Anti-Fragile?

Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information

Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.

Jacques Ellul

As regular readers know I am not Ant-fragile. I am destitute. Employers are uninterested in enabling me to remain in place by work. I engaged the City help program last week and now proudly hold a voucher that if a kind company offers me steady stable employment the wages will be partly paid for two months. Wonderful. So what. I cannot even substitute teach! Here the problem is the California idiocy requiring vaccinated staff, students, bedbugs and lice and sanitized textbooks filled with communist and gay ideology. And the racial identification, and sexual orientation of teachers.

And the $72 fingerprint reimbursed after first day of work. If no job why fingerprint?

This morning an interesting article on Populism and the shift globally to ant-Globalism rouzed my ire with the pitch at the end. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-07-08/did-globalization-drive-far-right-electoral-success-european-states-1990-2020

His pitch?

My Plan B Blueprint to Become Anti-fragile

The US and US dollar are clearly deteriorating. And there is a lot of danger in having too much exposure to a crumbling empire.

That is why I have a Plan B, which has allowed me to:

• Cut my tax rate to 4%

• Use that savings to invest in real assets, precious metals, and crypto

• Gain a second residency and apply for a second passport

• Diversify internationally

The above Phyance writer is deluded. Most investors are. Money is manna. Jack Benny in his skit as a miser is their idol. A real asset is a human being.

I read finance papers out of habit. I have only me to invest in. I am pleased really with the rate of return as my investment has grown larger than the sum invested in thinking and reading. Give me 5, I’m still alive, no money, no injection, so little necessary, even in the scope of the monetary, to keep on thinking and talking about what I read and no asset manager takes anything off the top. Of course in re-balancing my book portfolio I find no takers. My used philosophy books though unmarked are read and not pristine. My novels from unpopular and known writers hold no interest. Even my more mainstream books hold no interest-gardening books, large bird books, small bird books, political science and lit crit, Jung, no buyers on or off line.

“The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief.” Ellul

If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.

Ellul

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity