Thread on American Vitality

America has a foundational patrimony of Christian civilization, though that legacy has lately been fading away. Some people lament its passing, others welcome it, but no one denies it.
buff.ly/3QukoIC Yet there is still an essentially Protestant substrate to American culture owing to our history. One way to understand American liberalism & its crusading, moralizing zeal is as the secular descendant of New England Puritanism. Maybe a 50-100 yrs ago less true now.

America ran out of frontier when we hit the Pacific. That changed things.
The American dream reached its apotheosis in California. After WW II, the state became our collective tomorrow. But today, it looks more like a future we should avoid.

Thread

buff.ly/3VTxJeo After WW II, California led the way. It grew quickly as people moved to the state in search of opportunity & young families had kids. SoCal benefited from the presence of defense contractors & demobilized GIs returning from the Pacific Front decided to stay and put down roots.

Life expectancy in France is increasing and has now reached 83 years.

Life expectancy in the US continues its years long decline & is now 76.4 - a gap of 6.6 years.

Why? Is it the diet? Probably yes in part. But what about the smoking? 🧵 In France 33.5% of people smoke regularly. That’s almost triple the ~12% of Americans who smoke.

But doesn’t smoking kill? Shouldn’t that show up somewhere in life expectancy data? Is smoking bad but the rest of the French lifestyle so good that it overcomes it? 🧵

Military briefing: is the west running out of ammunition to supply Ukraine?

Answer: YES

Intentional degrading our manufacturing capacity is a big reason for this. But not the only one.

Thread on the many alarms sounded in this article. ft.com/content/d41357… Arms & munitions are just like everything else in our economy: not enough people will work making them, not enough materials to make them with.

Lack of chips is critical too. Where are those made? Not here. They’re made on the other side of the Pacific which is foolish.

The Afghan warlords who have been the recipients of many billions of dollars from the US, who cultivate the opium that drives the heroin trade in America, & who practice bacha bazi (sex slavery for adolescent boys) now want Uncle Sam to pay for a never-ending twilight war.

NO Republican leaders will want to immediately revert to old Neocon/Bushie talking points. We’ve spent 20 years paying the price for this feckless, ill-informed nonsense. Many Americans are dead because of it.

Withdrawing from Afghanistan was Trump’s policy. It‘s the right policy.

The Problem of the New Right - THREAD

Smart piece & worth reading in it’s entirety. But it misses the religious context of early America which is essential to understand the American project & the central tension in American politics from 1776-present.

scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-pr… This exchange w Levi Preston a minuteman who fought at Concord is important. He knew nothing of the Stamp Act, of the Tea Tax, of Locke or Sidney. He says he had the Bible, the psalms, the Catechism, & Watts’ hymns.

Fauci in 1989. How did the AZT that Fauci pushed on people work out? Another quote:

“The toxic effects of AZT, particularly bone marrow suppression and anemia, are so severe that up to 50 percent of all AIDS and ARC patients cannot tolerate it and have to be taken off it.”

The oldest Milennials are now ~40. They have about 25% of the assets of Boomers at the same age.

What do you think that does to culture and politics? Two generations of narcissists, one with money and the other without. I get replies like this everytime I tweet about Boomers. The fact is they took all the benefits of the system their parents & grandparents created, gave themselves all the credit, tore down the system & then blame millennials for being lazy.

Apple banned Parler from the AppStore using a pretext that Parler, which isn’t a publisher, didn’t stop the spread of dangerous & illegal content.

This is a lie. Parler does not permit illegal content. Apple thus relies on “dangerous” which in their use has no objective meaning. What they mean is: Parler permits free speech with which they disagree. They also mean that Parler is a competitor that threatens their monopoly which they now use to harm Parler.

They also do this as a favor to Democrats who now control all elected branches of government.

Confronting oppression.

“A universal spiritual death has already touched us all & physical death will soon flare up & consume us both & our children—but as before we still smile in a cowardly way & mumble w/o tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength? We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants—but just don't disturb our fragile existence.

Short thread on oil prices:
The headlines about negative oil prices yesterday & today are at once informative (sort of) & misleading.

The big story is the chart below *not* that the price of WTI went red for two days. That’s an anomaly arising out of a contract expiry and...1 Lack of storage capacity at Cushing, OK where the contract specifies buyers take delivery. The negative price may also have to do with the implosion of Hin Leong a Singaporean oil trading firm.

The real story is the pricing of oil futures for the next 2+ years. It’s not good.

Fact: There are more privately owned guns in the United States than ever before and the number of murders has been at or near a multigenerational low for several years. More guns, less crime? 1/n Fact: There were 387 deaths from mass shootings in US in 2018 (defined as 4 or more shot - not killed - at one time). Of those most were regular criminals like gang-related drive-bys & bar fights. About 100 were of the random, psycho-killer variety. 2/n