Trailer court follies

For the latest chapter in the decline and fall of the Murican empire, look no further than the evaporation of the educated from our landscape.

So now it is official: nearly half of to-day's urban youth on average, and not too many more of their suburban and rural brethren, fail to graduate high school, fail to obtain basic skills necessary to survival in a modern technological society.

For a good majority of the remainder, graduation occurs but is only a non-event, an anticlimax - they remain mal-educated, ignorant, the products of social promotion, holders of a worthless and hollow credential made empty by the dogs of government fiat.

It is clear that ever decreasing levels of achievement and increasing intellectual squalor only serves to depress our economic performance and productivity and debases our once envied way of life.  Where once competence could be counted upon in the world of commerce, incompetence and sloth reign supreme. It has become a truism of everyday life that the vast majority of the employees of the various massive corporate enterprises, and thus by extension their employers (most service sector), cannot be counted upon to provide a product or service effectively, efficiently, or with any degree of courtesy. Workflows and processes must be revised and devolved to match the minimum competencies (if that) of a workforce which has hardly demonstrated any sort of allegiance to the work ethic. 

A generation has it writ upon their faces "DO NOT CARE" unless it concerns some form of gross orgiastic self-engorgment, generally involving either bodily parts or controlled substances.

Why the sudden embrace of the existence of subsidy, sloth, parasitism, and moral decay amongst the young thug set? Why do able bodied people reject achievement and meaning in their lives for the counterfeit pleasures of substance abuse, sexual excess, et al.?

Because given the choices posed to them, the youth will always take the easy way out. His mindset is fixated on short term indulgences as opposed to long term reward for diligent effort. It is the consistent mentality of the untrained, immature mind.

Formerly this process was understood by civilization, and much effort was expended amongst society's adults to place restraints on youthful behavior in order to restrict the natural inherent tendency toward the pursuit of instant gratification and endless leisure. The structures imposed by social institutions would shape the young person's mind and character, ultimately orienting it toward the pursuit of productive work as the brain matured and the individual came to accept the societal norms of work and effort which are demanded of us all.

But these restrictions have dissolved in the face of a State that provides eternal subsidy for all mistakes and penalizes those who pursue productive paths as the parasitical classes make permanent hosts of the wealth generators. The bonds of family, friends, schools have evaporated to be incompletely replaced by an impersonal and distant god-State.

And when traits of behavior are not learned during the formative years, they remain unlearnt perpetually and can only be belatedly taught only at great expense of effort, usually resulting in futility and failure to correct the destructive habits of subsidy. When the pursuit of perpetual gratification becomes the focus of existence, like a narcotic it cannot be neither continued nor withdrawn easily without the gravest of consequences.

The future of the uneducated masses appears bleak indeed. Illiteracy, illegitimacy, parasitism, and personal chaos ensure that the failure class will be of little use to society in their future lives, and ensure a lifetime of welfarism for each. Assured of rendering but only marginal contributions to the economy (if that), this lost generation will find itself ill-equipped to compete with the rising economies and advanced training of countries in distant lands formerly best known for the frequency of famines and despotic regimes. The tables will soon be reversed as the current crisis of civilizational devolution reaches its inevitable denouement, with these things becoming a fact of life here as the vast majority select the life of subsidy over productive effort, thus relegating anything approaching an advanced industrial economy in this country to the dustbin of history. The remaining semi-productive activities on these shores will increasingly be restricted to those areas which service the nauseatingly eternal belly of subsidy - fast food, drugs, guns, and social welfare services. All of this will be accordingly dumbed down to fit the feeble abilities and barely extant expectations of the ascendant trailer court class.

As the Far East assumes predominance in world economic affairs on the basis of its productive economy, the Lost World of Amerika will degenerate into a destitute mobocracy, filled with filthy, slimy creatures hardly worthy of being described as people, their grimy hands outstretched in a permanent pose of perpetual need to their now-totalitarian government and to the rest of the world. The global masses will but shake their heads, extend a few words of pity, and be on about their business, happy to leave the comatose masses to their degeneracy of mutual slaughter and self-immolation.

As Ayn Rand stated, the mind is the key tool of the human being which enables him to rise above the other animals. Nature did not endow the 'naked ape' with particularly exceptional strength, natural protections of a physical sort, or swiftness of speed. The evolutionary advance that elevated Homo sapiens to predominance in the natural world was the careful use of his intellect and stored knowledge, passed on through the generations via education.

To abandon this advantage is to fall back into the barbarous state of the animal kingdom from whence we came. And for this, this is precisely what will happen. To live as animals is to exist as animals. And it ends as we shall die like animals for our betrayal of ourselves.

Such is the ultimate outcome of the worship of death - the civic religion of our age.

History lesson a la Cap!

Since this city is our state capitol, it is fitting that this visual history lesson should come about. From the Old State Capitol exhibit on Louisiana's capitols, here is a visual timeline in our seat of government:

Drowning in idiocy

With each passing day, seemingly another brand new piece of bad economic news falls our way. Either one company or another is at the verge of collapse, or the credit markets have evaporated into vapor, or the fate of homeownership as we know it in this country is in mortal peril! Yada, yada, yada it goes, out to the overfed obese diabetic morons in the heartland who couldn't tell apart a derivative from a dividend.

All these imbeciles know is that the sky is falling (because our Leadership says it's so!), and so it is declared that we desperately need a strong Leader who will act fast and decisively, with all the powers of the State granted to him (what happened to liberty?), to preserve prosperity and prevent the dickheadery and the trailer park class from having to actually, you know, produce something for a living.

These mental midgets have no ability whatsoever to engage in deep thought. If they actually used their gray matter for a moment, or at least attempted with some feeble effort to research the origins of the current cataclysm, the clarity of the situation would be greatly apparent: State makes crisis, State reacts to crisis by grasping for and obtaining more power, State sows seeds of newer, bigger crisis down the road while worsening the present crisis.

But even now, with this shell game long exposed by pages like this and other heroic efforts in print and other media, the sheeple clamor desperately for government protection.

This article may be of use in understanding the apparent contradiction therein, rooted in the abdication of sanity and critical thought which is the hallmark of our culture to-day.

The ignorance of to-day's Amerikana is startling.

It is said that the civic knowledge, or lack thereof, of the average Amerikan is shocking. I will tell you that it is not because people are necessarily afraid to use their minds and educate themselves on specific issues (though this is a large part of it).

They will gladly engage in feats of astounding mental agility if it suits them - memorizing the names of celebrities' babies, comprehending the convoluted plots of television soap operas, navigating the Kafkaesque labyrinthe of the welfare system and exploiting it for their benefit to obtain a greater share of their "entitlements" which they are "owed" by the rest of us.

Their insipid lives are focused on pleasure, self-gratification, and physical engorgement. The trailer park set lives for the lowest common denominator - a minimum of effort, producing a bare minimum of lifestyle, supplemented by the usual "disability" payments and other State-sponsored producer extortions.

And always in their lives there is chaos. The inner lives of the minds of the moron class is a rapid and vapid cacaphony of dueling and jumbled emotions both intense and shallow at the same time - emotions without rhyme or reason, appearing like fleeting vapors in the air and vanishing all at once, emotions derived of the sensations of the moment produced by the glands and the chemicals of the mind and bodily organs (including reproductive), products entirely of the momentary situation, a frightening and uncontrolled jumble of mysterious physical and mental processes which poses incomprehensible to the average public secondary school degree holder. This inability to take charge of their own lives and impose discipline on the wild forces of nature renders the existence of the trailer park denizen forever chaotic and terrifying.

Bouncing from crisis to crisis, their days are filled with the stuff of high drama that fills the plots of the average bargain basement soap opera to overflowing. (The producers of Dynasty would be proud.) Unlike the Carringtons, however, the end results of this crisis filled existence are hardly satisfactory. Days and nights are filled with incidents of sudden, completely random acts of appalling violence, arguments which rise out of nowhere and generally lead to physical blows, irresponsibility on a grand scale, etc. Between the swells of narcissistic rage lie the long, barren fallows of inebriated, stupefied apathy, generally spent in front of a television set and almost always accompanied by some sort of alcoholic beverage or high calorie, high sugar junk food.

They neither comprehend nor possess the ability to comprehend the society around them. The thrust of their life philosophy, such as it is, is to pick up the dominant moral ethos by mental osmosis (since critical thought has been shown to be beyond them) and carry it to its negative extreme, its logical bottom. The dominant ethos of our era is nihilism. Therefore the underclass (as we refer to them in PC-speak) represent and reflect the hollow and depraved nadir of that creed.

So Amerikan society collapses not with a bang, but with the wheezing of a morbidly obese, near mentally comatose dolt who has abdicated control of his life to those who are willing to do the thinking for him.

Enter the psychopaths, who swindle their way to the top with impossible promises of turning stones into bread - obvious cons, but which are readily believed by those for whom God means less to their lives than Mickey Mouse. They keep and hold power by similar sleight of hand and illusion - by the performance of economic magic tricks to feed the masses who refuse to work for their supper (which always blow up in society's collective face down the road), and to entertain a culture for which entertainment is the primary purpose of people's lives.

Enter the psychopaths - exit liberty. An ignorant citizenry begs to be enslaved. An educated people cherishes and preserves its freedom. 

With the dwindling of the last light of competency in this nation, liberty is extinguished.

The morons' brains will then be used for the purpose for which they are best suited:

Fertilizer.

Elitism: it's what's for dinner

Looking back on my weary existence, I have witnessed more than my share of dimwitted narcoleptic assholes who sought to impose the very sense of their moral, intellectual, economic, and cultural superiority upon the huddled masses with aplomb. And one of the most high-hatted and malevolent methods by which this kind of social fascism is imposed is the vessel of the elite Catholic "college preparatory" high school.

In the city from whence I hail, there are a small but well regarded number of these schools.  Not that many, of course, since profligacy in the 'elite' moniker would render it all the less formidable. To wit, there is a difference in the greater Crescent City area between the standard Catholic 'archdiocesan' high school which takes in a relatively broad cross spectrum of the student population, and those elite 'prep' academies which are largely populated by the sons and daughters of society's most privileged and advantaged elements.

And what achievements these children of advantage produce! All these institutions can boast of how many National Merit Semifinalists they graduate each year, or their vaunted athletic prowess and near-monopolization of state championships in various sports, or their long and stories histories filled with long lists of proud achievements by students and alumni - which makes these places, usually dedicated to the greater glory of the deity or some such, manifestations of God's grace on earth, eh?

Please.

They are nothing more than reproducers of elite White privilege. They are repositories of entrenched wealth and power which manifest themselves in the most rigid and inhuman regimes known to the educational system.

I am all for old-time discipline. But Catholic high schools are the only place where a teacher can throw a totally unprofessional hissy fit and fling a chair across a classroom filled with students without any risk whatsoever to his employment status; where men of questionable origin and character rage poetic about the exact number of spitballs that he counted on the stairwell banister; where entire assemblies are made to stand out in the driving rain as 'discipline' while their dictatorial leaders shout "YOU ARE (insert name of school here)!"

Catholic academies bear more than a passing resemblance to fascist dictatorships.

What, you don't believe me? Pity you, moron. The unbending dedication to tradition; the revered treatment of past great fulfillers of the cause; the rule to conformity in thought and appearance; the segregation by genders; the sustenance of caste systems (in this case based on class order) which often degenerate into old fashioned hazing and physical persecution; the exclusion of racial minorities (particularly that most loathed of the Other races, Blacks); the paranoia against "out groups" (in this case, everyone outside the institution and having no part of it); the overbearing religiosity; the obsession with mass events, assemblies, the collective, and the grandiose, always overwhelming the individual and his own mind...I could go on but this might take all night.

The elite Catholic high school provides a fine and absolutely engrossing educational experience, and provides incredible academic opportunities. That is the one good thing I can say about it.

But at what cost to the soul?

Is the intent to create "Christian men" (as is generally claimed by the administrators of these military academies in disguise) or automatons for the System of which the Church and the social elites are so very much a part of??

Because I don't think Jesus would consider conformist brownshirts very Christian.

People say that because I abandoned and foresook the opportunities available to me at that not so mature age in my life, I pretty much ruined my life.

If they mean that I am nowhere near as successful as I might have been, they are absolutely correct. I am far, far less of a person than I could have been because of my self-immolating and immature actions - products of a fatal immaturity that has been the major defining force of my life and the key factor in my current bedraggled and despised socioeconomic status. The power brokers pretty much assure you a bad end in this matter. Cross them, even at this insipid level, and you are marked for life, and your existence as a failure is assured. (In my case, it would have happened anyway, since my personality and character is the absolute definition of what is required to be a loser.)

But if they mean that because I happen to think for myself, and question authority, and not trust every last thing our politicians, Leaders, and clerics utter from their reptilian throats, then they are shucking and jiving again. Because I would rather have a critical mind and be unsuccessful than the alternative - which, as you may have figured out by now, is to join the legions of the dickheadery.

What they didn't teach you in school

People often claim that I am above average in intelligence, and in the past various academic tests of this theory have supported that assumption. (For one, I do not believe it.) Yet I wonder how relevant "IQ" as a score is to actual life performance. I mean, at least from personal experience I don't see how having high intelligence (if that is actually true) has provided much benefit for me. I have never felt more than completely ignorant and clueless when going about my affairs in society. Either my actual intelligence is far, far lower than what is presumed (quite likely) or raw intelligence, in and of itself, is quite divorced from what actually makes a person successful.

I believe that effort and drive are the key factors. (Of course I do not possess either of these, so that explains much.) A person may have average innate intelligence, but if that person applies his efforts to learning all about a certain subject and mastering it, he will generally be an expert in that topic. I see no advantage to this process if that person has an IQ of 120 as opposed to 95.  

So I am not buying this crap about how folks in the ghetto are just too stupid and too bedraggled to better themselves. If they are stupid, that is a willfully entered fate of which they will have to bear the consequences. Education is important to the extent that basic literacy and numeracy skills are fundamental to success, but even a person who knows nothing else but the basics can be a success if he actively applies his mind.

Of course the purveyors of credentialism would deny this with a passion, lest it negatively affect their mounts of entrenched privilege. It would seem, however, that a university education is increasingly irrelevant to actual employment demands, and even serves to make a person less intelligent by indoctrinating him in a statist leaning worldview completely inimical to how the world actually works.

After all, the grate (sic) minds at the Fed, in Congress, and even the Leader himself are all highly trained products of university. See how wonderfully they "manage" the economy!

What I am saying is that the "best" minds are often full of shit, and the average mind manages to contemplate far more than it is given credit for.

Why, then, do intelligent people fail? Sometimes they buy into a worldview and a mindset, passed down by their teachers, that is unworkable. Sometimes they believe that because they are so gifted, they don't have to expend the effort since they are "special." Sometimes they are just fucking lazy, worthless pieces of human refuse.

Certainly, not all intelligent people are walking failures, and not all 'average' people have what it takes to enter the upper middle class. But just because a person has letters behind his name does not automatically make him more valuable to society.

So this leads me to Urban Prairie Schooner's First True Maxim of Life:

A person's value to the world is measured by his/her net contribution to society.

This is not the same as economic value or net worth, or potential value. This bears directly on what you actively put into life, and if that enriches the world around you.

Not all people are equal. Human life is intrinsically valuable, but some folks are more deserving to be walking this earth than others, because they provide a valued service to others, are loved and respected by many, and contribute to overall social prosperity and cohesion. The looter class, well...their worth may be the sum value of the biological tissues that comprise their bodies, for whatever that's worth.

That is not a call for a second holocaust. That is just a fact of life.

Conform or die

Since I have been remiss in adding material to this blog here is the third poast today to compensate for recent lack of activity.

My posts of late have focused on my failed life and its ramifications. I say all this not to whine but to warn young people that you have to get your act together early on, or you will end up a broken old man largely hated by everyone.

'Fitting into' society, for all my verbal scorn therein, is critical. You ain't gonna find a well-paying job if you scare people or otherwise put off hiring managers in any way.

You will also lose the respect of your family and peers. My families' attitudes towards me are daily reminders of how lack of discipline and moral character can destroy a life.

I have yet to meet any of my sisters-in-law, nieces, or nephews. My brothers are afraid of permitting me to physically approach their family members, or even be in the same room with them. I do not hold this against them. They are only doing what they feel they must do to protect their families.

They have made it clear that they want me completely and fully out of their lives, with no role for me therein.

It is their decision to make and I respect that. After all, I have given them good reason in their minds for their course of action.

As for my friends...well, if I had any, I suppose they would have abandoned me long ago. As it is I am such an unappealing and nonconformist person that peers of my social group never saw fit to treat me any other way except with extreme violence and malevolence.

What were my sins?

Nothing criminal, I assure you. Namely my faults have merely been those things related to not fitting in.

I was never a very talkative or social person as a youth. This is the root of my issues. If you are not social in American society, and you keep to yourself and are shy and quiet (particularly if you are male), this is worse than murder, rape, or pillage. You are the equivalent of the terrorists. You make people uneasy around you, for some mysterious reason, as if you were the next Cho Seung-Hui. That is the definition of terrorism, no? People naturally come to hate you, and wish for your early death - and yes, I have been told on more occasions than I can count that the world would be a MUCH better place if I were dead. Could they be right? Perhaps.

I have never harbored homicidal tendencies such as afflicted the aforementioned Cho, but no matter - act "autistic" (for lack of a better word), and you are instantly tagged as a potential mass murderer (or at least a disruptive, unproductive force in society suited for the welfare line), and universally shunned and brought to a very low level in society despite any talents or achievements you may have to your name, or your real desire to work and be productive and contribute something of value to this world.

As a youth I had few friends, preferring books and learning over active play. In the community where I grew up, this is a no-no for a male. In order to prove your manhood, you must act macho and have interests in sports and such things. Regrettably my proclivities were otherwise, and I was too stupid to change my behavior to suit despite numerous warnings that there would be negative ramifications in the future.

When I went off to college, my community essentially cut me off. Education was a thing for upper class people who had time and money to spare. I should have been hustling for work, helping to support my parents.

I did work the entire time while in college, and I dutifully turned over my meager paycheck to my father every week. But time in class takes away from time when I could have been working, and I never heard the end of it.

You say, "But attending college certainly improved your life. If you had conformed to what your parents wanted from you, you would be a whole lot worse off today."

Surely, you jest.

I really wasn't suited for college. Professors always asked me what I was doing there. Fellow students shunned me. I handled the coursework well enough. Again, though, not fitting in did me in. Too much time studying and working; too little time getting to know other people and building relationships, which is so crucial to getting ahead in life.

In fairness I don't believe those other people wanted much to do with me anyway. They were too 'cool' and 'hip' for an unsophisticated trailer trash dumbass like me, I guess.

I have mentioned before in this blog that a college degree is merely a credential - an important credential for dickhead employers, but symbolic nevertheless. You don't learn anything in school that you wouldn't learn better and more efficiently on the job.

And it doesn't assure you of employment. A college degree does not say "One Degree, Good for a Job" - not even a diploma in a technical field such as I received. (Believe me, I did not make the mistake of graduating with a liberal arts major which would have positively ensured a future as a burger flipper.) In my case I faced many years of minimum wage employment after graduation. This of course did little to impress my family, or convince them of the relative value of a college diploma.

Not fitting in again. What hiring manager looking to fill skilled positions would take a risk on a shy loner from the trailer park, when there are dozens of Type A personality assholes with the same resume, looking for the same type of work?

What I should have done was take a few courses at the local vo-tech college after high school graduation, learned a skilled trade, and entered a portion of the workforce where positions are going begging due to lack of trained workers. (Shit, even the governor wants to do something about this very problem.)

I would probably be making double what I earn today, and I might even have the respect of my family and co-workers.

What I have now is a family that wants nothing to do with me, a reasonably well paying job of which I have no doubt could easily disappear tomorrow at the whim of my boss, co-workers and managers who think I am under-qualified and incompetent even for the easy and mindless GOVERNMENT WORK which I currently perform, and a community which has disowned me since I have 'rejected' its values, despite the fact that I am likely doing economically better than all the men remaining there put together.

I don't fit in there since I chose the professional white collar world; I don't fit in there either since I can just never escape the taint and disgrace of growing up amongst trailer trash. Not that I advertise it, but it always seems to find its way through somehow, and not because I have a habit of chimping out. I don't fit in anywhere else since I prefer to keep to myself and live a quiet life devoid of high drama and frequent trips to drinking establishments.

The only place I have found even a marginal degree of acceptance is the Black ghetto. In the 'hood people are too busy with their personal troubles, or trapped in their own addled mindlessness, to care much about anyone else, particularly some interloper screwball White man - so they just go ahead and leave you alone. So here I am.

If there is one good thing that can be said about the ghetto, then that is it.

I guess I should have conformed to what society wanted of me. Of course I believe in individuality and being yourself. Always have. But what has it gotten me, other than poverty, alienation, loneliness, and certain early death? Being true to yourself may work for the privileged - but if you belong to the grim working middle, you had better listen to your betters or else. Because, quite frankly, the people in power and their hangers-on couldn't give a flivering fuck if you live or die. In fact, your death only benefits them, for that means one less potential social burden. So they would rather see you dead anyhow. Such is the dark economic calculus of our bureaucratized age.

College: what is is good for?

By and large today university education provides little to nothing of useful knowledge which we end up using in our professional working lives. Most folks learn much of that on the job, over the length of a career. College provides some knowledge which may be enriching on an intellectual or personal level, and leads to useful professional contacts for budding yuppie dickheads working on their MBAs, but otherwise....is it really worth the time and massive financial investment (literally, since most youth today borrow heavily to finance their tertiary educational endeavors)?

I don't believe it necessarily is.

A university degree by itself is mostly used a credential today. The type of degree and major is not entirely critical at all in cases, though certain degrees will carry you a lot farther than others. A master's degree is essential if you seek to work in anything else besides a traditional professional field like architecture or engineering.

For instance, the profession I work in is really only tangentially related to my university field of study, though it plays a support role for that original field. I use very little of what I learned at university in my daily working life. Virtually all of the technical knowledge that I am required to know to competently perform my job, I learned after I was hired. Of course, with every job outside of food service and sanitation, there is a certain amount of specialty knowledge and specific technical skills that need to be learned for individual positions. But seriously, I had scant background in my current field. But I also hold a college degree of a certain type, and that credential apparently trumped everything else when I applied for the position. (Not that I'm complaining there.)

I suspect that unless you chose a very specific and tuition-busting career (and I thought I had, to be honest!) such as law or medicine, or you decided to become an engineer - where there are more State-supported contractor job opportunities than you will ever know - this will be true for you also.

What's funny is that I enjoy my current field far more than I would have enjoyed working in my original chosen vocation. Life works out that way sometimes.

And then there is this sick need among educators to steer every youth, no matter his aptitude or desire for it, toward college. What a misdirection of resources and a waste of a number of precious years of a confused youngster's life. Excuse me, but isn't this why there are so many remedial courses offered at state universities nowadays? Not everyone is suited for college, people!!! There is no shame in vocational trades. Why should there be, anyway? Let me tell you, one can make good money in those areas. There are many construction contractors who live a whole lot better than I do, and I bet most of them have never stepped foot on a college campus, even a community college (except maybe to do building work).

So many people go to college who shouldn't, and then waste six to ten years of their lives trying to find a field of study they can actually perform competently, and interests them at the same time. All during the while they barely exist, living communally in seedy student ghettos (or even real ghettos) and making only marginal contributions to the economy (usually as low wage food service workers). After a long period they will eventually graduate, just barely knowledgeable in the field of study - and then find that their job prospects as anthropology or women's studies majors are no better than unemployed ghetto Blacks.

Or they wind up dropping out after two or three years and end up working at Wendy's, selling fries and shakes.

Trust me, I've seen it all. And it ain't pretty. What do you think kept me in school and on track to graduate in time?

But I digress. In any case, any Tom, Dick, or Harry who is literate and well-read can be trained for a well paying position if he is willing to learn a business, apply himself, and is at least marginally intelligent. This so-called need for (increasingly expensive) 'university education' is symptomatic of the credential inflation so rampant in America today, which is orchestrated and perpetuated by power elite scumbags who desire to raise the bar higher so that progressively fewer people - or more properly, people not of their background, skin color, or socioeconomic class - can obtain the brass ring that is success in this society.

After all, if there are fewer people coming into the professions, between the wildly inflated (and rising) expense of obtaining a degree (or degrees) and State licensing requirements for many well-paying fields, that reduces competition and allows for higher prices (and profits), now doesn't it? Gee, what a bright idea!

And of course, people without the requisite credentials have no hope of breaking the economic barriers that separate the powerful from the oppressed. No corporation in their right mind would hire them lest they lose their reputation among the privileged - you know, upholding the system and all.

That'll keep 'em low and dumb, like 'those people' should be.

Who are 'those people'? Ask a fascist.