Some gems from 2020;

• Gary Saul Morson: Suicide of the Liberals (firstthings.com)
• Craig Murray (craigmurray.org.uk)
• Laura Sullivan: How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (npr.org)
• Cynthia Chung: The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence

(strategic-culture.org)

• Jason Brubaker: Sithrah, Episode 1 (webtoons.com)
• This little beauty was written by GPT-3 (language via machine) after it trained on the work of Wallace Stevens (American modernist poet, 1879-1955).

I must have shadows on the way
If I am to walk I must have
Each step taken slowly and alone
To have it ready made
And I must think in lines of grey
Must have dim thoughts to be my guide
Must look on blue and green
And never let my eye forget
That color is my friend
And purple must surround me too
The yellow of the sun is more more
Intrusive than the bluish snow
That falls on all of us. I must have
Grey thoughts and blue thoughts walk with me
If I am to go away at all.

Matt Taibbi: For What Are America’s Wealthy Thankful? A Worsening Culture War (taibbi.substack.com)

This is what happens when the very wealthy stop having a stake in the outcome of a country’s future.

Bryan Carney: “You Have Zero Privacy” Says an Internal RCMP Presentation. Inside the Force’s Web Spying Program (thetyee.ca)

Aaron Kesel: Information War? Internet Archive To Rewrite History With Alerts For Sites That Have Been Fact Checked (activistpost.com)

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

• George Orwell

NEWSPEAK: A controlled language of simplified grammar and restricted vocabulary designed to limit the individual’s ability to think and articulate “subversive” concepts such as personal identity, self-expression and free will.

THOUGHTCRIME: A person’s politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of the dominant ideology.

DOUBLETHINK: A process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to accept a clearly false statement as the truth, or to simultaneously accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one’s own memories or sense of reality.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Groups (smbc-comics.com)

• New Discourses: Pursuing the light of objective truth in subjective darkness. (newdiscourses.com)
• Cynical Theories: How Activist Scharship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity–and Why This Harms Everybody (cynicaltheories.com)

Social Cooling: Big Data’s Unintended Side Effect (socialcooling.com)

Gary Saul Morson: Suicide of the Liberals (firstthings.com)

Craig Murray (craigmurray.org.uk)

Michael Anton: The Coming Coup? (americanmind.org)

Laura Sullivan: How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled (npr.org)

Here’s the basic problem: All used plastic can be turned into new things, but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive. Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can’t be reused more than once or twice. On the other hand, new plastic is cheap. It’s made from oil and gas, and it’s almost always less expensive and of better quality to just start fresh.

Charles Hugh Smith: How Nations Collapse: Disunity (oftwominds.com)

Charles Murray: Comfortably Numb (claremontreviewofbooks.com)

"It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The forms of art as life seem exhausted; the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are the great historical forces.

It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confession of malaise…. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

• Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (2000)

Armin Fischer: Open letter to the protesters in Belarus (cooptv.wordpress.com)

Ben Hunt: Too Clever By Half (epsilontheory.com)

It’s always the meta-game that gets you.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Happy (2) (smbc-comics.com)

If you’re happy and you know it, are you sure?

Nick Cave: What do you think of cancel culture? (theredhandfiles.com)

…you’ve asked about cancel culture. As far as I can see, cancel culture is mercy’s antithesis. Political correctness has grown to become the unhappiest religion in the world. Its once honourable attempt to reimagine our society in a more equitable way now embodies all the worst aspects that religion has to offer (and none of the beauty) — moral certainty and self-righteousness shorn even of the capacity for redemption. It has become quite literally, bad religion run amuck.

Cancel culture’s refusal to engage with uncomfortable ideas has an asphyxiating effect on the creative soul of a society. Compassion is the primary experience — the heart event — out of which emerges the genius and generosity of the imagination. Creativity is an act of love that can knock up against our most foundational beliefs, and in doing so brings forth fresh ways of seeing the world. This is both the function and glory of art and ideas. A force that finds its meaning in the cancellation of these difficult ideas hampers the creative spirit of a society and strikes at the complex and diverse nature of its culture.

• Charles Hugh Smith: Falling Into the Abyss Between Wall Street and Main Street (dailyreckoning.com)

Ask yourself these questions:

What kind of system will we get if the vast majority of the trillions created out of thin air by central banks goes to financiers and corporations?

What kind of system will we get if these financiers and corporations use some of this free money to buy political influence?

What kind of system will we get if the really big money is skimmed by financial games that generate no goods or services, no jobs, and no productivity — in essence, they are completely worthless to the real economy and society?

What kind of system will we get if the stock market bubble is touted as “proof” the system is working splendidly and wealth is bubbling up without any limit thanks to the Fed’s magic money machine?

• University of British Columbia: Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities (gwern.net)

The essence;

We argue that contemporary Western democracies have become particularly hospitable environments for victim signalers to execute a strategy of nonreciprocal resource extraction because several features of these societies make victimhood potentially advantageous.

The abstract;

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

• Mike Balsamo and Gillian Flaccus: On Portland’s streets: Anger, fear, and a fence that divides

Police aren’t monsters; humans are.

• An anonymous quote from the internet;

Lesson #1: learn how to stand up for yourself Lesson #2: teach others how to stand up for themselves

• This little beauty was written by GPT-3 (language via machine) after it trained on the work of Wallace Stevens (American modernist poet, 1879-1955).

I must have shadows on the way
If I am to walk I must have
Each step taken slowly and alone
To have it ready made
And I must think in lines of grey
Must have dim thoughts to be my guide
Must look on blue and green
And never let my eye forget
That color is my friend
And purple must surround me too
The yellow of the sun is more more
Intrusive than the bluish snow
That falls on all of us. I must have
Grey thoughts and blue thoughts walk with me
If I am to go away at all.

• MN Gordon: Black Lives Matter: An Immodest Suggestion

If BLM was strategic they’d be fighting for school vouchers to start pumping out semiconductor engineers 10 to 12 years from now. … This is an industry where America’s up and coming generation has fallen a step behind its global competitors. There’s a need. There’s demand.

You can thank us in 2030.

Quotes from anonymous humans on the internet;

As someone coming from an ex-soviet state, I’ve felt personal alarm bells ring more and more, as I experience the kind of intolerance and double speak America is heading into. Both the left and the right my opinion are missing the key points on freedom (the left suppressing and labeling, the right militarizing).

Another;

Also from an ex soviet state. Also feel alarm bells going off. I’m legitimately scared. I’ve seen this before, I know where it goes. It’s really hard to convey my feeling of alarm to people here though. Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it, I guess.

Doesn’t help that the conformists have been allowed to frame the narrative as ’either you agree with us, or you’re literally Hitler/Stalin’ depending on political alignment, which is a very powerful weapon to shut down discourse.

This rising culture is freedom and diversity in all things except thought. This is how totalitarian regimes form. This is what my parents dumped their entire life savings into escaping, and here I am watching it rise again.

Sinead Bovell: I Am a Model and I Know That Artificial Intelligence Will Eventually Take My Job (vogue.com)

Real world examples include @lilmiquela, @shudu.gram and @imma.gram.

“The people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. All you have to do is tell them that they are in danger of being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to further danger.”

• Hermann Goering

• Peter Welch: Programming Sucks (stilldrinking.org)
  • All programming teams are constructed by and of crazy people
  • All code is bad
  • There will always be darkness
  • A lot of work is done on the internet and the internet is its own special hellscape
  • We didn’t start out crazy, we’re being driven crazy

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Culture

Fun fact: You won’t go to Mars, but McDonald’s will.

Shaun Nichols: Seven ’no log’ VPN providers accused of leaking - yup, you guessed it - 1.2TB of user logs onto the internet (theregister.com)

Zaria Gorvett: Why it pays to be grumpy and bad-tempered (bbc.com)

"Happiness functions like a shorthand signal that we’re safe and it’s not necessary to pay too much attention to the environment,” he says. Those in a continuous happy haze may miss important cues. Instead, they may be over-reliant on existing knowledge – leaving them prone to serious errors of judgement.

An anonymous quote from the internet;

I left academia because I didn’t conform to ultraleft views. I was walking on eggshells to avoid being denounced. No one knew I (horror) held moderate views and thought scientific study rather than emotions of the day should decide policies.

An anonymous quote from the internet;

Growth for growth’s sake sounds like cancer to me.

An anonymous quote from the internet;

remember in the Robocop movies when corporate America aids criminals & helps incite riots so they can lower property values & buy up the city while privatizing that city’s police force haha science fiction is crazy

• On September 18th, 1895, Booker T. Washington said;

“The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”

Cynthia Chung: The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence (strategic-culture.org)

The study explained that the world financial and economic system needed a complete overhaul according to which key sectors such as energy, credit allocation and food would be placed under the direction of a single global administration. The objective of this reorganization would be the replacement of nation states.

…

Wherever this strategy has unfolded, the target state is told by the international community that it has no right to intervene and is told to stand by as its nation is ransacked by locusts and its government ‘reorganised’.

See also, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Monkey (smbc-comics.com)

Hm… let me try to explain.Imagine there’s a confused, angry monkey who is rapidly amassing a vast assortment of powerful explosives. He looks out the window every day and sees nobody stopping by to chat with him. In fact, he sees nobody in the entire neighborhood.

Should the monkey find this strange?

Paul Graham: Beating the Averages

If you do everything the way the average startup does it, you should expect average performance. The problem here is, average performance means that you’ll go out of business. The survival rate for startups is way less than fifty percent. So if you’re running a startup, you had better be doing something odd. If not, you’re in trouble.

…

After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening– that’s starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Job

How do you inflict suffering on someone with a well-hedged portfolio in a diversified technological society?!

• The President and the Press (audio via jfklibrary.org);

President John F. Kennedy Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City April 27, 1961

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate very much your generous invitation to be here tonight.

You bear heavy responsibilities these days and an article I read some time ago reminded me of how particularly heavily the burdens of present day events bear upon your profession.

You may remember that in 1851 the New York Herald Tribune under the sponsorship and publishing of Horace Greeley, employed as its London correspondent an obscure journalist by the name of Karl Marx.

We are told that foreign correspondent Marx, stone broke, and with a family ill and undernourished, constantly appealed to Greeley and managing editor Charles Dana for an increase in his munificent salary of $5 per installment, a salary which he and Engels ungratefully labeled as the “lousiest petty bourgeois cheating.”

But when all his financial appeals were refused, Marx looked around for other means of livelihood and fame, eventually terminating his relationship with the Tribune and devoting his talents full time to the cause that would bequeath the world the seeds of Leninism, Stalinism, revolution and the cold war.

If only this capitalistic New York newspaper had treated him more kindly; if only Marx had remained a foreign correspondent, history might have been different. And I hope all publishers will bear this lesson in mind the next time they receive a poverty-stricken appeal for a small increase in the expense account from an obscure newspaper man.

I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight “The President and the Press.” Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded “The President Versus the Press.” But those are not my sentiments tonight.

It is true, however, that when a well-known diplomat from another country demanded recently that our State Department repudiate certain newspaper attacks on his colleague it was unnecessary for us to reply that this Administration was not responsible for the press, for the press had already made it clear that it was not responsible for this Administration.

Nevertheless, my purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of Presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.

Nor, finally, are these remarks intended to examine the proper degree of privacy which the press should allow to any President and his family.

If in the last few months your White House reporters and photographers have been attending church services with regularity, that has surely done them no harm.

On the other hand, I realize that your staff and wire service photographers may be complaining that they do not enjoy the same green privileges at the local golf courses that they once did.

It is true that my predecessor did not object as I do to pictures of one’s golfing skill in action. But neither on the other hand did he ever bean a Secret Service man.

My topic tonight is a more sober one of concern to publishers as well as editors.

I want to talk about our common responsibilities in the face of a common danger. The events of recent weeks may have helped to illuminate that challenge for some; but the dimensions of its threat have loomed large on the horizon for many years. Whatever our hopes may be for the future–for reducing this threat or living with it–there is no escaping either the gravity or the totality of its challenge to our survival and to our security–a challenge that confronts us in unaccustomed ways in every sphere of human activity.

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril. I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

I

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.

Today no war has been declared–and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired.

If the press is awaiting a declaration of war before it imposes the self-discipline of combat conditions, then I can only say that no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of “clear and present danger,” then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent.

It requires a change in outlook, a change in tactics, a change in missions–by the government, by the people, by every businessman or labor leader, and by every newspaper. For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match.

Nevertheless, every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of national security–and the question remains whether those restraints need to be more strictly observed if we are to oppose this kind of attack as well as outright invasion.

For the facts of the matter are that this nation’s foes have openly boasted of acquiring through our newspapers information they would otherwise hire agents to acquire through theft, bribery or espionage; that details of this nation’s covert preparations to counter the enemy’s covert operations have been available to every newspaper reader, friend and foe alike; that the size, the strength, the location and the nature of our forces and weapons, and our plans and strategy for their use, have all been pinpointed in the press and other news media to a degree sufficient to satisfy any foreign power; and that, in at least in one case, the publication of details concerning a secret mechanism whereby satellites were followed required its alteration at the expense of considerable time and money.

The newspapers which printed these stories were loyal, patriotic, responsible and well-meaning. Had we been engaged in open warfare, they undoubtedly would not have published such items. But in the absence of open warfare, they recognized only the tests of journalism and not the tests of national security. And my question tonight is whether additional tests should not now be adopted.

The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will. But I would be failing in my duty to the nation, in considering all of the responsibilities that we now bear and all of the means at hand to meet those responsibilities, if I did not commend this problem to your attention, and urge its thoughtful consideration.

On many earlier occasions, I have said–and your newspapers have constantly said–that these are times that appeal to every citizen’s sense of sacrifice and self-discipline. They call out to every citizen to weigh his rights and comforts against his obligations to the common good. I cannot now believe that those citizens who serve in the newspaper business consider themselves exempt from that appeal.

I have no intention of establishing a new Office of War Information to govern the flow of news. I am not suggesting any new forms of censorship or any new types of security classifications. I have no easy answer to the dilemma that I have posed, and would not seek to impose it if I had one. But I am asking the members of the newspaper profession and the industry in this country to reexamine their own responsibilities, to consider the degree and the nature of the present danger, and to heed the duty of self-restraint which that danger imposes upon us all.

Every newspaper now asks itself, with respect to every story: “Is it news?” All I suggest is that you add the question: “Is it in the interest of the national security?” And I hope that every group in America–unions and businessmen and public officials at every level– will ask the same question of their endeavors, and subject their actions to the same exacting tests.

And should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate whole-heartedly with those recommendations.

Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war. In times of peace, any discussion of this subject, and any action that results, are both painful and without precedent. But this is a time of peace and peril which knows no precedent in history.

II

It is the unprecedented nature of this challenge that also gives rise to your second obligation–an obligation which I share. And that is our obligation to inform and alert the American people–to make certain that they possess all the facts that they need, and understand them as well–the perils, the prospects, the purposes of our program and the choices that we face.

No President should fear public scrutiny of his program. For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed.

I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers–I welcome it. This Administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.

Without debate, without criticism, no Administration and no country can succeed–and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment– the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution- -not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply “give the public what it wants”–but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.

This means greater coverage and analysis of international news–for it is no longer far away and foreign but close at hand and local. It means greater attention to improved understanding of the news as well as improved transmission. And it means, finally, that government at all levels, must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security–and we intend to do it.

III

It was early in the Seventeenth Century that Francis Bacon remarked on three recent inventions already transforming the world: the compass, gunpowder and the printing press. Now the links between the nations first forged by the compass have made us all citizens of the world, the hopes and threats of one becoming the hopes and threats of us all. In that one world’s efforts to live together, the evolution of gunpowder to its ultimate limit has warned mankind of the terrible consequences of failure.

And so it is to the printing press–to the recorder of man’s deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news–that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

An anonymous quote from the internet;

I can’t get my friends to install Signal because they say they have nothing to hide from their government and now the same government is using Signal to hide from my friends.

Sithrah is old Hebrew for Protector. This comic has amazing artwork.

Jason Brubaker: Sithrah, Episode 1 (webtoons.com)

Jesselyn Cook: Facebook’s Secret Ban On CBD Ads Is Devastating Small Businesses (huffpost.com)

If you’re in Canada, maybe The MaryMaid Company can help.

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity – play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it.) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word “engagement.” Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked “NO EXIT,” yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing,then invent one.

• A warning from, ironically, 1984. I try not to put videos on the RAIL, but I make an exception for Yuri Bezmenov.

Active Measures/Psychological Warfare is to change the perception of reality to such an extent that despite the overabundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their communities and their countries. It’s a great brainwashing process that is very slow and occurs in four basic stages:

1: Demoralisation – Introduce Marxist/Leninist ideology at the institutional level, unchallenged by the original ideology of the enemy. 15-20 years is the length of time for one generation to be institutionally programmed. Reversing this step requires another 15-20 years to educate a new generation of patriotic and common-minded people. Where old dissidents like Jane Fonda could profit, new dissidents like Julian Assange will rot.

2: Destabilisation – Economy, Foreign Relations, Defense Systems; 2-5 years. We’ve seen this happen numerous times since 2001.

3: Crisis – It can take only 6 weeks to bring a country to crisis. This crisis ultimately results in a violent change of power, structure and economy. This has also occurred numerous times since 2001.

4: Normalization – A welfare state managed by Big Brother. Everything is (not) under (your) control. The education system, politicians and media will indoctrinate the new generation and the indentured servitude will continue. This step is indefinite.

• Isabella Tree: If you want to save the world, veganism isn’t the answer (theguardian.com)

Paul Graham: Economic Inequality (paulgraham.com)

… determination is the most important factor in deciding between success and failure, which in startups tend to be sharply differentiated. But it takes more than determination to create one of the hugely successful startups. Though most founders start out excited about the idea of getting rich, purely mercenary founders will usually take one of the big acquisition offers most successful startups get on the way up. The founders who go on to the next stage tend to be driven by a sense of mission. They have the same attachment to their companies that an artist or writer has to their work. But it is very hard to predict at the outset which founders will do that. It’s not simply a function of their initial attitude. Starting a company changes people.

In retrospect, the USA died in 2020 at an age of 233 years.

• Canada: 1867-2117 = 250
• USA: 1787-2037 = 250
• Assyria: 859-612 B.C. = 247
• Persia: 538-330 B.C. = 208
• (Cyrus and his descendants)
• Greece: 331-100 B.C. = 231
• (Alexander and his successors)
• Roman Republic: 260-27 B.C. = 233
• Roman Empire: 27 B.C.-A.D. 180 = 207
• Arab Empire: A.D. 634-880 = 246
• Mameluke Empire: 1250-1517 = 267
• Ottoman Empire: 1320-1570 = 250
• Spain: 1500-1750 = 250
• Romanov Russia: 1682-1916 = 234
• Britain: 1700-1950 = 250

• An anonmymous quote from the internet;

25-35 is such a weird fucking age because you’re 100% a bread-and-butter Standard Edition Millenial but the cool teens are like “ok boomer” because you have a Real Job but the actual Boomers at your job are like “I’m not going to listen to a literal fucking child” as they download 16 self-replicating viruses and meanwhile the Gen Xers are telling you to refinance a mortgage for a house you don’t have and you’re sitting there at the Adults Table with the pretty tasty casserole you cooked because you’ve finally figured out how to do that now but everyone is eating the Boomer’s store-bought macaroni instead and admittedly they do sort of taste similar so it probably wasn’t worth all the trouble of cooking from scratch and you’re trying to comfort the freshly-graduated sobbing 22-year-old next to you because she just woke up here and doesn’t know where she is but you have like maybe 5k dollars in a savings account labelled RETIREMENT that grows approx. twelve cents

• Another;

As the society advances and problems are solved for us, we are left with the most central core problem, ourselves.