A week ago, the supermarket tabloid The Daily Star set up a webcam pointed at a wilting head of iceberg lettuce with a blonde wig to see if the lettuce would outlive the prime minister. It did.

Paul du Quenoy says his (pierced and tattooed) generation is conservative, because it remembers growing up under Reagan. (!)

What makes X-ers like me (born in 1977) so damn conservative? In the context of 2022, there is no great mystery. We grew up in the 1980s, a blessedly simpler time when life was fun and carefree, when the USA was cruising toward Cold War triumph, and when truth, justice, and the American way were both time-tested certainties and the unstoppable wave of the future. As far as we knew, we were living in the best of all possible worlds, riding our bikes without helmets, going to raves without social media tracking our every move and pill, knowing our moms and dads couldn’t be helicopter parents if they had the whole Army Air Cavalry Brigade at their disposal. Every problem had a solution. Every feeling found a form. Every dream became a reality.

Moronic boomers took our complacency for laziness. We were derided as “slackers,” dismissed as the first generation who would live worse than our parents. We were chided for our cynicism toward the Sixties ideals that our elders still mouthed but had abandoned so hypocritically that for us they were little more than a good laugh when the adults left the room.

For a brief moment, we were the Brat Pack ready to take the reins in a Pax Americana. Then, as the college students and young professionals of the 1990s, we watched the boomers piss it all away. Scandal followed scandal. Power grab followed power grab. One institution after the next was corroded by corruption and greed. By the end of the decade, the first boomer commander-in-chief left us wondering what the definition of “is” was as he testified in the first presidential impeachment trial in 130 years. The boomers knew they had failed. But rather than admit it, they retreated into Bob Dylan’s tedious word salads and hid behind corporatized Beatles lyrics.

Of course their values struck us as hollow and empty. The much promised better world — and the opportunities we were meant to have so long as we jumped through their achievement hoops — never materialized alongside all the wars and recessions. Like the latch-key kids we’d once been, we found our own solutions. We became self-reliant, self-directed, and self-assured. Our medium was sarcasm because nothing left to us was sacred or even authentic. More of us believed we would live to see UFOs than Social Security checks. To the mass irritation of our parents and teachers, we tuned in religiously to the satire of South Park before it got preachy, The Simpsons before it got zany, and Saturday Night Live before it sucked.

We watched with bemusement as the younger generation born after 1980 — the millennials now poised to vote Democratic despite it all — grew up coddled and medicated, enslaved by technology, unable to solve basic problems without turning to parental helicopters. Their entitled ways became even less intelligible as they spouted identity politics and grievance tropes gleaned from our failing schools and universities, using them to whine, shame, and scold their way into the lower echelons of the workplace while taking gruesome bites of avocado toast to help the overprescribed Xanax and Adderall go down. The irony with which they expressed their discontent seemed pointless and sad.

To our immense frustration, the boomers cultivated millennial dependency and helplessness, all while keeping real power, success, and independence out of their emotionally impaired reach. “You will own nothing and you will be happy,” an arch boomer recently told them without discernible objection. Is it any surprise that more American millennials view socialism more favorably than capitalism and vote that way? For both sides of this codependent intergenerational alliance, the ideology of the left offers to provide for their ever greater needs while absolving them of all responsibility. There’s an app for that. It is called the Democratic Party.

Generation X-ers are caught in the precarious middle. Our financial fortunes have been broadly held back by Boomers unwilling to pass the torch, and are coveted by millennials. The freedoms we knew and cherished through our young adulthoods are now ever more forfeit to the nihilistic abstractions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which are demanded by our insecure juniors and mandated by our browbeaten seniors. The uplifting unity we felt when the Berlin Wall fell has yielded the crude, hackneyed divisions of identity politics and a digital age atomization so thorough that 65 percent of young Americans do not feel comfortable having a face-to-face conversation. Our natural esteem for success and prosperity is locked in mortal combat with the crippling self-doubt, poisonous envy, and consequent ill will of the generations surrounding us.

For the X-er, the choice is clear. One party, whatever its faults, vibes morally and ethically with the spreading of human happiness and success tempered by traditional values. The other party tries to enforce alien moral and ethical vibes as a precondition of human happiness and success at the expense of traditional values, especially if they get in the way of its peculiar vision of “social justice.” Nearly six out of ten X-ers are drawing on their halcyon childhoods to find the right way forward.

RTWT

I certainly hope he’s right about the voting, but personally I’m skeptical of the alleged perspicacity of the generation that thought Punk Rock was any good.

A tiger’s tongue is coarse enough to lick flesh to the bone.

We should be moving toward a right to sex. People should be able to have sex when they feel they want to, and we need to develop services that meet people’s needs without attaching the baggage of shame or criminalization.

So let’s talk about sex.

— Alexandra M. Hunt (@hunt4change) October 18, 2022

I’m afraid you’ve missed your chance for Federal Whore Stamps. Alexandra lost (by a huge margin) in the Democrat Party Primary last May for Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District.

Scott Alexander describes Every Bay Area House Party.

You walk in. The wall decorations vaguely suggest psychedelia. The music is pounding, head-splitting, amelodious. Everyone is struggling to speak over it. Everyone assumes everyone else likes it.

You flee to the room furthest from the music source. Three or four guys are sitting in a circle, talking. Two girls are standing by a weird lamp, drinks in hand. You see Bob.

“Hi, Bob!”

“Hey, good to see you again!”

“What’s new?”

“Man, it’s been a crazy few months. You hear I quit my job at Google and founded a fintech startup?”

“No! What do you do?”

“War insurance!”

“War insurance?”

“Yeah. We pay out if there’s a war.”

“Isn’t that massively correlated risk?”

“Yeah. The idea is, we sell war insurance to companies who do badly if there’s a war – tourist attractions and the like. Then we sell the same amount of peace insurance to military contractors. As long as we get the probabilities and costs right, we make the same profit either way.”

“Neat idea, how’s it going?”

“Great! Ayatollah Khameini just bought a ten billion dollar policy.”

“Of the war version or the peace version?”

“Can’t say, confidentiality agreement.” Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Biden is the Inflation King.

Pass it on. pic.twitter.com/rhDjz66CE5

— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) October 17, 2022

Mark P. Mills, a policy wonk at the Manhattan Institute, explains that the Green Energy Revolution that is supposed to replace the use of fossil fuels in the immediate future is entirely a fantasy, a case of magical thinking that would require the abolition of limits inherent in the laws of physics.

A growing chorus of voices is exhorting the public, as well as government policymakers, to embrace the necessity—indeed, the inevitability—of society’s transition to a “new energy economy.”

Advocates claim that rapid technological changes are becoming so disruptive and
renewable energy is becoming so cheap and so fast that there is no economic risk in accelerating the move to—or even mandating—a post-hydrocarbon world that no longer needs to use much, if any, oil, natural gas, or coal.

Central to that worldview is the proposition that the energy sector is undergoing the same kind of technology disruptions that Silicon Valley tech has brought to so many other markets. Indeed, “old economy” energy companies are a poor choice for investors, according to proponents of the new energy economy, because the assets of hydrocarbon companies will soon become worthless, or “stranded.” Betting on hydrocarbon companies today is like betting on Sears instead of Amazon a decade ago.

“Mission Possible,” a 2018 report by an international Energy Transitions Commission, crystallized this growing body of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. To “decarbonize” energy use, the report calls for the world to engage in three “complementary” actions: aggressively deploy renewables or so-called clean tech, improve energy efficiency, and limit energy demand.

This prescription should sound familiar, as it is identical to a nearly universal energy-policy consensus that coalesced following the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo that shocked the world. But while the past half-century’s energy policies were animated by fears of resource depletion, the fear now is that burning the world’s abundant
hydrocarbons releases dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

To be sure, history shows that grand energy transitions are possible. The key question today is whether the world is on the cusp of another. The short answer is no. There are two core flaws with the thesis that the world can soon abandon hydrocarbons. The first: physics realities do not allow energy domains to undergo the kind of revolutionary change experienced on the digital frontiers. The second: no fundamentally new energy technology has been discovered or invented in nearly a century—certainly, nothing analogous to the invention of the transistor or the Internet.

Before these flaws are explained, it is best to understand the contours of today’s hydrocarbon-based energy economy and why replacing it would be a monumental, if not an impossible, undertaking.

Eric Lind:

Current situation at my parents house…..the young neighborhood owl has stolen this stick horse and is flying around the neighborhood with it. Hilldale/Forest Park/Ridge lane neighbors…if your child is missing their stick horse, you’ll have to talk to the owl!! 🦉

Edit: for those of you questioning if the owl is hurt or “entangled” in the stick horse….we have no reason to believe this is the case as we witnessed the owl moving the horse around and even changing it’s grip on it at one point….this owl is part of a family of owls that have been in the neighborhood for about 6 months now, and this is one of the young owls…if someone sees that the owl is in danger or believes it is hurt, I’m sure the proper authorities would be contacted…

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Be sure to click on the photo to see the larger version.

Pakistani photographer Atif Saeed captured this impressive photo as the last of a series taken as the lion advanced in his direction with intent before scrambling hastily into his jeep. link

The votes are in- you’ve decided to upgrade to fish class & fly w/ 747!

747 was deemed an order of magnitude more massive than 901, who experienced troubling tummy turbulence enroute. 901 made a strong start in her 1st #FatBearWeek appearance. Expect big things in the future! pic.twitter.com/i6IPy2ajEw

— Katmai National Park (@KatmaiNPS) October 12, 2022

HT: Karen L Myers.