AC Blog

I’ve always been annoyed when people younger than I identify “the sixties” with the stupid memes of Nehru jackets and bell-bottom jeans, etc. What I remember was that Time, Inc., coined the terms “hippies” and “flower children” to fabricate News out of them, as if they were real movements on a demographically significant scale. These times were meaningful to us boomers — because we lived them, not because of the labels and marketing BS. Remember movies like “The Trip” and “Beach Blanket Bingo”? This crap was exploitation of us, not something we created, and most of us found it repulsive. Sure, “Easy Rider” was reflective of the age, but Peter Fonda wasn’t a boomer (1940).

So, finally, someone has pointed out the obvious: young people don’t create the society they’re living in — they consume and respond to the world they grow up in. So the sixties, revolutions and tacky “modernism” and all, was mainly the product of the 20’s and 30’s (and some 40’s). In other words the “establishment” that a few of us were trying to get away from.

New Yorker Article

The subtler values of the sixties, represented by a very tiny percentage of us, are of course quite real, and are probably not very different than the visionary values of any generation. Laudable and insightful and cosmic, perhaps, but it doesn’t look like many of these dreams became real in the next generations. Some progress seems to have been made, but the orange idiot is himself a baby boomer (1946) bent on undoing as much as possible, right back to the 50’s, before our generation fades into oblivion and facile stereotypes.

Someone recently referred to Numerology as a branch of mathematics. I wouldn’t call it that, but it’s definitely in there with other number recreations. And yes, Pythagorus, like others fond of playing with numbers and geometry and such, loved finding the correlations between unrelated things, tying them together with formulae.

I haven’t found any credible evidence of numerology, but there is one phenomenon to keep in mind with this kind of exploration — the laws of probability and statistics apply in often surprising ways. For example, the odds of two people in a group of 57 or more having the same birthday are better than 99%. (Google “birthday paradox” for the math behind that.) Or the odds of a (truly unrigged random) penny coming up heads, after having just come up heads 100 times in a row, are 50:50. (The previous heads have no influence over the future.)