The political scene in the U.S. just keeps getting worse & worse & worse.

Trying to justify an attack on what turns out to have been a Venezuelan fishing boat, Trump foams, 300 million people died last year from drugs. That's what's illegal.

He can't be talking about 300 million people in the United States, can he? I mean, if that were true, it would be so-oo-ooo much easier to find parking, wouldn't it?

But that's just comic relief.

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JD Vance's current plan—and he's the true Annointed One—is to compile a database of those who are insufficiently reverential over Charlie Kirk's death and then harass their employers into firing them.

America! Land of the Snitch!

Like I've said, I think all political violence is bad, and people ought not to be assassinated for expressing their opinions, regardless of whether or not I agree with them. I'd never heard of Charlie Kirk before he was shot. I can't say I like much of what I've learned about him after his death, but those candle-lit vigils being held in his honor across the land are more or less the equivalent of all those George Floyd vigils back in 2020—the significant difference being that the Floyd vigils were an urban phenomenon & the Kirk vigils are a rural phenomenon.

(There was actually a Kirk vigil in Montgomery I almost went to last night because I am very, very curious! But I talked myself out of it. I don't think I would have been able to blend in with the crowd, and that raises personal safety issues.)

I've seen several photographs of Kirk flashing the white power sign, circle of pointer & thumb, other three fingers erect.

But is it a white power sign? For decades, that particular hand gesture signified A Okay.

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I will say that while there is little in Kirk's ideology I agree with, the one thing I think he was 1,000% correct about is that the youth in this country—especially the youth with penises—need some kind of structure that the culture at large is simply not providing them with.

He was very, very smart to target college campuses.

Adolescence is a social construct. (cf Philippe Aries' remarkable Centuries of Childhood.) It was invented in the 17th century at roughly the same time as the Industrial Revolution, and it served to keep individuals out of the labor market at a time when great numbers of workers were being displaced from their traditional employment slots.

Adolescence, then, almost by definition, is a waiting period, a socially sanctiioned interval of utter aimlessness.

But aimlessness is uncomfortable.

Adolescence is not strictly a chronological definition. The boundaries of adolescence keep shifting as the labor market shifts—and right now, thanks to AI, the labor market is tightening. College kids today are equivalent to, say, the high school sophomores of 50 years ago. A significant number of them are clinically depressed—it's hard to come by exact numbers, but one recent study posits that 34% of Gen Z are taking antidepressant meds, and that doesn't account for those who are self-medicating.

Anyway, this is a group of people who really want a purpose.

And Charlie Kirk was peddling purpose really successfully. Charlie Kirk's New Improved Purpose! product evidently was able to make people feel good about themselves.

That's the key! People want to feel good about themselves.

It's too bad the Left can't learn from that. In the aftermath of George Floyd's death—which, as I say, I see as kind of an analogue—the purpose products seemed to all be from people like Robin DiAngelo who hectored well-intentioned people, You will never be good enough.

And you know what?

Fuck that shit.

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In other news:

I was highly productive yesterday in the sense that I did lots of things that needed to be done. But not in the sense that I did lots of things I much wanted to do.

The tax class remains interesting. Big Company uses a completely different computation method than TaxBwana does. Very systematic! Branchings of the probability tree! If this, then this. It's a canon!

Then I got a tidy chunk of Remuneration done and went to the gym.

My Fitbit doesn't actually register any of the exercise I do at the gym. Which is a major bug. Because one of the reasons one owns a Fitbit is to bask in the dopamine ping and gloat.

Once home, I watched the original Willie Wonka movie, rendered sublime by Gene Wilder's exceedingly strange, haunted, otherworldly performance:



Sigh.

If only it were that easy.