip before 2024 is over. A common topic of discussion out there is how my younger coworkers in LA can't afford to buy houses in the metro area.

An engineer job in LA gets you what was a working class lifestyle in "Walker, Texas Ranger" days in that city. There is no chance for those engineers to buy a house in the LA metro area, plus it would be foolish to tie up $1M in a house that's worth $250,000 almost anywhere else in the US... not too many years ago, like in 2015 such a house would have been maybe $130,000 in my area.

One of the symptoms/reasons for the decline in quality of life is the value of the dollar plunged. It's halved since 1993. A $170,000 salary in 2024 money was about $80,000 in "Walker, Texas Ranger" time money, but I think the numeric comparison doesn't capture all that's gone awry over the years and doesn't show what's really causing the decline in quality of life and the increasing difficulty of maintaining a "middle class" level of consumption.

I think the failure of "life scripts" is how most people experience the system failing. A high school aged student in Los Angeles might receive the life script of "engineer in tech" as a viable path to an upper middle class lifestyle when they are growing up... but then the anecdotal evidence and life experience shows how the steps along that path really doesn't lead to the intended outcomes.

So what's really happening? I think it's actually quite simple. The economic system in the US produces X quantity of goods per year. In 1993 the US population what 258M by census estimates. Today it's 341M! For some period of time the economic system increased output at least at the rate of population growth, but I don't think that's the case anymore, also the number of high paying jobs hasn't kept pace. In tech, for example, the number of people employed has been flat going back to 2022. Salary growth has not kept pace with productivity either--it's been flat relative to productivity for a long time. Executives and shareholders snarfed up those productivity gains.

Then on top of that generalized theft, the system has gotten aggressively preachy about ideological insanity topics--basically global warmaids and the high value of gays and trannies. 

Why participate in this shitty scam system? Middle and working class people finally realized that it makes no sense to play along anymore so they're not. Young people are especially disenfrachised--why would they enter the workforce on the bottom rung of the economic ladder in a shithole city like LA or NYC? They can't even afford rent for an apartment with the salary provided by a job obtained via six figure college debts.

The idea the political system will solve any of these problems is laughable. Every passing year I see more clearly how insane it is to expect some politician weirdos to solve any problems.

Anyway, what should a person do to avoid ending up as soylent green? One possible strategy is to look at your life script, especially if your young, and unfold all the assumptions that inform the narrative of the life script. One that's obviously failed is the "college degree=job and middle class income"... so everybody knows that now. It was modified to "work in the trades if you don't get a STEM degree", so I'd be skeptical about those assumptions too, because now, more and more people are going to work in the trades. The competition in STEM fields is global because India and China produce a huge number of STEM graduates and tech, in general is saturated.

In general, it's insufficient to blindly follow any life script and expect the intended outcome to occur, and it will be increasingly necessary to look ahead and take risks and experiment to invent novel paths or to find niche scenarios to exploit.

The "C" Computer Language versus The US Government

In recent weeks I noticed some articles about federal government officials recommending no new programs be written using the "C" computer language because of "memory safety" issues that these officials claim other languages don't have. This is the first time in my career that a government bureaucrat offered an opinion about something I work with every day.

My initial thought is it is a safe bet that "C" will outlast the current US federal government by many decades--I don't mean the Biden administration, nor the Trump administration, I mean the US constitutional order and all its associated institutions. My second thought is who is paying the officials to have those opinions? I could get into the details of why "C" will be around forever, but it's pretty dull stuff.

Corporate Global Warming Training?

I recently sat through the annual sexual harassment training at work. I've probably wasted about 40 hours of my life sitting through various elementary school "courses" like it at various jobs. I would bet $50 that over the next 10 years corporations will mandate global warming courses, or whatever random white liberal religious topics they feel the desire to preach about.

To me, the global warming topic is the most ridiculous of the virtue signaling/luxury beliefs preached about by people like Bill Gates, with his 66,000 square foot house, Al Gore, or Taylor Swift with her private jets flights to get ice cream. The mini-me liberal believers are similarly fraudulent in their preaching. Of my family and friends, I'm the "greenest" and have been slashing my lifestyle for years mainly to get out the matrix as quickly as possible, but I also am the most skeptical about computer models' ability to predict the weather 100 years from now.

Anyway, I think now that Trump was elected a second time, which is really just a big request by the nation for the establishment to fuck off, there will be a push through institutions like corporations to drill their favored opinions into the heads of employees.

I think things are about as centralized and mechanical and controlled as they will get in my lifetime right now, and the trend will thankfully be to move rapidly in the other direction.

Fake Music, Fake Sports: Why?

Every once in a while I watch a video on the YouTube channel "Wings of Pegasus". The guy makes videos that reveal which musical performances, whether live or recorded use auto-tune or other manipulation. He just did a series of videos on Taylor Swift, who of course is super produced. Her concert audio is all pre-recorded, etc... She's a spokeswoman for global warming but she takes a private jet everywhere, etc.. Sports is similarly fake. The NFL seems about as real as WWE. The pro and Olympic athletes are all dopers.

Those industries insist it's all real and "clean". That is, sports are real contests with athletes who train hard so they're superhuman. Taylor Swift and myriad other music industry products are actually super talented musicians who all sing perfectly in tune all the time and never miss a note. Why do they lie about it all?

I think there's a simple message embedded in sports and music "stardom". It really helps cement the average person's "belief" in the system's legitimacy. If there are super star musicians, and super star athletes, then it follows there are super star CEOs or super star politicians, and that whoever the system says is a super star really is as talented as a phony like Taylor Swift or some doper athlete.

Politicians often hang out with such people to imply they're all part of the big important people club and that there's a natural difference between them and the masses. That is, a politician is talented at doing politician shit the same way Taylor Swift is somehow mysteriously better than myriad rando people with way more talent on YouTube, or a given 'roid monster is a naturally better person because they can run fast or bench press 315 pounds 20 times.

The story that's sold to kids and childish adults about athletes is they train hard and have genetic gifts, and that it's plausible anyone with similar characteristics could achieve success in sports. People who participate in sports often look up to the pro athletes as a model, which is useful for companies that sell shoes, or bikes, or sports drinks.

The musician narrative is different. It's usually that the musician is a magic person or a fairy princess or whatever and they were "discovered" and their natural supremacy was put on stage for all the world to see.

Failing Life Scripts

My wife and I are watching "Gilmore Girls" which was first broadcast back in 2000. It's pretty interesting to watch as a cultural artifact, but is not something I'd typically want playing in the background in the evening chill out time.

One of the main characters Rory Gilmore is a high school, then college student who wants to be a news reporter even as that industry was already disintigrating. The show pretends like the newspaper industry was viable and thriving when even in the early 2000s it was already falling apart. I'm in my 50s now, and I started real adult life in the early 90s, and I can't remember the last time I had a newspaper subscription. All the friends and family members I have who worked in the news media eventually moved on, because it was a dead/dying industry in the early 2000s. Even today cable news channels like CNN are on their last legs.

Anyway, a whole shitload of life scripts like "news reporter" turned non-viable just during my adult life. In fact, the general idea that a person could go to college, major in any random thing, and graduate and make a upper middle class salary are long gone. In fact, now a college degree can be much more of a burden than a path to success if a kid takes out a student loan; even if they have wealthy parents or grandparents who can finance their education, it's still potentially a big waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere.

I think the average person experiences systemic economic failure through failure of the life scripts. When the plans they received through their education and upbringing don't work, it's very stressful and difficult to adjust.

One way to interpret the 2024 and 2016 election is the MAGA republicans want to restore the viability of the life scripts that worked in 1955. They think it's possible to use the regulatory system and tariffs to resuscitate manufacturing in the US to bring back high wage manufacturing jobs. Maybe it's possible, but essentially the whole neoliberal program needs to be rolled back and there's no signs of that from Trump who in his first term undid some post 2008 banking regulations. The neoliberal system is essentially a giant parasite that sucked wealth out of the population via the financial system, and banks are a key component of that theft.

What was the neoliberals' vision of the future? What are the life scripts on offer from the democrats? It is the "own nothing and be happy future" where most people are proles who survive on Bill Gates brand bug paste, don't own a house, and get a monthly welfare payment in the form of crypto currency. Some apparatchik class manages the system and preaches about butt sex and pronouns and tells you what the temperature of the earth should be. It's very bizarre to me to see my left wing friends and family continue to recite the bullshit associated with their bizarro world neopuritan religion.

I think neither MAGA nor Bill Gates' dystopia will happen in the US. In fact I think the "belief" based society is a thing of the past and being molded and shaped by life scripts and a failing system is just a recipe for personal unhappiness if not an early demise. The follow on to the neoliberal system is the no-system IMO, well at least for people like me. I think giant bureaucratic entities like countries and mega corporations will falter as well because all that shit is built on training, and really an agreement between the people and the people who run the institutions that the life scripts will work... but now there's no script.

I think the COVID scenario was a sneak preview of the downside of "belief" and following the rando opinions of authority figures and their scripts. It showed that you basically have to assay information yourself and make up your own mind and that the system is predatory and is built on lies. "Should I take the covid juice?" For me it was a clear "no". For most people it wasn't a decision they made, they just went along with what was just a sales pitch from pharma companies. The dopes that run corporations tried to strong arm their employees to take the juice too.

Anyway, it's early days for these changes. The future life scripts will be based on what rando individuals come up with as the system neoliberal corporatocracy system flails and dies off.

Life Scripts and "The System"

A common complaint in the USA, especially by younger people, is the "life scripts" don't work anymore. Basically there's no easy recipe to achieve the middle class American lifestyle.

When I was in primary school, the educational system, which is just one component of "The System" was setup to track kids into three groups, essentially. There was an "elite" track, which really didn't exist in my local school system. Then a professional track, which meant you'd go to college, and then everybody else.

The "elite" track was for kids in wealthy families basically. They might go to a private school, then go to a fancy college like Harvard or Yale. A couple of my friends did end up in elite schools. One ended up in a cushy job making a 6 figure salary back in 1995 even though she didn't have any special skills or knowledge. The other, sadly, died in college.

The professional track meant you'd go to some random college and end up with a professional job like doctor, lawyer, dentist, engineer, or just some office job. That's the track I was in and most of my friends were in. Most ended up with professional jobs of some kind. Some went and did more interesting things, but were ultimately still reasonably successful. Although a handful of people I know ended up with college debt, no job, and kind of wrecked.

A lot of the kids in the everybody else track went to the military, then college. Some went into the trades and some just got other random jobs until they found their niche.

The generic life scripts associated with the corporate/consumer "system" we live in worked pretty well back in the early 1990s when I started out in post college adult life. A person who even half-assedly applied him or herself in the professional track could at least get a job and earn an income, eventually get a house and even start a family, own a car, go on vacations, etc...

The life scripts were kind of failing already back in the 1990s, though, and included a lot of poison ideas, like going into debt to buy depreciating assets like cars, or to believe a house is an "investment" that will only appreciate in value.

Anyway, by now, the almost every life script is wrecked and does not work. You can be a professional person in certain places in the USA, like Los Angles, and basically be a working class drone unable to buy a house--which would actually be a totally foolish idea if you could slave away and make a $200,000 down payment on a $1M dumpy house with a dirt lawn with a homeless camp on the sidewalk.

The "elite" are trying to push a new set of life scripts, like "own nothing and be happy" on the people, but it looks like a no sale. Anyway, people insisting the old life scripts continue also can't work.

Voted Trump? Got Neocons Again!

Supposedly Trump appointed Marco Rubio as the Secretary of State. He's just another POS neocon. This is a polite way of omitting that Trump and Rubio are zionist jew puppets. Zionist jews have snarfed TRILLIONS of dollars out of the US for utterly failed wars for their LARP project in Israel. It's pure insanity that people keep going along with this shit.

I didn't expect anything different. I was just wondering how terribly jewed out Trump 2.0 would be. If Harris had been elected we'd just get some other psycho mass murdering jews in charge of US foreign policy.

How to Invest Locally

Geauga County has a good bike path, really a multi-purpose trail, called the "Maple Highlands Trail" which follows former railroad grades. I ride on there several days a week as part different loops I use for my rides. I generally ride out some country roads and maybe do some hill climbs or put in some miles then make my way back home on the trail.

I looked up the total cost of the system. It's very low compared to similar lengths of road. Large bridges on the bike path are a tiny fraction of the cost of bridges along the road, like $200,000 versus $1.5M. The bike path infrastructure doesn't have to carry semi trucks or heavy equipment, of course. Also it makes use of the old railbed and is a fraction of the width of a two lane road so it's inherently less expensive than a road.

The system cost maybe $750k - $1M altogether over the span of several years and is about 21 miles long. One section of the system is a dual purpose road for Amish buggies to bypass a steep hill along State Route 608. I believe all the pavement of the system is original even though it's about 20 years old now. It's in pretty good condition overall. Even 20 years on, its potential benefit to residents and businesses is barely realized.

$1M per 35,321 households in Geauga County is only $28! Over 20 years that's $1.41 per household per year. The number of people with a Strava account that have ridden the trail is about 2,100. Some estimate about only about 5% of cyclists use Strava so at least 40,000 people total have ridden the trail in just the last 10 years or so. Similar numbers of runners and walkers use the trail as well. The vast majority use it for recreation or exercise. A tiny handful of people use it for transportation and commuting. A large fraction of the total population of the county, then, used the trail system, plus visitors use the system as well.

Anyway, it's one of the rare no-brainer, manifestly beneficial infrastructure projects I've seen in my lifetime. If it were hooked up with neighboring county rails-to-trails system it would be even more beneficial and if it were combined with other infrastructure projects that would not impact its primary purpose it would be even more valuable. For example, maybe there's some need for telecom conduit and fiber optic infrastructure via those paths. I have no idea if that's the case, but it's just an obvious potential scenario that could add more value to such projects. Even lower cost infrastructure would be useful for horseback riding, gravel bikes, mountain bikes and even road bikes.

Walker, Texas Ranger versus Gilmore Girls

I recently started watching "Walker, Texas Ranger" with Chuck Norris every once in a while. My wife and I are watching "Gilmore Girls", too. Streaming the episodes makes it easier to see the world-model the writers of the series have. "Walker" is the type of TV show or movie I watched when I was growing up. I would never watch a show like "Gilmore Girls" when I was younger mainly because the worldview of the writers is like toxic waste, and the stink would have turned my stomach. Now it's interesting to me to watch because it's a cultural artifact.

In the episodes of "Walker" I watched so far, the main character is a complete man, and really the show is about how to be a complete man. He's spiritually grounded in "native american" spirituality, because the character is supposed to be part native. His spirituality forms the core of his character. His success at martial arts is due to being "balanced", which I suppose could be interpreted as having awareness of one's place in the universe. In the show, the government is often corrupt, and the character Walker has to take action to clean it up. In short he's a super hero, but he's also human and struggles with life's problems. The episodes are a little bit like after school specials and maybe were meant to serve as a sort of tutorial for 10-18 year old boys. The movies and TV shows I watched and comic books and books I read as a kid had similar themes. They were almost all about the main characters' struggles with the forces of nature and against human evil and corruption.

The "Gilmore Girls" is quite a departure from all those themes. The only two sort of heroic/masculine characters on the show are almost always weathering a vortex of insanity from all the other characters in the show who are vain and impulsive or dominated by egomania, and all of whom are dysfunctional, or incompetent in almost every area of their life whether they are male or female. Eventually the show reveals that the main characters' family the "Gilmores" are inbred on top of being borderline people. The lead female characters of the show are very entitled, and are propped up by family wealth, or networks of friends that bail them out and provide them with money and valuable gifts basically because they are attractive and witty and quirky.

The overall idea of the show seems to be that dysfunction and mental illness and entitlement are "the way it is". The pop culture of the United States in recent years started to celebrate and push that dysfunction/insanity worldview as the norm, and the institutions push the idea that dysfunctional, crazy people need to be dutifully cheered on by everyone else.

Americans Reject the Establishment Again

I see that Trump won the election pretty handily. I'll be happy that all the campaign signs are going into the landfills. I'm very tired of seeing all that garbage on the side of the road.

Kamala Harris is a bad politician and the Biden administration obviously sucked so it's not such a surprise that Trump won. If there's a larger theme it's that people in the US---probably all over the western world too--are done with the "establishment" people and their institutions. That's a continuation of the rejection of the RINO republicans and reformulation of the GOP into a populist working class party--basically some version of FDR democrats. The democrats became republicans too. It's bizarre partisan people don't notice those changes.

The current establishment is "left wing" which just means they advocate social engineering policies because people called gay kids "fags" in 1985, buy they are still all about stacking as much wealth as possible.

The establishment is rich people, corporations, and associated institutions like universities. The American lefties want to adopt a Europeanish style system with heavy handed central planning. The average person would be living like a hamster in a habitrail while an inbred parasite class "manages" society and infrastructure that slowly falls apart. That top down central planning is a follow on to the failing neoliberal financial/corporate system. It's really an attempt to cement the current social/economic order in place forever.

Many Americans apparently don't want that outcome. Many people realize the top down plans of the past several years were utter failures. The common core education system pushed by people like Bill Gates and Obama is an utter failure. Obamacare sucks ass. The states in the US that are lefty dominated are losing residents at a rapid rate and the average IQ in states like California is plunging as the population mix changes.

The problems in America run pretty deep and I don't think an election or any resulting institutional reform will fix a single thing. Its really a waste of time to scheme over "policies" and "system" fixes. Systemic fixes aren't really possible. That's the neoliberal system in a nutshell--a big paper, now electronic monster that can be tweaked and poked and prodded to produce some desired outcome. Nope. Not gonna work.

We'll probably get 4 more years of establishment driven left wing nutjob craziness. I'm sure dumb fuck shitlibs think the world ended for the second time. They'll probably rededicate themselves to wrecking cities they control and crapping up corporate life even more than it already is.

Americans invest way too much time and energy in national politics and national media. They should bring their focus home and even work on their own self instead of even thinking about nonsense like politics, the NFL, national media, the stock market, etc...

Ego Based Society Sucks

When I was in High School, my friends and I were guided down a path of "achievement" mainly by praise and vague promises of future financial success. For example, I was a musician and eventually became the "first chair" player in the band in my section and participated in myriad band activities over the years. The real reason I did that was all my social connections were band people, but I never really liked playing and wasn't "into music" like a lot of people are. It never occurred to me to sit down and listen to jazz records for example. Then when I was in college, I had a music scholarship, so I was forced to keep playing. Once I was out of school I barely ever touched a musical instrument again. I have a twinge of nostalgia for it once in a while, but I know I won't practice and seek out opportunities to play, so I don't bother with it.

Lots of kids were in a similar situation in their particular niche--maybe it was sports; maybe it was some other performing art; maybe it was 4H or horse riding or something similar. The school scenario grooms people into a world where they can be the center of attention every once in a while and maybe win a ribbon or stand on a podium, or have an article about their performance in the school paper. Some kids might love the thing they're doing in faux competitions, others might be blase about it like I was with music.

One common factor to all those performance based ego-feeding sessions is the competition is really limited and is essentially a fraud. A good high school musician might never be a world class soloist that can play in an orchestra for example. A high school football player can be good within their entire conference but be miles away from a Division I college player.

Anyway, in short, life's problems really are nothing like the faux competitions kids are groomed to invest so much time and energy in. There's some valuable habits that can come from training to be a musician or athlete, but the overall structure of the programs is very misleading and damaging and artificially limits the horizons of kids.

The critique of "track based" education that sort of reformed schools in the US has some merit, but the system that's replaced it is obviously way worse. Schools replaced faux competition with praise of everybody and now the students are just entitled retards and brats based on the reports I've seen.

The Montessori school system seems better; they basically throw the kids into real life with training wheels, then the kids learn in the context of doing real things. Kids run businesses for example, or learn about biology in the context of a farm, and that kind of thing. I have no idea how that system works with respect to the ego based/faux competition scenarios I was constantly in, so I can't comment on it, but one of the major problems with the faux competition scenario is it trains the ego to stay in the world of lies instead of grooming students to deal with real reality.

For example, a business can fail no matter how hard a person works, how smart they are, etc... A person groomed to believe the praise they received their whole life might misjudge what "failure" means. There's a fake praise feedback loop instead of feedback based on real world performance, or real world scenarios where performance doesn't even impact the outcome, which is quite common in real life.

Grounding kids in real world scenarios would produce a much healthier society based on realism, but it's a lot easier to manipulate a population that's trained to pursue ribbons, trophies, and public praise and fake money.

The Least Important Election of Our Lifetime

Whichever bozo gets elected tomorrow, the same shit is going to happen.

For some reason Trump voters think Biden caused runaway inflation--that started when Trump was President and the feds gave away $2.3T because of the stupid COVID scam. Trump went along with all the COVID insanity. He pushed operation warp speed... that white liberal doofuses eventually loved.

Kamala Harris initially criticized operation warp speed, but then she did a 180 once her handlers told her what to say.

Kamala Harris is a non-entity. She's a continuation of the Obama years, which were a continuation of the Bush years.

The problems in the US are problems with the public at large, not just the corporations or the government. The whole country has been corrupted by an insane, inbred ruling class that's pushed short sighted self serving policies.

The typical political partisan lives in a land of make believe, especially the lefties who are just in a complete fantasy world.

Good YouTube Channel

This guy has a good handle on the nuts and bolts of the socio-economic scenario in the US and western world.

Link to video

Fail Your Way to the Top!

Intel is apparently financing a big PR campaign to try to sell the story line that they're not failing tech company like DEC was, or Sun Microsystems was, etc... they're a unique national treasure that the US can't function without, so Intel wants endless government cheese. I think the sales pitch is aimed at the goofball retard politicians and "elite" dope class.

The current CEO of Intel made hundreds of millions of dollars so far in his position. I assume other executives are getting similar truckloads of cash and stock and perks even as their company goes on the dole full time.

There's a similar theme with the neocons--all their schemes were terrible, destructive failures, but they're still embraced and promoted by national media and similar institutions.

The same thing happens with crazy left wing ideas which are pushed from the top through prestigious schools like Yale or Harvard. Obvious, patently absurd ideas like "defund the police" and decriminalizing shop lifting blew up in the faces of the cities that put them into practice, but the dope squad that pushed those nonsensical ideas will face zero consequences for being abject failures.

In fact, there's not much room for pragmatic or practical people because the policies such a person would advocate might be viewed as "racist" or "antisemitic".

End of the Neoliberal System

Some major labor unions did not endorse Kamala Harris this election because their membership realizes the democrat party is the neoliberal party and doesn't represent them anymore--it hasn't for decades, but they finally figured it out.

Neoliberalism is just corporatocracy/oligarchy in drag and with effeminate/gay talking points. The behavior and policies of the US government are the same whichever party is in charge of the congress or the presidency, because all the "representatives" are basically just employees.

The MAGA republicans sort of figured it out, but have a pretty dim vision of what would need to change to "restore" America of even just 20 or 30 years ago. The typical democrat is either a beneficiary of the system itself and maybe has an apparatchik type job in an HR department or a tech job or professional job in some giant quasi-public institution, and/or also is a puritanical religious person that believes in global warmaids or think the government "helps" people in need--basically they believe propaganda that was on TV in the 1980s and 1990s.

Neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. The western countries are all hollowed out from it and some Asian countries are on the up-swing because of it. One of the main issues with the neoliberal system is the parasitic western "elites" imagined they'd control the countries they shipped western manufacturing to for the past 50  years. However, the "elites" in Asia decided to build and manage their own industries instead of serve as junior partners to western corporations in perpetuity, so even the executives at failing companies in the western world are now under threat from competition they created.

Anyway, the central governments in the west are the problem and not the solution to neoliberalism. I think Europe is just FUBAR and has a pretty bleak future and isn't really worth worrying about, at least from an American person's point-of-view. The western hemisphere, though, could actually enjoy a prosperous future if the current governments were purged and we rebooted a new financial system and promoted internal and local investment instead of global centralization of financialized wealth-tokens.

Good Depiction of "Elite Overproduction"

 We are watching the old TV show "Gilmore Girls". It's a chick show. The characters are supposed to be quirky, unique, and lovable but to me they're almost all awful

The main characters of the show are mother and daughter. The mother character got pregnant in high school and had the daughter at 16, so when the girl character is supposed to be high school age, the mother is supposed to be in her 30s.

The mother's family is wealthy New England snobs that had high expectations for the mother who lived a bohemian independent life, but transferred her own life expectations to the daughter. The high school aged daughter is obsessed with going to Harvard, and if not Harvard some other ivy league school. As part of her quest to do that she enrolls in an elite private high school, which is one of the central story lines in the show.

Anyway, the concept of "Elite Overproduction" from the historian Peter Turchin is depicted well in the show. The daughter is questing after an elite job, like a CNN reporter. The children of the wealthy families follow a script to get into a position in life, but eventually the positions run out or get diluted. CNN reporter is a great example: the entire media industry restructured, so all the kids pursuing an elite journalism role in the early 2000s were chasing after a largely obsolete job in a declining industry.

I think elite overproduction is really a symptom of systemic stagnation and decline. The "elite" population expands just like the overall population, but the defining characteristic of the elites is hyper-consumption of resources. They collectively impose a parasitic burden on everyone else. That's probably the main theme of our era: a bunch of entitled people get paid a lot, and the system is rigged to support their lifestyles.

For example, there's more managers and administrators than ever before in places like colleges and hospitals for example and the cost to fuel the lifestyles of those administrators drove rapidly inflating costs in both industries. There's probably more managers per capita in every industry, including tech. I saw that throughout my career.

The current dream of elite twats is a centrally planned expert managed economy that's totally automated so there's no jobs for anyone but them, and there's not even any competition for their positions. There's a corresponding authoritarian bent to their schemes, like the whole COVID scam, which demonstrated how fraudulent their claims of expertise are.