New Normal Digest #2
Author’s note: this series is an experiment, as I explained a week ago the fallout from my decision to depart Facebook. These are items that would have gone there. Now they’re going here. I propose to do ten and then decide, based on reader response (if any). Do you like what you see? Or do you think my time would be better served doing other things? Let me know in the comments.
“Mysterious” Deaths Abound….
Recalling the student-athlete who died “mysteriously” a couple of weeks ago, here’s another case. She was a TikTok “starlet.” Her name was Taylor Rousseau Grigg, and she was 25.
Then came a third, of Turkish pilot İlçehin Pehlivan who lost consciousness and died in flight early Wednesday. Fortunately his copilot was able to take over and make an emergency landing in New York.
Mr. Pehlivan, 59, died before landing, the airline said, without specifying a cause. The airline said that he had had regular health examinations, including one in March of this year, and that no problems were found. [Emphasis mine.]
Happens every day, folks! Nothing to see here! Move on, move on!*
It Baffles Me: Why Do So Many Evangelical Christians Support Israel Automatically and Unconditionally….
…. when the Israelis do this?
“Israel has a right to exist!”
And Palestinians do not?
“Israel has the right to defend itself!”
How does shooting children in cold blood contribute to Israel defending itself?
“Palestinians are terrorists and deserve whatever they get!”
Are you telling me those dead kids were working for Hamas or Hezbollah? Are you hearing yourselves?
If all human beings were created in God’s image and all therefore have intrinsic value, this includes Palestinians and other Arabs, does it not? See also, from last night:
Chuck Baldwin, in this hard-hitting piece which cites Scott Ritter, suggests that the events of this past year will spell not just the downfall of the Netanyahu regime that has sanctioned these abominations, but of Israel itself. Especially as there are doubtless well-meaning Israelis that are as horrified by the violence as we non-Zionists in the West.
Could Israel implode in the near future (or face a devastating attack from Iran)?
If the latter in particular happened, what Jewish neocons would do is a very interesting question! Surely it would give Zionists everywhere, who believe that Christianity’s God somehow sanctions our era’s Rothschild / UN creation which fulfills Old Testament prophesy, something to think about. Some Christians view hostility towards Israel (even when Israel provoked it) as heralding the approach of the Rapture, followed by the Great Tribulation and ending with Jesus’s Second Coming and the establishment of His Kingdom on Earth.
(At least they’ve learned enough from past failures not to give us timelines for this un-Scriptural approach to the End Times anymore.)
Turning, with relief, to domestic matters:
James Howard Kunstler….
…. has become one of my favorite writers on the Web. For one thing, as a writer he’s better than I am. For another, we’ve both been censored. Or so it looks from here, with his main site gone and his coming to Substack.
Do I need to actually argue that there’s a war against freedom of speech going on? It’s coming from the political class’s upper-echelon elites: people like John Kerry and Hillary Rodham Clinton. As JHK observes in the dry style he’s absolutely mastered.
“We lose total control. . .” she said.
Perhaps when you heard that you thought, “What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?”
You have also known for some time now, that Hillary is exactly the something wicked that has been coming this way for many years, to the siren song of the cable news harpies shrieking Trump Trump Trump. . . Putin Putin Putin at all hours, day and night, month after dreary month, and all the other avatars of ruin pretending to run the life of our nation. But this utterance begs enough questions to keep Chat GDP vexed and perplexed for the rest of its unnatural life: We lose total control. . . ?
Yes, as matter of fact, you do. This might be a book tour too far for Mrs. Clinton and her claque, now that her basket of deplorables shivers in the cold and dark out in Appalachia amid the stink of their kinfolks’ uncollected corpses.
I presume this last is a reference to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, where fed gov spokespersons and controlled “legacy” media are desperately trying to hide their neglect with their usual ploy of calling us “conspiracy theorists.” The whole piece:
“Always Believe Women…”
…unless those they accuse are either leftists or globalists or both. Think Bill Clinton, who has never been called onto the carpet for, say, his treatment of Juanita Broaddrick. There are other women, especially in Arkansas, who are living out their lives basically in hiding because they fear the powerful Clintons.
But these days we’re looking at Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s hubby, who has been credibly accused of slapping around a girlfriend right in public. To the woman’s credit, she became his ex-girlfriend on that night.
But unlike E. Jean Carroll who can reap millions off her accusations against Donald Trump in front of a leftist judge over something that we have no real evidence ever happened, Emhoff’s accuser is known only as “Jane”: also keeping her head down because Emhoff is a “prominent public figure.”
And another leftist. The unwritten rules for women: always accuse conservatives! So Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas became fair game! Never accuse leftists / globalists! Which is why Bill Clinton and Doug Emhoff are untouchable, and you have to have been truly vile to be brought down: Harvey Weinstein is a case in point.
Sasha Stone, another writer you should check out if you haven’t already, spills the goods:
The Diminishing of Social Trust: Charles Hugh Smith Reports the Trajectory.
Charles Hugh Smith, another top-drawer Web writer, has documented the diminishing of social trust over time in a series of articles on his site: here, here, and here primarily.
His diagnosis includes multiple factors. It includes, first, not just the large and still-growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, but this gap coupled with the justifiable suspicion that the haves have rigged the financialized system to deliver unearned goods into their laps.
Second is the growing sense of incompetence that is not just accepted but actually expected. This is illustrated every time a clerk says, “That’s not my department” or some equivalent to, “I just work here.” Couple this with the avalanche of increasingly shoddy goods out there.
Start with technology. The very first computer I bought, a Tandy (remember those?) back in 1989, lasted 11 years. The Compaq I bought in 1998 gave up the ghost in either 2005 or 2006: that’s around (count ‘em) eight years at the most.
I worked on my first laptop until it conked out in 2010. I bought another tower affair which started giving me “blue screens of death” in 2014. By that time I was in Chile and hearing rumors that Hewlett-Packard was having imported and selling fifth rate equipment here.
In any event, I never had a laptop last more than two years after that. Usually the keyboard would go first; then other functions would quit working one by one.
Warranties were only for a year, of course, and after a while, buying a new one is cheaper than having an older one repaired.
I bought the Dell laptop I’m writing on now in Miami in summer of 2022 and brought it back to Chile to avoid the shoddy stuff here. I chose Dell on its reputation, which (like nearly everyone else in this market, may be living on borrowed time).
We’re in the final quarter of 2024. My Dell’s keyboard started malfunctioning around six months ago. I went through several keyboards attachable via a USB port until I found one that wasn’t too flaky and served most of my purposes.
Three weeks ago, the sound system went out on it, leaving me dependent on my iPhone for courses and Zoom calls and conferences.
It’s not just hardware that’s gotten more difficult to use.
To cite the example I always think of first as a writer of sometimes lengthy and complicated manuscripts using Word, I’d honestly like to shoot the person at Microsoft who eliminated the feature that enables the user to “page down” one page at a time. Each edition of Windows has called for a new edition of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.
Am I alone, I wonder, in finding each edition more difficult to use than its predecessor was?
And don’t get me started on Microsoft’s move from selling packages you could pick up in any good computer store and install yourself to the subscription model they started using last decade, giving consumers no choice in the matter. Obviously, corporations can make far more money forcing customers to pay for a year subscription than they do actually selling the software.
This history, which goes from devices that lasted over a decade to devices that start falling apart in less than two years, has conditioned my own lack of trust in technology corporations that design, manufacture, and distribute this stuff.
Surely this reflects what Charles Hugh Smith calls under-competence, the prevailing species of incompetence.
Returning to Smith’s series, what is he talking about: social trust? It is the trust in businesses to deliver usable products consistently over time. It is the trust in government agencies to serve the public instead of drowning the public in bureaucratic red tape—or putting you on hold for an indefinite wait that could be anything from 15 minutes to two hours or more.
What that communicates is that contrary to their canned messages (“Your call is valuable to us!”) those who design such systems don’t care about our time at all!
No, your call is not important to them, because you’re not important to them; you’re one of thousands of sand grains on the mass consumption beachfront. If you were important to them, they would hire enough agents deal with customer needs.
This would cost them money, of course, and we come to the rub of what is behind the degradation of everything: the desire of those at the top to make as much money as possible while paying out as little as possible.
Such realizations sabotage social trust. It is turning high-trust Western societies into low-trust ones like Chile where literally everything has to be documented, validated, and stamped.
I’ll hand Smith the mike at this point:
In high-trust societies, transactions are frictionless and low-cost. In low-trust societies, transactions must go through multiple levels of verification, trusted third-parties, etc., each of which is costly.
Correspondent Bruce H. illuminates the differences between high-trust and low-trust transactions:
"There must be a high degree of social trust in order to make business transactions. If you think the other person is likely to take the goods and not pay, you are not likely to engage as freely, and the "shadow work" of ensuring that a transaction is honored drains the economy.
In cultures where cunning and deception are seen as laudable, business transactions are slow, proceeding only carefully, in a time-consuming way because both parties have to ensure the other's compliance at every phase of the arrangement. This is costly.
In cultures where personal honor take primacy, a quick handshake is sufficient and work can begin immediately, confident that payment or the exchange will proceed to both parties benefit.
Diminishing of social trust leads to increasing resentment and eventually dysfunction.
A final cause of loss of social trust goes beyond these autobiographical specifics. It is traceable to the realization that we’ve been lied to about so many things over such a long period of time: going back at least as far as the assassinations of the 1960s. If no one has anything to hide, then why not declassify the remaining thousands of pages of documents related to these assassinations?
Charles Hugh Smith supplies a list of the things we’ve been lied to about by “our” government.
Just Asking Questions about such things is, of course, something we’re no longer supposed to do anymore. Even if we’re not assuming that those atop the corporations we've been talking about are reptilian space aliens.
Men (and Women!) of System.
Who are the Men (and Women!) of System?
Put in these terms, just another phrase for People Who Push People Around! That minority in our midst with a psychological need to control others. Historically, in intellectuals, this has manifested itself in the construction of Utopias: “perfect societies.” Such societies all had one central characteristic. The whole is what matters. Not the parts. Not the individual persons, or even persons conceived as members of families or local groups or communities. What matters is The System.
Many Men (and Women!) of System have migrated into government, for the obvious reason that governments tend to legalize and then monopolize Pushing People Around.
But in a money political economy, why limit Men of System to government? They can be anywhere, including in the World Economic Forum which is not a government or in Google or in Facebook which are not governments or BlackRock which is not a government.
According to Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a Man of System (explains Jeff Thomas) was:
any individual who believed that he knew what was best for others and sought to impose his system (from the top, down) on the population, whether they agreed or not.
Mister Smith felt that the failing in all such systems was the same – that the Man of System was dangerous for two reasons. First, the Man of System believed that he knew more than he was actually capable of knowing. Second, the Man assumed that, if he simply dictated human action, the individuals in question would comply – much like pieces being moved around on a chessboard.
This is because the Man (or Woman!) of System is often either an operational or actual philosophical atheist who doesn’t believe in a Power higher than himself (or herself!). It’s a small step from There is no God to I am God! (or a god).
*Update on “Mysterious” Deaths.
This appeared just this morning regarding the sudden death of the TikTok “starlet.” At first glance, it appears to settle the matter in favor of the perfectly mundane. But does it? I’m not a doctor but I know enough about public health to know that the conditions the article cited should not have been fatal unless something else was compromising her body systems.
My question is simple. Did she get the mRNA shots, or didn’t she? Yes, or no? Did the Turkish pilot? I’d like to hear someone say it, one way or the other. But no one is talking! If by some chance the woman didn’t get them, fine. Same with the pilot. I’ll issue an Erratum saying so in a future issue. But it would be nice if someone would come clean and report this transparently … assuming, in light of Charles Hugh Smith’s observations above, we can trust anyone on such subjects anymore.
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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