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.