Nowadays, you read reports about how membership in the old timey fraternal organizations has and is experiencing a massive decline–I expect helped to be killed off by the alternatives of TV and the Internet, and a much less face-to-face society.

Now, well, it seems to me that many, perhaps most people–especially young people–are just floundering, without a clear direction, or a goal to life, something worthwhile to commit to besides the acquisition of more things or money, to Video Games, or to TikToks.

In our era of Cell Phones we’re mostly looking down at our phones, not at other people, forward, or up at the sky or stars.

What did people do in the “Old days” for entertainment?

Well, from what I’ve read, there was farming–a lot of farming, their were lots of card games, board games, attending church and long sermons, visiting relatives, friends and neighbors, get togethers and parties, a lot of fraternal organizations to join and participate in, horse races, hunting and fishing, horseback riding–and remember getting from here to there consumed an awful lot of time.

It was all much more face-to-face, and people oriented.

So, people’s lives were filled up with a lot of things to do, just different things to do than today, a lot of those “old timey” things were done outside, and the pace of life was much slower.

Medical care was, of course, much more primitive, and life expectancies a lot shorter than they are today.

Even given that, though, was it a better, grounded, ultimately a more satisfying life?

You be the judge.

You could also factor in today’s anti-male bias against an active, traditional outdoor “man’s life” as being, what? old fashioned, uncouth?

Looking for something to read, I pulled a reprint of the first 1911 “Boy Scout Handbook” from my Library shelves.

Just reading the preface–with its straightforward, upright, and earnest tone– demonstrated, yet again, how far we have fallen; how far today’s mindsets are from those of 1911.

(You could argue that it was all pretense, and that the organization contained the seeds of it’s corruption from it’s inception–the fine words a facade–but I believe that the people who wrote the Preface believed in, and meant what they wrote.)

The Boy Scouts–which, aspired to, and starting in 1911, apparently very successfully played a major and very positive role in forming the character, knowledge, and experience base of several generations of boys and, as well, the character of America–was an obvious target of the Left, and the LGBTQXYZ movement, which have subverted, and basically destroyed it.

It started off well, but, over the decades–especially the last couple of decades–it became increasingly corrupted, and it just lost it’s way.

Another rather important support deliberately knocked out from under the foundations of the United States.

What a shame!

Yes, I though it extremely odd that that person didn’t see Feynman as Jewish-looking or Jewish-sounding. Perhaps he meant he didn’t look or sound like Alec Guiness in Oliver Twist as Fagin?

That’s pretty funny. I guess he looked and acted no more Jewish than, say, Mel Brooks. Wait, Mel Brooks is Jewish? Who would have guessed it?

Also Paul Samuelson to MIT instead of Harvard in 1940. From Wiki:

Samuelson’s biographer argues that a central reason for Samuelson’s move from Harvard to MIT was the anti-Semitism that was famously widespread at Harvard at the time. In a 1989 letter to his friend Henry Rosovsky, Samuelson blamed anti-Semitism in Harvard economics above all on chair Harold Burbank, as well as on Edward Chamberlin, John H. Williams, John D. Black, and Leonard Crum.

And anti-Semitism has returned to Harvard under the guise of “diversity.” I saw statistics showing that the Jewish share of students went from 20-25% 50 years ago to 7% now, while at Brown and Cornell the shares are still up in the 20-25% range.