Civilization is crumbling, but it is worse elsewhere. In the dark. Feeling used yet?
20221012
Civilization is crumbling. We’ve been without power about half the time the last three days. Zoriana and I had to walk the mile to kindergarten this morning because the neighborhood jitney bus isn’t running. Oksana forwarded me a doom and gloom piece about how we will all freeze in the dark this winter.
I have been trying intermittently to set up a butane stovetop system for four days. Every time I get into it some damn thing or another interrupts me. I expected that by the time I got my ducks in a row everybody would be sold out.
I wanted to take precautions by buying this gas stove, just in general. In this is been something on the back of my mind for a long time. I have hesitated because I was thinking about natural gas, which comes from Russia. But it really makes more sense to have tanks of butane and we can get through the winter, probably with two tanks and those you can buy in advance. You don't have to rely on the continued flow. We just ordered a butane/propane stove. When it arrives at the end of the week I’ll hustle to buy a big butane tank and to the hardware store to get a connecting hose.
Now for an assessment of the danger. The Russians have been trying to knock out the power and Kharkiv for several months now they pretty much still have power. Russia supposedly spent $1 billion worth of missiles in the attacks of last weekend.
It is claimed that this attack had been long planned and was just coincidence that it was in place when Putin got the pretext of an explosion on the Kerch bridge. I don't know, but I am sure that they do not have the resources to keep it up. If they did they would have been doing it.
Kharkiv usually comes back online after a day or two. Russia will simply not be able to keep the power out here forever. My take would be that they are increasingly desperate. If these things were really going to be effective, they would have been tried months ago. My bottom line is that were okay for the winter. But I'll still feel better to have a backup in the form of butane.
These outages are probably a useful suggest reminder that we are at war. Also that this is a world of relatively scarce resources. Not only here in Ukraine, but everywhere. This is one of the chief thrusts Dutton's “The Past is a Future Country,” which I just finished. One of his theses is that we have been living beyond our means for quite a while. We have been burning up the accumulated wealth of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Not just the material wealth, but also the wealth of spirit and character that enabled us to maintain peace and achieve this richness.
Dutton’s has a number of excellent points. Badly made, however. His graphs are terrible. Here is a worthwhile quote: “Wokeness is the new child mortality; the new crucible of evolution.” In other words, the woke will not inherit the earth. They don’t breed. Another term I like is “clever-silly,” applied to Nobel prize winning economists (viz Bernanke, Krugman) embracing Modern Monetary Theory, MMT. Also call “Magic Money Tree.”
He endorses some of my reasons for staying in this Eastern European war zone.
It also appears that Eastern Europe is following a very different political trajectory from that of the West. It is much higher in binding values, as expressed in relatively strong ethnocentric attitudes (Aschauer & Mayerl, 2019), religiosity (in some Eastern European countries, at least), and intolerance of homosexuality (Doebler, 2015). There could be a number of reasons for this, including later industrialization, and the relative poverty of Communism, making the populations more inclined to trust their implicit beliefs, and a lack of ethnic diversity, due to Communism not allowing immigration from the developing world. One also has to consider how specifically south Eastern European Balkanization effectively recreates the increasingly sinister multiculturalist conditions that the West is itself heading to, by a plethora of young and small ethnically distinct nation states that deeply distrust each other. But the most straightforward reasons would obviously be that Eastern Europeans have very strong resistance to leftist ideas culturally, born out of having recently suffered under Communism for almost a century, and simply because they are just, intrinsically—that is, genetically—more ethnocentric than north Western Europeans (see MacDonald, 2019). For example, the average Eastern European has half the number of ancestors compared to the average Western European (Ralph & Coop, 2013). This would mean that Eastern Europeans would be more genetically distinct from outsiders and, thus, it would be in their genetic interests to be more hostile towards them (Salter, 2007). In addition, it might, itself, be a reflection of small communities that have been selected to be hostile to outsiders. If such countries continue with these attitudes, we can predict that, eventually, at least in the more northern states, they will be manifestly safer, and more stable, than Western European countries, because they will be lower in ethnic conflict and thus higher in cooperation. Their success may then motivate Westerners to act to imitate them.
I wish he had had more to say about us.
I have taken Eddie and Zoriana out on bicycles twice recently. On Sunday we went to Victory Park with Eddie’s friend Artem. We rented a rowboat which the kids took turns paddling for an hour. Remarkably, there was still not only the boat concession, but an ice cream place open. They got what was left of chocolate cones at a closeout sale price.
Yesterday I bicycled with Eddie and Zoriana up to the end of the lake. And they played on the playground for half an hour while I went to the grocery store. Zoriana and I then bicycled last night to her music lesson yesterday. Already at 6 o'clock it was getting dark. Fortunately I had the lights on the bicycle, but nonetheless we are getting to the end of bicycling season. Once again feels like late fall. So far we haven't had an Indian summer this year. It's been cold all fall. The temperature fell into the frost zone last night.
Nothing I can say will make people feel stupid for having been stampeded by the Covid hysteria into getting locked down, distanced, masked and jabbed. Could what other people say will make a difference? Today a Pfizer VP testified that they didn’t even try to find out if their injectable biological product stops transmission. So much for us evil unvaxxed “killing grandma.” gato malo reports that judicial watch put together this government to-do list of ways to entice or compel you to comply. Link to the government source documents here. If I had fallen for that crap I would feel pretty used at this point. But I’m not a liberal, and I didn’t.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is getting on the exercycle while there is still hot water for a shower. Eddie read geography from Leif Erikson through Vasco de Gama, Columbus, Magellan and Abel Tasman. When the power is out I find him sitting by a window, reading. I am ecstatic. He is at this moment grocery shopping for mom on his bicycle.
More books like the Population Bomb. I'm sick of them. Every age thinks that the past age was better off, but the truth is that we live better than Louis the Sun King. The only think blocking progress is government do gooders like the WEF thugs who want to take farmland, so we'll starve, and block the production of oil and gas so we'll sit in the dark and freeze. We're facing energy shortages in Europe only because the Germans decided on a Green Agenda and didn't have a plan B. What a bunch of idealistic fools to trust Putin.
The Biden people have blocked pipelines and drilling to restrict the production of oil and gas. Now, there is a shortage and they have to suck up to MBS and Madura. There is enough oil and gas in the US to last 300 years, but not if government has a Net Zero agenda.
Justin Turdo in Canada has now mandated electric cars for all Canadians and there is exactly one electrical charging station in the entire state of Alberta. These policy people are like dodo birds, except those who will die out will be the peasants and the pawns, not the WEF elite.
Life is so much better today than it was when I was a boy. We have more of everything, except brains.
Dutton makes a good case for diversity does not increase strength. Might even cause deeper divisions if cultures refuse to adapt to the dominant culture. The US has been a leader in bringing in diverse cultures and assimilating them into the "American dream". But that was in a process of controlled immigration where people waited years to be granted entry. They largely were proactive in adopting new cultural norms, to fit in. The arrival of large numbers of refugees largely displaced by war or economics are much harder to assimilate into the culture because of different motivations. While these arrivals do eventually move on from their retained cultural enclaves in the US, the EU seems to be less able to achieve that integration. Some of that might be historical; the EU doesn't have a long record of adding arrivals.
Culture is something that is quite difficult to change. It's the glue that allows the tribe to tolerate each other. Trying to change culture may be quite difficult. Watching the effort to change US culture now in process has become quite uncomfortable. Trying to deny a great heritage claiming all sorts of historic injuries may please a few but at the risk of building a conflict reducing social cohesion. As you note the future of non-reproducing woke is not sustainable. OTOH, the backlash has been arriving as the less-woke are taking great offense. Another social blip that needs to end.