Some of our elites are real elites, like those in scientific and technological fields. Others, though, are fake elites like many of our political elites. They stay in power by providing welfare, affirmative action and lax enforcement of criminal activities to nonwhites, especially blacks, in exchange for votes. Without this large underclass, which they constantly work to expand in order to solidify their power, they would be mostly obscure powerless nonentities. Obama might be vice principal in some high school and Biden might be some ambulance chasing lawyer barely getting by. Lumping everyone together under the nebulous category “elite” tends to obscure that we are talking about two very different groups.

Since our political elites are not actually all that elite and are really mostly corrupt incompetent bunglers, it is really only a matter of time before their incompetence drives this country into a ditch. This is already happening. Coolidge, mentioned by Mr. Derbyshire, presided over a government that only spent 8% of GDP and ran budget surpluses every year. Our current government elites spend 24% of GDP, three times as much, and run almost two trillion-dollar yearly deficits that have led to a thirty-one trillion-dollar national debt. Some elite!

This group of nincompoops is going to eventually become discredited as the economy contracts and federal tax revenues dry up. A comparison can be made to the nomenklatura in the old Soviet Union. They were presented as fearsome and dangerous opponents for decades. Reagan, though, predicted that eventually “freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history”. He was right. Someday our current fake elites will end up on the same ash heap.

No mention of taxes or Jews. I know the J word is difficult for some people, but “taxes”? We can’t say “taxes”? We can’t say our present dysfunction started in 1986 with the tax bill effected under Mr. Early Stage Dementia which dropped the marginal rate to 28 percent and set in train the series of subsequent cuts, of which the Trump cut in 2018 – another 2-odd trillion lost, but who’s counting, except Fitch – was endorsed by the present iteration of our Janus-faced uniparty.
The homelessness, the wealth gap, the ruin of public schools, the obscene costs of college, the rise of Jewish Washington, all have their genesis in the Reagan bill. That’s why they named the airport after him. But discussions re taxes and consequences are “off the table,” per the well-forgotten John Boehner, even now for Mr. Good Guy Contrarian Brooks, who, to be fair, might not even have thought of it, like people in China don’t think about Tianamen Square, or June 4, 1989. It doesn’t exist, it’s a gap in time. Was there something there? How odd.

Also odd, though increasingly less so, is the parallel development of the Middle Kingdom and the Land of the Free. Similar wealth gaps, similar uniparty control, similar obsession with war, similar, even, deference to the utterings of America’s leading war criminal. Here’s a funny story, from the BBC. In 1993, Michael Eisner wanted to get Disney’s The Fugitive shown in China, which hadn’t allowed a contemporary release of an American feature since Spartacus. What to do? Of course, call Henry. They went off together to visit and voila! history was made. The Han gangsters and the Jews seem to understand each other.

I read Brooks’ article, and started on the comments. The readers of the NY Times are apparently not able to “…try on a vantage point where we’re not the good guys”. So much for a liberal education. They truly are clueless, bubble-bound, and malevolent.

-Discard

Elsewhere, Derbyshire has praised Coolidge for “minding our own national business”, the corollary of a limited immigration policy espoused by Coolidge. However, he didn’t quite declare a policy of non-intervention in Latin America as his admirers have claimed.
https://millercenter.org/president/coolidge/foreign-affairs

So embittered were most Latin American leaders over America’s policies that the republics of the Western Hemisphere assembled for their triennial conference in Havana, Cuba, in 1928 eager to demand changes in American conduct. In a rare trip overseas, President Coolidge personally traveled to Havana to address the conference and extend an olive branch. Former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, serving as a special envoy, gave a tour de force of a speech that persuaded the delegates to refrain from passing a strong anti-U.S. resolution. Afterward, Kellogg had his legal adviser draft a white paper that argued against direct military intervention in Latin America. Although not a change in policy, it reflected a dawning awareness of the need for change

Actually, it was the much-maligned Herbert Hoover who ended the US military occupations in Haiti ( 1930 ) and Nicaragua ( 1933 ). Credit to Mr Hoover where it’s due, Mr Derbyshire.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/strange-death-warren-g-harding
The Death Of Harding Led To Collidge Becoming President

This article did not live up to its header. You need to elucidate on the limits of Meritocracy.

In intelligence, personality, and characteristic behavior, we’re as equal as we’re ever going to be. Some probable developments in the near future—embryo selection for the offspring of elites, for example—will make us less equal.

Why will embryo selection be only for the elite? The cost will not always be prohibitory. Even a cursory look at the current situation in this country amply demonstrates that vast improvement is needed in intelligence, personality, and characteristic behavior. Embryo selection and other genetic tools can be a significant step forward for humanity.

While meritocracy is not perfect, it beats the hell out of democracy…a system where idiots elect idiots or, in the case of the current version of democracy, where democracy is only a ruse to hide the fact that we are a plutocratic oligarchy.

Years ago when I was an academic in a STEM department in a leading university my Head of Department chided me; he observed that I spent some of my precious tea-break chatting not to fellow academics but to assistant staff – that is, technicians and secretarial staff, and even, gasp!, cleaners. I had more sense than to tell him why.

There were two principal reasons. The minor one was that – consistent with my upbringing – I thought it a good thing not to have class apartheid. There was no good reason I could see why the university Officer class shouldn’t mingle with the Enlisted men and women. It might please them to be recognised and appreciated. Courtesy, as people used to say, costs nothing. Anyway, it might be to the benefit of both if the Men understood a bit more about how the Officers saw things. They’d learn far more about that from free conversation than from being preached at.

The major one was that they were more interesting to chat to than fellow academics, in one particular. They taught me things I didn’t know about a world I didn’t inhabit. This might make it easier for me to understand them so that we might both get more out of working together. It also meant that I felt discouraged from taking a narrow view of my colleagues and fellow citizens.

One way to phrase Brooks’s point is that nobody ever gives the American credentialed class a brisk kick up the arse to dissuade them from taking the narrow view.

A very good point. We have the brainwashed, anti-scientific “elites”, which are useless, or worse, outright damaging.

Jared Taylor always wonders if people believe in their patently false world views, or if they know the truth and intentionally mislead others.

… recording that all other biographers of the Thirtieth President were equally silent about the Immigration Act. Claude Fuess, whose 1939 biography of Coolidge I’ve been quoting a lot, doesn’t mention it at all in his book, which is more than five hundred pages long.

And yes, I was inclined to cut Amity Shlaes as much slack as I could on account of the fact that she, like me, had once fallen afoul of America’s chronic refusal to face reality on matters of race.

All biographers simply omit the 1924 immigration act. Such conspiratorial OMISSION is amazing, and begs for an explanation.

Were they ashamed to tell the truth? They were not yet ready to simply malign the immigration act as “racist” for maintaining the US racial/ethnic/national distribution and its .
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1924-law-slammed-door-immigrants-and-politicians-who-pushed-it-back-open-180974910/

One question, was there also a quota for West Africans, the originating nations of Blacks?

David Brooks is a true believer who has an occasional crisis of faith but always comes around, with his faith in liberalism strengthened for having been tried. It’s touching, really. Stupid, but touching.

OK, seriously, I thought there was nobody left in the country who thought this nonsense. A hell of a lot of middle-class people came out a lot better financially without > 50% tax brackets. I am one of them. So, cutting taxes is a good thing, FYVM.

The homelessness, the wealth gap, the ruin of public schools, the obscene costs of college, the rise of Jewish Washington, all have their genesis in the Reagan bill.

Really?

Homelessness is largely due to the mantle institutions being dismantled, along with tolerance by cities of it.

The wealth gap is HUGE due to Crony Capitalism, not tax cuts.

The public schools can get $20,000/student and still turn out trash, and much more money is being spent than before we had that wonderful Feral Dept. of Education.

College tuition is sky high due to Feral school loan guarantees and direct Feral loans, meaning the U’s can raise tuition to the moon and the kids, well, the taxpayers (the way it’s going) can always pay.

Jewish Washington? Was that a Reagan thing?

You are completely full of shit in a way that I haven’t seen in decades.

This is a Calvin Coolidge post. Have some respect, asshole.

State of US power

Video Link

OK, seriously, I thought there was nobody left in the country who thought this nonsense. A hell of a lot of middle-class people came out a lot better financially without > 50% tax brackets. I am one of them. So, cutting taxes is a good thing, FYVM.

The homelessness, the wealth gap, the ruin of public schools, the obscene costs of college, the rise of Jewish Washington, all have their genesis in the Reagan bill.

Really?

Homelessness is largely due to the mantle institutions being dismantled, along with tolerance by cities of it.

The wealth gap is HUGE due to Crony Capitalism, not tax cuts.

The public schools can get $20,000/student and still turn out trash, and much more money is being spent than before we had that wonderful Feral Dept. of Education.

College tuition is sky high due to Feral school loan guarantees and direct Feral loans, meaning the U’s can raise tuition to the moon and the kids, well, the taxpayers (the way it’s going) can always pay.

Jewish Washington? Was that a Reagan thing?

This is a Calvin Coolidge post. Have some respect, asshole.

It is interesting that none of the Coolidge biographies mention his major feat; Immigration. I would guess the reason is that all the publishers were against publishing such a fact. Oddly, this was a very popular act throughout the US at the time.

Our scientific elites are a mixed bag.

Corporate DEI has been in place for a while now, never mind the universities. I busted scientific dishonesty in a couple of (one former) full professors decades ago, when they were contaminating the commercial world with malfeasances.

Artificial price regimes, enabled by regulation, monopoly and corruption, allow high prices to create extra tech billionaires. Just look at medicine, generics are captured and turned into price freaks, or given short shrift, that then allows newer drugs with small or less actual benefit to charge high prices that are a quantum leap from yesteryear’s treatment costs or for drugs, that may merely be unoptimized in application.
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cookie-cutter Jewish left-liberal immigration advocate with very acute social-observation skills, but not a very firm grasp of the underlying sciences.

In nature-nurture issues, for example, he is much more favorable to nurture than our current understanding can support. See my review of his 2011 book about human nature, Hard Wiring.

But those very acute social-observation skills are on display in this New York Times column.

Yawnn… Damning with faint praise here. Middling based and reactionaries know this and could articulate the matter to anybody in ten minutes, but nobody wants to, or will listen to middling based and reactionary.

I usually consider an elite in the non-technical realm as one who tends towards psychopathy. A flawed, emotional thinking member of the 4% at one end of a bell curve distribution.

At the other end is the 4% that are able to do abstract logical thinking. Those who create civilization, not destroy it.

Minus your closing epithet, I second your dismissal of commenter Teilhard’s morally and intellectually unsound claim that the moderate and long overdue reduction of Washington’s punitive rates of taxation forty years ago explains virtually all of today’s social ills. Indeed, the unsoundness of his moralizing and reasoning is painfully reminiscent of that of his namesake, the once-upon-a-time Jesuit celebrity who would have done himself and the larger world far greater service had he spent less time writing and speaking and more time saying the rosary and practicing the spiritual works of mercy.

Of course, Derbyshire articles—with their author’s characteristic slyness that sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails (as here), at concealing his loyalty to the Jewish Establishment and its doctrinaire Narrative—tend to bring out people who like to grumble and have a lot to grumble about, most of it of a minimally focused nature.

I differ with the accusatorial idea that intelligent people marry each other out of some kind of elite smugness, looking down their nose at the less intelligent. I believe that, rather, it’s a matter of…I will call it “conversational necessity.” Someone recently posted elsewhere on Unz the formula that a married couple must be within 20 IQ points of each other in order to converse. I don’t know where he got that number from, but he got me thinking back to my own dating history long ago, and I believe the concept is correct. I venture to say that other people here can recall the feeling; of thinking, on a date with a very hot/cool gal, when will this clunky, forced-feeling date be over; and thinking it entirely without condescension or smugness or a feeling of superiority.

OK, seriously, I thought there was nobody left in the country who thought this nonsense. A hell of a lot of middle-class people came out a lot better financially without > 50% tax brackets.

But what has that “a lot better financially” really gotten you? Look around, this is what it has gotten you. Trinkets and baubles of a futile existence, where everything has a price and little has value. Happy with it?

I agree with the poster in some ways. Inheritance taxes should be ruinous enough so that the most one could leave their heirs is, say, $500K per capita. That’s it. That’s enough to provide for them. The Spartans had it right.

Well the real problem, and the real danger, is not what you give or don’t give to the offspring, it’s more like where does the rest of it go, and what gets done with it?

Let’s say you’re filthy rich, and you have the means to leave each of your accursed children $125 million a head. But the law says you can only leave them $500k per capita as you specify. Let’s also assume you can figure out clever legal ways with trusts and what-nots to leave them each another cool $5million. What happens to the other $120 mil? IRS gets it one supposes, but — then what? If all that happens is, it gets used to fund more Diversity Instructors and Bullets for Israel and Executive Assistant Executive Heads of More Diverse Diversity Departments, then you may as well have sprayed it with gasoline and set it alight.

Everyone here is a moron. Only idiots think that “elite” means answering questions correctly on standardized tests and getting jobs based on one’s education and skills.

The United States of America is not a nation. It is a pirate’s cove populated with the descendants of slaves, con-men, whores, frauds, fakers, and fools.

This is why there can be no “meritocracy”. One has to have a nation of relatively connected individuals working together for group survival in order to reasonably find those individuals who merit aristocratic authority. Take the oil rich nations in the middle east or east Asians nations. Even though everyone there isn’t a scientist or engineer, (or for that matter educated), the socio-economic policies benefit the native population there. So even if one isn’t an “elite”, one still gets priority access to jobs, resources and status if one desires.

These nations then import people to do the jobs “they don’t want to do” or even to do skilled labor, but these emigrees must leave the country by 65, and there is no citizenship or political rights granted to them. Only dumb people in the West think you can grant someone congenital rights without being born into the nation’s bloodline. That’s why the west will continue to decline. The “great” experiment in living out the wacky ideas in the minds of a bunch of pontificating, parlor drunks from Europe has failed!

But what has that “a lot better financially” really gotten you? Look around, this is what it has gotten you. Trinkets and baubles of a futile existence, where everything has a price and little has value. Happy with it?

I’m not happy about much going on right now with this country, fiancially and otherwise. However, that has exactly Jack Squat to do with Reagan’s Middle Class tax cuts.

As for inheritance taxes, you think like a Communist*. The Middle Class guys run small businesses and want to hand them down to their sons, that’s who you are screwing over with your “steal the inheritance” plan. It’s not the rich. The rich have trusts and other ways out. The rich have ways out of everything, including those high income tax rates of the past, no matter what “effective bracket” they supposedly were in.

Quit being so naive, Daniel. It’s this naivity that the Communists use for recruiting. Don’t show up to the meeting, I beg you.

.

* Please don’t talk about land reform errr, red-lining and reparations next.

Mr. Craon, that 2nd-to-last epithet, as you might be able to tell, was not supposed to be in there at 2nd thought. That was too much. You are right.

Right now, I’ve got a weird bug/feature (not Ron Unz’ fault), in which I don’t get buttons, the movement to the anchor tag (i.e. to the comment point) and the 5-minute EDIT window right away.* The first comment showed it was wiped out, but it wasn’t. My apologies for that last part of the post, Mr. Teilhard.

For Daniel, I meant to write too that small businesss used to be the backbone of this country. Inheritance confiscation would kill them. The Kung Flu PanicFest has already done a big number on them, something I feel was somehow part of someone’s plan…

The death of small business is what you are feeling with your line about trinkets and baubles. Sorry to call you a Communist. That was too much also.
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* It’s more of a feature, in fact, as this big delay in the features means the twits are all settled somehow, and they don’t keep making the screen jump around for 30 seconds or more.

I don’t get it. The left now opposes meritocracy. What am I missing?

… as you might be able to tell …

Yes, I suspected as much. Use of the epithet was uncharacteristic of you.

I don’t get it. The left now opposes meritocracy. What am I missing?

The left opposes meritocracy, and the right plays lip service to opposition. Currently, the left is the leading proponent of Acts of Societal Disruption, of which DEI is but one action meant to divide our civilization and subjugate the people. The purpose of the charade of a Two Party system is to lead the citizens to believe that there is a functioning electoral system.

The controlling body is the Deep State.

What happens to the other $120 mil?

Best thing would be to just burn it in a barrel.

Someone should do these British news stories as Monty Python skits. No one would know the difference.

I have to give Mr. Brooks some credit for enough introspection to write about behavior in Goodwhites which he and his ilk think is unnoticed by Badwhites. Living in the DC area, we are infested with these people who genuinely believe that that they are both right and righteous in their belief that they know they true way of doing things. The follow up dogma is that government should force these doctrines on anyone ignorant enough to contest them. They genuinely consider themselves altruistic, as long as they get credit for doing good/s.

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”

Acton is better.

What happens to the other $120 mil?

Best thing would be to just burn it in a barrel.

I was going to say that’s pretty much what Zimbabwe did but, no, they did the opposite. (Following the example of the Hungarians and the Germans.) Either way, though, the saver and his heirs lose everything.

Burning would be deflation. Would that send prices down?

“Acton is better.”

And Gloucester is best…

I do the wrong, and first begin to brawl.
The secret mischiefs which I set abroach,
I lay unto the grievous charge of others.

shitain delenda est.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12392871/Autistic-girl-16-arrested-dragged-screaming-home-Leeds-12-officers-saying-female-cop-looked-like-lesbian-nana.html

derb is a lesbian. and he must be repatriated. along with his fellow shitholer brimelow. all the smart brits left shitain long before derb did. like my great grandfather and most recent immigrant ancestor, arrived 1885. derb isn’t a brit. he’s a shit.

america needs a third party with one plank: the carpet nuking of shitain. a country so satanic it is even more rigidly stratified than shitmerica and has yuge swathes of poverty not found in france, germany, or northern italy. thatcher was trans. sad.

Radio Derb: Coolidge Centennial, David Brooks Vs. Meritocracy, Leading the Anti-Trump Vendetta, And N.Y. City’s Illegals (Cont.), Etc.

https://vdare.com/radio-derb/coolidge-centennial-david-brooks-vs-meritocracy-leading-the-anti-trump-vendetta-and-n-y-city-s-illegals-cont-etc

https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2023-08-04.html

Thanks, P.F.

“And thus I clothe my naked villany”

A hell of a lot of middle-class people came out a lot better financially without > 50% tax brackets. I am one of them. So, cutting taxes is a good thing, FYVM.

There is a long way between >50% and 28%. And even more going down to the 20% interest rate for long term capital gains including carried interest (a fun aspect of the 2016 election was the way both candidates were against the low rate for carried interest, yet nothing happened, fascinating how that works).

One thing I find interesting is how easy it is to find data about the highest marginal income tax rates. Such as this.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-income-tax-rates-piketty

And how much harder it is to find the variation by year across the income range (which matters much more than the top rate). This page has the relevant data in tabular form from 1862-2021. They have a downloadable spreadsheet of the data.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/

Years ago I had a neat graphic showing 1913-2013 showing that visually, but the only copy I am finding now is on my hard drive. This page offers a calculator which is a pretty good substitute.
https://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913

It is interesting how stable the effective tax rates have been since WWII in the $50k-$200k inflation adjusted to 2012 income range. Despite all the tweaks and variation outside of that range. Though leaving out the EITC is a pretty big omission at the low end.

This paper has some interesting data on returns and taxes generated at different marginal rates. See charts 2 and 3.
https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/27921/901456-Income-Tax-Paid-at-Each-Tax-Rate---Updated-.PDF

More graphics here.
Brackets: A Historical Perspective
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1016&context=nulr

Brooks is an establishment hack pos small hat and he doesn’t give a shit about white America.

We don’t really have an elite if you mean an intellectual/moral elite.

We have top down jew propaganda waged by hostile small hats with a grudge….and under that we have paid off shabbos goy grifters.

I often think of what a raging pos David Frum is…..he said something like, “This is a dangerous time, because whites are losing power and status and they are angry. And it’s too bad because they just have to accept it and they can’t do anything about it.”

I say, hang David Frum from the nearest tree, shove a corncob up his ass, and then ask him if whites are unable to do anything about their jewish engineered dispossession.

I don’t think that David Brooks is too far away from David Frum, as they both exhibit outgroup hostility and ingroup preference.

Face it, the jews on the right (Rubin, Prager, etc.) might not be viciously anti-white, but they are always crazy pro-Israel….so they are just as worthless as Adam Schiff and Chuck Schumer.

The Chineeze are known as the Jews of Asia. They mostly control the economies of the Southeast Asian countries through their diaspora oligarchs, known as tycoons.

Thus it is not too surprising that the Han and the Khazars can do beeznees together.

Same in the US

🇺🇦 Rich Ukrainians party in Kiev, while the poor get sent to the front pic.twitter.com/9RVuGJXuhW

— Jackson Hinkle 🇺🇸 (@jacksonhinklle) August 15, 2023

The problem with meritocracy is that meritocracy means that you have no birthright. No birthright means no protection against misfortune in your life. Birthright need not mean a hereditary privilege of some kind, if only the right to enter some occupation. It also can mean the right to enter a career based on your natural ability and your citizenship without having to first assemble some specific collection of meritocratic touchstones. In some ways, that which American call “meritocracy” is more like its opposite.

What we call meritocracy is the conferral of certain lifetime privileges on the people who have collected together the necessary meritocratic jelly beans regardless of their actual merit. Our meritocracy is more of a stochastic meritocracy than it is one of proven ability. It bases its legitimacy on the argument that the people it declares “merited” are infinitely more likely to be capable than people selected by any other method. In actuality, the Wonderlic or some other banned personnel test would do a better job and give more people a chance at career entry and upward mobility than the university caste system does.

June 4, 1989, was the prototype Colour Revolution. Taking advantage of social discontent caused by Deng’s ‘market’ reforms, the USA had its agents attempt to turn that unhappiness into ‘regime change’. The Colour Revolution guru, Gene Sharp, a tool of the NED, CIA, the Soros Mafia etc, and an agent of US regime change operations, that, if successful, always produce neo-liberal regimes beholden to the US Imperium, was even in China just before the outbreak, and operations were run from Hong Kong, still under UK rule.
Once the so-called ‘Goddess of Liberty’ statue, crudely aping the US Statue of Liberty, appeared, it was plain who was behind it. The effort culminated in violence, but NOT in Tian An Men Square, which was peacefully cleared during the night, not that that has stopped the Western MSM lying about the ‘Tian An Men Massacre’ ever since.
The violence occurred around the Square, as US agents, including from Taiwan and criminal gangs from Hong Kong, attacked police, massacring many. The PLA dealt with them, but scores, perhaps hundreds, of young patsies were killed in the process. Since then we have seen many Colour Revolutions, usually climaxing in violence, as in Belgrade and Kiev, the latter where the sniper killers were from the fascist putschist forces, and foreign killers imported by the USA and stooges like Poland and the Baltics. China won, and has boomed unlike any country ever, since.

He can pray anywhere, but outside a health clinic amounts to intimidation. Women don’t abort for convenience, and deserve undergoing the process without outside interference. There are such things as legal exclusion zones outside these places, so if he was ignoring the law, he was wanting to be arrested.

The wealth gap is the prime purpose of capitalism, a system, born of hatred of the other, created to produce wealth for the very few and poverty for the rest.

Will the shambolic outcomes in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and possibly Ukraine encourage the US to limit its blitzkriegs to Latin America and the Caribbean in future? Perhaps not while the possibility of a Taiwan debacle is open.

University Activists Demand Campus Popeyes After Ni@@er Word Usage.

Video Link

How is silent prayer an “interference”?

And if those sluts are not getting rid of their unwanted babies for “convenience”, then why are they doing it? Sadism?

You can bet those at the party funnelled more US money for their champagne and caviar than to the teen and old geezer untrained soldiers sent without proper equipment or even blankets.

Savor the contrast:

Calvin and Grace Coolidge returned from the White House to their modest rented duplex at 21 Massasoit Street, Northampton, Mass. It’s still there, with a brass plaque on the front porch.

Barack and Michelle Obama, flush with tens of millions of laundered ‘book advance’ cash, bought mansions in Kalorama (Washington DC), Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and Hawaii.

It took less than a century for US presidents to transition from more-or-less ordinary citizens to the trappings of an emperor.

The problem with meritocracy is that meritocracy means that you have no birthright.

What we call meritocracy is the conferral of certain lifetime privileges on the people who have collected together the necessary meritocratic jelly beans regardless of their actual merit.

That sure as hell is not what I mean by meritocracy. I use the true logical meaning of meritocracy: Only those who can demonstrate they have the talent and aplomb to complete a task satisfactorily should be selected. In all facets of life, merit should be the only requirement for consideration.

Great comment! Well reasoned, and well written.

Some of our elites are real elites, like those in scientific and technological fields.

Unfortunately, most of them fall into the category of what Ortega y Gasset referred to as the learned ignoramous, learned in one thing, but ignorant of all else, especially in how to govern, from the family, to education, to the government itself.

The rise of the learned ignoramous in all of the important areas of human activity, but especially the sciences, was a process already well underway by the end of the 19th century. That’s why Ortega made it central to his thesis of Western Civilization and where it was headed unless something drastic was done. Since nothing was done, we’re there now, since the problem has only gotten worse.

The book in question, The Revolt of The Masses, published in 1930, still holds up pretty well. His basic idea, or concern, was that the West would not survive the double whammy of the population explosion and its biggest deposit, the learned ignoramous.

What sane person living today could possibly deny that he was right?

Interestingly, after he wrote that he pretty much gave up. He continued to publish, and some of it was of the highest quality. But he knew that the learned ignoramous was, by then, firmly in the saddle and in all professions and social institutions. His focus of course was mainly on the university (the book to read is his excellent The Mission of the University). But even then he came to the conclusion that the chances of reform were not good. That was in 1944.

In a meeting at Cooper Union in NYC in front of members of the last of the “real” elite, who were still concerned about our teaching-learning institutions in general, and the university in particular, the great cultural historian and behavioralist Morse Peckham pretty much pronounced the university DOA and said that if the “real” elite really cared they’d let the university go its declining way and invest in new institutions dedicated to the values of higher learning. That was in 1971.

One of the last hold outs was the educator and historian Jaques Barzun. He waited as long as he could. But by 1980 came to the same conclusion in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning. He said that the fatal blow to the university was struck during the campus disturbances between 1965-68. He felt that our last chance was in how the “real” elite responded to that protracted debacle. And how did the “real” elite respond? It caved, of course. Specifically, it caved to the demands of protesters (sound familiar?). Those protesters were to become the fake elite that today make the learned ignoramous look like a genius.

Today there is only the fake elite. The only sensible, practical response to this state of affairs is to do to the civilization what Peckham suggested the elite do with the university, let the whole thing go its declining way and work instead toward building from the ruins a new culture and civilization that more adequately responds to the demands for human survival and an improved quality of life.

David Brooks is a conceited, no talent jackass. A repellent pathological liar and scum bag.

He gas lighted and cheated on his faithful wife of 28 years with his much younger, not attractive assistant.

After lying, cheating and stealing marital funds to support his affair, he then scolds and reprimands – like all disgusting liberals – his faithful wife, from the pages of The NY Times with a piece admonishing her and embarrassing her to basically leave him alone. The piece is called “Leaving and Cleaving.”

This man actually used his opinion slot in the NYT to demean and humiliate his wife because she was calling and texting too much after he blew up their life.

Here is a biting satire of his piece. The author is repulsively woke but she nailed Brooks, with his smug face and cushy life. To channel Roatan Bill, what skills could this douchebag bring to the table if we suffer The Big Collapse? Scribble character assassinations and scribes to his own Awesomeness on the backs of old paper grocery bags as we bust wood and plant corn?

https://www.chumplady.com/2019/04/david-brooks-can-bite-me/

Women don’t abort for convenience,

Head explodes.

That is exactly why they abort.

What other reason would there be?

To commune with the staff? To experience mind numbing menstrual cramps? To light $800 on fire?

They kill the baby because they don’t want to raise the baby. It is not convenient for them in terms of money, social life or status.

The Han will run circles around the Khazars, and already have. The Khazars have grown rich and soft. The Han still have the ability to go hungry, the Khazars don’t. The last stand for the Khazars was discriminating against Asians in school admissions. The Ivies and other top universities are already top heavy with Asians, Han especially. Get ready for the New America, Asian elite, Hispanic plurality.

Some of our elites are real elites, like those in scientific and technological fields.

Bullcrap!

I know of women who’ve had multiple abortions to the point they are no longer able to have children, and then of course they are devastated.

But again, if you trace the source of the subversion it always leads to the same crew.

“Possibly Ukraine”. Get a grip. man, certainly Ukraine.
All this will continue whilst Neocons remain in charge of US foreign and defence policy ( and much else besides ). Only when the last Neocon is removed from the US Government, will there be a change.

There are a few descriptors for early America that we should always keep in mind such as:

1) “hardly any barriers to entry and the what 3 months saved wages could do was change your life.”

2) “lowest cost producers making the lowest cost products earning us the highest wages and profits”.

3) And a population that was completely invested in the ‘American Dream’ of being completely sovereign; — OWN your own land, OWN your own house, and OWN your own business.

Speaking of number 3…. I have a neighbor in our nonHOA subdivision, about a dozen ranch style homes away, who comes from China. He bought the home in 2011.

But we never met until 2019 at a local school board meeting. One by one, we parents took our 2 minutes at the microphone to complain about the racist DIE policies.

I thought I was extreme it suggesting they’ve gone from a nonracisit color-blind policy, to becoming fully racist and thoroughly antiwhite. But Chu go up there and in broken Englishexplained they were communists. So Chu and I became fast friends.

What I’ve learned about Chu and Chinese people today – they are single minded about getting the American Dream- the trifecta of Land, House & Business.

My wife is an escrow officer and she has seen hundreds of small land purchases $7k-25k being bought by Chinese foreign nationals – “Biden’s illegals” she calls them. What worries her is the small lands are peices surround the outskirts of our city.

David Brooks is of two minds: one is firmly the NYT led Tribal association that is ever mindful of their own narrow interests and the other is somewhat on the side of lukewarm Republicans, who may or may not be internationalists. Either way, he is opposed to Donald Trump.

Homelessness was/ is largely the result of kicking the mentally unwell out of institutions to save money that Reagan pushed. Probably in the long term it cost much more. True, some people locked up against their will were better off free, but reforming mental institutes, even at higher cost, would have had a more salubrious effect on American society than throwing those inmates out on the streets.

To paraphrase Jesus, “the mentally ill will always be with us”. But if we institutionalize, and possibly cure some mentally ill people, we particularly keep them out of the political sphere and maybe our foreign policy would be more productive and humane.

The point of interest is equal treatment. Illegal demonstrations by Muslims, Negroes, Minorities, the Lumpen Proletariat, Anti-fossil fuel “activists” block traffic, etc. and relatively nothing happens.

In the worthless Americon Constitution, this is the Equal Protection Clause. How stupid of you not to apprehend this idea simply on common sense and very basis morality.

Perhaps he should have said that he was praying for Bill Gates to spray the atmosphere with reflective metal and synthetic polymers to mitigate and imitate rationality, science and honor. Then her would have be given a “Cheerio, Sir”.

“Born of hatred”? Explain how Capitalism was born of hatred. Socialism and Communism, well they’re easily explained in a word each, ENVY and RESENTMENT.

Speaking of Communism, among the iSteve comments, I came across a gem of an exhortation to Americans to go to Communism, from none other than Leon Trotsky himself, in the 1930s. Read this shit, MangledBrain, and tell me, was that Leon Trotsky writing to the best of his abilities? If so, well, I’m so sorry I never learned Russian, because I had no idea heretonow how utterly retarded those head Communists were. They’d give a modern purple-haired Grievance Studies professor a run for her money.

Treg, no matter how great China is doing now*, many $1,000/monthly pay salaried Chinese government officials of all levels have bought nice million dollar houses in Seattle, Vancouver, BC, San Fran, LA, and university towns across America “with that money”. They will indeed send their kids to the University here, not for the education but for the foot in the door.

These people still somehow have more trust in the American way than they do in the Chinese way, and then there’s the plan about getting their “hard earned money” out of China. An easier way is for them is to have what may be called an “Anchor Baby” by some, but I call it having a “Bug-Out Baby”.

.

* I just got back from a trip there, so Peak Stupidity will have a score or more of posts on China coming.

Agreed! When I was an undergrad, while my classmates were kissing up to the profs, I preferred hobnobbing with dept. secretaries, dining hall staff, janitors and groundsmen. They always had something interesting to say. They seemed to enjoy it too.

It’s spelled ignoramus.

“What has divided us so deeply, Brooks argues, is meritocracy.” David Brooks as a ‘token conservative”? That’s like having Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer (49+ murders of Women) as your token ‘Women Rights Advocate’. All those “elites” running things in D.C. ALWAYS figure out a way to describe themselves as being the only ones worthy of Ruling. Throw in year after year of a.) only promoting people like you into Government and b.) chasing out EVERYONE who disagrees with your elitist, self serving viewpoint and Behold! You get a smug, arrogant, INCOMPETENT Ruling Class willing to crash the entire World before they admit they are smug, arrogant incompetent buffoons. (Also sleazy and corrupt for good measure).

How us that Meritocracy working out?? Are the so-called elites running the country well for anyone but themselves and whichever group(s) they favor? Can a society function with elites who have loyalty only to themselves? Can a society function only with elites?You’d think our elites would be smart enough to figure out the answers, but it doesn’t appear that way?

Our “elites” have far more in common with average citizens than they ever will with the likes of a Steinmetz, Tesla, Newton, Ford, or any other great genius or innovator. Who would be stupid enough to put any Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump, any prominent Neocon or prog, politician, opinion writer, average college professor, or anyone on the same level, in a group with real intellectual powerhouses and innovators. They don’t belong anywhere near those people, and are mostly just coached-up worker bees and normies in comparison.

It’s not the working class that is destroying the nation, and it’s not the average citizen who is flooding the country with low iq people or high iq foreigners with no real ties or loyalty to the people or nation. If you really look at it, who is coming off looking greedy, disposable, stupid, disloyal, and morally deficient? Can you say it isn’t the elites? To peg the majority of your fellow citizens as being useless and replaceable, and then to go about offshoring their jobs, replacing them demographically, and screwing them over in every way possible because you are in a position to do so, is not meritocratic or nice, and it’s probably not so smart in the long-term.

I guess we shouldn’t leave out the murderous foreign policy and the Epstein-type culture that they ignore and promote, or the opoid epidemic. Yeah, our elites are really something else.

Derb and commenters,

That Brooks is a jew has more predictive power concerning his positions and his mentality than anything else does.

The pattern is clear, it is salient, but I suppose the kids in the bus are still singing along with their kidnapper.

Well Derb, if that wasn’t enough, they named a once in a hundred years cyclone after Hilary (devil witch from hell) Clinton and it’s headed our way.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12415245/Hurricane-Hilary-updates-Tropical-storm-bring-strong-winds-Southern-California-coast-Sunday-morning.html

“we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.”

Proofreader needed! Should have read either “elite, college-dominated profession” or “elite college-dominated profession.” In either case I would suggest the latter obtains. You’re not gonna find too many folks from Ol’ State U slinking around the hallowed halls of the Bagel Times–notwithstanding Mo Dowd of Catholic U– or the WaPo.

The meritocracy emerged from what we call “democracy”, unlike the traditional European landed aristocracy who attained that status by birthright. The meritocracy is the closest thing we have to an aristocracy except for the fact that they are meritocrats by virtue of high SAT scores which got them into Yale, Harvard etc., ironically, once the bastion of the closest approximation this country ever had to an aristocracy–the old WASP establishment. What we call the “meritocracy” emerged out of the huddled masses in Ellis Island, many (if not most) Jews whose meritocratic offspring still feel uneasy over the fact that they are maybe two generations removed from the shtetl.

The traditional aristocracy is the suave, cultured Ronald Coleman. The current one is Chuck Schumer (1600 on his SATs), a lettered Sammy Glick.

Agree. There are BS elites and there are elites. BS elites are very insecure about their elitism and tend to be very performative with their actions.

Professor Kevin MacDonald made mention of Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONIST legislation in the Murdoch mob’s Wall Street Journal in 2018. Professor Kevin MacDonald is banned from foreigner bald guy Elon Musk’s Twitter because Elon Musk is a pissant poodle boy for the Jew-controlled ADL. Musk has yet to confirm my appearance on his Twitter presidential candidate series, but my write-in campaign for president is currently on course regardless of the Twitter snub from Musk.

Professor MacDonald is a very smart man who has explained the origins of Jew behaviour in European Christian nations. MacDonald explains the Jew proclivity to be hostile to the European Christians who unwisely allowed them to enter their nations. Dozens of kingdoms, principalities and nations have thrown the Jews out because of their behaviour.

Remember: Anti-Jewism is a response to Jewish behaviour.

Kevin MacDonald briefly stated that Jews have been pushing for open borders mass immigration for a long damn time.

Kevin MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal — April 10, 2018 — on the Jew push for open borders mass immigration:

In dismissing my argument that Jewish organizations have been disproportionately influential in U.S. immigration policy, Abraham Miller fails to confront the data compiled in my 1998 book “The Culture of Critique,” which also describes changes in academic attitudes on race critical to passage of the 1965 Immigration Act (“The Theory Behind That Charlottesville Slogan,” op-ed, April 3). It was absolutely understood by both restrictionists and antirestrictionists in Congress that Jewish organizations spearheaded opposition against the 1924 law’s national origins, despite little public support. Jewish organizations also organized, funded and performed most of the work of a variety of umbrella organizations aimed at combating the 1924 law. The 1965 reform was thus not the result of popular pressure but rather of a 40-year program of activism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jewish-organizations-had-a-role-in-1965-act-1523374146

The key point is that organized Jewry in the United States pushed extremely hard to open the mass immigration floodgates in the decades prior to the passage of the nation-wrecking 1965 Immigration Act.

Professor Kevin MacDonald is a great man with a lot of guts. Kevin MacDonald is also a Baby Boomer who tells the truth(KM was born in 1944, close enough for me).

Well Derb, if that wasn’t enough, they named a once in a hundred years cyclone after Hilary (devil witch from hell) Clinton and it’s headed our way.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12415245/Hurricane-Hilary-updates-Tropical-storm-bring-strong-winds-Southern-California-coast-Sunday-morning.html

Looks like Hurricane Hilary strikes again. The last time Libya was totally devastated by Hurricane Hilary. A total annihilation. From the most developed and prosperous country in Africa to abject poverty.

Some of our elites are real elites, like those in scientific and technological fields.

Bullcrap!

what about Elon?

(((David Brooks))). And BTW,

the ‘Murkan meritocracy ended when the Jews

overthrew the Protestant Establishment during the 1950’s-1970’s.

what we endure now is a

Jewocracy.

Here is David Brooks in an earlier article:

The government has to work aggressively to reduce the human capital inequalities that open up in an innovation economy. That means early and constant interventions so everybody has a chance to participate.

translation = ZOG must continue to fuck over middle and working class white guys, (Nazis) with thuggish laws to crush them down, and to favor blacks and browns and everyone else, and pick the winners and losers, based on race, to keep these Nazis held low and powerless.

Never Again, means Never Again!

~ you’re welcome

Some probable developments in the near future—embryo selection for the offspring of elites, for example—will make us less equal.

That’s why such technologies should be subsidized for those who are too poor to afford them. Along with gene editing of embryos, of course.

Thanks for the correction.

Fortunately, I’m in good company.
https://theweek.com/articles/462824/11-historical-figures-who-really-bad-spelling
https://erinwrightwriting.com/dont-need-good-speller-good-writer/

Unfortunately, you’re not.

Grammar Pedantry Syndrome is a form of OCD found in lonely introverts.
https://actrightnowcounselling.com/resources/understanding-grammar-pedantry-syndrome/#:~:text=Therefore%2C%20Grammar%20Pedantry%20Syndrome%20(GPS,passed%20the%20line%20into%20obsession.

The good news is the point of my comment still stands.

The bad news, for you, is that you can’t think about ideas, so you obsess about spelling.

He was right. Someday our current fake elites will end up on the same ash heap.

only no

We, (America’s middle and working class) will end up in the ash heap, our property confiscated to pay off the elite’s trillions in debts, as the elites fete themselves and the ‘rival’ elites of the world, on our carcasses.

What can not be sustained, will not continue. So one day, the debt will come home to roost.

But it won’t be the elites who pay the price for their generations of hubris and excess, it will be the middle and working class. Before Jeff Bezos gives up one mansion or yacht, ten million (or more) middle class Americans will be expected to give up everything they have. It was the middle and working class Americans, (after all) who voted for the politicians who sent all those billions to Israel and Ukraine and everywhere else. In a democracy, what the politicians do, is what the people want them to do, right? So now it will be those middle and working class American who will be on the hook for all that money they (voted to) spend, and now have to pay back, with interest.

Did middle America think Brandon was going to be on the hook for the billions he’s hemorrhaging all over the place? Of course not! The American people voted for him, so it’s the American people who are responsible for what he does, and for paying back the trillions. They voted for him.

NY Times columnist David Brooks is a member of the Jews Organized Globally(JOG) tribe.

David Brooks is a tribally-motivated Jew Supremacist.

David Brooks knows the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire is going dodo.

David Brooks cooks up some crud about so-called “minoritarianism” as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire is slouching towards the ruling class boneyard.

David Brooks knows that the European Christian ancestral core of the United States of America will soon be installing a new ruling class that will explicitly advance the interests of White Core Christian America.

Baby Boomer Jew David Brooks has in the past comically used “we” when talking about the colonizing, settling and pioneering of America. What a laugh. I have ancestors who colonized, settled and pioneered America. David Brooks has ancestors who started complaining about Christians as soon as they got off the boat.

David Brooks is a hostile Jew who hates the European Christian ancestral core of the United States. David Brooks knows that the United States was created by people from England, with the Swedes, Dutch, French, Germans and other European Christian people contributing. David Brooks is a putrid example of the hostile Jews who infest the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire.

David Brooks pushes nation-wrecking mass legal immigration, mass illegal immigration, REFUGEE OVERLOAD and ASYLUM SEEKER INUNDATION.

David Brooks pushes unnecessary overseas wars that kill European Christian soldiers for no purpose but to protect Israel and to advance the interests of JEWS ORGANIZED GLOBALLY(JOG).

David Brooks pushes globalization and financialization and sovereignty-sapping trade deal scams that pauperize American workers.

David Brooks is an anti-White, anti-Christian Baby Boomer Jew who should be financially liquidated, have his citizenship revoked and be forcibly deported from the USA.

It’s a type of human sewage system. Those Chinese who are shits, naturally flow towards the world’s greatest cesspool. Good for China, too.

Stein is one of a kind.

Elementary School Teacher Stands up for Trans Rights 🏳️‍⚧️⚧️🏳️‍🌈 pic.twitter.com/m2k3xwaYra

— Alex Stein #99 (@alexstein99) August 16, 2023

As Adam Smith observed, capitalists follow the ‘vile maxim..;, ‘Everything for me, and nothing for anybody else’.You’re definitely a capitalist.

The Real American ‘Dream’ is the ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’. The war of all against all, or ‘Divide and Rule’ if you prefer.

David Brooks cooks up some crud about so-called “minoritarianism” as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that the JEW/WASP Ruling Class of the American Empire is slouching towards the ruling class boneyard.

Bingo!

And Bravo!

Can’t agree.

I honestly do not think the last election was legitimate in any way.

I don’t think our people support the choices of the hostile jewish elite.

We didn’t vote for open borders; it was forced on us.

I don’t believe that a majority support sending money to Ukraine.

The Jmedia lies about everything, so it’s very difficult to accurately assess what people really think.

I don’t think that any of the polling is legit either, as it’s designed to push and sway public opinion.

No, I don’t blame the American people for the wreckage that is now America; I blame the small hat rulers.

As I constantly repeat, the proof of what I’ve stated can be proved by asking when was the last time you actually saw the interests of white people being served? And on the other hand, when was the last time you saw jewish interests thwarted?

I could go down a long list of issues, and I promise you that on each and every issue, white people got fucked, and organized jewry got what they wanted.

And even if I were to agree that elections are legit (which they are not) I could easily demonstrate that the politicians brazenly LIED to our people, and then took the actions that their jewish donors demanded.

Our people, white Christian people, have no voice at all in the land of their forefathers.

No voice whatsoever. No “privilege.”

And in fact, whites are officially second class citizens, enemies of the state, demonized and labeled as domestic terrorists.

Journalists as Conspiracy Enablers or Conspiracy Apologists?

Brooks like many of our elites embraces the concept that America is a proposition nation, about an ideal, rather than a real place with real people, blood and soil. Yet at the same time celebrate a country in Israel that is explicitly ethnic, about blood and real people. And Brooks in particular forced his 1st wife to convert to Judaism (and since dumped her for a newer model) and had a son serve not in the US military, but in the IDF. And if you bring that up, you’re an antisemite.. Those circles in the Venn diagram do not overlap.

Simply despite the polite veneer, Brooks is a fraud. We would be much better off if Brooks and his ilk of not really conservatives made haste to their true homeland and stop writing high-minded drivel they do not even believe.

when was the last time you actually saw the interests of white people being served?

this is my main point, I was being sardonic in saying ‘we voted for it, so it’s on us’ – because when they come for your property, to pay off “your” debts, that is what they will say. You voted for these debts! Now it’s time to pay.

cue song about The rich man north of Richmond.

It’s kind of like the people of Ukraine. They voted for Zelinsky because he promised to end corruption and seek rapprochement with Russia. He did the opposite in both cases, and the Ukrainian people are now being brutalized – because they “voted” for it.

What’s sort of interesting, I think, is that this shit has been going on a long time. Centuries. But it was always regional. Spain, England, Russia, Germany.. but now it is global. Now they’ve got the entire Western world by the throat. (it’s amazing what a legal counterfeiting machine and unlimited money can do).

Video Link

If the world’s people can not find a way to rein in this power, then the Jews will use it to create a hell on earth so unimaginable, as to make Gaza look like a utopian dream.

in which I don’t get buttons, the movement to the anchor tag (i.e. to the comment point) and the 5-minute EDIT window right away.*

try refreshing, Achmed, it works for me.

Regardless of what you mean by meritocracy, what it means in America is the mono[olization of the entry level and gateways to certain careers and positions by people who have had certain touchstone experiences.

That’s why I called it “stochastic meritocracy.” If you mean something else by it, you should explain what it is.

If you mean something else by it, you should explain what it is.

I did. Here is a dictionary definition: government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability.

I did. Here is a dictionary definition: government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability

Unless modern America is beyond the capacity of humans to manage properly, we don’t have a meritocracy. I don’t think anyone believes that the people running the U.S. have any interest in finding and developing their potential replacements among actual American citizens, and any system that promotes Affirmative Action is NOT a meritocracy. Brooks, and anyone who claims otherwise, is a dishonest buffoon.

Modern America is corrupt, chaotic, and poorly managed. I go back-and-forth on whether or not the people in charge are mostly incompetent or evil. They are a mix of both, for sure.

How do you know who has the most ability, or even who has enough ability to make the gate?

I totally agree. I have never said differently.

How do you know who has the most ability, or even who has enough ability to make the gate?

For Christ’s sake… past performance or tests.

I totally agree. I have never said differently.

I didn’t mean to come off as attacking you. I’m sorry that it came off that way. I was just giving my view without reading prior posts.

No problem.

We’ve developed a smug… our current understanding…

who the fuck is “we”? what the fuck is “our”?

drrrb: it’s a figure of speech…

jv: for low IQ strivers like yourself.

drrrb has a low IQ. and he’s the first in his family to use toilet paper. and then only occasionally. like when he goes on a date with his fellow low IQ striver charles murray. just sad. drrrb is like a toddler who’s proud of how bad his diaper smells. except he’s 78 years old. just a totally GROSS person.

the problem is pyschopathic strivers like drrrb. that’s the problem.

dad harvard. granddad princeton, me BGI volunteer. cousin on mom’s side in who’s who for fluid dynamics.

rich? no.

rich enough? yes. lagom ar bast. douchebags call me wanting comment for their story about my family. ignore!

discriminated against by strivers like drrrb? yes.

and “consciousness studies” is for low IQ 11 year old girls.

just read the fucking upanishads…or heidegger…the APOLOGIZE.

You’re back to stochastic meritocracy. The issue I am interested in is the entry level. The entry level is the choke point. Focus in anything else and you end up back to arguing generalities, which is to say, what element is likely to produce the most people able to follow a certain career. That’s what stochastic meritocracy means.

The issue I am interested in is the entry level. The entry level is the choke point.

Entry level to what? If you don’t like my answers, come up with your own.

Spend it (on yourself) before you croak! It’ll stimulate the economy if nothing else.

When you’re dead, you’re dead. You don’t need it.