Excellent song, great lyrics. The Eagles did a very competent cover in On the Border with Glenn Frey and Don Henley sharing the lead vocal. While Waits is not everyone’s cup of tea, at his best – as here – he is quite good.
Thanks, that sets me up for the whole day!
A couple of times a year I can really say,
“Now the sun’s coming up, I’m riding with Lady Luck,”
but then Lady Luck goes home and I’m just riding.
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me
than a frontal lobotomy.” – Tom Waits
Engineers and other aficionados of the FFT, this one’s for you:
From the Bee Gees to Tom Waits, a truly eclectic mix. Ol’ 55 comes from the album which revealed TW as a unique talent, Closing Time. And you might add Warren Zevon to the mix, another unique artist who shone a savage light on contemporary American life. Try The French Inhaler for his slant on the bleakness of Hollywood. Prescient too.
I had my own “Ol’ 55” experience as a young man, headed home at 6:00 in the morning, and I was even was humming this very song, but I was riding my old Honda CB 750. Wind in my face, memories of the night still vivid, and oh yes, I was feeling very alive.
It’s hard to beat Waits’ first five albums. I lost track as he became more experimental and dissonant. Here’s my favorite about two lost souls meeting.
_______________________________________
And the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone
He didn’t seem to be like any guy she’d ever known
He kind of looked like Farley Granger with his hair slicked back
She says I’m a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat
How far are you going?
Said Depends on what you mean
He says I’m only stopping here to get some gasoline
I guess I’m going thataway just as long as it’s paved
And I guess you’d say I’m on my way to Burma Shave
And with her knees up on the glove compartment
She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like root beer
And she popped her gum and arched her back
Hell Marysville ain’t nothing but a wide spot in the road
Some nights my heart pounds like thunder
Don’t know why it don’t explode
Cause everyone in this stinking town’s got one foot in the grave
And I’d rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
“ Ben Shapiro said Friday that pro-Trump rioters should rot in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol, contrasting himself with other prominent conservatives who recently complained about their incarceration.
Mr. Shapiro, an author, podcast host and co-founder of The Daily Wire conservative news website, made the remark during a panel discussion on the latest episode of the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher”.
Fellow panelist Malcolm Nance said during the show that former President Trump mobilized 40,000 “to lay siege to the Capitol,” but only a fraction of that figure breached the building, Mr. Shapiro noted.”
Thoughts? Anyone?
Re: Ben Shapiro. He’s a prig.
That too, that too.
Anyway, Dear Readers… Let’s all have a bit less Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect when we read other #@$% written by that %^&*bag Jaffa-ite Windbag, Ben Shapiro.
Zaphod re: Robert Pirsig. And he did that ride, made famous by his book, 2-up on a 305cc bike. As a fellow long-distance rider that has always amazed me. It guess it goes to show that big is not always better. But still, even my old 750 felt small … with just myself.
My last bike was another Honda, the new CB 1100 – wonderful bike. Alas, it (and I) came in 2nd in an encounter with a steel guardrail outside of Breckenridge, CO a couple of years ago. Considering that it was blocking a pretty much straight down 200 ft fall, I can’t fault the guardrail too much. Only accident in 40+ years of riding. Once I’m fully past the psychological damage (body has fully healed) it’s going to be a new Triumph Bonneville T100.
Re: Shapiro…
Zaphod:
You win.
@huxley:
That’s cool… But I need to drag his corpse behind my chariot for a few more laps before I’m myself again! 😀
This is a Friend of a Friend story, so who knows…. From the 90s.
My FoaF was flying back to LA and noticed a couple laughing and giggling and carrying on the whole trip. They were so silly that FoaF assumed they were both mentally retarded.
After they landed FoaF saw the couple being met at the gate. Turned out they were Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones.
@Telmachus:
Ouch Re the Guardrail. For a while in Australia they had these new-fangled tensioned steel wire guardrails which were supposed to be safer than the traditional sort — until it was noticed that they made like cheese wire with motorcyclists. Think they’ve all been switched back now.
You’re unlikely to recover from that kind of psychological damage on Philippines roads, but here’s hoping you get in a bunch of miles on the Bonneville when that posting is done.
IIRC Pirsig got in a few digs in his book at one of his riding partners on a thinly-disguised BMW — ostensibly because that guy couldn’t do his own maintenance.
I’ve read stories online of middle class Indian guys riding half-way across India and up into the Himalayas on Royal Enfield Bullets. It seems to be a rite of passage for some. I guess if they could do it on one of those, Pirsig could manage the Interstates on a more modern and reliable Honda.
IIRC Pirsig got in a few digs in his book at one of his riding partners on a thinly-disguised BMW — ostensibly because that guy couldn’t do his own maintenance.
Zaphod:
The tension between the couple and himself, Pirsig called Classic vs Romantic and he used it as a lever to get his whole Metaphysics of Quality lecture going, as well as speculate some about the post-hippie search in the 70s.
Great to see a picture of his motorcycle!
I had a cousin who rode a Yamaha 125 from Illinois to Florida. Technically illegal on the highways, as I recall.
I have two motorcycle stories, both involving my dad.
Context: Our home town on the flat plains of Texas had one high-point: the overpass where the east-west road (definitely not a highway) arched above the railroad tracks.
When we were kids around high-school age, my brother was always nagging our folks to let him have a motorcycle, but they were very adamantly opposed, especially our father. It was a recurring breakfast and dinner butting-of-heads.
One day, while I was prowling through a closet for some reason, I found a box of old photos, obviously from before any of us were born. One showed my dad on a bike of now-unremembered provenance, “shooting” the overpass, with clear daylight between the wheels and the asphalt.
When I asked him about it, his only comment was to inform me that, if I ever showed the picture to my brother, he would kill me.
(A symbolic threat, of course, from my quite amiable and un-violent father, but it conveyed the message.)
Sometime after we all left home, he received my mother’s indulgence to finally get a new bike, which he used to commute to work (all of maybe 2 miles). As they aged, she eventually tried to persuade him to give it up, but I suspect you know how far she got with that.
However, one day, he came in, somewhat out of the blue, and said that he was selling the bike.
Some years later, after he had passed away, she confided to me something that she had never told him: just prior to his announcement, she had been watching out the kitchen window and saw him tip over as he parked the bike, and was nearly unable to pick it up again.
It’s good to recognize our limitations.
Tucker Carlson Visits Hungary. Earth Plunges into Sun.
“Why Johnny Can’t Think” by Rob Jenkins at townhall.com
If it seems that young people these days believe absurd things, that they utterly lack both the ability and the inclination to reason logically—well, it’s not your imagination. Today’s college graduates can’t think, or at least don’t think, because they’re not being taught to.
This sad reality, though long suspected, became clear in 2011, with the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. After a four-year study of more than 2300 undergraduates at selective universities across the country, they concluded that a sizeable percentage of them improved little if at all as critical thinkers.
Since then, numerous studies and surveys by organizations like Noel-Levitz, the Association of American Colleges and Universities,The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Payscale have confirmed Arum’s and Roksa’s thesis. Employers consistently report that new hires fare poorly in writing and critical thinking—essentially, two sides of the same coin.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities not only claim to be teaching critical thinking; they shout it from the rooftops—even as the end users of their “products,” employers, complain that skill is in short supply. Why the disconnect?
The answer, I believe (and as I argue in my bookThink Better, Write Better) is that what institutions of higher learning are teaching these days under the banner of “critical thinking” really isn’t—or at least it isn’t what employers mean when they use the term. Organizations want people who can be objective and analytical, using logic and reason to solve problems. That’s what the term “critical thinking” means to them, and what it has meant to most of us for decades. It’s certainly what I was taught in college.
Today, however, that is not at all what colleges and universities mean—or perhaps I should say, what most professors mean. “Critical thinking,” for them, is a Marxist exercise in “critique,” what Marx himself called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” It seeks not to solve problems but to break down, or “deconstruct,” all aspects of society….
The answer, I believe (and as I argue in my bookThink Better, Write Better) is that what institutions of higher learning are teaching these days under the banner of “critical thinking” really isn’t—or at least it isn’t what employers mean when they use the term…
Today, however, that is not at all what colleges and universities mean—or perhaps I should say, what most professors mean. “Critical thinking,” for them, is a Marxist exercise in “critique,” what Marx himself called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” It seeks not to solve problems but to break down, or “deconstruct,” all aspects of society….
TJ:
This has been obvious for some time — to my horror. I’m not sure why Jenkins qualifies his statements with “seems” and “I believe.”
I’ve never understood how “critique” itself never faces such critique — other than that it is an intellectually dishonest method intended to roll Western civilization and gain power for itself.
@Huxley:
Article by Ron Unz from 2012 — I think you will find more truth and prescience in it than from any major ‘Conservative’ media organ of that time:
“Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.
A similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home. Presented below is a companion case-study, “Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison,” in which I point out that while the American media a few years ago joined its Chinese counterparts in devoting enormous coverage to the deaths of a few Chinese children from tainted infant formula, it paid relatively little attention to a somewhat similar domestic public-health disaster that killed many tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans.
A society’s media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America’s own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.
Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome’s rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.
But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.”
Strikes me that it’s worth (*) a bit of unsavory Jew-baiting in the sidebar or comments to get good social commentary which is hard to find elsewhere. 2012. Was he more or less correct about how things have panned out than the NYT *and* National Review?
(*) Jews may beg to differ, naturally. But I’m unaware of any successful long-term stable civilization in history which was founded or kept up on the solid bedrock foundation of worrying very much about the feelings of a tiny 2.5% minority. No hard feelings. Gnon doesn’t care about feelings.
But don’t think of this in terms of partisan politics. It’s not a question of just those #$#%ing Democrats. Let me make it simple: Your Country (yes, sorry) is simply incapable of performing needed maintenance and repairs on a busted bridge.
No excuses. Reasons yes. Excuses no. Whatever. Yadda for 100 miles in column inches about who/what/why/when/if/but… Yes there are many fine blameless people in the USA…. But still.. the bridge is busted. That’s all that matters in the end.
Could. Not. Fix. A. Simple. Thing. Like. A. Bridge.
Multiply that bridge by hundreds of thousands or millions of bigger and smaller analogous cases.
There’s a lot of ruin in a country.
Until there isn’t.
Meanwhile back in GordonChangia where everybody is beaten with cattle prods and forced to donate all their organs every day:
Oppressed Oriental Slave: “I don’t remember this 8 lane shinycable-stay bridge being here last week.”
Evil FuManchu in Mao Suit: “No it wasn’t. Would you like fsome ries with your Uighurburger?”
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Excellent song, great lyrics. The Eagles did a very competent cover in On the Border with Glenn Frey and Don Henley sharing the lead vocal. While Waits is not everyone’s cup of tea, at his best – as here – he is quite good.
Thanks, that sets me up for the whole day!
A couple of times a year I can really say,
“Now the sun’s coming up, I’m riding with Lady Luck,”
but then Lady Luck goes home and I’m just riding.
“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me
than a frontal lobotomy.” – Tom Waits
Engineers and other aficionados of the FFT, this one’s for you:
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2021/08/07/sex-is-a-spectrum/
From the Bee Gees to Tom Waits, a truly eclectic mix. Ol’ 55 comes from the album which revealed TW as a unique talent, Closing Time. And you might add Warren Zevon to the mix, another unique artist who shone a savage light on contemporary American life. Try The French Inhaler for his slant on the bleakness of Hollywood. Prescient too.
I had my own “Ol’ 55” experience as a young man, headed home at 6:00 in the morning, and I was even was humming this very song, but I was riding my old Honda CB 750. Wind in my face, memories of the night still vivid, and oh yes, I was feeling very alive.
@Telemachus:
Unrelated, but:
https://www.motorcycle.com/manufacturer/honda/robert-pirsigs-zen-cb77-superhawk-rides-into-the-smithsonian.html
Knew it was a Honda, didn’t know the model.
It’s hard to beat Waits’ first five albums. I lost track as he became more experimental and dissonant. Here’s my favorite about two lost souls meeting.
_______________________________________
And the road was like a ribbon and the moon was like a bone
He didn’t seem to be like any guy she’d ever known
He kind of looked like Farley Granger with his hair slicked back
She says I’m a sucker for a fella in a cowboy hat
How far are you going?
Said Depends on what you mean
He says I’m only stopping here to get some gasoline
I guess I’m going thataway just as long as it’s paved
And I guess you’d say I’m on my way to Burma Shave
And with her knees up on the glove compartment
She took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like root beer
And she popped her gum and arched her back
Hell Marysville ain’t nothing but a wide spot in the road
Some nights my heart pounds like thunder
Don’t know why it don’t explode
Cause everyone in this stinking town’s got one foot in the grave
And I’d rather take my chances out in Burma Shave
–Tom Waits, “Burma Shave”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGeIusN-avE
_______________________________________
“Her hair spilled out like root beer…”
Rock’n’roll poetry.
Your Fellow American, Ben Shapiro takes a stand on the January 6 Protestors Issue:
https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/081/398/022/original/7ececde334e6fc74.jpeg
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/7/ben-shapiro-capitol-rioters-will-end-up-rotting-in/
“ Ben Shapiro said Friday that pro-Trump rioters should rot in prison for attacking the U.S. Capitol, contrasting himself with other prominent conservatives who recently complained about their incarceration.
Mr. Shapiro, an author, podcast host and co-founder of The Daily Wire conservative news website, made the remark during a panel discussion on the latest episode of the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher”.
Fellow panelist Malcolm Nance said during the show that former President Trump mobilized 40,000 “to lay siege to the Capitol,” but only a fraction of that figure breached the building, Mr. Shapiro noted.”
Thoughts? Anyone?
Re: Ben Shapiro. He’s a prig.
That too, that too.
Anyway, Dear Readers… Let’s all have a bit less Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect when we read other #@$% written by that %^&*bag Jaffa-ite Windbag, Ben Shapiro.
Zaphod re: Robert Pirsig. And he did that ride, made famous by his book, 2-up on a 305cc bike. As a fellow long-distance rider that has always amazed me. It guess it goes to show that big is not always better. But still, even my old 750 felt small … with just myself.
My last bike was another Honda, the new CB 1100 – wonderful bike. Alas, it (and I) came in 2nd in an encounter with a steel guardrail outside of Breckenridge, CO a couple of years ago. Considering that it was blocking a pretty much straight down 200 ft fall, I can’t fault the guardrail too much. Only accident in 40+ years of riding. Once I’m fully past the psychological damage (body has fully healed) it’s going to be a new Triumph Bonneville T100.
Re: Shapiro…
Zaphod:
You win.
@huxley:
That’s cool… But I need to drag his corpse behind my chariot for a few more laps before I’m myself again! 😀
This is a Friend of a Friend story, so who knows…. From the 90s.
My FoaF was flying back to LA and noticed a couple laughing and giggling and carrying on the whole trip. They were so silly that FoaF assumed they were both mentally retarded.
After they landed FoaF saw the couple being met at the gate. Turned out they were Tom Waits and Rickie Lee Jones.
@Telmachus:
Ouch Re the Guardrail. For a while in Australia they had these new-fangled tensioned steel wire guardrails which were supposed to be safer than the traditional sort — until it was noticed that they made like cheese wire with motorcyclists. Think they’ve all been switched back now.
You’re unlikely to recover from that kind of psychological damage on Philippines roads, but here’s hoping you get in a bunch of miles on the Bonneville when that posting is done.
IIRC Pirsig got in a few digs in his book at one of his riding partners on a thinly-disguised BMW — ostensibly because that guy couldn’t do his own maintenance.
I’ve read stories online of middle class Indian guys riding half-way across India and up into the Himalayas on Royal Enfield Bullets. It seems to be a rite of passage for some. I guess if they could do it on one of those, Pirsig could manage the Interstates on a more modern and reliable Honda.
IIRC Pirsig got in a few digs in his book at one of his riding partners on a thinly-disguised BMW — ostensibly because that guy couldn’t do his own maintenance.
Zaphod:
The tension between the couple and himself, Pirsig called Classic vs Romantic and he used it as a lever to get his whole Metaphysics of Quality lecture going, as well as speculate some about the post-hippie search in the 70s.
Great to see a picture of his motorcycle!
I had a cousin who rode a Yamaha 125 from Illinois to Florida. Technically illegal on the highways, as I recall.
I have two motorcycle stories, both involving my dad.
Context: Our home town on the flat plains of Texas had one high-point: the overpass where the east-west road (definitely not a highway) arched above the railroad tracks.
When we were kids around high-school age, my brother was always nagging our folks to let him have a motorcycle, but they were very adamantly opposed, especially our father. It was a recurring breakfast and dinner butting-of-heads.
One day, while I was prowling through a closet for some reason, I found a box of old photos, obviously from before any of us were born. One showed my dad on a bike of now-unremembered provenance, “shooting” the overpass, with clear daylight between the wheels and the asphalt.
When I asked him about it, his only comment was to inform me that, if I ever showed the picture to my brother, he would kill me.
(A symbolic threat, of course, from my quite amiable and un-violent father, but it conveyed the message.)
Sometime after we all left home, he received my mother’s indulgence to finally get a new bike, which he used to commute to work (all of maybe 2 miles). As they aged, she eventually tried to persuade him to give it up, but I suspect you know how far she got with that.
However, one day, he came in, somewhat out of the blue, and said that he was selling the bike.
Some years later, after he had passed away, she confided to me something that she had never told him: just prior to his announcement, she had been watching out the kitchen window and saw him tip over as he parked the bike, and was nearly unable to pick it up again.
It’s good to recognize our limitations.
Tucker Carlson Visits Hungary. Earth Plunges into Sun.
https://www.unz.com/article/tucker-carlson-visits-hungary-apoplectic-rage-on-the-left/
“Why Johnny Can’t Think” by Rob Jenkins at townhall.com
If it seems that young people these days believe absurd things, that they utterly lack both the ability and the inclination to reason logically—well, it’s not your imagination. Today’s college graduates can’t think, or at least don’t think, because they’re not being taught to.
This sad reality, though long suspected, became clear in 2011, with the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. After a four-year study of more than 2300 undergraduates at selective universities across the country, they concluded that a sizeable percentage of them improved little if at all as critical thinkers.
Since then, numerous studies and surveys by organizations like Noel-Levitz, the Association of American Colleges and Universities,The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Payscale have confirmed Arum’s and Roksa’s thesis. Employers consistently report that new hires fare poorly in writing and critical thinking—essentially, two sides of the same coin.
Meanwhile, colleges and universities not only claim to be teaching critical thinking; they shout it from the rooftops—even as the end users of their “products,” employers, complain that skill is in short supply. Why the disconnect?
The answer, I believe (and as I argue in my bookThink Better, Write Better) is that what institutions of higher learning are teaching these days under the banner of “critical thinking” really isn’t—or at least it isn’t what employers mean when they use the term. Organizations want people who can be objective and analytical, using logic and reason to solve problems. That’s what the term “critical thinking” means to them, and what it has meant to most of us for decades. It’s certainly what I was taught in college.
Today, however, that is not at all what colleges and universities mean—or perhaps I should say, what most professors mean. “Critical thinking,” for them, is a Marxist exercise in “critique,” what Marx himself called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” It seeks not to solve problems but to break down, or “deconstruct,” all aspects of society….
https://townhall.com/columnists/robjenkins/2021/08/08/why-johnny-cant-think-n2593762
IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES. Who knew?
The answer, I believe (and as I argue in my bookThink Better, Write Better) is that what institutions of higher learning are teaching these days under the banner of “critical thinking” really isn’t—or at least it isn’t what employers mean when they use the term…
Today, however, that is not at all what colleges and universities mean—or perhaps I should say, what most professors mean. “Critical thinking,” for them, is a Marxist exercise in “critique,” what Marx himself called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” It seeks not to solve problems but to break down, or “deconstruct,” all aspects of society….
TJ:
This has been obvious for some time — to my horror. I’m not sure why Jenkins qualifies his statements with “seems” and “I believe.”
I’ve never understood how “critique” itself never faces such critique — other than that it is an intellectually dishonest method intended to roll Western civilization and gain power for itself.
@Huxley:
Article by Ron Unz from 2012 — I think you will find more truth and prescience in it than from any major ‘Conservative’ media organ of that time:
https://www.unz.com/runz/chinas-rise-americas-fall/
“Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.
A similar dangerous reticence may afflict most of our media, which appears much more eager to focus on self-inflicted disasters in foreign countries than on those here at home. Presented below is a companion case-study, “Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison,” in which I point out that while the American media a few years ago joined its Chinese counterparts in devoting enormous coverage to the deaths of a few Chinese children from tainted infant formula, it paid relatively little attention to a somewhat similar domestic public-health disaster that killed many tens or even hundreds of thousands of Americans.
A society’s media and academic organs constitute the sensory apparatus and central nervous system of its body politic, and if the information these provide is seriously misleading, looming dangers may fester and grow. A media and academy that are highly corrupt or dishonest constitute a deadly national peril. And although the political leadership of undemocratic China might dearly wish to hide all its major mistakes, its crude propaganda machinery often fails at this self-destructive task. But America’s own societal information system is vastly more skilled and experienced in shaping reality to meet the needs of business and government leaders, and this very success does tremendous damage to our country.
Perhaps Americans really do prefer that their broadcasters provide Happy News and that their political campaigns constitute amusing reality shows. Certainly the cheering coliseum crowds of the Roman Empire favored their bread and circuses over the difficult and dangerous tasks that their ancestors had undertaken during Rome’s rise to world greatness. And so long as we can continue to trade bits of printed paper carrying presidential portraits for flat-screen TVs from Chinese factories, perhaps all is well and no one need be too concerned about the apparent course of our national trajectory, least of all our political leadership class.
But if so, then we must admit that Richard Lynn, a prominent British scholar, has been correct in predicting for a decade or longer that the global dominance of the European-derived peoples is rapidly drawing to its end and within the foreseeable future the torch of human progress and world leadership will inevitably pass into Chinese hands.”
Strikes me that it’s worth (*) a bit of unsavory Jew-baiting in the sidebar or comments to get good social commentary which is hard to find elsewhere. 2012. Was he more or less correct about how things have panned out than the NYT *and* National Review?
(*) Jews may beg to differ, naturally. But I’m unaware of any successful long-term stable civilization in history which was founded or kept up on the solid bedrock foundation of worrying very much about the feelings of a tiny 2.5% minority. No hard feelings. Gnon doesn’t care about feelings.
Can’t fix a bridge:
http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/bidens-bridge-is-falling-down.html
The Kosher Samosa nails it again.
But don’t think of this in terms of partisan politics. It’s not a question of just those #$#%ing Democrats. Let me make it simple: Your Country (yes, sorry) is simply incapable of performing needed maintenance and repairs on a busted bridge.
No excuses. Reasons yes. Excuses no. Whatever. Yadda for 100 miles in column inches about who/what/why/when/if/but… Yes there are many fine blameless people in the USA…. But still.. the bridge is busted. That’s all that matters in the end.
Could. Not. Fix. A. Simple. Thing. Like. A. Bridge.
Multiply that bridge by hundreds of thousands or millions of bigger and smaller analogous cases.
There’s a lot of ruin in a country.
Until there isn’t.
Meanwhile back in GordonChangia where everybody is beaten with cattle prods and forced to donate all their organs every day:
Oppressed Oriental Slave: “I don’t remember this 8 lane shinycable-stay bridge being here last week.”
Evil FuManchu in Mao Suit: “No it wasn’t. Would you like fsome ries with your Uighurburger?”