I had not done one of these in a bit and thought I should try to get this going again. Got some nice notes from folks encouraging me to share quality material I come across, so here goes:
A World Nobody Wants. Compact Magazine continues to put out great content and quality essays. This piece by David Schaengold takes a harsh look at modern architecture and construction and posits that we are building cities that aren’t very appealing. He’s right. By trade, I am an apartment developer, and I find the vast majority of stuff that is built is downright ugly. Architects aren’t doing us any favors - who thought this was a good idea?
That’s what greets the weary traveler as they approach downtown Nashville from the south on I-65. Bleccch!
At the start of the New Urbanist movement in the early-’80’s, there was a push to make our architecture more human and attractive. There was an emphasis on creating civic buildings that had some grace - to a good degree that was taken to heart. Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Hall is a good example of that:That emphasis needs to be reinforced, especially when we think about structures like school buildings and most of the ones erected in the 1960’s to accommodate the surge of the Boomers are uuuugly. Perhaps that’s part of how our education system got so bad?
This next piece came out last year and I keep it bookmarked in my browser for periodic revisiting: “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.” The author, Harold Robertson makes the solid argument that departure from a meritocracy to governance by equality and diversity will end very badly. We are seeing this all around us. Just this week, a plane flying out of San Francisco dropped a wheel off its landing gear into the parking lot. Another plane in Houston suffered a collapsed landing gear and just today, two planes in Boston played tag with each other on the runway. We are not far away from a major catastrophe and it’s not just in the airlines.
A good fried on mine in the shipping business notes that the younger generation doesn’t want to work hard or learn, and the ones that know what to do are all retiring. I am seeing the same thing in the trades of the construction industry. And yet we push our kids forward telling them that the only successful path is through the mental mash-up called “college.” Take a look at a typical class at our own University of Tennessee:Yeah, those kids are getting some quality education…we are doomed!
I am picking up on a counter-revolutionary trend in the generation coming out of college right now (if they survive the brain-washing, although more than a few have had their eyes opened by the COVID madness) and it is a return to traditional norms. The rise of the “tradwife” movement is one of those threads. But, as Lane Scott argues in “Tradwife Ideology Won’t Save You,” you need a lot more than an ideology to fight back against the insanity of modern culture.
We need a convincing picture of modern America to sell to the rest of the country, but we can’t fashion one until we understand how modernity (which we cannot escape) can develop along lines in keeping with the ancient philosophical and religious convictions to which we are devoted.That means fleshing out or at least hinting at how to live in harmony with eternal truths, given the particulars we have to work with in American society. Our dogma, our Western canon, can outline the field of play, the dividing lines between fair and foul, what is entirely out of bounds, and the general rules of the game. It is essential that we do this—the field of play must be identified. However, actually playing the game once the rules are set is what it means to live out a culture and carry on a tradition. This cannot be culled from books.
Thoughtful read, worth your time!
Joel Kotkin has a great piece up over on Unherd: “Goodbye to Davos and Good Riddance!” For so long, the lefty intelligencia and their ilk have convened in Davos, Switzerland in January to issue proclamations to the world about how we should all behave. The more we have learned about this creepy get together the more we find a lot to dislike. Here’s their leader, Klaus Schwab at a function where they all had to wear Star Trek outfits:
Normal, right? Their masterpiece several years ago during the COVID schtick was called “The Great Reset.” The end result of this is that “you would own nothing and you would like it.” It envisions a populace zoned out on endless scrolling, earning a minimum wage and living in something called 15-minute cities. No cars, no travel, everything provided for…sounds just like The Matrix. Anyhow, Joel does a great job of taking it apart and it is worth your time.
Finally, I don’t know how many of your watched the State of the Union last night. Sadly, I did and found it quite jarring. The bar was set pretty low for President Biden, if he tapped out or started mumbling incoherent phrases, the media would have said he “outperformed.” Instead, we got an amped up geriatric squinting and yelling for 90-minutes…mostly on the same stuff he’s said before. In case you missed it, Victor Davis Hanson put a compact summary up on X this morning: “One Angry Biden Lie After Another.” Pretty solid fact checking by the good Professor.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, here are a few funnies to get the party started:
I will review it all once I get the chance to catch up on reading for the retool of my real estate business. This is very much what I want the News Aggregator to become and not just be a link list.