Writing in 1944, George Orwell predicted life in 2019

No, we're not talking about 1984. George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) wrote that in 1948, while he was living on the remote and desolate isle of Jura, in the Hebrides. About four years earlier, before he fled London for the solitude of Jura, he wrote an essay called "Pleasure Spots", in which he foresaw, with uncanny accuracy, what life would be like in the 21st century. Here's part of it -- the five principles governing how we live today.

1. One is never alone.
2. One never does anything for oneself.
3. One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
4. Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
5. One is never out of the sound of artificial music.

To this last principle, Mr Orwell added, "The function of the music is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of the birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude." How prescient. How sad.

Quoted by Thurston Clarke in Searching for Crusoe (Ballantine Books, 2001).

What happened to our society: Pat Buchanan's view

This is a follow-up to yesterday's post in which British writer Pat Condell summarized in under four minutes what went wrong with the society of the AABC countries (America, Australia, Britain and Canada). If you haven't seen the video, be sure to check it out. Today I want to share another summary, using the printed word this time, by another Pat -- Patrick J. Buchanan.

Mr Buchanan has been described as "America's leading populist conservative". He has been a senior advisor to three American presidents, ran for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party's presidential candidate in 2000. What follows is excerpted from "The Last Chance", the final chapter of his best-selling book Suicide of a Superpower: Will America survive to 2025? (St. Martin's Press, 2011).

Our intellectual, cultural, and political elites are today engaged in one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments in history. They are trying to transform a Western Christian republic into an egalitarian democracy made up of all the tribes, races, creeds, and cultures of planet Earth.

They have dethroned our God, purged our cradle faith from public life, and repudiated the Judeo-Christian moral code by which previous generations sought to live.

They have declared men and women to be basically the same, that all voluntary sexual relations are morally equal, that the traditional family is but one social option, that men can marry men and women can marry women, that race is a social construct invented by bigots bent on repressing others, that all are endowed with the intelligence and ability to succeed in the most competitive society on earth.

All religions and all "lifestyles" are equal and all are to be equally respected. These elites will fight to ensure that a mosque is built at Ground Zero with the same ferocity as they will to ensure that no Nativity scene ever appears on the National Mall. If there is an inequality of rewards in our society, they believe, this is the residue of a reactionary America, the fruit of societal injustice, and it is the moral duty of our modern state to rectify that injustice and mandate equality. Those who reject these truths are benighted or bigoted.

Our secular elites believe in this revolution. The people never did. Middle America detests it. Thus it has had to be imposed from above, by judges, bureaucrats, professors, and those who control the content of our culture. One part of America believes we are headed for a wonderful new age. The silent majority thinks the country has lost its mind....

The experiment is failing and will continue to fail. For it is based on a theory which runs counter to reality, an ideology whose tenets are at war with the laws of nature. Like the Marxists who were going to create a new man and a new society, our establishment is attempting the impossible.

Our elites have created a concept of the ideal nation -- the most egalitarian, diverse, democratic, and liberated that ever existed. And they have mobilized the vast power of government and law to force America to conform to that concept. They will fail, and this great and good country will die of their experiment.

Toronto killer of 10 "seemed a little off"... that's all

The death toll in yesterday's mass murder in Toronto has risen to 10, with 15 wounded. Agent 3 has been following the story closely, looking for the connection with Islamic terrorism that almost everyone suspected immediately the story broke, since the weaponizing of rented trucks has practically been trademarked by ISIS.

Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders, who is Black [with a capital B, the latest PC style for people of the coloured persuasion. Ed.] flew back from a junket to New York and appeared on local TV around sunset to promise there would be "a fulsome answer" [sic] to questions about the perp's identity and motivation before the end of the day. Agent 3 took that to mean the boys in black were working the suspect over with rubber hoses, but of course it's not PC to say that. In any case, "government officials" were quoted on the late news as saying the massacre was "not part of any organized terrorist plot".

The weasel word there is "organized". That's like the answer I give when people ask me if I belong to an organized religion; I reply "No, I'm Catholic." When he heard that, Agent 3 surmised that the perp wasn't an official "soldier" of ISIS, but a freelance jihadi, perhaps a "radicalized yoof" who had gone to the Middle East to fight the infidels and returned to carry on the Islamic war against the Christian West on the enemy's turf. Well... errr... that's not how it turned out.

The driver of the white rental van, arrested on the scene by one (1) brave cop who ignored the man's request to "Shoot me! Shoot me!", is Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old student (for seven years, already) at Toronto's Seneca College. He was apparently raised, if not born, in the north Toronto area. From his name, I'm guessing his ancestry is Armenian, so if he has any religion, it's more likely to be Orthodox Christianity than Islam.

No cries of "Allahu akbar!" were heard, just "Kill me!" No ISIS flag or copy of the Quran was found in the van or at Mr Minassians home. No-one ever heard him say anything about geopolitics or the Islamic plot to rule the world. Those who were acquainted with the murderer are saying only that he was kind of a loner, kept to himself, and "seemed a little off." So it seems we can rule out any Islamic extremist motive. Why, then, did he do it? That brings us to the crazy part.

The Georgia Straight reported yesterday evening that Alek Minassian identified himself as part of "the incel rebellion". "What's that?", I hear you ask. The term is new to me too, but the Straight describes it as an obscure movement of men who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate, or "incel" for short. In other words, guys who can't get laid and are taking it out on society at large.

The Straight continues: The name of Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old resident of Richmond Hill, appeared alongside this Facebook post: "The Incel Rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys. All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!" It was a reference to a 22-year-old Californa man who killed seven and injured 14 in a shooting and reckless-driving spree in Isla Vista, California, in 2014.

Prior to doing this, Rodger posted a YouTube video saying he was determined to punish women who had rejected him. Rodger described them as "Stacys" and men who were sexually active as "Chads". He died of self-inflicted wounds but not before he published a "manifesto" expressing his extreme contempt for interracial couples.

California, eh. And race, of course. The poison of the Golden State spreads not just across America but beyond its borders as well. If I were an Islamic extremist bent on using terrorism to purify Western society, I'd start with California, specifically Hollywood, the fount of all depravity. But then I'm just a simple old codger trying to survive in a quiet corner of the forest without having to defend myself against jihadis or nutbars driving white vans. God help me. And God help our sick, sick, sick society.

Further reading: "Toronto van suspect reportedly attended special needs program, made unusual noises", Fox News, 24/4/18. SPOILER ALERT: The noises were "meows". Saved you from reading the article. You're welcome.

Book review: More on stupidity from Bill Bryson

More on stupidity... More on... Geddit? Moron!

I am working hard [hardly working? Ed.] on a review of Bill Bryson's latest book The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). My problem is that I keep running into long(ish) passages that I want to quote verbatim. I've already done that twice this week, and feel I'm now in danger of posting the whole book, a page or two at a time. The publishers wouldn't like that. So I content myself with copying one last excerpt.

An underlying theme of Mr. Bryson's latest "travel" book -- really a text in sociology and philosophy -- is the deep and abiding stupidity into which the world is falling. Although the book is ostensibly about Britain and the British, the author takes a few potshots at America and Americans along the way. (Being an American himself, he's entitled to do so.) Here's his account (from pages 284-285) of a visit to Austin TX.

Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective.

Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house [in Britain] doesn't have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: 'City?'

I replied: 'London.'
'Can you spell that please?'
I looked at her and saw that she wasn't joking. 'L-O-N-D-O-N,' I said.
'Country?'
'England.'
'Can you spell that?'
I spelled England.
She typed for a moment and said: 'The computer won't accept England. Is that a real country?'
I assured her it was. 'Try Britain,' I suggested.
I spelled that, too - twice (we got the wrong number of Ts the first time) - and the computer wouldn't take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn't think of anything else to suggest.

'It'll take France,' the girl said after a minute.
'I beg your pardon?'
'You can have "London, France".'
'Seriously?'
She nodded.
'Well, why not?'
So she typed 'London, France', and the system was happy.

I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: 'Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?'
'That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.'
'Shoot,' she said and looked chagrined.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can't identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it's spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Having now passed on three excerpts from The Road to Little Dribbling, -- this one, "Bill Bryson on declining standards of punctuation and grammar" and "Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity" -- perhaps I can be excused from writing only a few more lines in praise of the book.

I'm not sure if Mr. Bryson set out to be a curmudgeon. Perhaps one doesn't "set out" so to do. With me, it just happened naturally as I watched the world around me sink into the muck of tastelessness, political correctness, and the other stupidities of which Mr. B complains. He pokes fun at our Western society and "culture" with a large pitchfork, in the manner of H.L. Mencken, but with even more humour.

The Road to Little Dribbling purports to be a travel book, the genre which Bill Bryson does best. It does describe his zigzag rambles up "the Bryson Line" from the English Channel to Cape Wrath (and considerably beyond), but, as noted before, the book is not so much about places and things -- although both are described in detail and with great wit -- but about people. Like Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, it is a work of serious philosophical inquiry wrapped in dry humour. Don't fail to read it.

Further reading: Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. The Project Gutenberg e-book, FREE.

Bill Bryson on rising levels of stupidity

As Ed. told you earlier today -- see previous post -- [not the one with the video of the Swazi reed dance! Ed.] -- I am writing a review of Bill Bryson's latest opus The Road to Little Dribbling (Penguin Random House/Doubleday 2015). Some people will call it a travel book, but in reality it's a trenchant commentary on the decline of culture and just about everything else, disguised as a travel book. One of the things decried by Mr. Bryson is the descent of modern society into a deep and abiding stupidity. He didn't write that; I did. Here's what he wrote, pages 226-227.

I was seated at a window with a good view of the Jeremy Clarkson poster that I had noted earlier [see previous post] and this got me to thinking about stupidity again, in the universal sense. I had recently read about something called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is named after two academics at Cornell University in New York State, who first described it. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me.

So what I began to wonder was this: what if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgement or diminished taste? That would explain the success of Mrs Brown's Boys, for one thing.

We all know that regular exposure to lead can seriously impair brain function, yet it took decades for scientists to figure that out. What if something even more insidious is poisoning our brains from some other part of our daily lives? The number of chemicals in use in the developed world was more than 82,000 at the last count, and most of them - 86 per cent, according to one estimate - have never been tested for their effect on humans.

Every day, to take just one example, we call consume or absorb substantial amounts of bisphenols and phthalates, which are found in food packaging. These may pass harmlessly through us or they may be doing to our brains what a microwave oven does to a tub of baked beans. We have no idea, but if you look at what's on TV on a typical weeknight, you have to wonder. That's all I'm saying.