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As the empire deliquesces into a fetid slurry of economic failure, we stand ankle deep in the rising swamp waters witnessing the futile battle of the giants, Walmart and Amazon.
Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning, wrote this week that “[t]he Amazon-Walmart rivalry will determine the future of retail.” Well, it seems that way, perhaps, and I understand why a lot of people would imagine it, but I would draw some different conclusions. What we’re seeing is more like the battle between Godzilla and King Kong, two freaks of nature produced by a toxic culture, fixing to finish each other off.
The condition that will flavor events going forward is scale. Everything organized at the giant scale is going to fail. We have made all the systems of daily life too large and they will not function in the long emergency (and the fourth turning), an age characterized by universal contraction. This is true of corporations, institutions, schools, hospitals, farms, governments, virtually all organized enterprise. Retail is currently just the most visible example at the moment, since it is a commercial battleground that doesn’t enjoy public subsidies. The organisms on that field are exquisitely sensitive to economic reality, and the salient reality these days is the impoverishment of their customers, the former middle class.
This has been a sensational year for retail failure so far with a record number of brick-and-mortar store closings. But it is hardly due solely to Internet shopping. The nation was vastly over-stored by big chain operations. Their replication was based on a suicidal business model that demanded constant expansion, and was nourished by a regime of ultra-low interest rates promulgated by the Federal Reserve (and its cheerleaders in the academic econ departments). The goal of the business model was to enrich the executives and shareholders as rapidly as possible, not to build sustainable enterprise. As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes — and the American landscape will be left with empty, flat-roofed, throwaway buildings unsuited to adaptive re-use. Eventually, the empty Walmarts will be among them.
Just about everybody yakking in the public arena assumes that commerce will just migrate to the web. Think again. What you’re seeing now is a very short term aberration, the terminal expression of the cheap oil economy that is fumbling to a close. Apart from Amazon’s failure so far to ever show a corporate profit, Internet shopping requires every purchase to make a journey in a truck to the customer. In theory, it might not seem all that different from the Monkey Ward model of a hundred years ago. But things have changed in this land.
We made the unfortunate decision to suburbanize the nation, and now we’re stuck with the results: a living arrangement that can’t be serviced or maintained going forward, a living arrangement with no future. This includes the home delivery of every product under sun to every farflung housing subdivision from Rancho Cucamonga to Hackensack. Of course, the Big Box model, like Walmart, has also recruited every householder in his or her SUV into the company’s distribution network, and that’s going to become a big problem, too, as the beleaguered middle-class finds itself incrementally foreclosed from Happy Motoring and sinking into conditions of overt peonage.
The actual destination of retail in America is to be severely downscaled and reorganized locally. Main Street will be the new mall, and it will be a whole lot less glitzy than the failed gallerias of yore, but it will represent a range of activities that will put a lot of people back to work at the community level. It will necessarily entail the rebuilding of local and regional wholesale networks and means of distribution that don’t require trucking.
If you think we’re just going to switch the trucking industry over to electric vehicles or engines that run on bio-fuels, hydrogen, compressed air, or natural gas, you will be disappointed. Ain’t going to happen. We’re going to have to come up with something else, starting with the basic idea of the walkable community. This implies that we’re going to have to revive the existing towns and small cities that fit that description. And it also implies that a great deal of American suburbia will have to be abandoned. The capital will not be there to reform it. In any case, commerce later on in this century is not going to be anything like the Blue Light Special orgy of recent decades. And the transition will get underway with a speed that will make your head spin.
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As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes — and the American landscape will be left with empty, flat-roofed, throwaway buildings unsuited to adaptive re-use. Eventually, the empty Walmarts will be among them.
As someone who works in one of these retail big-box structures that is coming up on its sixtieth year of existence, take my word for it that these structures don’t age well at all.
And they are kind of big to throw away. They will rot in place.
Yes. As collapse proceeds apace, I can imagine them becoming major vagrant-havens.
“Yes. As collapse proceeds apace, I can imagine them becoming major vagrant-havens”
They will eventually become mini-malls, similar to indoor flea-markets…8 by 10 foot segments rented by the day, week, month.
Ever been to Reno? It has fallen on hard times. One of the major casinos, Fitzgerald’s, whose building anchors the “Biggest LIttle City” sign on its NW corner, is now a low-end flea market as described above. Dirty windows, small stalls…lots of homeless standing around.
The best part is we’ll have Roman Collosseums in every major American city.
“The best part is we’ll have Roman Coliseums in every major American city.”
Wolfie,
Who will be the lions, who the “Christians”? Who will be the guards, and who shall guard the guards?
I fear Mr. Tibbs, and his “sheepdogs” will be the lions….
Indoor Swap Meets…
We already have Colosseums. They’re called “football stadiums.”
This model is part of the SME economy here in Indonesia. Ramayana, one of the big retailers whose annual reports I have written for the past decade, divides its stores into ‘own product’ and ‘consignment’ sections, more or less split 50~50. The former benefits from economies of scale, Ramayana-sponsored promotions etc.
The latter, being run by single individuals in 12X12ft square ‘kiosks’, works on a ‘succeed soon or die off’ model that emphasizes consumer appeal, service and right pricing. In terms of clothing (the main line of Ramayana) there is a lot of cheap Chinese apparel dumped into the country and sold through these networks.
It’s a curious co-existence. And the government is specifically trying to champion SMEs, which are local in scale and scope.
After a long journey down the Rabbit Hole of political causes behind the Geography of Nowhere, JHK is finally coming full circle and back to where he started. The analysis of our Happy Motoring paradigm, Big Box Suburbia, and fetish for dissonant architecture.
As for who wins, I’d say that Wal-Mart will have achieved the status of a Critical Infrastructure. Even Too Big To Fail. I can see Washington buying shitloads of Wal-Mart stock when the fall begins. Wal-Mart may eventually become a “Public-Private Partnership” and enjoy the worst of both worlds.
Public-Private Wal-Mart will retain its hereditary barons and rent seekers but, the product sourcing, distribution, and regional management will be regulated and protected by the Feds. As for the hapless employee-slaves, they will enjoy NO LABOR RIGHTS whatsoever.
The very top and bottom of Wal-Mart will remain private; where the Top collect all the profits and the bottom are completely disposable utilities. The procurement and distribution operations will be controlled by government to ensure the distribution network is maintained and the stores are open.
Distributions of Soylent Green/Red/Yellow and mandatory vaccinations will be of critical importance.
An essential problem will be how many cars can one park in a typical Walmart lot while everyone in the area needs to get into there. Parking lots are about the most dangerous place in the world – but still behind Chicago, Sweden and Shitholistan that is.
Though I still can’t see people walking 25 miles one-way to get to their “local” store.
Oh, I know: the Gummint will be bussing citizens there. Finally mass transit we can believe in.
Walmarts surrounded by tent cities filled with people waiting for govmn’t supplies of bottled water, toilet paper, vitamins and oatmeal.
Absolutely correct.
From raw material to finished product in a consumers home many road
trips and ocean voyages have to be taken: raw materials to factory, parts to another factory, finished product to warehouse, from one warehouse to another and then finally from the last warehouse to either and amazon warehouse or a retail store.
Where does it make a difference if the customer drives (or even walks, if this were possible anywhere) to the local store or a delivery truck ships from an amazon warehouse?
To reduce this amount of shipping you would have to have extremely localized production which is completely infeasible. Let me know how you plan to make a computer, car or even only a power drill from scratch completely in a 50 mile radius of Tombstone, AZ.
Even only to localize all production within single states of the US is by orders of magnitude more inefficient than the current globalized system. Why do you think cars, TVs, computers, etc. are now so cheap and commonly affordable?
Of course if the range of your ambitions is to cobble together a loom
or long bow from locally available wood, this may indeed be possible after 95% of the population has disappeared to ensure the continued existence of local vegetation.
“To reduce this amount of shipping you would have to have extremely localized production which is completely infeasible. Let me know how you plan to make a computer, car or even only a power drill from scratch completely in a 50 mile radius of Tombstone, AZ.”
Michael,
You hit my intuition on the head. While Jim claims Walmart–and its cheap imports from afar–is unsustainable, I’ve always felt the efficiency and economy of scale it effects is the most–perhaps only–sustainable model, as compared to what you note above. Thus, whether Jim ever says it in a single sentence or not, I think one has to assume the rest of that statement: “Walmart unsustainable…and most things we now have access to we won’t…in a World Made by Hand…”
I would love to see an ongoing discussion/podcast/etc. that included people who know resources, manufacturing, etc., such that some picture of the possible worlds–aka, villages, or gangs–that will inhabit the land–everywhere–becomes a little clearer, and thus, maybe persuasive in the sense of motivating individual and collective action based on science,probability–and the shit when can actually get done after the SHTF. Jim’s novels are interesting and entertaining, but too easy to dismiss, as they can be written off as fiction–regardless of his very informed perspective.
I, myself, am stocking up on Levis and other durable clothing for when the Chinese looms stop, and I’m allergic to most animal hair, thus no rabbit squirrel–skin underwear for me…
Howie – I would suggest some other items to stockpile which are cheap, small and world(made-by-hand) changing would be razor blades, sewing needles and fishing line.
A $100 spent on those 3 items (others spring to mind, this is just an example) would, in 50yrs or less, be worth a naked emperor’s ransom.
As noted above, try making almost anything apart from napped flint (which requires considerable skill) from scratch and the phantasy comes grinding to a halt.
“Retail is currently just the most visible example at the moment, since it is a commercial battleground that doesn’t enjoy public subsidies.”
They are definitely subsidized. The vast majority of their employees are on Medicaid, food stamps or both. If they had to pay a living wage and cover healthcare they wouldn’t stay in business long.
On subsidies: Bezos is a tax cheat. If I recall, Amazon is based in Luxembourg, for corporate tax reasons. On 4Q 2016 revenue of $37.5 billion, Amazon paid $75 million in tax. The math is $75 on $37.5K in revenue. I’ll take that any day. Anybody else? Same old BS, privatize the profits, and socialize the costs.
How else will they be the first trillion dollar company if they pay taxes. Come to your senses!
Amazon’s phallic logo says it all, “givin’ it to us, from A to Z”.
Amazon provided the stock-manipulation, super-hedge-fund model in the late 90s, Apple adopted it–and with astounding results. Imagine the number of millionaires America would have if the now eviscerated middle class had been paying Amazon/Apple rates of taxes and had had the use of that extra 30% compounding over the last 20 years…
But, of course, the Dow would be at 1M, the Nasdaq at 10 or 20M, and we’d all be outbidding each other for superyachts…
“Bezos is a tax cheat”
What you describe is tax avoidance…legal by law. He also may be a cheater, but to prove that, you would need someone with the abilities of Q-Schtick, a forensic accountant.
Well said. You are correct.
My thoughts exactly, SteveO. Prior to retirement I had the misfortune of working for my state’s Dept. of Public Welfare. Over the course of many years, I must have approved the applications of thousands of low wage workers from Walmart (and other retailers) who needed SNAP (food stamps) and Medicaid to make ends meet.
Look at the bright side. Many Walmart employees had life insurance policies. Problem was, they were unaware, and they were not the beneficiaries – Walmart was – “Peasant Policies”, taken out and paid for by Walmart, with Walmart as beneficiary. If there is, or ever has been, a more purely evil corporate citizen than Walmart, I haven’t seen them.
Of course, the crowning evil of Walmart has to be the way they come into low-income areas, wipe out all their competition, and then leave if the profits for that store decline somewhat from peak. The low-income area in question then becomes a food and retail desert. This is how Walmart earned the nickname the “Economic Death Star”. The only good thing I can say about them is that they don’t brutally gouge their customers on prescriptions the way Walgreen’s does.
Amen. Well put. And come into rural areas, and after they wipe out all the local businesses, become “the Company Store”. As the now only employer, they pay wages that are so low, that their employees have no option but to shop at Walmart. They effectively create their own customer base. To be fair, I’m not so sure that was Sam Walton’s original business model. That thump, thump, thump you hear may be Sam Walton spinning in his grave. As far as his kids go, I wouldn’t piss on Walmart if it was on fire.
Gouge they do. Pharmacy is big in the gouging department. They ought to give free samples of Vaseline with every purchase. I expect the get their kicks from your pain!
How about Home Despot? Their arrival in my leafy suburb totally eradicated every Mom and Pop hardware store, lumber yard, plumbing supply house etc. Perhaps they’re kind to their employees. I’d ask them (the employees), but they seem to avoid making eye contact with customers.
I rode Yahoo up to $500 a share and ran over every short like a freight train. I have shorted Amazon at least a 1/2 dozen times and got run over like a freight train. Bezos is now the richest man in the world, and he did it with a company and a business model that makes no sense. I can buy a $20 pack of toilet paper and have it delivered to my house FREE. Now I know it costs at least $10-$15 dollars to deliver that package, so what’s the net? It props up UPS, FEDEX and USPS and it it destroying all brick and mortar retailers, which are the bedrock of local tax municipalities. How does that make sense? Amazon won the dotcom war.
Stock market casino prices are purely a function of Fed funny money policies and totally unrelated to any whimsical notion of underlying “value.”
Yesterday, while perusing opportunities at my favorite thrift store (the best business model for those opposed to the current retail structure,) I had the good fortune of finding the most very excellent, 2003 DVD documentary “The End of Suburbia,” which stars none other than our CFN host himself: James Howard Kunstler.
The film remains critically important; It’s message is more salient today, as the sprawl and concurrent infrastructures have had 15 years to metastasize.
If you have not viewed this classic, I would strongly encourage you to do so.
That ‘classic’ is what brought me here. Almost as long ago.
I sold my condo sixteen years ago and moved to a one bedroom apartment in a four story – within easy walking of three big grocery stores and two outdoor oriented shopping centers, i.e., all the stores are accessible from the parking lots – not really malls at all.
There is a good library as well – medical and dental offices – several coffee shops, Tims, Starbucks and Second Cup, many parks, etc…
My wife and son have been here with me for thirteen years.
I have no ambition or desire to ‘get ahead’ or to buy a house in suburbia – the idea is absurd – its where the yups live – most neocons and neolibs – and ‘getting ahead’ is a zero sum gain – I am more a musketeer type – i.e., tribal – like an Apache of old, which is how we have tried to raise our son, with modifications of course.
I am not sure what is coming – change I suppose – big time.
“Falling Skies” seems just now worth watching – for all three of us.
Jim – I still have a copy of your magazine article “Home from Nowhere” in my files. “The Long Emergency” still resonates.
All the best – looking forward to your ideas.
The cover story of the September 1996 issue of The Atlantic was JHK’s article Home from Nowhere. I read it at that time, and from that article Iearned of JHK’s other writings, including the Geography of Nowhere.
From Des Moines, Iowa, the Sprawl Capital of the World
Your wife and son have been with you for 13 years in a one bedroom
apartment walking to nearby stores and carrying (in back bags?) the
goods periodically needed for continued existence?
Do you also read by candlelight (with guilty feelings about Co2 production) and take cold showers?
But you did drive to work every day, your son did drive or was driven to school, etc. You do go on vacations presumably not on foot from your residence. So by which proportion were you able to cut your personal driving by means of these substantial sacrifices?
I work for one of those behemoth hospital systems and have been with it since it was 1 hospital and watched it grow into an un-manageable monstrosity. Many of us in the trenches of these institutions are just trying to keep it together as our “brilliant” leaders unsustainably expand our places of employment into monstrous systems that can’t keep organized. The larger systems get, the more chaotic they become. I’m just waiting for the day when it all collapses in on itself.
Our local medical extortion racket facility CEO is comically, grossly obese. Not sure how much Lord Falstaff is pulling down to masquerade as a “health care” exec, but the comedy value is worth its weight in gold. Not an ounce of cognitive dissonance there on his part evidently.
This exec sounds like a fitting metaphor for the institution over which he presides.
He’s perfect. The medical industry knows people have to eat in order to not actually starve, but that’s where it ends. The crap they serve on hospital trays and in cafeteria is worse than McDonalds.
Its not what gets served thats important, its who does the serving
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_L._White
Not wishing to be non-P.C. in this context, but since it is thwack after all:
that’s Rastus!
All we need now is an Uncle Ruckus-brand of malt liquor.
I would be amazed to see Cream of Wheat served for breakfast in a hospital. It actually has some nutritive value. Truth is, the food served in all the hospitals I’ve ever visited is truly awful. Not only is it tasteless, it is quite unhealthy. Vegetables, other than potatoes, are rarely seen on a plate.
Does the massive manager of whom you speak, maintain mobility by use of an electric riding cart, like the morbidly obese shoppers utilize at Walmart and other “fine” retailers, particularly grocery stores?
Or maybe a self-propelled wheelchair or gurney?
Outta my way!
Not yet. He’s just old school fat. Of the hideous sub-cutaneous variety as well, so rolls and rolls of it. I actually feel sorry for him now. I Googled him and found a picture of him, his wife, and their high school age son (in football uniform no less). Everyone of ’em morbidly obese. Really sad, especially for someone who spends his time in the limelight.
“We’re going to have to come up with something else, starting with the basic idea of the walkable community.”
The purveyors of urban sprawl have latched on to that and are using it to their advantage. Where I live, a family owned apple orchard has run out of family who are interested in working the land. The developers eagerly bought up the couple of hundred acres of land because of it’s close proximity to I93. The local government has latched on to the “walkable” concept without having the faintest idea what it really means, so the developer has agreed to create a “walkable community”. They are going to be allowed to drop way below the zoned minimum lot size and they will have to put in sidewalks and “eclectic” shops to walk to.
There is no public transportation in this area, and no work other than retail in a walkable range. It’s really just another location where they took green fields and are building “spec houses”, but by damn they will have a walkable community.
Good post, Jim – the shot’s you just called are landing up here like turds dropping from a tall cow. Here in Belleville, capital of shitty chain retail/ big box stores in Ontario the worm is starting to turn.
Walking through the Quinte Mall en route to my dentist (the only reason other than the Liquor Store that I ever go to the fucking place for) I noted that in this one mall, in a one-mall Ontario farming town of 50,000 there are 2 specialty tea shoppes within an easy rock-throw of each other, 6 shoe stores (owned by the same parent corp),several clothing stores (owned by the same corps), 4 jewelry stores, 3 baseball-cap hat stores, and 2 candle stores.
I like tea, but all the other stuff….things are assuming a surreal, dreamlike quality. It’s…how would you phrase it – the hypertrophic supersaturation of retail?
However, we’re a farming town centered on the coast of Lake Ontario, backed by beautiful farming land and wilderness, with a good road system, rail hub, and a downtown waiting to wake up and
get back to work.
Assuming your Prez doesn’t fuck up the entire planet first.
Many years ago Catherine Austin Fitts did a study of the types a mall stores you mention. The shops with high rents in malls, yet you rarely see anyone actually buying anything. Her conclusion, they launder drug money.
If the money laundering angle is true, it brings another hidden component to this whole collapsing mall scenario. The only stores still open will be laundering cash in a near vacant mall, not selling anything. Or, they close down too, where will the money laundering operation move to? They will end up like Jason Bateman in the series Ozark on Netflix try to launder $50 million in an area with about $100 million in annual activity.
Or maybe by then the economy will finally reach the point where the banks and regulators don’t care where the money comes from as long as money flows. By then the former middle class won’t have any to spend anyway.
According to Bezos if any manager at Amazon shows a profit they are not working hard enough. Profit means an end of growth for Amazon and managers should be doing everything they can to promote market share. Expansion should, for now be eating all profit.
Flat roofed concrete slab buildings may dot the American landscape but not here in Amazon Camelot. Here their corporate campus rise from the South Lake Union development of their new headquarters like Dubai rose from the desert. At least some of the overhead skyscraper building cranes used there are here now. Blink and when your eyes open there will be a new skyscraper.
As far a competition goes Amazon will destroy Walmart before they both burn like vampires at sunrise. Amazon sells convenience and Americans are lazy. Getting low on cheese doodles? Amazon can have them to your door within hours with ‘Amazon Fresh’. You don’t even have to fart to make it happen with one click shopping.
A nation that could not even tell that Trump was an idiot won’t be noticing that they pay more to get the doodles to their door through Amazon. The convenience will trump all consideration in the screen softened brains of the American public.
Amazon web services provides the infrastructure for commercial websites of all kinds. One example is Netflix which runs as a scalable activity on Amazon web servers. Amazon web services is huge and I happen to know from personal experience that the deep state has full access to their content. I know this because when I was blogging about the deep state’s involvement at Clusterfuck Nation a few years ago my harassment and obedience training began by the deep state interrupting and playing games with my Netscape feed. I was watching a video about John Trudel when their shit began. Amazon is going to guarantee their monopoly the same way Microsoft has. Provide the government with a platform they can use to spy and quietly individually harass with and any anti-trust issues won’t have to be worried about. When shit hits the fan steps will be taken to keep Amazon afloat as long as it can float. It will be an issue of national security. Amazon trucks guarded by National Guards.
Here in the Emerald City Amazons flower is in full bloom and opulence is everywhere. I see a dozen Tesla’s on I-90 every time I go to work. Prediction of Amazon’s imminent demise are very premature. It will of course all implode at some point but one thing we all should have learned by now is that collapse, while inevitable by the laws of physics, will manifest in its own time like a cosmic joker of a god playing three-card Monte with us. What Wall-Mart did for big box shopping Amazon does with the web. Amazon will melt like Icarus but for now she rises and the sun is not yet too hot for her climb up into the sky.
My apologies for the grammar. My submit finger gets itchy after I stream out a few hundred words.
[Scolds and swats with newspaper] Bad dog!
No need to apologize K-Dog, we all do it and far too often. Our host gets us all whipped up and we get anxious. That is one of the many reason that we come here. It is good.
Thanks for that, you are right.
As long as you don’t soil the carpet or start humping an unsuspecting leg it should be overlooked.
“A nation that could not even tell that Trump was an idiot won’t be noticing that they pay more to get the doodles to their door through Amazon.”
A lot of us had an inkling or knew that Trump is an idiot of an unknown quantity. A lot of us also knew that the alternative is an even bigger idiot of known quantity. So we were left to choose between two steaming piles of shit and many of us chose the one we thought stunk less.
Well put JMR. Even today, if I was forced at gunpoint to choose between the two, I’d still take Trump.
You’re being forced at nuclear tipped missile and you still won’t admit that Hillary would be better in this situation.
Winning the election was probably the biggest favor Trump could have ever given to Clinton. Had it gone the other way, even if she would have been better than Trump is today (which is an extremely low bar), she would have been the biggest disappointment in terms of performance that I could imagine.
And in such a hypothetical case, nobody would have known the bullet we dodged by not electing Trump, so there would be no appreciation for how much better it would be under HRC rather than how it is now…
seawolf,
If Hillary had initiated her No Fly Zone in Syria, we’d already be at war with Russia.
JMR and outsider,
Absolutely!
I have no love for Mr. Trump, but I held my nose, swallowed hard, and voted for him.
And I would do it again given the same miserable choices.
“A nation that could not even tell that Trump was an idiot..”
It’s not that we didn’t notice. It’s that Her campaigned on a promise of war with Russia asap, and he said he’d try to avoid it. Her mountain of crimes was piled just too high.
“I’m going to rain down fire and brimstone on North Korea.” Who was the last guy to say that. Let me think? Was it? Yes I think it was. God.
Allegedly.
North Korea is a very interesting situation. The Kims have always thought they owned the “I’m-a-crazy-B*tard-with-his-hair-on-fire” meme, and have used it many times to keep the cigars and liquor flowing to their top echelons.
The Donald, however, has always used this meme in his real estate efforts. So he is playing their card against them.
Donald wants the NKs to attack first, so that he can Virtuously retaliate. Nothing like a war to distract the population from the issues that are actually most important to them.
The NKs want Donald to attack first, so they can Virtuously shoot off their missile(s) and Righteously call down the Wroth of the Chinese.
The Chinese (and maybe the Russians) will be happy with either scenario since in either case, American influence declines in the East, leaving them with a stronger hand, and quite likely full control over the hard-working minions of South Korea.
Koreans, both North and South, are the only sure losers if any action is taken.
“According to Bezos if any manager at Amazon shows a profit they are not working hard enough. Profit means an end of growth for Amazon and managers should be doing everything they can to promote market share. Expansion should, for now be eating all profit.”
This is interesting, but perhaps should be expected.
When you think about it, when the Fed loans money into existence by stuffing the pockets of banks and investors, in order to get a sizable portion of that money you need to court investment. Profit does not draw investment any longer — growth does.
If the Fed had injected that same $85B a month they injected into banks, but instead just loaned (at zero interest, with no real punishment for failure to repay) 100M families in the US $850/month, then instead of asset inflation we would have the more-traditional CPI-based inflation, and to get a share of that money you would allow your prices to rise and take the money in the form of profits.
In a world being inflated by the expansion of currency, to protect yourself you need to bogart more than your “fair share” of excess currency to make up for the losses to that inflation. Bezos, by pushing growth over profits, is responding to the markets that exist today and doing exactly what needs to be done to survive.
The question is what happens when the gig is up. Can Bezos shift on a dime from growth back to profits if the game changes and asset inflation is replaced with CPI inflation? What would he do if deflation hits hard?
I live in a progressive community with a small historic core and bus service along its main artery to the other side of town with more typical chain shopping. Nice. However, this is a tourist economy that would be devastated should fuel be rationed. https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Universal-Innovation-Sustainability-Organisms/dp/1594205582
Yes Jim, GodzillaMart and King Kongazon are two hungry giants fishing in a smaller and drying out pond for the last few remaining catfish (bottom feeders). The last I checked, and that was years ago, there was two trillion dollars missing in the pool of American’s income. I just searched the web for “decline in American income” and came across a huge trove of articles that claim a continued decline into the future. Unfortunately for the American public, our government, our businesses, and all of our institutions never read the story of the Goose That Laid The Golden Egg. How can a country hope to grow better when the income of it’s private citizens is assaulted with such vigor while costs skyrocket around them? Throw in mandates and “unaffordable” health care obligations, raise the premiums by 20% a year and watch the people simply cease to exist. If it is the plan to wipe us out then it is working. If it just the results of poor planning, then how did such stupid people get to the decision making levels in the first place? Oh that’s right, Greed destroys all that it touches, doesn’t it? Too bad, it was a nice place for a long time.
For those with power there is no decline. They just get richer. Those who do go into decline so that these few others may prosper will just fade away and die. Media is owned and controlled by the haves and not by the I-don’t-have-Jack-Shits so without a sympathetic media the powerless have no voice. Their stories will be unsaid and unwritten.
For some all America has to do to be great again is to let the rich man prosper, fuck everyone else. One of them is in the White House right now and you put him there America. America is on the path to be great again. Robber baron great with the poverty of sweatshop America or the misery of a Charles Dickens novel to keep steak on the rich mans plate.
Some desiring cosmic justice predict a fall, but that is premature. Injustice can for a while feed on itself. For quite a while.
Don’t tell me you actually voted for her. Well, dogs do love bitches.
I went third party. Please do not insult me by saying I must have voted for the Wall Street bitch again.
My apologies. Not sure what you mean by again.
Again, as in once was enough!
I wasn’t really bent out of shape about this but I wanted to be emphatic. Thanks for the apology.
“Too bad, it was a nice place for a long time.”
Walter,
You are correct…We Boomers won the lottery in that we were fortunate to be born during the height of empire…missed the first depression, relatively comfortable and able to weather the next. We got the best of it…the “crumbs from the table”, for the majority of us, were very well-filling and tasted great.
We did not cause the upcoming outrages…we were just along for the ride.
No one from Wall Street ever asked me whether the Quarter by Quarter profit paradigm was viable. That paradigm brought us to where we are today. It is, among a few others, the root of our upcoming failure.
On a final note…thank you for your earlier comments…I am humbled.
As Amazon has metastasized into a growing cancer, I’ve felt more and more guilty over ordering from them when items are available for the same price, or only a little more, from local retailers. I’ll even take Walmart over Amazon. At least they hire local people, even though we still have to subsidize their workers with Food Stamps and Medicaid.
My local Walmart, however, keeps adding more self-service checkouts and eliminating as many human cashiers as possible. The lines are generally long where they have humans as they are trying to force those with 20 items or less to use self service. I want to use the humans, but don’t want to wait in line for twenty minutes (with melting ice cream), just to assuage my guilt.
Hard to assuage guilt when drones at the checkout counter ignore you until it is ‘your turn’ and that twenty minute line is because the electrons have to dance a few hundred miles back and forth to move the imaginary money. (they move fast but they too have to wait their turn) Actually paying with real money and using clerks who can count change (most of them can’t) is much faster.
But that is progress in a world where technology does not have to provide as much as it has to be cool and new. It is madness, now everyone is one Carrington Event away from starvation yet it is called progress.
It’s never the number of items. It’s the number of transactions. A person with 50 items, will always complete their purchase ahead of a line with 5 people buying 10 items each. The purchaser & the cashier both contribute to the problem.
Aeons ago when I saw someone in line holding a single item I’d tell how much it would cost with tax. Then when they reached the front of the line they would be ready to go money in hand. Electronic transactions are sequential and bound to the idiocy of a fixed sequence. They transfer the idiocy to the modern clerk.
What an annoying twit you must have been.
Not at all. I was friendly and polite and people liked the attention. You jumped to the conclusion (understandably) that I was barking at them.
I did not do this all the time and I am not a human calculator. I would simply remember previous transactions. I would always size a person up before I said anything to them. If they were in a mood to be annoyed I’d say nothing.
I have been a lot of things but ‘annoying twit’ I have never been. I figured part of my job was to make people smile and feel good. I’d never ignore the person I was dealing with at the moment but tried to make the line a positive experience for everybody. Annoying twits don’t take the trouble of sizing people up before dealing with them. That is what is annoying about them, they think they are the center of the universe. What I was doing was a ‘we are all into this together’ sort of thing. If you think that is annoying you are beyond help.
But wait a moment Outsider; I try to buy local whenever I can – support local businesses that help pay local taxes and provide local jobs.
I have been a Sears’ Craftsman tools brand guy for five decades. Great products with outstanding warranties.
Why is Sears Roebuck, that other formerly great American retail giant dying? Endure the following:
Needed a spark plug for a pole saw and the local Sears, five miles distant, was on the way from other chores. Stopped in for the replacement and found nothing. The sales associate at lawn and garden/tools area was too busy talking to his “homegirls” to assist. Two days later the other close Sears was on the way to a medical appointment. Stopped in to get said plug. NO dice there or the attached automotive section. The explanation from the helpful and knowledgeable salesman was astonishing but expected: manufacture moved to China and from there spark plug altered for sole sourcing. Buyback of manufacture by Black and Decker for U.S. production means part not available until new manufacture up and running. Two years minimum. He said I could get this rare part at a local auto parts distributor.
Now plenty pissed off and needing the part; logged on to Amazon, found needed plug in less than two minutes. Ordering took another minute and with some other products had free shipping. One day and a half later my package arrived (and with points from a credit card got the freaking plug basically for free.)
Who can compete with that kind of product fulfillment scheme?
As great as it is for the consumer, I shall not lament its demise.
Just going to have to keep a half dozen spark plugs, W30 oil, bar oil and other pieces parts available in my shed. The vegetation around these parts don’t give a damn about where I shop.
A perfect story that highlights what I have felt for years. The retail experience is atrocious in America, absolutely atrocious. It’s almost like they train their associates to provide an absolutely horrible experience. Who out there cannot relate to this story?
Old farts like me DO remember when shopping at the old line retailers like Sears and JC Penney was a GOOD experience.
But, that quality experience cuts into the rent seekers’ take. Quality is always the first thing to be sacrificed for their sake.
Store managers are driven by the latest management fads and cost cutting gimmicks instead of relying on what used to work. i.e. good middle-of-the-road products, well-trained floor staff, and well stocked stores.
I work as an engineer for a tech startup in San Francisco. Last night, I gently suggested that perhaps this bull market was a little long in the tooth and that our product might launch into a weak economy. What then, dear leader?
The response was terrifying: the CEO believes that Silicon Valley is its’ own financial microclimate that can only be stopped by actual nuclear war.
There is some truth to the microclimate idea. In fact, the hollowing out of the American economy is partly due to tech’s “disruption.” So a financial crisis could actually accelerate the search for cost cutting measurs enabled by tech.
Nonetheless, the extent of the Echo Chamber thinking, that this Gilded Age will never end, was frightening. Oh well, time to ask for a raise then.
I look at it this way: from my rather small and isolated community, I can either drive to Walmart or let Amazon drive to me. Amazon is at least modestly efficient in that regard, since UPS/Fed Ex is delivering to everyone in the neighborhood anyway. Neither is optimal in any sense of the word, but the local retail has gone away either way, never to return. So I use Amazon when I must, Walmart and big box very rarely/not at all, and use the local “big box” grocery store (which is to say, the only local grocery store) for pretty much everything else.
The overriding problem is that there’s simply far too many of us, such that many of us have spread out to isolated locales to maintain some semblance of personal space. That and the fact that we also consume far too much in the process. All enabled by a psychopathic centralized federal government that uses an obscenely bloated MICC to ensure that we maintain access to far more than our share of the world’s natural resources so that we can continue to maintain our psychopathic life styles for as long as possible.
This is not going to end well at all for any of us.
That was in response to outsider above.
“This is not going to end well at all for any of us.”
Not exactly true.
“As the companies march off the cliff of bankruptcy, these individuals will be left with enormous fortunes.”
Fortunes big enough to buy what they need in a world of collapse, or so they think. Why else would the madness continue! Will there be justice? Probably not.
Their time will come too eventually. Not that we’ll likely get the satisfaction of witnessing it. But there will ultimately be no “winners” from all of this madness.
“Their time will come too eventually”
DA,
If you read Stockman’s “The Great Deconstruction”, you would find your comment exactly mirrored the last sentence in the book…the rich will get theirs, also.
History is replete with examples….
Always thought highly of Stockman. Gotta admire someone who dared to speak truth to power to Ronnie Raygun right out of the gate.
Although I’ve defended Walmart vs Amazon, it has been a mixed blessing. We have a Supercenter near me that is also a full sized grocery store. Prices are generally only a few cents cheaper, but it has devastated the regional grocery stores around here. I can’t stand all the aggressive low life shoppers who clog up the aisles at Walmart and make for a migraine-inducing experience. I’ll gladly pay the few dollars more and shop in comfort at my local Giant Eagle. I just hope it doesn’t go the way of Sears and KMart.
DA,
Hey! I know… we’ll *all* go to work for the gum’mint! It will be like everyone doing each other’s laundry; and if things get a bit squeaky, we can always pay our own salaries in order to pay our taxes.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
But, seriously, you’re correct; too many folk consuming too many resources. …And I certainly don’t propose continuing to live like porcine pashas even if there were far fewer of us. The master/slave relation shit has just got to stop if we’re ever to understand a respectful way of living (and as JHK says, “inhabiting the landscape”).
I was working out as a project engineer myself back in the ’80’s and attended our annual planning meetings for the company that I was employed with at the time. In my third year there, as the market for our systems was clearly trending downward, the plan for next year’s business was being worked towards increased sales and profits. I suggested that perhaps we should plan for decline in business rather than an increase and got the big raspberry from the management who insisted that growth must occur every year and cannot be projected as less for any reason.
When our sales took a dive over the course of the next few years (though the projects were always higher) most of the managers were canned, though it did not help sales, but someone must be punished, right? The endless growth model never works and those who do not plan for cyclical economics are always disappointed. When America was at its finest, corporation were run by engineers and salesmen and accountants rode in the back seat. Even the bankers used to be muzzled at least sometimes. Today with the engineers mostly on leashes the fools make the decisions and control the plans. The country is screwed.
It’s funny how the Walmart paradigm that Jim always rails against is being replaced by something 10 times more inefficient: Amazon.
Ten times more profitable too, apparently. For the investor class anyway.
Profitable for the investment class. In America that is all that matters.
Probably a pretty risky place to suggest this, but I’m optimistic. Let me say first that I really appreciate Mr. Kunstler’s blog, I love the “World Made by Hand” series and “Safe and Happy Place” was great too. But I just don’t buy the end of life here as we know it. And I’m bolstered a bit by the predictions that have pretty much all turned out to be wrong. (So far.)
I believe the solution, just like the problem, is energy. It appears that we have more than enough relatively cheap energy to last as long as we need it. Not forever, of course, but long enough to make the transition to renewables, fusion, or whatever turns out to work. Essentially, I think we caught the problem in time.
We have plenty of oil and gas to make all the solar panels, wind farms and tidal generators we need, plus the batteries to store the energy. Proabably enough left over to keep the private jets flying too. This will allow us to keep our air conditioners and transition to electric vehicles, or whatever type of vehicle turns out to work. I hope.
Just a side note, I believe Amazon did have a few modestly profitable years. Once we get the electric UPS trucks, or the electric drones, we should have home delivery forever. But if we want to get out of the house, we can always drive our electric SUV (or personal helicopter?) to Wal-mart.
You have been taking some really good drugs, wanna share?
It appears that we have more than enough relatively cheap energy to last as long as we need it.
You are so full of shit somebody must be paying you to be here.
A risky place to suggest your cornucopian fantasy, you were right about that!
I’m not sure your tone merits a reasonable response, but I’ll give it one try. No drugs, and nobody paying me for this, I can assure you of that. Otherwise, if there is something in my post that you find factually inaccurate, please point it out.
Clearly we still have very cheap energy. How much longer is harder to say, but so far the predictions of the end of it have all been wrong. Time will tell, but I suspect we will have it long enough to move on to something better.
I think you are conflating “cheap” with the amount of USD that gas stations will trade you for a gallon of gasoline, and vice-versa.
A better term that describes that particular relationship is “undervalued” or “mispriced.” This is what happens when currency is loaned into existence at an unprecedented rate and stuffed into the pockets of bankers and investors. Price signals are no longer indicative of relative scarcity.
You may in fact be right about “undervalued” or “mispriced”; I certainly don’t know. But if so, that has been the case for a long, long time, and it continues. So far. Only time will tell in the long run, but it seems to be running a lot longer than many expected.
I’m quite confident we will solve the energy thing, which Mr. Kunstler says will precipitate all the other dominoes. Once that is settled, we’ll have to straighten out a few other big things, but it can be done.
Clearly we do not have cheap energy. Seventeen cents a gallon in the seventies was cheap. When gasoline gets over $4 a gallon the economy starts to shut down. We are not far from that number now. The cheap easy to get stuff is gone and now shale oill with a munch lower EROEI takes its place. It is not cheap oil and were the price at the pump to accurately represent the cost of extraction we would be in a deep depression yet again. As far as replacing our energy supplies renuables are still in the starting gate waiting for their time which will never come. Electric vehicles are nowhere near becoming a replacement for the internal combustion engine and the only people driving electric cars are those with money they could literally burn and not miss a meal. It is common for the technically ignorant to claim technology will save us because they do not appreciate little things like conservation of energy constraints and efficiencies. Elements of this cornucopian mindset pepper your comment which was all opinion and no facts but yet you have the gall to ask me for facts. You imagine a pipe dream of technical rescue but you have nothing but faith to go on. Were you mathematically literate you would not be able to entertain your feel good fantisies which bear no relation to reality.
With you drugs might be an improvement.
Further if you can’t imagine a cheap energy future that will last at least fifty years you are shortsighted. Think about how long it takes to pay back infrastructure or better yet think about future generations. If energy is cheap now it won’t be for younger generations or do you have the audacity to claim good times are here and will never end.
The time to suffer fools is past. Fools have become dangerous.
That was a low blow. Anytime anyone says something you don’t agree with you say they’re being paid? How are you any better than Google or Ozone?
There’s enough coal to power America for centuries btw.
Thank you Janos.
K-Dog you still haven’t pointed out anything factually incorrect in my posts. But I’ll help you out by pointing out a few of yours. Besides being wrong about the drugs and the payment, you were wrong about the cost of energy too. Gas wasn’t never 17 cents a gallon in the 70’s. And it’s not close to $4.00 now. It’s about half that price, and that’s not too far from what it was in the 70’s either, adjusted for inflation. Obviously you were wrong about me being mathematically illiterate too. On the contrary, I’m quite competent there, and willing to help you again if you need it.
Electric cars are not mainstream, but they aren’t just for the wealthy either. I had one for three years and it was just fine for 90% of our needs. Other times, we used a petroleum vehicle. Overall, he electric probably cost a bit less to run than a gasoline car.
I’m probably a bit older than you, but I’ve been hearing people predict the imminent end of the world as we know it for my whole life. So far they’ve all been wrong; I’m confident you are too. (And Mr. Kunstler too, so don’t feel bad.) Someday it will happen, but not for a long, long time. It will take more than an energy shortage – which we are far from – to do it.
Not where I am it is not, it is over $3 a gallon here close to four in fact and I did pay 17 cents a gallon once in the seventies. I’ll stay with my mathematically illiterate comment and I owe you no facts because you gave me none.
Most people can’t afford electric cars. Last time I bought a car I checked prices. Even if you get an electric car you are not done. You need a charging station and the equipment for charging stations is not generally sold to the general public for liability reasons so you have to hire to get it professionally installed.
All my life I have heard selfish assholes who do not want to see the bigger picture because it suits them to be in denial say so how wonderful technology is and how imaginary inventions are going to save us at the eleventh hour, It never happens and it never will.
In fact we have been on a slow decline since the seventies with only the well off prospering with a widening income gap between rich and the poor. I suspect I know what side of the fence you are on.
As to drugs you are under the influence of one today. The drug is called hopium.
I’m sorry K-Dog, I gave you quite a few facts, though you may not have liked them. I’ll repeat a few for you: No drugs, no pay, gas was not 17 cents in the seventies and it’s not close to $4 today.
In fact, the average gas price in the US is now $2.36. That’s not “about $3”, and it’s not “close to $4”. We do still have cheap energy, like it or not.
You’re also wrong on the electric cars, so here are a few more facts. You can lease a Leaf for about $200 a month. Everybody can’t afford that, but many can. You’re mistaken about the chargers too.
You do not need a charging station. You can plug your car into a wall outlet, though it is a relatively slow charge. You can use a public charging station , and it will charge much faster. You can also buy your own high power unit and put it in your garage, as I did. Actually, I built my own; it’s not very hard. But if you don’t want to, there are lots of companies eager to sell you one. You may choose to hire an electrician to install it, as you might with any electrical appliance. I chose not to.
I don’t know where you heard that charging stations aren’t sold to the general public. Same place you heard gas is $4 and used to be 17 cents in the seventies? What were you saying about drugs?
We are all aware that income disparity has been growing. I have no idea why you brought that up.
I do have to come back and admit gas is not about to hit $4 a gallon today. Driving home from work I see gas prices have suddenly fallen. A few months ago I would have been right about it being close to $4, the price where baristas lose money if they drive to work.
I have to get premium which is going for $3.29 a gallon now. I’ll make a bet that this glut is temporary and gas prices often fall in late summer. Are these prices cheap? Relative to yesterday and tomorrow the answer is yes. Prices will go up quick enough however because the cost of extraction can’t support this price.
I am on extended stay, remote work experiment that worked well so far, in Europe emailing my work (and invoices) to US Co.
For long five months I did not touch f’g car keys and had everything that I need, say, in my kitchen in time as little as 6-7 minutes and no longer than 20 minutes – all by comfy walk to local stores or open farmers market where sellers are not some new age creeps smelling on patchouli – trademark of organic growers in US.
In couple of weeks though, I am returning to the madness.
Americans and their power toys, be it your-cars story that ‘cover all your needs’, or as in other posts: ‘I walked into Sears looking for (always) a spark plug…’, lava of red lights in front of you in your direction and white lights in opposite on early evening freeway ‘theater’ on work days, week ends anywhere in US with roads and freeways strewn with trucks loaded with dirt bikes.
Kind of a problem right there ?
A low blow it is not. We live in a world where people on the net are often not who they seem. There has been a history of pretending on this site. JHK has even referred to ‘government employees with too much time on their hands’ who log in on using government computers on our dime. What he does not say and which I do is that they are actually doing their job. But it is job I do not approve of. You know full well that part of that act is a flying car cornucopian don’t worry be happy schtik. Your schtik is to make the site unpopular with your racist comments about blacks. You both have your purpose.
Ho long have we been here ‘Vlad’. Is it ten years or 12 now? You know I know the score.
How long.
Thank you K-Dog. What about the rest of the facts?
Gas was not about to hit $4 a few months ago either. Some years back it was over $4, but it didn’t last that long and has been cheap for quite a while now. Natural gas is low, and probably staying there. Coal will always be cheap as demand goes away.
I know it’s very popular to say that the cost of oil extraction exceeds the price, but that seems to be try only at the expensive wells that have stopped pumping. They are making money on the rest of them. As demand declines, we may see prices get even lower. That’s always a harder one to call.
I shall repeat you have not given facts and as you have not I don’t have to argue with you. As to gas prices I live in the pacific northwest were gas prices have always been above average and they have indeed pushed close to $4 here in recent memory. I can find a graph that says gas is $2.50 a gallon but the stations I drove by on the way home were over $3.00 a gallon and that is the best price we have seen for a very long time. Regardless the supply of cheap fossil fuels is gone and the demand does not go away because it can’t. The laws of the universe and not wishful thinking will decide our future and as the model of endless growth reaches its ability to provide misery will stock the land.
What exactly is your point. That there is no reason to worry about the future? Do you think we can have a system free from regulation where cockamamie ideas of trickle down enrich all and while some get far more than their share it is fine because everybody gets enough. The truth is unbridled growth always leads to a crash because slackers and cheaters are always there to do it. It is the tragedy of the commons. I wont be arguing with you because you think this is a game where you can pick and choose your facts to support your point of view. You are not searching for any truth and I will close with your last statement.
“As demand declines, we may see prices get even lower. That’s always a harder one to call.
As demand declines. Is the population getting lower or are we starting to run vehicles on water? The only reason demand declines is because people don’t have jobs and they are forced to use the foot-mobile and if demand is declining right now in mid summer we are indeed in some deep shit.
The laws of the universe and not wishful thinking will decide our future and as the model of endless growth reaches an end in its ability to provide, misery will stock the land.
“I know it’s very popular to say that the cost of oil extraction exceeds the price, but that seems to be try only at the expensive wells that have stopped pumping”.
So you do know something about EROEI after all. Evedence mounts that you are a poser.
K-dog,
We also have been shown a yuuuge manure pile of evidence that vladdie really enjoys his assignment — that’s the most disturbing part of the whole pose.
K-Dog, not only have I given you facts, I’ve corrected yours. If you make more mistakes, I’ll correct them too. Look how much you’ve learned about electric cars already. You’re welcome.
Gas may be expensive in your neighborhood, so you may think the extraction costs are high, but you’re actually seeing the cost of taxes, real estate, labor, etc. That’s why gas remains cheap in the rest of the country.
You did good finding the chart that shows gas around $2.50 (probably closer to $2.30, but that’s okay). So we can put the $3-4 idea to rest. Now find a chart that shows when it was last 17 cents. Hint – it wasn’t the ’70s.
You acknowledge coal is cheap. We all know natural gas is cheap. You now realize gas is around $2.50 a gallon. In the next sentence you say the supply of cheap fossil fuels is gone??!! Which fossil fuels are you finding so expensive now?
What exactly is my point, you ask? Pretty much what I said in my first post. We are not heading into a “Long Emergency”, we will confront the challenges and our future will be just fine. All of the predictions of impending doom, from the energy crisis to the stock market crash to the end of automobiles have been wrong, and will continue to be. Amazon will be delivering to your door for a long time and folks will still drive to Walmart in 20 years.Just so you understand, these are not facts, but they’re pretty good predictions.
This is an interesting debate, so I will toss in my two cents…
I would have to say you are both right and both wrong. First of all if you look at the oil supply curves we have passed peak oil and the gig is up, just look at the data. Solar and electric will not save us per say and yes we have tons of coal that can be liquified but that is really not economically viable to maintain the current state.
We have borrowed from future to tap oil that belonged to future generations. So yes oil appears to be cheap today but our current society can not survive without…. drum roll: Diesel + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Trains: Diesel Electric + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Tractors: Diesel + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Backhoes, bobcats etc..: Diesel + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Cargo Ships: Diesel + grease……
See a pattern… Non of the items can be run at todays scale on batteries.
I’m always amused when I hear the debate about electric cars…. Where does the lithium come from? hmmm mines, trains, ships…
Our food system floats on a sea of oil……
The collapse is happening, it us just going to be a “long” decline path. If you are of the “sex + drugs + globalist generation” aka baby boomers, you are “OK” but the rest of us are sort of screwed.
Downsize + decentralize + localize will be the pattern moving forward. That does not bode well for the large complex government, social and corporate structures we have in place today.
But maybe in the long run it will be more healthy for the human race than the current setup….
Ladros,
He tries to make me look wrong by using averaged data and ignoring what I say. I came in with a fuzzy expletive and he tried to exploit it.
I have put gas in the gas tank of a 1967 Oldsmobile Cutlass in 1975 and I paid Seventeen cents a gallon. It was my car. It had been silver but I painted it a chocolate brown with gold-flecks. Graycenphil read me earlier state that I have bought gas at $17 cents a gallon but without this detail. He ignored me and came back with gas has never been at 17 cents a gallon. He also ignores that gas prices in Washington state are significantly higher. We don’t all pay the same price. In talking about gas prices time intervals over which an average price is taken is important. He ignores this. He talks about gas prices to misdirect conversation from what you know.
Trains: Diesel Electric + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Tractors: Diesel + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Backhoes, bobcats etc..: Diesel + grease + hydraulic fluid + Motor oil
Cargo Ships: Diesel + grease……
See a pattern… Non of the items can be run at todays scale on batteries.
I’m always amused when I hear the debate about electric cars…. Where does the lithium come from? hmmm mines, trains, ships…
Our food system floats on a sea of oil……
He lies. Lets be clear about it so yet again he has to come back under a new name.
Well, let me say this: it’s not so much what we produce or don’t produce, it’s who ends up with the spoils.
You see, the financial and corporate class is playing for keeps. They own all of the remaining resources. What this means is, however this story plays out, they remain firmly in control, forever, or until every last resource is exhausted and all the blood has been sucked up.
Like vampires, they are now all over America and the world’s surface. The problem goes much deeper than just what forms of energy we will use, and how far electric cars will take us.
The problem is: we have all been reduced to serfs. Permanently.
That game of Monopoly we all played as kids was much more instructive than we ever imagined. Turns out, that was its intent right from the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
And we thought it was harmless fun!
The one card that I wished Monopoly had was, “On Strike!”
Whoever draws that card automatically forwards it to the player with the most properties (Fat Cat). The “On Strike!” card enables all the lesser players to skip his properties (won’t cross the picket line) AND the Fat Cat has to pay the rent out of pocket until it’s his turn again. That rent gets distributed to the others in the form of cash and/or properties.
Such a card would also provide a positive lesson. Keep the system in balance by checking the Fat Cats. The game can go on indefinitely.
And to complete your repurposing of the game, all that would be needed are a couple additional tokens: 1) A scalpel: represents the sexual reassignment player; 2) a gun: represents the IRS employee standing in your bedroom when you wake up in the middle of the night…
K-Dog, it really doesn’t matter what type of car you had, gas didn’t cost 17 cents a gallon in 1975, no matter how much you want it to. Are you suggesting that the color of the car, or the fact that you owned it, or that it was a 1967 model somehow affects the price??!!
I’m well aware that gas prices vary across the country. I explained that is not because of a difference in cost of extraction, but more about taxes and local expenses. If you are still unclear on that, I’ll do my best to explain it further. Just ask.
You are also wrong about e saying it was never 17 cents. I said it was never 17 cents in the 70s.
If you think I have said a thing that is a lie, please point it out. BUt if it is something ridicuou slime 17 cent gasoline, you’ll need some references or links.
“like”, not “slime”
I remember a gas war in San Antonio where some stations (independents, as I recall) were advertising gas at $.19 a gallon.
But that was the early 1960s.
“I remember a gas war in San Antonio where some stations (independents, as I recall) were advertising gas at $.19 a gallon.
But that was the early 1960s.
Speedy,
I was living in San Antonio in 1960…was 14 and had a Vespa motor scooter. Paid .15.9 cents at the bottom of that price war…remember it vividly.
Robert E Lee High School….
“I believe the solution, just like the problem, is energy. It appears that we have more than enough relatively cheap energy to last as long as we need it. Not forever, of course, but long enough to make the transition to renewables, fusion, or whatever turns out to work. Essentially, I think we caught the problem in time.”
Graycenphil,
Although there is some comfort (perhaps even hope) in your belief in the technosphere, I see one yuuuge bluebottle fly in your optimistic ointment: The same wunderkinds who caused the clusterfuck are the very ones who will place themselves in charge of the “solution”; and *they* will stonewall and run out the clock, frantically maintaining the status quo. I don’t think there will be any problem-solving time left at the finale of their tender ministrations. I suggest preparing as best you and your friends, relatives and neighbors possibly can.
Ozone, one never knows for sure. There is certainly some truth about those in charge of the solution, but I’m pretty optimistic there too. They are pretty fond of this wonderful time and place we all live in right now. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to lose it either.
So they may still control the resources, but instead of oil and gas it may be hydrogen and solar farms. I’m pretty sure things won’t be all that different in 20 or 50 or 100 years. That’s both good and bad, but mostly good.
Greycenphil,
Okay then. In that light, I would suggest that you blithely continue and not concern yourself with preparing for anything. As JHK has previously sarcastically intoned: “Its All Good!”
Oh, and don’t forget to trust the decisions your leaders, they would never do anything detrimental to your comfort and interests, and would never be in positions of power and wealth unless they were inherently your betters.
Maat
”
Maat or Ma’at refers to both the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice, and the personification of these concepts as a goddess regulating the stars, seasons, and the actions of both mortals and the deities, who set the order of the universe from chaos at the moment of creation. Her ideological counterpart was Isfet
”
Add a belief in flying cars and you have Greycenphil who I believe we have met before.
He claims he is asking questions but he is not. He attempts to direct traffic. Whistle in mouth like a doughboy micky-mouse hand in front of a white blue suited pig face. Think of him that way or if you prefer as a religious nut thinking life just flows down de-Nile. Take you pick.
And in the end, all progress toward any energy resource–especially the magical one that provides infinite free energy–will kill us all, as Jevon pointed out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
On the contrary, I question pretty much everything and everyone, have prepared for pretty much everything, but remian pretty confident that our current scenario will continue for a long, long time.
Questioning everything, of course, includes questioning the doomsayers too, just as I’m doing here. My whole life, there has always been some reason why life as we know it is going to end in the near future. So far they have always been wrong; I’m pretty sure they’re wrong this time too. That said, as I say, prepare for anything. But you don’t have to expect it.
Turkey theory:
http://www.businessinsider.com/nassim-talebs-black-swan-thanksgiving-turkey-2014-11
”
What exactly is my point, you ask? Pretty much what I said in my first post. We are not heading into a “Long Emergency”, we will confront the challenges and our future will be just fine. All of the predictions of impending doom, from the energy crisis to the stock market crash to the end of automobiles have been wrong, and will continue to be. Amazon will be delivering to your door for a long time and folks will still drive to Walmart in 20 years.Just so you understand, these are not facts, but they’re pretty good predictions.
”
Turkey theory exactly ask any living turkey and they all love the farmer. But Graycenphil shall not be my farmer.
But a turkey is not as stupid. All a turkey needs or wants is corn and it is a forgivable sin for a turkey to imagine an endless supply. Graycenphil alleges to be an individual who imagines and endless supply of everything metals, energy, food and good times. He sees no need to imagine our future in any other way than a turkey does. Were he a real person he would be a madman. Something you would want to cross the street and get away from. At best he would be simply irresponsible.
K-Dog, you are endless source of misinformation. Still, I’m willing to continue correcting you.
I never said anything about an endless supply of energy, food, metalss and good times, but we do have enough of it all to last a long, long time. Of course, some sources of energy are essentially endless. Food too for that matter. And I expect to enjoy good times no matter what.
So maybe you finally, almost, got something right, though it was unintentional.
Now I’m a bit curious though, just when do you expect all these things to run out?
I would agree with all that, but what is left out of the scenario is the ever expanding global warming scenario. All the projections are for a slowly warming century. The models are based on past stats and predict a steady stream up the temp gauge. What hasn’t been factored in is the all too probable feedback loop, methane gas release in the arctic and the warming mushrooms in a space of a decade or 2. So not only will we be dealing with contraction, and resource depletion, but a rapidly warming climate with all its terrible ramifications. My guess is the world cant deal with it all and global conflict over resources does us all in before the natural end.
Thank you for bringing up the global warming disaster. This is the elephant on the bed no one wants to mention. Sure, there are tons of news stories on it, but they always end with “we have plenty of time to get this fixed”.
Ha, it’s game over right now. We’ve likely hit the positive feedback loops in the Arctic with the methane explosions. Paul Beckwith, if you watch his videos, thinks it’s highly likely we’ll get an ice-free Arctic by 2020.
We have multiple disasters at our doorstep: energy, financial, ecological. I don’t see how we avoid a bottlenecking of the human population over the next 50 years.
wet dog
AGW is a scare, a mass delusion, one of many.
http://www.ruthdudleyedwards.co.uk/RDEreviews/Review-warming-booker.html
Christopher Booker has also written about the ‘scare’ phenomenon which took off in Britain from the late 80s onwards. His The Real Global Warming Disaster (which the linked article reviews) is based on, and an expansion of, a long chapter in his earlier Scared To Death, which he wrote together with Richard North about these scares. He also wrote the definitive history of Britain and the EC, which he also sees as a delusion. In 1969 he wrote a precocious book about the odd rise out of nowhere of the Swinging Sixties in England, The Neophiliacs, which looked at it as a mass fantasy (he identified two full ‘fantasy cycles’ between 1956 and 1969.
Then you have the abuse witch hunts (eg Boston, Jimmy Savile in Britain, Catholic Church in Ireland) which is a major branch of the fantasy industry.
Then there is the mass immigration fantasy. Ed West’s The Diversity Delusion is an excellent analysis of mass immigration into Britain. When I read it for the second time (good books always reward a second read, even a third) in the final chapter I found what I expected to see but had missed first time round: a comparison of the mass immigration lobby with a millennial cult whose prophecies about the arrival of our alien masters fail to materialize, but whose membership multiplies nevertheless.
There is even a widespread historical fantasy as far as I can see, having read the Spanish Historian Pio Moa (Rodriguez) who destroys the myths surrounding the Civil War and Franco’s ‘regime’. For starters, the Republicans were not fighting for democracy as none of them were democrats and the same goes for the ‘Resistance’ to Franco. Pio Moa should know as he was a Marxist terrorist himself. If it is Mao and Chinese history, then look at Chang and Halliday’s best seller.
These are just the fantasies which spring to mind just now. I think they can all be put into the huge, multi-coloured pc fantasy. There is no reason I can think of why the Left has a near monopoly (Pizzagate was of the Right) except that they dominate life and culture.
It is interesting to compare the common characteristics of these witch hunts and fantasies. One of them is deceit, which is why you have probably only heard one side of the non-debate. Ruth Dudley Edwards (better known for her biography of Padraig Pearse) gives the most glaring examples from the book, which was written before ‘Climategate’ provided another.
My point of view should be sharply distinguished from conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists believe anything. It does not require conspiracy although conspiracy has always had its place in the march of events (Peter Hitchens describes it as ‘lunch’) as there is no need because those who share the fantasy want it to be so. Probably the best example of this collective self-censorship Wikipedia which (almost) always arrives at the conventional pc wisdom.
I however believe little unless I can check it out, or at least I flatter myself that this is the case. This makes things very difficult as you can imagine. Nobody seems to have a full picture of the truth (myself included of course). For example, Booker writing in the Daily Telegraph last year used the phrase ‘from what we all now know about Savile’ – the problem being, of course, that what ‘everyone knows’ about him is not just wrong, but insanely wrong from the evidence. So if Booker, who seems to have spent most of his career looking at this, can still get it wrong then everyone else can too.
So forget about AGW and the ‘positive feedback loops’ and the rest of the worse-than-useless jargon. The white-coated ones are just as fallible about these things, in fact more so as they form part of the non-thinking thinking classes. In fact the crusade against ‘pseudoscience’ can possibly also be added to the list above. And the belief that all human behaviour can be explained by neuroscience and brain scans. And the new aggressive evangelical breed of atheist, whose creed John Gray describes as one of the cruder Christian heresies.
And I didn’t even mention the economic geniuses.
And behind all of this there is the massive, inane background throb and hum of fake news and the squawks of our outraged moral media guardians, ‘explaining’ what is happening.
I beg to differ, mdm, all of the predictions that I have read usually start of with the statement that conditions are happening faster than they anticipated, whether it refers to glacier melting, or temperature change in the Arctic ocean. I think that their best guesses are just that, guesses. They are giving their best shot, but it’s still just a guess. Regards, Capt Spaulding.
Captain,
If the current modeling of the climate is correct, than we are, indeed, in a death spiral. If, however, it is in error, than our pitiful, laughable efforts to control the climate may have to be…reconsidered.
Grants Pass, Oregon, just last week, broke a climate record for heat on a particular day (don’t exactly recall which) that bested the highest heat recorded since…1929. Who was fouling the air in 1929? Why excessive heat then? How does whatever answer you divine impact current models?
You are correct…just guesses…marginal science at best. Understand the prevailing model as such.
Gore said we’d be extinct by now with New York underwater. When will you people learn that it’s just another globalist scam?
No, they won’t. They have their own set of facts and are completely impervious to any argument. It’s a substitute religion.
I really don’t know.
Living in the Caribbean, my choice is Amazon, although lately they got a habit of price gouging by a least 10% compared to same merchandise in original online stores.
Having said that, in the heat of the civil war, it is nice to have a large, air-conditioned cool place like Wal-Mart to gather and rehearse future moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVsVxpJoF78
Nouveau riche or native?
Sexual refugee from the old good US of A.
Why are you in the heat of the civil war?
No, just in heat..
A sexual refugee in heat? Did I get that right?
Thanks for the Russian supermarket link.
NP. Here’s another one in electronics store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwsAEK7xQDY
Investors that buy stock in corporate money losers are like the farmer that expends more calories in planting and growing than he gets in harvesting. No farmer, no farm, no investor, no company, can survive that way. The laws of physics don’t allow for it.
Any shareholder that doesn’t get money back from the company is throwing away calories in the form of money. It’s like a farmer that doesn’t harvest. And Amazon has never paid dividends. What good does money-calories do the stockholder if the money-calories are sitting in company coffers where the stockholder can’t get at them?
Amazon stock sells for over 900 bucks a share. Amazon’s stock valuation is assuming a massive money-caloric surplus. But this money-caloric surplus has to be given to shareholders to do them any good. Not giving shareholders money-calories is trying to defy the laws of nature. And Amazon shareholders will find out that the laws of nature cannot be defied.
Farmers need to eat. Farmers need to harvest in order to eat. A shareholder needs to eat. A dividend is the shareholder’s harvest. A company that doesn’t let the shareholder harvest and eat has no reason to exist.
In an inflationary environment like the one we’re in (asset inflation, not the more traditional CPI inflation), the way to survive and even thrive is to take in a surplus of currency-based “capital” and grow your market cap faster than inflation takes away the buying power of that same capital. That’s why profits don’t matter — or actually why profits are indicative that you are not growing as fast as you could and why zero-profits or even steady-state losses attract investment capital because of the notion that investors chase growth instead of profits.
This has nothing to do with physics, or eating. It has to do with how to adjust to an inflation-based currency that is not universally-relevant as a price signal for all the things you can buy with it. It has to do with how the DJIA can go from 17k to 22k in less than a year but gasoline stays rock solid or even goes down a bit at ~$2/gallon over that same time.
How the investor class made it so that they could sell one share of Amazon stock and turn around and buy 450 gallons of gasoline with the proceeds from that sale is not about physics — it’s about psychology.
A shareholder doesn’t “need” anything, since by definition they have too much money anyway. In any faith-based monetary system, which most assuredly includes all fiat systems, hoarding/investing is a sign that people have lost faith in that system. Their fear of lack prompts them to “invest” (park their money instead of investing it in actual, real, personal local production) in transparently phony casino operations – aka “markets” – for the chance to gain outsize returns for doing nothing. They produce nothing, they benefit no one, and they are a scourge and a blight on all of humanity.
They just want to ride the wave dude. Totally tubular investments and sugar plumb faeries.
The question is whether there will be a wave to ride.
And I looked upon the seas, and they were flat…
Mr. America needs to walk on by…
https://youtu.be/0rhRhSx_jbM
I had to come back because I have something important to say.
I was thinking as I was getting ready to drive with the Teslas that the idea that Amazon delivery is inefficient is a myth.
You drive a fuel efficient hybrid to buy groceries at an average American distance round trip of ten miles. You bring back back 75 pounds of groceries.
That is 7.5 delivered pounds per mile.
An aging smoking out of tune belching truck that gets horrible mileage drives 60 miles and delivers 7000 pounds of groceries on a shift.
That is 117 delivered pounds per mile.
117 / 7.5 = 15.6
Q: Does the fuel efficient hybrid get better than 15.6 times better mileage than the diesel guzzling truck?
A: NO
My analysis is simplistic and only considers the end of the supply chain. You can also play with the numbers and lie to yourself as much as you wish to get your own feel good answer. Or you could come up with reasonable numbers and use science.
But the Amazon model was called inefficient and this is my two cents.
Agreed. Amazon and Walmart should be similarly efficient until you consider that Amazon delivers to your door, while Walmart (for the most part) does not. But I did notice recently that you can buy some items from Walmart (60 lb dumbbells) through Amazon now too, so Walmart’s more flexible in that regard as well. That alone means Walmart’s more robust in their delivery capabilities, although I’ve heard Amazon’s reaching out for limited brick and mortar capability as well, with Trader Joe’s(?) I think.
“There is no public transportation in this area” –SteveO
Of course there isn’t. Public transportation requires tax monies and the conservative refrain since Reagan has been to “cut taxes” and shrink government until it’s small enough to drown in a bath tub.
So, no public transportation.
Why DO they have flat roofs?
I am still unconvinced that suburbia cannot be retooled. Some more than others, but many are in very nice locations with lots of farmland nearby, and with front and back yards as well as by the streets, all of which can be planted in fruit and nut trees, gardened, chickened and even goated. Garages will make ideal storefronts, unused houses can be converted to schools and churches, and families will double up.
Flat roofs are the cheapest and quickest to put up. Especially for large buildings. It’s just that simple.
Even if flat roofs were not the cheapest and simplest roof, the flat surface makes for easy installation of A/C units and other utilities on the top of the building.
Re last week, So there are other search engines than google.
Oh, and also, about having all those packages delivered door to door, true enough but we already have mail service, and I think it is far more efficient than having each person drive to the stores and get it themselves.
Yes, why not lay down leather everywhere? Why do people have to wear shoes?
I’d love it! I’m a barefoot girl. But maybe you missed my point. Should we not have mail service? Isn’t it better for one vehicle to drive all day delivering many packages and have 50 people not drive anywhere?
Sophia,
Remember what Sam “Lightnin'” Hopkins opined; …Rubber on heels slower than rubber on wheels….
Can you have them add a layer of cotton socks? I get blisters…
Just wait a little while longer. It isn’t just Walmart and Amazon … retail in general is in trouble. Retail stocks posted their worst day since March during trading Thursday, as the SPDR S&P Retail ETF fell roughly 3% on disappointing earnings by retailers like Macy’s and Kohls.
No doubt. As incomes continue to degrade, consumers will dry up and blow away and more retailers will go the way of the stegosaurus. Years ago when McMansioneer’s were paying 50% of their incomes on mortgage payments, they still had “home equity” with which to continue consuming. But those days are gone and credit cards are maxxed out as well, so the fuel for retail is dried up. With medical costs jumping upwards at 15% to 20% a year it surely cannot be long before the purchase of shoes, clothing and backyard furniture is completely dead. You don’t need backyard furniture if you have no backyard, do you?
If there is some magic that is going to replace this void in the economy I for one cannot see it. Personally I believe that there has already been Too Much Magic. I seem to recall reading that somewhere….
In Minnesota the sprawl, er fall… er Mall of America announced its 25th anniversary to market its…? what?.. glory? My wife an I thought that we might have gone a total of 5 times during that period and it was only to visit the indoor amusement park and movie theater; I don’t recall ever purchasing overly priced objects I could find closer to home. It happens to be across from the airport to fly consumers in, kind of the opposite of Amazon.
It’s not all of them. Memorial City Mall here in Houston is flourishing. Then again, the Petsmart I have been going to for years is closing and it is on 290, a major thoroughfare. You’ll know the end is near when the last bastion of government jobs, the DMV, goes the way of the dodo.
The Main DMV in St. Paul is located in the Sears Store next to the capital bldg.; though is now complemented by a new and larger DMV located in the Downtown office and dwindling retail. Though there has been significant investment in apartment housing, some affordable but mostly luxury.
Daytons was bought from Target by Macys and now Macys has left, leaving more room for corporate offices many of these are empty, though they get a great rate from the city in its attempts to keep downtown alive. Since St. Paul is the Capital lots of govmnt jobs and money.
“Starting from the founding American principle that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” he argues that the source of the neoprogressive detour from the original American principle of liberty is “the abandonment of the idea of consent as fundamental to political legitimacy and the substitution in the place of consent of a welfare or enjoyment model of political legitimacy.” 9 Neoprogressivism, he explains, “is formulated specifically to replace consent . . . with the welfare model, which holds that states are legitimate to the degree that governments extend enjoyments rather than to the extent that they are obedient to the commands of citizens.” 10 This trajectory mirrors that of the EU to a remarkable extent, and in both the EU and the U.S. the abandonment of the principle of legitimacy by consent is linked to relativism. If there is no such thing as objective truth or unchanging human nature, then, in principle, citizens cannot claim truly inalienable rights –rights that are rooted in human nature and objective truth, and that preexist government. In the absence of these rights, the human person is not the shaper of his own destiny, with government as his servant. Instead, it is the state –the government –that shapes the individual. The source of political legitimacy is thus not the consent of the governed, expressing their immutable dignity by their agency in their own governance, but rather the government’s success in providing its citizens with the good things in life. In a meaningless world, there can be nothing more than comfort and entertainment –eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
Todd Huizinga, “The New Totalitarian Temptation”
Bread and circus?
No, Major League Baseball and Formula 1 racing. Both of which raise huge question marks about the imminent end of modern civilization — or not, depending on your interest in sport.
This year I estimate roughly 50 million have attend MLB. The Formula 1 attendance worldwide is staggering. A lot of somebodys have money to spend on sport entertainment. Kind of makes one question the economic apocalypse. And where, we ask, are the Climate Puritans? They should be all over these atrocities against nature.
MLB = Grown Men Standing Around. Spitting. Scratching. Even the players are bored as hell!
Formula 1 and Indy Car I just don’t appreciate. Like watching go carts, just faster. I’d rather just ride go carts myself.
Granted, NASCAR is stupid and has probably far exceeded its shelf life, but the speeds and the wrecks are rather awesome. NASCAR has a genuine culture as well (at least historically), whereas Formula 1 has always been simply a corporate event for the country club set.
The managerial class is trying to destroy their culture (redneck) to make it palatable to minorities. I hope they fail and fall.
Yes, and NASCAR is paying the price for it now big time! Survey the stands during most of the races now and be amazed by all the empty seats. They sold their soul to get in bed with corporate America, mindless to the fact that their core demographic (Southern white men) is the one getting fucked by corporatism.
Ray McKinnon delivers an absolutely amazing soliloquy at 24:10 in his 2001 film short, The Accountant, concerning what happened to rural America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9PMI7a2Fw4
“Stupid People” on Youtube has rendered MLB, Nascar and the rest of the overpriced inanities that only cats could finding fascinating dead. Watch a car go in circles or a guy jumping head-first onto a bed of nails–from the balcony of his two-story home?
Last night, I watched the excellent BBC documentary, “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City” that describes the opposing roles Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses played in the mid-20th-century “redevelopment” of American cities, and that contained several short interview clips by JHK.
Today’s blog post is a good one, and I would like to see more future posts like this one, the de-Malling of America, and Jacobs/Moses, etc. instead of the increasingly tiresome idiocy of American Politics and Finance.
Jim,
I did write a thoughtful answer to your post on “August 10, 2017 at 1:08 pm “
Yes you did. I can’t add much to it and it wouldn’t be fair for me to expect you to absorb the entire MGTOW philosophy from just a couple of exchanges or just a couple of videos from two or three channels.
MGTOW is growing because the Big Picture is validating it. Your particular situation may be wonderful but, it is the exception rather than the rule.
All I can do is ask for you to be open to the idea that MGTOW is growing and for damn good reasons.
Very interesting! First time I’ve heard of this being an actual semi-organized “thing.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Going_Their_Own_Way
https://www.mgtow.com/
Now ax or ponder, What else am I missing?
MGTOW isn’t “organized” but, is a state of being for straight men. Just as you can be a bachelor, married, divorced, or widower, the new status is MGTOW.
The first four are oriented around marriage, its built-in obligations, and inculcated social expectations. MGTOW is a unique philosophy that enables men to break away from the Wedding-Divorce Plantation and seek after self-actualization.
YouTube was taken over by militant feminists who are hostile to MGTOW and have demonetized those channels. SO…, while the message can be found in one place, I’d suggest checking out the many MGTOW channels. There is something for men in all stages of awakening i.e. the curious, the awakened, Red Pill Rage, fugitives from the W-D Plantation, those established in the narrative, and the Monks. I would classify myself as a MGTOW Monk.
The channel, “Messenger Rising,” was my guide in the beginning. He is a bonafide MGTOW Monk and a battle-scarred survivor of Britain’s anti-male Marriage-Divorce Industrial Complex.
Most men come across Sandman and Angry MGTOW because they are so prolific. Sandman’s presentation is easy to digest and he covers the endless horror stories sent to him. Angry MGTOW is for those deep in the Red Pill Rage and feeling of betrayal that everything we believed in was a lie!
Dozens and dozens of other channels and they all have a message for men who are weary of the gynocentric tyranny.
But….what will we tell the children?
daveed,
More like, “What children?”.
Women with any goddamn sense will protect themselves from pregnancy via a man who is not going to be around to help raise and protect such progeny. Sorry, that’s just how humans do, unless said women can get support by other means (usually meaning, the State). Why the stigma against “unwed” or “single” mothers? Because it used to be a known and unplanned-for burden. Social taboos and strictures are always built around practical matters.
So sure, by all means, these men should be invited to “go their own way”, but they shouldn’t expect much dispersion of their genetic material when their chosen path is discovered and word gets around.
ozone, unfortunately, the very best DNA will go extinct due to the necessity of MGTOW.
Modern women are just insane and are not worth marrying or having children with. Even if a handful of women are worthy, ZOG has created a social soil that is too toxic to grow families. Let alone able to sustain advanced civilization. MGTOW is rational self-preservation for quality straight men in these final years before the new Dark Ages fully manifests.
The MGTOW generation will be the last flickering light of civilization before the Endless Night of The Idiocracy falls upon ZOG Amerika. Don’t blame us for not planting seed in a field that The Tribe has polluted and sown full of tares.
OK, but you said I had not watched the core video. Gimme a link.
There is no “core” video anymore than there is a core color in a kaleidoscope. My comments are mainly for the men, here.
I’ll share my two cents on it with you (sophia) but, there’s nothing about MGTOW for women.
Be satisfied that it exists and is growing for good reason.
Yes, janet is right about it being online but, isn’t just about everything online now? Her misandry and bigotry are showing by attempting to dismiss it as such. MGTOW is online and men are coming to it online.
MGTOW is exploding among the young men because, unlike older men, the Red Pill is available to them now. They know about Female Nature now. We can tell them how to NOT fall into the trap of the gynocentric Marriage-Divorce Industrial Complex. They won’t suffer as we did.
https://cdn-media.threadless.com/submissions_wm/699345-d68e20b52df6f84fb8b491aca2c30f54.jpg
MGTOW looks like a George Soros/Open Society/Globalist organization. Divide and Conquer…. 🙁
I strongly disagree ladros!
Soros and his peers amplified modern feminism and weaponized marriage.
MGTOW is an ORGANIC reaction to Jewish social engineering. MGTOW is rational self-preservation.
Do your homework and you’ll see what I mean.
What is increasingly worrisome is the isolationism of the typical American. Going to the mall was a social experience. All of these things are being eliminated. It used to be people would visit, just come over to your house and sit and talk. Gone. It used to be going to church every Sunday was a social experience. Gone. It used to be going to the pub was a social experience, but now everyone has their beaks in their phones. Gone.
You hate Christianity, remember? People are too crazy now to associate much with each other. As your Lennon said, Come a little closer and I can feel your disease (or at least dis-ease).
I wish it were true that Large Scale would dissolve and City scale would bloom. But I just can’t see the benefits of localization outrunning the unbelievable economies of scale in centralized production and distribution. To some extent, the more expensive energy and resources get, the more advantage there is to economy of scale. Now if you are saying that after a drastic collapse, there will be produce stands and scrap dealers in the downtowns, that I can accept.
I like your assessment. The question is which system should be in control; there you find dragons. Common sense gives easy answers but we are not a nation ruled by common sense.
A complete recalibration of expectations for standard of living, material possessions, and a healthy balance between contributing to one’s community and maintaining self-sufficiency: that all sounds like a good thing, and I am able to imagine such as world as better than the one in which we find ourselves today.
The part I’m having difficulty imagining is getting there from here with our towns and main streets sufficiently intact to accommodate such a life. Mobs of starving louts with no useful skills and lots of guns seems more like a formula for pillaging everything to the ground.
Mobs of starving louts with no useful skills and lots of guns seems more like a formula for pillaging everything to the ground.
LOL! Love that word picture!
The problem with apocalyptic religions is that you get recurrent Apocalypse, but never the promised Utopia.
“With these words Petrarch concludes his well-known letter in which he describes to a friend the devastation of the town of Florence by the “Black Death.” In the years 1345 to 1350 half the population, or, as is maintained by others, one-third of the population, had succumbed to the plague. Two hundred thousand market towns and villages in Europe were completely depopulated, and in the dwellings encumbered with corpses wild beasts took up their abode. Statistics drawn up at the instigation of Pope Clement VI state the number of deaths for the whole world at 42,836,486. The name “Black Death,” which was commonly given to the plague of 1348, must be regarded as the expression of the horror aroused by this uncanny disease. Popular imagination depicted it as a man mounted on a black horse, or else as a black giant striding along, his head reaching above the roofs of the houses.”
“The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague”, Johannes Nohl
That’s not popular imagination. In “The Gods of Eden” William Bramley says that the Grim Reaper came from this period. People said they saw a figure clad in black with a scythe like device spraying an aerosol mist in the air and without fail the plague would develop there.
Sometimes the Gardener’s of the Earth must reap, Sea. Beyond that, there is pest control. You are a bug to us, not a feature.
I want to be the guy on the cart who yell “Bring out the Dead” or better yet, the guy in the Masque of the Red Death who breaks into the Elite’s Party.
I don’t see this as a battle. There are two entirely different demographics.
I think Amazon has a business model that could potentially weather part of the storm. Instead of driving for hours you can get exactly the broken or missing part of something that you need to get something going, a bicycle part, for example. Most places even in my fairly large city don’t have what I need, but Amazon does. Yes, someone is going to have to deliver that but it will be as part of a route that is delivering everyone else’s stuff too and long after I stop driving my car they could theoretically still deliver although with higher shipping charges and possibly slower ship times. Many of these critical parts are not very big anyway and save throwing away whole machines. It might save me from making all of the parts myself or having to bike through all of the junkyards and second hand stores to find parts. I do understand that it relies on the internet but I think that will be with us for a while after a lot of other things implode.
Wallmart is life support system for a lot of extremely poor people as are a couple of deep discount food stores. It is a bit of a freak show, at least in my city with all of the tatted up folks, the amazing obesity even of younger people, and all the women with hardware in their faces and such. It is amazing what rubbish people are buying there, even though they do have a small produce section. Most people are buying the worst foods they possibly could, like soda and pop tarts and I would have to assume that is what they subsist on. As for the actual building. They did have some really nice greenhouses there and the car park has about 25 acres of potential community garden so there is hope. The building could also be part of a “maker community” like they have in Norway. I don’t think we need to go to socialism as that is not the answer. I do think we need to change our mindset about community and survival. Can you imagine a place where woodworkers and metalworkers and restoration people can get together to make things happen? We now think in terms of dollars and time is money, etc. What if it wasn’t? There are a lot of people out there who are much more valuable than what they are getting paid to do but that is not the priority. What if by valuing people and social capital all of this could change? That might make these places worth saving for a while. You could also grow a lot of stuff up on the roof and that would actually save part of it from sun degradation which destroys roofs.
So maybe that’s it. Maybe there will be two kinds of survivors. One will be a maker, a craftsman, and an organic gardener who will attempt to adapt at least while he/she can. The other will hang on to whatever they can, subsisting on the remains of the system for as long as they can. I think Wallmart and Amazon will serve these two demographics very differently and I really don’t see them as competitors.
And maybe, just maybe, like the 100th monkey…the people will adapt and change and become creative craftspeople and gardeners. It doesn’t take that much land and there is so much wasted space due to roads and car parks.
The Government should distribute those little Walmart Go cars to the whole population. Why walk when you can ride? If we can’t drive cars, at least we can at least be Shriner Clowns.
at least we can at least be Shriner Clowns:
Nice word picture!
Rosy cheeks blanch the whiteness of his motionless face but onward he goes. His head frozen in a twist to keep the gold fringed crimson hat on his head, ahead he goes. Swerving only to bump the occasional pedestrian who gets in his way.
Another take on Amazon, and one perhaps more sinister, is it’s collaboration with the the american government’s intelligence/surveillance agencies. For an in depth look at the partnership, read the informative WSWS two-part series … link below.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/13/amzn-j13.html
Some say closed Walmarts are being used by the Government now as well. Possible emergency distribution centers.
I’ve heard that repeatedly as well. It would make sense.
I wouldn’t be too quick to write off suburbia, although I would agree that the country is overstored. The fact is that many Americans want little or nothing to do with their nearby central cities. All too often, central cities are synonomous with high taxes, lots of crime, homeless vagrants and bad schools. Think Detroit, which has lost over 1 million residents since 1950 (more than 1/2 its 1950 population). Its major department store, JL Hudson, closed about four decades ago. In Rochester, NY, investors had the misfortune of building an indoor mall (Midtown Plaza) a few years before the race riots of the 1960’s. The mall closed in 2008.
While the city of Oakland, CA’s downtown is a retail desert, the nearby suburb of Walnut Creek has one of the most successful shopping areas in the state, with its own Neiman Marcus, Tiffany’s, Apple store, Macy’s and Nordstrom’s.
Whites were driven out by Black Terror. Once Blacks gained control of the political machinery, they knew there would be no justice and there would be no coming back. Multiply this by a thousand and you have one more factor in the Fall of America – another unspoken story of news fit to print but not printed because it doesn’t fit the broken record narrative.
Exiting Walmart Express, Walmart now has its neighborhood market stores, smaller grocery stores adding to local food store competition.
In the competitive heat of capitalism, Amazon decides to buy Whole Foods.
Big goes to bigger, bigger goes to gargantuan, and gargantuan will go to humongous or Ginormous.
I save a lot of money at Walmart. Some coffees are close to 3 dollars cheaper than at our local Safeway, as are 1/2 gallon containers of Breyer’s ice cream, to cite just two examples.
Of course Amazon is known as THE on line store, as compared to Walmart, who will have to exert considerable savvy and effort to catch up.
Our Walmart is a 24 hour superstore. If I want or need something at 2 am (e.g. aspirin) at 2 am there is no traffic, there are no lines, and in half an hour I am home again and have the aspirin for pain relief. I doubt Amazon will ever be able to do that.
Yes, yes, it’s all about market share and catering to those markets most efficiently.
Walmart may have a lock on the 2 am aspirin buyer, but I’m sure it’s not giving Amazon a headache.
Walmart does sit atop the profitability mountain, with Amazon at the base.
Soon Amazon will deliver by drone at 2:00 am – the drones made up to look like Owls.
They better be quiet, or this shooter will permanently mute the hoo-hoo-hooters.
Imbecilia Americana and Spite Lee is more preoccupied with protesting the unemployed status of a washed-up mulatto QB who made a convert’s sophmoric rush to discovery of his “blackness” from the pocket of his white adopted parents. Sacked for a loss, again.
He was surely naive in thinking he could protest the national military police state so flagrantly using the public megaphone of the NFL when the NFL derives so much of its macho mojo from its support of the that same military police state. His ridiculous looking throwback ‘fro and doing it all in ultra liberal San Fran, all on the cusp of a national political backlash against 8 years of Liberal bullshit under Obama didn’t help his cause either. Kaeppy evidently took a few too many concussive hits during his brief time in the spotlight, but he’ll likely have the rest of his life to recover and ponder his mistakes in relative anonymity.
Corporate capitalism grants no quarter to freelancers or malcontents. Like Chad Johnson, Terrell Owens, and so many others before him, young Kaeppy’s finding that out the hard way. In the end, those who get paid obscene amounts for playing a child’s game should probably just shut their mouths and be happy until they retire, after which they can parlay their newfound celebrity and wealth status to support their latest cause du jour.
His record $126 million dollar, seven year “contract” may turn out to be worth only about $25 million in the end.
Yeah, it’ll be tough for this Black Panther wannabe.
The great game is back, and there’s money to be won.
The Industry is amazed: they were thrown for a loss by this geeky looking punk. Whites actually turned off the GAME. They didn’t think this was possible. Nothing trumped the Game. But apparently, grotesque, hypocritical minority pride does for some.
Add to that the announcers: big, muscular guys who used to play suddenly all PC and shit. It’s distasteful: dogs dancing for their dinner. Whores. Mercenaries. Traitors. The GAME is supposed to be innocent. A relic of America’s yesteryear. Friday Night Lights with UFO’s flying overhead trying to tune in too.
“MGTOW is growing…” –JiminFlorida
MGTOW does not exist in the real world since it is mostly a virtual community. If it did materialize in a face to face way, we would probably see that it should be called OWMGTOW.
Since humans are by nature social beings, and since the number of feminist men is overwhelmingly large, MGTOW can safely be disregarded as a fringe phenomena. I suspect it is composed of old white misogynist men who are bitter.
Meanwhile, women are growing stronger, and are less dependent on men. Hence, women are demanding equality.
I am glad MGTOW exists if it lessens the pain and isolation some men feel. We are social beings.
a fringe phenomena. – janet
============
phenomenon
MGTOW is Freedom. It is like unto a soul in the process of leaving a diseased and dying body.
Your gynocratic nightmare reflects the victory of a malignant cancer over a body that has already suffered too many self-inflicted wounds.
It’s huge in Japan. They call themselves the Grass Boys. And they’re young. Predates the movement over here I believe by at least a few years.
When women win, men lose and therefore women lose. When men win, women win too. Why? Because that’s the Natural Order. Men are wired to take care of Women but not vice versa. Men are better.
Janos, I may have discovered the spiritual core of MGTOW.
In the Uddhava Gita. Chapter 26 (The Aila Gita)
excerpts:
The following song was sung by the famous emperor Purarava. When deprived of his wife, Urvasi, he was at first bewildered, but by controlling his lamentation he began to feel detachment.
King Aila said: Alas, just see the extent of my delusion! This goddess was embracing me and held my neck in her grip. My heart was so polluted by lust that I had no idea how my life was passing.
That lady cheated me so much that I did not even see the rising or setting of the sun. Alas, for so many years I passed my days in vain!
Alas, although I am supposed to be a mighty emperor, the crown jewel of all kings on this earth, just see how my bewilderment has rendered me a toy animal in the hands of women!
Although I was a powerful lord with great opulence, that woman gave me up as if I were no more than an insignificant blade of grass. And still, naked and without shame, I followed her, crying out to her like a madman.
Where are my so-called great influence, power and sovereignty? Just like an ass being kicked in the face by his she-ass, I ran after that woman, who had already given me up.
What is the use of a big education or the practice of austerities and renunciation, and what is the use of studying religious scriptures, of living in solitude and silence, if, after all that, one’s mind is stolen by a woman?
To hell with me! I am such a fool that I didn’t even know what was good for me, although I arrogantly thought I was highly intelligent.
Although I achieved the exalted position of a lord, I allowed myself to be conquered by women as if I were a bullock or a jackass.
Even after I had served the so-called nectar of the lips of Urvasi for many years, my lusty desires kept rising again and again within my heart and were never satisfied, just like a fire that can never be extinguished by the oblations of ghee poured into its flames.
Who but the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who lies beyond material perception and is the Lord of self-satisfied sages, can possibly save my consciousness, which has been stolen by a prostitute?
What is this polluted body anyway—so filthy and full of bad odors? I was attracted by the fragrance and beauty of a woman’s body, but what are those so-called attractive features? They are simply a false covering created by illusion.
A fine example in the classic tradition. Shankara has a poem where he compares women to vampires, stealing a man’s blood in the form of work during the day and his blood in the form of semen at night – even worse!
You might enjoy the work of a famous Yogi, Astrologer, and Internet Personality, Julian Lee. He showed up here to help me several years ago for a short time. A Yogananda disciple, he teaches the good news of celibacy in the belly of the beast – Portland, Oregon, his adopted home town. Yes, a sin, but why? Because it takes the sacred energy meant for higher things. This is first and fundamental. Of course a multitude of other sins follow – the tragic ones involving unwanted children and broken families.
http://celibacy.info/Awaken_Young_Men_Renounce_Mortal_Sin_Julian_Lee.html
Check out the side bar – a great interpretation of Shakespeare’s condemnation of lust. He’s a Man – going to local sex festivals and pleading with the youth to reprny as they mock and spit on him.
should be repent
Did you attend the ratha yatra? If so, what city?
Ratha Yatra? HA! I live in White Trash Flori-Duh! LOL
Where I live, the rednecks would think ratha yatra was a new brand of ramen noodles.
It’s YUGE in Japan. Absolutely YUGE. The world has never seen the likes of this movement. Fantastic people. Only the best. Very, very, very good people, I’ll tell you that. They’ve accomplished more in those 2 years than any other movement known to man, including that Christianity hocus pocus.
^MGTOW can safely be disregarded as a fringe phenomenon.^
MGTOW is Freedom. It is like unto a soul in the process of leaving a diseased and dying body.
Your gynocratic nightmare reflects the victory of a malignant cancer over a body that has already suffered too many self-inflicted wounds.
Not to diminish JiminFlorida’s new direction, but, I belong to a more inclusive group. It is one in which men (or women) grasp life’s incandescence. You may have heard of us (MOWGLI).
I hope someday you will join us…..
Never heard of MOWGLI. Men Or Women Grasp Life’s Incandescence, eh?
Sounds very New Agey or the offshoot of some trendy mega-church. Thanx but, I’ll pass.
Indiscriminate inclusion is precisely the cause of many of life’s problems.
Trump thanked Putin for the expulsion of American diplomats
I want to thank him because we’re trying to cut down our payroll and as far as I’m concerned I’m very thankful that he let go of a large number of people because now we have a smaller payroll
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-thanks-vladimir-putin-for-expelling-755-us-diplomatic-staff-were-going-to-save-a-lot-of-money/article/2631199
As you understand, the President frankly trolls his enemies – the State Department and the CIA. After all, in order to save on wages they can not be transferred to other places.
And this is a trolling of such level that no one could doubt his hostility to those whom he trolls. In this phrase, the well-restrained fire and fury with which he threatened North Korea are heard, which greatly frightened his compatriots and allies, especially the Japanese and Germans.
Shoot!
They are afraid of North Korea, and they are not afraid to organize the Maidan and support the neo-Nazis in Kiev!
I am pretty sure that if Russia bangs its fist on the table, there will be just a wet place instead of N. Korea.
As for Trump’s compatriots, even in the worst years of Clintonism the vast majority of Americans were against turning America into a world policeman. But they were inspired that America could afford it, and their objections were very cold, I would even say “theoretical”.
And America can no longer afford this and the fear of nuclear war is a very important stimulant of higher nervous activity progressing in the right direction.
And Donald Trump successfully solves this problem, threatening Kim Jong-un, who is certainly a very formidable ruler of North Korea, but he has much less opportunities to avenge his country than Putin.
I think the whole thing is just for show, but I’m not sure what the play is just yet. Langley and the Pentagon could certainly have put together a low key operation to dispense with Kim uneventfully by now if they really wanted to, so this must be about something else. Probably just about making China and/or Russia dance to our tune under nuclear threat once again. Lot’s of perceived value in political theater!
No.
It is an ideological weapon used by BOTH sides in the ongoing civil war in the United States.
That too.
Did we decide that China is giving Kim all this technology and/or materials?
Did Yogananda father a child?
How good was he?
When a pick pocket sees a Saint, all he sees is pockets.
It seems that Prince William has already assumed his duties
The procedure began to transfer power from the visit of the Duke and the Duchess of Cambridge to the village of Passchendaele, where from July to November 1917 the Third Battle of Ypres took place, during which the tanks got bogged down in the mud after heavy rains, and it turned out that there was no technical advantage in the Anglo-Saxon world before the almost defeated German Empire! And the Englishwoman at the top of the victory admitted her defeat!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/kate-middleton-prince-william-visit-10905321
And now, literally yesterday the news tape was full of victorious relays like:
WAR IN EUROPE: MOST AMERICANS SUPPORT SENDING TROOPS TO BALTICS IF RUSSIA ATTACKS
http://www.newsweek.com/us-military-europe-most-americans-want-troops-baltics-if-russia-attacked-648458
And today:
Kim Jong Un doesn’t need to strike Guam — he’s already won
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/kim-jong-un-doesnt-strike-174809266.html
Trump: We Have Lost the War in Afghanistan. We Should Get Out Now
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lost-war-afghanistan-now-143347975.html
Prince Charles, as a great theatergoer and one of the main connoisseurs of Shakespeare, was undoubtedly the intellectual leader not only of the United Kingdom, but also of a number of Muslim countries where Shakespeare became well known by Muslim Ummah thanks to him and Martin Lings.
But we should not forget that it was Prince Charles who was the first person who dared to compare Putin to Hitler.
Nobody cares what Prince Charles says or thinks. He has no standing or credible opinion on geopolitical matters.
Comparing Putin to Hitler is supremely sophomoric. Either that or he said it purely for the peddlers of prolefeed.
The Canadian made film “Passchendaele” was a commercial failure after it was released in 2008. But I did learn from the closing credits that Canada lost about 60,000 troops in WWI, more than the US did in its Viet Nam adventure. In 1917, Canada’s population was about 8 million.
Sometimes the news media distort the truth by refusing to cover certain stories. One story Canada’s national newspaper (The Globe and Mail) has refused to cover is the long running behind the scenes battle for the Royal Succession.
James, thank you for getting back to the subjects that got me reading you in the first place. It would be great fo you to drill down and speculate how these behemoths will fail.
Is it just that energy will become so expensive that running a mega warehouse or big box chain becomes uneconomical? How and what other factors will lead to the demise….
Even the world’s most liberal major newspaper, the NYT, has seen fit to publish only 26 obits concerning women while publishing 107 about men. It seems that women are not particularly noteworthy.
Janet, for the past 5000 years women are not doing well in ‘sacred’ literature or in current news.
From 6/25 to today.
Correct, Q. The HISstory is dismal. Now, especially since 1964, we are entering HERstory. Feminism is growing in influence. What has JiminFlorida, Janos and others upset is the increase in women’s power … which affects them.
Women now have the law on their side. Women now outnumber men in higher education which will eventually lead to women having more power in the workplace. It is women’s economic, legal, and political POWER that men fear. The leader of the free world right now is a German woman.
” Feminism is growing in influence.”
Our society is becoming Balkanized, Political correctness/Marxist dogma is the order of the day, transient sexual proclivity becomes a serious social/political issue, neither Johnny nor Jamal can read at adequate levels, immigrants, illegal and otherwise, clog the social safety net, Onanism is growing in influence etc. etc. ect (thank you, Q). This you ascribe to the growing influence of feminism?
As BRH is wont to offer…”and how do you like it NOW gentlemen?”
To tell you the truth, not so much…but at least now we have someone to willing to take credit for the issues we face.
Los Angeles Times has favored Jews in its editorial Obituaries.
Even praising a former SDS type bomber.
When I consider my suburbia in a 215 square mile Southern municipality, I prefer it to downtown living in Seattle, Boston, San Fran, or Oklahoma City. I have neighbors not strangers that I have to put up with. And rural areas? Few are self sufficient and that means they need to drive for everything. So let’s say I have the perfect population density.
I fill up my car every two weeks. I could ride my bike to work (3.2 miles) and fill up less. All 1000 of my neighbors have 1/2 to 1 acre lots to garden, make mini-businesses, or raise chickens. Downtown is accessible (4 miles) by every conveyance but walking. If there is no money and no jobs I’ll stay where I am thank you very much. Its not the walkability of my suburbia that is the problem–it’s the lack of interdependence in the community. Everyone’s job has nothing to do with their neighbor. We are an older community and don’t have McMansions but a financial tsunami that eradicates 50% of normal jobs will strain mortgages and what comes of that–is not yet known. I had Amazon Prime for 1-year but no longer shop with Amazon and I shop for food at Publix–not Walmart. Walmart can be a homeless shelter with hammocks when the EBT cards are not re-loaded. The churches can take turns meeting in the parking lot and serving food to the indigent. Suburbia is not a wasteland–it;s the future.
When did you last see new retail selling durable goods? These days, infill in strip centers is all services: pilates studios, hair-and-nail places, gyms, restaurants. I swear there’s one old shopping center nearby with three check-cashing / car-title-loan places.
We are on the skids. Only grocers, for now, seem in expansion mode. Wegmans opened one of their city-sized supermarkets here, and since it’s close by, I don’t mind ambling around to do a bit of shopping. The selection is good, the in-store cafe really great, and it has a pub. They mix good drinks.
The other day, without any benefit of alcohol, I was in their cafe eating Thai-style chicken with the suburban hordes. It was a nice meal, people seemed happy as it was not rush hour, but suddenly I had a vision–and it came upon me in the midst of happy thoughts–where I saw the back wall, by the recycling bin and trash can marked “landfill,” covered in vines. the sound-deadening ceiling tiles had fallen, and there was trash everywhere. The palate, except for the vines, was dusty gray. Then I saw the wall as it currently is, again.
It really unsettled me, as if I had a flash-forward to a World Made By Hand. I don’t tend to believe in precognition or other such things, so I finished my chicken, walked into the pub, ordered a pint, and thought “Kunstler would enjoy that story.” And there it is.
Why not? Jean Raspail left his villa one morning for his walk along the beach and suddenly “saw” vast numbers of Brown 3rd World invader/refugees. Based on his vision, he wrote the famous novel, “Camp of the Saints”. Now his vision is coming true.
Well, heck yeah…..and that song from the boffo Broadway musical (based on the book)…..unforgettable! Can’t recall the title,
but remember them singing, “DooDah! DooDah”
I’m getting Pings and Needles on my Jewdar, Jewdar.
“Retail is currently just the most visible example at the moment, since it is a commercial battleground that doesn’t enjoy public subsidies.”
They most certainly do get public subsidies. EBT and WIC alone are enough in POS sales to keep the stores alive — In fact many grocery stores business slows down all week/month long until the accounts are credited. I can track it in the stores’ databases. It’s a sign wave every month, roughly. Now, mind you, I see what you mean: that it’s not direct.
But just have a look this:
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/food_stamps/food_stamp_nation-SNAP.html
14,588 participants for each Walmart Super Center.
And who is the financial powerhouse backing the EBT? Why when this report was made it was none other than Jamie Diamond and his J. P. Morgan bank. Now I image Jeff Bezos wann-gib-me-some-o-dat!
It is an indirect subsidy to the card holders, to the stores, and to the governments themselves since the investment funds invest in these corporations, which, by the way, cannot exist but for the license of the US master corporation itself, in any case.
In a virtualized environment based on robotics stores can be ANY size that they need to be, adjust on demand, can be as ubiquitous
as black flies on a Maine romp ’round a lake in June, and burn near zero energy compared to the recent past’s HU-man capitalized happy-faced centers of disinterested servitude, which I think is where Whole Foods comes in.
Check this out, for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYSpr-tFQss
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggkkllrCb1M
And Jim can I please point out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
which is partly where this notion of “sustainability” came from. It isn’t the kind of live-long-and prosper local I think we imagine it to mean.
M. King Hubbert was one of the group’s associates. Read the book:
Technocracy Rising:
https://www.amazon.com/Technocracy-Rising-Trojan-Global-Transformation/dp/0986373907/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502501871&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=technocrat+rising
Speaking of Big Box stores…a few days ago the ‘flapper’ in our toilet tank failed (it had turned into a pinkish mush-like substance from too many years immersed in water) and had to be replaced.
I went to the nearest Wal*Mart. Upon entering I inquired of a young Indian woman stationed at the entry doors (of course she was Indian; the density of Indian population in the vicinity of Edison, NJ is alleged to be greater than in Calcutta) where I might find a ‘toilet flapper’ which she, of course, didn’t know from third base. I said “OK, where in the store is the hardware section.” She pointed and said “all the way back in THAT corner.” I thought to myself “of course.”
This caused me to coin on the spot Q’s Law of Big Box Store Merchandise Location. Whatever you need is always at the most distant point in the store from wherever you happen to be standing. This is especially true if you have arthritic knees and hips and if the item you are seeking is small and very inexpensive. The flapper I eventually found cost $3.47 + tax.
I proceeded to checkout where every human-manned station had incredibly long lines. Then I spotted the self-checkout area (intended eventually to displace human/paid employees) containing 8-10 computer stations and here too there was an unbelievable line. I DETEST self-checkout or anything involving computers and processes that I am totally unfamiliar with (nor am I interested in LEARNING these processes). Invariably I have to ask for assistance and look old, stupid, and inept in front of the frustrated people in line behind me. Buying airline tickets and paying for deck parking where you must deal exclusively with a machine are two other tech nightmares for me.
As expected I had to wave to the 50ish swarthy Indian man in charge of helping the ‘technically challenged.’ He had an almost indecipherable accent. I’ll take a wild-ass guess that he was from Bangalore.
Some good prejudice here, Q. But you are still in the black from your post earlier in the week. Why not publish it in Race Traitor?
http://racetraitor.org/
Finca August 9, 2017 at 4:54 pm:
Now the war between them [Mitch McConnell and Republican establishment] and Trump is a fact, and if we consider that it started on Trump’s birthday with the shooting of his close friend the Republican whip Scalise, and the Republican leaders at least took advantage of this for pushing through the congress and the Senate of the notorious law on anti-Russian sanctions, and may be even conspired with the organizers of this assassination attempt, this war will be brutal and without restrictions in the choice of means.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/just-wait-little/#comment-313850
The New Yorker – 3 hours ago
Will the Rift Between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell Last?
What happened this week is that when Trump wasn’t busy threatening North Korea, he was busy threatening McConnell.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/ryan-lizza/will-the-rift-between-donald-trump-and-mitch-mcconnell-last
At this point, it’s more than a “rift”, more like a blood feud.
It most assuredly will happen though. No one who matters has any conception of what oil is; they think that America is powered solely off of American ingenuity and the flatulence of holy entrepreneurs. They also think that nothing that we do on a daily basis concerning oil usage is in any way problematic. That is why I ridicule so heavily the economic ‘seers’ like Russ Roberts and company. They all have PhDs but no common sense. Bless his soul, I’ve listened to him for years, and typed a number of angry comments in his comment section, but nothing ever seems to sink in.
When a guest returned for another episode of Econtalk this week for the second time in a month, apparently none of the ridicule I threw at them the last time around mattered in any way, shape or form. The only answer is growth, and the complaint is that Americans are too complacent and not innovative. We haven’t come up with enough hamburger recipes as a nation to sell at drive-throughs, I guess. We are truly falling behind.
Bless your soul, Kunstler, I wish you would get on that podcast and talk some sense into him about things. I have suggested it to him more than once. I actually believe that you are pretty much one of the only people in this entire country that understands anything about anything, except for perhaps Charles Marohn and Dmitry Orlov, and maybe a couple of other people who you have had on as guests. I would prefer for reality to sink in before history forces it upon us, but I will unfortunately not be crossing my fingers; I consider it hopeless.
All I want and all I hope for is to escape the slums of modern America while I’m young and enjoy a few years in a more hospitable place. I would prefer not to spend my waking hours and all my precious time zipping around in my car and trying to find fleeting joy eating hamburgers and shopping.
Nice to see some guys not bitching, but actually doing something:
The Lilium Jet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohig71bwRUE
The Lilium taxi would allow 5 people to fly 5 times faster than by car and be just as affordable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLhTqLwAr0U&t=89
No offense, Fincaln, but I think you’re on the wrong blog. lol. Kunstler, (as well as myself), would consider that a techno-fix, and too much magic. Better to ditch the car infrastructure and put trains on the roads, in my opinion.
Still cool though, but most of those plane thingies don’t have a flight time of over 10 minutes or so. It could take another couple of decades to change that equation.
Battery technology is a low energy dense technology. It has to be that way. A violent highly yielding chemical reaction is not going to be reversible the way a battery reaction has to be. If a battery can keep something up for ten minutes an internal combustion engine will keep it up for an hour. Compared to a gas tank the batteries in an electric car are huge to give any reasonable range.
Plane thingies can use batteries because they are small. Make them larger and the square-cube law comes into play and they can’t fly at all. The battery becomes too heavy as power requirements go up.
Double size, and you get four times the wing-power attempting to keep eight times the weight flying. The ability to fly is cut by half. Helicopters are hit hard by this law; the largest payload a very big cargo helicopter can carry compared to the world’s largest airplane is almost 14 times smaller.
Then it stands to reason that space launches would be vastly more efficient if they took off as airplanes and used the lifting power of wings until they reached some high altitude i.e 50,000 ft.
Then, rockets would take over and the plane could pitch up to achieve orbit.
It would require retractable wings to enable safe reentry but, I can see the feasibility based on the laws you presented.
Of course, somebody will mention that, if it were feasible, NASA and the Russians would have done it already. The answer is that the whole “space race” was actually to prove ICBM capability! Including the ability to put weapons in orbit and de-orbit the warhead to its target.
All of the other science stuff is just for propaganda value and is secondary to the original mission. Multi-stage rockets are mature and reliable so, there’s little incentive to pioneer a hybrid winged-rocket launch vehicle. A vehicle which could lift a LOT MORE than a rocket into orbit or beyond.
Europe is the Heart of Christendom, but it’s turned away from Christianity and is now being overrun by the Muslim hoard.
“Here not only the ‘burn blisters’ appeared, but there developed in different parts of the body gland boils in some on the sexual organs, in others on the thighs, in others on the arms, and in others on the neck. At first these were of the size of a hazel-nut and developed accompanied by violent shivering fits, which soon rendered those attacked so weak that they could no longer stand upright, but were forced to lie in their beds consumed by violent fever and overcome by great tribulation. Soon the boils grew to the size of a walnut, then to that of a hen’s egg or a goose’s egg, and they were exceedingly painful, and irritated the body, causing it to vomit blood by vitiating the juices. The blood rose from the affected lungs to the throat, producing on the whole body a putrifying and ultimately decomposing effect. The sickness lasted three days, and on the fourth, at the latest, the patient succumbed. As soon as anyone in Catania was seized with headache and shivering, he knew that he was bound to pass away within the specified time, and first confessed his sins to the priest and then made his last will. When the plague had attained its height in Catania, the Patriarch endowed all ecclesiastics, even the youngest, with all priestly powers for the absolution of sin which he himself possessed as bishop and patriarch. But the pestilence raged from October 1347 to April 1348. The Patriarch himself was one of the last to be carried off. He died fulfilling his duty. At the same time Duke Giovanni, who had carefully avoided every infected house and every patient, died.”
“The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague”, Johannes Nohl
And now here I am deep in troll-land.
Amazon has 39% of on-line sales.
Costco has 8% of on-line sales.
Target has 4% of online sales.
Wall-Mart has less than 1%.
There is no Wall-Mart behemoth to battle. Wall mart rode the big box model horse and now times have changed. Sam is dead and the Wall-Mart family is content to live off the fat of their underpaid workers. Costco who has a history of paying their workers well and has thus earning a rightful place in our community by not being a vampire, kicks Wall-Mart ass.
Were Wall-Mart to start paying their workers decently and become interested in innovation they would once again become a contender but that opportunity is slipping away. A union would force Wall-Mart to innovate and become competitive but the Waltons I have been told are more interested in being New York royalty. Not going to happen. Sell the stock.
Walmart also sells through Amazon now, so that sales figure is likely understated. Regardless, there’s certainly an argument to be made that they got greedy and over expanded. If nothing else, it’s generated abysmal PR. They would have done well to position themselves closer to Target IMO, although it seems as if just the opposite has actually happened. Target’s increasingly positioning itself closer to them.
Hi Pucker, I thought I had the comment at the bottom but I replied to you by accident. So it goes.
Check out Hit,er, I mean Trump and the Golden UN.
UN is ready to party, and Trump wasn’t invited.
The real MGTOW, Men Getting Tonsorial Overlays Wantonly.
https://www.popsugar.com/news/Donald-Trump-Kim-Jong-un-Hair-Swap-Meme-43868468
“In the town of Thornberg the pestilence tormented the people to such a degree that they rent their hands and arms and tore out their hair. In many places in Transylvania they assailed one another in the alleys and streets, and in their frenzy bit and tore each other like dogs and perished miserably. Defoe relates that the plague-boils, when they grew hard and would not burst, caused such terrible pain that they resembled the most exquisite torture, and that many, to escape their torments, threw themselves out of the windows, shot themselves, or took their own lives in some other way. Very frequently the sufferers became demented from horror and pain. Wrapped in their bed-clothes, they rushed to the graves to bury themselves, as they said. In Provence a man climbed to the roof of his house and hurled the tiles into the street. Another executed a mad grotesque dance on the roof till he was shot down by the guard. A third, who for four days had been lying as if dead, awoke suddenly as a prophet, rushed out into the fields and announced the last judgment, exhorted all to repentance, and cursed those who refused to kneel before him. Such scenes naturally augmented the general horror inspired already by the streets and squares encumbered with corpses. The number everywhere was so great that nowhere were the churchyards sufficient. In Erfurt in 1350 eleven huge trenches were dug and 12,000 corpses were thrown into them.”
“The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague”, Johannes Nohl
“Don’t despair and fear not”, many will tell you. “It’s all in God’s plan”.
Such comfort, such wisdom!
I read Defoe’s account. There was horrible screaming pain and many other bizarre manifestations in the plague.
“different parts of the body gland boils”
Including the brain I figured out.
The account gives you an eerie feeling. A particularly eerie passage is the mention of entire blocks of families found dead in their homes. Parents, sons and daughters and their old folk all dead in their homes. For them is was apocalypse.
Funny how, when I have the flu, I do not seem to be able to “rush”
anywhere or perform dances on my roof. I am going to have to try the plague next time to increase the level of my vitality.
DDT, not Jesus, liberated Western civilization from such horrors.
The next Apocalypse will likely be another biological warfare pestilence or nuclear war?
The apocalypse is the spread of man itself.
It will happen later today. The Rev. “Wispy” says that White Supremacists demonstrating is an act of violence. Notice the S word and not the N word.
The president of the UVA, Teresa Sullivan, is deeply saddened and disturbed by the White demonstrations.
Mike Signer, mayor of Charlottesville, denounces the White demonstrations. Demonic, Democratic Denunciations.
What will it be? White flight or White fight?
Erase slavery, not history. I say fight.
“In Vienna also the streets and squares, gardens and vineyards teemed with the sick and dying. “It has been seen,” writes Abraham a Santa-Clara, “that small children were found clinging to the breast of the dead mothers where the innocent little angels could not know that with such drink they were drinking death. It has been seen that when the dead mother was placed on the cart her little daughter tried to accompany her by force, and with a lisping tongue continued to cry, ‘Mammy, mammy’ bringing water to the eyes of the rough, hardened corpse-bearers.”
And now they sit in cafes on the Mariahilfer Strasse, and sip Viennese coffee while pouncing on luscious pastries, the dead long buried and probably never even remembered, while the tasty treats induce their torpor.
Tucson,
…And thus is the human condition.
This is not Soviet propaganda, it’s the voice of Roosevelt America
which was killed by the same people as the USSR, but 7 years earlier. 7, and not at 45
Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrKDBFJoo2w
Another thing there might be too many of are food stores, or ‘Supermarkets’ as they are now called. Decades back one little market, with a few specialty shops like the bakery and butcher shop, seemed to be sufficient to meet the needs of this small town. Now huge stores have been built all over the place, at least a dozen within a 10 mile radius of here. The profit margin of these superstores being very low, I don’t see how they all can survive. And more are going up; a new Aldi’s was announced, to be opened this winter about 8 miles north.
Whether or not there is any decent, healthful food being sold in these places is open to question.
brh
BRH,
Although I do get your point about too many looters (corps.) at the same corpse (the dwindling-to-done reserves of “the lower/working classes”), I have one word to impart: “Population”.
I think it’s a better than even chance that some new plague (a la Pucker’s reports of The Black Death) will tend to mitigate that, however.
I have a great immune system. But Captain Trips will decide, eh? The Old Black Woman or the Dark Man? Neither for me. The Third Way.
Listen folks, turning eighty this August I’ve witnessed most cities you can name sprawl in area from scale where downtown skyline could be viewed from outskirts beyond which was a mix of farmland and yet unfenced range and shorelines from which many of lessor income harvested small game and fish. Kansas City, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Denver, Memphis, Dallas, on and on. Seattle and Portland, OR when I first experienced them in 1961, were wonderfully small in scale and population, and the wilderness surrounding them remained wilderness — not yet what it has become, a ‘wilderness theme park’ with “designated camping only” for the swarms of fashionably equipped REI members (and their damn dogs) trudging the trails. Don’t you get it; its population growth from our insane immigration policies which have been kept in place to sustain real estate values and “economic growth”. In my life time national population has gone from 130 million to……what? Now, here in Oregon the town of Bend (just 30 years ago still tiny in its beautiful setting) is rapidly exploding into just another megalopolis driven by all those with wealth enough to seek a “better neighborhood” from the blight of “growth” from which they’re seeking escape.
A Whole Foods 365 opened near me.
I went opening day, in hopes of samples of bakery goodies, etc.
No tables of samples [if you gave information you got a carry bag and some ‘nan’ chips] AND THE PLACE WAS PACKED.
i THINK STORES HAVE TO GO BIG TO COMPETE.
Have a coffee bar, bakery, salad bar.
Theres an Indian looking lady that wraps 30 dollar a pound cheese, at one ‘super’ supermarket.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/phillempert/2016/06/02/365-by-whole-foods-the-7-days-after-opening-review-and-there-is-still-a-lot-to-question/#143edf15ed95
Just a word about Walmart. I do go into our local Walmart every so often, to buy mundane stuff like fishing gear and underwear. Lately I’ve noticed the store is understaffed and disorderly. For example, several weeks ago there was one cashier and a line to the back of the store. When I tried to find a clerk to check a price there weren’t any around. I asked the cashier why she was alone she replied all the other ones got fired or quit.
brh
How,
ah,
er,
TALL
were they?
Thwack,
How tall? This may be germane in other venues…in Wall Mart, the salient question is…how wide?
My closest local Walmart is the same way. Last time I was in there several years ago I went to customer service to complain, but the line there was even longer. It was also common knowledge that the local gangs used the parking lot as a gathering place after dark, so unless you were a community elder (Hispanic youth are still respectful of recognized community elders) you simply stayed away.
Oh Janet…. Oh Janet… Doth mine eyes deceive me? No less an august pure left-wing publication than The Nation has published an article by one Patrick Lawrence discussing the DNC hack that wasn’t. You have to scroll down past the obligatory verbiage regarding you-know-who and the usual stuff to “most popular” and there it is. Some time ago I made note of forensicator’s foray into the time stamps which were at odds with typical internet download speeds. Houston, we have a problem. Although you-know-who has a larger problem in that there is a team dedicated to uncovering evidence of something… anything…. and they will not take no for an answer.
Many many years ago at Boy Scout camp a group was surprised by the interim scoutmaster barging into the tent as they were doing what boys of that age will sometimes do. Later they roamed about the larger camp and came upon tents not yet occupied by troops and, pulling out their folding knives, begin to mimic the interim scoutmaster’s sudden appearance by slashing the taut tent top and exclaiming the equivalent of “here’s Johnny!” By dinner the vandalism had been discovered and panicked scoutmasters were concerned with the presence of criminals with ill intent within the confines of the greater Scout Camp. Were were informed of the threat and told to remain in our campsite, in groups. I recall shining our flashlights into the darkness upon hearing anything. At that point those of us who perpetrated the vandalism and those who merely witnessed had come to believe in the reality of criminals roaming about with sharp knives. We did not sleep well that night, but not because of guilt.
I’m sure there’s a lesson in here somewhere…(?).
Bruce and DA, IMO everything is about physics and eating or, to put it another way, production and consumption or, IOW, survival. Otherwise why bother with the games to preserve purchasing power in the face of inflation? But you’re right in that it’s about psychology, that is, the psychology of outwitting other people to get your hands on their money.
You’re right also in that we do have asset price inflation. That’s one of the consequences of massive monetary expansion.
As far as consumer price inflation goes, if you trust the numbers put out by govt agencies (which I do NOT, but put that aside), what we’re supposed to believe is that in the face of relentless offshoring of American industrial capacity and the consequent diminishment of American purchasing power due to job loss, CPI increases at a steady, steady, steady 1.5 to 2.5 percent year after year. Is this believable? Do you believe it?
Let’s assume that govt CPI numbers are on the up-and-up. My question is how is this possible? Why wouldn’t we see a crash in the cost of living given the enormous decline in the cost of production due to offshoring and the demolition of US family incomes?
Maybe official inflation numbers ie 1.5% to 2.5%, really DO represent massive inflation given drastic decreases in underlying production costs. What I’m saying is that the only way that consumer prices stayed up was because of massively inflationary monetary expansion.
For my part, I wipe my ass with those CPI numbers for two reasons. The first is that it implies that the Federal Reserve has a steady and sure hand on the monetary throttle and that their economic models are predictive. But economic models, as has been proven over and over, are for shit. As for a sure and steady hand, the Fed is an institution in the employ of Wall Street banks whose mandate it is to enable Wall Street in its racketeering. That’s the only sense in which it has a sure and steady hand. To the Fed all other considerations are trivial. The second reason is that official inflation numbers defy what I see with my own eyes. The govt has an obvious motive to massage and manipulate inflation numbers: to minimize cost of living adjustments to social security beneficiaries.
Another issue is that of that much over-used term, “growth”. Growth? Of what? For whose benefit? Amazon has seen a massive increase in its revenue since its inception in 1994. It’s top-line numbers are beyond human imagining. Is this what we mean by “growth”? But Amazon’s retained earnings, that is, the accumulation of past years’ profits less dividends, are in comparison laughably small, a paltry amount. Who benefitted from this “growth”? Clearly, shareholders didn’t benefit in any real and rational way because none of that massive inflow of funds netted out to any appreciable profits never mind any cash payout.
Another problem is “market cap”. Does this number have any grounding in reality? You take two numbers and multiply them and because there’s an arithmetic basis people think that there’s something real about it. All you’re doing is taking the last price at which a company share changed hands and multiplying it by the total number of shares outstanding. But that last price only applied to the shares that changed hands at that time. Why would we apply that price to the entire stock of shares issued? What sense does that make? My suggestion is that it makes zero sense, that the price of a stock at any given time is a function of the supply of the stock available for sale at that time and the demand for the stock at that time.
I suggest that it makes zero sense, and that the proof is that corporate buyouts and mergers that use such a concept are doomed to fail because they use ideas not based in reality. How many times have we seen a company buy the entire stock of another company at a large premium over which the stock is currently trading? How many times have we seen resultant “goodwill” get written down? How many times have we seen the combined business crash and burn?
I could go on but this ain’t my blog. What I’m suggesting is that the game that investors are playing is irrational. It is a glorified Ponzi, with its own terminology and its own rules which are based in generations-old custom and law. But no matter how old the laws and customs are, the rules are not rational, not based in the physical world, not based in a real world of production and consumption, or IOW, ” eating”. As such the system is doomed to failure.
Nice post. You walked through it all pretty well here. I would add only that, contrary to popular belief, that equities markets are secondary markets, and as such, are simply trading pieces of paper long after the fact of the actual firms they represent receiving any monetary infusion from them. Their “value” is thus entirely speculative, and as you stated, represent nothing more than an elaborately disguised and easily manipulated Ponzi scheme.
Equity markets’ TRUE benefit comes from the fact that the American sheeple have been sold the lie that high equity prices reflect vigorous underlying national economic health, which is actually 180 degrees out from the truth. Irrationally high equity prices simply indicate that financial speculation is rampant, and that actual productive investment in goods and services is being foregone in favor of out sized short term pump and dump profit taking.
I’m not particularly smart or incisive, but the very first time I had all this explained to me in college finance I could see the truth of it quite plainly. The truly amazing thing was that none of the kids I attended with did, or apparently, even cared.
“I’m not particularly smart or incisive, but the very first time I had all this explained to me in college finance I could see the truth of it quite plainly. The truly amazing thing was that none of the kids I attended with did, or apparently, even cared.”
DA,
Their focus (likely in line with their entire cheat-n-grab-n-git upbringing) was probably more concerned with how to shoulder their way to the trough in order plunge in their ravening snouts than how the trough actually gets filled.
Just read an article by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone in which he says that the LIBOR or London Interbank Offer Rate is made up & has been manipulated for years by the banking industry. Most of the world’s borrowing is based on the numbers generated by LIBOR, & Taibbi says it’s all a shell game.
They made the news with this a few years ago when LIBOR manipulation was first revealed, but the gen pop probably had no idea what they were talking about.
IOW, it’s not based on reality… But it chugs along nicely.
This is in opposition to what Volodya just told us. He says by ignoring reality we should expect doom.
Yet the proof of the continuance of LIBOR and the increased valuation of Amazon stock is evidence that reality is overhyped and not necessary.
Fiction works. Imagination works. Made up numbers work. Adhering to “reality” is optional.
Doom may or may not be reality-based. Black swans appearing or not appearing may be independent of our concept of reality. It’s just our imaginary concept, after all, like LIBOR.
So you imagine the food you eat too? How’s that working out for you?
So far, so good. It’s amazing how few calories are needed. Costco offers free product samples.. They are protein-packed!
The problem with “reality” is that nobody knows what it is (similar to “truth” you alluded to before). Thus in human affairs it is the beliefs which count. These can deviate significantly from the unknown physical reality all the way to the last moment of existence.
Whites are rioting in Charlottesville. Rioting. White violence is more prevalent (more bombings, more shootings, more masacres) than so-called “Islamist” terrorism. Muslims are peaceful. Angry white thugs threaten law and order.
They were attacked and fought back. That’s the whole point: Whites protest their dispossession and genocide chanting, “You will not replace us” as they perform a puja to General Lee with torches bought from Walmart.
https://www.dailystormer.com/unitetheright-fight-breaks-out-at-torchlit-march-nazis-win/
Thats a misquote; the actual chant was:
“JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US”
just sayin
Catherine Austin Fitts says that Amazon is the C..IA and that Amazon bought Whole Foods. She says that if you order stuff from Amazon it comes replete with surveillance devices.
Yes, I’ve found bugs attached to some of the books I’ve ordered. I scream into them to damage the ears of those monitoring me.
really?
Rally. The Ratha-Yatra is the Nascar of Ancient India.
really?
DA, that’s an immensely important point that most people have no clue about. As you say, what stock markets do, once the IPO is over and done, is SECONDARY. Two rich guys trading shares of a company has got bugger all to do with the company, seeing as not one cent of the money that the rich guys exchange ends up in company coffers.
Then there’s your other point, that productive investment is being foregone in favor of using company money for stock buybacks. Now, I guess I’m naïve, but there once was a time when dealing in your own company stock was illegal. But this is Wall Street. What Wall Street wants, Wall Street gets.
Is something against the law? Well, Wall Street lobbies Congress and gets it made legal. They dress it up with rules and regulations which are easily circumvented or left unenforced and presto!
Is a practice abusive? No problem, get the academic community to give it theoretical justification. Get the perfessers and Nobel prize winners to say that this unjustifiable action is actually for the benefit of all.
For example, is the volume of speculation in this or that financial instrument destructive? Don’t be daft, speculation lends LIQUIDITY. That’s always the excuse no matter the economy destroying distortions in prices or markets.
Should you be able to buy insurance on a corporate bond that you don’t even own? Isn’t that akin to buying insurance on something where you don’t have an insurable interest, like for example, your neighbor’s car or house? No problem, there’s a market for trading in these insurance contracts and so there’s LIQUIDITY and oh, how could I forget, PRICE DISCOVERY. The question is this, what are we getting? Is it price discovery or mis-information?
That stock markets are a primary concern of the Fed only makes sense in light of the fact that the Fed is owned by Wall Street banks that own and traffic in this stuff. You might ask why is it that stock markets get so much public attention given that it’s a zero sum game played by rich people? I suppose that it makes sense only because of the resulting economic mayhem, like lay-offs and plant closures caused by mergers and acquisitions, which are things typically done on stock markets.
Tell me, why is it in the public interest for Goldman Sachs insiders to get rich?
Quiet down, white goyim. The Jewish bankers need to make their money somehow.
“I suppose that it makes sense only because of the resulting economic mayhem, like lay-offs and plant closures caused by mergers and acquisitions, which are things typically done on stock markets. ”
Volodya,
The economic mayhem you reference is generated by Wall Street, and thusly;
Wall Street does not demand from corporations that they buy back their stock, close plants, or fire employees. They have a very simple mechanism that requires this, and insures that their bidding be done…it is simply a demand that growth occur quarter over quarter. This demand is enforced by boards of directors in the corporate structure that demand shareholder value growth, on a quarterly basis, and the CEO of the corporation will provide same, or lose his position. This forces the CEO to provide for these share increases in any manor which he sees fit or necessary…there is no social contract here, it is the CEO’s survival at issue, and does not provide for anything but short-term survival…quarter by quarter.
Once growth slows, the corporation starves…first the fat, then the muscle, then the organs. It is by this mechanism that the corporation destroys it’s long term prospects for short-term benefit. The fat can be likened to low-hanging fruit…manipulation of financial statements/methods, looting retirement funds, breaking unions. The muscle loss equates to massive lay-offs, the organs, of course, plant closures, off-shoring of production, stock buy-backs with borrowed money…. All of the destruction you have witnessed in the last 30 years, all the human tragedy, economic destruction, massive debt…the hollowing-out of the middle class and the destruction of industry in the United States, all engineered by individual CEO’s trying to keep the gravy train running one more mile….
Have A Cigar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMr3KtYUCcI
-T
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs.
…Not even close Tibbsy; no cigar for you. (Much too self-referential of a perspective.)
You want to ride with what e. is talking about? …Then let’s ride with Mark Knofler and get some actual sting to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgud7aqieqY
Lyrics for those of us who get too wrapped in the groove:
http://www.songlyrics.com/mark-knopfler/gravy-train-lyrics/
I’m not a hardcore racist but it’s amazing how similar black people are everywhere you encounter them. Even the most liberal do gooder knows this, but can’t admit it.
I’m sitting here in my room reading this blog and hear this loud cackling from across the parking lot in my suburban apartment complex. I can’t help but look, and, sure enough, a black family. Getting into a BMW SUV.
There goes your theory of the middle class black people who are oh so different.
The explosive cackle of the Female Boon has to be one of the most horrible sounds in all of nature.
Maybe they’re autistic?
https://undark.org/article/invisibility-black-autism/
Check,
Ambrose Kane blog
SBPDL
Taki Mag.com
Autism is the white “race card”.
If you are dim, slow, and socially awkward… but you are still white?
Just claim you have autism and all is forgiven.
Same thing with Assburgers syndrome.
************************************
* Got CHARTLOTTESVILLE??*
************************************
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4783914/White-nationalists-hold-torch-lit-march-UVA-campus.html
In the old republic, the dull and the ignorant enjoy engaging one another in acts of violence, rage, death, and destruction, without an understanding of the forces which compel them to do so.
Y = career politicians x career lobbyists x globalist mainstream media x career unelected Deep State bureaucrats x Hollywood elites x unprosecuted corruption x globalist banking cartels x globalist technocrats
“God integrates empirically.”
– Albert Einstein.
Y = old republic NETWORK globalism = THE SWAMP.
In the New Republic, all good people in the arena enjoy resuming the restoration of the Constitutional republic from JFK’s point of interruption, can see for miles and miles, and enjoy Liberty in building out properties and the local means of production, with the capability to sow, nurture, grow, harvest, store, cook, engineer, design, program, automate, construct, process, raise, teach, counsel, hunt, defend, provide, debate, organize, compose, perform, worship, dance, laugh, love, celebrate, and sustain.
We are the sheepdogs.
And we are old fashioned and sentimental.
And we belong to the longest serving Civil Rights organization in the Republic.
And we don’t require others for border protection or building bridges.
And members are made by undying love, devotion, and loyalty to the Constitution.
And we are happy to participate in the proper pursuit and offering of due process under the Constitution to the NETWORK globalist class charlatans who sold out the old republic in their lust for power and the love of money.
And we are ready for what’s next.
Sent from the New Republic.
They Call Me Mr. Tibbs
-T
Elysian I can remember instances where Wall Street financiers bought substantial positions in companies in order to make specific financial demands of management. But your larger point is right, the CEO has to deliver and that usually means “growth”, usually defined as increases in the price of a stock regardless of the fact that these prices don’t float down from the sky or come out of some computer algorithm but are rather generated by someone selling and someone else buying. IOW what is one guy’s income from the sale of a share is the other guy’s cost.
So, given that you now have a shareholder that bought in at the higher cost, how exactly such “growth” is beneficial puzzles me. I don’t get it. Never have. How it’s beneficial especially to shareholders that weren’t party to the sale is still, after all these years, beyond me. There is no logic to it.
No matter, paralogic or not, this “growth” delusion is still in Wall Street. It’s like the religious delusions that once swept Europe. Wars were fought over whether you use two fingers or three fingers to make the sign of the cross. But in time, the delusions all eventually disperse. It will be so with Wall Street.
And you’re right, whatever the CEO does, delusion or no, he does for the sake of his own interests.
“So, given that you now have a shareholder that bought in at the higher cost, how exactly such “growth” is beneficial puzzles me. I don’t get it. Never have. How it’s beneficial especially to shareholders that weren’t party to the sale is still, after all these years, beyond me. There is no logic to it. ”
Volodya,
The logic is that the principles in the IPO, and upper management of the corporation have been vested with stock, as well as stock options that activate at a certain price point…this is where the real money is, both for the IPO facilitator, and the corporation’s “swells”.
Regarding the initial purchaser of the stock? Fuck ’em…they took the short money.
I spent several years as a dog robber to a CEO of a public company…Princes…Royalty do not live as well as CEO’s using OPM…other people’s money.
That’s it, the logic applies to a select group of employees. As for the others, you got it right, fuck ’em.
Growth is needed to maintain plausibility that the ever increasing debt load can be rolled over (from Peter to Paul), nobody remotely believes that it will be extinguished — ever.
Zero growth can only happen with zero rates of interest and these are
fundamentally opposed to economic logic:
you cannot lend money for zero interest because lending money entails:
(a) opportunity cost (you do not have the money any longer thus cannot take advantage of economic opportunity should it present itself), and
(b) the risk of not being paid back.
Each point alone would make it completely illogical to lend with zero interest, but both together make it all the more irrational.
Now irrational activity can go on for a while but eventually will be
terminated by “the mandates of reality” as our host likes to phrase it.
Ukrainizaion of America
Janos’ compadres organize an ISIS-style provocation in Charlottesville, Virginia
A car plowed into at least 20 protesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4783914/White-nationalists-hold-torch-lit-march-UVA-campus.html
Of course I realize that the most are just useful idiots, but provide fertile breeding ground for various agents-provocateurs to operate.
Just like Maidan in Kiev
Terrified at our thousands, Police attack peaceful White protestors in Charlottesville, attempting to break up the rally before it began. They have given us a greater Victory than we already had. Spencer and the ACLU are going to sue the City. The Fire rises and the Black Sun has peeked over the horizon.
https://www.dailystormer.com/charlottesville-complete-victory-event-debriefing/
Are your “thousands” are ready to fight and die on the side of Hillary Clinton, Janos?
That was an obvious by the book Color-Revolution provocation executed by paid agents-provocateurs, especially the car-plow incident.
Judging by the first Media response, the prime target is regime change – this time in America.
CIA ????
Are your “thousands” are ready to fight and die –WE ARE LEGION.
WE ARE MILLIONS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIzHirR5kbY
Yeah, right, federal judges are well known for their love of President Trump and protecting America from all kinds of radical people.
After all, it’s not them who is going to die under the plow-cars.
all right, lets not go crazy now
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/36/13/c2/3613c2711a6630021ed2222782d8f172.jpg
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4783914/White-nationalists-hold-torch-lit-march-UVA-campus.html
Is there anything more beautiful than fire – the TV of the Paleolithic? And a cleaner it can’t be beat. Water only cleans the surface of things. Fire cleans right down to the molecular level, separating atoms that have no business being together. Elemental purity is back in the biggest possible way.
From now on, ALL White rallies, protests, and organized gatherings MUST show up READY FOR BATTLE with the cops. The cops are mercenary forces for the Enemy and can no longer be regarded as protectors of the peace. If the cops were really our public servants, they would have arrested whoever it was that ordered them to disrupt the peace and vandalize the treasured statue of Robert E Lee.
Although it may sound cartoonish, the best form of street fighting against the cops is MEDIEVAL WARFARE and related weapons! The only concession to modern technology is that Whites must also carry pepper spray, tear gas, and LOTS of flash-bangs to throw at the cops.
There should be specialized battle line protesters who are equipped and able to use actual shields, swords, maces, bludgeons, and pepper spray to fight the police. It would absolutely ROCK if somebody is able to built a real trebuchet that can be transported to the protest site, be quickly assembled on a flatbed truck, and already be calibrated where X number of metal bars will throw a projectile X number of yards.
Non-violence and “peaceful protest” has brought us to tyranny and chaos. Gandhi, MLK, and the whole “love your enemies” has to be repudiated and buried once and for all. Learn from our brother, the hornet. He may not make anything of value for anybody but, he can teach us how to demand respect!
TPTB won’t stop unless they also feel the sting of a people who are Mad As Hell and aren’t going to take it anymore.
Janos: as they perform puja to General Lee?
Janos, Walmart does not sell puja supplies, not even in Edison, New Jersey. The torches were meant to recall KKK marches and incite violence.
By the way, traitor Lee does not deserve puja as he doesn’t even measure up to the ankles of Lord Krishna. Lee belongs in the history books. One billion people love Krishna.
How is Osho doing?
???
Tiki Torches? They sure as hell do sell ’em. Walmart is part of the People’s Revolution.
“Spencer and the ACLU are going to sue the city” –janos
As they should … if the police started the riot. White nationalists have first amendment rights and the ACLU has always defended them.
Send a contribution to the ACLU.
Janet — I sense you are perhaps a bit conflicted here, as if you were Janos contemplating the de facto mission of Planned Parenthood…
Or perhaps you are conflicted because you support the ACLU defense of the white supemacists but cannot send a donation to the ACLU?
Atlantic Council —The 2017 Global Citizen Awards
Trudeau gets gloabony award.
last years winners (2016) included Italy (now over run)
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/events/g … zen-awards
Let’s take down all statues–everywhere–since they might trigger big feelings. Especially that statue of Charlemagne in front of Notre Dame in Paris.
In 782, Charlemagne massacred 4,500 unarmed Saxons in Verden, but baptized them forcibly in the river Aller before the killing. News of the Verden massacre spread like a shockwave through Denmark and Scandinavia–since both the Saxons and Vikings were pagan. Hence, the Vikings feared they would be baptized and executed if they met with Christians.
In 793, during the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, they drove the monks naked to the sea to drown.
Ah, the travesty of baptism. Violence always brings more violence.
Jen in San Jose
Replace all public statuary with Henry Moore. Yes, we Can!
Yes, keep them in the history books, but take down all statues of mass murderers. Good idea, Jen!
Well said. Christian Europe pretended they didn’t know why they were being attacked. Of course most didn’t, but some did. That being said, the Vikings were raiders anyway and would have attacked in any case. But there was a fury against the new religion for the reason you mention.
One dead as car mows down anti-fascists at white nationalist rally: Driver ‘intentionally’ accelerates into crowd and leaves 19 hurt after riot cops use tear gas to break up violent clashes in Charlottesville
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4783914/White-nationalists-hold-torch-lit-march-UVA-campus.html#ixzz4pZt70yl8
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
fick suck
One bystander says it was unintended. The driver of grey car was pelted with rocks and lost control of car.
Are you saying: “he dindu nuffin…?”
“he a good boy? Gentle giant…?
he was turning his life around…?
Ok
The news would sound very differently if a statue of Dr. MLK were scheduled to be moved and the Dindu Nuffins rioted to keep it in place.
After 60 years of Whites suffering abuse from ZOG, is it any wonder that some are finally doing more than making impotent noise? The days of “peaceful protest” by Whites are OVER… thank Odin.
I’ve said before, when Due Process is thwarted and then weaponized against Whites, what is left but blood and violence? These White Nationalists are telling a White-hating government that their plans to vandalize the memory of the Confederacy, and take down the statue of General Robert E. Lee, WILL BE FOUGHT with the only means left… good old-fashioned VIOLENCE.
The ghost of Joseph Stack is saluting the White Nationalists. Those antifa bastards were breaking car windows and deserved what they got.
Keep the memory, but take down the statues of mass murderers.
You and I can go take down the statue of Abraham Lincoln, then.
I’ll set the chains and you work the bulldozer to pull him down.
Deal! But let’s not stop with Lincoln. All military generals, all commanders in chief who initiated, ordered, or participated in mass murders should be read about in history books. Mass murderers should not be celebrated or memorialized in statues.
Consultofactus, Lakewood, United States, 24 minutes ago
Aw come on Brits – before you get on your high horse admit that this doesn’t even come close to the carnage at one of your football (soccer) riots.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4783914/White-nationalists-hold-torch-lit-march-UVA-campus.html#ixzz4pZvFbmuj
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
This really refers to the last thread, where JHK says, ‘Now, just wait a little while.’
Swedish economist Tino Sanandaji, talking about the effects of massive immigration in that country, quotes Adam Smith: ‘There is a lot of ruin in a nation’, meaning that well-run countries have large resources (I suppose in terms of infrastructure, organization and mutual trust) so that their downfall does not happen overnight.
If anyone is interested in listening to him here is a link with English subtitles. He says these things because native Swedes will not, cannot or are not allowed to say them, and I suppose just because it is the truth as he sees it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMt8zkSP9xE
Massive immigration is just the continued leveling of the world by globalism. First wages by capital mobility, then nations by labor/population mobility. A watered down, leveled, and social safety net stripped population is a compliant and helpless population, although cultural differences will of course be purposefully inflamed just to “keep things interesting.” File under the heading of divide and conquer. The plan comes into sharper focus daily now. Who among us can stop it?
I concede that certain business interests benefit from the wage competition and have lobbied successfully (apparently) for immigration laxity but how much of it is planned and co-ordinated? Not much is my hunch. Who are those who make up “globalism” anyway? Is it written down like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or is it just “discussed” at Davos? Or is it little more than a feeling in the air? That is what I think unless you can convince me otherwise.
The Left support immigration for ideological reasons. Andrew Neather, a former senior adviser to Blair, let it slip a few years back that “New Labour” were promoting immigration “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, which I take to carrying out an irreversible fait accompli. Neather said that it would have positive social benefits, which I think means it would hasten the abolition of the country that used to be called Great Britain. And the press and broadcast media also favour it from all accounts.
But there is no plan as such. Dominic Cummings, a former senior Conservative government advisor, described that government as a flock of headless chickens running around from one crisis to the next with nothing but short-term ad-hoc reactions to the latest crisis. He said you would sometimes wonder if there were a door somewhere behind which all the “good guys” are sitting, like in a James Bond film, but ended with the words (described by Peter Hitchens as ‘almost literature’), “There is no door”.
So how about the biggest single immigration ‘event’ in modern times in Europe when Merkel told the EU to open its borders to the hordes of ‘refugees’ pushing against them in September 2015? This followed a short but overwhelming bout of social media hysteria following the publication of a photograph of a drowned Kurdish child whose body had washed up onto a beach. A Flemish journalist who had worked as a Berlin correspondent, Clementine Forissier, said at the time (France Radio) that it was the first time she had seen the Chancellor make a major decision without careful planning. She described her actions as ’emotional and not rational’.
This supports my argument that irrational motives trump rational ones, even if the latter do exist and have some effect. See my post further up the thread in response to ‘wet dog’, who is worried about global warming.
The only planning and coordination that needs to take place is destruction of traditional societies through Globalist economic liberalism, color revolutions, and Dark Ops planned wars of terror, all of which are synergistic and self-propagating after being unleashed. After that it’s all good. Stand back and watch the inevitable unfold. No further planning or coordination required.
Clarification: “Is it written down?” This refers to the plan.
Cummings’s and Neather’s comments are valuable because they are rare glimpses of what those who govern us really think. Neather’s comments somehow found their way into print and were highly embarrassing for the Labour government.
What we are witnessing is an intensification of the spiral of confrontation between Trump, on the one hand, and the world party of war (“Deep State” in US), on the other.
Obviously, according to Hillary Clinton, who in her youth did a similar trick with Nixon, this should end either with impeachment, or with voluntary resignation of Trump, or with Kennedy 2.0. However, a lot says that Trump is not Nixon and that he is preparing to fight back.
In this connection, he sent two signals to the world and his supporters in the United States.
The first is that the bill on sanctions against Russia is a pick of idiotism, but he was forced to sign it, so as to not fall under impeachment. In this connection, the reproaches from the rather high Russian level that Trump is a weakling seem to be inappropriate.
Sometimes, due to objective circumstances, Lenin, the brilliant tactician, too, had to sign the Brest peace, so as not to lose all power.
The second Trump signal consists in the beginning of the repair of the White House. It’s not a matter of purging the White House of the bugs, as well as of the people who regularly put them. This is just an excuse. The point is in the sign, in the message. The White House is a symbol of the United States. Repair in the White House means the need for repairs in the US. And it will be done. But if there are problems with this, and repairs will be disrupted (the US will not be restored), then, as President, Trump reserves the right to undertake what he thinks fit. And because of who started to debug the White House, the scenario when Trump will make his bet on the military to solve internal political problems is not already something of a fantasy land.
But for this, he must become a real leader of the military. Which can not be done without a war. And here there are options, of which, judging by the quite indicative reaction of Moscow and Beijing during the voting in the UN Security Council, to choose the least painless for all mankind.
Perhaps the global party of peace will be able to seize control levers in the US (the center of the modern world order) without a limited nuclear conflict.
But maybe not.
Therefore, you have to be psychologically ready for this situation.
If we consider a nuclear war, even a limited, between US and N. Korea, then this is, of course, horror-horror. However, if this event is seen only as one of the elements to prevent the seizure of power in the US by the Clintonoids, and to prevent a global nuclear conflict between Russia and the US that will be guaranteed in this case, which means the death of all humanity, then the heating of the situation with N. Korea begins to appear in a completely different light.
Jim,
“All I can do is ask for you to be open to the idea that MGTOW is growing and for damn good reasons.”
I hate to be boring, but most times in life there’s two sides to a story. So I read, for example, this:
https://www.mgtow.com/manosphere/
and it pretty good stuff. But yet when I read the old feminist stuff I see that then we had a system in which women were often suffering with little recourse because they were too disempowered. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far the other way. This is a general frustration I have with the human race. They are oblivious to stupidities that ought to be corrected until finally it gets through to them that something is out of balance and then they all collectively go “OH!” and swing that damned pendulum so far in the other direction that now you’ve got an equal and opposite wrong.
I will say that I have long been at odds with modern feminism for their need to pretend that there are no gender differences. It sactually taken women backward, not forward.
Yes, many young women are fools, but they have been indoctrinated and it takes long life experience, an unusually open mind and a philosophical bent to figure out the lies of the matrix.
It may be that men have a sharper vision, less muddled, and will lead themselves and then the women out.
Yes, the mind is vacillating. And there’s money and power at the extremes because then it’s a “thing” – an agenda, a mission, an electorate, a change OR a status quo to preserve. But the middle, the golden mean? Who cares about that. Thus the Zen Buddhists talk of the “True Man of No Title” and the Taoist Sage is “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown”.
Women love status quos and virtue display – even if the status quo is as crazy as fuck and a complete violation of Natural Law. And as you know from your Newtonian Physics, a constant rate of change is just another status quo. The Elite have developed constant revolution as the paradigm of security. Amazing. The Chinese Cultural Revolution last for about ten years. Ours is going on fifty now.
You guys win the internet today for this exchange. Western women have gotten their wish with equality and discovered it’s actually their own worst nightmare. They’ve destroyed the traditional societal values and norms that held things together for all of history and replaced it with chaos and dissension, and in the process, become more like (or greatly exceeded) the psychopathic men’s culture they sought to replace. Equality in the workplace was always and only about doubling the workforce so as to neutralize labor and make it compliant to the whims of the global capitalists. Combine that with a healthy dose of immigration – legal and otherwise – and the silent coup was complete. Game, set, and match for capital over labor.
By the way, anyone notice that the global elite “old money” families are still mostly traditional patriarchies and that their women are mostly just fine with their roles? Hmm… wonder why that is?
Great last sentence. Absolutely true from everything I’ve ever heard. Many women would give their eye teeth for what middle class women had in the 50’s. Now only the Elites have it.
A Society – any Society – is delicately balanced, an organism in other words. It takes little to sicken it or even kill it. The new Elite knew their business and how to do it slowly, secretly, insidiously.
It occurs to me upon reading this (DA 9:24) that perhaps what happened is a crisis of industrialization. Because on one hand I can agree that the results are a nightmare for women, and yet I do know a lot of women with babies and toddlers and full time jobs (disclosure: I stayed home for 10 years and would rather live under a bridge and beg than go to work when I have a nursing infant) who do not seem unhappy with their lot, or who say they could not stay home full time. Why is that? It surely isn’t that their menial jobs are fulfilling careers. I think it is because women need and have always needed to be closely embedded within a wholistic community, having the company of other adults or taking part in the family business or farm. What makes people crazy is staying alone within 4 walls with only the company of infants or toddlers. They’re adorable, but it’s waaaay too much of a good thing. It’s unbalanced and no society has ever lived that way!
Great distinction. The nuclear family is unnatural as is suburbia. The Feminists conflated the nuclear with marriage and all kinds of family and threw the baby out with the bath water.
“By the way, anyone notice that the global elite “old money” families are still mostly traditional patriarchies and that their women are mostly just fine with their roles? Hmm… wonder why that is?”
Have you studied this feenomeenon or or is it just anecdotal?
Have the wimmen contacted you?
Not aware of any studies, but the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong. Of course they’re not really “traditional” in the middle class sense, since childcare and chores are likely outsourced to servants. Typical for their class though.
But do women really virtue display more than men? Aren’t there just as many men as women in the liberal academic camp? And what about that white knight syndrome? Isn’t that a virtue display? By the way, what percentage of the crowd at the million vagina march were male?
Yeah, I think they do. Early Liberalism was sane but as it progressed and became more feminine, men were dragged down too – either trying to please individual women or an predominantly female electorate.
Women are herd animals, all clustered under the dome of the bell curve, forming a PC Cathedral. Very powerful and dangerous under the demonic form of government known as Democracy.
20 years old with your own Dodge Challenger registered in your name?
Thats a chick magnet.
What a fukcing waste
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4785732/Man-charged-murder-plowing-car-protesters.html
In The Reckoning, that is– or maybe, the Great Contraction– there will be many opportunities in the new way of life for everyone who was meanwhile working in the sundry past times of the Malls. I include Amazon and Walmart in this, as well. Millions of hard working people in the country, who would rather be business owners, or craft workers– will get the chance when the monopolies & rackets are over.
We have, in many ways, a false capitalism. There is little competition. If a syndicate of mega multi-national corporations who are in agreement is your definition of capitalism, its not.
Just like communism and socialism (and any other “ism” for that matter), there is no “pure” form of capitalism. There’s just whatever it becomes in the hands of its human practitioners. Many would argue (and I’m one of them) that capitalism’s current form was always and always will be inevitable, as capitalism’s “greed is good” mantra inevitably results in collusion and corruption in an effort to buy out any legal, political, academic, and social influences that might foolishly try to restrain it. No, that’s not any “textbook” capitalism that you’re likely to read about, but surprise surprise! The textbooks have all been rewritten as well to support the manifestly corrupt academic community’s rubber stamping of their capitalist masters’ psychopathic rationalizations.
http://www.wvwnews.net/content/index.php?/news_story/house_with_confederate_flag_stormed_in_altwo_(white)_males_beaten_and_killed_(video).html
Why we fight. It didn’t make the news – just more dog bites man stuff.
Welfare State….
“Hitler also mentioned yet another reason to reject Schopenhauer’s pessimism: it does not correspond to the struggle for existence. He explained, “Human life is the occasion of a constant selective struggle (Auslesekampf). Whoever does not struggle, will perish.” 3.
“Hitler’s Religion”, Richard Weikart
Human life is the occasion of a constant selective struggle (Auslesekampf). Whoever does not struggle, will perish
Western Black Project in its chemically pure form.
The sanctions against N. Korea open the gates to war and are a sufficient pretext to start one, the US has almost completely untied its hands, and Russia and China are holding their breath in the hope that the hegemon will run into that lamppost with a bang and a big grin on its face, and the dollar will shed its “evergreen” status like a Christmas tree in April.
There has been an intensive negative selection in the US elite since 1990s, in the late Soviet scenario; they are very much tormented by the presence of intelligence, especially someone else’s.
Funny the role reversal that’s taken place in the wake of the Cold War. “Loser” Soviet Russia collapsed, floundered, got exploited, came to their senses, reorganized, rebuilt, and have come out the other side more free, rational, and cohesive than they were for the entire 20th century. Meanwhile, “winner” USA, rejected any possible lessons learned, consolidated, grew, proclaimed its hegemony for all to hear and pissed off the entire world in the process, and is now on the verge of a much messier economic collapse and societal meltdown that will be extremely hard to ever recover from. What the gods would destroy they first make crazy. It won’t be long now. Funny that.
Righto! And remember when conservatives feared and despised USSR/ Russia (a generation or so ago) but now believe that Putin and the other Russian oligarchs are the greatest thing since sliced pierogi?
Memories of the future
The American media have remembered the history and are trying to find in it whether a support, or a landmark in the storm, which now rocks the ship called the US.
True, they themselves do not understand that they are looking for landmarks, not in history, but in the old propaganda, and do not worry that they will be run aground by a divergence of that propaganda from the real history.
In particular, horrified by Trump’s refusal to blame white nationalism for a horrific incident in Charlottesville they try to set George W. Bush as an example for Trump, who immediately after 911 went around all the mosques, performing a prayer in them to show that the US does not fight Islam.
In mosques it is necessary to take off shoes, and when during the establishment of contacts with Muslims it turned out that the President of the United States has holes in his socks, all the American Media for a week was bathing in orgasm, close-up showing a hole on the right sock, from which the toe of the President of the United States stuck out.
The globalists’ divide and conquer strategy paying off nicely in Charlottesville. The little people squabble over little things, while the oligarchs exploit their inattention to cash in bigly.
the wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads
But a little bird heard the Master and servant talking and carried it unto The Evil One. Who then sent his demons to warn The Tribe, even the lords of the Earth, and to do wickedly, for the Time was short.
Just make sure Nazis NEVER march with tiki torches. I’m trying to save Germany, not Gilligan’s Island…….Hitler’s last words
You are hilarious Captain!!!
Jen in San Jose
Women love to laugh – no matter how wrong it is. Thus groups of women out clubbing will photograph themselves next to a homeless man in order to humiliate him and feel powerful in contrast. Pure Evil.
Janos, our benevolent host must be up late.
My enlightened reply to messianicdruid, and your most gracious comment, have been cast into the realm of Aksara. Om.
The Age of Kali rests heavily upon CFN.
You are welcome. I don’t get it either.
You never know who among your near or distant ancestors had a one-night-stand and with whom. Let me be the first among CFN commenters to reveal his (and his wife’s) DNA test results.
Two months ago I ordered DNA test kits from an outfit called MyHeritage. They were ‘on sale’ for $69 each plus tax so the 2 kits ran me $150 total. Here are the results which they refer to as “Ethnicity Estimate (beta)”:
Results for Q.
Europe 100.0%
. North and West Europe 84.6%
– North and West European 73.0%
– Irish, Scottish, and Welsh 11.6%
. South Europe 11.6%
-Italian 11.6%
. East Europe 3.8%
– Balkan 3.8%
Total for Q. Shtik 100.0%
Results for Mrs. Q.
Europe 100.0%
. East Europe 65.6%
– Balkan 35.7%
– East European 29.9%
. North and West Europe 31.9%
– North and West European 23.2 %
– English 8.7%
. Ashkenazi Jewish 2.5%
– Ashkenazi Jewish 2.5%
Total for Mrs. Q. Shtik 100.0%
Since my wife has lots of Jewish friends she was ecstatic about that last 2.5% element and immediately texted them.
I was somewhat astonished and asked Mrs. Q “if you are 2.5% Ashkenazi Jewish why aren’t you smarter?”
When we sent the results to our kids it caused quite a stir. They assumed that they were, therefore, 1.25% Ashkenazi Jewish. They also assumed that if you add together my DNA percentages with those of Mrs. Q and divide by 2 the resulting numbers should be the DNA of my kids. But, no, that is NOT how it works. I wrote to MyHeritage and asked them about this. They replied with an explanation which I will not burden y’all with unless some of you are actually interested.
Beside providing the percentages, they show a map which helps greatly in understanding what they mean, for example, when they say “North and West European.” There is a reddish colored amoeba-shaped blob composed primarily of Germany and France with parts of adjacent countries (Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland, Denmark).
So, I am challenging all of you (especially Janos) to spring for $69 plus tax to get your DNA tested and report back to us.
When the student is ready, the master will appear.
-Q
You married a Jew. Dude. Now your kids may not be able to get in to the New Republic.
I hope you’re kidding. I think you’re kidding…
Why? We have the tech and it will be used if the above scenario ever actualizes. Jews use it to determine entry into Israel, at least in doubtful cases.
You still think we can all get along, in the words of Rodney King. But you two are wrong: we can’t.
Q,
Aside from a fresh topic of conversation within your family and intimate circle…did the information make you feel better? Worse? I would also be curious to know the date and cause of my death…but really don’t want to know.
What if I were to find that I had significant Italian heritage (gesticulating wildly)? Suppose I discovered a Moor in the fuel supply? What inner demons would that unleash? How would I respond to Thwack?
“…wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then…” – Bob Seger
I will remain satisfied with my current perceptions of self…correct or otherwise.
Q is reading the obituaries – his way of preparing for what is to come. He may well read his own one of these days – and realize that he has already died and is now a ghost. That’s what can happen if you believe life is just meat. The spirit clings to what it knows instead of going towards the Light Fantastic.
Green bananas, right? Whats a matta, you? Why you looka so sad?
What did you think you were? Are you surprised at the Italian and Balkan in other words?
Does it specify Neanderthal Blood (the blood of the gods)?
I was extremely surprised to learn that I am 11.6 ‘greaseball.’ But then my son Thom suggested it was all from northern Italy so I was still ‘classy’ and not a Goombah. That 11.6% Italian matches the 11.6% labeled Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. We have in our family an extensive and elaborate written family tree on my mother’s side which began around 1750 with the arrival from Scotland of one Hugh MacDonald. So, the Scottish has long been part of my known heritage. But there are no known Dago names ending with vowels that I am aware of. The small Balkan percentage doesn’t surprise me at all and, anyway, at this point in the game, who cares? All my life I considered myself to be German and Scottish.
Yeah, that makes sense on the face of things. But why did it come up “Italian” at all if you’re Nordic through and through? There must be some grease there that made it “ping” Italian.
I’ve been sorely tempted to do this, but I don’t want MyHeritage (or whomever) to own my DNA ‘formula’. Didn’t you read the fine print?
A question for the readership;
It appears that financial crashes and other perturbations in America’s financial life have occurred during the months of September-October.
Black Friday… Gold crisis of 1869
Panic of 1907
Crash of 1929
Black Monday…the flash crash of 1987
Crash of 2008…Lehman Bros, AIG bailouts
All of these issues surfaced in Late September-October of their respective years.
What are the 3rd quarter dynamics? There must be a simple mechanism for this commonality. I am reminded of a little ditty regarding selling late in the year and waiting out the winter…but the actual wording escapes me. Any help?
I think you are confused about the ‘late in the year’ part. There’s a rhyme that says “Sell in May and go away.”
The so-called ‘flash crash’ was 9/30/2010…not the one in 1987.
Q,
Yes, I am sure I was referencing that ditty…an error on my part.
The Media is feasting on blood. It must be stated again: the Judge gave the Alt-Right a permit to rally at the Park. Instead of honoring it and trying to keep the Peace, the police herded the Brothers approaching the Park towards the Communists – where they were attacked and defended themselves. The Police used this as an excuse to call of the rally. Then they pushed the Brothers out of another nearby Park which had been a staging area and where they had been falling back to. If the Police hadn’t fomented chaos and violence, maybe the car incident wouldn’t have happened. We’ll have more to say about the driver when more is known. Good first hand account below.
https://www.dailystormer.com/unitetheright-historic-event-for-the-ages/
My worst suspicions have come true – the Media uses Alt-Right rally for non-stop attacks on President Trump.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the same people who organized and paid for BLM rallies are also behind that.
Test
Now it works! Damn computers!
NSA/CIA must have ate my posts!
“Q is reading the obituaries – his way of preparing for what is to come.” Janos
One could happen upon death by sitting in an automobile in a horrendous traffic jam.
Or while waiting in line at a TSA checkpoint.
And worst of all: in the “express checkout” line at the Walmart. The horror.
If I may Q.; please find yourself a copy of the Bardo Thodol. (I would bet the farm that Janos has his own fully dog-eared copy.)
A most precious guidebook as we are all going on, what the author of “Peter Pan,” J.M. Barrie called “….an awfully big adventure.”
At one time, I used the Bar Dahl before taking the journey into undiscovered country. It always brought me back from the bourn, unlike mere mortals. Good stuff.
Just about the only reason I ever go to Walmart (maybe once a year) is to check out the world class freak show of customers and staff. Fantastic, scary and weird all under one roof. No admission charge.
Where it’s Halloween every day (and night.)
Yeah, but sometimes….
Google Walmart babes.
https://www.prisonplanet.com/final-warning-to-white-people-goes-viral-on-twitter-after-charlottesville-rally.html
Wake up Ozone.
“No matter where you lived, it shipped your order directly to you, whether you were looking for cast-iron cookware, a mandolin, the newest technological marvel, or the latest in petticoats. Amazon, right? Actually, it was Sears–a century ago.” NYT
The article goes on to explain how a Mr. Lampert, honing his financial predatory skills at non other than Goldman Sachs’ risk arbitrage desk, allowed Sears to borrow excessively and get rid of spin offs and assets like Craftsman tools.
In 2015, 266 Sears and K-Mart properties were sold for $3 billion to Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate investment group. Oh, and Mr. Lampert, CEO and largest Sear shareholder, was also chairman of the board of trustees for Seritage.
Steve Mnuchin was Lampert’s roommate at Yale, and was on one or more of Lampert’s boards.
The article says that Lampert took on the e-commerce challenge more than ten years ago, but apparently he was more interested in financial engineering and organizational restructuring that proved disastrous.
Sears has lost more than $26 billion in market value over the past decade, and shed more than 175,000 jobs. There have been 155 Sears and K-Mart closings this year.
So the question is, why is this once great, venerable institution on the verge of bankruptcy? Yeah, a lot has to do with brick and mortar and declining foot traffic. But, as the article mentions, what about Victoria’s Secret, for example? They do well in store and have a billion dollar business on line. Right, the line is limited in comparison and sex always sells well, and Sears just became “sexless” over time. Good management should be able to fix that.
Mr. Lampert, as Sears Holding’s chief banker, collects fees and provides loans to company operations. He and his hedge fund hold a large portion of the company’s debt, secured by property and inventory.
And debt holders come before shareholders in any restructuring.
Sears used to be “America”. Now it’s Wall Street.
https://helenaglass.net/tag/mayor-mike-signer/
Charlottesville mayor, Mike Signor,
worked with Podesta, campaigned for Hillary – Obama,
he was a senior advisor for The Center For American Progress.
The CFAP is a Soros funded front that coincidentally operates two sister organizations; Generation Progress and The Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Yeah, he’s milking this for everything he can. Ambitious scum.
Big announcement here last week by Congressman Jim Larsen D. Ct, made with much fanfare. Jim is a big organized labor guy, which means more or less he represents the interests of public sector union members. He has a plan, and it is this: We will dig a deep east/west tunnel, underneath West Hartford, Hartford, the Connecticut River and East Hartford, about 12 miles long and 100 ft deep, and put the interstate highways in it. Length of project: 20 years. Cost of project: $6 trillion.
… Like its 1956, Pax Americana is bestriding the world and flushed with cash. Sky is the limit. Anything is possible if you think big enough and are willing to pour enough concrete, oceans of concrete and steel.
Legislation will be introduced next session. Expect a lot more bills from these megalomaniacs as we dissolve into chaos and penury, like colonizing mars and wind mills to power up Houston.
brh
“a 12 mile tunnel” —brh
But won’t it be dark in there? For $5 Trillion I hope it has LED lighting.
Little Jane, the LED lighting is going on the bridges in NYC, if Governor Cuomo has anything to say about it.
brh
Big Backrow,
and if Christie has anything to say about it, on the NJ State park beaches?
Such repartee. Nice to see everyone getting along.
Nothing is more ridiculous than Leftists who claim “community” with people they don’t know and can’t understand. The below is a representation of true Islam.
By Anita Singh
9:11AM BST 29 Oct 2010
The couple chose an idyllic resort in the Maldives as the perfect place to renew their marriage vows and pledge everlasting love.
But their happiness has turned to humiliation after the wedding video was posted on YouTube and subtitles disclosed that their “Islamic blessing”, which was conducted by a hotel employee in the native Dhivehi language, was in fact a stream of insults.
“You are swine. The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine. Your marriage is not a valid one,” he intoned as the couple held up their hands in prayer, blissfully unaware of what was being said.
Dismissing them as pork-eating “infidels”, the employee went on: “You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel. The other too is an infidel and, we have reason to believe, an atheist who does not even believe in an infidel religion.
“You fornicate and make a lot of children. You drink and you eat pork. Most of the children that you have are marked with spots and blemishes.”
Several other staff members were present at the ceremony but said nothing. One appeared to be stifling a laugh.
The “celebrant”, identified as Hussein Didi, made reference to bestiality and “frequent fornication by homosexuals”. Close inspection of the official-looking document in front of him reveals it to be a copy of the staff employment regulations.
The video was shot by hotel employees who can be heard sniggering in the background and debating whether or not the bride is wearing a bra. “Don’t look at the breasts!” says one as the bride leans over in her white wedding gown to plant a coconut palm. “My beard has gone grey watching those things. I have seen so many of them now that I don’t even want to look any more when I see them.”
The ceremony took place at the Vilu Reef Beach and Spa Resort, which charges £820 for the privilege. The hotel’s website claims that the sunset ceremony is the perfect way “to mark a milestone in your amazing journey together”.
Although the couple’s identity was undisclosed, they were thought to have been Swiss.
The video has caused uproar in the Maldives, a nation heavily dependent on tourism, and the government ordered a police investigation. Ismail Yasir, the deputy tourism minister, said he was “very concerned”.
“We have asked the resort to inform us what action they have taken,” he said. “We are embarrassed and outraged. We would like to assure everyone who would like to come to the Maldives that we will take such incidents seriously and will take action.”
The staff involved have been suspended. A spokesman for the Vilu Reef apologised for their “unforgivable conduct” and said: “The management of the resort is deeply saddened by this humiliating event.”
Everywhere whites go in the world enjoying their commodity travel experience…….the wogs spit in your food. The French even have a name for it….”ranch dressing”.
LOL! National Lampoon’s European Vacation comes to life.
ah, janos, each and every time onehunglo commend you for demonstrating wisdom, comment summarily deleted….
that ok.
let not you heart be troubled.
may God be with you.
-onehunglo
Meanwhile, there’s petroleum, keeping everything moving (for the time being) Right now the USA is burning up nearly 22 million bpd, about 11 million of that imported and 11 million produced domestically. Domestic production is as high as its ever been, and consumption is also reaching peak levels.
‘Sustainable Energy’, solar and wind, still amounts to less than 3% of total energy production in the United States. We hear so much in the popular media about alternative energy and renewables but they really don’t amount to much and most likely never will. I think at some point TPTB will have to level with us and admit the whole thing was a grift, a fraud to raise some cash and buy some time until something else came along. But it appears nothing else is likely to come along to save the day; its oil, natgas, coal, nuclear power … or nothing.
brh
One of the few things that Jimmy Carter did right was his push for energy conservation and wind/solar power. Had we continued what he started, alternative energy would contribute well over 20% by now. But Reagan and the neocons sacrificed them on the altar of Big Oil.
There ARE efficient windmill designs but, they are NOT being used. TPTB don’t want them. The failure of rackets like Solyndra was NOT a failure of alternative energy! It only revealed classic crony capitalism and political payola at work.
The NASA-designed 3-blade windmills are extremely inefficient and the whole project was designed to FAIL. Unlike most things, wind power DOES NOT SCALE UP. The bigger the windmill, the less effective it is. It is MUCH more efficient to gain the swept area with a dozen smaller and faster turning windmills than by one big and slow turning machine. There are better designs than the 3-blade unit. Which, BTW, is the worst.
Contrary to popular belief, NASA is no longer the embodiment of good science. NASA “science” is mostly junk science now. But, it is kept up as a showcase for EEOC diktats (“diversity”) and peddler of pseudo-science for public consumption.
A good boondoggle is a terrible thing to waste. Carter was absolutely vilified for daring to even hint at the truth.
BRH,
Speaking of wasting/conserving distilled petroleum go-juice; Brit Jam, this coming Sunday, the 20th, Haddam Neck Fairgrounds. My first sighting of an electrical (only) motorcycle last year; the owner said that it almost threw him off (wheelstand) the first time he twisted the throttle; fastest thing off the line he’d ever been on. (I can’t quite remember, but I *think* he said it had a 200 mile range on a charge. I didn’t ask how many FRN’s were used to obtain the thing.)
Police ‘STAND DOWN’ Blamed for Virginia Chaos
There was no police presence,” Ms. Caine-Conley said. “We were watching people punch each other; people were bleeding all the while police were inside of barricades at the park, watching. It was essentially just brawling on the street and community members trying to protect each other.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/charlottesville-protests-white-nationalists.html
Another telltale of the Color Revolution technologies applied in Charlottesville, just like in Maidan in Kiev.
Yes! This one will no doubt have negative repercussions for Trump supporters, although they’re likely to just dig in all the more. Civil War 2.0 coming soon? Hmm…
Bill Still agrees with Finca: professional paid agent-provocateurs caused chaos in Charlottesville
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jf0QkjIQaqg&t=60
SOP for the spooks.
Testing again.
About oil. I have been in the energy markets for over 10 years. There is absolutely no shortage of any kind in the visible future. Production is at all time highs domestically and internationally, way past the highs of 2005 and 2007 supposed peak oil time frame. For the people talking about $3-$4 gasoline where they live, current gasoline market price is $1.56 the rest is state tax and profits, so you have states with current pump prices at $1.80 and you have states with prices at $3.80. There are huge new discoveries all of the time that are not being developed at all. There was an article today stating “Oil companies left another 135 wells dormant in the Permian Basin in July, bringing the inventory of drilled but uncompleted wells to 2,330, up 73% Y/Y – wells that could add hundreds of thousands of barrels to surging U.S. oil output when the wells are brought into production.” Based on the numbers I have seen trough the years my current view is this: peak oil is based on the oil companies own data from 15 years ago to make it look more scares than it actually is, to keep the price somewhat elevated for a commodity that turns out to be abundant. The only thing that can bring the price up would be a huge production or distribution disruption of some sort.