Shakespeare and Austen: Things They Never Told Me

I am swinging through Britland with my daughter, with stops in Stratford and Bath. And I am learning things I never knew.

For instance, I now understand why the ordinary Brit Bill of Stratford could write about Julius Caesar and Troilus and Cressida. It's because of the school he attended at the Guildhall in Stratford.

See, back in the 1570s, a kid like Bill, son of the local glover, could go to work, at age 8, or he could go to the free school at the Guildhall.

Here's how the school worked. There was a master, paid 20 pounds a year, and about 40 to 60 students. These students sat on forms -- that is boxes that contained the beer they would drink during the day -- by age. The youngest boys sat on the First Form, the next youngest on the Second Form, all the way up to the Sixth Form. British schools are still organized on this model.

Back in those days the instruction was entirely verbal, because paper was so expensive. So students learned their Latin and arithmetic and multiplication tables verbally. Also, the master did not teach them all the time. How could he when there were 60 kids from 8 to 16? So most of the instruction was from the older boys to the younger boys. And if a younger boy didn't know something, he would apply to an older kid for help. Studies show that people remember 90 percent of what they teach.

Since the kids were learning Latin they were also learning Classical history.

So now I know how it was that Shakespeare, a nobody from Stratford-on-Avon, could write plays about Roman history. He had a remarkable education from the local guildhall school, and thus knew about all that stuff.

I asked the chap telling us about all this where he got his information. He said it came from a book, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham. It is available on Google Books and elsewhere. I will be checking it out.

But I want to know: how come I didn't know this? And how come such a system worked, at such a low expense? And how the students learned all this stuff, even though there was no paper and no textbooks?

And how come our present system is a total failure even though it is drenched in money and teachers? How come a schoolmaster paid £20 per year could educate 60 boys without a scrap of paper? And how come the kids could come out with a serious knowledge of the classics? Seriously, how come?

Now, my theory of education is that kids should be chucked out of school at about 11 or 12 and told to get a job, or an apprenticeship. The ones that wanted to continue in school would have to crawl on their knees over broken glass begging to be allowed to stay in school. You can see that the system in Shakespeare's time was not all that different. Only in those days you started work at 8 unless you could get yourself enrolled in school.

The guild school had a punishment day, Friday, on which all defaulters would be "birched" or beaten with a bundle of birch twigs. But here's the thing. You could redeem yourself by good behavior in the interval between your infraction and the Friday birching ceremony. What a concept!

It's interesting that our entire knowledge about early education comes from Dickens and Dotheboys Hall and Mr. Creakle and Dr. Wackford Squeers. What if education in former times was nothing like Dickens' notions? What indeed.

Then we went on to Bath, location of Jane Austen novels like Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Jane spent several years in Bath, four years in the house of her father who had moved there after retiring as a parish priest, several more years in reducted circumstances after his death in 1805.

Here is what shocked me. The Pump Room is right next to Bath Abbey, quite an imposing church. But I never recall reading about the Abbey. Just a hundred yards away from the Pump Room and the Abbey is the river Avon. How come Jane Austen never mentioned the river? She lived in Sydney Place, just across the river from the Abbey and the Pump Room, so would have frequently crossed the bridge across the river Avon.

But another mystery was solved. Sir Walter Elliott, father of Anne Elliott the heroine of Persuasion, lived in Camden Place. There is no Camden Place in Bath, according to Google Maps. But, on a map of Bath in 1800 there is a Camden Place. It is close to what is now Camden Crescent. So we are to assume that there has been a lot of demolition and building in Bath. Which is odd, because you would think that Bath emerged complete and entire like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus and has remained pure and entire ever since. Apparently not, although the terraced houses of the Circus and the Royal Crescent are still as magnificent and entire as they ever were. Only today they are mostly broken up into flats.

I'd talk about our visit to Stonehenge, only we bailed out after we found that the entrance fee was £34. So we took off for London and took a photo from the road. Back in my day little kids could run in and out of the stones; my dad took movies of me to prove it. But now visitors are kept at a distance. Because preservation.

What a world!

Understanding the Left

The Zman is trying on ideas to understand the left. Is it just a bunch of cat ladies? Is it a plot to undermine white-created society?

Or is it an assault on "rationality and order," using the idea that the world is a "narrative of opinion?"

But if that is the case then

If race is a social construct, then diversity must also be a social construct. In fact, it is irrational, as what would be the point of decorating an organization with things that do not exist? That also means so-called hate speech is a social construct, as it is rooted in the belief in racial and ethnic differences. If those differences are imaginary, then hate speech is imaginary as well.

Of course it doesn't matter because whatever social construct the left comes up with is treated by them as the truth, whereas other peoples' constructs are treated as racist sexist homophobic lies.

So the whole thing depends on the ability of the left to control the conversation.

Now I think that it is a mistake to imagine that anyone's world view is based on "rationality and order." It is all based on some narrative opinion, some notion, upfront, of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

Every world view is based on the situation of humans that, as self-conscious beings, we are able to construct a view of the world, and then marshal knowledge and "rationaliity and order" that seem to us to explain the world and what comes next.

We conservatives have a world view that is based on the notion that we do not know what heaven on earth would look like. Because we believe this we believe that religion and government should be separated, that religious world views should not have the power to use government to enforce their world views.

Indeed we believe that there is only a limited amount that government can do to make a better world.

But our lefty friends believe that with political power they can make the "arc of history bend towards justice." So every lefty action is devoted to the notion of using political power as an agent of justice. Part of that strategy involved delegitimizing other world views in any way possible. So it doesn't matter what they say about other people, how many people they deplatform, if it brings us a step closer to justice and equality.

If you believe that your political beliefs represent The Way to truth and justice then it makes complete sense to push aside people that disagree with you, to accuse them of being worse than Hitler. For they are roadblocks on the road to justice.

Now my belief is that the lefty idea that political power is the royal road to justice is the problem. Political power is only useful for defending us against enemies, people that wish to use force on us.

But once that is achieved, we believe, there is not a lot that government can do to make the world a better place. And the point of the Founders and the thinkers that inspired them is that the thing to do is to create limitations on the use of government power, to make it difficult for anyone to use government power to alter the arc of history. Because the idea that the arc of history is moving towards justice if it agrees with your ideas is baloney.

Anyone can come up with a vision of a better world, and anyone can imagine that, with him in charge and the naysayers out of the way, that we could abolish poverty and injustice in short order.

And that is the problem with the left. Lefties have the naive idea that they are the good guys, period. And so we ought to do what they want. But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in one aspect, they have got it wrong. How would we know? What would we do about it? What mechanism would there be for rolling back a program that, despite good intentions, does not achieve what it promised?

Supposing some Koch Brother came up with a critique of a lefty program. How would he get the lefty government to give it some consideration? Then how would the lefty government deal with the fact that it considers all Koch Brothers and their ilk as un-redeemable?

The fact is that humans are not good at taking correction from people they believe are evil, as lefties believe the Koch Brothers are evil.

Reduced to its essential, the best way to understand the left is as a religious group, a cult, with a vision of paradise on Earth. It wants government power to legislate its moral vision and enforce it on the rest of humanity.

Well, the left has been pretty good at realizing that if some Christian group tried that it would be disastrous. That is why lefties are very strong on opposing any attempt to "legislate morality."

But the beginning of wisdom is to understand that it is wrong for anyone to "legislate morality." Anyone can see that when the other guy legislates morality is is a Bad Thing. But only a wise fool can see that when I legislate morality I am just as bad.

That is why the government governs best that governs least. Because it will mean that the government is doing very little in the line of legislating morality, and imposing its moral view on other people.

Try convincing a lefty friend of that. You can't, because he believes that his belief is a saving truth and only racist sexist homophobes could or would disagree. And since anyone that disagrees with him is evil à la lanterne with them!

Trying to Put Multiculturalism on the Stage

Last night I saw As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon from the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was as multicultural as you like, with a black Orlando, a vaguely non-white Celia, a woman Jaques, a black female Silvius, and thus a lesbian thing with Phoebe. And deaf or dumb Audrey who needed another character to interpret her sign language.

Oh and there were minor parts for a South Asian and and East Asian.

Really, considering the effort that went into providing satisfaction for the progressive political community it is amazing that the production team had any creative energy left for the play itself.

But it was great fun and My Girl Rosalind was delightful.

I get the problem. As You Like It is about the travails of a bunch of rich kids involved in family power and inheritance problems. The only character in the least bit modern, and the least bit non-patriarchal-white-supremacist is Jaques, the professional pessimist reciting his Seven Ages of Man.

Do you see the problem faced by our lords and masters in the educated ruling class? The great cultural monuments that the 50-ish white woman wants to go see are all about white culture, and often pre-industrial revolution white culture at that. The issues and concerns of the left have no place, were not even thought of back in those days. What's a woke theatre creative to do?

Well, they do what they did with As You Like It here in Stratford in 2019. And I got to see an As You Like It by the semi-pro Seattle Shakespeare Company earlier in the year. They too had a couple of reversed genders. Just to maintain their street cred in the theater community.

What these chaps really want to do is the musical version of The Boy in the Dress, "the story of a twelve-year-old boy who enjoys cross-dressing, and the reactions of his family and friends." Hey, whaddya know, RSC is doing just that this summer.

Actually, I get it. My reductive Three Peoples theory gets it. What our educated class wants these days is to be "creative." And the easiest thing to be creative about is sex. Let's ring all the changes, and the more it épates the bourgeoisie the better.

But here is my thing. What we need today is not navel-gazing by the educated class and their bribed apologists in the theater community. What we need is cultural product that explores much more the situation of the ordinary middle class in the 21st century. Not to mention the immigrant community.

What does it mean, today, living in the world of the flyover middle class, scorned and abandoned by today's educated class? What does it mean to be an immigrant to the developed west, torn between your ancestral culture, the business workaday culture and the political culture? Your ancestral culture still tugs at you and seems to be a safe place but it isn't; the workaday trust and customer-oriented culture of work and business is something that you need to master in order to make it in the city but it is frightening; and the political culture offers all kinds of temptations and short cuts, which all come with a hidden cost, that you are cannon fodder for the various political power factions in the society.

And where are the satires of modern life, satirizing all the sacred cows of the educated ruling class? Why aren't we assailed from morning to night with penetrating satires of abortion activists, LGBT organizations, journalists, NGO activists, AntiFa, woke Google employees, idiotic tweeting celebrities, and so on? How about a satire on the modern university and its feminized bureaucracy? How about a searing look at K-12 education, that looks at the insanities of failing to educate inner-city black children? Why is it that movie villains can only be white military officers and white businessmen?

Look, I get it. The reason we have the currrent "divided country," and that everyone on the left is spitting cotton, is that the left's Great Reaction is failing everywhere. But, as is the way with all cultures, the first and second encounter with failure only prompt the culture leaders to call for a bigger effort, a Big Push, in the language of World War I, an extra effort to get the team over the goal line.

It cannot be true that the whole endeavor is heading for disaster, that its glorious vision metastasizes into misery wherever it is tried. That realization doesn't come till later, till the gutters are running with blood, till the day before Thermidor.

Now, as you know, my Three Peoples theory has an exact prescription for all our ailments, and it should be taken daily.

For the People of the Subordinate Self, the prescription is to learn the trust and service culture of the city and of Axial Age religion, to graduate from the tribal and hierarchical culture of the agricultural age to the trust and responsibility culture of the city.

For the People of the Responsible Self, the prescription is to step out a little beyond the comfort of merely obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules, and dare to do something a bit dangerous.

For the People of the Creatie Self, the prescription is to understand fully the Hero's Journey, that it starts with the terror of the descent into the underworld of the unconscious, and it ends not with glorious success and the adulation of the multitude, but with a Sacrificial Death, pointing out the Way along the borderlands between Order and Chaos: dying that others may live.

Now, imagine if our theater and arts community was writing plays and movies about the meaning of life, the universe and everything informed by the wisdom of the Three Peoples theory.

That would a a world of wonders.

David Koch was a Good Guy

At some point in the last 20 years, someone on the left decided that "The Koch Brothers" were evil. And ever since, lefty boilerplate has routinely identified "The Koch Brothers" as the very fount of evil and oppressive capitalism.

So when David Koch died, aged 79, after a long battle with prostate cancer, all kinds of lefties expressed their delight.

I'm not really inclined to attack them for that. Most lefties are fools, that have never read a book, and merely spout the hate that they have been carefully taught, from year to year, in their little ears.

The Koch Brothers were exemplary businessmen that inherited a family business from their father and turned a business worth tens of millions into a business empire worth tens of billions.

That means, lefty friends, that they created jobs, jobs, jobs.

But to the New York Times he and his brother Charles were right-wingers.

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y.

It's weird isn't it. The right-wingers that I read are mostly annoyed with the Kochs because they are pro-gay, pro-abortion, and pro-immigration. And they funded libertarian enterprises like Reason magazine. But to the New York Times obituary writers, Koch was "right-wing."

Which meant, of course, that when David Koch stumped up $100 million to help refurbish the New York City Ballet, all the fashionables with the right opinions -- as in correct rather than right-wing -- expressed their horror at allowing this monster a shield of respectability.

Give me a break.

I honor the Kochs for putting so much money into libertarian ideas, although I stop short of true libertarianism. That is because my reductive Three Peoples theory recognizes that the People of the Subordinate Self want protection, not just political protection from pirates and plunderers, but economic protection from the tides of the market. My politics tries to give them that -- or at least an illusion of economic security -- rather than declare that government has no business in the economic safety net business.

But what I honor the Kochs for is their work with dad's business. You don't get much information from the NYT obit, which is heavy in politics and family lawsuits, but I understand that when the Koch brothers inherited the business it was in trouble, partly because of a lawsuit relating to technology that Koch père had developed. But the Koch brothers persevered and made Koch Industries into a thoroughly modern corporation that encouraged its employees to take responsibility -- and even dare to make mistakes.

That is a big deal for me, because I think that the secret of life is to develop the courage -- or what my daughter calls resilience -- to try out ideas, knowing full well that most new ideas end up in failure.

But for our liberal friends the Kochs were all about "dark money" and funding "the right" and being a secretive private corporation. I get it. Private corporations don't have to tell the world very much about their affairs, and lefties hate that. And they also hate people that they can't effectively bully into conformity. It really is offensive to them that the Kochs could live and work and fund their ideas and charities when the Kochs were opposed to everything good and woke.

It's a strange world, isn't it. You take your dad's company, and instead of clipping coupons you expand and deepen it and provide jobs for tens of thousands. But that makes you into cartoon villains for our lefty friends. What is wrong with you guys?

Never mind. David Koch, of The Koch Brothers, was a good guy. Rest in peace.

Innocence and the Three Peoples

Earlier this week I discussed the Culture of Innocence that is defining for the Left. The clients of the Left are always helpless innocent victims being unjustly oppressed by the capitalists, or the patriarchy, or the white supremacists, or the fascists.

Mark Bauerlein in "Deliver Us from Innocence" observes that the nation state partakes of this culture.

Niebuhr saw it at work in foreign policy: “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their ­human contacts.”

But Bauerlein goes on, real innocence only applies prior to The Fall.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were sinless, ­cognitively ­innocent and morally innocent. But after the Fall, with moral innocence shattered, this other innocence turns into a mode of obtuseness. It is ­sin-blind and self-unaware. It will not and cannot see itself addressed when Jesus looks upon sinners and says with authority, “go and sin no more.”

Or, to put it bluntly, once you have acquired self-consciousness which includes, I think, the ability to sort-of see yourself as others see you, the continued protestation of innocence is an exercise in bad faith. Innocence went out the window once Eve bit into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

But. Whatabout the innocence of nations? Whatabout the innocence of the Jews? I think the answer is simple. When you are fearful, when you are living in a dangerous place, then you must regress to a previous place. Because when you are fighting for your life you do not have the luxury or the leisure to start thinking "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." So you regress to a place of fake innocence to help you face the dangers of the times.

Now we apply this to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

It seems to me that, to a considerable extent, the People of the Subordinate Self are not yet self-conscious; they are, in fact, innocents. They experience themselves as helpless victims of the gods, of their lord. They are fatalistic, and do not imagine that they have the agency to do anything about their situation. The left has played on this in a masterful way by offering to take the place of the gods or the lord and lead the subordinates to safety.

The Jews were the guys that put all this together, and why not. They just extended their own situation as an endangered minority and applied it to any non-majority group. Because, I think, the same rules apply. If you are Strangers in a Strange Land then you must stick together, for safety.

The People of the Responsible Self are not helpless innocent victims. We believe in personal responsibility. In a way, of course, this is a mirage, because the truth is that individuals are, to a great extent, the helpless victims of circumstance. You could be caught in a storm at sea; you could be caught in the middle of a bloody revolution or a Great Depression or a war through no fault of your own. But you are still thinking: how do I get out of this situation? You do not lie back and think of England. And even if the worst comes to the worst, you think to yourself, well, I fought the good fight. You do not think how come the government didn't protect me.

The People of the Creative Self, of course, cannot be helpless victims, nor even responsibles. Because the whole point of human creativity is that now, we humans are creating the world, not just living as the subordinates of the gods, or as responsibles living in the world that God created and according to the Law that God set forth. But things are not so simple, as Ariel Levy relates in "The Rules Do Not Apply."

[38-year-old] Levy was married to a woman and five months pregnant, having been impregnated with a friend's sperm, when she lost her baby, delivering it alone in a hotel room in Mongolia, where she was on a reporting trip.

Yes. You can kick over all your middle-class morality and its suffocating rules. You can marry a woman; you can decide to have a baby in your late 30s. You can go on your reporting trip anyway.

But evidently someone forgot to tell you that the creative life is hard, and will likely end in failure. You might have learned that by reading Nietzsche, but of course you have been carefully taught that Nietzsche was a Nazi. Or maybe you would have got a clue from Joseph Schumpeter that wrote about "creative destruction." Or you might have learned that 9 out of 10 business startups end in failure.

Our great global problem is that, like Toad of Toad Hall, the globalist educated ruling class wants to play all the roles from helpless victim to rulemaker for the deplorables, to courageous creative artist and activist. And if things go wrong, it's the patriarchy's fault.

But creativity is hard. That is what all the myths about going into the underworld (of the unconscious) and finding out if you are really up to the mark are all about. And that is why, if you survive your Hero's Journey, it will probably end in a sacrificial death on the border between Order and Chaos.

Our glorious creative class is, right now, on its own collective journey into the underworld of the unconscious. It is a journey of frightful peril and most will not return to the light of day with all their marbles.

If you discover that you are not up to the journey, that you don't have the necessary hardness for the creative life, well then better slide back to a life of Responsibility where The Rules Do Apply and protect you from doing stupid stuff. Or you can become a helpless innocent victim and wait for someone else to tell you what to do to solve your problems.

But don't complain about the patriarchy or white supremacy or America being a racist slaveholding country since 1619. Either suck it in, follow the rules, or fall in line.

What I am saying is that you can't pick and choose. You wanna be a fancy-schmancy creative? Then no fair acting like a victim. No fair saying "but they didn't tell me."

And no fair playing the activist game, pretending to be taking it to the Man when really you are just a regime thug doing the dirty work for the rulers.

Bronze Age Mindset Gets the Michael Anton Treatment

I had no idea that Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) had cracked the top 150 on Amazon. No idea! Right now it is #3,872.

But that is what Michael Anton, of "The Flight 93 Election" tells us in a Claremont Review of Bronze Age Mindset. Anton got his copy from Curtis Yarvin, the software geek that wrote "Unqualified Reservations" as Mencius Moldbug. Of course, Anton has a bit of a struggle with BAPs Nietzschean view of the world. Whatabout a "stable, just, and lasting regime?"

And what exactly does BAP mean by "pirate?" Not, I assume, what they mean in The Pirates of Penzance when the hero got accidentally apprenticed to a pirate instead of a pilot. Hey, accidents happen. But still, this young man discovered, "it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king."

Anyway, I thought a bit about the "pirate" thing, because it really was shocking to read about in Bronze Age Mindset. And then I thought: Elon Musk. There's your modern pirate for you.

Elon Musk is a modern rascal, who is ruthlessly taking advantage of all the government money and investor money going, for solar cells, for electric cars, and even space rockets. But why? I think it is pretty obvious. Musk is from South Africa. If I were a native South African white like Musk I suspect I would say to myself and the world: screw you. Screw you vile hypocritical lefties that pitched me out of my homeland with all your sanctimony about apartheid. Hey, how did that turn out, down the road, with a murder rate at 36 per 100,000, which is positively medieval? So now I owe nothing to nobody. Scew you.

Ditto for any young man in the west today living under the sanctimonious racist twaddle of our globalist educated ruling class.

I was reading a biography of Nietzsche, written in 1940 by a man I respect, Crane Brinton, and it joins the chorus blaming Nietzsche for the Nazis.

And certainly there is plenty in Nietzsche that would suggest things to a Nazi-to-be. So, shall we bury Nietzche because he helped bad people have bad thoughts and so became "the Nazis' favorite intellectual?" Sure, if that's what floats your boat.

But I think that what Nietzsche is saying is that, if you think you can rationally philosophize your way to a stable, just, and lasting political regime you are smoking something. The truth is that the world is a shitshow. There is nothing stable and lasting, and probably if you try to make things stable and lasting you will cause instability. There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

So, the truth about life, the universe, and everything is that we are winging it, always have and always will.

So, will the pirates of BAP enslave us all and bring on a new Dark Age? Maybe, but I don't think so, and not because I believe that BAP's pirates are any nicer that the pirates of old. It is because the modern era does not lend itself to ruthless political power.

Surely, the lesson of the Soviet Union and Maoist China mean that if they mean anything. The point of Marx was to prophesy that a ruthless movement of political action led by Educated Youth was the one thing needful to smash the bourgeoisie and prevent the "immiseration" of the working class in a new feudalism. How did that work out, Chuck? It was an absolute, pedal-to-the-metal, bloody disaster. Unequaled in history, I dare say.

So what do we learn from the disaster?

I think the lesson is that the modern movement of human rights, of ending slavery, of limiting the power of government and politics says nothing about us moderns being better and moral. It is because all these things assist in human flourishing.

Or, if you want me to get crude, the clunking fist of political power does not pay.

Not only that, but slavery does not pay. It is too hard to supervise, and the slaves don't work very hard, compared to wage labor.

And so, over the last half millennium, in fits and starts, we have entered a new era, where the old rules of power have been replaced with new rules.

Back in the 19th century the Fabians sneered at the capitalists forever asking: does it pay? But, of course they are fools for saying that. All "does it pay" asks is, are you throwing money down a rat hole by doing that? Because if you are, it could be that you are dumb or something.

But that is what the market economy is asking every moment. What is this product, this service worth to you? A lot? A little? More than yesterday? Less than yesterday? And what it means is that most everything can be worked out by the decisions of people to buy or not to buy interacting with other people. No clunking fist needed, but it really helps if you are trustworthy and the people you deal with are trustworthy too.

But that still leaves the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

As men, we can think of it this way. After we have provisioned and protected the women so they can put the next generation on the ground and get it off the nest, what then?

The fact is that men are programmed for adventure. Used to be the adventure of hunting megafauna until we killed them all. Then it was the adventure of protecting our food-growing land from the chaps next door.

So now what do we do? What is there in the world of risk, and adventure, and developing courage, and making a name for yourself?

I don't know and neither, I think, do you. But that is what the young'uns are trying to figure out. When they get it all figured out, I hope that they will go gently with racist sexist homophobes like me. But you never know.

Scott Adams: Four New Types of News

I just took the trouble to transcribe a piece of Scott Adams' daily podcast, where he develops the idea of four new types of news in "The Golden Age of No Real News." Says he:

There used to be a time what news was something like: Hey, some events happened; let us tell you about the events. Then we called that news.

But now things have changed. So Scott Adams comes up with four new types of news.

Fake News. "Something that didn't happen; something taken out of context... In this case The New York Times simply denying that an event happened." Adams is talking about John Harwood and Maggie Haberman denying the plain text of the leaked NYT editorial meeting where they said they were going to go after Trump because of his racism.

Hypothetical News. This probably always existed, but now it is more prominent.Hypothetical news is like this:

If there is a recession, Trump might not get reelected. If the meteor hits the Earth, we're not prepared.

It's like they ran out of real news!

Mindreading the News. It is "based on what we imagine... other people are thinking. Now, that goes well with taking Trump out of context" and substituting your assumption of what people are thinking.

Reframing History News. This, of course refers to the New York Times "1619 Project" keying on the first year that slaves from Africa arrived in North America. Hey, it's great to get beyond the textbooks and look at history again. But this is not an innocent exploration of the past. The purpose of it is to think differently about the present, i.e., Trump Racist.

It is really not hard to understand what is going on here. It is the liberal educated ruling class thrashing around trying to figure out what to do now that the good old narrative that they inherited from their good old liberal parents is not keeping the rubes quiet and respectful.

And of course the big thing is race. For half a century our liberal friends have ruled us and kept us down on the farm with the accusation of racism. But now, the race card is not working very well any more.

Think about it this way. What would you do if the method you used for keeping the peasants quiet no longer seemed to work, and you started getting reports that the natives were restless? Well, the simple answer is that you wouldn't know what to do because nothing in your life had prepared you for this day.

When you are a ruling class the point is to rule. You think up ideas that you decide are good for people and you enact legislation and write regulations and hand down legal decisions about what people may do and not do, about which group is to be privileged and which group is to be marginalized. I've been reading the history of the Brits in India in The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, and it all comes down to the ruling Brits at the time deciding, well, we are going to issue this proclamation; we are going to formulate that regulation; we are going to cut the salt tax in half; we are going to split Bengal into two halves because right now it is too large for one regional government to handle.

That is what our liberal friends have been doing for the last 50 years. Oh, there aren't enough African American firefighters, so we need Affirmative Action. Whatabout women fighter pilots? We should change the rules to increase the number of female pilots in the Navy. There aren't enough women in STEM, so let's change the rules to increase the number of women in tech. All the money in college sports is going to men's sports and that is wrong, so let's force equality in colllege sports.

But, of course, our lords and masters are not thinking about the lives they are wrecking, the injustice they are creating. They merely think, well, here's a racism, here's an oppression, here's an injustice, so how do we fix it?

And then when the peasants rebel they are genuinely shocked. Hey, all they were trying to do was to creat a more just and equal society! How can anyone be against that? Unless they were racists inspired by Trump's dogwhistles!

Well, I don't suppose any liberal is going to listen to me, but here goes.

The reason our Founding Fathers wrote down in the First Amendment that there should be no "establishment of religion" is because people disagree about things, especially morality. So the idea of limited government is to restrict the agenda of government to those things that nearly everybody can agree upon.

Nearly everyone agrees that murder is bad, theft is bad, rape is bad, and that the perps should be locked up.

But what about education? Education of children, nearly everyone agrees, is a good thing. But what should we teach the kids? That's where people start to disagree. Problem with a government education system is that the government tends to limit the range of educations available to children. And there are activist groups with agendas that want to force all children to be educated in accordance with their agenda.

Of course, when you are the ruling class and, say, the natives get restless about Drag Queen Story Hour at the local elementary school, you are outraged! Who do these homophobes think they are!

Hey Fredo! That's what I think about wind and solar power. Who do these watermelons, red on the inside, green on the outside, think they are! But we have to save the planet! Sez who? The scientists getting government grants? The corporate shills getting green energy subsidies? The little rich kid with a family foundation that wants to "make a difference" with activism? You gonna force me to ride a bike to work?

So my judgement about the four new tpes of news, as described by Scott Adams, is that they represent a flapping around in the liberal bubble. They tell us that our liberal lords and masters don't have a clue.

And the big thing they do not get is that there is really very little the government can do outside of keeping us safe that really benefits us.

And the big question is this. After you have created all your wonderful programs, what happens when the world changes and all the conventional wisdom assumptions you made back in the day no longer apply? Are you chaps going to revise and reform all your programs? Or are you just going to tell the rubes to shut up and take their medicine?

And flap around inventing new types of news to muddy the waters and confuse everyone?