Tag: decline and fall

The Useless College Degree

It used to be that at least the possession of a university degree meant that you weren’t an innumerate, half-illiterate peasant. This is no longer the case.

Gone are the days of university freshmen reading classical philosophers like Plato or contemporary pedagogues like Ta-Nehisi Coates. These days, incoming college students are lucky if they can get through Judy Blume’s “Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing.”

According to a new “Survey of Adult Skills” conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – a forum for 38 high-income, predominantly Western countries – a not insignificant number of adult students enrolled in higher education are now reading and doing math at a level which, in a more functional society, would be alarming for a middle schooler.

The survey, first spotted by the Economist, tested around 160,000 people of all ages, across all 38 member states. It found that across all OECD member countries, a full 8 percent of college students are reading at the level of a ten-year-old, if not worse. While countries like Germany and France rang in at under 5 percent, countries like Poland, Israel, and the United States blew the curve at 21, 20, and 14 percent, respectively.

The numbers aren’t much better when it comes to math.

Across OECD countries, 9 percent of college students do math at or below a ten-year-old level. In Italy, the US, and Slovakia, that figure jumps to over 15 percent — only outdone by Israel, where roughly 21 percent of college students were underachieving at the same low benchmark.

This certainly puts the lie to the concept of Progress, or the idea that we are smarter than our ancestors because Science. But giving pieces of papers to peasants no more makes them educated or intelligent than giving pieces of paper to foreigners modifies their genetics.

Part of the reason for the decline of the Western countries is the mass importation of sub-100 IQs bringing down the average. But a more significant element is the convergence of the schools and universities, neither of which are still capable of performing what used to be their primary functions.

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The Decline is Real

Remember when they told you that America has plenty of room for all those immigrants? And when they said Americans needed to reduce their dependence upon nuclear power and fossil fuels?

Well, the demand for electricity now surpasses the ability of American power plants to supply it.

  • The largest U.S. power grid operator has issued a Energy Emergency Alert – Level 2 (EEA2) because it is “NO LONGER ABLE TO PROVIDE EXPECTED ENERGY REQUIREMENTS.” According to the PJM Emergency Procedures Website, Electric Utilities MUST begin cutting the energy load immediately: The ⁠alert was issued to increase reserves on the system and avert outages during peak demand around ​6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) on Friday, it said. PJM also notified neighboring regional grids, including in New York ​and the Midwest, that electricity exports from PJM may be curtailed, a procedural step that allows those neighboring regions to plan accordingly.
  • Consolidated Edison Company, the electric utility for the five boroughs of New York City, has had to cut power levels by eight percent (8%) in areas of Brooklyn and Queens.   The announcement reads as follows: “We are asking customers in parts of Queens and Brooklyn to conserve energy while crews complete equipment repairs. As a precaution to help maintain reliable service, voltage has been reduced by 8% in neighborhoods including Glendale, Forest Hills, Forest Hills Gardens, Ridgewood, Maspeth, Middle Village, Long Island City, Hunters Point, Sunnyside, Sunnyside Gardens, Woodside, Bay Ridge, Borough Park, Carroll Gardens, Dyker Heights, Park Slope, Sunset Park, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Flatbush, and Bensonhurst.
  • Liars. It’s 25% less here in Forest Hills.

Sooner or later, reality always intrudes. Not only can we touch the real, but the real will eventually touch even the most fevered ideological imaginations. 250 years is a very good run, but the USA will not make it to a third centennial.

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Supreme Court Upholds Paper

This is an absurd and pernicious anti-American ruling by the Supreme Court in defense of geography-based citizenship:

The Supreme Court slapped down President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship in a major blow to the administration’s radical vision for the composition of the country. In a landmark 6-3 decision, the Justices halted the President’s attempt to end birthright citizenship – calling it blatantly unconstitutional and out of bounds.

The constitutional guarantee was enshrined by the 14th Amendment, and ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves, but has since applied to every person born on US soil or its territories.

It impacts an estimated 150,000 children born in the US annually to noncitizens.

The ruling is a major defeat for Trump, and comes as the high court has ruled against him in a handful of major cases – including invalidating his sweeping tariff regime, and blocking his effort to fire Lisa Cook from the Fed’s board of governors.

As one diehard liberal recently pointed out, the use of liberal democratic institutions to defend the indefensible and defeat the will of the people is only going to guarantee the eventual destruction of those institutions.

There will not be any independent judiciary in the governments that replace the corrupt governments of the West when they fall, because, as with so many Enlightenment concepts, their supposed value is net negative to society.

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Where is the IRA?

I don’t believe the Irish fought British rule for more than 60 years for the right to be invaded and beheaded by Africans:

A Sudanese man arrested over the attempted ‘beheading’ in Belfast is an asylum seeker, it emerged today.

PSNI Chief Constable Jon Boutcher said the suspect is believed to have travelled from Sudan to Paris, and then from Paris to Dublin, on unknown dates, before taking a bus to Belfast in February 2023.

There, he immediately claimed asylum, before he was given leave to remain in the UK in September 2023.

He has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after the horrific attack at 10.30pm last night, which left a man in his 40s in a critical condition with ‘significant’ eye injuries and wounds to his face, neck and back.

Social media footage shows a man standing astride a bloodied victim holding a knife to his throat and his fist in the air. He starts making a sawing motion as witnesses scream: ‘He’s trying to cut his head off’…

Anti-immigration activists have called for mass protests in Belfast this evening, prompting fears of widespread disorder. Some posts online called for men over 18 to attend, wear dark clothing and ‘be prepared to fight or be arrested’.

Chief Constable Boutcher urged people to let ‘the police do their job unfettered and undistracted’.

Enough. Mass immigration isn’t military invasion, it’s something far more insidious and much worse for the native populations being subjected to it.

As any American Indian can attest. And the American Dilemma is now the Irish Dilemma.

The American dilemma is now the European dilemma.

In America, it all begins with the fact that we have had a multiracial society from the very beginning. When the English arrived, there were already Indians. We then imported another race: Africans. And after that, we let in everyone, from everywhere. The American multiracial society has been a total failure, and that should have been clear to Europeans at a time when they still had white countries.

Part of the problem, however, was that even if European intellectuals had understood that America had a racial problem, they were convinced they could solve it. They thought the problem was not multiracial society itself. The problem was those ignorant, prejudiced Americans—especially Southern Americans—and Europeans were sure they could teach us to do better.

But even Lee Kwan Yew couldn’t solve the problem. A corrupt collection of unelected European bureaucrats have zero chance of succeeding where the most brilliant politician of the 20th century couldn’t.

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You Happened, Boris

The abject parody of Winston Churchill isn’t concerned about the invasion of Britain, the Orwellian speech police, the self-sinking of the Royal Navy, or the mass rape of British girls, but call out one Zionist psychopath who infamously celebrated ethnic cleansing in public and he’s up in arms!

Boris Johnson@BorisJohnson
What’s happening to our country when Dame Helen Mirren can be abused in the street?

Why, it has aroused his fury!

Here’s the thing. No one cares anymore about these little performances anymore. Vladimir Putin can drop an Oreshnik right on Big Ben and all the true red-blooded Englishmen would be grateful. Because their enemies are inside the gates, and they have been for some time.

You should have fought the invaders on the beaches, Boris. But you didn’t. You welcomed them and put them up in nice hotels instead.

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The Turning Point

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few years now, the USA is no longer a global superpower. It’s now been demoted to major regional power, which is very far from nothing, but its pretensions at pursuing elite interests in the name of playing global policeman are observably over:

Last week’s Trump-Xi summit produced no dramatic declaration or historic treaty – yet its importance may prove far greater than any immediate deliverable. What happened in Beijing was not a breakthrough in policy but a breakthrough in recognition: the United States openly acknowledged China as an equal center of global power. That alone marks a historic turning point.

For decades, American administrations approached China from the assumption that Beijing was either a manageable challenger or a state that would eventually integrate into a US-led international order on American terms. The summit suggested something fundamentally different.

US President Donald Trump appeared compelled to recognize that China is no longer simply a rival great power but a central pillar of the emerging world order – one that Washington can neither isolate nor overpower. This was the true message of the summit.

Neither Washington nor Beijing expected immediate breakthroughs. The summit was never realistically supposed to solve structural tensions overnight. Its purpose was to stabilize relations between two powers which are increasingly aware that prolonged escalation has become prohibitively costly. The talks reflected the reality that the US now needs stable engagement with China as much as China needs stable engagement with the US. This mutual dependency is perhaps uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable – neither full confrontation nor full separation is sustainable anymore.

For years, the Americans described China as a revisionist actor seeking to overturn the international order. But the Beijing summit demonstrated something more consequential: the international order itself is already changing. Many countries have begun treating China not merely as a competitor to the US, but as a parallel – and in some respects superior – center of global gravity.

The post-WWII international order is now over. Clown World is still scrambling to control what it can, but it is in disarray. Which means these will continue to be interesting and tumultuous times.

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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

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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.

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Immigration and IQ Matter

Here’s why IQ matters.

Look at the percentage of problem causers vs problem solvers in a 100-avgIQ group vs 85-avgIQ.

Imagine MOST of your population is problem causers, a tiny sliver is problem solvers, and no geniuses? A place like that would look like, well, like somalia or india.

Then imagine a place where most people are maintainers, and you have more midwits and problems solvers than problem causers? Well, that would look like America (30 years ago before we let in india and somalia)

HoeMath is absolutely correct. I addressed this very issue eleven years ago in Cuckservative. It’s interesting to see how some of the concepts, and even some of the terms, have now permeated the mainstream discourse. That’s encouraging for the state of discourse ten years from now, when for some reason that no one will be able to explain, no one believes in evolution anymore.

The fundamental challenge is that neither midwits nor maintainers are capable of seeing problems coming from down the road. Their perspective is always a limited one of the last 15-20 years. If something hasn’t caused a problem yet, that means it never will. The maintainers ignore everything but their day-to-day responsibilities and the midwits devote themselves to aggressively attacking every problem solver or genius who is concerned about the problems the midwits can’t yet perceive.

Here’s a genius-level future problem for you: explain why PZ isn’t being actively suppressed.

Think that one through if you want a sleepless night or two. Although it could be worse. If it gets featured by any of the major book reviews, or appears on The New York Times bestseller list, and I start getting requests for puff-piece interviews, Houston will definitely have a problem.

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Civilizational Erasure

The White House warns the European politicians that their long-term course is suicidal on a grand scale:

Europe is facing potential “civilizational erasure” as the continent’s policymakers encourage censorship, crack down on political opponents, and turn a blind eye to mass immigration, the new National Security Strategy released by the administration of US President Donald Trump warns.

The landmark and strongly worded document released on Friday says that while the EU is showing worrying signs of economic decline, its cultural and political unraveling poses an even greater threat.

The strategy cites EU-backed immigration policies, suppression of political opposition, curbs on speech, collapsing birthrates, and “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” warning that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

One of Washington’s key goals is “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” the paper adds.

Trump’s strategy notes that the rise of “patriotic European parties” offers “cause for great optimism,” in a reference to growing bloc-wide support for right-wing Euroskeptic parties calling for strict immigration limits.

It’s not exactly a mystery what’s happening when on the one hand, they’re encouraging assisted suicide and sexual self-mutilation and sterilization in the public schools and mass immigration on the other. The only thing that is remarkable is how many people are too stupid and short-sighted to admit what has been happening right in front of them for years, if not decades.

But they’ll fail, sooner or later. They always do. It’s only a question of just how messy the whole thing is going to get before stability is restored. China went through it. Russia went through it. Now it’s the turn of the West to do the same.

The tragedy is that so many people take civilization for granted despite having no concept on what is necessary to maintain it.

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