Before my career even got started, while I was still in school, there were a handful of top students all competing for two internship slots at one of the auto-industry Big 3. Being a top-2 student, I was looking forward to one of the slots. Not so. It seems the funding for those available positions were for black candidates only. Another company was offering an internship for a female-only applicant. All the years of hard work and striving for excellence, and the two guys that got the slots were literally the bottom two achievers in the whole class.
I nearly quit right then. Instead, I transitioned into a related major that was still merit-based. That was over thirty years ago, a moment in time that changed my life. It was a fork in the road I didn't want, but was thrust upon me. We are surrounded by this weakest-link thinking, and my observation is that the world is very much like Ayn Rand depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Populated by mindless drones who are takers, not makers. At some point you decide to just withdraw, or forge your own path through life. The positive outcome of that experience was that it forced me to see the world the way it truly is, at the age of 25.
I have had similar experiences. It forced me to move towards self-employment and ultimately to try to create things, even if sometimes in a corporate environment.
I am sure there are pockets of sanity. I know there are. But the more public aspects must at least conform to the DEI demands.
Here in the UK for a long time the way around the constraints was to create projects for self-employed contractors. They were a business expense for the corporation, not employees, so not subject to the quotas. They did this for mission-critical stuff that had to get done.
Alas quota madness has caught up even with this; helped along by more and more women in the tech space. That is the area I worked in and it is becoming hard to compete with imports who will work for much less money.
Unless the BRICS can stop the mad scientists of the West, our grandchildren will be so chock full of Luciferase that they will no longer be fully human.
Genesis 11 shows what happens when men begin to believe they are god.
Life is nothing if it is not a string of changes. Will we end up like Monaco or Easter Island? Who knows?
The people who peddle the models know what they're doing. Sustainability is a great example. Before the EPA took over, trash was burned and returned to the ground where bacteria and bugs took care of the rest. After many years of burning and burying by stages, the soil was better and more fertile than before. EPA banned the old burned landfills, and now trash is shipped via diesel railroads and diesel trucks and bunker fuel ships to China or other countries, where it's disposed without any precautions.
Industries used to recycle their own wastes carefully and intensively, turning the leftover pieces into new products or new ingredients. Now they have to ship the wastes to China like everyone else.
Totally agree. A bizarre series of incentives that make things worse. Such is the world we live in.
While I agree the strategists get it, the minions usually don't. Many mid-rangers are blindly embracing nonsense. Recycling is just one example. Where I live we used to burn the lot to generate electricity. All banned now, so we landfill it at enormous expense.
I liked your answer but a few years ago China refused to take any more of our rubbish, which is also most likely the reason for a load of anti China talk from our governments at this time. I know a lot has been taken by Turkey but not sure if it all goes there.
I believe as soon as China refused to take any more, without blinking most of it was re-directed to Indonesia and Turkey. And you can guess where most of that probably ends up. The "recycling" guff that we get pushed at us in the UK at least is grossly dishonest. The only stuff that does get genuinely recycled as far as I am aware is glass, metal and paper/cardboard. Of course. legislating for mandatory compostible or biodegradable plastic substitutes would incur a bit of extra cost on the mega-corps, so that is just ignored as an option.
My favourite example is a Bangladeshi chemist invented a plastic substitute from seaweed. You can use it to make poly bags that are fully biodegradable. They are in fact beneficial to the environment.
Nothing. No one backed him. The current environmental movement is not interested in solutions only power.
I've seen videos of the burning pits in Turkey where most of it goes. Plenty of thick black smoke for Turkish workers to suck in!!
You're more generous than me with the amount you think gets recycled here but agree with what you say. There's plenty of good substitute's around being ignored.
I do too. But these things are weaponized to bring about their real preoccupation with impoverishment to assuage their guilt.
I do however believe sustainability needs to be fully assessed so we know as much as possible before committing. Too many of these schemes are neither sustainable or cost effective.
When I first explored the area of ‘holistic economics’, I realized the life is destruction and creation in different measures as different times and all ‘profit’ is the result of externalizing waste (costs) while harvesting up value (utility).
There is a certain aspect of all politics (left or right or center doesn’t matter) that focuses on coming up with ways to overtly or covertly coerce outcomes.
It’s a very distinct form of politics that exists solely to find ways to avoid asking people permission to do things.
I’ve noticed this kind of politics is almost always ‘big politics’ where ‘big, important people’ pursue ‘big important projects’.
‘Small’ politics (not necessarily ‘local’) rarely operates in this manner. I don’t think this is because ‘small’ is somehow more utopian but only that, at the ‘small’ level, its easy for the disgruntled to find the source of this disgruntlement and give them ‘a piece of their mind’ (as the saying goes).
John C. Calhoun’s ‘Disquisition on Government’ addresses this ‘big/small’ issue constructively.
A really well written and thought out post . Unfortunately I have lived long enough to see all you mentioned come into being and I don't like what I see happening.
A lot of the whole climate change con is it brings a lot of tax payments, I mean our government is listed as a corporation so it's got to make a profit one way or another. Zero carbon is an impossibility unless we're all planning on dying, in fact one year I think it was in the late '70's carbon dioxide levels went up to nearly 12 and the planet flourished. Equality is an impossible attainment and the sooner people wake up to that fact the better it will be.
I just live by the rules of do no harm to anyone or their property and it works out pretty well.
I realized what you meant, those with meaningless lives are being led by the ring through their nose to follow the latest scam. The sad part is that they often take the youngsters along with them. Climate change being a huge one in that regard.
Yes. As they say, liberalism is Christianity without Christ, which doesn't work of course.
We all have some spiritual needs and our atomized, broken world is not supplying it. Hence the neo-religion of woke. It fulfills a need. They'd be better off at church.
A handful of wealthy people and corporations own all of the media and control our perception of the world. Fear Porn is spread by the Al Gore's of the world while the military industrial complex has needlessly continued the cold war for 33 years too long.
There will never be true equality. We all simply follow our appointed paths and then we die. Everything is simple.
But much is done in the name of equality. Both by those who truly believe in it and those for whom it is a convenient mechanism to push through their agenda.
Most people's view of the world is passively received from the media, so they will never wake up.
Much is done in the name of equity; but nothing can be done about equality. There is a micro view of life and a macro view. When we take the micro view, we either fall into superstition or terror. When we take the macro view, we accept the fact that 95% of the universe is empty and the illusion of 3 dimensions has cursed humanity forever. If a nucleus of an atom was the size of a dime, its electrons would spin hundreds of yards away. In the big picture, we are not.
That's where the Berserker class live; the lowland Scots and the Northern English. Not a place the elites or their imports will want to be when the penny finally drops.
The "sentimental belief in an equality that has never existed anywhere" is part of the equation. So is the sincere belief that the planet is in danger and modern society needs to be drastically cut back, and managed by experts who have complete contempt for and indifference toward ordinary people.
I should have added that with some the alarm that the planet is in danger is not a sincere belief but is rather only a tactic, an excuse to frighten people into surrendering the liberties to the experts, who in fact are not experts at all but often tremendously incompetent.
When people start off on the "sustainable energy, sustainable living" diatribe, it sets my teeth on edge. They don't even consider that there is no such thing as "free energy" in real terms. The solar panels that are made with rare earth metals extracted at great human expense, and no doubt using so-called fossil fuels (another inaccurate and emotionally-charged term); and manufactured using furnaces and presses using more coal and diesel; transported across the globe in diesel-powered container ships. And if you went even further down the line, the huge swathes of land that would be occupied by "solar farms" or "wind farms" (more cuddly terminology to describe a place where absolutely nothing grows) and which is useless for agriculture or trees - all of which would absorb the demon CO2. It's even conceivable that the consequence of all the wind captured by the turbine blades has a downstream effect in the areas of land in the shadow of their activity. A bit like a baffle fence one makes in a garden. That micro-climate is in a small way affected. Nothing is ever for nothing, in human experience and interaction, just as in the laws of nature. Of course there are ways of making and growing things which are more or less damaging to the environment, and this is reflected in the unit cost of whatever it is. But the green fundamentalists (watermelons, as James Delingpole memorably called them) do not seem to accept the inevitability of trade-offs. It must be absolutism. Fanatics will always hasten their own destruction though. As you say, reality always wins no matter how long the trip takes.
I do think their subconscious mind gets it. Their ambitions are subconsciously destructive. They are punitive. And I believe it is driven by guilt. They will not accept we are wealthy and others are dysfunctional.
Regarding equality: because man’s virtue is limited, the legal fiction of “equality before the law” is probably the best we can achieve. Inside the court, race, sex, IQ, religion - these do not exist. We presume every man equal, because not even our best metrics of measurement are sufficient for weighing a soul.
Don’t throw the equality baby out with the equality bathwater, is what I’m saying.
All of this is ironic, since - as our Glorious Cult Leaders insist - race/sex/IQ/religion don’t exist in reality - however, we must bias the court system along these lines to correct for errors caused by things that don’t exist. They really are insane.
I am passionate about equality before the law; truly one of our greatest gifts to humanity. Just the idea of it.
All sacrificed for what? Emotion.
It is the judiciary that shocks me. How little the they fight to preserve all that makes us great and the role they themselves could play to reset things. But all very much part of the Establishment.
But the egalitarian impulse has no interest in the positive aspects of equality or how it could be applied. Only the dragging down of everyone to the lowest common denominator.
I've stood and testified in my own defence against false accusations, I've been separately indicted on false charges which were subsequently dropped, and I'm personally acquainted with a prosecuturial attorney whom you might know through his infamy. Here is my assessment of their moral character.
A great deal of the justice system is inhabited by psychopaths who get a kick out of outsmarting people through word games, sadists who wrap up their fetish in moral justification, pinheads with thinsight, who see only that which is right in front of them, and judges who mistake weakness and moral callowness for mercy. And the occasional true believer (best lawyer I ever knew hated the government, said - "If you're guilty that's between you and God, I'm here to get the turkeys off your back."). The industry isn't one that keeps good people in it. Much like in the military - 90% of lifers are losers with no better options or worse, 10% are true believers.
For the vast bulk who are immersed in the legal profession, their spiritual qualities range between "wet fart" and "tailings pond." Law & Order (the TV show) is a psyop. Nobody even close to that calibre exists in reality.
Like environmentalism, feminism has become twisted beyond belief. At age 70, I've seen too many instances of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
Easiest way to take down any modeler (or politician) is to ask “how exactly”. They either have no answer or it’s some highfalutin gobbledygook that makes no sense. Keep pushing on the “how” and they’ll finally cave and give a straight answer. Then you have them.
I agree. But they succeed through emotional manipulation. Discussions about changes to energy sources never involve power engineers, for example. Just PR people. Or Swedish teenagers.
Before my career even got started, while I was still in school, there were a handful of top students all competing for two internship slots at one of the auto-industry Big 3. Being a top-2 student, I was looking forward to one of the slots. Not so. It seems the funding for those available positions were for black candidates only. Another company was offering an internship for a female-only applicant. All the years of hard work and striving for excellence, and the two guys that got the slots were literally the bottom two achievers in the whole class.
I nearly quit right then. Instead, I transitioned into a related major that was still merit-based. That was over thirty years ago, a moment in time that changed my life. It was a fork in the road I didn't want, but was thrust upon me. We are surrounded by this weakest-link thinking, and my observation is that the world is very much like Ayn Rand depicted in Atlas Shrugged. Populated by mindless drones who are takers, not makers. At some point you decide to just withdraw, or forge your own path through life. The positive outcome of that experience was that it forced me to see the world the way it truly is, at the age of 25.
I have had similar experiences. It forced me to move towards self-employment and ultimately to try to create things, even if sometimes in a corporate environment.
I'm beginning to think that self-employment is the only viable option. Does anyone without DEI qualifications rise in the corporate world anymore?
I am sure there are pockets of sanity. I know there are. But the more public aspects must at least conform to the DEI demands.
Here in the UK for a long time the way around the constraints was to create projects for self-employed contractors. They were a business expense for the corporation, not employees, so not subject to the quotas. They did this for mission-critical stuff that had to get done.
Alas quota madness has caught up even with this; helped along by more and more women in the tech space. That is the area I worked in and it is becoming hard to compete with imports who will work for much less money.
An excellent post, albeit depressing. Thank you, I think.
Meant to say, next week I'll aim for something uplifting. I have a very positive one coming soon. Honest.
Just a little dose of reality. They won't win. They can't. Only reality can.
Stiff upper lip 🤓
Thank you for reading.
Unless the BRICS can stop the mad scientists of the West, our grandchildren will be so chock full of Luciferase that they will no longer be fully human.
Genesis 11 shows what happens when men begin to believe they are god.
Life is nothing if it is not a string of changes. Will we end up like Monaco or Easter Island? Who knows?
The people who peddle the models know what they're doing. Sustainability is a great example. Before the EPA took over, trash was burned and returned to the ground where bacteria and bugs took care of the rest. After many years of burning and burying by stages, the soil was better and more fertile than before. EPA banned the old burned landfills, and now trash is shipped via diesel railroads and diesel trucks and bunker fuel ships to China or other countries, where it's disposed without any precautions.
Industries used to recycle their own wastes carefully and intensively, turning the leftover pieces into new products or new ingredients. Now they have to ship the wastes to China like everyone else.
Totally agree. A bizarre series of incentives that make things worse. Such is the world we live in.
While I agree the strategists get it, the minions usually don't. Many mid-rangers are blindly embracing nonsense. Recycling is just one example. Where I live we used to burn the lot to generate electricity. All banned now, so we landfill it at enormous expense.
I liked your answer but a few years ago China refused to take any more of our rubbish, which is also most likely the reason for a load of anti China talk from our governments at this time. I know a lot has been taken by Turkey but not sure if it all goes there.
I believe as soon as China refused to take any more, without blinking most of it was re-directed to Indonesia and Turkey. And you can guess where most of that probably ends up. The "recycling" guff that we get pushed at us in the UK at least is grossly dishonest. The only stuff that does get genuinely recycled as far as I am aware is glass, metal and paper/cardboard. Of course. legislating for mandatory compostible or biodegradable plastic substitutes would incur a bit of extra cost on the mega-corps, so that is just ignored as an option.
My favourite example is a Bangladeshi chemist invented a plastic substitute from seaweed. You can use it to make poly bags that are fully biodegradable. They are in fact beneficial to the environment.
Nothing. No one backed him. The current environmental movement is not interested in solutions only power.
Not enough profit for our greedy lot to do the right thing.
I've seen videos of the burning pits in Turkey where most of it goes. Plenty of thick black smoke for Turkish workers to suck in!!
You're more generous than me with the amount you think gets recycled here but agree with what you say. There's plenty of good substitute's around being ignored.
I think sustainability is a laudable goal. I suggest well-heeled liberals start by hosting their next dinner party using food found in dumpsters.
I do too. But these things are weaponized to bring about their real preoccupation with impoverishment to assuage their guilt.
I do however believe sustainability needs to be fully assessed so we know as much as possible before committing. Too many of these schemes are neither sustainable or cost effective.
When I first explored the area of ‘holistic economics’, I realized the life is destruction and creation in different measures as different times and all ‘profit’ is the result of externalizing waste (costs) while harvesting up value (utility).
There is a certain aspect of all politics (left or right or center doesn’t matter) that focuses on coming up with ways to overtly or covertly coerce outcomes.
It’s a very distinct form of politics that exists solely to find ways to avoid asking people permission to do things.
I’ve noticed this kind of politics is almost always ‘big politics’ where ‘big, important people’ pursue ‘big important projects’.
‘Small’ politics (not necessarily ‘local’) rarely operates in this manner. I don’t think this is because ‘small’ is somehow more utopian but only that, at the ‘small’ level, its easy for the disgruntled to find the source of this disgruntlement and give them ‘a piece of their mind’ (as the saying goes).
John C. Calhoun’s ‘Disquisition on Government’ addresses this ‘big/small’ issue constructively.
Yes it is not filling in potholes we worry about. It is the cosmic justice brigade who will kill us.
The cosmic justice brigade, thanks for making me smile. It's perfect.
A really well written and thought out post . Unfortunately I have lived long enough to see all you mentioned come into being and I don't like what I see happening.
A lot of the whole climate change con is it brings a lot of tax payments, I mean our government is listed as a corporation so it's got to make a profit one way or another. Zero carbon is an impossibility unless we're all planning on dying, in fact one year I think it was in the late '70's carbon dioxide levels went up to nearly 12 and the planet flourished. Equality is an impossible attainment and the sooner people wake up to that fact the better it will be.
I just live by the rules of do no harm to anyone or their property and it works out pretty well.
It is a huge scam of course. My worry is the true believers further down the totem pole. Those with meaningless lives looking for a crusade.
I realized what you meant, those with meaningless lives are being led by the ring through their nose to follow the latest scam. The sad part is that they often take the youngsters along with them. Climate change being a huge one in that regard.
Yes. As they say, liberalism is Christianity without Christ, which doesn't work of course.
We all have some spiritual needs and our atomized, broken world is not supplying it. Hence the neo-religion of woke. It fulfills a need. They'd be better off at church.
A handful of wealthy people and corporations own all of the media and control our perception of the world. Fear Porn is spread by the Al Gore's of the world while the military industrial complex has needlessly continued the cold war for 33 years too long.
There will never be true equality. We all simply follow our appointed paths and then we die. Everything is simple.
But much is done in the name of equality. Both by those who truly believe in it and those for whom it is a convenient mechanism to push through their agenda.
Most people's view of the world is passively received from the media, so they will never wake up.
Much is done in the name of equity; but nothing can be done about equality. There is a micro view of life and a macro view. When we take the micro view, we either fall into superstition or terror. When we take the macro view, we accept the fact that 95% of the universe is empty and the illusion of 3 dimensions has cursed humanity forever. If a nucleus of an atom was the size of a dime, its electrons would spin hundreds of yards away. In the big picture, we are not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVAJYaFj_0E
Don't You Feel Small - YouTube
Just spent a very enjoyable 2 weeks going around the England/Svotland border lands.
When balkanisation does arrive 100% certain now. These are the areas all like minded people will flock to.
Then the rebirth can begin….
That's where the Berserker class live; the lowland Scots and the Northern English. Not a place the elites or their imports will want to be when the penny finally drops.
We're all a bit mad around here, but it's weird, it's a "friendly madness" if that makes sense.
The "sentimental belief in an equality that has never existed anywhere" is part of the equation. So is the sincere belief that the planet is in danger and modern society needs to be drastically cut back, and managed by experts who have complete contempt for and indifference toward ordinary people.
It is the inevitable end of the arrogance of technocratic thinking.
I should have added that with some the alarm that the planet is in danger is not a sincere belief but is rather only a tactic, an excuse to frighten people into surrendering the liberties to the experts, who in fact are not experts at all but often tremendously incompetent.
When people start off on the "sustainable energy, sustainable living" diatribe, it sets my teeth on edge. They don't even consider that there is no such thing as "free energy" in real terms. The solar panels that are made with rare earth metals extracted at great human expense, and no doubt using so-called fossil fuels (another inaccurate and emotionally-charged term); and manufactured using furnaces and presses using more coal and diesel; transported across the globe in diesel-powered container ships. And if you went even further down the line, the huge swathes of land that would be occupied by "solar farms" or "wind farms" (more cuddly terminology to describe a place where absolutely nothing grows) and which is useless for agriculture or trees - all of which would absorb the demon CO2. It's even conceivable that the consequence of all the wind captured by the turbine blades has a downstream effect in the areas of land in the shadow of their activity. A bit like a baffle fence one makes in a garden. That micro-climate is in a small way affected. Nothing is ever for nothing, in human experience and interaction, just as in the laws of nature. Of course there are ways of making and growing things which are more or less damaging to the environment, and this is reflected in the unit cost of whatever it is. But the green fundamentalists (watermelons, as James Delingpole memorably called them) do not seem to accept the inevitability of trade-offs. It must be absolutism. Fanatics will always hasten their own destruction though. As you say, reality always wins no matter how long the trip takes.
I do think their subconscious mind gets it. Their ambitions are subconsciously destructive. They are punitive. And I believe it is driven by guilt. They will not accept we are wealthy and others are dysfunctional.
(The following is truncated from my share note.)
Regarding equality: because man’s virtue is limited, the legal fiction of “equality before the law” is probably the best we can achieve. Inside the court, race, sex, IQ, religion - these do not exist. We presume every man equal, because not even our best metrics of measurement are sufficient for weighing a soul.
Don’t throw the equality baby out with the equality bathwater, is what I’m saying.
All of this is ironic, since - as our Glorious Cult Leaders insist - race/sex/IQ/religion don’t exist in reality - however, we must bias the court system along these lines to correct for errors caused by things that don’t exist. They really are insane.
I am passionate about equality before the law; truly one of our greatest gifts to humanity. Just the idea of it.
All sacrificed for what? Emotion.
It is the judiciary that shocks me. How little the they fight to preserve all that makes us great and the role they themselves could play to reset things. But all very much part of the Establishment.
But the egalitarian impulse has no interest in the positive aspects of equality or how it could be applied. Only the dragging down of everyone to the lowest common denominator.
I've stood and testified in my own defence against false accusations, I've been separately indicted on false charges which were subsequently dropped, and I'm personally acquainted with a prosecuturial attorney whom you might know through his infamy. Here is my assessment of their moral character.
A great deal of the justice system is inhabited by psychopaths who get a kick out of outsmarting people through word games, sadists who wrap up their fetish in moral justification, pinheads with thinsight, who see only that which is right in front of them, and judges who mistake weakness and moral callowness for mercy. And the occasional true believer (best lawyer I ever knew hated the government, said - "If you're guilty that's between you and God, I'm here to get the turkeys off your back."). The industry isn't one that keeps good people in it. Much like in the military - 90% of lifers are losers with no better options or worse, 10% are true believers.
For the vast bulk who are immersed in the legal profession, their spiritual qualities range between "wet fart" and "tailings pond." Law & Order (the TV show) is a psyop. Nobody even close to that calibre exists in reality.
Like environmentalism, feminism has become twisted beyond belief. At age 70, I've seen too many instances of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
All I'd add is that any cause can be hijacked. Or as a Harvard prof once out it, any cause can be Stalinized.
The gays, feminists, environmentalists. Whatever they were meant to be doing the cultural marxists saw their chance.
I think these days, every cause gets hijacked. It seems to be human nature.
Easiest way to take down any modeler (or politician) is to ask “how exactly”. They either have no answer or it’s some highfalutin gobbledygook that makes no sense. Keep pushing on the “how” and they’ll finally cave and give a straight answer. Then you have them.
I agree. But they succeed through emotional manipulation. Discussions about changes to energy sources never involve power engineers, for example. Just PR people. Or Swedish teenagers.
Someone needs to give me better hair, pronto!