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Modernity

You know, one might conclude from somewhere or other that I am a mighty reader.  I’m not.   I suck, frankly.  I’m going through “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” slowly, on Audible.com, but the one book I am reading, “Antifragility”, by Nassim Taleb, I am inching, snailing, turtling my way through.

But I will invoke one passage, where he critiques Steven Pinker for believing that the reduction in war and violence over the past 1,000 years, let’s say, somehow means the future will continue that way.  He says risk is in the future, never the past, and we are at a place where so many things could get so fucked so quick, that no sane person could say we are safe.

And I feel this.  We all have our demons, our past.  We all have emotions floating up from somewhere, if we listen to them, that take us here or there.

But there is the macropicture too.  Sane people, in my view, wonder how long we can borrow 40% of the Federal budget, mostly from the Fed.  Sane people look at Medicare particularly, and wonder how it can stay solvent, with the mass retirement of the mass Baby Boomers.

Sane people wonder who got Barack Hussein Obama elected.  Sane people wonder where he was in his twenties; who paid for it; whether or not he is gay (like Hillary); whether or not Frank Davis was his actual father, and his mother a porn “star”; what his actual birth certificate says; and who paid for his education.  And who wrote his books.  Michelle is apparently on record as saying Bill Ayers wrote them.

Then you have 9/11. Once you dig a certain amount, you start to question your sense of reality.

But I would say this: anyone who is serious has to add to their possible list of “mental health events” the wholesale collapse of American society.  No one can say it is impossible, and increasingly it even seems likely.

If telling the truth has become a revolutionary act, we need more revolutionaries.