Trouble is, such observations are very subjective.
I feel a bit the same about people’s behavior though.
I notice people (here in France) seem to have less sense of humor, less patience, are more irritable & less logical. It’s impossible to know whether that’s just a subjective impression & if it’s true...what explains it? Maybe people are scared of Putin - the media never stops going on about him. Maybe people are uneasy about the globalist trap closing in, even if they’re not fully aware. To my mind, we’re seeing bureaucrats here who are increasingly authoritarian; private companies too. The banks try to force us to give more & more intimate details of our life - saying the state orders them to « know their customers ».
LOTS of things for people to be uneasy about even if they are not aware of the WEF-WHO-CCP agenda.
Naomi, I would never try to protect the vaccine or defend government that has gone off the rails, but the elephant in the room is the smart phone. We have gone from 3 channel network TV to 24 hour news cycle cable television to 1000 minutes a day news and opinion in our hand. Our Landline was disconnected because as of last year, telephone companies were no longer required to maintain copper lines. Our cable is gone because the business model doesnt work any, so we stream. However, streaming to the tv is so unreliable my wife watches tv on her phone. How ironic that they have us right where they want us, in the palm of their hand. Is my most damaging addiction alcohol or the machine in my hands? Hands down it is the phone. This is the reason people have lost communication skills and ability to concentrate. I'm sure all the other pollutants affect us as well, especially the medicinal ones, but the cell phone might be the most effective means to control us completely.
Congress passed a law (9 +- years ago) against the Public Schools offering students high sugar /high fat snacks. This was to "cure" obesity Epidemic. Meanwhile, a different law makes sure the Schools get "free" 5 pound blocks of processed American Cheese by the pallet load. This is the Milk lobby in action. The schools melt this milk fat down and pour it over NACHO chips. In well to do areas Children do not ride the orange school busses; they arrive by their parents SUV following a trip through the Dunkin Donuts DRIVE THRU. But YES, the boob tube phones get all the attention while real life passes by. Real conversations are very rare. Soon we will all be getting our info spoon fed by A. I. bots.
This is a fine letter. I have shared it widely with others who are seeing the same problems you describe. The inability of people to regulate their emotions has been deteriorating for a very long time. Social skills, good manners, the very idea of graciousness, has either been neglected or held in contempt by a generation whose philosophy has been based on "sex, drugs, and rock n' roll." This situation has been exacerbated by the lockdowns and masking of the pandemic. However, it was in play long before the turn of the 21st century. No doubt television played a major roll, as Neil Postman has pointed out so well. But now we have "the Device." The effect of the proliferation of screens in our daily lives is not yet completely understood. It will take time to reveal their full impact. But it is increasingly obvious that people feel entitled to disgorge their emotions with little or no provocation.
Evidence for this was driven home when I recently boarded the ferry from San Juan Island to go to the mainland. I have been commuting by ferry to the island for over 18 years. So I was surprised by a new public service announcement informing passengers that threatening behavior, aggression, or vulgar language directed at ferry employees or other travelers would result in denial of future use of the service. That such a warning has to be SAID at the beginning of every sailing speaks volumes about the deterioration of our social/emotional landscape. Civility now has to be mandated. The question remains how do we reestablish decency in such an abrasive environment?
I recently established a Substack page where I have posted three essays. I posit that the inability to read, write, think and do math is directly attributable to age segregated public schools. This is equally true of our youths emotional dis-regulation. Schools are simply not a healthy place to send children. I am particularly close to a family who have never sent their three children to school. When they are out in public complete strangers ask the father if his children are home schooled. When he answers the affirmative and inquires how they guessed, the response is always, "They are so polite."
If we are to defend the values of Western Civilization we need to pay attention to how it is being deliberately undermined. Your letter is a flag warning us of where this is leading. I'm adding my voice to yours. Please feel look up my work at Substack.com Lisa V. Sadler. I would welcome your comments and insights.
Thank you Dr. Wolf: I now have one more cultured answer to a meltdown: "It looks like your prefrontal cortices are not modulating your impulses normally."
Thank you for your informative post. I guess I just never thought about this issue. I can list many childless people in my life who have impacted me in a positive way. It is sad that some must find someone else to blame for the failures of our society. We all must look in the mirror to determine our failures.
Naomi . . . . I had no idea you were part Romanian! I just gave a lecture about a Romanian postage stamp from 1953 featuring youth flying large balsa and tissue paper gliders (my area of expertise). Fanatics with arcane knowledge are fascinating. The world is blessed with many of them. They are everywhere. You usually won't find them glued to a cell phone screen.
[Correction: I thought I was reading an account by the traveling German doctor, not the city-expat tourist from upstate, Dr. Wolf. I will leave as is, but apologies for my misunderstanding.]
Welcome to New Normal New York. The city has been fully domesticated, and all of its once phenomenal wilderness squeezed out. Restaurant kitchens close at 10, bars close at midnight & the only dance clubs for white people are trans-woke EDM circle jerks (pardon the hyperbolic image.)
The transformation has been going on in earnest since 9/12/2001. Lockdowns were the nail in the coffin for unfashionable logic and unfetter thought.
You didn't also observe (in writing) that everyone is stoned on unregulated weed here. You can smell it everywhere. I speak as a lifelong stoner, without the desire to censure the proliferation of pot. Life in NYC has become about coping in personally isolated ways & working hard to maintain a tolerable media-bubble that avoids social sanction and economic ostricization. Pot used to be a shared experience; now it is taken like a pill prescription.
Dissent and the kind of social intellecting that was once common to NYC culture is veritably extinct. What artists and intellectuals remain, by and large, drink the kool-aid. Though upon intimate solidarity found one can find murmurs of discontent about woke platitudes and cancel culture. People who make things are indeed tired of it, but good luck getting them to say it out loud.
You also failed to mention the transformation of the NYTimes which has gone full-blown thought-police rag. It doesn't only tell you what to believe and where the strict line of taboo is drawn in the sand, but it is explicit about how to feel about all issues so that you can be sure to conform & not step out of line around approved conformity. Being reflexively labelled as a conspiracy theorist or a science denier is feared as much as being cancelled.
People don't inquire deeply with others, because the threat of having to cope with a Trump-tolerant person - an enemy in our midst & the ones thought to be causing all this disintegration - is too stressful a prospect for civil interaction to endure in the current fashion.
RFK Jr. supporters occupy the same social status as Jehovah's Witnesses & Hare Krishna's in NY these days.
But let's not spend too much time demonizing NYC, here. It's not like Germany hasn't been host to CJ Hopkins' experience. Are RFK Jr.'s books available on the shelves in Berlin's independent bookstores? Cuz they aren't in NYC either.
The primary downtown culprit, McNally Jackson Independent books, recently upgraded their location from Nolita on Prince to central Soho upon being invited into McKenzie Bezo's curated-occupant building by West Broadway, presumably as a reward for their strict woke-supremacy enforcement. You won't find Dr. Nehls nor Whitney Webb on the shelves there. I'll bet you can't even find Jordan Peterson.
As for the cops and the erosion of the 4th Amendment, that became immanently obvious during Occupy. They've been saying, "yeah, so sue the city if you have a problem with us," since Bloomberg normalized Guiliani's thuggish policies and gave them a corporate gloss & arsenals of Stingray cell-tower emulators. I mean, the city was run for 12 years by a literal technocrat billionaire. Did you see the giant vault doors at all the tunnel entrances? Yeah, they're not there for flood mitigation.
The 4th Amendment hasn't been in force in the US since Monika Lewinsky's whole private computer was entered into evidence with a single congressional warrant. It's as useless as Julian Assange's 1st Amendment. The gloves came off at the inflection point created by Snowden's advent. Now no abuse of power is too bold - though I will admit that social media nudging & NDA hamstringing seem to be more subtle & practical methods of coercion than direct threats, beatings and assassinations, so the latter are not much in evidence.
If you can give a person a promotion or their family member debilitating chronic disease, their political & economic threat risk is effectively neutralized for life. Likewise with student debt.
In short, the city has been fully transformed from Liberal to NeoLiberal quite successfully. Any middle class that wishes to survive here must be in full compliance or remain silent, if they wish to keep the paychecks rolling in. And forget about protecting your children from the Blob unless you are mega-wealthy.
All the non-default-mode thinkers left over the last 4 years. (I've stuck around as a masochistic exercise in bah-humbugism, habit, and the residue of neighborhood community that remains in tiny islands around the city, enabled by a low-impact career in the arts.) You don't need mRNA explanations to account for the total arrest of the hippocampus here, though I'm sure they don't hurt in the drive toward universal-enough zombification.
It's a place ripe for conquest, and you know Blackrock & their ilk is chomping at the bit for the next federally-declared emergencies to swallow up all the remaining real estate like they have attempted in Lahaina & elsewhere. Even New Haven CT real estate is getting swallowed up by Larry Fink.
Anyway, sorry that your idealized bohemia has been so scrubbed & sanitized. My recommendation is to find some good clean food (still excellent but expensive), keep taking anthropological 1st person notes, and enjoy the rest of your trip. Find the regulated weed shops, and enjoy blowing smoke in the vicinity of the loitering cops who don't want to be there anymore than you want them to be, except for the incentive of their overtime pay. That moment of Drug-War-Transcendance is about as much progress as you'll find around here, at least until the fluoride in the municipal water is replaced by trace lithium & ivermectin.
The kind of parenting you describe is too common (I see it in Vancouver too), but there are also a lot of parents pushing back against this stuff ... I see the babies and toddlers locked away in strollers by disengaged mothers (more often nannies), but I also see lots of parents walking around, phone free, with their kids strapped to their chest (I didn't use a stroller for a year). There are the junk-food parents, but there are also lots of parents who limit their children's access to processed foods and refined sugar. I suspect New York is an extreme case. There are the moms glued to their phones at toddler-and-caregiver hangouts and playgrounds, but there are also moms who make mom-friends. Many are becoming more autistic, but many are also waking up. Thank you for the beautiful writing.
Those who don’t want to have children, should not. It is a very difficult and incredibly important endeavor that requires the ability to prepare a human being to successfully leave you. That being said, I don’t recall childless people being blamed for the failings of wokeness or Western Civilization’s collapse. I blame it on the narcissistic individuals who can’t see beyond the ends of their noses. Everything is about them, even their children. To the point that the child is merely an extension of themselves. They follow all the “social justice” issues because it makes the feel good about themselves. It serves them. Thanks for responding.
Lawful versus legal explanation:
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/edW5VCcWhJb
Trouble is, such observations are very subjective.
I feel a bit the same about people’s behavior though.
I notice people (here in France) seem to have less sense of humor, less patience, are more irritable & less logical. It’s impossible to know whether that’s just a subjective impression & if it’s true...what explains it? Maybe people are scared of Putin - the media never stops going on about him. Maybe people are uneasy about the globalist trap closing in, even if they’re not fully aware. To my mind, we’re seeing bureaucrats here who are increasingly authoritarian; private companies too. The banks try to force us to give more & more intimate details of our life - saying the state orders them to « know their customers ».
LOTS of things for people to be uneasy about even if they are not aware of the WEF-WHO-CCP agenda.
Robert Malone - who in my view has brought a lot of important information to light - recently said the globalists are a « worthy enemy ».
Have to strongly disagree.
They are evil, criminal, tyrannical.
Nothing «worthy» about Gates, Bourla, Von der Leyen, Lagarde, Macron, Trudeau, Biden....
Nothing at all.
Naomi, I would never try to protect the vaccine or defend government that has gone off the rails, but the elephant in the room is the smart phone. We have gone from 3 channel network TV to 24 hour news cycle cable television to 1000 minutes a day news and opinion in our hand. Our Landline was disconnected because as of last year, telephone companies were no longer required to maintain copper lines. Our cable is gone because the business model doesnt work any, so we stream. However, streaming to the tv is so unreliable my wife watches tv on her phone. How ironic that they have us right where they want us, in the palm of their hand. Is my most damaging addiction alcohol or the machine in my hands? Hands down it is the phone. This is the reason people have lost communication skills and ability to concentrate. I'm sure all the other pollutants affect us as well, especially the medicinal ones, but the cell phone might be the most effective means to control us completely.
Congress passed a law (9 +- years ago) against the Public Schools offering students high sugar /high fat snacks. This was to "cure" obesity Epidemic. Meanwhile, a different law makes sure the Schools get "free" 5 pound blocks of processed American Cheese by the pallet load. This is the Milk lobby in action. The schools melt this milk fat down and pour it over NACHO chips. In well to do areas Children do not ride the orange school busses; they arrive by their parents SUV following a trip through the Dunkin Donuts DRIVE THRU. But YES, the boob tube phones get all the attention while real life passes by. Real conversations are very rare. Soon we will all be getting our info spoon fed by A. I. bots.
Dear Dr. Naomi Wolf,
This is a fine letter. I have shared it widely with others who are seeing the same problems you describe. The inability of people to regulate their emotions has been deteriorating for a very long time. Social skills, good manners, the very idea of graciousness, has either been neglected or held in contempt by a generation whose philosophy has been based on "sex, drugs, and rock n' roll." This situation has been exacerbated by the lockdowns and masking of the pandemic. However, it was in play long before the turn of the 21st century. No doubt television played a major roll, as Neil Postman has pointed out so well. But now we have "the Device." The effect of the proliferation of screens in our daily lives is not yet completely understood. It will take time to reveal their full impact. But it is increasingly obvious that people feel entitled to disgorge their emotions with little or no provocation.
Evidence for this was driven home when I recently boarded the ferry from San Juan Island to go to the mainland. I have been commuting by ferry to the island for over 18 years. So I was surprised by a new public service announcement informing passengers that threatening behavior, aggression, or vulgar language directed at ferry employees or other travelers would result in denial of future use of the service. That such a warning has to be SAID at the beginning of every sailing speaks volumes about the deterioration of our social/emotional landscape. Civility now has to be mandated. The question remains how do we reestablish decency in such an abrasive environment?
I recently established a Substack page where I have posted three essays. I posit that the inability to read, write, think and do math is directly attributable to age segregated public schools. This is equally true of our youths emotional dis-regulation. Schools are simply not a healthy place to send children. I am particularly close to a family who have never sent their three children to school. When they are out in public complete strangers ask the father if his children are home schooled. When he answers the affirmative and inquires how they guessed, the response is always, "They are so polite."
If we are to defend the values of Western Civilization we need to pay attention to how it is being deliberately undermined. Your letter is a flag warning us of where this is leading. I'm adding my voice to yours. Please feel look up my work at Substack.com Lisa V. Sadler. I would welcome your comments and insights.
Bad times indeed..
Here's a site expounding current global events in the light of bible prophecy.. To understand more, pls visit 👇 https://bibleprophecyinaction.blogspot.com/
Thank you Dr. Wolf: I now have one more cultured answer to a meltdown: "It looks like your prefrontal cortices are not modulating your impulses normally."
Thank God for all those whose cortices are.
Dear Scriber,
Thank you for your informative post. I guess I just never thought about this issue. I can list many childless people in my life who have impacted me in a positive way. It is sad that some must find someone else to blame for the failures of our society. We all must look in the mirror to determine our failures.
No… only in the minds of pedophiles
Naomi . . . . I had no idea you were part Romanian! I just gave a lecture about a Romanian postage stamp from 1953 featuring youth flying large balsa and tissue paper gliders (my area of expertise). Fanatics with arcane knowledge are fascinating. The world is blessed with many of them. They are everywhere. You usually won't find them glued to a cell phone screen.
Lovely reflections, Dr. Nehls.
[Correction: I thought I was reading an account by the traveling German doctor, not the city-expat tourist from upstate, Dr. Wolf. I will leave as is, but apologies for my misunderstanding.]
Welcome to New Normal New York. The city has been fully domesticated, and all of its once phenomenal wilderness squeezed out. Restaurant kitchens close at 10, bars close at midnight & the only dance clubs for white people are trans-woke EDM circle jerks (pardon the hyperbolic image.)
The transformation has been going on in earnest since 9/12/2001. Lockdowns were the nail in the coffin for unfashionable logic and unfetter thought.
You didn't also observe (in writing) that everyone is stoned on unregulated weed here. You can smell it everywhere. I speak as a lifelong stoner, without the desire to censure the proliferation of pot. Life in NYC has become about coping in personally isolated ways & working hard to maintain a tolerable media-bubble that avoids social sanction and economic ostricization. Pot used to be a shared experience; now it is taken like a pill prescription.
Dissent and the kind of social intellecting that was once common to NYC culture is veritably extinct. What artists and intellectuals remain, by and large, drink the kool-aid. Though upon intimate solidarity found one can find murmurs of discontent about woke platitudes and cancel culture. People who make things are indeed tired of it, but good luck getting them to say it out loud.
You also failed to mention the transformation of the NYTimes which has gone full-blown thought-police rag. It doesn't only tell you what to believe and where the strict line of taboo is drawn in the sand, but it is explicit about how to feel about all issues so that you can be sure to conform & not step out of line around approved conformity. Being reflexively labelled as a conspiracy theorist or a science denier is feared as much as being cancelled.
People don't inquire deeply with others, because the threat of having to cope with a Trump-tolerant person - an enemy in our midst & the ones thought to be causing all this disintegration - is too stressful a prospect for civil interaction to endure in the current fashion.
RFK Jr. supporters occupy the same social status as Jehovah's Witnesses & Hare Krishna's in NY these days.
But let's not spend too much time demonizing NYC, here. It's not like Germany hasn't been host to CJ Hopkins' experience. Are RFK Jr.'s books available on the shelves in Berlin's independent bookstores? Cuz they aren't in NYC either.
The primary downtown culprit, McNally Jackson Independent books, recently upgraded their location from Nolita on Prince to central Soho upon being invited into McKenzie Bezo's curated-occupant building by West Broadway, presumably as a reward for their strict woke-supremacy enforcement. You won't find Dr. Nehls nor Whitney Webb on the shelves there. I'll bet you can't even find Jordan Peterson.
As for the cops and the erosion of the 4th Amendment, that became immanently obvious during Occupy. They've been saying, "yeah, so sue the city if you have a problem with us," since Bloomberg normalized Guiliani's thuggish policies and gave them a corporate gloss & arsenals of Stingray cell-tower emulators. I mean, the city was run for 12 years by a literal technocrat billionaire. Did you see the giant vault doors at all the tunnel entrances? Yeah, they're not there for flood mitigation.
The 4th Amendment hasn't been in force in the US since Monika Lewinsky's whole private computer was entered into evidence with a single congressional warrant. It's as useless as Julian Assange's 1st Amendment. The gloves came off at the inflection point created by Snowden's advent. Now no abuse of power is too bold - though I will admit that social media nudging & NDA hamstringing seem to be more subtle & practical methods of coercion than direct threats, beatings and assassinations, so the latter are not much in evidence.
If you can give a person a promotion or their family member debilitating chronic disease, their political & economic threat risk is effectively neutralized for life. Likewise with student debt.
In short, the city has been fully transformed from Liberal to NeoLiberal quite successfully. Any middle class that wishes to survive here must be in full compliance or remain silent, if they wish to keep the paychecks rolling in. And forget about protecting your children from the Blob unless you are mega-wealthy.
All the non-default-mode thinkers left over the last 4 years. (I've stuck around as a masochistic exercise in bah-humbugism, habit, and the residue of neighborhood community that remains in tiny islands around the city, enabled by a low-impact career in the arts.) You don't need mRNA explanations to account for the total arrest of the hippocampus here, though I'm sure they don't hurt in the drive toward universal-enough zombification.
It's a place ripe for conquest, and you know Blackrock & their ilk is chomping at the bit for the next federally-declared emergencies to swallow up all the remaining real estate like they have attempted in Lahaina & elsewhere. Even New Haven CT real estate is getting swallowed up by Larry Fink.
Anyway, sorry that your idealized bohemia has been so scrubbed & sanitized. My recommendation is to find some good clean food (still excellent but expensive), keep taking anthropological 1st person notes, and enjoy the rest of your trip. Find the regulated weed shops, and enjoy blowing smoke in the vicinity of the loitering cops who don't want to be there anymore than you want them to be, except for the incentive of their overtime pay. That moment of Drug-War-Transcendance is about as much progress as you'll find around here, at least until the fluoride in the municipal water is replaced by trace lithium & ivermectin.
Godspeed.
The kind of parenting you describe is too common (I see it in Vancouver too), but there are also a lot of parents pushing back against this stuff ... I see the babies and toddlers locked away in strollers by disengaged mothers (more often nannies), but I also see lots of parents walking around, phone free, with their kids strapped to their chest (I didn't use a stroller for a year). There are the junk-food parents, but there are also lots of parents who limit their children's access to processed foods and refined sugar. I suspect New York is an extreme case. There are the moms glued to their phones at toddler-and-caregiver hangouts and playgrounds, but there are also moms who make mom-friends. Many are becoming more autistic, but many are also waking up. Thank you for the beautiful writing.
Those who don’t want to have children, should not. It is a very difficult and incredibly important endeavor that requires the ability to prepare a human being to successfully leave you. That being said, I don’t recall childless people being blamed for the failings of wokeness or Western Civilization’s collapse. I blame it on the narcissistic individuals who can’t see beyond the ends of their noses. Everything is about them, even their children. To the point that the child is merely an extension of themselves. They follow all the “social justice” issues because it makes the feel good about themselves. It serves them. Thanks for responding.
many people in northeast also carrying undiagnosed neuro psych issues from tick borne exposures/infections
The fax sounds are probably for a TTD machine.