In stock market investing, you’re supposed to be pessimistic when everyone else is optimistic, and optimistic when everyone else is pessimistic. Warren Buffett famously put it this way: “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.”
The reason the aforecited principle applies well in stock market investing is that the herd instinct makes people buy or sell stocks because other people are buying or selling. The result is that the stocks get over-sold or over-bought, thereby driving their price too low or too high in relation to their real indicators of value – mainly their current and future profits.
Eventually, the herd drives the stock so high or so low that even dedicated herders cannot fail to miss the fact that the stock is mispriced in relation to objective value indicators. At that point, they finally change direction – they start buying while the herd is still selling, or vice versa – and the price trend reverses. The herd reverses direction, and stampedes off the other way. You can make money by being contrary to the herd. Be a bull when they’re a bear, and vice versa.
So, does the same principle apply in evaluating the state of a culture? Has the assessment of American culture become so bearish that it is surely too much so?
No. One of our formerly great universities teaches us this week that we are still headed down.
Stanford announced that “American” is hate speech. That’s because it ignores the part of the Western Hemisphere that is outside the boundaries (I’ll avoid the hateful, racist, anachronistic word “borders”) of the United States. It effectively eliminates Mexico, which after all is in América del norte. And Brazil, which is in América do Sul.
Baloney. The fact that people of the United States refer to themselves as “Americans” (and so does the rest of the world) does not mean that they are the only Americans. The people of Germany and elsewhere sometimes refer to Germans as Europeans, and they indisputably are. That doesn’t mean anyone thinks the French and Spanish are not.
The worst that can be said about Americans and the rest of the world refering to people of the United States as “Americans” is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s imprecise. It fails to specify which Americans are being referenced. But Stanford objects to “American” not on the grounds that it is imprecise, but on the grounds that it’s racist. It’s a dig at all the Americans who are in Latin America and, for that matter, Canada too.
When I call myself an American, the person I’m speaking with is free to ask, “¿Qué país de América?” In my many travels, that has happened only once. It was from a young French woman (who was obviously hitting on me, as they usually do).
That one of our formerly greatest universities would reach so deep to find fault – of the vile racist kind! – with an innocuous and universal word that they and their countrymen and the rest of the world have innocently used for centuries to describe citizens of that country, is stunning.
We’re still sinking.
It’s worth noting why. The people who are putatively in charge of Stanford are not as stupid as this example seems to suggest. The problem is that all American institutions of any size now have uber-woke diversity czars, who are indeed stupid and also anti-American. The bosses are cowed by these stupid anti-Americans for fear of being called racist. The net result is that the smartest people at the institution are ruled by the stupidist.
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Not only America, my friend. It is a malaise that has afflicted every part of the putative “West.” I believe it began following, and largely as a result of the World War(s), in which the best of Western manhood was killed off in an internecine killfest. This left a population that was all too willing to be cowed by members of the so-called Third World and traitors in its midst who were happy to use those populations as a bludgeon to destroy what was left. There is a parallel between the dismantlement of the British Empire and the current dismantlement of the American one. Enemies without were invited in and once entrance was granted, the inevitable destruction began. If God sees fit to preserve what is left, then traditional America has a chance to overcome its enemies and survive. If, however, the time has come for the rise of the Beast and Antichrist, then there is no hope save hope in Jesus and a better world to come, a world without end, Amen.
So I guess Amerigo Vespucci has joined Columbus as EEEVIL, as well? These DIE morons are nothing more than the commissars or gauleiters for the totalitarian society they crave.
The uber woke diversity czars and the “professors” of gender and Black studies etc. Read some of the statements from these people, indeed they are not only stupid but ignorant and narrow minded, ignoring or denying history. That they all get paid enormous salaries to spout this destructive misinformation is bad, that they force feed it into the minds of America’s youth is worse.
Find what’s sacred and yoke it with stigma. Or, as Alinsky put it “Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”
The near bottom will happen when most Americans can’t get enough food to eat, are forced to share their houses or apartments with others, when their income is taxed to the point of not being able to afford the things they want, when the government tells them when they can or can’t see medical professionals and other forms of a culture that they invited by not appreciating the freedoms they were given by their forefathers and allowing the bloodless takeover of their homeland by Marxist fascists. And unlike the stock market at the bottom of a bear market when investors can turn it around, the probability of turning America around will be questionable.
I agree that we’ve not hit bottom yet, not by a long shot. My supporting anecdote: Last night casually watching the New Year’s Eve festivities on TV with my wife, on came a commercial for the Hulu platform, advertising an upcoming “original 6 part series”, “The 1619 Project” By Nicole Hannah Jones, who’s become fabulously rich by peddling her slander about the founding of the United States. This is the dreck with which the young generation of Americans is being indoctrinated.
The Church is dominated by homosexuals, the entertainment industry by pedophiles, the government-educational complex by Marxists, the post-pandemic medical field by mindless cowards and conformists, the Administration by cultural assassins, and the New World Order intelligentsia by the likes of Bill Gates. Meanwhile, Putin and Ukraine’s Mr. Green T are engaged in what Don Surber calls “symbiotic Satanism,” a phrase that aptly embraces everything mentioned previously. Ring in the New Year; say goodbye to Natural Law and the Rule of Law in general, family, citizenship with its implied promise of rights and protections, independence of almost every kind, and the human dignity that comes with a self-examined life. But let your heart not be troubled: rock bottom is yet to come.
Diversity Officer = Political Officer, it’s what Fascists/Communists do, they’re an important component to the Military. West Point and the Air Force Academies have been training such for a while now as well as cow-towing to the Atheist groups eliminating any traditions remotely influenced with religion. Mostly with the Blessings and Guidance of the Lawyers Guild.
Kowtowing.
Reading an article in the January, 1952 Readers Digest by Charles Tobey, a then senator from New Hampshire, he asks, “are we rent by bigotry and political intrigue?…..Have we established justice when day in and day out criminals go unpunished and honest men suffer?” The rest Tobey’s analysis is discouraging as much as we see today. Seventy One years later we still need the words of Him with whom we have to do! He said many things to the hearer and reader including, “I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
Harvard University is using grade inflation.. everyone gets a useless ~ * A *. = participation trophy.. Yale and other elites , too ?
The average GPA at Harvard is now 3.8 … out of 4.0, according Aden Barton, Crimson Opinion Writer..
If my geography is correct, only the United States of America uses the name “America” among all of the countries inhabiting the Americas … South America, Central America, North America.
Since I cannot think of any adjectives for national citizens from the words “United” and “States” then it only makes sense that U.S. citizens utilize and proudly describe themselves as Americans.
Just as a thought … could District of Columbia residents call themselves Colombians?!?
“America … F**k Yeah!”
Cram it … Stanford.
A Damn Happy and Bad Ass American New Year to all … especially the invertebrates at Stanford!
Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone series is a poignant parable for the story of contemporary “Americans” in “America” — men and women obstinately persisting in a way of life carved out for them by their ancestors, knowing that they’ll be the last generation to do so. It’s an old human story, offering salvation solely in the act of going down with your boots on.
As Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye observed, the central story of all literature is the loss and/or regaining of one’s identity.