True dat

 

Healthranger observes that most people have no idea about how the world functions - or why it's that way.

While I am blessed to be able to interview some of the smartest people in the world, I remain aghast at the utter lack of knowledge among the "ignorant masses."

• Most people don't know a thing about food ingredients.
• They don't know where energy comes from.
• They don't know where their own organs are located in their own body.
• They don't know how mechanical things work, not even at a basic level (like combustion engines).
• They don't know basic first aid or emergency medicine for self-treatment.
• They are completely clueless when it comes to geography.
• They don't know what money is. (And they certainly don't understand compounding interest.)
• They don't know how computers work, or how storage devices function.

The average person is a walking biological shell of cognitive emptiness. And their lack of fundamental curiosity prevents them from ever making the effort to learn anything that matters.

But they are total experts in fashion, sports and celebrities, of course. They know all the latest trends pushed by shallow influencers, but they have zero knowledge of what's happening in the world and why their life is becoming more difficult by the day.

There's more at the link, and in the comments that follow.  Worthwhile reading.

I've noticed the same thing (although not among most of my readers, who wouldn't waste their time on my scribblings unless they shared my interest in when, where, who, how, why, etc.).  It really is frightening to listen to some of the terminal inanities spouted by some of our politicians (on both sides of the aisle - Republicans have idiots among their number, just as Democrats do).  That applies particularly to the Kumbaya school of international relations . . . "If we just leave Iran/Russia/China/North Korea/wherever alone, they'll leave us alone!  After all, everyone wants peace!"  Yeah.  Riiiiight.

What to do about it?  There's the rub.  I have no idea how to make people understand when they're not interested in understanding.  All one can do is "preach to the converted", sharing ideas and concerns with those who are prepared to think for themselves, and then take whatever steps are possible to protect ourselves from the ignorance of others.  On the other hand, that stores up troubles of its own.  Remember Aesop's fable about the ant and the grasshopper?  Jim Quinn updated it to reflect modern times.  I suspect his is more accurate than the original!

Peter

Brainwashed ideology runs headlong into common sense

 

I'm going to embed a video clip below.  It shows Gina Plata-Nino, the Director of SNAP Policy and Advocacy at the Food Research and Action Center, being questioned by Rep. Brandon Gill.  The topic of discussion is efforts to remove unhealthy food choices - in this particular case, sodas - from the list of items eligible to be bought using funds from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

Ms. Plata-Nino is clearly left-wing and populist in her approach, defending peoples' right to use SNAP benefits in any way they please.  Notice how she avoids, evades and dodges any attempt to get her to admit that sugary sodas are in no way nutritional, and aren't really "food" as the SNAP program was originally intended to fund.  She literally can't be persuaded to acknowledge facts.  Instead, all she can do is repeat her pre-programmed talking points.

It's a bit like medical administrators and professionals who absolutely cannot admit that only biological women can become pregnant and give birth.  They daren't acknowledge that fact, because in doing so they would be forced to acknowledge that "trans" women are not, in fact, women at all - merely cosmetically adapted males.

Here's the video.  It's only about five minutes long, but I think it's worth watching.

That's what we're facing in every election in this country.  Districts dominated by people who use government benefits will listen to advocates and politicians like Ms. Plata-Nino, and vote in lockstep with those who promise them more benefits without cost to themselves.  Districts dominated by people whose taxes have to fund those benefits will be (legitimately) angry at how they're wasted, exploited and abused by the recipients.

Sadly, more and more districts are dominated by those who want something for nothing, and vote accordingly.  Many of those votes are, of course, illegitimate, as the widespread investigations into voter fraud and electoral register mismanagement are demonstrating.  Will that be enough to put things right?  Your guess is as good as mine . . .

Peter

Not such apex predators

 

I had to laugh at this blog post from fellow South African expatriate Kim du Toit.  He and I see eye to eye on many issues (not surprising, given our similar backgrounds).

This morning he wrote about an article titled "One Super Predator in Africa Instills More Fear Than Lions".  The super predator, of course, turned out to be humans.  We use brains and tools to conquer our environment and the nasty things that we find there.  We've done it for millennia, and will doubtless go on doing it until the extinction of our species and/or the entropy death of the universe.

Kim doesn't mince his words.

We are, in the animal kingdom, like marshmallows.  Pork-flavored marshmallows, to be precise, just the thing to make lions sharpen their claws before putting on a dinner napkin.

So why do these dangerous animals think that we are the apex predators?

Because we don’t fight fair.  As though fighting for one’s life, or hunting down food requires us to be all Marquis-of-Queensbury types;  what foolishness.

**** that.  If a pride of lions wants to target a few humans for brekkie, well… say hello to an A-10 Warthog or an Apache attack helicopter, and let’s see who’s really the apex predator, Fluffy.

Click over there to read the whole thing.  It's giggle-worthy . . . and true, too, for the most part.

Of course, if one of those predators catches you alone and unarmed in the bush, you're toast, but that's your fault.  Being a successful apex predator requires remaining on the apex, so to speak.  Step off it, and there will be consequences.

Peter

Shocking news - except to Africans

 

I note the following news report.

A South African hotelier is believed to have been eaten by a 15ft crocodile after human remains were found inside the swollen reptile.

The animal was shot from a helicopter and airlifted from the crocodile-infested Komati River in a daring police operation before a post-mortem examination was carried out.

A ring was found inside the belly of the 500kg apex predator and is thought to have belonged to Gabriel Batista, 59.

The businessman was swept away in floodwaters while trying to drive across the Komati River in the north-east of the country a week ago.

Investigators will carry out DNA tests on the bones and flesh found inside the crocodile.

. . .

 As well as the body parts, six different types of shoes were found, according to Capt Potgieter.

There's more at the link, including images.

The comments from friends and acquaintances in the USA have been amusing.  A surprising number are absolutely horrified that a man who'd just escaped drowning had promptly been eaten by a wild animal.  It's almost as if it was unfair, somehow.  They weren't comforted by my assurance that in large parts of Africa, that sort of thing happens on an almost daily basis.  As for the "six different types of shoes" . . . yeah, I'd say Mr. Batista was far from the only human meal that croc had enjoyed.  Local tribespeople were doubtless greatly relieved by the news that it had been caught.

Rural Africa remains a very dark continent, filled with very deadly animals.  Actual examples:

• A man visits a neighboring village, gets drunk, and decides to walk back to his village along a deserted path at night.  Halfway there, a passing leopard finds him and decides that he'll make a satisfactory supper.
• A man goes looking for a lost cow along a river bank.  A hippo, grazing on long grass a short distance away, decides that she doesn't want him (or anyone else) getting between her and the water, which is her security blanket.  She bites him in half.
• A hunter gets too close to an elephant, which promptly tramples him into pink slush in the mud.  He isn't able to shoot her in time to save himself, and in the stress of the moment, only wounds her.  While she's recovering from the bullet wound, she kills several local villagers who get too close to her, on the general principle that if a man did this to her, she's going to presume that any man she sees is going to try to do likewise.
• An armored personnel carrier is driving through thick brush and trees.  The vehicle commander is standing with his head and shoulders outside the turret, trying to see through the thick growth to plot his course.  A boomslang (tree snake) is jarred off its branch by the APC as it brushes against the tree.  It falls onto the vehicle commander, bites him (injecting a full dose of poison, which proves fatal) and then falls through the turret hatch into the interior of the vehicle, biting two other soldiers before it's killed by a rain of rifle butts.  The two survive, but only because it had already injected much of its venom into the vehicle commander.  They're sick for several weeks.

All those incidents were personally known to me.  I was nearby when they all happened.  That's the norm in wild rural Africa.  The cities can be a lot tamer, but not always.  A few decades ago, I remember two leopards who set up house in the concrete basement and utility spaces of the biggest soccer stadium in Soweto, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people.  They lived off local cats and dogs.  When their presence was deduced (due to the rapid decline in other local pets and wildlife, and the presence of their tracks after rain) the local police were asked to hunt them down and shoot them.  Freely translated and interpreted, the local cops' reply was along the lines of, "You want us to go into a concrete labyrinth, with no light at all, to hunt two big cats that can see in the dark?  Oh, hell, no!  Here, take our rifles and show us how it's done.  We'll watch.  In fact, we'll sell tickets on pay-per-view!"

I'm very sorry for Mr. Batista, and for his family, of course . . . but that's Africa:  and in Africa, the good guys don't always win.  It goes with the territory.

Peter

The real problem of "living up to your income"

 

I know plenty of people who are using almost everything they earn to support their lifestyle.  Some do it because they earn so little, they can't afford to do anything else with it!  Others do so because they want much more than they actually need, and they earn a salary high enough to afford wants as well as needs, so they spend all their "excess" money on those luxuries.

That's where the trap comes in for everybody, but particularly for higher-earning individuals and families.  They're committed to repaying hire-purchase accounts, credit card bills, leases, and what have you.  They've used their surplus income to "bring forward" consumption that they'd otherwise have had to put off until they managed to save enough to buy it.  Instead of saving money, they borrow money in order to spend even more.  Psychology Today examines this behavior.

For decades, America has operated on a simple yet precarious principle: Borrow from tomorrow to pay for today. This mindset, deeply embedded in our economic systems and individual behaviors, has created a teetering tower of debt that threatens to collapse under its own weight. As a nation, we've normalized living beyond our means—from federal deficit spending to consumer credit card debt—with seemingly little consideration for the inevitable reckoning.

. . .

The national debt has grown exponentially rather than linearly, suggesting that each generation has become more comfortable leveraging the future than its predecessor.

. . .

Historical evidence suggests that debt-fueled economies eventually face correction. The 2008 financial crisis provided a preview of what happens when leveraged systems begin to unravel. Yet instead of fundamentally restructuring our approach, we responded with even more borrowing and financial engineering.

There's more at the link.

The problem is that such spending habits last only as long as there's money to spend.  I'm seeing more and more cases where income is suddenly cut off (as in being fired, or made redundant) or greatly reduced (getting a new job, but having to accept a much lower wage or salary than you made in the old job).  Having weighed oneself down with debt and spending patterns based on a higher income, suddenly one is faced with creditors demanding repayment, vehicles being repossessed, and all the other burdens of an over-leveraged household.  Kids whine when they're told they can't have all they're used to, spouses blame each other for the sudden hole in their finances, and in some cases families break down altogether under the strain.

Karl Denninger sums up the problem.

The real problem for ordinary people in the economy is that anything that is unsustainable over a sufficient amount of time will blow up in your face.  But when will it blow up?  That's a more-difficult problem.  For example we know that housing is largely locked up in a large part of the country -- indeed, most of it.  In those places where it sort-of-isn't there are other serious problems including property tax and insurance concerns that might as well have it locked up from a standpoint of actual affordability.  Add to this that many formerly thought of as "safe" professions which earn a nice wage, including computer science and medical, are rapidly being destroyed in terms of forward earnings capacity by both AI and foreign worker imports.  There are plenty of stories already of people living quite high on the hog having accumulated a lifestyle with mandatory monthly spend commensurate with $250,000 wages suddenly being laid off and finding no replacement for that wage at even half what they formerly made.  If you've managed to get yourself into a leveraged position with a forward requirement for such earnings and they disappear you're in very serious trouble indeed.

Again, more at the link.

Just this week (so far) I've heard from friends and acquaintances fighting that very issue.  Examples:

• A family has been reduced from three cars to one, because they couldn't afford the lease payments, insurance, etc. for the two very nice vehicles used by father and mother.  The remaining old beater had been given to their teenage son, but he's had to give it back to the family.  Neither he nor they are very happy about that.
• Two families are urgently seeking low-cost rental accommodation because their nice big McMansion-style houses are being repossessed.  They're finding it almost impossible to locate anything as nice as what they had, and even lesser houses are more expensive to rent than they had anticipated.  It's gotten to the point of screaming fights with their kids because they're going to have to share two rooms, one for the boys and one for the girls, rather than each have their own space.
• Two families have had to give up their pets to shelters for (hopefully) adoption.  It's been a real trauma, particularly for the children, as they can't be sure their pets will go to loving homes where they'll be properly cared for.
• I know too many people who are using one credit card to pay off another each month, never reducing what they owe.

With those problems fresh in mind, you can bet that my wife and I are checking on our monthly expenses to make sure we can fit into a reasonable budget, and keep our heads above water if any sort of financial emergency hits.  Recent medical bills would have made that very problematic, except that you, dear readers, came to our rescue last year, to our deep and abiding gratitude.  Even so, it's up to us to use what we have wisely, and not waste it.  We also made a decision early in our marriage to get out of debt as far as possible (following Dave Ramsay's advice), and pay cash for routine expenses wherever possible, and pay off our credit cards and other accounts in full every month rather than accumulate a balance, and save money in an emergency fund.  Those decisions have been a Godsend for us, sparing us more than a little worry.

I guess more and more of us are going to be facing this conundrum as prices increase and jobs become harder to find.  It's a good time for all of us to take stock of where we are, what we're spending, and how we might cope if similar problems rear their ugly heads in our lives.  If you have helpful suggestions that might help others to do that, please share them in Comments.

Peter

Stand by for the next Shifta War...

 

I note that the Kenya-Somalia border is to be reopened.

Kenya's border with Somalia will re-open in April almost 15 years after it shut because of attacks by Islamist militant group al-Shabab, President William Ruto has announced.

Based in Somalia, the group has masterminded a series of deadly assaults in Kenya including one on a shopping centre in the capital, Nairobi, killing 67 people in 2013 and one at a university in Garissa two years later killing 148.

The plan has been announced before, in 2023, but further attacks postponed the arrangements.

Ruto said the intention to re-open two crossings follows years of security assessments, adding that there will be a heavy deployment of security forces to ensure the move does not compromise safety.

There's more at the link.

I think this is a terrible idea.  That part of Africa - northern Kenya, eastern and northern Uganda, southern Sudan, Ethiopia, and of course Somalia - has been home to the so-called Shifta bandits for generations (of whom Al Shabab is nothing more or less than a recent reinvention of the wheel, with a religious gloss overlaid on their traditional barbarism).  The current disastrous situation - almost a genocide - in southern Sudan is just the latest atrocity in a region that's been soaked in blood for centuries.  It's family against family, clan against clan, tribe against tribe.  The so-called Shifta War was fought there in the 1960's, and despite "official" peace agreements, has never really stopped.

I spent time in the area many years ago, trying to arrange mission convoys for various church groups, getting food and medical aid to mission stations that desperately needed it.  I think my convoys were the only ones that usually got through, because I made sure to hire the meanest, most vicious Shifta bandits I could find as convoy guards against their fellow scumbags.  They would be well paid, but only after the convoy got through and returned safely.  Things got "sporty" on occasion, but my guards usually justified their cost and then some.  Sadly, some mission groups decided that my methods were insufficiently Christian, and had to stop.  (It's odd that most of their aid convoys never made it more than a few miles from their depots before being raided and robbed blind.  They were regarded as "soft targets".  My convoys were not!  I think they felt I was making them look bad to their NGO sponsors.)

There are many other places like this around the world.  Western news media seldom have anything worthwhile to say about them.  They quote government ministers or spokesmen who proclaim that everything is sweetness and light, while on the ground it's "the strong survive" and devil take the hindmost.  Shifta country is one of the worst . . . and now they want to reopen a border between two of the worst-affected parts of Shifta country.

I already know what the result is going to be.

Peter

If you haven't been following the job market...

 

... you might not have noticed that reality is catching up to prediction rather faster than we might want to believe.

A couple of weeks ago I cited Matt Shumer's blog article about the current state of artificial intelligence (AI).  His article went viral, and has been quoted in many mainstream news media outlets.  Here are a couple of excerpts, followed by real-world examples of how his predictions are already happening in the corporate world.

I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

. . .

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

. . .

Amodei has said that AI models "substantially smarter than almost all humans at almost all tasks" are on track for 2026 or 2027.

Let that land for a second. If AI is smarter than most PhDs, do you really think it can't do most office jobs?

Think about what that means for your work.

How does this translate to the real world, right now?  Go read this article:

‘It’s going to be painful for a lot of people’:

Software engineers could go extinct this year,

says Claude Code creator

Want another one?

Jack Dorsey cuts nearly half of Block

workforce amid major AI overhaul

That last one's a doozy.  Dorsey is cutting almost half of his company's work force, because he no longer needs them to do the work they used to do.  AI is replacing them.

[Dorsey] said in his note that the job cuts are "one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation."

. . .

Dorsey said that the "intelligence tools we're creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly."

There's more at the link.

Block's layoffs affect every department and every kind of work within the organization.  They're not confined to IT workers, computer specialists and the like.  From secretarial to marketing to management to product development, all jobs are on the line.

What does this mean for your job?  For your kids' education and preparation for the workforce?  We'd better all be paying attention . . . and preparing Plans B, C and D for personal development if we want to be employed in the future.

Peter

Corruption at the top of the health care industry

 

Yesterday we looked at how vaccine manufacturers may be vulnerable to lawsuits, even perhaps criminal charges, following the publication of the Medicare billing database last weekend.  That's not the only example of potential high-level corruption coming out of the COVID debacle.

Eaton Rapids Joe reminds us:

Slowly, ever so slowly, it is starting to leak out that scientists and researchers knew back in 2020 before the vaccines were released that aspirin was the Covid super-drug. Yes, plain, old, garden-variety, low-dose aspirin.

If fact, they knew back in 2007 that aspirin was THE GO TO drug for SARS. SARS is also a corona virus and is a kissing-cousin to Covid-19. 

. . .

The "problem" is that aspirin is a commodity with very, very low profit margins. 

The other "problem" was that emergency certification of vaccines are not allowed if there are other approved therapies. Powerful people had patents for modified-RNA based vaccines. It was in their economic best-interest to squash alternative therapies. It is also likely that they enjoyed basking in the glory of being called "Savior".

This is one of the reasons why I have a very low level of trust in the Deep State. 

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

There's more to it than just aspirin.  The health authorities also cracked down heavily on the prescribing and dispensing of ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat COVID.  In fact, they tried to prevent them being distributed at all, withdrawing stocks and sequestering them - despite both drugs being proven, effective remedies for COVID-like diseases for many years.

As Eaton Rapids Joe points out, the problem was that emergency certification of COVID vaccines was only permissible if there were no other approved, effective treatments.  Given the money to be made from the vaccines, the solution was simple:  remove other effective treatments from the market.  That way, emergency certification could be (and was) given - and the vaccine manufacturers, health authorities, and other beneficiaries earned literally billions of dollars.  The fact that thousands died or suffered ongoing health problems from the vaccines bothered them not at all.

I knew about this at first hand, because I was born and raised in Africa, where IVM and HCQ have been in daily use by millions of people for decades.  The developers of IVM were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015, and both it and HCQ are on the World Health Organization's Model List of Essential Medicines.  IVM is a remedy for many parasites and fungal infections, while HCQ was developed as an anti-malarial drug;  but both have proven effective against congestive diseases such as SARS or COVID.  In addition, HCQ has proven effective against certain forms of arthritis (I use it to treat spinal arthritis).

Don't be fooled by claims that neither has been proved to be effective against COVID.  That propaganda was hurriedly poured out in torrents by the medical industry during the COVID scare, because they didn't want to upset the money rolling in from their new vaccines.  I'll give you the clearest possible evidence that both worked.  Where are the reports of massive COVID infections and mortalities in Africa?  Even at the height of the scare, there were no such reports, because COVID never spread wildly in Africa.  Why not?  My opinion is that it's because so many Africans - millions of them - were already taking IVM and/or HCQ on a regular basis to treat common infections and diseases on that continent.  They had already built up a "pre-resistance" to COVID because of that, and so did not succumb to it.  Effectively, COVID was stopped before it could get a foothold.  That's my opinion, of course, but I know at first hand how effective those drugs were (and still are) in Africa.  I took them myself for many years.  If there's another explanation, let's hear it.  I'm waiting.

I still keep supplies of IVM and HCQ on hand, because they still work against a wide variety of congestive diseases, viruses, etc.  My wife and I have both felt the beginnings of the current flu bug, or whatever it is, during the past few weeks.  We have a simple solution:  the moment we feel the crud coming on, we take one tablet of IVM and one of HCQ right away, and then alternate them daily until the problem is past.  Neither of us developed full-blown crud, and neither of us felt (light) symptoms for more than 24-48 hours.  We've been doing that for a long time.  I know that "correlation is not causation", but after years of using both drugs in Africa, I'm in no doubt about how useful they are.

There you have it, friends.  If you can't get your hands on IVM or HCQ locally (and the US medical establishment is still pretty firmly against them, for obvious reasons) then I suggest you consider other means of doing so.  Some go to Mexico and patronize local pharmacies, who have no such reservations and don't even require prescriptions.  Some buy online from pharmacies in other countries, which is illegal under US law, so I'm not going to recommend you do that.  Of course not.  IVM can be had in veterinary form in this country (derided by the authorities as "horse dewormer" - but what horse dewormer has won a Nobel Prize?).  The horse dewormer version still works on humans.

Thanks to Eaton Rapids Joe for mentioning aspirin and COVID.  It's a worthwhile reminder.

Peter

He has the right of it

 

Aesop, whom we've met in these pages on many occasions, is back from his blogging hiatus and demonstrating that sarcasm, acerbic wit, and not giving a damn do, indeed, convey points of view very well.  Here he is discussing the US dollar and fiat currency in general.

Wages since 1985 have cratered. Case in point, my parents' combined household income in 1985 was at the 50th percentile at the time, i.e the mid-point, nationally. Or notionally. Mine is currently at the 90th percentile nationwide, all by my ownself, IOW, better than 90% of US households. But for me to have the purchasing power they enjoyed near the household median in 1985, my paycheck would need to be larger than it is by seven- to ten-fold. IOW, I make 500% of what mom and pop did, yet the purchasing power of my income is only about 40% of what theirs was then. That's how much nothing my fiatbux "Real wages" command currently, and how badly "Real wages" have dropped.

Gold is gold, which is why the spot price is USD$4500/oz as I write this, compared to +/- USD$300 in 1985. That means a dollar in 2026 is worth less than 7% in real terms what it was 40 years ago.

. . .

For Common Core grads, that means your dollar now is worth less than 5/1000ths - 0.005% - of what a dollar was worth in 1932. ($1 x 0.065 x 0.07 = 0.00455. QED) A dollar currently is worth less, in real terms, than the cost for the ink and paper to print it. Maybe write that down on your hand in Sharpie, lest ye forget. We don't need zinc pennies anymore, because $1 bills are the new 1/2¢ coin. And the only people who've figured that out are EVERYONE who's selling you anything, worldwide, and why all your s***, from cars to houses to Happy Meals,  has zoomed in price. Gold hasn't zoomed. Your dollars are simply worth Jack, and S***. That's how inflation works, with the Treasury printing fiatbux three shifts a day, and inflating the unbacked money supply by trillions, year after year. Fun times, dead ahead. 

. . .

This reality is why Fiatbux - dollars, francs, yen, renminbi, whatever - are all finely engraved toilet paper. Don't make me do a retard crayon talk here. The only things that have cratered harder than "real wages" since 1985 are Russian armored regiment performance, or possibly Minnesota fraud investigations. Even Catholic church child abuse investigations have improved more than real wages since 1985. To suggest otherwise makes CNN economic reporters and hosts on The View sound wise. 

. . .

Sometime between tomorrow and death, most of the world is going to discover firsthand what the inhabitants of Weimar, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela all learned about financial reality. It isn't going to be pretty. In a Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff kind of way. Mind the drop.

Just saying.

There's more at the link.

Of course, he's saying nothing new to those of you who've been following our discussions on this blog over the past few years.  We most recently addressed the problem less than a week ago.  Nevertheless, there are relatively few people, in my experience, who actually understand the issues and/or will reorient their lives in such a way as to live according to reality as it truly is.  Most people will continue to spend money, not on things of lasting worth or that will retain their value, but rather on what the Bible calls "riotous living":  weekends in Vegas, fashionable clothes, fancy frou-frou imitations of coffee, and so on.  If most people would spend on true necessities what they spend every month on such fripperies, they could prepare themselves and their families for hard times and sleep easier at night.  However, most don't bother.

If you want a glaring example of evidence about our present situation, it's actually the absence of a piece of evidence.  It's simply this:  What happened to the audit of US gold reserves in Fort Knox that we were promised?  Where is it?  Where are the results?  The subject has literally vanished from view.  My conclusion is that it's being deliberately suppressed;  and if that's the case, then I can only assume that our gold reserves simply aren't there any more.  Where they are, and/or what happened to them, I have no idea:  but if we had them, there's no reason at all why we, the people who (in theory) own them, just as we own (hah!) our government, should not be told about them.  I'm pretty sure the powers that be understand full well that if they aren't there, they no longer underpin the value (such as it is) of the US dollar, so they'd rather ignore them and pretend the problem doesn't exist.  Trouble is, after we've been lied to and misled so often by so many administrations, nobody with two or more working brain cells trusts the deafening silence which is all we hear about the subject.

(If you think differently, I have this bridge in Brooklyn, NYC I'd like to sell you.  It's beautiful!  You'll make a mint out of charging people tolls to cross it!  Price on application.  Cash only, please, and in small bills.)

Oh, well . . .

Peter

A very sobering statistic

 

This headline caught my eye yesterday:

Day 1,419: The Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Just Surpassed Soviet War With Nazi Germany

This week has marked another grim milestone in the nearly four-year long Russia-Ukraine war. The conflict has just entered its 1,419th day - which means it has officially surpassed the entirety of the historic Soviet campaign against invading Nazi Germany, which lasted 1,418 days from June 1941 to May 1945.

Red Army forces eventually drove Nazi troops back from the Volga River all the way to Berlin, before seizing the German capital. But in today's war, the 1,419th day is just another in a long one in a tragic and grinding war of attrition, where it is believed each side has lost literally hundreds of thousands.

. . .

On both sides, a whole generation of young men is being wiped out.

There's more at the link.

We too often focus on the geopolitical and/or military and/or strategic and/or statistical aspects of the Russia-Ukraine war.  However, that misses the human tragedy that is playing out for both countries.

All nations involved in the two World Wars lost a significant proportion of their brightest and best young men.  After those wars, their absence was noteworthy in that the performance of most of those countries (in any sphere you care to name) was less than expected, and lower than pre-war forecasts would have anticipated.  My father, who fought in World War II, often said that the reason Britain descended into socialist chaos so fast after the war was that too many of the future leaders who could have kept her on track were dead.  Leaders tend to make themselves vulnerable simply by leading, because they're priority targets in war.  An army without effective leaders at all levels - NCO, junior officer, field officer, etc. - is a losing army, and, by extension, so is the nation that uses it.

We don't know what the future holds for either Russia or Ukraine, but we do know for certain that a lot of their young men aren't going to be there to help them.  Both countries will suffer from this loss for decades to come.

May the dead of both sides be forgiven their sins, if that is possible, and may they rest in peace.

Peter

"Politics is the art of the possible" - not the impossible

 

First German chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously opined, "Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best."  That's as true today as it was when he said it, about one-and-a-half centuries ago.  Unfortunately, many politicians ignore it and try to carry on regardless, usually with disastrous or tragic consequences.

The latest to do so is Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado.

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has said she should "absolutely" be in charge of the country, following the US ousting of President Nicolás Maduro last week.

"We are ready and willing to serve our people as we have been mandated," Machado said in an interview with the BBC's US partner CBS.

She thanked US President Donald Trump for his "leadership and courage" after US forces stormed Caracas and arrested Maduro, but said nobody trusted the deposed president's ally who has been appointed as interim leader.

Machado and her opposition movement claimed victory in 2024's heavily disputed elections, but Trump has refused to back her, saying she lacks popular support.

There's more at the link.

I accept that Ms. Machado won an electoral majority in Venezuela during the most recent elections, but she never took power, because Maduro and his goons controlled almost every avenue of control open to them.  She was blocked at every turn, and had to go into hiding in case he arrested her - in which case she'd surely have had an accident or illness while incarcerated that would have killed her.  She recently had to be smuggled out of the country to accept her Nobel Peace Prize.

There's simply no way she can muster enough support from the authority structures in Venezuela to hope to take over.  Maduro and Chavez loyalists would kill her before she took office, and the entire government bureaucracy and machinery of state - long since converted into bribe-taking, corrupt, self-seeking figureheads - would refuse to obey any directive she issued, or any law she had passed, that threatens their place in the sun.  She may have popular support among the electorate, but the reality of the Venezuelan equivalent of the "Deep State" is that electoral support doesn't matter at this time.  As we noted yesterday:

Trump “is correct in saying this is a deeply corrupt regime, and it’s a deeply factionalised military and state structure engaged in all sorts of illicit activities, who would be hard pressed to part with their ill-gotten gains, prestige and positions, and literally put their necks on the line,” says Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House.

. . .

And Maduro and Hugo Chávez, his predecessor, bought loyalty by carving the state into fiefdoms from which their various clients could extract rents, impoverishing the nation while creating powerful rival power centres.

“Now the head is gone, as we see when you have dictators die, you end up getting a lot of rivals under the leader jostling for power. So don’t be surprised if somebody in the military shoots the vice-president. That’s part of the disintegration,” says Pape.

Again, more at the link.

I agree that, in simple justice, Ms. Machado probably should be the next President of Venezuela.  However, in cold, hard, practical terms, for her to assume that office would be a death sentence for her, her family, and many Venezuelans who support her.  It would plunge that country into even greater turmoil.  It's simply impossible under present conditions.  To think otherwise is to live in cloud cuckoo land.

Peter

So much for tolerance

 

Brandon Smith, whom we've met in these pages on several previous occasions, points out that our excessive and inappropriate tolerance has led to the exploitation of our culture by the Third World, at grievous expense to ourselves.

The “melting pot” has been poisoned with a rancid cocktail of nefarious agendas. Any positive vestiges of the ideal have been lost. Any value the melting pot might have once had is gone. All that is left is an army of parasites looking for blood; a swarm of mosquitoes rushing in to latch onto a vein. Few if any of these people or institutions care about the “American Dream”, they only see the US as an easy target ripe for conquest.

. . .

No other culture on Earth worships tolerance like westerners do, and there’s a good reason for that. In the case of the US, our ancestors ... garnered us enough riches that we can afford to virtue signal, but not for much longer.

The people that want to give our civilizational wealth away are people who lack respect for the trials and tribulations required to obtain it.  They have no clue what it will take to earn that success back.

Another problem is that our tolerance often goes unappreciated because it is not a virtue for any other culture, either. The third world sees tolerance as weakness and opportunity. Many foreign social belief systems, from Judaism, to Hinduism to Islam, carry an ancient code of tribalism, an insider/outsider mentality of supremacy which is admonished in modern western thought but tolerated in immigrants.

For third worlders, a culture which is tolerant is fair game for exploitation and perhaps even invasion. You will consistently see foreign groups in the US argue that they are indeed American, but at the same time they will declare allegiance to their nation of origin. Their love of America is based on their love of the WEALTH they can derive from America. They’re laughing all the way to the closest Western Union.

Most have no interest in our principles and our heritage. They see America as an economic zone, a global commons with resources to be tapped. In other words, foreigners see immigration as a fishing business, a means to gain access to a largely unprotected wealth pool created by a culture with more historic merit and more success. They have been gathering their nets for quite some time.

In 2024 the US government under Joe Biden spent over $72 billion on foreign aid with another $26 billion in supplementals. India and Mexico transfer around $100 billion total in remittance from the US each year (foreign workers sending money back home). A number of officials with ethnic roots in these countries regularly argue in favor of continued visas and mass immigration while claiming it’s “for the good of Americans.”

Again, their loyalty is to their culture of origin first and America last.

For progressives and globalists immigration is also about wealth, primarily the redistribution of it from middle-class and upper-class Americans into foreign coffers. They see the common American people (conservatives) as a thorn in their side that needs to be removed. The draining of our buying power and living standards is a stepping stone to cultural deconstruction.

Mass immigration is a tool for social change. Multiculturalism erases national pride and the concept of protected borders. For if we are overwhelmed by the third world, who is going to care about maintaining the borders of our nation anymore? We might as well let the whole thing collapse, right?

They openly admit to this agenda, it’s not a secret. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

There's more at the link.

I'm very much in favor of tolerance, provided that those to whom it is extended reciprocate by assimilating into our culture and national norms, and actively seek to give back to the society that has accepted them.  Tolerance is very much a two-way street.  I've tried very hard to live that since coming to the USA myself, almost thirty years ago.  I hope I've succeeded.

However, many immigrants from the Third World have not done so . . . precisely the opposite, in fact, as exemplified by recent revelations about Somali fraudulent activities in Minnesota and Ohio.  For them, I daresay our tolerance has played out its string - and not before time.  Let them take such attitudes and practices back to Somalia, where they belong.

Peter

Immigration from the Third World

 

We've all heard variations of the meme that "If you import the Third World, you become the Third World".  To a large extent, it's true - just look at the crime, welfare and health statistics of most enclaves of such immigrants and they tell their own story.  Unfortunately, it's regarded as racist to point out that reality.

Lawdog has written a blunt, in-your-face summary of Third World reality.

When you import the 3rd World, you get 3rd World values

He's only the latest to point out that reality - and although he's writing about Somalia, you can extend his conclusions to cover the whole of tribal Africa.  I've written about that at length myself:  see my article "What to do about Africa?" for an in-depth discussion.  (For an overseas perspective, The Spectator's Australian edition published earlier this year an article titled "Importing the third world: The cost of accepting immigrants who don’t share our values is too high".  It's also worth reading.)

Like Lawdog, I grew up in Africa, and I've worked in most sub-Saharan African states.  I entirely agree with him.  The whole continent is a colossal mess, and probably will remain so, because nobody is ready, willing or able to impose a working system of ethics and social standards upon the existing morass.  It's no wonder so many are trying to flee the continent by any means possible, even risking their lives to do so - because staying put will be just as great a risk to their lives, if not greater.  Many will quite willingly commit murder if that's the only way to get here.  I know.  I've seen it happen.

Far too many of our illegal immigrants come from backgrounds like this.  Only by removing them from our midst will our own crime, welfare and health burden be eased, because they're a very large part of the reason why it's so heavy.

Peter

A very timely reminder about emergencies

 

The former Secretary-General of NATO, Lord Robertson of Britain, is not complacent about the danger of war in Europe.  He warns that Britain, and by extension every other country in NATO, needs to better prepare its citizens for what might happen.

Robertson has a torch [flashlight] on his key ring, in case the lights go out, and some spare money, in case the ATMs stop working in London.

“We are under attack,” Robertson, 79, said. He is now a Labour peer and has met Putin nine times.

“He (Putin) is a very different individual to the one that I did business with.”

. . .

“I think we are being tested. They’re going to the edge of what they think is acceptable. They won’t go across that line, at this point,” Robertson said of Russia.

Targeted assassinations, cyberattacks, sabotage and disinformation campaigns are all examples of Moscow’s so-called grey zone activities.

“That’s the way in which you undermine western societies. There is no doubt at all, there is a challenge to the West,” he added.

. . .

“With our adversaries becoming bolder and our critical national infrastructure becoming more fragile and much more on a knife edge, we need to be much much better prepared than we are today,” he said “It won’t be enough to wait to until the lights go out and the hospitals shut and the data centres melt because the air conditioning has gone out and the traffic lights have stopped and the ATMs don’t work anymore.

“At that point, people will expect government to have done something,” he said.

. . .

Robertson was as “ready as I could be”, with torches [flashlights] in every room, a battery-powered radio and a stockpile of food and water.

He said it was also the case in the UK that the public needed to have “resilience” in case there were civil emergencies or financial disasters.

Following Knighton’s speech at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) this week, he suggested the government could start to engage the public by issuing booklets to prepare UK citizens for war, such as Sweden’s recent If Crisis or War Comes.

There's more at the link.

All the risks he highlights are likely to occur in the USA as well.  We've already had concrete evidence of the dangers:

• Known terrorists identified and arrested within our borders, some even legally admitted due to lax background checks;
• Foreign students trying to smuggle dangerous bacteriological material into the USA (and don't tell me it's for "research" - if it was, they could legally obtain all they need within the country, without smuggling.  They can only have been planning to position it to do as much damage as possible if and when released);
• Foreign criminal gangs and drug cartels actively setting up cells and groups in almost every major US city, including smuggling weapons, illegal narcotics and other dangerous substances across our borders.

Such people, and/or those they've influenced, could very easily disrupt a city by the simplest of sabotage activities.  I'm not going to go into details, for obvious reasons, but back in the day, I was a sector officer in civil defense for one of South Africa's largest cities.  I know whereof I speak.  The ease with which ordinary, everyday services and utilities could be disrupted was enough to make for sleepless nights, and now that everything's dependent on computer systems and (increasingly) artificial intelligence, they are even more vulnerable.  That's why China, among others, is trying to deliberately infiltrate as many industrial, commercial and control networks as possible - so that it can disrupt them at the flick of a switch if it should become necessary to them.

I'm not a doom, gloom and disaster merchant.  I don't run around crying "Wolf!"  However, the evidence of these dangers is all around us, and I don't have to make up a thing to justify improving our personal and family preparedness for the sorts of problems and disruptions that may occur.  I daresay most American households could not survive serious shortages or systemic breakdowns for as little as a week;  a month is probably out of the question for most of them - yet I (and many others) regard a month as a minimum period to be able to get by without outside assistance.  Attitudes toward preparedness need to change, and change quickly, if we're to be able to withstand the sort of problems raised by Lord Robertson, the Swedish government, and so many others.

A timely reminder indeed.

Peter

Putting the dollar into perspective

 

We've published charts several times in the past, detailing how the buying power of the US dollar has declined over the course of the past hundred years or so.  Visual Capitalist has just published the newest such graphic, which I recommend to you - it's worth viewing, and thinking about.

What struck me was this inset showing the buying power of the dollar in terms of candy and other consumables, over the years.  I've snipped it as a screenshot to make it easier to read.

Now that's a graphic illustration of what our money is currently (not) worth!

Peter

Putting the economy in perspective

 

I'm getting, not merely irritated, but actually alarmed by the number of people (particularly journalists) who are prattling along about how US consumers are spending as much as last year, and that therefore there's no need to worry about a recession, blah, blah, blah ad nauseam.

The reality is very simple.  Sure, the dollar amount spent is about the same in most areas:  but the quantity and/or quality of goods and/or services those dollars are buying is a lot less than it was in earlier years.  Things are more expensive, and their quality is often less than it was in the past.  Where I could buy a self-propelled Honda lawnmower for plus-or-minus $400 two years ago, the identical model, from the same store, is today almost $900.  Where I could buy an expensive replacement part for my vehicle two years ago for $950 (dealer price), today it's almost $1,500.  Those are just two examples.  I'm sure my readers can supply many more from their own experience.  In short:  if I bought ten widgets last year for $100 apiece, and this year I bought four widgets for $250 apiece, I've spent $1,000 in each of those years - but I've got less than half as much for my money.

In other words, the actual dollar amount spent is no longer an accurate measure of the state of the economy.  It's buying a lot less than it used to, and the jobs that were supported by that quantity of goods sold - making them, importing them, selling them, servicing them, etc. - are no longer available in the same numbers.  When I take my vehicle in for a routine oil-change, I sometimes have to wait two to three times as long as I used to, because the dealership has half the number of mechanics on staff as it used to have.  They tell me they'd like more, and that they're offering high salaries in an effort to attract more, but in private chats with a couple of the managers, they're making it clear they can't afford to hire more, because the dealership's turnover (in terms of number of vehicles sold at a decent profit) has dropped, so it can't pay for them any longer.  Again, that's just one example of what I'm sure many of us are seeing.

There's another factor.  As Ernest Hemingway had one of his characters explain:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

A lot of us have experienced things getting worse over the past few years and decades, but on a "little by little" sort of basis.  All of a sudden, things are happening faster, and there are more problems coming to light.  One literally can't read a newspaper from one day to the next without some new item of financial nastiness catching one's eye.  We - or, rather, our economy - is/are moving from "gradually" to "suddenly" on a steepening downhill trajectory.  One can't blame President Trump for that;  he inherited the mess that President Autopen Biden left behind - but people, particularly on the left, are trying to blame that on Trump, because it's always easier to point fingers at others instead of accepting part of the blame ourselves.  For decades we've voted for politicians - of both parties - who've gleefully voted us money the country did not have, in order to gain our votes in future.  Now that bill is coming due.

Rudyard Kipling warned us of "The Gods of the Copybook Headings".  (I make a point of re-reading that poem at least once a year, and frequently more often, because it's so darned true!  I highly recommend that you do the same.)  Well, his warnings are coming true in our economy as we watch it unfold.  DiveMedic summed it up well last weekend.

The system is insolvent. There isn’t enough money in the world to cover the debts created by that system. Currently, Social Security owes everyone about $75 trillion more than we have to pay - an amount that is double what our national debt already is - in other words our national debt isn’t $34 trillion, it’s more like $107 trillion. If you total all of the money in the world: every nation, every currency, every ounce of gold, it comes up to $134 trillion.

In other words, we are on the cusp of owing more money than actually exists. Even the official national debt of $34 trillion wouldn’t be eliminated if the government confiscated every 401k, IRA, 457 plan, and all other retirement accounts. The retirement accounts of US citizens are only worth about $31 trillion.

We are about to see a collapse of the US economy, and with it, the world economy. It’s inevitable.

There's more at the link.  Go read it all.  It's worth your time.

Too many of us are trying to fool ourselves (and each other) that this is just another one of those periodic scares, that there's really nothing to worry about.  I hope and pray that's right . . . but I fear that it's not.  Therefore, I'm buying more reserve supplies to help my wife and I eat at night during harder times, and (even though I'm still facing significant medical expenses) we're reducing our debt load to an irreducible minimum, so that we're not caught short when things go smash.  We've spoken about that often enough, so I won't repeat it here.

I highly recommend that you do likewise, dear readers.  This is not a comfortable time.

Peter

The death of lecture-based universities?

 

That's what the Australian Courier-Mail foresees.  A tip o' the hat to our Australian reader Andrew for sending me the link to the article.

The future of face-to-face learning at Australia’s universities is in serious doubt as more institutions ditch old-school lectures in favour of full online or hybrid learning models.

While some students and staff are campaigning to save lectures from the chopping block, others in the sector say the train has already left the station and the future of universities is online as students “vote with their feet”.

The face-to-face debate reared its head again recently as Adelaide University students and staff protested what they claimed was a move away from in-person learning at Australia’s newest university – a claim the university continues to deny.

Meanwhile, Open University Australia helps potential students connect with more than 890 online degrees in response to changing student preferences.

University of South Queensland (USQ) Associate Professor Alice Brown has researched and written on the challenges and opportunities of online higher education learning, finding the ultimate determiner is the students themselves who routinely “vote with their feet”.

“There is a trend and phenomena of students becoming increasingly discerning about how they want to study and when they want to study,” Professor Brown said.

“If they are not offered an online option, then they will vote with their feet and go to courses that are fully online.”

. . .

The debate comes as a number of Victorian universities are now offering digital-only lectures, with most choosing not to reintroduce in-person models post-Covid.

RMIT environmental engineering student Ted Oldis, 24, said attending his university in-person was a toss-up decision he makes daily.

“If you’re trying to juggle work, friends and study you have to balance the convenience of the online lectures with attending in-person,” he said.

“If you don’t need the social aspect and you think the learning is the same, it honestly comes down to convenience, and more often than not it’s easier to do the online learning.”

Mr Oldis said he had toyed with attending as many lectures and tutorials as possible in-person this semester.

“This semester I made a conscious decision to attend every class and lecture I can in-person,” he said.

“I wanted to try to engage more and meet new people. But to be honest, I don’t feel it’s been worth it compared to doing the same stuff online.”

There's more at the link.

I have every sympathy with those students who are avoiding in-person classes and focusing instead on online and distance education.  I hold four university qualifications, two of which I obtained through distance education only (i.e. by post) and two by part-time evening classes plus distance education.  I can't say I felt in any way short-changed by not having the full "campus experience" of a full-time education.  In fact, the professors in my Masters degree often said to us students that they preferred working with us as opposed to full-time students, because we'd already learned to fend for ourselves and earn a living, and didn't expect the world to provide everything to us on a platter.  Comparing ourselves to the self-centered idle twits who infested that campus' post-graduate programs, it wasn't hard to see why they came to that conclusion.

Looking at the pro-Palestinian protests across many US universities over the past couple of years simply makes the contrast even starker.  The only reason those students could carry on so irresponsibly (not to mention violently) is that they had parents and trust funds and bursaries to pay for their existence while they did so.  The rest of us, who have to work for a living, may want to protest in favor of causes we support, but we can't afford to do so nearly as often or as long, because we know that our employers will kick us out and hire replacements who'll be willing to earn every dollar they pay us.  We've grown up.  Most of those students haven't.

I think American higher education would be a lot better off if we got rid of at least half the campuses in this country and fired all the professors who live in their academic cloud cuckoo land instead of in the real world.  I'd also suggest that we fire every student who doesn't pass at least half their courses every year.  No do-overs, no accommodations, no touchy-feely wishy-washy excuses.  Unless there are truly exceptional circumstances to excuse them, they can pass, or get out.  Why should my tax dollars be wasted on supporting them?

Grrr . . .

Peter

"Fertilizing the moron farm"

 

That's how El Gato Malo, blogging at Bad Cattitude, describes our society today.  (He [?] eschews capital letters.)

consider the possibility that the advent of moronical modernity finds its roots in a simple tenet of economics:

when, all else equal, the price of something drops, people choose to consume more of it.

the price of being moronical declined and so consumption of this "good" increased.

pre-enlightment, people were poor and life had more notable tendencies toward "nasty, brutish, and short."

it was a time full of severe selectors any of which would both cull you from the herd and assure future generations that genes like yours would not be around to commit further foibles.

. . .

such calamity used to be near instant. now it is a slow burn through the sizable fat reserves of the once replete civilizational success that made everyone so comfortable in the first place.

the plenty of the post enlightenment removed these penalties even replacing them with welfare state subsidy.

that's how you fertilize a moron farm.

it's also how you drive and enable antisocial behavior and open up a society to conquest and collapse.

. . .

such safety nets are a positive right, a right to food, to shelter. on a first order basis, this seems a good thing, but the second order underpinning is always authoritarian and a violation of the negative rights to self determination which stand as fundamental. the mantra becomes: we will take (by force or threat of force) from some in order to give to others.

. . .

and the safety net is cushy enough and the overall level of life around us high enough that behaving is such a fashion can keep you afloat and OK without needing anyone else. life as a low-trust non-contributor has become tenable and shame at the idea of doing so has attenuated and even inverted into levels of astonishing entitlement.

. . .

the selfsame good intentions of "wanting to make sure everyone is OK" are precisely what land us in a society of takers crowding out makers and where plenty and safety are lost.

this selects for those low in motivation, intelligence, aptitude, and trust to have many children to maximize benefits while at the same time upping the burden on those who do pay and rendering their own child rearing options more limited.

There's more at the link.  The article is well worth reading in full.

I've seen this at work in multiple levels of our society, from the inner city ghettoes to so-called "refugees" being handed more money and largesse at the border than many Americans earn by the sweat of their brows.  One incident in particular sticks in my memory.  A few months after I came to this country, I was invited to speak to a couple of classes of high school seniors in Lake Charles, Louisiana, about Africa and current events there.  After a couple of classes, I went outside during a break to talk to any students who were interested to learn more.

A young woman introduced herself to me, and wanted to know about "welfare programs" for single mothers in Africa.  She was openly shocked and disbelieving when I told her that most African countries don't have any.  It emerged during our conversation that she was 17 years old, and was currently pregnant with her fourth child.  She'd had the first when she was only 12.  All four had different fathers.  The truly shocking thing to me was her casual claim that her mother encouraged her to have them all, because the State of Louisiana would pay her welfare and other benefits totaling several hundred dollars per month for each child.  She'd basically chosen to have her babies as cash cows - not because she valued them as human beings.

What sort of mother brings up her daughter to think like that?  What sort of family brings up kids who will surely realize, at a very young age, that nobody really loves them or cares for them, except as a source of money?  When they grow up, they'll be kicked out of the house to make their own way.  What are the odds that they'll do precisely and exactly the same thing as their mother and grandmother?  The highlighted sentence in the last paragraph cited above fits their situation to a T.

Another example came my way during my time as a prison chaplain.  There's a program run by a group of churches which aims to give a Christmas present to the children of incarcerated inmates, who otherwise might receive nothing.  During September and October, the chaplains at my prisons pass out forms to inmates, one per child, and have them fill in the details, then return them.  I was dumbfounded at the number of inmates who casually asked for six, or eight, or ten or more forms, and returned them all with the names of all the children they'd fathered.  Almost all the children were born to different mothers.  It was almost like a contest among the criminal element, the "winner" being the man who'd begotten the most children on the most mothers.  Not one of them showed any shame or embarrassment at their conduct.  This was just the way their lives were.

I fear El Gato Malo is correct . . . but I don't know how to change that, apart from cutting off all such benefits - which would undoubtedly result in rioting and plunder on a huge scale as the outraged "moronicals" demanded that their free stuff be restored.

Oy.

Peter

Prison reform? Start with the basics

 

City Journal published an article recently advocating that America adopt the Japanese model of prison reform.

America’s federal prisons are decaying and overcrowded, contributing to violence among inmates and undermining opportunities for rehabilitation. But thanks to an infusion of federal cash authorized by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Bureau of Prisons has a chance to clean things up. As the BOP weighs those and other reforms, it should look to Japan, where prisons are spacious, efficient, and largely disorder-free.

. . .

Federal prisons are currently about 10 percent over capacity. At BOP’s high-security lockups, the figure is 23 percent ... Japanese prisons, by contrast, operated at 47 percent of capacity in 2023. Their facilities, not coincidently, haven’t seen riots or wide-scale disorder in decades, and they report far fewer assaults on inmates ... These differences can’t be attributed, moreover, to differences in system size or composition. Though Japan is a much smaller country, its prisons detain roughly the same proportion of people as America’s federal prisons, relative to population.

There's more at the link.

That's all very well, but it ignores some great big red flags over the US prison system - state and local as well as federal.  Having worked as a prison chaplain in both federal and state systems, I can summarize the issues like this:

1. There are far too many people in prison, because we criminalize far too many minor offenses.  What should be handled by a fine, or a "boot camp" for young offenders, or so many hours of public service, is instead shuffled off onto an already overburdened prison and jail system.  The revolving door never stops spinning.  I've known individuals imprisoned three or four times in a single year for short sentences, only to come out, offend again, and be incarcerated once more.  It makes no sense.
2. Prisons themselves are basically warehouses for criminals.  The federal system is better than most state systems, but none of them offer much in the way of rehabilitation, vocational education and/or training, or meaningful efforts to help people change their way of life once they get out of prison.  Nobody cares about the prisoners, to put it bluntly.  They want them out of sight and out of mind, so prison budgets are set to do precisely that - and nothing more.
3. Our prisons are "fed" by a welfare and entitlement system that pays people to live in dysfunctional families, attend dysfunctional schools, and emerge as dysfunctional adults in a dysfunctional society.  To reform our prison system, start by reforming the society in which our prisoners live, out of which they come, and to which they return.
4. Our young offenders are given slaps on the wrist rather than real punishment or correction when they do wrong.  Offenders might get to 17 or 18 years old with literally dozens of arrests and convictions, and never receive any serious punishment - but when they're legally no longer kids, and do precisely and exactly the same thing for the umpteenth time, they're slammed with an adult sentence of years in jail.  They don't understand it, and they resent it, and they become even more bitter and anti-social as a result.  Frankly, I can understand that.  It's like complaining that a puppy pees on the carpet in the living-room, but never trying to train him not to do that.  He's going to go on doing what he can get away with, and never think twice about it.  When he becomes an adult, some owners take their "undomesticated" dogs out back and shoot them, because they're "incorrigible" - but it's the owners' fault in the first place.
5. As a society, we've largely abandoned a working system of ethical and moral values.  "If it feels good, do it" became the mantra of the 1960's, followed by the pagan "An it harm none, do what thou wilt".  The results are to be seen woven into the very fabric of society.  We've abandoned the Biblical wisdom of "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it".  It's going to take generations to reinvent and reapply such basic standards, but unless and until we do, our prisons will bear mute witness to our joint culpability.

If we get those things right, or go back to them, our prison problems will be resolved.  If we don't, then any attempt at prison reform is basically farting against thunder.

Peter

I don't want to hear him ask me that, either...

 

From the inimitable Stephan Pastis.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

I think most of us would have to plead guilty to wasting far too much time, and far too much of our lives . . .

Peter