Notes from the twilight of Western civilization

Our internet provider here at Falling Downs shut us down for “routine maintenance” today. That’s one way to break your screen addiction, at least for a few hours! I used those hours to do some yard work. Must have pulled four wheelbarrow’s worth of weeds out of the flower gardens today. That’s not as grand as it sounds. Our flower gardens transitioned to weed gardens years ago, so four wheelbarrows is nothing. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I was putzing about with the pruning shears and the rake, I was also cooking up a rant about the state of affairs we find ourselves in. Dress Codes In my hippy-dippy youth, I made a point of rebelling against dress codes. Then, when I did a mid-life career transition to teaching, I found out they had a dress code at the school board. I discovered this when I innocently wore a t-shirt to work with a Moosehead Beer logo on it. That was one of my favorite shirts, a relic from when I worked at Saint John Shipbuilding and Moosehead sponsored our slo-pitch team. A couple of cases of beer for every game and free t-shirts all around! The VP took me aside and explained no-one, student or staff, could wear apparel festooned with beer company logos. Or any other liquor purveyor. And no political messages or obscene language, of course. That was 1995. Fast forward 30 years, and my sources tell me beer logos, cannabis logos, and obscene language are all a matter of a child’s right to self-expression. If a child wears a “Fuck Trudeau” t-shirt to class, well… human rights! Is there any dress code left at all? Yes! Apparently the local school board has drawn a red line. Genitals and nipples must be covered. Cover them with your Fuck Trudeau shirt if you like, but your goodies gotta be covered. We have standards! Education We haven’t just tossed out the dress code, we’ve also dispatched any kind of educational standards to the dustbin of history. We’re currently experimenting with dumbing down the math curriculum again, mainly because certain BIPOC groups fail too often (hint; it’s not the People of Colour from Asia). Dumbing down education has downstream consequences. It puts us at a disadvantage vis-a-vis societies where they don’t dumb down math. Like Russia and China for example. I’ve read there’s more advanced math in a Russian high school curriculum than there is in a four year degree at MIT. That’s why Russia has hypersonic missiles that work, and America doesn’t. That’s why Biden just put a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs. We can’t compete. Defence Very much related to our declining education system, is the downward spiral in Western military capability. While the US military (and those of the me-too nations) spent the last ten years fine-tuning their pronoun protocols (human rights, you know), our adversaries were fine-tuning their missile technology. Ukraine had been an eye-opener when it comes to evaluating Western military technology in actual battlefield conditions. We can’t compete. Social Cohesion To have any hope of achieving a viable future, you need most of the populace believing most of the time that things are getting better. That’s the only way to keep a diverse population all rowing in the same direction. You can bleat “diversity is our strength” all you want, but if your diverse population all agree that we’re in a housing crisis and a health care crisis and a cost-of-living crisis, where exactly is the “strength?” Incompetence of the ruling technocrats We are governed by experts. Our actual elected parliamentarians are smart enough to know they don’t know what they’re doing. That’s why they spend billions on expert consultants. How’s that going? The general crapification of everyday life Look around you. Tent cities in parks and on major streets. Open drug use, and I’m not talking about doobies. People shitting in the street. Rent for a 1 bed flat starting at 2k per month. You’d have to work about four min wage jobs at once to make that affordable. A decent quality of life? More and more, young people, all across the diversity spectrum, are coming to the conclusion that you can’t get there from here. Meanwhile, they’ve got a housing crisis in China, too. In their zeal to provide decent housing for every one of their 1.4 billion citizens, the commies overshot the mark and have hundreds of thousands of new apartments sitting vacant! But at least there’s no tent cities!