In one piece on history below, I did not go into the bias and ignorance of historians, I think you consider me pretty solid on that point, but to a PRACTICAL problem with academic history. History is changing at a maddening pace today, and the bureaucracy that has grown up around history simply cannot keep up.
By the time any book has gone through the printing process, a year or so, and the education bureaucracy, the latest news is years old. That is like trying to keep up with physics using stone tablets.
So they don’t even TRY. History books today could have been, and in some cases were, used in the 1950s. Even in the 1960s when I was in graduate economics, we had almost no textbooks. We had lists of articles to read.
Another practical problem comes up in the fact that, contrary to popular belief, smaller businesses tend to PREFER racial and sex quotas. Big businesses, with huge legal staffs on hand, find it easy to negotiate these things with government agencies. But the small business man does not have lawyers on hand. They would prefer just to be given a hard and fast rule, a straight, quota, to meet rather than having to hire a lawyer.
Government regulations help nig business, which is why big business lobbies tend to favor liberals. Government regulation puts rising small businesses out of business. Big business and big government get along just fine.
Small business come out of nowhere and bust up monopolies, as Vonage is doing to the phone companies. Vonage now has its own legal staff, but big business needs to bust up such companies when hey are small and vulnerable, and one of their major allies is regulation.
We get so tied up in outright bias that we can easily miss these practical considerations.
Another big problem that was big in the Reagan days and was supposed to be unique in American history was homelessness. I dealt personally with this a lot in alcohol and drug recovery. I sponsored a number of people who were homeless.
During the Depression, Shanty Towns sprang up all over the country. I have not met a single homeless person in the program who would not have LOVED to live in a Shanty Town rather than on the street. Homelessness is indeed an American problem unique in our history, but not for the reasons given.
The solution to homelessness today is for paid activists to lobby for legislation in Reagan’s day was to get government money to build housing that meet bureaucratic specifications.
Housing in Depression days was different in two ways. First, almost any American could BUILD a shanty. Secondly people had a PLACE to build a shanty.
There are no more “woods” where you can put up a shanty town. Government doesn’t allow you to build them. That is what is unique.
Minorities move into Projects. White folks move into mobile homes. Mobile homes are also regulated out of most cities. My sponsees could have built their own shanties. It never occurs to most minorities.
In the real world, public housing for “the poor” is a battle zone. Once again, that is government regulation. Shanty towns were safe and white.
People make communities, not books.
Sane whites prefer the streets to public housing.
All this is a RESULT of activism. Housing regulations and racial requirements in public housing are the result of activism. So if you are white or one for the few blacks who can build his own place, you have to have a pretty substantial income to afford to live in regulated housing that is decent and safe.
Hence homelessness.
#1 by Dave on 02/27/2008 - 4:28 pm
Crowded societies either strictly self-regulate or they are extremely police regulated such as we are in the US. There used to be plenty of room in America, no more.
There are enormous numbers of persons living on the street in China. The astonishing thing is that no one touches his or her goods. In most places in China you can leave your personal property on the street and you can be absolutely certain that it will remained untouched and your personal property be there when you get back.
The reason for this, of course, is that everybody knows if they don’t respect each other’s personal property there will an eruption of bloody hell. These behavioral norms, so astonishing to us, are rooted in dread and fear. And despite what the MSM tells us, life in China is brutally hard.
We have this absurd situation in America, where large sums are spent in the improvement of downtown business districts, and hard working small business people attempt to make a go of it, finding a niche in order to compete with McDonalds, Burger King, Walmart, and Target, only to have it all ruined by mentally ill derelicts and assorted outcasts pissing in their doorways.
The public doesn’t come into these “improved” downtown business districts because of these homeless people. Yet homeless advocates, who usually have the ear of the local political command, have no feeling whatsoever for the hardworking small business people who have had their investments and plans ruined by the presence of these homeless people.
Walmart and Target don’t care. This fits their agenda perfectly. They don’t like anyone competing with them. THEIR venues of business are highly and effectively policed.
I have never seen homeless people hanging out at Target or Walmart, maybe offsite, but not on the premises. Activities are being video taped on the premises. This is true of McDonalds and Burger King also.
We live in the most highly regulated society that has ever existed in history. Our lives are unbelievably highly regulated and political and diplomatic skills are key in any tyranny. Everything you do must be highly strategic and tactical in a tyranny.
America is hell for anyone who doesn’t “fit” or who simply cannot understand the true nature of the American tyranny. America is a vicious society for very large numbers of people. Large numbers of us simply don’t survive.
I lived in downtown cores of big cities for years. Unlike most commuters, and that is what most of the population in America’s urban downtown cores are, I was confronted by living there 24 X 7 not only with a lot of street violence, but also with the large numbers of bodies scraped off the streets of people who died of unnatural causes.
In any large America city there is a constant stream of bodies coming into the coroners offices of people who should not be dead, as they are not old and of dying age. Whether or not these deaths are actually investigated depends upon whether anybody really cared about them in life. That’s how the coroner actually makes his decision on whether to investigate.
The real statistics are always kept low profile, as the level of unnatural deaths is an embarrassment to the local business and political command.
This coroner’s office moral arithmetic is in force the world over.
America is no exception. And the level of unnatural deaths occurring in any society can measure the civility of that society which includes how honestly and effectively unnatural deaths are accounted for.
In my opinion America has a VERY POOR RECORD in this regard. That’s why I hate local politicians more than I hate the Feds. The personalities of the local political commanders occupying the governance seats of municipal governments are usually horrible. They are invariably utterly contemptible and selfish liars.
I have watched one too many corpse of somebody who should not be dead being hauled onto the meat wagon to feel otherwise.
The middle classes are never confronted with this. They are too busy watching 19th century ball games to notice.
Shame on them.
#2 by Brutus on 02/27/2008 - 5:54 pm
This reminds me of something I talk about from time to time.
Notice how the flood of CSI shows and MOST other crime documentaries imply that NOBODY gets away with murder today?
Tune to “The First 48,” one of the better shows. On this show they frankly admit and demonstrate that if the murderer is not apprehended or otherwise identified within the first 48 hours it is usually gone baby gone!
And on shows like “Cold Case Files” you can plainly see that there are literally 100’s of tons of files for unsolved murders, most of which will never be investigated, let alone solved.
On one such show, maybe “Cold Case Files,” they took the camera crew into the Los Angeles *County* building where they store these unsolved, cold case murder files. You know, where they store those, what, 1×2 foot, cardboard file boxes containing all the records and notes of the murder. It looked like that warehouse at the end of “Raiders of the Lost arc.”
Like I said, that was only for Los Angeles COUNTY, not even all of Los Angeles. And I think it was only for the fairly recent cases, not the entire history of the county. Imagine how many such cold cases there are across the country.
It’s staggering.
#3 by Brutus on 02/27/2008 - 6:44 pm
By the way, William F. Buckley Jr. is Tango Uniform at 82.
Good. One less of “The Greatest Generation” we will have to Listen to.
Also, The filter down thing is working again. Last night I happened to watch “The O’Reilly Factor” for a few minutes.
In one segment O’Reilly had a woman election attorney on. They discussed George Soros and the woman detailed how he and a few other “Hollywood types” have used their vast wealth and influence to change the face of society into something that THEY like.
It was a calm and straightforward discussion. Not any ridiculing of conspiracy theories and such. O’Reilly stated he had no idea a few people had been able to so drastically change the world. The woman said “yes” and that it had went on for a very long time. It was pointed out that “Right Wing” activists Were virtually bankrupt whilea relatively few people like some in Hollywood and other “Left Wing Radicals” could spend hundreds of millions of their own to and change popular opinion and set the status quo.
Like I said, what was different in that it was discussed calmly and seriously. There was no sarcasm by O’Reilly, no “oh come on’s” or such. It was instead implied that this is a serious issue just discovered that needs to be addressed and that further investigation will be done.
It was not until hours later that the significance of this dawned on me. I am so used to and long since bored with the subject that I never realized that I had just seen something on “Mainstream” TV that has long been either suppressed, ridiculed or otherwise met with open hostility.
Times are changing.
#4 by Brutus on 02/27/2008 - 7:11 pm
I apologize for the multiple posts in a row, but my mind is not as organized as I wish it were. I remember only later what else I want to say.
Anyway, there is a good discussion going on at Chronicles again. Go there and click on the article by Buchannon about ethnonationalism. I’m there as Brutus.
There is the usual gobbldy-gook by respectable conservatives that it is all about “culture” and not race, and that tribalism is very wicked.
Here is the URL:
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=519#comments
Help me out.