The Types of Women You'll Meet in Northeast PA

Have you wondered why you sit at the bar all night while the men around seem oblivious to your presence? You can blame the following types of women for discouraging NEPA men from approaching you.

1. Vegan Girl - Her face is a work of art (classical art not modern art). She's short and thin but a little curvy. She likes organic food and is a vegan. She shows all the signs of liking you as she gives you undying eye contact, speaks to you in a girly, high pitched voice, and laughs at your otherwise unfunny jokes. She gives you her number. You text her a day later and receive no reply. Several days later she sends a text message stating that she's been with her boyfriend since age twelve and that she's happy with the relationship.

2. Soldier's Unhappy Girlfriend - She's of average height and body weight. She usually has wide hips, small breasts, and big eyes. Her facial bones are more pronounced than Vegan Girl's, making her appear less elegant, but she compensates for it with bigger eyes and an overall high estrogen look. She's not happy with her soldier boy. He's short and stupid, but his undaunted persistence has netted him her companionship. She flirts with you, hoping that you'll give her an excuse to run away from him, but his persistent texts police her conscience, and she returns back to him with an air of moral sanctimony.

3. Cat Lady in Training - She's not old enough to be a cat lady yet, but she's on her way. She's pretty--sometimes so pretty that she gets hundreds of likes on Facebook. In her photos she never appears with a guy, but in nearly every one cats and dogs flank her on all sides. Her looks vary greatly. She may be thin with big beautiful eyes or have sexy curves with average-sized eyes. She can be tall, average in height, or a little short. But she's always single.

4. Disney Princess - She has pale skin, big sparkling eyes, and a V-shaped torso with wider shoulders than average. She often has big boobs, though not in every case. She's average to short in height. Overall she's quite attractive, but conversing with her can be quite difficult because unless you're interested in the Disney movies she watched as a little girl, you'll strain to find things to talk about.

5. Hypergamizing Latina - She's Hispanic. She has a beautifully crafted face and an hour glass figure. She has a cosmopolitan sense of sophistication from the city whence she came. In spite of her sophisticated ways, she prefers the typical NEPA white guy. The reason for this involves her line of descent. Her female Amerindian ancestors survived because they married white Spanish men who provided for their kids. These women must have been more attracted to such men than their fellow Amerindian women. Meanwhile, the Spaniard men who took them as wives probably preferred a white Spanish woman but settled for an Amerindian one because white women were scarce in the Spanish colonies. Therefore, on both sides she's hails from people having genes that disposed them to be attracted to whites, and it's not surprising that she is. It doesn't hurt matters that white skin is still seen as a status symbol in Latin American countries, something to which any woman subject to the forces of hypergamy gravitates. She likes you, but if you're like most white guys, you only want her as a girlfriend and later settle down with a white girl.

6. Zipped Lip Girl - She clams up whenever you're around. She may twist her lip into a grimace like that one gymnast chick of Olympics fame. She never looks you in the eye. Trying to get a word out of her is like pulling Excalibur out of its stone. She often has light skin, dark hair, a fine-featured face, and a flawless complexion. She's thin to average in weight and may have wide shoulders like the Disney Princess type. She can be astonishingly beautiful, but little is known of her life because although she talks heartily to her friends, she's mute in your presence.

Because the guy thinks you're probably one of these six types, he walks past you.

The Ten Worst Places to Work in Northeast PA

Northeast PA is rated one of the worst places to live in the nation, and our previous two posts have documented some of the reasons for this. If NEPA is one of the worst places to live, it must also be one of the worst places to work. Therefore, NEPA's worst employers must be the worst of the worst. Here, we examine Glassdoor, Indeed, and Google Reviews as we plunge into the depths of the NEPA employment world.

10. Telerx "Bleak Obscurity"
Glassdoor Rating 2.6
Reviews: 194
Hanover Twp, PA

Complaints of favoritism, micromanagement, no room for advancement, and the company not valuing employees abound in Glassdoor comments concerning the Hanover Twp and Pittston locations.

9. Highmark Blue Cross "Misery Spreading like Cancer"
Glassdoor Rating 2.3
Reviews: 328
Wilkes-Barre, PA

Blue Cross in Wilkes-Barre was reportedly a nice place to work until Highmark took over and started making life hell employees. Discontentment with Highmark is not unique to workers in the Wilkes-Barre office. Highmark, which has offices nationwide, has an abysmally low Glassdoor rating (2.3) for such a large company (10,000+ employees). None of the top ten worst places to work nationwide have as low rating according to the Huffington Post. In short, Highmark has collected a lot of human misery into one organized unit and extended some of it to Wilkes-Barre.

8. Regional Hospital of Scranton "Houseful of Neglect"
Glassdoor Rating 2.1
Reviews: 5
Scranton, PA

Employees and patients allege it is understaffed. Employees also claim management is incompetent. (Only five reviews appear on Glassdoor which by itself seems insufficient to draw conclusions from, but because 35 reviewers on Google gave the hospital an identical rating of 2.1 out of 5, we concluded that there must be some serious problems with this place.)

7. Paper Magic Group "Going in a Downward Spiral"
Glassdoor Rating 2.0
Reviews: 22
Moosic, PA

Complaints of nepotism, management not valuing employees, bad supervisors, and a general sense of decline can be found on the Glassdoor page along with a rating of 2.0 which is low for a company of this size.

6. Romark Logistics "No Hablo Ingles"
Glassdoor Rating 1.9
Reviews: 8
Hazleton, PA

Complaints of low pay, bad management, and a dearth of English-speakers are to be found on its Glassdoor profile.

5. Kane is Able "Dead End Jobs"
Glassdoor Rating: 1.8
Reviews: 12
Taylor, PA

The name is a play on words which refers to the Bible story of Cain and Able, who are the two sons of Adam and Eve. The story goes that Able, a shepherd, sacrifices his best lamb to God while his brother Cain just throws in some crops. God likes Able's sacrifice better, leading Cain to envy Able so much that he kills him and thus commits the first act of murder. This seems to be a fitting reference because according to reviewers on Glass Door, Kane Is Able offers a lot of dead-end jobs:

"They always find a way to give u no room to advance" (October 2015) and "They don't promote from within" (November 2014) and "[they don't give opportunities to] seasoned employees" (January 2016).

Unlike Highmark, which is based elsewhere but extends its misery to NEPA, Kane is Able is based in NEPA but extends its misery throughout the country, much like the next company on our list. 

4. McCarthy Tire and Auto "All in the Family"
Rating 1.7
Reviews: 9
Wilkes Barre, PA

Friends tell us McCarthy Tire gives deals to insiders and price gouges people who are not in their clique. One Yelp review confirms some of this:

We gave these guys a fair shake by taking our small fleet of vehicles (8) here for almost a year. Several times we had to talk to the manager because of blatant price gouging on the bills for our basic maintenance and today we just received the last one we will ever get from them. We dropped a truck off to get a wheel baring replaced and the inspection done about 3 weeks ago. It took them about 10 days to get it done, which in itself is unacceptable, and now today we received a bill for $3,900. These guys are a complete rip off and I would never recommend them. If I could give them negative stars I would.

According to reviews on Glassdoor McCarthy Tire also treats its employees badly. In typical NEPA fashion, top positions are reportedly filled by incompetent family members who rule over minimum wage peons and abused middle managers:

It is a family business and they keep it that way. Family is loyal but not always in touch with what is actually going on. Communication and attitude are terrible among employees.... Bosses will keep piling on work and treat you like you aren't a human being. Management gives the impression that they actually care and work hard, but it is far from the truth. One minute they will tell you about all the things you are doing wrong, and then the next minute they head to the golf course or go on vacation. They have unrealistic expectations and truly believe everyone under them is replaceable...The pay leaves a lot to be desired: it's as if they think they are still operating in the 1970's... HR is pretty much worthless as they are nothing but liars. (Taken from Glassdoor entries ranging from November 2014 to May 2016).

3. Outsourcing USA "Under a Microscope"
Glassdoor Rating 1.4
Reviews: 16
Dallas, PA

The Times Leader, which also has a low Glassdoor rating, did a puff piece on USA Outsourcing, interviewing CEO Lynn Banta who cited having a law degree from the Delaware Law school, the old name for Widener, which is currently ranked 153 out of 205 accredited law schools in the nation.

Multiple Glassdoor entries claim this allegedly family-run business has low pay, no opportunity for advancement, mandatory overtime, high turnover rates, incompetent managers, and, as one former employee relates, extreme micro-management:

Logging every second of your day was the worst. In most places it's pretty standard to clock in and out for lunches and to tell supervisors when you'd like to take a 15 min break, etc. However here, every minute of your day was tracked. Went to the bathroom for 7 minutes, better be logged as 7 minutes. Had to talk to a supplier for 3 minutes about an ad? Log that 3 minutes. Imagine cataloging every minute of your day for 8+ hours.

2. Jack Williams Tire and Auto "Good Old Fashioned Slavery"
Glassdoor Rating: 1.4
Reviews: 10
Avoca, PA

Complaints of poor communication, lack of planning, low employee morale, high turnover "with most warehouse employees leaving in the first 90 days", micromanagement, having to use "1982 DOS" computer software, charging workers "for everything", poor benefits, no room for advancement, no raises, mandatory overtime, and no set schedule can be found on Glassdoor comments ranging from November 2015 to June 2016.

1. Mid-Atlantic Youth Services "Reign of terror"
Glassdoor Rating 1.3
Reviews: 9
Pittston Township, PA

This for-profit juvenile detention center has an incredibly low average Glassdoor rating. A reign of terror allegedly prevails in the Pittston location that consists of favoritism, mandatory overtime, high turnover, and back-stabbing:

You constantly need to watch everything you say and do because people get fired left and right. You can't trust most of your fellow staff to back you up regarding anything unless you're the "clique" type and all of you regularly hang out outside of work. The rumor mill is awful. The place is a revolving door of staff. Pay is not worth the risk of what can happen to you in this type of place [because many youths are dangerous]. Upper management treats supervisors like kids. Staff are always told to give their opinions about helpful changes but are punished for giving them. You WILL be mandated to stay past your scheduled shift. Staff constantly call off. Staff are not cared about whatsoever unless they have been deemed a favorite. Sups talk crap about staff in front of other staff. No opportunity for advancement. Employee morale is always terrible. You are expected to have no life outside the place. You may need to work doubles on holidays. Backstabbing co-workers are common. And if you try to be fair to the Christian kids, the Muslim kids will get offended and try to get you fired. (Glassdoor Comments range from May 2014 to March 2015.)

Indeed.com also has some additional horror stories concerning Mid Atlantic Youth.

***

Addendum
There is no doubt that many small NEPA busineses are just as bad or worse than the ones presented here, but they fly under the radar because they are small enough that they do not generate enough former employees to substantiate a large number of Glassdoor reviews. For example, TABcom in Hazle Township and LT Verastro in Scranton have low Glassdoor ratings of 1.8 and 2.1 respectively, but each has only five reviews, which do not constitute a high enough number from which to predict that additional reviews would make for a similarly low rating. It could be that those companies were unlucky enough to suffer only bad reviews from disgruntled employees and no good reviews from satisfied ones even though theoretically there may be many satisfied employees. However, once a company starts to receive 9 or 10 reviews and they're all low, something must be amiss. Admittedly, some companies in this list have only a four or five reviews from local locations but corresponding low ratings from other areas solidify the notion that the company has systemic problems wherever it goes. If any of these companies have had serious restructuring since 2015 then we apologize for any reviews made based on past circumstances.

Ten (More) Reasons to Leave NEPA

Eight months ago we published an article called Ten Reasons to Leave NEPA. It was comprehensive, but this list will give the reader a more intimate understanding of the dark social underworld that is Northeast Pennsylvania (NEPA).

10. Demographic Asymmetries
NEPA is place where people go to die -- not live. In other words, if you're young and want to experience life, then go to an area with good-paying jobs and other energetic young people like yourself. But if you're old, have made your money, and want to live in a place with a cheap cost of living where your retirement dollars won't be sapped away to rapidly, then NEPA is ideal.

If you're young but incapable of earning much money because you have low intelligence or a disagreeable personality, then NEPA has plenty of low-paying jobs for you. It also has drug users in need of drugs in case you want to sell drugs to them.

The scarcity of good jobs in NEPA has resulted in several demographic trends. For one, there are very few Asians in NEPA because Asians tend to gravitate to high-paying areas like Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. In NEPA, a few people from India live in Mountain Top but that's about it.

Secondly, blacks and Hispanics have been flocking to NEPA since the late nineties. Many blacks go on welfare and many Hispanics do the cheap warehousing jobs which "Americans won't do" (well, at lease not for NEPA wages of $9-$10/hr).

The typical black or Hispanic family which moves to NEPA for the cheap cost of living doesn't produce quality white collar employees, so employers often recruit high IQ blacks and Hispanics from outside the area to comply with racial quotas. The majority of these talented minority recruits eventually leave the area for the same reasons most of NEPA's whites do: there is more opportunity elsewhere. NEPA is sort of a proving ground for them until they can get to greener pastures, so they are transient figures for the most part. Most of the minorities who come to stay, however, are usually of a low socioeconomic status and are either here for cheap labor or welfare.

Also, a few white trash also move to NEPA. They serve as clients for the black and Hispanic drug dealers of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton. However, there are very few of them compared with the masses of blacks and Hispanics.

The end result of these migrations is that there are four times more white baby boomers in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/ Hazleton (W-B/S) metro area than white millennials as compared to the national average and five times more white baby boomers than white children under ten years of age. In short, the data suggest that NEPA is a terrible place for a white millennial to look for a future spouse and an even worse place to start a family. W-B/S is ranked 374 out of 381 Metro areas with respect to the percentage of white children under the age of five versus the overall population. Only places in Hawaii or southern Texas that are essentially populated by Polynesians and mestizos, respectively, exhibit lower proportions of white kids. 1

Below some graphs illustrate aforesaid data.

In figure 1 we see that in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton/Hazleton (W-B/S) metro area nonwhite males and females far outnumber whites in the 20-29 age bracket aka millennials. In figure 2 we see the reverse: white males and females far outnumber nonwhites in the 65-74 age bracket, aka baby boomers. Figure 3 shows the raw data used in the pie charts and uses a color scale of red being low, yellow being average and green high.. Figure 4 shows the age breakdown of white females in the W-B/S metro area versus the national average using the same color scheme. About 43% of females are white in W-B/S and 70% versus 43% for the rest of the nation. The bottom row shows how W-B/S has only about a third of the number of white females as compared with national average in the millennial age bracket (age 20-29 or the 7th and 8th columns above) but how they are actually over-represented in the baby boomer bracket (age 65-74) to the tune of 118% or 18% higher than the national average. The bottom row is also color coordinated with yellow being at the national average, red below it, and green above it.

A valid critique of looking at only at the Wilkes-Barre / Scranton / Hazleton metro area is that outlying heavily wooded suburbs such as Dallas, Clark's Summit, Mountain Top, etc, are a high percentage white. However, in these places live the sort of snobby, detached elites who own the slave-driving warehouses and dysfunctional family-run businesses that torment the NEPA masses. You're probably not in their clique.

Rural areas around NEPA, which lay farther still outside the suburbs, contain some friendly, albeit simple-minded folks. Lehman and Sweet Valley are most representative of such areas. If you don't mind country living, that is, mounting a quad for a woodland romp on occasion or cutting enormous amounts of grass on your giant lawn or comparing the rack of this year's slaughtered deer to your buddy's, then it's not a bad life. However, if such activities offer you no pleasure then you'll find yourself in bad company.

9. Apathetic and/or Needy Friends
If you're lucky enough to find friends in NEPA, they usually come in two varieties.

"I know that feel bro"

1. The first is the kid you grew up with who's smart but too lazy to embark on a career. He settles for demeaning job in a call center or a retail outlet where he is ruled over by hostile emotional women having IQs one to two standard deviations below his. He lives with his parents and still hangs out with his old high school buddies, playing magic cards and video games while staying in a constant state of failure to launch.
2. The other type of friend is one who tries at life but fails. He's smart -- but not smart enough. He can't keep a job for more than a year. He complains endlessly about his situation but seldom endeavors to improve his employability by acquiring marketable skills. He holds out for the one good job he'll never get. His life is a viscous cycle of disappointments, and he broadcasts his repeat loop of burdens to you endlessly. He uses your shoulder to cry on so often that sooner or later you have to cut ties with him, lest you drown in his tears.

8. Social Anxiety as the Social Norm
Go to any normal location in the United States, and you'll find that many strangers are polite and friendly.

This is not the case in NEPA, where store clerks gruffly scan your items without acknowledging your presence. If you try to introduce yourself to a stranger at a bar, coffee shop, or anywhere else, the person usually will not look you in the eyes or even in the direction of your face and will mumble one-syllable replies. One has to devise a strategy for breaking down this proverbial wall. Thus, even brief social interaction is a chess game to get the other person to start conversing.

In other areas of the US, however, you can simply say hello and the person will respond with like enthusiasm. Social dysfunction is the exception in most places but in NEPA it is the norm.

7. Fear of Social Interaction While Sober

If a friend invites you to his house and you try to strike up a conversation, he'll shove a beer in your hand. If you keep trying to talk, he will keep handing you beers until you're drunk and quiet. Indeed, the inhabitants of NEPA are most gracious with giving out beers. But they will not, and perhaps cannot, give you a moment of sober conversation, which perhaps costs them more on a psychological level.

6. Scarcity of Jobs
One reason why nepotism is so rampant in NEPA is that people's family members often have immediate income needs, so many businesses become family affairs. Perhaps this is a self-reinforcing spiral, with fewer jobs provoking more nepotism resulting in more workplace inefficiency, lower profits, and eventually, even fewer jobs, more nepotism, etc.

As evidence of the scarcity of jobs, if one goes to Indeed.com and searches for jobs within a 25 mile radius of Allentown (which isn't in NEPA but the Lehigh Valley) over twice the number of jobs appear in the search results. One might attempt to chalk this up to differences in population density. However, this is not entirely the cause. There are 608,763 estimated people within a 25 mile radius of Allentown and 320,557 of Wilkes-Barre. As of writing this there are 10,111 jobs on Indeed within a 25 mile radius of Allentown and 5,078 within 25 miles of Wilkes Barre.

For 25 mi of Allentown: 608,763/10,111= 1.66% of the population needed for work.
For 25 mi of Wilkes-Barre 320,557/5,078=1.58% of the population needed for work.
1.66% / 1.58% = 5.1% more jobs for hire in Allentown than NEPA per capita. This is above the 5% margin of error typically used is statistical surveys. Measuring the overall population rather than the working population may seem misleading, since before we stated that NEPA has a high per capita of baby boomers, many of whom are retired. But consider the distribution of these jobs from the following graph:

There are more jobs within the $20k-35k in Allentown but more in the $35-45k in Wilkes-Barre. This probably reflects truck driving jobs so common in NEPA, which pay around 37k per year. Notice also that jobs paying above $45k are more common in Allentown. In sum, the Lehigh Valley overall has more jobs per capita available on Indeed.com and more that pay high wages (above $45k/year).

In any case, NEPA employers often complain that they cannot fill blue collar positions with people who will show up to work, yet they reject most applications of college graduates since most jobs are blue collar. These days it is not uncommon for a college graduate to need any job, including blue collar work, and since backward NEPA employers still think college degrees as rare as they were in the 70s and as such refuse to hire college grads, they will continue to suffer poor workplace performance.

5. Disappointing Dating Scene
In number five of our previous top ten reasons we documented how there is a high ratio of males to females in Luzerne County among millennials, being as high as it is in China, where there is a national crisis of men not being able to find wives. We also alluded to the physical detriments of NEPA women overall, such as a tendency toward poorly developed secondary sexual characteristics. In ten of this list, we proved that the number of millennial white females is very low on a per capita basis in W-B/Scran/Haz, being at only about a third as high as the national average. For every one white female milennial in NEPA there are three in a typical place in the US.

In spite of women being picked over, few and far between, and less attractive on average there are still some eye catching young ladies in NEPA. However, if you're able to get one, they will usually fall into either of the two following categories:

1. Semi-retarded Disney Cartoon-Watching Girlfriend - This girl is by no means literally retarded. She performs her job at at call center or retail outlet with the utmost robotic efficiency. The problem is that arrested development has manifested itself in her leisure activities, which include watching Disney cartoons that she saw as a little girl. She often has pets, which, together with movie trivia, occupy the farthest reaches of her consciousness. She is always a white girl and usually is light-complected. She has a beautiful face and usually has large breasts and narrow hips but some have wide hips and small breasts instead. Communicating with her is a test of self-control as one must avoid using long sentences or referring to abstract concepts which might cause her eyes to glaze over. She typically shows interest in you at first but quickly becomes bored with you unless you can put on an act of being a normie chad.

2. Hypergamizing Latina Girlfriend - Hypergamy refers to mating up, or choosing a mate who is better looking, wealthier, or more popular than yourself. It is the subject fairy tales about a lowly peasant girl marrying a prince charming. Whereas men tend to be more sensitive to the physical aspects of hypergamy, ie, they want someone who's better looking than they are, women are more sensitive to the social manifestation of hypergamy, ie, they want a man with higher social standing than they have. Social status isn't just related to wealth however. It also manifests itself along racial lines. In countries whence Hispanic girls come, lighter skinned elites rule over dark-skinned mestizos and/or mulattoes. After many centuries of native Amerindian and black women gaining status by marrying white Spaniard men, an attraction to white skin is practically embedded in the DNA of Hispanic women. Thus, they will settle for white men who are less attractive relative to the white race than they are to their mestizo or mulatto racial cohort. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see an ordinary-looking white guy in NEPA with a knockout beauty of a Latina. The white guy gets morphical hypergamy by getting a thin curvy woman with a pretty face and the Latina gets the white skin status she craves out of her mate. If you're a white guy who wants a woman who's the same race as you but not significantly less attractive, the deck is stacked against you in NEPA. However, you can get a beautiful Latina girlfriend quite easily because of hypergamy.

In short, we can expect that the few pretty white girls available in NEPA have arrested development due to having lower intelligence since NEPA, as expressed in the last list, is in the bottom quintile in educational attainment and education levels are correlated with intelligence. Moreover, we can expect an abundance of young Latina women to be available because many millennial women are Hispanic, so the fact that these are the only two (defacto) options is not surprising.

4. Behind the Times
Northeast PA is said to be between twenty to forty years behind the rest of the country. Casual observations verify this. It is not uncommon to see women in small credit unions using carbon paper and fax machines rather than modern printers or the Internet. They would never hire a young person who would pester them to stop living in a 70s movie set.

Coelacanth Fish: Fossil (Above) Living (Below)

Also, much as the coelacanth fish was thought to be extinct but later found as a living specimen, old cars you'd never think are still driven are common in NEPA. They're not classic cars either, just old, beat up, living fossils that have stood the test of time.

As a final example, throughout America smoking was more common in decades past, but in NEPA it remains quite popular. Wilkes-Barre / Scranton exhibits the second highest cigarette consumption per capita in the nation. NEPA also has the highest number of chain smokers in the nation. The effect of this is that young women age faster and their voices become deep and raspy, as their grovelized vocal chords deliver a decidedly masculine tone.

Whether it be workplace procedures, transportation means, or lifestyle habits, NEPA is out of the loop.

3. No Entry Level Jobs
An old saying goes "if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere". This is not true with respect to NEPA. One fellow we knew who had a degree in English could not find a job in NEPA that paid more than $8/hr. He moved to NYC and now works as an editor and earns a decent salary. It's tough to make it in NEPA -- not because of competition as it would be in the Big Apple -- but because employers are lazy and only want people with tons of experience who require no training. Any job market is better than NEPA.

Staring into the NEPA Abyss

2. Jealousy
When crabs who are stuck in a bucket notice one of their fellow crabs succeeding at efforts to climb out, they often pull him back in. This analogy is applied to humans who hate to see others succeed and who similarly pull them down. Because all negative behaviors are more common in NEPA due to brain drain and sanity drain, we can expect jealously to be common, all things being equal. Add to this the fact that NEPA is a proverbial bucket in which most individuals are unwillingly stuck, and you have a recipe for especially high levels of jealousy.

1. Arrogant Normies
Some people deserve to be a little aloof. For example, Nikola Tesla spent most of his time alone, and justifiably so. If he were alive today, we would not expect him to put aside discovering the next scientific breakthrough to meet with normies and discuss TV sitcoms, the score of last night's game, the best place to get chicken wings or sub-1100 SAT Score music. Generally, he would not like to skip from subject to subject without ever getting into depth about anything like what happens in so many normie conversations. Since he was a kind man, he probably would have done so if he had had unlimited time, but he was mortal and condemned to live only so many days on this earth, so he limited himself to communicating with people through other ways, such as through lighting their homes with AC electricity, something no normie could ever hope to accomplish.

But imagine the pure evil of normies who shun others for not having adequate knowledge of movie trivia or the cheapest local discount stores or craft beer. Do said normies deserve to be aloof?

Because the zenith of shared knowledge does not surpass normie levels in NEPA, their attitudes are considered high brow and set the tone for the culture. Need we say more?

***

During the early part of the 20th century it was said that the coal miners of NEPA were birds of passage, ie guest workers who tentatively lived in northeast PA until they could find better work elsewhere. In other words they never had a sense of permanence. They were Europe's poorest who roamed the world in search of work that could physically sustain them. They had to buy their stuff at the company store, which did everything it could to tie them to area by getting them in debt and thus make them a captive population.

Being an early coal miner was horrible work. They died in their forties of black lung, ie their lungs becoming nonfunctional from the accumulation of coal dust. They lived shorter lives than wildmen hunter gatherers and the South's former black slaves. The backbreaking work left them eager for spirits which they drank to ease their aches and pains in corner bars. Despite their daily eclipse in the mines they played football and baseball on the weekends, exchanging coal dust for soil dust in raucous physical contests. Their spirits could not be trapped in the mines even if their livelihoods were.

Granted, NEPA still has beautiful green landscapes, charming reminders old ethnic traditions, and stylized architecture from bygone eras. Many people have fond memories of growing up in NEPA. But today the beauty of its land and former inhabitants serve as reminders of potentialities unlived, such as a kiss never made, a battle never fought, and a song never sung.

Today NEPA's inhabitants no longer physically go into the mines, but their world is a subterranean Hades of stupidity, insanity, spitefulness, and old age.

A phoenix cannot rise from its ashes if it remains in them. Nor can it appreciate its ashen struggle unless it is freed. It's time for the remnant of worthy souls in NEPA to be the last birds of passage to leave.

The way to fondly think of NEPA is through the lens of nostalgia. One should strive to be the beleaguered traveler who returns to NEPA to see the ghosts of his past and pay respects to a land and former inhabitants that time has forgotten and which posterity may fail to remember.

Notes
1. SEX BY AGE 2014 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates US Census Factfinder