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Open thread 6/09/23

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  • Rev.Bro. Generik Broderick June 9, 2023, 8:18 AM

    Wildfires[sic]War games[sic]president biden[sic]
    sic, sic,sic World
    Unceasingly we Pray
    Same Olde Answer.
    “Fear not. I got this.”

  • ghostsniper June 9, 2023, 9:16 AM

    Four Organizations All Founded in 1913

    FED – Federal Reserve
    FBI – Federal Bureau of Investigation
    IRS – Internal Revenue Service
    ADL – Anti Defamation League

    Must be a coincidence…

    • JD June 9, 2023, 7:46 PM

      The FBI was established in 1908.

    • ghostsniper June 11, 2023, 8:04 AM

      Ever seen 30 Hummingbirds…..
      ….having a pool party?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeKu6NEf02g

      • Casey Klahn June 11, 2023, 2:34 PM

        Negatori on the pool party sighting, but I will report that twice I have caught a hummingbird by hard. Kung Fu, himself, would be impressed.

  • jwm June 9, 2023, 9:20 AM

    Well, on this most dismal, depressing, and infuriating day of “news, and current events,” I bring one small but not unimportant bit of good news:
    Sippican is back.

    https://www.sippicancottage.com/

    JWM

    • Casey Klahn June 9, 2023, 9:44 AM

      Unequivocally my favorite blogger/writer of all time (Gerard was a news/culture/writer/blogger, so)! jmw, please tell me when you think he quit blogging, because I lost track.

      Of note: I took a side trip while in the East to visit Gregory and his family. He, and they, are as great as you imagine them to be. Very fine people, and as I said a GREAT blogger and author.

  • Casey Klahn June 9, 2023, 9:47 AM

    Best blog post ever written, in this or any other universe:
    https://www.sippicancottage.com/2009/03/my-father-asks-for-nothing.html

    I recall discussing Sippican’s greatness with Gerard, too.

    • Kerry June 11, 2023, 4:12 PM

      That put a nice big lump in my throat. Thanks. Seriously, thanks.

  • Denny June 9, 2023, 9:50 AM

    Tucker is back! –
    He’s asking only one simple question; – What is right and what is wrong?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsmIdy5r1YA

    The Times They Are a Changing – Dylan

  • Anne June 9, 2023, 1:52 PM

    OH. I am so glad to see you folks are as great admirers of Sippican as I have been for a long time. It is great to have him back. I checked his list of past publications and it looks as if he only posted occasionally, but then for a few years nothing. We need him and I am grateful.

  • Anne June 9, 2023, 2:03 PM

    Dear Casey:
    THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS PIECE FROM SIPPICAN! 40 Missions in a bubble gum is almost miraculous! He looks like the kind of kid who could have/would have done it!

    My dad came home late from the war in 1946. He had been in a Dutch hospital because “the Germans were mean to him in that camp”. I remember walking downtown with him and a car would backfire as they often did in those days. Dad would fall flat on his face in the street and snuggle up as close to the curb as he could get. He had been a pilot over Germany, shot down, captured, and put into a camp. I think the problem was that Dad was a first-generation born of German immigrants I believe once the camp commandants found out he had a reasonable understanding of German things probably got a little tougher on him than most. Don’t know. Thank you again for this beautiful piece from Sippican!

    • Casey Klahn June 9, 2023, 5:22 PM

      It’s a sacred piece of writing, if you’re someone whose father served in the war, and in combat. Mr Sippican senior is surely borne up by angelic hands, one under the crook of each elbow, lifting him up to the great briefing room in the sky.

      Miss Anne, your father is without a doubt also in a great tent, on some plain that only exists for veterans of World War II. He suffered too much. Too much.

  • John the River June 9, 2023, 2:39 PM

    Not just a writer.
    Not sure how many people remember this but he also made things. I have wood benches & shelves made by Sippy.

  • SK June 9, 2023, 4:09 PM

    I try hard not to let the news drag me down. I focus on planting, growing, harvesting cooking. I watch nature closely, I love the birds and marvel at other of God’s creatures that share my land. All this keeps me busy and happy.
    But not today. Today was a sad day. The day the music died. The day America changed forever. I’m sad because this generation and future ones will never know the freedoms I enjoyed growing up in this wonderful country that gave me and my family so much.
    Commentary on here on other blogs still provides some hope but it’s a slim reed and I’m just so saddened by this week’s events.

  • Anne June 9, 2023, 4:48 PM

    Here is what we can do folks.
    First, gather together friends and like-minded members of YOUR community. Get linked up with groups from other communities and —-and then begin to organize private schools in your communities. They don’t all have to be Catholic or Jewish. There are many good private schools that are non-denominational and even some that continue to resist what’s happening in this country. Focus on building the positive that will help get the next generations into a future that resembles our values and this country! A cup of coffee with friends thinking about how to start a school is a good first step! You can do this!

    • SK June 11, 2023, 11:18 AM

      Thank you Anne. A temporary lapse on my part.
      In fact, I engage in many of the activities you listed. I was just cross and cast down by the news of the week and the general lack of outrage. It was kind of you to comment as you did.

  • Mike Seyle June 10, 2023, 7:46 AM

    Thanks to John and Casey re: Sippican Cottage. I went there and found he has a book, “The Devil’s in the Cows”; went to Amazon and ordered it and checked the reviews to see if anyone here had done one, and lo and behold, Gerard did. He lives on, even in book reviews. Also got me interested in looking up the Library of Congress regarding photos, some of which are in the book.

    • Casey Klahn June 10, 2023, 9:11 AM

      I will write one. I have a signed copy of the book, and unlike 99.99% of the media I see today, after I read Sippi, I come away smarter than when I started. You’re in for a treat with the stories.

      • Mike Seyle June 10, 2023, 9:23 AM

        Great! I look forward to it, Casey.

        • Mike Seyle June 11, 2023, 8:49 AM

          Well, “Lorelei,” you’re a man of your word.

          • Casey Klahn June 11, 2023, 2:39 PM

            My wife & I are one. Especially on Amazon.

            Thanks for the note; I signed it with my John Hancock. SMH.

  • ghostsniper June 11, 2023, 2:33 PM

    America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

    The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

    In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

    By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

    The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

    Unfortunately, it’s not possible for selection for competence to return, because the demographic changes to the US population means that politics are no longer ideology-based, but identity-based, and people from cultures that have never valued individual merit in any way are not going to start doing so in a post-meritocratic United States.

    Furthermore, the average level of intelligence, and therefore, the average level of competence, has declined with the mass infusion of inferior genetics, to such an extent that the average IQ is probably 10 points lower than it was before 1965, when the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

    One doesn’t need to be a eugenicist to understand the societal consequences of long-term dysgenics. Think of it as large-scale regression to the historical mean, or, if you’re not an abstract thinker, why the USA is going to lose its ability to provide widespread indoor plumbing to its inhabitants.

    https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/

    https://voxday.net/2023/06/11/regression-to-the-historical-mean/

    • DT June 11, 2023, 4:23 PM

      Yep …

    • Casey Klahn June 11, 2023, 6:49 PM

      This explains a lot.

      The real pandemic is how f-ing stupid everyone is.

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