Submitted by Hardscrabble Farmer
Guest Post by Lyman Stone
The Baby Boomers ruined America. That sounds like a hyperbolic claim, but it’s one way to state what I found as I tried to solve a riddle. American society is going through a strange set of shifts: Even as cultural values are in rapid flux, political institutions seem frozen in time. The average U.S. state constitution is more than 100 years old. We are in the third-longest period without a constitutional amendment in American history: The longest such period ended in the Civil War. So what’s to blame for this institutional aging?
One possibility is simply that Americans got older. The average American was 32 years old in 2000, and 37 in 2018. The retiree share of the population is booming, while birth rates are plummeting. When a society gets older, its politics change. Older voters have different interests than younger voters: Cuts to retiree-focused benefits are scarier, while long-term problems such as excessive student debt, climate change, and low birth rates are more easily ignored.
But it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic. In a recent report for the American Enterprise Institute, I looked at issues including housing, work rules, higher education, law enforcement, and public budgeting, and found a consistent pattern: The political ascendancy of the Boomers brought with it tightening control and stricter regulation, making it harder to succeed in America. This lack of dynamism largely hasn’t hurt Boomers, but the mistakes of the past are fast becoming a crisis for younger Americans.
Zoning codes in America have their roots in the early 1900s. Some land-use rules arose out of efforts to manage growing density in cities due to industrialization and new construction technologies that allowed taller buildings. But most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial groups. For many decades, though, zoning codes were relatively limited in scope.
Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s. This shift is reflected in the increasing frequency with which various land-use associated words were used in Google’s database of American English-language publications. These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.
There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.
Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction difficult. Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.
But, of course, Boomers didn’t only make rules that nudge young people out of homeownership. They also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.
Just as tight land-use rules make existing homeowners richer by reducing how many new houses are listed on the market, strict licensing rules make existing workers richer by reducing competition in their fields. And while some industries clearly need licensing rules for health and safety reasons, most of the growth in licensure has been in fields where health and safety justifications are less salient: Do you really need hours of course work and special exams to be a florist, an interior designer, or an auctioneer?
By privileging existing workers, licensure rules increase income inequality, and they do so specifically by shifting income toward older workers. When licensure standards exclude felons, they also disproportionately affect minorities. Young people, and especially minorities, are increasingly being legally prohibited from work.Again, scholars differ on explanations for why licensure has proliferated. It could be that work has simply gotten more complex.
Or it could be that the decline of unions led to a search for new ways to maintain occupational closure. Increased gender and racial integration in workplaces may also have led to a search for new forms of hierarchy.But even for workers who don’t need a formal license, barriers to work have grown over time. Jobs that once required a high-school degree now require a college degree.
This escalation of credential requirements has created a kind of educational arms race. The rise in collegiate attainment, again, did not begin with Boomers. Rather, the GI Bill, and the explosion in new university chartering that it underwrote, created a new norm of college education for many jobs. With the rising availability of higher education, employers, who tend to be older than their employees, often demand degrees as licenses.
Meanwhile, even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water. The social norm requiring degrees for virtually any middle-class job is one largely invented by Boomers and their parents, and enforced by those generations.
As with formal licensing and land-use rules, there are explanations for the rise of degree requirements: greater public support for education, a complex economy, growing demand for knowledge-workers. All probably have some validity. But the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.And whatever specific factors contributed to the rise of licensure, land-use rules, and demands for more degrees, these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of life.
Regardless of changes in formal segregation, unionization, demand for knowledge workers, returns to various asset classes, or other explanations for the rise of work and housing regulation, what is striking is that these trends occurred simultaneously. A graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend.
Sector-specific explanations seem a bit suspect when the trend itself is so general.The most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates. Even though murder rates are today at the same levels they were in the 1950s, the imprisoned share of the population is higher in America than in any country other than North Korea. We imprison a larger share of the population than authoritarian countries such as Turkmenistan and China.
That huge spike has a very clear origin in the crime wave of the 1960s and 1970s. Academic research has shown that incarcerating more criminals does reduce crime somewhat, so, as with all the other examples I’ve given, this response was understandable.
But many countries experienced a similar crime wave. Most of them experienced similar crime declines in the 1990s, even without so much imprisonment. Furthermore, research has also shown that imprisonment patterns in America were heavily biased by race, with incarceration rates not always reflecting actual rates of criminality.
Today, while incarceration rates are edging lower, they remain astonishingly high. Even as younger Americans are locked out of jobs and housing by strict rules set by previous generations, a startlingly large share of them, especially in minority communities, are literally behind bars. Those who remain free are nonetheless bereft of family, friends, and potential co-workers—and whole communities are, as a matter of law, stripped of potential workers.
It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s. And whatever specific arguments may have justified a command-and-control response to crime, this kind of response reared its head for every major political problem encountered by Baby Boomers: housing, jobs, education, crime, and, of course, debt.
Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time. Already, in places such as Detroit, Illinois, and Puerto Rico, where political rules make flexible solutions hard and the population is aging very quickly, massive debt restructurings loom large. But around the country, the pressures of long-term obligations will grow.
Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilities. It’s based on consensus forecasts from groups such as the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget for economic growth and for programs such as Social Security and Medicare where such forecasts are available—but in some cases, such as state debts and pensions, no such forecast was available, and so I developed a simple one.
Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.
Furthermore, the basic demographic balance sheet is getting worse all the time, increasing the relative burden on young people. Working-age Americans are dying off in alarming numbers.
The odds of a 32-year-old dying have risen by 24 percent in the past five years, even as death rates among older Americans are about stable. Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence. But, of course, while this sudden increase in working-age death rates is a new concern, the long-run fiscal crunch has been obvious for decades. For virtually the entire period of Boomer political dominance, it has been obvious that long-term obligations needed to be fixed. And yet, the problem has not been fixed. Younger Americans will suffer the consequences.
As dire as this all sounds, there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically unpalatable.
Not all of these problems were first caused by the Boomers, but they each worsened on their watch. If leaders in business, education, and politics want to solve these problems, they can. Whether the gerontocracy in charge today wants solutions may be another question altogether.
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So, the take-away is that we need to bring back segregation. Way ahead of you. Why not do it on a nation-state level?
“Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending, while solutions for government debt and obligations are widely known, even if they are politically unpalatable.”
Rather than do this, why not merely deport all non-Whites? This would create a housing surplus, and eliminate the need for releasing non-White drug dealers and pimps before their sentences are up, and eliminate most of the useless university professors and graduates, and provide a massive budget surplus.
The difference between the article author’s plan, and this plan, is that this plan would actually work if implemented.
Your Utopia sounds enticing except that I have read that poor folks (immigrants) provide the rent money for white folks. If you actually read the article, you should be able to grasp what the author is getting at; boomers were so different from the hardworking Silents. Boomers got it in their head that they could so rig the game that they would not need to work hard for a living the way their parents had.
The idea is so ingrained and internalized – that children ought to be better off than their parents – nobody questions it. They actually say shit like, get an education so that you won’t have to work hard like your parents. As if hard work were beneath them. Now the boomers have passed on this chemically imprinted information onto their own kids and the little fuckers refuse to work, they want free shit while they sit at home making believe they are keeping up with Kim and Kanye.
Meanwhile, low IQ tards buy into the ‘it’s the illegals’ mantra. Yokes has done a marvelous job of brainwashing folks into believing that ethnic cleansing will solve the problem of crime, homosexuality and unsatisfied housewives. I could save oxygen by saying the old proverb: it’s the economy, stupid. A rising tide floats all boats and vice versace ( is it visa versa?)
There is so much to blame on the boomers that I believe the author has only given us the tip of the iceberg. But I will stop here in case HR is offended.
Sorry, don’t really see what you are getting at. But I am sure it has something to do with boomers and ruining everything because if it was about you, that would be kinda retarded. How could anyone expect retarded from you?
You live in LA, you know that an influx of people leads to rising prices which bolsters the income and wealth of folks who own houses. Moron up above says empty houses are good. Tell that to the folks in Detroit. I bet you think Chicago is going to work its way out of the pension crisis once there are more empty houses.
Still don’t understand what you are now so wound up about. I said nothing about the post at all. I said nothing about empty houses or Detroit or Chicago or pension funds. What possible joy can you two get out of personal attacks? Why don’t you two go over to the very good post about NPC people and study that one for a while. At least on that post your NPC behavior would have some relevance.
El,
Who gives a shit about pensions? These are the exact people who have found a way to live off others.
And the “moron up above” is talking about solving the housing crisis. I’d rather solve the housing crisis than the pension crisis. People living in houses are better citizens than government pension bloodsuckers any day.
The “boomers” wouldn’t have gotten away with it had the “silent” not voted for them, acquiesced or remained silent.
Of course it started before that with the war of northern aggression; 16th, 17th, 19th, amendment (the Federal Reserve Act wouldn’t have been possible without the 17th and the 62nd and 63rd Congresses); and more but……
Through gradualism the communist fuckers stole the country right out from under their/our noses.
There is no rising tide for anyone except the 1% who have some kind of access to the Fed’s money printing…The new jobs are almost entirely low wage and go 90% to illegals and other immigrants…
“Some kind of access” is not magical, they have their hirelings in office and the rest is a matter of designing ways to tap the money pipeline. Mexican kleptos have got it down to a science. Lopez Obrador has not tightened down on any of the high level theft of government funds. His tough approach is limited to calling them “pipis” (peepees – dicks). Duterte has a more effective method of crime control; lead poisoning.
Duterte doesn’t have a choice because Pilipino Cartels don’t offer plata as a choice.
It’s why a Social Security pensioner can fan his feathers in Manilla and look like Bill Gates.
I think this article is written by a city slicker with an agenda, the premise is a red herring, it is not a zoning issue or a segregation issue.
1. the cost of single family homes exceeds the income of a lot of worker bees.
2. all the good lots have been built, what remains are lots that are less desirable:
below grade (flooding) or steep grade (expensive construction) or far away from services (requires well/septic, no cable or DLS)
3. the “kids” want to live in the exciting city, along with the folks at American Enterprise Institute
I’m a boomer who grew up in a military family (1st US institution to desegregate) in the land development business for 20 years (zoning expert) and have two daughters. You made three, ironclad assertions: the ‘issues’ blamed on Boomers were red herrings; the easy money has already been made in the housing market; and things are going to get exciting.
I think you have an agenda. The author wrote with an angle, a point of view, but it isn’t a nefarious agenda. It explains a lot and shines a light on modern yet over-regulated life. Why did Americans feel freer back in the day? Because they had less regulations governing their actions. Today, it’s all about regulations, laws and limitations. Imagine Andy and Opie going fishing on the spur of the moment today. They would need a fishing license, safety vests, lanyards, a lifeguard on duty and a tranny to throtttle any overt masculine toxicity Andy might inadvertently display and transmit to Opie lest some lesbian lose her lunch. They’d have to throw the fish back to avoid violating the fish’s right to life. Then Andy and Opie would have to go on Oprah to obtain forgiveness for their white ways, for not dedicating their day off to productive shit like knocking over a liquor store.
The easiest way forward is to privatize day care centers. If a parent cant afford it let gramma pay or home school.
Once immigrants have to play by the rules. They’ll be demoralized.
privatize day care centers – Anonymous
Your wisdom knows no bounds, Genius.
You are partly correct: the fault lies with Liberals, not Boomers per se. True that most Urban Boomers are Liberals, just as are most of all generations in America, and the Urban Liberals have run (ruined) America. As a Southern Rural Boomer myself, most of us opposed all of the above “Progress” but were outnumbered; we feel your pain and share your anger. The Democrats are hell bent on making things unbearable and there will be a Reset.
Blah, blah, you’d think Southerners walked on water. If the fuckers hadn’t oppressed blacks so, they would not have migrated north to Chicago and Detroit and even west to LA. Do you fuckers ever admit being the least bit wrong?
Yes, but you are welcome to all the Blacks you freed.
And pay the upcoming reparations, and while at it my people want some money for what sherman’s thugs burnt and/or took. With interest, compounded daily.
The north didn’t want the blacks either. They had their own form of segregation. When blacks migrated to Lawrence, KS after the War of Northern Aggression, they were told to keep on walking. They eventually settled in Nicodemas, KS, an all black town that still exists today.
And desegregation has worked out so well, hasn’t it? That plus Johnson’s NOT so great society has decimated the black family and neighborhood schools so that all that is left is dysfunctional female led homes full of kids from different men. Before that, the black neighborhoods were vital, well functioning areas with black owned businesses, stores, and churches. The kids who got in trouble and were disciplined. Not that they were perfect by any stretch but it was far better than what we have now.
Elephantiasis Crotch,
Sharecropping whites were much more oppressed and suffered worse than niggers owned by 1% of southerners. Marauding Yankees ensured that many a southerner would become a sharecropper by burning defenseless homes and barns across wide swaths of the south.
‘Historical’ records of slave ownership in the south 5%, were inflated by counting every member of the family as a slave owner, or 24% if every relative was counted.
You don’t count, asshole.
Thanks, bro.
There is a good bit of truth to the above. Union soldiers so decimated Southern fruit orchards that we nearly lost all pome biodiversity by the turn of the 20th century. Through the extraordinary efforts of old-time apple hunters like Tom Brown in NC, they are slowly being re-introduced across the country.
War is so fucking useless most of the time.
EC- I never oppressed anyone, I have been oppressed by the Yankee occupying government in DC. Who is wrong here??
Hardfarmer ,I you like and respect you but you need to look at the crime numbers concerning the amount of crime blacks have committed and are still committing against white Americans. The numbers will blow your mind . Then look at rapes committed blacks against white women. This got my attention years ago when a young man from Australia did a criminal investigation . He found between 1974 to 2004 some 30 million crimes by blacks against whites in those 30 years.Then he suggested looking at the FBI numbers . I did and what found was shocking and disgusting. I think you can still find this article as well as the FBI numbers over at the A R blog or American Renaissance since Google has been deleting so much information about crime in order to protect blacks. Just like MSM ( Jewish Owned ) . You never saw or heard a word about this in that media. I knew Jews protected blacks so they could keep using them as biological weapons against whites but I never knew how much until then.Blacks commit so much crime that if white people knew there would be a backlash so fast and a demand from even white liberals for a return to Segregation.
I do agree Boomers have hurt America but it’s mostly been the ones in government. They have Boomers up at the Dept of Transportation with phds that do nothing but sit behind a desk and write regulations that we in the private sector have to go. Once the head of the Department appovers then those regulations become law without a vote from Congress. I’m sure it’s like this all across government. I read a while back the average American commits 3 felonies a day with out even knowing it. I know that’s true in truck driving.
Same with Social security ,Med 1 and Med 2 as well as disability. Government is full of Boomers writing laws to help themselves. The Government and Public Unions are the two things that are really wrong. The Public Unions is one we will save for another day. If knew just a little of the Corruption in these Unions it would once again blow your mind and their main job is to steal money from taxpayers. Think about that. To steal money from you and me and our families.
Sorry Hardfarmer ,I thought you had written this article. I was going to reread it and then I noticed.Damn.
Don’t forget all of the Regulators who simply create new regulations to justify their useless jobs. If they admitted that things were working fine in a particular area and needed no change/regulation, then their job wouldn’t be necessary.
The hospital I’m at has a “corporate compliance” team that constantly reviews notation, charts, billing etc–monthly they create some new form, paperwork or computer entry to address some made up problem that isn’t a problem.
Want to know another reason health care is so high in the States? Regulation/paperwork. I spend at least 25 to 35% of my day at the dam computer and less and less time treating patients…hate it.
As a boomer I played by the rules. I naively thought our esteemed politicians knew what they were doing and were for the most part earnest. In my later 50s I realized the truth of the matter; everything is a scam. This came too late to do much about it, although I’ve tried to attone for my ignorance. I have 3 children, all in their 20s. There is no way I would have gone along with what has been laid at their feet had I known. The wheels of this debacle were set in motion over 100 years ago with the creation of the FED among other things. We all find ourselves still helping our children way past the time they were supposed to finally leave the nest, putting our own retirement in limbo. So, it’s not like we intentionally threw them under the bus or are remorseless about their plight.
As for the darker faces, we’ve all carried their water to a massive degree. $ Trillions wasted on them for nothing in the way of results.
I don’t accept this morass as my generations deficiency. I spent my life playing by the rules as did most others I know.
Steve ,you sound as if you are disappointed in yourself for being so stupid.
And you’re not?
Anonymous , not really . I expect stupid from myself but Steve sounds really upset with himself.
Steve ,I was just ” playing ” with you. I will be 58 in 4 months and didn’t start waking up till about the age of 50. I felt more anger then anything then came helplessness cause there’s nothing any of us can do to change the situation in Washington .Voting doesn’t work .
Yes, I’m upset. I invested heavily in my kids thinking they would have at least as good a shot at the Apple as I did. Upset that this is not the case and very worried about their future. While they are all getting degrees in med related fields and will generally do well when compared to their peers, their prospects include massive taxation, sharp decline in energy, polluted earth and general steep decline in quality of life. The number of issues they’ll face is daunting to say the least. All 3 have expressed no desire to bring children into THIS world. How sad is that?
We all played by the rules, Steve-O. That’s not the way to become president or rich or both.
We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes – Leona Helmsley
So sorry, I can’t take the blame for the state of the country. No one ever called me and asked if what was being legislated was a good thing, no one ever came to me and gave me a choice in the laws, the rules, the bullshit, and if I went against the ‘rules’ I was punished. I had a gun held to my head at tax time, LBJ never consulted me on the merits of his ‘great society,’ I didn’t agree to Clinton giving the farm to China for his personal enrichment.
So sorry, the article is crap, blame the Boomers is like blaming Millenials, I didn’t vote for or want the Bushes, Clinton, Obama and all the other bullshit that was completely out of my control. All I could do was stand on the sidelines and watch train wreck after train wreck unfold.
OK, I really haven’t stepped in on this one because there were lot’s of comments that I agreed with and I didn’t see what I could add, but you, Mygirl, have said what I feel precisely. Look up the author of the piece. See where he is coming from and the other articles that he has written. We boomers didn’t start this dumpster fire. We didn’t throw the burning bottle into the dumpster and as Mygirl says, nobody asked us what we thought about the burning trash in the dumpster. We sat in our cars in lines waiting for gas. We went to Vietnam. We struggled through stock market crash after stock market crash and not once did we ever blame it on our parents.
This asshole is just another “everybody gets a trophy” whinny little bastard who thinks that it can’t possibly be his fault that criminals infest the halls of government. Well it is his fault. It’s my fault too. And it’s all our faults because we voted for them. We allowed them to be there starting the dumpster fire. Or we stood by and did nothing while they wormed their slimy way into those halls of power.
Thank you, great comment.
Exquisite reply
Preach Mygirl!!!
Hallelujah! Praise Be! Amen! And go tell it on the Mountain, MyGirl…maybe you’ll let me paw your donation bowl?
I promise to make the biggest contribution.
I hear you Steve and pay a similar price physically and emotionally for my previous lack of awareness. I don’t know about you, but a single book (specifically, a single man in that book) helped me tremendously.
And to EC… I don’t want to be president or to be rich.
1 Tim 2:1-2… “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.”
1 Thes 4:11-12… “And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; That ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”
As for moving past and forward, as that is all we can do…
Phil 3:13-14… “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”
That the world crumbles around us is no surprise. Sin takes its toll; sins toll is decay. How we choose to conduct ourselves while it happens is the question we all must ask ourselves very seriously. I’ve made my choice and will follow it through to the best of my ability. My “20 somethings” have mostly picked up on it too… and we learn more every day. Thank you, Father!
We must strengthen the Remnant. This wave of drug legalization, infanticide, along with the simply outrageous mainstreaming of mentally ill sexual libertinism (tranny library BS) topped off with out of control borders will challenge our foundations and reveal those built on shifting sands as well as who has been swimming naked.
“We must strengthen the Remnant.”
One thing indispensable to that task. The Bible rightly divided.
And to EC… I don’t want to be president or to be rich.
Good one!
Nailed it Steve ! My wife & I worked and paid for everything up front cash most of the way other than the mortgage and a car payment . College education was for our kids paid in full ! Now those who got their asses in a debt sling are being told their debts will be forgiven WTF ! My guess is the Misses and I have a huge write off for what we forked out . That will make a nice retirement nest egg addition but we won’t hold our breath !
As for the racial nonsense , reparations have been paid for decades and we get Chicago & Baltimore in return . The former Baltimore County school head is in jail ! A black man who took kick backs and his opening statement to a graduating class sounded like a scene from Amos & Andy “When you all leave up outta here” ! 3 black female mayors of Baltimore all major fuck ups and the saga continues
FWIW
Lyman Stone, 27, whose last full-time job was as an economist at the U.S. Agriculture Department, has interests that range from fertility in the Northern Mariana Islands to gentrification in Cincinnati.
Mr. Stone’s background as an agricultural economist (specializing in cotton) for the USDA.
Stone, a Kentucky native who also has an affiliation with Demographic Intelligence, a Charlottesville, Va.-based consulting firm that counts JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble among its clients.
He’s married
He claims to be Christian.
Grad of George Washington University.
He blogs about migration, population dynamics, and regional economics at In a State of Migration, https://medium.com/migration-issues. He also writes regularly for Vox’s Big Idea vertical, and for The Federalist. His work has been covered in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous local outlets.
I think he’s an open borders guy. Like cuck Paul Ryan – who I still fantasize about shooting through the temple with a hunting arrow. His Twitter page says he wants a billion Americans. Hey, if Americans want to fuck their way to that, fine, but I’m guessing he wants to import them.
Relax, Momos. It’s cyclical. No one is to blame. The crowing of the chicken does not cause the sun to rise. Dig deeper into the dynamics of the 4th turning hypothesis/theory.
Well, I had to look that one up.
Momo is a type of South Asian dumpling; native to Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal, and the Ladakh, Sikkim, Assam and Darjeeling regions of India. It is similar to Chinese baozi and jiaozi, Mongolian buuz, Japanese gyoza and Korean mandu.
Of course it is cyclical, but that does not mean that the cycle operates under it’s own power. There very well could be a cycle here but it is not driven by god or the physical order of things. It is driven by men and their greed and avarice. It is only a cycle when men of good character oppose those of bad character and beat them back into the shadows.
Oh and it is not the chicken which crows, it is the rooster.
Ima gonna pick up the slack left by El Cholo, the picky beaner. A rooster is a chicken, a male chicken. The female chicken is called a hen
A young man is attending the county Fair in order to show his chickens in a contest; one male and one female, held under each arm.
Presently, he meets a pretty girl and they strike up a conversation. However, he soon has to use the restroom and so he asks the girl: “Say, can you hold my cock and pullet?”
And those capons go rolling along.
By extension, a man is a male woman. The female cock is called a pullet.
Momo is a dumbass, ozum is calling us dumbasses because we don’t realize that there are cycles or turnings. Hollywood as usual gets faked out. Moron. Here, HR, fetch.
Maybe in your world beaner baby but according to the encyclopedia he was calling all dumplings. And that makes quite a bit of sense and is actually a very well thought out slur.
Another liberal….
Where are his shoulders?
Reminds me of Beto O’Rourke. Does he skateboard?
Wonder how good his broken Spanish is….
Beto has good pronunciation and inflection, he speaks El Paso Spanish; it isn’t eloquent but it’s serviceable, certainly not broken. The black dude sounded terrible, sort of like a Russian speaker trying to speak English (although Vlad speaks English quite well).
Actually Be to is Irish. Not Hispanic at all!!!
No shit, Sherlock.
No, no. Beto has been accused of being Mexican. He is guilty until proven innocent.
Bust. Me. Up.
Cory Booker (they/them/theirs) choked on the first Spanish word.
Actually Co ry is black, Not Hispanic at all!!!
A neighbor in Nayarit is a Belgian Count in his 70’s with beautifully accented Parisian Spanish and a swashbuckler’s swagger.
It takes him all of five seconds to melt every Señorita and Señora into an adoring puddle.
If only.
Doc Pangloss on women:
The only thing women need is therapy.
What therapy?
This (makes talking gesture with his hand)
It’s likely true because Eve was talked into sin by the snake.
You never wanted to kiss a snake?
Liar.
When she left, I described the heartache as a snake with its fangs in my heart. I got no sympathy or even credit for the imagery. Damn bitch.
The Democrat’s Immigration Policy is a Plan to swamp the US election process with new (illegal) Democrat voters and take over the Senate and Presidency. It was obvious when they refused to approve 5 billion for the Wall but approved over 10 billion for humanitarian aid for the illegals. They are manipulating the 2020 election, exactly what they are falsely accusing Trump of doing with the Russians. Since Democrats are effectively a Communist Party, this is effectively a Communist plot which will result in a Communist take over of America that cannot be reversed at the polls. Communist Pogroms and economic collapse will follow like in every other Communist country. It is Treason and they are Traitors. Their Plan must not be allowed to continue and must be stopped ASAP.
Point well taken. They are a communist party and their candidates are always endorsed by the CPUSA. The attempted coup and frame job they attempted is textbook. In 1905 the Communist Party of Russia voted to become a criminal conspiracy. The Democrats under Obama and for the benefit of Hitlary engaged in a criminal conspiracy to steal an election and then overthrow Trump after they lost.
A number of people should be put up against the wall and shot. Seriously. What is most painful is that far too many have no idea what extreme events have occurred and how tenuous and precarious their situations have become as they continue on in their dream world painted by the MSM whores and traitors who are active participants in this criminal conspiracy..
Playing the blame game is just another way to divide people. Boomers, and I am one, even though I was in elementary school in the 60’s, do deserve some of the hate going around. Go ahead and pile it on. I can point fingers at other generations, too, if I want. What does it accomplish?
If everybody had to work and pay for what they have or get, that includes government, many of the problems we are faced with, such as illegal immigration, would sort itself out. The debt explosion throughout society is one thing that could be fixed but it requires thought not feelings.
The debt explosion clearly begins in 1971 the second Nixon did away with balance of payment settlements in Gold. Charts show a near 90 degree upturn from that moment.
I remember riding in our Ford Country Squire wagon coming home from my Grandmother’s on a Sunday night listening to the radio as Nixon gave the speech to the country about it. Had I only known then what I know now. I had no idea what any of that stuff was back then.
But gold was $32 an ounce, and Ft. Knox was full of it.
Yeah I agree, the list of Boomers that I despise as politicians is probably a long list, but grouping people by “generation” is a sweeping generalization too far. AOC is young, and she is one of the scariest idiots out of all this morons. I guess I’m generation X, and I saw that change from easy jobs for people with a work ethic to a debt-fest of everyone “needs” to go to college. College keeps millions out of the work force, and a great number would likely be partially employed if they tried to work. In part b/c High Schools graduate large number of lazy idiots. I’ve never seen a generation as divorced from “real” hands on work then the youngest generations. Being raised in A.C., AC cars, homes, cellphones has caused a host of problems. It’s amazing how many younger people I have heard the “I don’t like going outside”. At least the Boomers I know/knew usually could change a car tire, fix simple things, and still do some real life stuff. But we now have skinny-fat kids. I’m still in better shape than 90% of these younger kids b/c they sit on ass constantly and struggle to look you in the eye b/c they are so accustomed to looking at computer screens.
I suppose I was a child of the 80’s, I was still told to “go outside and play and don’t come back till dinner”. I played in the woods, dug in the dirt and used my imagination. TV watching was basically something we did only after dinner, no one sat around watching TV all day. And no one was addicted to Commodore 64’s and trying to put in 8 floppy discs. Now parents are letting their 2 year olds use cell phones WTF??? I think we have a whole load of problems coming this way from the non-baby boomers, so all the generations seem to be screwed at this point. My grandparents went through the great depression and I spent alot of time with them growing up, so they colored my thinking that our country was not near as resilient as it was a long time ago. Its a sad state of affairs that if the electric stops 80% of people would die, yet 100 years ago, pretty much everyone would have got by. My grandparents didn’t have electricity until they were older, things have change alot in just 60years.
Beautifully said Bubbah.
I bought all my girls tool sets and they know how to use them. They can all operate assault rifles and various handguns and one is a real whiz with a Mossberg 930. They can use warehousing equipment like pallet jacks. They all have graduate degrees except the youngest who is a Summa Cum Laude honors grad working in a lumber yard until this Fall when she starts Law School in a first tier school.
It wasn’t easy but if I dropped dead today I know my kids would be among survivors if any of our dystopian fears come to pass.
There’s your solution- bust up the grid.
The boomers ARE extremely ignorant. Want proof. Just look at the kids they raised. LOL
Speak for yourself.
Talking last year to my Boomer father it finally dawned on me that they were/are a product of their programming. To this day he can’t overcome the WWII images that were pounded into his head “every day and everywhere.” The rise and ubiquity of radio and television combined with the white guilt of The Holocaust ™ against the demographic frame of the Fourth Turning generational cycle created a perfect storm: and entire generation eager to be manipulated into societal suicide and a silent generation of parents shamed into letting it happen.
“…they were/are a product of their programming.”
There is a ton of truth here, TC. My dad is 84 and there is no changing his mind about his being “the greatest generation”. He’s not a Bible believer as I am. Nothing has changed except the intensity of that programming. Ask Edward Bernays. Armed without that ever critical two-edged sword, most were helpless to combat its influence. Churches paved the way. It’s really not possible to lay the blame on any one generation. This process was played a long slow game. The West abandoned the KJB and it was all downhill from there.
“white guilt of The Holocaust”
This is a new guilt, it’s bad enough whites are guilted for slavery without adding Hitler’s crimes.
I stopped about halfway through. Was it all just a diatribe against zoning laws? That seems a strangely particular thing to get into a high dudgeon about. Like being really pissed about rutabagas or my hatred of Rush.
Everything has gotten more regulated since at least the dawn of the Industrial Age. Labor rules, overtime pay, the five day work week, food inspections, building codes, product safety rules. This stuff way precedes the Boomers. Look at what FDR wrought. Some of it was good. Some wasn’t. To blame all of our woes on people born between 1946 and 1964 is confirmation bias. This guy should wait to write until he has something coherent to say.
All true Iska but he gets paid by the word so write he must.
Heterosexual white males have become fourth-class citizens (subjects?) in our own country.
Here is a breakdown of the classes that presently exist:
–illegal alien–first class–able to violate just about any American law with impunity including murder, identity fraud, public benefits fraud, etc. (that would get a lower class status individual arrested, fined and incarcerated)
–certain minorities–second class–hispanics and black Americans receiving “public assistance”–still covered under so-called “civil-rights” statutes, the same as illegal aliens…slightly less immunity from lawbreaking.
–certain other minorities–third-class–hispanics and blacks who are here legally and NOT receiving public benefits…slightly less immunity from lawbreaking.
–white females–also third class–covered under certain provisions of “civil-rights” statutes…slightly less immunity from lawbreaking.
–white heterosexual males–fourth class–expected to obey all laws, unlike the above classes–expected to WORK and pay the majority of taxes in order to support the previous three classes. In addition, according to our esteemed “civil-rights” (for some) movement and agencies, white heterosexual males ARE NOT protected by “civil-rights” laws–except for the abolition of “freedom of association” (only for white males) replaced by “public accommodation” statutes…NO immunity from lawbreaking–even when unintentional.
As to the “boomer generation” being held responsible for many of today’s ills, I only partially agree. Those who were anti-Vietnam war protesters got most of the good jobs both in government and academia and were able to embed their left-wing communist politics within government and academia while those of us who served were marginalized and “frozen out” of the promised jobs for returning veterans, despite laws establishing veterans preferences for such jobs. The hiring managers were mostly draft-dodgers themselves.
I blame those of the “greatest generation” (WW2) for most of today’s ills. Passing so-called “civil-rights” laws, (but only against whites), enforcing them at the point of federal bayonets, and destroying true “freedom of association” but only for whites and Christians did more to add to our present screwed-up situation than just about any other action.
While enacted in (somewhat) “good faith”, these “civil-rights” laws have morphed into the monstrosity that we live under today. Every “protected” group is now clamoring for special “protections”. From minorities to homosexuals, transgenders and (soon to be legalized) pedophiles are demanding special “protections” not available to heterosexual white males.
The Greatest Generation sat on its hand when JFK’s brains got blown all over his wife.
The Boomers did the same at 911.
Gen X’s moment is about to ring the doorbell.
Knock, Knock.
“Who’s there?”
“Dump!”
“Dump who?”
“Dumpster Fire!”
It was the boomer leadership that made the laws. If I would guess it’s probably the top 1% of the Boomers who made the rules. I sure didn’t get to be a writer of some of the stupid shit that got put into law. Just sayin’. John
Hollywood is totally lost on the point of the article but he is determined to guide the conversation like the drunk who appoints himself greeter at a posh venue.
EC- Speaking of leadership, I have been invited to be in “THE CLUB”. No joke, I had a invite from the Atlanta Federal Reserve to participate in a business leaders survey to advise on monetary policy.
I’m not jooish….WTF. Maybe they think I’m a joo.
Put a lox and bagel lunch in a briefcase and your in.
Don’t forget the little people.
EC, I have been studying your speech patterns and I am pretty sure that you are indeed a beaner, as you claim. The way that you use your words and your slurs, which are almost constant, I would have to guess that you are illegal, and almost exclusively from your slurs, that you are gay. There are, here in LA, whole communities of gay mexicans. The gay nightclubs that you so frequently mention, and are therefore intimate with, are full of gay mexicans. Disneyland is full of them as they are the only ones who can work for the slave wages that they pay there. They are standing on every street corner trying to pick up little boys and they are driving around in candy orange metal flake 63 Chevy Impalas slammed and glammed with dingle balls hanging from the top of the windshield.
Now I don’t want you to think that I have anything against all of you and your illegal brothers and sisters who breed like rats and sit all day in every emergency room in the city. That would racist and homophobic. I would never want to be anything like that. I am just wondering two things;
One is, how do you find the time to type so many comments into TBP given your obviously busy schedule as a male stripper and lap dancer?
The other is, how do you manage to use such beautiful english? It must be really hard not to fall into spanish every now and then. You seem to always be ready to let fly with a suggestion of homo-erotica and you have so many names for the same thing. It really must be difficult to keep all of that straight when you are up all night giving head to your customers. I realize that the crystal meth helps a lot, but when do you sleep?
Damn.
I’m going to have to get used to holding my breath while my upthumb is all up in you?
“There are, here in LA, whole communities of gay mexicans.”
Collective pronouns should be capitalized, as all native English speakers know.
But don’t let that hold you back. Please, inform us on all things Mexican and gay.
Inquiring maricons want to no.
No, or know? And if you see me eschewing capital letters, you can guess that I am holding the collective in disregard.
Es que no hablo Espanol, guey. Yo hablo Tex-Mex. Pienso en Ingles y lo traduzco al Espanol. Si pasara mucho tiempo en el gey bar que tu frequentas, quizas seria otra la situacion y estaria pensando en Espanol y tradiciendo al Ingles. Lo espantoso es que sabes demasiado de los geis Latinos.
how do you manage to use such beautiful english? – HR
My English is not beautiful, numbnuts. HF writes beautiful English, he is inimitable. Stucky is my idol, when I grow up, I want to write just like Stuck. I also want to be honest like LLPOH and civil like Yokes. I want to be tastefully naughty like Iska and color my writing with nostalgic interludes like Maggie. I want to connect the dots like Uncola and pull the curtain back like Admin.
EC-I’m baffled as to why they picked me. Loopey and Stucky say I’m a fukkin retard so it can’t be for my knowledge. Maybe they think I have a large gold reserve buried in them thar hills. On my mother’s grave, IDK why the Fed is looking for me.
That is really intriguing.
Lyman, Joseph Goelbbels would be so proud of you!!! Well done, sir!!!!!!
Well, to throw us Boomers under the bus is a bit much. We, “common folks” had as much “power” to change things as people have now. Did I want so many of the rules and regulations that were imposed upon us? Let’s face it, it is not generational as much as it is psychopaths in various generations in charge of the “machine.” Did we have any say to about the Federal Reserve, the IRS and on and on. Did I have any say so when the Kennedy clan said our kids where to be bused to the worse neighborhoods in Boston so we can be integrated ( while there kids went to private schools.) Did we have any say so with Nafta or other policies that destroyed the middle class??
So, what did we do as a family? We went to the land decades ago, not just 10 years ago. We home schooled our kids, We do not do drugs like Pot, LSD, or even pharmaceuticals. We grow out own medicine from the plants and have become Medical herbalist and teachers for decades and don’t need nor contribute to thethe Corporate Medicine Machine. We make much of our own food for decades, we don’t pay taxes to the machine due to becoming a Ministry where we totally believe and praise the Greater Power/ God who is in charge. We are 70 years old now and still garden, teach and make medicine. We don’t watch TV – haven’t since 1970, so we don’t have the 30,.000 commercials in our head per year that most of you have. So, if you think you are so “dropped out” and on the Land and so much more enlightened than the rest of us, you are wrong. You have been part of the machine and still believe that it is our “generation” that messed things up. Read more history and see that the thread that is corrupted goes way way back in time.
There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ Boomer, born between 1946-1964.
Who I am isn’t defined by the generation I grew up with, it’s the people that I wanted to emulate as I grew into my own, unique personality. In the 1960’s, there were very different cultural influences on boys and girls raised in California or Georgia. Today, social media makes the regional differences irrelevant. That change (homogenization of social values) is what should be under your microscope. It takes a whole lot of laws to put everybody on the same page.
Using indexes for zoning and work permits to identify government overreach as a Boomer-induced phenomenon is an extreme oversimplification masquerading as a ‘factual’ consideration. Leave the hype around ‘mathematical’ graphs used as evidence to define a phenomenon to those pimping for a Nobel Prize in a manlift while fingering temperature rise because of CO2. Don’t be Al Gore.
Where is the graph for US union membership? It refutes your claim. Union membership had already reached its zenith by 1975 when it began its precipitous descent as Baby Boomers entered the workforce in huge numbers. Baby Boomer s didn’t destroy Unions, our parents did.
The rise in laws regulating zoning and work permits were a consequence of an agrarian society becoming the manufacturers for the world, not Baby Boomers wanting Uncle Sam to regulate everything.
Both graphs begin their ascendant in the 50’s when the bulk of Boomers were born. It was the Boomer’s parents that left the farm and moved to cities to create the American Middle class. There were no laws regarding land use on a farm, and there were no laws regulating the use of child labor on a farm. When I was 16, a ‘work permit’ was already a requirement in California and in Florida. I had to work ‘under the table’ while homeless, because my parents couldn’t sign my work permit application.
The rise in crime has NO generational correlation – it has a direct and easily illustrated correlation with our society moving , en masse, from the country to the city. Overcrowding people who are accustomed to lots of space (and privacy) will always result in more crime.
No generation becomes a significant factor in the legislation of their nation’s laws until they are in their 30’s and raising a family. That era for the Boomers began in the mid- 1980s, and the factors (laws) you cite were already well entrenched and clearly rising before the first Boomer became a U S Senator.
Boomers didn’t become a majority in the House of Representatives in the 1998 midterm elections, yet we’re responsible for laws and social phenomena that began their ascendance in the 1950’s? I was in grade school when Martin Luther King started decades of protests for civil rights. I was 21 when Presidents Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ pogrom of welfare began. Boomers didn’t create these social phenomenon, our parents did. Boomers didn’t start the applause for cross-dressing 10 year-old boys, our children did.
Isn’t “White Man’s Guilt” a big enough banner for the world’s blame game for all the social ills that continue to climb their graphs? Why is the first American generation to end an illegal war with protests across the entire nation being blamed for the problems that have their genesis in a warfare/welfare state? Sure, things got worse while Baby Boomers have been in charge, but that hasn’t been a generational issue either. It’s been the result of a manufacturing society becoming a service society and middle class jobs vanishing here and reappearing in China.
Blaming any generation for a predictable cycle we can now see spooling in other countries is pretty sloppy if HUGE factors that ensure social disruption are ignored.
China has moved from an agrarian society to a manufacturer for the world in the last 20 years, and all the graphs you have presented will imprint on their society too. Which generation will they blame for all of their social ills as they become a service society? Mao’s?
You forgot to mention “muh moon landing” too.
Could you graph that for us, please?
Surely it’s a traceable factor in The Boomer’s generational mission to fuck up the planet.
Very good comment DD
But nobody is listening. LOL.
Lyman (((Stone)))
Hey Meathead if you would just do a little research on your ” beloved Jews ” you would know how they have got to be called the ” new ruling class ” . Mostly by Jews at the Federal reserve handing out counterfeit money to their follow Jews at the big commercial Banks and them giving ” free ” money out to other Jews so they could then buy the real assets of our nation. This process is nothing new. Jews are a tribe of the most vile criminal Traitors that has ever walked the earth and they are some of the biggest mass murderers. They are planning on doing here in America what they did in Russia.( Google it Hammerhead.)and they are going to use third world immigrants.
You can love these vile satanic bastards all you want Hammerhead but it doesn’t change the fact that they HATE you.
Once they have gotten control of a nations media the brainwashing starts. This brainwashing has been going on for a good 50 years or more over and to White Americans. TV is a SATANIC ALTER sit up in most households in America. White people are under a massive satanic spell just like you if you think Jews are your friend. You will see during the coming 4th turning . You are going to learn the hard way.
There maybe be a few good ones kinda like blacks but the tribe is evil and the population of that tribe is the ” mean “. Just read the History of the so called Jews. It’s all there unless Google has deleted it.
Agree and plus 100
The mechanism of destruction was the Deep State and its main tool was a leftist dominated Supreme Court…For example, the decision that States could not deny welfare to non-citizens. And of course the decision, based on fake evidence and faulty reasoning, that schools could not be segregated, although the Court had no jurisdiction over State issues like education until the fraudulent “interstate commerce” exception was cooked up in 1943…
The WW2 generation, the Silents, and the Boomers are all heavily complicit in buying into the leftist Deep State propaganda and refusing to notice that integration, for example, was a complete disaster…So when a bunch of Jews and Ted Kennedy proposed the 1965 Immigration Act, which has been the death knell of America, they fell for it…
The Boomers-Did-It meme has been discussed/debated here on TBP from the very beginning.
It used to trigger me. Really … it was the genesis of quite a few biggie shitfests. Maybe it’s because I am a Boomer and I got defensive. Yes, indeed, but thee is an even more significant reason for my rage; I fucken hate stupid fucken arguments! The decline of a rich and huge country can never ever be reduced to One Big Reason. Our decline is exceedingly complex and there are without a doubt dozens of major reasons for it, all intertwined, one thing affecting another affecting another and so on.
So, to primarily blame just one generation tells me something about the author; he is a simplistic moron at best, and a Diseased Donkey Dick sucking fuktard at worst.
His article failed to trigger me. But, it did nearly bore me to death.
A good portion of those who die at a young age are not a loss to society but a gain. Many if not most are parasites or criminals. They don’t work anyway. Same for the incarcerated population. The only problem with prisons is they are not run on the Mexican or Turkish models. They are to expensive. Dead nigger drug dealers and addicts are not a bad thing. Same applies to most convicts. Most are anchors on society. That said HSF has some good points about boomers voting for free shit.
Schools need to spend a lot less money and get back to basics. They can’t suck much more than they do now. They can just spend more or less money for the same crappy results.
Basics?
You mean, whining, ratting, and demanding?
Whining about hurt feelings, ratting out those who hurt their feelings, and demanding sympathy for the rope they put around their neck to prove their feelings were lynched by nigger-haters?
Fucking Boomers; they destroyed reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Join the “Don’t Marry Movement”. There are 3 main points:
-Never legally marry an American woman
-Never have children with an American woman
-If you are married to an American woman, never buy a house so she cannot steal it from you in divorce
Read the full essay explaining the purpose of the movement here: https://womenarestupid.site/blog/the-don-t-marry-movement
Excellent submittal HSF, Excellent
If the Boomers (myself one) can’t or won’t recognize the devastation we’ve created in our wake, they’re either damned stupid or damned selfish. Either way damned.
How in Gods creation could anyone not understand the rise of outright socialists in the political theater? Are us Boomers to believe pot laws were passed for the “other” generations? BS!!!
I won’t make a dissertation but my God, were my generation capable of putting the joint out and laying the bottle down, we’d actually have a fair chance at pulling our heads from our asses and handing something of substance and value to our offspring.
Spoken like a true suffragette demanding amends from the drinkers and pot smokers who granted her the right to vote on prohibition. What sort of evil outlaws the palliatives that make their histrionics endurable? Cruella Deville, skinning a puppy??
Fucking Delilahs, all of ’em.
Please, God, give me one, last, full-strength yank on her Temple’s essential pillars; vanity and insecurity.
Those are the root cause of pointing one’s finger at another in blame. Not weed and alcohol.
Both allow me to enjoy having my head up my ass. You’ll never do that for anyone.
A pity, really.
You wax truly poetic dung. I have to say that I am impressed.
You are delusional if you think the boomers had anything to do with the laws and regulations of the last 50 years. The Billionaires set the laws, always have and always will. The rule makers care not what your opinion is on any matter at any time. This is a war of the billionaires against the billionaires and the little people are their pawns of the game. Your minds are warped and guided by the daily propaganda coming from MSM and the internet and of course, TV. There is no escaping it.
I know I keep banging the oil drum but everything this guy writes about is what ALL civilizations try to do when they peak. When a population grows beyond the carrying capacity of its environment, it overshoots then collapses. Its a physics problem, that’s it.
Humans have remarkable creativity. In the beginning of the cycle it allows us to do crazy cool things with our cheap and abundant resources. When the resources get scarce our creativity turns to just keeping the party going. Well, we’re at last call and this article eloquently describes the symptoms.
Please prepare your tribe.
Well, a certain tribe owns CONgress.
It’s not the carrying capacity of the Earth in this case, it’s the neofeudal overlords playing their global games.
Yeah, but all board games have a limit, a ‘carrying’ capacity. Unless you cheat. Nobody cheats nature.
The earth’s ‘carrying’ capacity isn’t measurable because Mother Nature is a sentient entity who makes her own choices and is capable of enduring much more than should be allowed, considering the benefits she offers.
The owners of Congress are most assuredly at her mercy, and their games have no weight on her scales.
The real problem remains, as always, overpopulation. Soon the boomers will fix that one and everything else will fall into place.
Yeah, yeah, all my fault. I am 63 and work much harder than people 1/3 my age. When I was 2o the old guys ran me around, now the punks run me around. My car is 8 years old and I get up for work at 1am.
We save and scrimp as much as we can. Just like Charlie Daniels ” I an’t askin nobody for nuthin.” I inherited a screwed up world and will pass one on; as all have.
The permit Nazis will be among the first to hang.
Come on, everyone here has wanted to see a tax collector, building inspector, health inspector, or tax, business, or environmental inspector TURN PURPLE AND DIE.
But seriously folks, literally *millions of people* are employed as spies, spooks, and intelligence analysts at the “17 intel agencies” and elsewhere.
I venture to say a GREAT MULTITUDE of these millions of folks collecting professional salaries working in MILITARY, CORPORATE, FEDERAL, and PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE are boomers, so you don’t have to go very far if you want to meet Americans (or asshole dual citizens) who have their hands dirty working for the FEDCOAT GOVERNMENT and AGAINST THE PEOPLE to one degree or another, in one capacity or another.
Oh, please.
American Hogs are conditioned to eat at the fullest trough. It doesn’t matter which generation they’re born into, or why there is an abundance of slops, or who is serving them.
The o.0001 % of dual Zion-Mayflower bluebloods insinuated into our government do NOT define Boomers.
Grow a pair and own up to your hungry disappointments while watching the underserving feast.
Boomers didn’t do that to you.
I don’t come around these here parts much anymore, always thought Hardscrabble “don’t go out on a limb” Farmer was the best of the lot. But the Millennial Whine that Boomers ruined it all just makes me wanna stab stuff. Pillows maybe, bales of hay. Nothing living, gotta be careful these days what you say. No Scrabbley-hun I can’t read this even thinking it may be a twist or catchy headline. The graphs suggest it’s serious anyway. There’s no cohesive, uniform “Boomers” as you use in your title. That includes all the towns full of people decimated by NAFTA – like you wrote about in your road trip saga – right along with the Enron execs, Bush1, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney and all the rest who fucked them over. All the victims of rapacious policy are lumped in with the architects thereof. It’s not unlike saying the Adults of 1930-50 (thankfully assholes didn’t give a catchy generational name back then) ruined Germany, Poland and a lot of Europe. All in one big schlemiel. Yup that whole generation blew.
Elites blow dearie. They always have they always will, in any generation. They prey upon those already struggling, and for whatever reason, they do it with joy in their hearts. And while stabbing their brethren in their collective backs, the elites loudly and longly pontificate IN DETAIL on how it’s the victim’s fault.
Before you shuffle off this mortal coil at least get that through your hardscrambled head. If you want something unique abut the entire generation of American Boomers it’s that they were the first generation hit with tidal waves of Psych experts, mass media, and Ad-men bombarding them not only to buy this or that, but to buy into New And Improved Lifestyles – that women will be happier out of the home, sleeping around is liberation, that meals in tinfoil are more fun that home-cooked, kids should be warehoused in commercial daycares, cigarettes are good for you, malls are better than Main St. , blah blah blah. That was the elites. A small-ish minority that has always existed and has always drawn legions of foot soldiers to do their bidding in hopes of upward mobility for themselves. It was not, and could not possibly have been the generation. They are killing themselves in what should be their golden years, and not out of “remorse for what they did”. Jeezus H, dude.
As far as this statement goes, I had to pick myself up off the floor, “Today, strict land-use rules—whether framed as rules about parking, green space, height limits, neighborhood aesthetics, or historic preservation—make new construction difficult.” That statement demonstrates the foolishness of sweeping generalizations in a country of 50 states, numerous territories and 300 million people. Has Mr. Stone resided in hundreds – thousands of jurisdictions which make zoning ordinances? Or, are we simply to accept what he states as fact? Does “missionary” impart special psychic knowledge of every city’s or county’s zoning practices?
In my neck of the woods, the running joke is that zoning variances come in six packs or are left under windshield wipers at Lowe’s or Home Depot. Whatever “limits” exist (few), are always changed to accommodate Big Builders, making the existence of restrictions at all, worthless. See, Stone, there’s theory, and then there’s practice. In fact, the governor (Republican) just signed a little-known piece of legislation (H.B. 7103) making it nearly impossible for residents to challenge any massive land grab, er, “development” conversions of open space/agricultural space. Can I remind author that such conversions only raise taxes on existing residents because the other thing that never occurs is a levy of an impact fee? In a neighboring town, residents had to hire outside geology and chemists to block a massive pit mine for a foreign-owned company which wanted a variance (and was about to get it save homeowner activism) to mine on land across the street from a residential area and school. It’s one big, happy family of builders slapping up soulless, fugly tract homes literally abutting one another with less than 3 feet on either side, and they are built overwhelmingly using illegal alien labor. Construction wages in the 1990s averaged $45/hour. Now, they average about $27/hr. Florida should change its motto to, “Building Tomorrow’s Ghettos Today!” It’s funny, but it’s no joke.
It doesn’t end there. More than a quarter of the labor force here is foreign, which creates massive labor dislocations for citizens. Americans who come to this state without jobs are told to keep going while the 1 million and growing illegal population is living and working openly at the local dairy farm/strawberry farm/orange grove. Of course this suppresses wages creating increased cost of living while simultaneously decreasing ability to support families. Author doesn’t seem to understand that it was all of those Silent generation folks initially retiring to Florida, who enticed the cheapest labor possible, because it is true that the Silent Generation is cheaper than cheap, and have voted repeatedly to “protect” Social Security, Medicare and everything else they have extorted from the rest of us via their enacted Ponzi scheme. They would bring in ebola-infected trash to provide home health services if they could and they are! I guess they’re getting what they deserve with their race-to-the-bottom in the person of Billy Chemirmir. I don’t believe his “clients” were Boomers?
There are no green spaces in the way that “City Beautiful” design principles which produced Forest Park in St. Louis, Portland, OR, or the lakefront in Chicago, IL offered a respite to residents at the turn of the 20th century. He might know that had he lived in any of those places as I have. In Florida, often held up as an example of a thriving economy and “free market” principles, in the way that most corporatists mean, there are no parks anywhere. There are no set asides, setbacks, height restrictions, anything in practice. In short, there is no vision which incorporates any public or common space anywhere. There are no playgrounds. There are no sidewalks, cities and counties having dispensed with those for the sake of Pulte’s, Richmond-Atlantic’s or other builders shareholder profits. The worst cheap shot here is the suggestion included that Americans are bigots who want to keep out minorities? No, just those who should not be in the country in the first place. However, we certainly are subject to the crime, fraud, murder, drugs they bring.
I saw Mr. Stone is a Lutheran missionary? May I suggest he stay in whichever foreign country he is telling, er, selling the Good News? IOW, Fuck you.
A good observation of what is going on today.
My two cents: The rule of law has failed us. It has produced rotten fruit.It has turned the majority of the population into sheep while increasing the number of goats mixing with and imposing upon the sheep. As a result we are now a police state maintained by the use of administrative law. This is by design. It is the pattern.
We seem to have forgotten that we are homo sapiens meaning we like to work with our hands and build things. Excessive automation has robbed us of this trait of building with our hands and as a result we have replaced quality products with quantity low quality products while at the same time causing high unemployment and idleness of the population. Then our leaders got the idea that everyone needed to go to college and educate ourselves to work with our brain instead of our hands not realizing that most homo sapiens are not yet ready to trade their creativity in their hands for head brain work. As a result we have created widespread confusion about our purpose in life.
Meanwhile human knowledge is being transferred to AI and computers while at the same time we humans are losing our innate skills developed in us during the past thousands of years of experience with working with our hands. Our civilization which has been built on human values developed over the past 5000 years is transforming into a society built and run on facts void of human values. This is the result of rule by law; administrative law developed during the last half of the 20th century.
Conclusion: Unless there is a universal change in consciousness in the people that supports the rule of conscience rather than the rule of law our western civilization is headed for failure and along with it the breakdown of our society.
Quit reading when zoning was mentioned. Zoning is a purview of Fascism. Baby Boomers didn’t start it. The GG (Greatest Generation) did. Mind you, Fascism is a form of Socialism and as everyone knows, FDR was an avowed socialist! Now to say that a majority of boomers are socialist would be a stretch. I was born in 1952 technically a baby boomer but I was reared a Constitutionalist. My schooling re-enforced the u.S. Constitution and the 1st ten amendments. Now I understand, the coup d’état that occurred as a result of the convention, never the less, the schools taught the Constitution protected liberty especially where the 1st ten amendments were involved.
One must remember, it was LBJ that fostered the “Great Society”. He was NOT a boomer. Many of the people in political office when the spike in zoning laws restrictions were still from the LBJ generation in the 1980s. Hell, Pappy Bush just died in 2018! He was the LBJ gen! So to say the baby boomer generation foisted this bullshit upon the people is an outright prevarication!
Socialist are the people that are responsible for the crap we have to live with day to day. These socialist are from every f’n generation since 1860. Lincoln was a socialist as well. That f’n piece of shite. His goal to socialize the cost of internal improvements upon the people of the several states.
So no the baby boomers are not to blame for the current state of the united States. The marxist/socialist/communist are. So fucking stop blaming a generation for the ills of the current culture!