The irredeemable, unmentionable Unz Review. Math problems. Liberal parenting. New friends.
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Snopes, Wikipedia, the SPLC and other self-appointed curators of the gardens of your mind ignore the Unz Review. Too toxic even to talk about. Wikipedia's treatment of Unz himself is rather brief and bland. They fervently want you not to know about him and his web site.
Unz himself is a complex character, opinions all over the map. Kind of supports Russia in this war, kind of believes in the vaccines, strongly believes that Covid was developed by and purposefully released by American intelligence operatives. Very Jewish but questions the Holocaust. He disagrees with many who post on his site, but publishes them because he believes in free speech.
Today I find this deep, well-sourced and researched article entitled How Safe are the Covid Vaccines. Quite long at 6600 words (12 pages), it is broken into five sections:
1. Excess Mortality
2. VAERS Database
3. Severe Side Effects
4. Heart Studies
5. Conclusions
The author, Eugene Kusmiak, does not believe there is a genocide afoot but does believe the vaccines are dangerous. Well worth reading.
For Warren, I have done your research for you. Wikipedia, Snopes, the SPLC and the ADL don't mention Kusmiak. To discredit him I'm afraid you'll actually have to read and refute what he has written. The public record shows that he is a member of the triple-9 society, with an IQ 3 SD above the average, which just happens to make him smarter than 999 out of 1000. Try =NORMDIST(100+3*15,100,15,TRUE).
While you are in Excel, you can check out the answer to yesterday's math problem. =1/COMBIN(6,3). Nobody rose to the bait. Eddie came close. He didn't have a theory, but he guessed 4.6%. Not bad.
Eric Topol, whose gushing about the wonderful new mRNA products got me going yesterday, is at it again. Vaccines, vaccines, vaccines! Just as the rest of us are learning to ask how far from dangerous the threats are and how their dangers compare with those posed by the vaccine "protection" we are supposed to welcome. We really do belong to two worlds.
I wrote about dropping the subscriber who incessantly wrote to call me a racist, anti-Semite and so on. He must know he'd find a hostile audience here, so rather than posting comments he simply wrote them to me in emails. In yesterday's blog I wrote that he had imposed zero expectations on his indulged children. Today I find this article entitled Research: Kids of liberal parents more likely to be depressed from the predictably conservative WND. It jibes with my observations. It will, of course, be rejected out of hand by liberals.
I haven't described the children of my grown family as depressed, but I have often used the related words angry and neurotic. I haven't seen this fellow's kids since they were little. He complained a couple of years back that his daughter ran into severe prejudice in college. He didn't offer an answer when I observed that she is only half Jewish and if she didn't open her mouth about it nobody would guess.
Lastly, cementing Unz' reputation as irredeemable, he posted this article entitled A Theory Correlating Racial Evolution with Intellectual Development. I find the article short and shallow, but not wrong. No more than a restatement of the common sense and received wisdom that dominated from the time of Herodotus to Richard Nixon. The only thing surprising about it is that Unz felt a need to publish it. I prefer older sources such as Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1831 take on the matter holds up extremely well.
We are living without bus service. The local jitney company has ceased operations, alleging that the cops were shaking them down too frequently. My guess is that while it may be true in part, this run has become unprofitable on account of the war Community leaders are pleading to get city buses to come here. Meanwhile, with good weather we are bicycling everywhere.
Last night Zoriana went to acrobatics class with her kindergarten classmate Miroslav, whose father offered her a ride. My 2/3 mile walk to pick her up was an adventure. I met a lady older than myself, walking with a cane, struggling to get home with 10 pounds of potatoes. I offered to carry the potatoes. She asked me to give her my arm as well, to steady her. We walked two and a half blocks to her house.
She was not at all apprehensive of this stranger, just as Oksana was not scared whatsoever the previous night when a stranger offered to give Zoriana a ride home after falling in the lake. That's how things are here. We are trusting because there is no need not to be. Both her gate and her front door were unlocked, and she invited me in for coffee. I had to beg off, not having time, but thanked her for the offer and gave her my card.
Getting to Miroslav's house I fell into conversation with mother Marianna and father Vlad as the kids played Monopoly. Turns out they are renting for the winter but will soon move to a summer house only two blocks from the two dachas we bought two years ago. We will make a point of seeing more of them.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the cherries, cherry-plum and apricots are in full bloom. It is a gorgeous time of year. Having no bus service, I'll be bicycling with Zoriana to her music lesson tonight. Life is good.
Personally, I think the big problem with kids today is very simple. Things are really good for many people; the human race is thriving, especially in the US. The big issue for many people now is how to become rich and famous. Kids imagine themselves as a star, adored by the masses. They expect to live a rich and happy life without any pain.
When I was born, I lived with my grandparents in an old old house where they had lived through the depression and World War II. They still had ration coupons and coins made of some composite material. I didn't have the internet at my fingers to show me a great life. I had a Sears Catalogue with a toy section that I wore out. We had a chicken house and rabbits and a huge garden which my grandfather managed by himself. When Sunday dinner came, we went down to the chicken house and my grandfather chopped the head off a rooster and I watched it run around with his head cut off, crashing into fruit trees until he collapsed. We didn't have a clothes dryer, we had a clothes line and clothes pins. In summer, my grandfather made hand cranked ice cream a couple of times. For me, life was about survival.
Later, my dad built a tiny two bedroom house that was a vast upgrade on previous homes. When my mother divorced my father, we moved to San Jose (you know, Silicon Valley, land of tech billionaires). We first rented a flat in the back of an Italian corner grocery. Later, we moved to an old Victorian slum which had been a Mexican whorehouse until we moved in and drunken guys came to the door late at night. "Donde esta Tilly?" I hung a sign on the front porch. Tilly doesn't live here anymore.
Today, kids expect a perfect life. They don't want to struggle. They don't expect bad things to happen. They want safe spaces; they don't like micro-aggressions. Their biggest problem is that reality is not idyllic. Kids want to be actors and singers and video stars. They're upset when the internet goes down for five minutes. When I was in high school, I had two pairs of pants, shoes in which the nails were poking up into my feet and that I protected with cardboard so it wouldn't cut my heels to pieces. When I turned 16, I got my grandfather's car, a 1937 Ford Coupe. Now, kids are annoyed if they don't get a Mercedes or a Tesla (and not the cheap model.).
I think it's a matter of expectations. They expect everything, they expect it now, and they expect it to be perfect. No wonder they are depressed and unhappy. Their expectations are never going to be matched by reality. They have no appreciation, no understanding of what they do have, because they take it for granted.
My mother was an alcoholic, she drank wine by the gallon, and she smoked cigarettes and before she died, she blamed me for not taking care of her well enough. The people at her funeral hated me. Why? Because they didn't know about the beatings that I got when I was a boy, beaten with sticks and belts because I was defiant.
Honestly, everything looks good to me now, because my expectations are so low. I find wonder in many things. I celebrate life because in comparison to my childhood, this is great, no matter what it is. I am certain that any of these modern kids, if they had lived my life would be miserable and feel that they had been cheated by life. For me, it has been magnificent. For them, it would be suffering. That's why they are depressed. Their expectations will never be matched by reality. I keep in mind what the Buddha says: Life is suffering. But we forget the most important part of this concept. Suffering is optional. It is a choice to suffer. It's not the events of our lives that matter; it is our response to those events.
We can't change life; We can only change ourselves.
Growing up as a Navy brat (Born, Raised And Transferred) my brothers and I were never indulged and expected to conduct ourselves as the children of a naval officer in both conduct and bearing. Since we were part of Forward Deployed Naval Forces, we lived mostly overseas among foreigners -- Japanese for most of my childhood, but others as well -- and we were expected to behave such that we did not bring shame to our country or cause problems with the locals.
There are many types and causes of depression, of course, from the "baby blues" to unipolar depression and so forth. I don't think it is a personality defect or a person's fault if they become depressed. Some people are more naturally prone to melancholia than others, just as some have sunny dispositions and others malicious. My nature tends to the sentimental and melancholic. I'm very similar to my mother in that way. Nothing is going to change those facets of my personality. But I recognize them and manage them. My husband's nature, like my father's, is much more matter-of-fact and practical, a problem solver. He sees the humorous side of human behavior and makes me laugh when I feel like crying. He helps me get out of emotional ruts, deal with issues and move on.
The only close Jewish friend I ever had I didn't even know was Jewish until one time were were invited to Christmas dinner and she mentioned that she was, and I said, "Oh, so you aren't coming?" and she said, "Me miss a free meal, didn't I just tell you I was Jewish?" And she came and we all had a good time. She was a brat, too, her father career Air Force and had flown F-105s during the Viet Nam war as mine had flown F-4Js, and she had lived much of her childhood overseas. Her identity was American first and foremost, same as mine. If you wear your religion, your politics or your ethnicity on your sleeve you will probably make problems for yourself.