"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't
even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny
doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
- Thomas Sowell
"Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: ''What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?''
- Thomas Sowell
"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
“All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about
as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo.”
- Morris Berman
“Think of how stupid the average person is,
and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
- George Carlin
"Are People Really Stupid?"
by Fred Russell
"On the face of things, judging from the general level of knowledge and understanding, not to mention the intellectual pursuits, of most of the human race one is tempted to say that the overwhelming majority of mankind lacks the intellectual capacity, the intelligence, to contribute to human progress. And it is in fact a very small elite that has carried us beyond Neanderthal Man, without whom, if the truth be told, we might still be living in caves. It is, in a word, appalling to contemplate the level at which ordinary people use their minds, what they read, if at all, what they watch on TV, the movies they go out and see, and the ease with which they are seduced and manipulated by the technicians of the psyche, namely, politicians and advertisers.
The impression one gets when contemplating these tens and hundreds of millions of people glued to their TV screens for the reality shows and sitcoms or fiddling with their smartphones from morning till night is of complete empty-headedness. This is not to say that such people cannot be shrewd, resourceful, or, for that matter, simply decent. It is to say that at the average level of intelligence displayed by the human race, the great intellectual achievements of mankind seem to be beyond the scope of the vast majority of men and women. But are people really stupid? And if they aren't, who or what has held them back?
Now one may be inclined to place all the blame for our ignorance on the television producers and gadget makers, but the truth is that by the time they get to us the damage has already been done. All they really succeed in doing is dragging us down a little further. The problem starts in childhood. It starts in the schools with all those empty cells waiting to be filled and no one, not entire educational systems, really knowing how to fill them. In fact, the opposite result is achieved. By the time the child finishes elementary school, unless he is destined to join the intellectual or scientific or economic or political elite and is self-motivated, as the saying goes, he will have developed an aversion to the learning process that will persist for the rest of his life.
It is not hard to understand why. School bores him, and oppresses him. Its premise, fostered in the West by the Church the virtually exclusive supplier of teachers until fairly recent times, historically speaking is that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good. The result has been rigidly structured frameworks where teachers hammer away at the captive child until his head is ready to explode. Within just a few years, the public school system thus destroys the natural curiosity of the child and dooms him to a life of total ignorance, dependent, for whatever sense of the world he does have, on second rate journalists, who themselves lack the knowledge, understanding, discipline and integrity to be historians or even novelists and therefore shape his perception like the ignorant clerics of the Middle Ages, raining down on his head a disjointed and superficial body of information presented largely to produce effects, and even this is beyond his capacity to retain.
The man in the street may thus be said to have a great many opinions but very little knowledge, mindlessly repeating the half-truths of experts and analysts who reflect his own biases and constructing out of them a credo of dogmatic views that remain embedded in his mind for an entire lifetime like bricks in a brick wall.
Does it matter? After all, we have all the scholars and scientists we need, and besides, a world where everyone became one would be a dull place indeed. It can even be argued that it is better for the race if progress is opposed, since, judging from its products, it mostly expresses itself materially and economically in an unholy alliance of greed and technology. However, progress of this kind cannot be fought if all that people have on their minds is to wire themselves into this technology, and that is what they will be doing until their minds are engaged in less frivolous pursuits. They are thus doubly victimized, first by the schools, whose methods are not attuned to the temperament and capacity of the average child, and then by the economic elites who control the technologies and consequently the flow of information and whose only interest in the man in the street is as a consumer of their products.
Unfortunately, there is very little hope that any of this will change. The wrong people control human society and will continue to do so, because they created the model and are the only ones who know how to operate it. The sad truth is that today's man in the street is neither wiser nor more knowledgeable than a medieval peasant. Calling ourselves Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens, seemed like a good idea once but very few of us have lived up to the billing."
"Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing, except how to get elected.
In a democracy, this ignorance is both a protected quality, like motherhood and a valued resource. By common consent, the ruled do not look too closely at the mentality of elected rulers, and the rulers speak solemnly of the wisdom of the people, who have none. Reporters will ask, “Senator, what are your views on Afghanistan?” but never, “Senator, where is Afghanistan?” or “Can you spell Afghanistan?”
To plumb the depths of democratic puzzlement, we might, by means of polls, ask how many voters can name three cities in China apart from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hongkong. Or how many can name even those cities. Or how many know even one date in Chinese history, or can name a single province. Yet they know that China is perfectly dreadful and dangerous.
Ask what countries border on the Caspian or Black Sea. Or, seriously, how many have ever heard of the Caspian. In today’s politics, these are not quiz-show trivia but influence Washington’s choice of our next war.
See how many have heard of the Minsk Accords. If they have not, they lack a hamster’s grasp of the Ukraine war. What they think they know probably comes through CNN and MSNBC, assiduous hawkers of the not so.
Gallup: Twenty-one percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth.
A good bet is that the lower third in intelligence of the population know nothing at all of international affairs and exceedingly little of national. Given the appallingly poor schools in the cities, another good bet is that the proportion of blacks cognizant of international geography or politics is vanishingly low. Since Latin American cardiac surgeons and system programmers do not swim the Rio Bravo to pick oranges in Florida, the Hispanic percentage is unlikely to be greatly better. Taken as wholes, none of these three groups is remotely qualified to vote.
“While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one.
n reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 were reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.
While people who read political columns online are likely of intelligence above the average, i wonder how many who rail against capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism, and terrorism can define the words.
I recently checked the bios of the members of the House committee on China to see how many read, write, or speak Chinese. None. Thus do we make policy regarding the most important foreign country on the planet.
A friend, a former US Senator, once estimated, dead seriously, that ninety percent of the Senate doesn’t know where Myan Mar is. If you and I, dear reader, do not know this, it probably doesn’t matter. The Senate engages in foreign policy.
It is important to note that intelligence does not by itself confer the capacity to vote. I know people way into the upper percentiles who do not have the time or the interest to worry about foreign policy, for example. There are engineers, neurosurgeons, mathematicians, journalists, musicians and artists, whose minds just don’t run in political directions, especially involving obscure countries on the other side of the world. Neurosurgeons have families who merit attention, journals to read to keep up with their fields, perhaps a hobby or two, and don’t have much left over to worry about a new Russian pipeline across Mongolia, wherever that is.
People I have met of IQ 190 or better, maybe four (of whom I assuredly am not one), have had the memory and analytical capacity to, I think, approximate an understanding of politics, history, and so on. These people are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. The rest of us at best can know bits and pieces.
For example, my knowledge of Caucasian politics consists entirely in the fact that Washington wants to put military bases in Georgia to help surround Russia. I am blankly ignorant of Congressional and state politics, agricultural policy, or much about what Blackrock is doing around the world. There is too much to know, and too little wit to know it with.
If we ignore exceptions and degrees, the public can be regarded as a vast semi-comatose polyp that knows only whether it is comfortable or cold and wet and has enough to eat. If the economy is good, people will vote for incumbents, whether these have any responsibility for the prosperity or not. If wars can be fought without inconveniencing them, in places not actually within their visual horizon, they will pay scant attention. They will not concern themselves with education as long as their children get good grades, however unrelated to anything learned. Their interests are local, though they can be stirred up over this football team or that, this Trump or that Biden, or morality plays about police brutality or the righteous heroism of Ukrainians.
Taking into account the aforementioned poor education, controlled media, and American anti-intellectualism – Americans seem to dislike the obviously intelligent – and you have a polity utterly incapable of anything approaching functional democracy. Rev the people up over the Superbowl or morality tales about the Ukraine or Russia and they will do anything desired. Roll over. Bark. Beg. Nothing to it."
"In today's vlog, we are at Costco and are stocking up on a lot of different grocery items! We show how we get the most out of our membership, making it totally worth it!"
"Prodexpo 2024 is the largest international show of food and drinks in Russia and Eastern Europe. Bringing togther more than 2000 companies to showcase food and drinks. ProdExpo is Russia’s largest showcase of alcoholic beverages and wines from more than 30 countries."
Iran's Big Threat To Jewish State After Tit-For-Tat Attacks"
"Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi threatened Israel of annihilation in case the Jewish State launched an attack on the Islamic Republic. The statement from Raisi came during a visit to Pakistan, according to IRNA news agency and comes at a time when tensions are running high between the two sides following tit-for-tat military strikes."
"Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do."
The irony would be that we know what we are doing.
When the last living thing has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up perhaps
from the floor of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done. People did not like it here.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
o
"The civilization now in jeopardy is all humanity. As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and sky. In our tenure on this planet, we have accumulated dangerous, evolutionary baggage propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We have also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, a desire to learn from history and experience, and a great, soaring passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity.
Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet earth. But up and in the cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evidenced when we view the earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
There are not yet obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction. I dream about it... and sometimes they are bad dreams."
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
"Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries, some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy. Also known as NGC 772, the island universe is over 100,000 light-years across and sports a single prominent outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait.
Its brightest companion galaxy, compact NGC 770, is toward the upper right of the larger spiral. NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with a spiky foreground Milky Way star in matching yellowish hues. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's large spiral arm is likely due to gravitational tidal interactions. Faint streams of material seem to connect Arp 78 with its nearby companion galaxies."
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.
You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”
- Haruki Murakami
“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”
"Dollar Tree is causing commotion with its recent price update. True dollar prices are a thing of the past in Dollar Tree. The discount giant is raising prices again, with some items as high as $7. The company also announced that the sister brand Family Dollar will close nearly a thousand stores starting this year. Are you still going shopping at Dollar Tree when prices rise to $7 an item?"
“I change the desktop image on my laptop every now and then, generally when I come across a new image I like. In the last year or so you’ll remember that I wrote about Caravaggio’s “The Rest on the Flight Into Egypt” and Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid.” Live with an image for a while and it’s inevitable that you learn something from it. Here is the painting I’ve had as my desktop in recent weeks, Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip”, 1872, one of America’s sentimental favorites.
A simpler, more innocent time. Boys at recess, barefoot in the grass. Hand-me-down clothes. Autumn wildflowers, trees turning to red and gold. A fumbling Ulysses S. Grant is in the White House, the country is at peace after a horrendous civil war, and the Panic of 1873 and subsequent depression is still in the offing. Anyway, all of that political and economic stuff is a bit of a pother and far away. The sun is high in the sky, there’s an apple in the pocket, and only the oldest boy is thinking yet about the eternal mystery that is girls.
Yes, a lovely sentimental anecdote to the busy rancor of our own time, the incessant noise of the television, the attack ads, the news of war. How blissful to be twelve years old again, fit and healthy with the grass between your toes. Never mind that these boys had a life expectancy at birth of about 40 years, and that many of them had probably already lost a sibling or parent; when the sun’s out, and it’s recess, and you’ve got eight pals to play with…
But that’s not why I like the painting. I love the way the arc of the whip reflects the curve of the hill. The vanishing point of the red schoolhouse and three white shirts – everything converges on the two adults in the distance, the grown-up world that inevitably awaits.
Between the three boys who anchor the whip and the six who resist the centrifugal force that breaks the chain is the schoolhouse, the open door and window bracketing the anchor’s grip. Maybe it’s because I was a teacher all my life, but I like to think that the “message” of the painting has to do with education, with what goes on when the boys and girls are called back inside by the teacher’s bell – the glue that holds a civil society together when the whiplash of events threatens to tear us apart. Not indoctrination. Rather, reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the basic skills that enable an individual to explore the world creatively. History, geography and science, with their lessons of diversity, tolerance and respect for empirical fact. The ameliorating influence of poetry and art. And one of these boys, maybe the oldest in the center, will become a teacher himself, maintaining an unbroken chain of accumulated knowledge that anchors us to the past and propels us together into a mutually supportive and secure future.”
"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life."
"A $250 Million War Game and Its Shocking Outcome"
by Nick Giambruno
"At a cost of $250 million, Millennium Challenge 2002 was the largest and most expensive war game in Pentagon history. With over 13,500 participants, the US government took over two years to design it. The exercise pitted Iran against the US military. Washington intended to show how the US military could defeat Iran with ease.
Paul Van Riper, a three-star general and 41-year veteran of the Marine Corps, led Iranian forces in the war game. His mission was to take on the full force of the US military, led by an aircraft carrier battle group and a large amphibious landing force in the Persian Gulf. The results shocked everyone…
Van Riper waited for the US Navy to pass through the shallow and narrow Strait of Hormuz, which made them sitting ducks for Iran’s unconventional and asymmetric warfare techniques. The idea is to level the playing field against a superior enemy with swarms of explosive-laden suicide speedboats, low-flying planes carrying anti-ship missiles, naval mines, and land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles, among other low-cost but highly effective measures. In minutes, Van Riper emerged victorious over his superior opponent and sank all 19 ships. Had it been real life, 20,000 US sailors and marines would have died.
Millennium Challenge 2002 was a complete disaster for the Pentagon, which had spent a quarter of a billion dollars to set up the extensive war game. It produced the exact opposite outcome they wanted. So what did the Pentagon do with these humbling results? Like a child playing a video game, they hit the reset button. They then rigged and scripted the game so that the US was guaranteed to win.
After realizing the integrity of the war game had been compromised, a disgusted Van Riper walked out mid-game. He then said: "Nothing was learned from this. And a culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future."
The main lesson of Millennium Challenge 2002 is that aircraft carriers - the biggest and most expensive ships ever built - wouldn’t last a single day in combat against even a regional power like Iran. Russia and China would have an even easier time dispatching them. They are overpriced toys. That means the US has wasted untold trillions on military hardware that could prove to be worthless in a serious conflict. Nonetheless, the US government still parades aircraft carriers around the world from time to time to try to intimidate its enemies. However, it’s a flawed strategy prone to catastrophic results if someone calls their bluff.
While Millennium Challenge 2002 occurred more than 20 years ago, it is of paramount importance today. Iran has substantially improved its asymmetric and unconventional warfare capabilities. It’s doubtful the US military would fare much better today than 20 years ago. In short, war with Iran today could be even more disastrous than the Millennium Challenge 2002 simulation.
Unfortunately, war with Iran is an increasingly probable outcome as tensions in the Middle East are at their highest point in generations and are trending higher. Previously, I lived in Beirut, Lebanon, for several years while working for an investment bank. The experience was effectively an advanced training course in Middle East geopolitics. Today, it helps me see the big picture in the region… and unfortunately, it isn’t pretty. I think the next big war in the Middle East is coming soon and could be the biggest one ever. It will focus on Iran."
“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!” - Robert A. Heinlein
“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.”
- Carl Sagan
And always remember...
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
America, 1910 - "1910 was well before my own time, of course, but I knew at least ten people who lived through it as adults, and discussed the era at some length with one of them, my great uncle Dave. And so this is an era I feel I can still reach out and touch.
One of the more interesting things about this era regards our separation from it. The great event that forged this divide was World War I, which is greatly under-appreciated in modern discourse. Schools cover World War II in great depth, but run through World War I fairly quickly. World War I, however – “The Great War” – changed human affairs and human consciousness far more than World War II did. The world before and the world afterward were very different places.
Bear in mind, however, that in 1910, people lived very similarly to the way we do. They (particularly in the cities) lived in houses with central heating, refrigerated their food, and ate the same foods we eat today. They had newspapers, affordable and rapid transportation, access to medical care, telegrams (delivery in an hour or two was common) and so on. Even movies and radio were starting to spread. Cars were arriving, as were electricity and telephones. Airplanes were starting to appear in the skies. Railroads went almost everywhere.
To give you a feel for daily life in 1910, here is a list of family expenses kept during November of that year: According to US News Money, the Cleveland Foundation calculated a family budget for 1910 that included:
• Food: $28 per month.
• Utilities: $4 per month, including fuel, light, and ice for the ice box.
• Insurance: $1, presumably life insurance.
• Streetcars: $1.50 per month.
• Clothing: $9 per month.
• General household expenses: $1 per month, which is equivalent to $23.38 today.
• In 1910, cars cost an average of $2,214, and cars built in the 1910s lasted about 5–7 years. In 1915, a home cost about $3,200, which is equivalent to $75,600 in 2015 dollars.
A major characteristic of this world was that people tended to be significantly more confident. And the primary reason for that was that their world was comprehensible. More or less all the factors of their daily lives were understandable. Even their scientific discoveries were understandable, provided that one was willing to get the necessary books and read them. It’s telling that television, just a few years later, was invented by a farm boy (Philo T. Farnsworth), whose knowledge came largely from reading magazines.
There is a critical difference between the person who sees the world as comprehensible and the person who does not:Understanding the world, we tend to make plans to accomplish our goals, and then pursue them, confident that we can (or at least are likely to) reach those goals. Feeling overcome by a world we cannot understand or rely upon, we hunker down in place. Not knowing what may or may not work, we pull back our horizons, hold on to whatever we do have and refuse to let go, even when letting go may get us something better. Those who can comprehend the world believe they can improve it, and so they insert their will into it.
What It Was Like: I’ve always liked the way Bill Buckler described this era in The Privateer: "There was a golden world which developed between 1815 and 1914. Over that century and with the interruptions of a few short wars a general peace had been the main feature. An immense optimism covered the world, economically underpinned by the Classical Gold Standard. Gold coinage, though often of different weights in different countries, WAS money. The entire western world was a form of payments union in the sense that Gold was money.
Governments were small; tiny compared to today. What taxes existed were almost imperceptible. The US had no income tax. Privacy, property and contracts were sacrosanct.
As I’ll often say, the people of this era often behaved foolishly, but they made their errors in a different and better context than we make ours in today. And the world between about 1815 and World War I was a type of golden age. And in fact, the technical wonders we enjoy would have been impossible without these people bringing them forward to us.
Between 1919 and 1935 or so, a great deal of human life was arranged in response to World War I and its pointless horrors. And the fact is that the West, in general, lost its confidence in this era. Sensitive commentators at the time (such as Virginia Wolfe) made note of it, and we see it from a number of people who reminisced about it. For example, economist Friedrich Hayek recalled this:
It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today. Hayek was not wrong about this. The law was simple in 1910 (legislation hadn’t yet overtaken the common law), and even beyond the rules you knew, law’s universal standard was “the reasonable man.” So long as you were reasonable, and your actions defensible with reason, you really didn’t have to worry very much about the law.
And regardless of the Victorian image of the time, there were many independent movements toward radical progress. Author Leonard Woolf wrote about the movement he was involved with this way: "We were not part of a negative movement of destruction against the past: We were out to construct something new; we were in the van of builders of a new society which should be free, rational, civilized, pursuing truth and beauty. It was all tremendously exhilarating."
Nor were women entirely silent. Here is a passage from Mary Wollstonecraft: "To be a good mother - a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers; wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret, against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow." I often think of this time as The Near Miss of 1900. I’m convinced that if somehow that moment had been continued, we’d be living far better and more happily than we are.
As I’ve noted in other places, a major source of our world’s confusion arises from our money. If that sounds odd, please bear in mind that money is the primary tool of our survival, being half of every transaction for food, housing and so on.
In 1910, new money had to be pulled from the ground with difficulty. And that difficulty kept it honest. It couldn’t be created by decree, which changed the tone of everything from taxes to stocks and bonds. More importantly, it kept the working man in a position of importance.
The next time you go through an old city, look at the grand homes that were built in this era, then consider this: Those homes were built by grocers, mechanics, longshoremen and bakers. As a result, working people carried more dignity than they have since. Hard work and prudence paid in those days, and there was no tax on income to siphon away one’s surplus. The hard-workers of this era made loans rather than begging for them. This informed not only their attitudes regarding themselves, but the mating strategies of the young.
In 1910, the young man went out to earn his “nest egg,” and thereby convinced the girl to marry him. There were myriad exceptions and failures, of course, but this was the standard model and could not have stood if it had been impossible. And, in fact, it was ridiculed and expelled a decade or two later, once the war and the income tax changed conditions so that very few could rise to it.
In Part One of this series we said that the Americans of 1960 still believed in their culture. These people certainly shared in that, but they believed in themselves in a deeper way than the Americans of 1960 did, and certainly far more than most people believe in themselves today."
"In today's vlog, we are at Meijer and are noticing some massive price increases on groceries and other products. It continues to get rough out here as many families continue to struggle to put food on the table!"
"Dive into "The Ultimate Cash Crisis: What You MUST Know!" People are adapting to life without cash, banks and ATMs. Discover the innovative solutions people are adopting and why keeping cash on hand is more crucial than ever! Not only are bank branches closing, but they’re absolutely limiting the amount of cash that people can take out of the bank. We are going to a cashless society."
"Markets up today ignoring war, debt, massive bubbles a commercial real estate crisis, people living pay check to pay check these markets are a complete rigged fantasy that are guaranteed to collapse."
“Large, dusty, spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen edge-on near the center of this rich telescopic image. The field of view spans nearly 2 degrees, or about 4 times the width of the Full Moon, toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus.
About 13 million light-years distant, NGC 4945 is almost the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy. But X-ray and infrared observations reveal even more high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. The other prominent galaxy in the field, NGC 4976, is an elliptical galaxy. Left of center, NGC 4976 is much farther away, at a distance of about 35 million light-years, and not physically associated with NGC 4945.”
"Sources tell Redacted that Russian President Putin was rushed to the Kremlin for an emergency war meeting in the middle of the night. What's going on? Are US troops launching a surprise attack on Odessa? Col. Douglas MacGregor joins Redacted with the latest."
