The Lost America

From a discussion at SG about Boomers and their destruction of the American way of life.

It’s hard for the younger generation to even conceive of what the generations that preceded the Boomers were like. I am speaking of the USA. Let me try to give you a taste. They loved their families, they were a cohesive civilized team, willing to put significant skin in the game to make things better. They wanted their kids to do better than they did. It was a common motto. They did try to actively curb the worst tendencies of the Boomers until they died off. You can see this in the cultural decline acceleration around 2005.

Any adult anywhere, as a member of the societal team, could and would correct me or any child when badly behaved. If you accidentally dented someone’s car you left a note, as examples. High trust, universally known unwritten rules. Everyone knew the shared history and traditions. It felt like One Great Extended Family rowing the boat together. As Gen z (and the younger generations) you very likely have not even know the experience of your own family as a team, from which experience you might imagine what a unified and cohesive broader society was. Gen X got to experience the discontinuity with in their own families, in most cases, and within society. It was a sudden mass plunge for many. Working Moms, latch key neglect, mass divorce, single parenthood, abortion. We had an apples and oranges comparison that was not subtile. Gen X suffers the grief of having lost something phenomenal that we were unable to stop and are unable to reverse.

What broke can not be fixed but maybe something that rhymes can be rebuilt. To try to do that, the Boomers need to be out of the way and the younger generations need to know what can be from what was.

The preceding generations did a lot of good, and you can be sure that their hearts and minds were in the right place even when they were spectacularly wrong. This you can easily forgive. They were human. They did their best. You loved them and they loved you.

If you want to get a taste of what it was like, look at the old cover art by Norman Rockwell, watch the old Captain America, Casablanca, anything by Frank Capra, anything with John Wayne. Look at the old Bugs Bunny cartoons and know that Bugs was the average American, modeled after Clark Gable, particularly in “It happened one night”. And we did NOT think of ourselves as a “nation of immigrants”. We were NOT full of rootless recents that only have this slogan as some common touch point. We were Americans, with both national and ingrained, globally dominant culture. Before USA USA was a “MAGA chant” it was just normal. Blue jeans were American and were like dollars. You could trade them anywhere in the world for almost anything. We also had regional dress, dialects and traditions because people were here in one place long enough for that stuff to be there. Assimilation in most places meant you weren’t “us” until the third generation, where the second married a townie and had kids. The kids were us. We didn’t think about anywhere else besides the the US much, if at all, but we did have some decorations modeled on the 17th century we used for Thanks Giving that included Indians as we knew them going back over 500 years, and I don’t mean the hyphenated come lately people named by the East India Company. It’s baloney to say we didn’t have a culture. We had a culture and national identity that was so globally dominant, so coveted that the dress and speech of the entire globe has been impacted to reflect

DISCUSS ON SG

Scratch and Claw

On the one hand, it’s a very bad sign that the middle class is now beginning to sell plasma in order to meet their debt burdens. On the other, it’s good that people are finally beginning to get a little more realistic about the fact that this is the new normal and multiple revenue streams are vital for families as they used to be prior to the post-WWII era.

Pressure is starting to show up in places people do not usually look first, and the numbers behind it suggest households and small businesses are both getting pulled tighter at the same time.

Middle class Americans are selling plasma to make ends meet while small businesses are dealing with rising cost pressures tied to tariffs and fuel prices, according to recent reporting from NBC News alongside related coverage on small business conditions.

On the household side, plasma donation has become a recurring source of cash for a growing number of Americans, with roughly 200,000 people donating plasma each day across the country, a scale that reflects how widespread participation has become.

The most important thing is to shed debt. That’s not news to most people here, but it remains far and away the most important thing. The second most important thing is to reduce unnecessary expenses. Do you really need that solo apartment? Is a vacation in Florida really vital or can you simply enjoy an excellent staycation at home for one-quarter the cost?

You don’t need to degrade your quality of life in order to lower your expenses. But you do need to think about what your priorities are. I can personally testify that staying home surrounded by excellent books to read is among the very highest qualities of life to which one can ascend.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Library, Unlimited

I’ve been occupied this week with assembling and testing a new translation system. It’s working very well, so well, in fact, that I’ve managed to successfully translate no less than eight hitherto untranslated works, seven from Japanese and one from Italian. All eight rate at a very high level, which is to say that while they don’t quite hit the William Weaver or Jay Rubin levels, they are rated higher than the translations you’re accustomed to reading from the average translated classic.

William Weaver is the late translator of Umberto Eco’s novels, whose work arguably marks some of the best translations ever written. Jay Rubin is one of Haruki Murakami’s translators, and trying to get closer to his level is what has been preventing us from releasing Kenji Weaver’s translation of Natsume Soseki’s Sanshiro until now.

But now that we have the system operating effectively and enough works are already finished to permit me to return to polishing the hundreds of waka required to complete the Genji Monogatari translation, we’re going to start publishing one ebook translated into English every week. Many of these will be works that have never been translated into English before, and some of them are unbelievably good. Most of them will be Japanese, initially, since that is the language with the strongest literary tradition that has the most untranslated works. But we are by no means limiting ourselves to that; we already have lists of our priorities in French, Italian,

Since I know a number of you will a) want to support this but b) really don’t want to buy ebooks from Amazon every week, what we’re going to do initially is use the Library substack as a de facto subscription for the weekly ebooks. We’ve raised the monthly price of that subscription by $2.49, so over the course of a year you’d save about $140 in the event you happened to buy all the ebooks, or $160 if you took out an annual subscription. Subscribers will also be permitted to vote on which projects they want us to tackle next; this is important because one reason some of these works are untranslated is because they are absolutely massive.

And, of course, if you simply wish to buy whichever books happen to appeal to you as they are published, that would be great too. Some of these books will eventually be published and/or collected into print editions, a few may actually see leather editions if they merit them, and if the project is successful enough over time, it may even eventually grow into a separating publishing imprint.

Castalia Library is committed to publishing the most beautiful books in the world. This is a potentially significant step toward Castalia House becoming the best publisher in the world.

DISCUSS ON SG

Iran Makes Its Demands

While President Trump is begging for a ceasefire, Iran is informing him of what it’s going to take for peace, and both China and Russia are backing up their primary ally in the Middle East.

In a tightly structured 12-minute address, Ayatollah Imam Sayyed Mojtaba Khamenei moved from familiar rhetoric into something far more consequential. The opening half followed the expected script; revisiting decades of U.S. warmongering rhetoric: sanctions, assassinations, regional conflicts.

But midway through, the tone shifted from retrospective to strategic. Sayyed Khamenei outlined three concrete demands, each with a defined timeline:

  • a rapid U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East
  • a full rollback of sanctions within 60 days
  • long-term financial compensation for economic damages.

Then came the ultimatum. Fail to comply, and Iran escalates, economically, militarily, and potentially nuclear. Not hypothetically, but operationally: closing the Strait of Hormuz, formalizing defense ties with Russia and China, and moving from ambiguity to declared nuclear deterrence.

The timing of external reactions was just as telling. Within hours, both Beijing and Moscow issued statements aligning, carefully but unmistakably, with Tehran’s framing. This definitely looked coordinated.

Translation: China and Russia are cool with Tehran going nuclear. Or, as is more likely the case, with Tehran not revealing that ready-fire nukes don’t actually exist and finally joining the Big Boys Make-Believe Club.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Longer Reach

In firing a pair of missiles at the UK base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Iran just demonstrated that they can hit targets twice as far away as anyone had thought. It is not safe to conclude that its abilities have been degraded, especially when it just demonstrated its ability to reach out and touch London and Paris.

It appears we’re going to find out soon if the mullahs are really the mad dogs that the neocons claim that they are, or if that was just another lie.

DISCUSS ON SG

UATV Maintenance Alert Complete

Unauthorized will be offline for an hour tomorrow, from 8AM to 9AM Eastern. This is for some long-scheduled upgrades that will allow us to move considerably faster in adding new features and integration with other services such as SG.

In other words, don’t panic or be surprised when it’s down. An update will be posted here when it’s back up again.

UPDATE: The upgrade is complete. UATV is live again.

Why Three Dimensions are Required

I know the interest in Veriphysics is limited here, hence the separate site devoted to the philosophy, but since this question has popped up in several places, I thought I should at least mention that it has been answered in substantive detail over there.

I don’t understand why it is necessary for there to be three different elements of the Triveritas. Aren’t L and M basically the same thing, because math is logic?

Here is the abridged version of the complete answer to it.

Each of the three dimensions of the Triveritas has characteristic failure modes that the other two dimensions cannot detect from within their own domain. That is why relying on any one, or even any two, leaves a structural blind spot that historically produces false confidence…

The critical insight from the historical record is that false claims survive by trading on their strong dimensions to deflect scrutiny from their weak one. The defenders of phlogiston pointed to its empirical success and quantitative accounting to avoid the question of logical coherence. The defenders of caloric theory pointed to Fourier’s mathematics and the theory’s logical elegance to deflect Rumford’s empirical challenge. The defenders of Ptolemy pointed to centuries of accurate predictions to deflect the question of explanatory unity.

And in every resolved historical case, the refutation arrived from the specific dimension that was missing. Not from a random direction, but from the precise blind spot the theory’s defenders were trying to hide. Newtonian mechanics, steady-state cosmology, and caloric theory all satisfied L and M but failed E, and all three were killed by empirical observation. Continental drift and the plum pudding model satisfied L and E but failed M, and both were killed by mathematical incoherence. Ptolemaic epicycles, phlogiston, and miasma theory satisfied M and E but failed L, and all three were killed by the arrival of logically coherent replacements.

Also, for those who are interested in applying the Triveritas, the reference scales for L, M, and E are all now complete.

DISCUSS ON SG

That’s How Bad

On last night’s Arkhaven Nights, JDA, the Legend, and I were reviewing the script of the cancelled Buffy revival. It was bad. It was very, very bad. To describe it as excruciatingly bad would not be exaggerating.

It was so bad that I don’t think we can rule it out as the culprit in Xander’s untimely death.

‘Buffy’ Actor Nicholas Brendon Dead At 54

RIP Xander.

DISCUSS ON SG

Can it Get Worse?

I’m pretty sure that if the champions of the printing press were given the opportunity to see how their magnificent new device would transform the written word into a means for women to write about their sexual fantasies involving demons, monsters, and the dead, they would have burned every last one of them.

One of its principal attractions was that it had the potential to democratise knowledge. In the past, the high cost of manuscripts had meant that only the well-to-do could afford them. Now that books could be produced in large numbers, however, printed volumes could be sold for much lower prices, making them available to those of lesser means for the first time. As Bussi remarked, it was possible for even the poorest to build a library of his own and for learning to become accessible to all. Excited by the prospect, some of those associated with presses began writing texts explicitly targeted at furthering the spread of knowledge. In 1483, for example, Fra Iacopo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo (1434–1520) published his Supplementum chronicarum. A sort of ‘bluffers’ guide’ to world history, this was expressly designed to make available to the masses knowledge which had previously been restricted only to the few.

As many observers recognised, this had a range of knock-on benefits. For some, the most important of these was permanence. According to the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo della Fonte (1446–1513), printers could ‘confer eternity’ on whatever they produced. Since printing put more books into circulation, he reasoned, it would ensure that ancient texts were less likely to be lost, and it would crown modern authors with certain fame. Others believed that the ‘flood’ of new books would lead to moral enlightenment. There was some justification for this. Recent research into domestic life has revealed that books of hours were by far the most commonly owned texts; and, as Caroline Anderson has argued, the fact that these books were often kept in the camera (bedchamber/dayroom) suggests that they were read on a daily basis, including by women. It was hence only reasonable to assume that, as printing spread, so virtue would also grow. For the Franciscan friar Bernardino da Feltre (1439-94), God had shed ‘so much light on these most wretched and dark times’ through print that there was no longer any excuse for sin at all.

But not everyone was so enthusiastic. Others, for whom novelty and progress were far from synonymous, regarded printing with open hostility. Of these, none was more vehement than Filippo de Strata.

Like many of his contemporaries, he did not have any particular objection to books as physical objects. Although he is almost certain to have preferred manuscripts, he does not seem to have thought that printed works were, in themselves, unworthy of being read. Printers, however, were another matter. Much like his contemporary, the historian Marcantonio Sabellico (1436–1506), he reviled them as much for their ‘plebeian’ ways as for their foreign origins. To his mind, they were beggars and thieves who had no appetite for work but were always hungry for money. They had come to Italy, babbling in that ugly language of theirs, with no other goal than to put scribes out of a job. What was worse, they had no sense of propriety either. Drunk on strong wine and success, they were hawking books to every Tom, Dick and Harry. In doing so, they were not democratising learning — as Bussi and Foresti liked to believe — but debasing it. Whereas, in the past, the expense and scarcity of manuscripts had ensured that great care was always taken over the preparation of texts, the ease with which books could now be printed — coupled with the intense competition between presses — had led to all manner of rubbish being churned out. These days, Filippo argued, you could hardly open a volume without it being festooned with errors. This clearly did immense damage both to classical scholarship and to education. By putting such defective texts into the hands of the masses, he claimed, even those who could barely speak the vernacular would feel qualified to teach Latin. But since printers were interested only in making a quick buck off such ‘unlettered’ fools, they had no incentive to do any better. All that mattered was getting a new edition on the market as quickly as possible, irrespective of its quality.

For much the same reason, Filippo also believed that printing was a threat to public morality. If printers had sold nothing but religious works, it might not have been so bad; but because they were interested only in profit, they were trying to attract new readers by appealing to their baser instincts. All manner of bawdy and unsuitable volumes were being produced: from the torrid love poetry of Tibullus and Ovid, to the worst kind of modern filth. Given how cheaply such books were sold, it was inevitable that vice, rather than virtue, would flourish.

As an avowed champion of textual AI, it is more than a little sobering to observe how the skeptics of past technological innovations have not only been proven right, but proven right beyond their wildest imaginings.

DISCUSS ON SG

VDH Predicts a US Victory

A summary of military historian Victor Davis Hanson’s perspective on Gulf War 2026:

Victor Davis Hanson has spent fifty years studying how wars end. When he says the tide is turning, it’s worth listening to why.

His argument isn’t based on what the Pentagon is saying. It’s based on how everyone else is behaving.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗻𝘀. VDH’s rule: Europeans never agree to go anywhere near a conflict unless they think the winning side has already been determined. They didn’t help in the early days. Now they’re starting to move. That movement is not idealism. It’s a calculation. They’ve looked at the battlefield and decided which way this ends.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝘂𝗹𝗳 𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗿𝗼-𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀. The Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris — these governments have survived for generations by reading the regional climate with precision. When they expel Iranian military attachés, when they intercept Iranian missiles over their own capitals and say nothing about American strikes, when the UAE reaffirms its $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the United States mid-war — they are not making ideological statements. They are placing bets. And they are betting on the United States.

𝗔𝗹 𝗝𝗮𝘇𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗮. This is the one that should stop you cold. Al Jazeera — the Qatari state media network, historically critical of American military action, the network Tucker Carlson and the anti-war right love to cite against Israel — is now calling the U.S. bombing campaign brilliant and effective, and saying it has been underestimated. When the media outlet of a nation that hosts both the largest American air base in the Middle East and a Hamas political office starts praising American military effectiveness, the message is unmistakable: 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘦’𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘸𝘪𝘯.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘆 𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻𝗮𝗹. A-10 Warthogs and Apache helicopter gunships are now flying strike missions in Iranian airspace at will. VDH’s point: you only deploy those aircraft when there is effectively no air defense left to threaten them. They are slow, low-flying, close-support platforms. Their presence confirms what the Pentagon has been claiming — Iran has no meaningful air defense remaining.

Iran’s strategy now is rope-a-dope. Run out the clock. Wait for American public opinion to shift. Hope the midterms create political pressure on Trump to stop. It is the only play they have left.

VDH’s conclusion: if Trump sees it through — and he believes he will — the regime falls. Not in years.

I am deeply skeptical. I will also point out that the track record of military historians has been uncharacteristically poor in recent years. VDH predicted a quick Russian victory in 2022, then predicted a Korean-style long-term standoff. Both Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind predicted Russian defeats in Ukraine. The reason is not because these are not smart, very well-educated men, but because the changing nature of warfare is very difficult for those who are experts in the previous forms to correctly read.

5GW, which is drone warfare, is a very different kettle of fish. So I don’t think these past signals necessarily mean very much at all, although it may explain why the US strategists are confident enough to send a pair of Marine Expeditionary Units to attack Iran on the ground.

DISCUSS ON SG