The west can not outproduce no one, let alone RF and China
If you disagree please provide an outline of how the west, ok
let's say on the one hand the US and on the other the EU
could
1- reform & organise bureaucracies, divert scarce resources and capital
to plan out and operate general infrastructure upgrades with complete local supply chains from widgets to titanium
2-to train up skilled workforces (a generation's work)
3-to de financialising the economy and ruling class mindset
4-to retraining the middle class into practical middle managers and not identity slaves
5-to .... a sense of general coherence or cohesion along national and not class lines, as well as sloughing off generations of propoganda think of vacuous democracy talk
6-to arrive at a persuasive and generally accepted sense of national purpose, to eradicate 300 years of exploitative slave based divide and rule practices
""2-to train up skilled workforces (a generation's work)"
The people the USA is producing now are qualitatively different compared to 55 years ago when I graduated HS. I worked in a cheese factory before going to school...as did many of my mates. Many working class kids paid for college with the decent money we were making at the time. Half my HS were farm kids who milked cows and did chores before getting on the bus. The halls of my HS smelled of cow shit because kids went straight from the barn to the bus. Most of my peers were raw boned and serious about school. No blue hair, no alphabet people and very few slackers. Some drew the short straw and ended up in Vietnam. Fist fights on Sat night behind the bowling alley a fairly common experience. Early longhairs got a beating sometimes for their hirsute presumption. Coon and deer hunting common recreations. Half the fathers toted guns in WW2. Serious, capable, trainable people. Now I walk into a coffeeshop and a majority of the young women are grossly overweight, having already "given up" on discipline and appearance.
Long story short...Most of the young I encounter would need some kind of rehab before even starting training in "defense" of the empire. The US is still fighting WW2 while drones are the "new" air force. I think the West needs to "own" the loss re the Ukraine Project and come to terms with the new multi-polar world. For the sake of the kids I hope rationality returns.
I'll add something - I live in a place where there are still fights in the street, the police have relatives and so work to popular consensus, cash is the only medium of pay, mostly everyone is very poor but landholding in common prevails, and in general commonlaw or custom holds sway, people can walk the distance to market, everyone drinks too much, but the bars compete with the churches, and people trip from one to the other, anyone from the coast or the city is met with suspicion and disbelief, and stories of the old times are told constantly
Thanks Gerrard. To contrast I'll add.... I live in a large, upper-midwestern city now. I've owned my suburban home, debt free, for close to 20 years. Retired at age 60 from industrial sales, twelve years ago. I can walk to Lake Michigan in 15 minutes. I can't remember the last time I saw a fist fight. Can't really recall hearing amped up, angry conversation. Three doors down from me though, last July, a neighbor shot and killed his wife and injured a step-daughter with the gun. Later to commit suicide. He clearly had had enough. No one I hang with goes to church but yoga and meditation operations offering a reasonable facsimile here I suppose. Plenty of bars around but more upscale with a pour of white wine running $8-12/ glass. Boutique, local brews @ $6-8/glass. Getting loaded is verboten. Bad form. My life is fairly charmed with sons doing well. Happy 45 y/o marriage. There is almost no one here to talk politics with (Genocide Joe disciples). I asked a couple of Harvard educated, NYT loving neighbors if they'd ever heard of Substack. They had no clue what it is. I'm so thankful for the intelligent writing and comments on Substack, without which I'd be really adrift in an ocean of stupidity.
That sounds more or less, with no irony, like the good life
A far cry from here, in Central Africa backwoods, but which I regard also as the good life- essentially in the autonomy from city life mores and morals - one can live very cheaply, the land is exceptionally fertile, grow your own is easy
- traditional life here lives on, and it shares elements with working class lives everywhere, nobody has a gun, the fights are fist fights, and very carefully calibrated, there is little damage done, the drink is beer, although there are numerous forest conconctions which are literally mind bending -traditional medicine and traditional drinking are closely related
Gerrard, have you by chance come across this book (link) that is an account of a white gal growing up in Rhodesia? If not I think you might like it. It blew my mind. Alcoholic mother, Uzi always on the dinner table and much more. Now of course it's Zimbabwe. My son, with a couple of friends, drove a Subaru from S. Africa to Addis Abba. Not my cup-a-tea exactly but I've done bat shit crazy things in my youth too. He came back from Africa with a TRILLION dollar Zimbabwe note. I asked him what it was worth and he said it would make a dandy bookmark. I've always wondered where the white farmer lads from Rhodesia ended up. I'm sure there's grist for a novel or three in their accounts. I guessed other parts of Africa and maybe Oz. Anyway, I promise this book is a great read and some of the tales are so crazy that you know they must be true. I read it in paperback. I've only been to Alexandria and Cairo in Africa but except for my age, I'd love to return. You can put her name (Alexandra Fuller) into a YouTube search and hear interviews with her. On top of everything else, she's a stone cold beauty. And...good luck to you too, mate. Last I'd heard she married an American guy and moved to Wyoming-since divorced.
Thanks for this - I'll look at the Youtube, but here we are beyond the reach of Amazon delivery
As for driving around Africa, as long as you have the right attitude and behaviour, and avoiding the wars in the Congo, or towns like Lagos, or Nairobbery, it would not be more dangerous than run down city areas in EU or US, in fact less so
I know little about East Africa, there's quite a gulf between francophone and anglophone, people/news is very local
This might start changing with the Russians - the experience of the Sahel countries is very relevant here
And with the Chinese - official China presence (as opposed to traders/immigrants) is growing more pronounced
Along w/ sundry disinformation which the legacy media promotes, articles keep popping up, insisting per the Surgeon General that we are in a Loneliness Epidemic: /journalists/ claim that loneliness is as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day
I walk around my suburban neighborhood and say "hi" to people. Some are surprised at this and some avert their eyes. I live about one mile from the 'hood and go to a Walmart that has probably an 85% black customer base. I'm very white. I notice (anecdotal reporting of course)
that black folk seem to generally be having a happier time than whites. More laughing with their friends...more spontaneous joking around. On a good day, this is a lower middle class Walmart, or less. I see pallets of Ramen Noodle packs getting wheeled around the store. The just maybe, plausibly a real meal pack. If I didn't regularly go to this Walmart, my contact with black folks would be pretty miniscule. I never ever feel in anyway threatened by the experience.
Yesterday I was shopping there at 6:30 AM and something seemed terribly amiss in the parking lot. What was it? Then it dawned on me....I didn't smell any early morning weed getting consumed there. Ain't life a trip?!
The west can not outproduce no one, let alone RF and China
If you disagree please provide an outline of how the west, ok
let's say on the one hand the US and on the other the EU
could
1- reform & organise bureaucracies, divert scarce resources and capital
to plan out and operate general infrastructure upgrades with complete local supply chains from widgets to titanium
2-to train up skilled workforces (a generation's work)
3-to de financialising the economy and ruling class mindset
4-to retraining the middle class into practical middle managers and not identity slaves
5-to .... a sense of general coherence or cohesion along national and not class lines, as well as sloughing off generations of propoganda think of vacuous democracy talk
6-to arrive at a persuasive and generally accepted sense of national purpose, to eradicate 300 years of exploitative slave based divide and rule practices
7-To allow the complete overhaul you precognise
8-108- Impossible
""2-to train up skilled workforces (a generation's work)"
The people the USA is producing now are qualitatively different compared to 55 years ago when I graduated HS. I worked in a cheese factory before going to school...as did many of my mates. Many working class kids paid for college with the decent money we were making at the time. Half my HS were farm kids who milked cows and did chores before getting on the bus. The halls of my HS smelled of cow shit because kids went straight from the barn to the bus. Most of my peers were raw boned and serious about school. No blue hair, no alphabet people and very few slackers. Some drew the short straw and ended up in Vietnam. Fist fights on Sat night behind the bowling alley a fairly common experience. Early longhairs got a beating sometimes for their hirsute presumption. Coon and deer hunting common recreations. Half the fathers toted guns in WW2. Serious, capable, trainable people. Now I walk into a coffeeshop and a majority of the young women are grossly overweight, having already "given up" on discipline and appearance.
Long story short...Most of the young I encounter would need some kind of rehab before even starting training in "defense" of the empire. The US is still fighting WW2 while drones are the "new" air force. I think the West needs to "own" the loss re the Ukraine Project and come to terms with the new multi-polar world. For the sake of the kids I hope rationality returns.
Yes ....thanks for this memory - I have heard similar stories
Your's rings true from start to finish, and I'm sure you could write pages and pages
It is heart rending to measure the difference between then and today for the vast majority of the peoples of US and Europe
It is terrible to see the destruction of ways of life which, with all the problems and deficiences, allowed general freedom and independence
I'll add something - I live in a place where there are still fights in the street, the police have relatives and so work to popular consensus, cash is the only medium of pay, mostly everyone is very poor but landholding in common prevails, and in general commonlaw or custom holds sway, people can walk the distance to market, everyone drinks too much, but the bars compete with the churches, and people trip from one to the other, anyone from the coast or the city is met with suspicion and disbelief, and stories of the old times are told constantly
Thanks Gerrard. To contrast I'll add.... I live in a large, upper-midwestern city now. I've owned my suburban home, debt free, for close to 20 years. Retired at age 60 from industrial sales, twelve years ago. I can walk to Lake Michigan in 15 minutes. I can't remember the last time I saw a fist fight. Can't really recall hearing amped up, angry conversation. Three doors down from me though, last July, a neighbor shot and killed his wife and injured a step-daughter with the gun. Later to commit suicide. He clearly had had enough. No one I hang with goes to church but yoga and meditation operations offering a reasonable facsimile here I suppose. Plenty of bars around but more upscale with a pour of white wine running $8-12/ glass. Boutique, local brews @ $6-8/glass. Getting loaded is verboten. Bad form. My life is fairly charmed with sons doing well. Happy 45 y/o marriage. There is almost no one here to talk politics with (Genocide Joe disciples). I asked a couple of Harvard educated, NYT loving neighbors if they'd ever heard of Substack. They had no clue what it is. I'm so thankful for the intelligent writing and comments on Substack, without which I'd be really adrift in an ocean of stupidity.
That sounds more or less, with no irony, like the good life
A far cry from here, in Central Africa backwoods, but which I regard also as the good life- essentially in the autonomy from city life mores and morals - one can live very cheaply, the land is exceptionally fertile, grow your own is easy
- traditional life here lives on, and it shares elements with working class lives everywhere, nobody has a gun, the fights are fist fights, and very carefully calibrated, there is little damage done, the drink is beer, although there are numerous forest conconctions which are literally mind bending -traditional medicine and traditional drinking are closely related
I wish you good luck
Brings back some memory ...
Gerrard, have you by chance come across this book (link) that is an account of a white gal growing up in Rhodesia? If not I think you might like it. It blew my mind. Alcoholic mother, Uzi always on the dinner table and much more. Now of course it's Zimbabwe. My son, with a couple of friends, drove a Subaru from S. Africa to Addis Abba. Not my cup-a-tea exactly but I've done bat shit crazy things in my youth too. He came back from Africa with a TRILLION dollar Zimbabwe note. I asked him what it was worth and he said it would make a dandy bookmark. I've always wondered where the white farmer lads from Rhodesia ended up. I'm sure there's grist for a novel or three in their accounts. I guessed other parts of Africa and maybe Oz. Anyway, I promise this book is a great read and some of the tales are so crazy that you know they must be true. I read it in paperback. I've only been to Alexandria and Cairo in Africa but except for my age, I'd love to return. You can put her name (Alexandra Fuller) into a YouTube search and hear interviews with her. On top of everything else, she's a stone cold beauty. And...good luck to you too, mate. Last I'd heard she married an American guy and moved to Wyoming-since divorced.
https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Lets-Dogs-Tonight-Childhood-ebook/dp/B000FC1HQY
added-link to an interview with her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSU9_5lhy6s
Thanks for this - I'll look at the Youtube, but here we are beyond the reach of Amazon delivery
As for driving around Africa, as long as you have the right attitude and behaviour, and avoiding the wars in the Congo, or towns like Lagos, or Nairobbery, it would not be more dangerous than run down city areas in EU or US, in fact less so
I know little about East Africa, there's quite a gulf between francophone and anglophone, people/news is very local
This might start changing with the Russians - the experience of the Sahel countries is very relevant here
And with the Chinese - official China presence (as opposed to traders/immigrants) is growing more pronounced
IтАЩll get back to you with more, shortly
Along w/ sundry disinformation which the legacy media promotes, articles keep popping up, insisting per the Surgeon General that we are in a Loneliness Epidemic: /journalists/ claim that loneliness is as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day
The bulljive doesn't end
I walk around my suburban neighborhood and say "hi" to people. Some are surprised at this and some avert their eyes. I live about one mile from the 'hood and go to a Walmart that has probably an 85% black customer base. I'm very white. I notice (anecdotal reporting of course)
that black folk seem to generally be having a happier time than whites. More laughing with their friends...more spontaneous joking around. On a good day, this is a lower middle class Walmart, or less. I see pallets of Ramen Noodle packs getting wheeled around the store. The just maybe, plausibly a real meal pack. If I didn't regularly go to this Walmart, my contact with black folks would be pretty miniscule. I never ever feel in anyway threatened by the experience.
Yesterday I was shopping there at 6:30 AM and something seemed terribly amiss in the parking lot. What was it? Then it dawned on me....I didn't smell any early morning weed getting consumed there. Ain't life a trip?!