JHK’s Three-Act Play
Clusterfuck Nation
Now appearing Mondays and Fridays
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page!
I took advantage of the calm before the storm, to pay a visit on Saturday to my hometown, Trumpville, a.k.a. Manhattan. My college buddy had a son who was acting in an off-Broadway play (closing night, so don’t bother asking). The city I knew as a kid — which, frankly, I never liked very much — seemed as lost and far away as Peter Stuyvesant’s quaint Dutch colonial outpost did to me in 1962.
That lost city of my childhood was one in which a boy could breeze right into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a weekday afternoon — my school was one block away from it — without the least hindrance. The place was free. There was no “donation” shakedown at the entrance. And hardly anyone was there. Do you know why? Answer: because most of the adults on the island were at work. It was a mostly middle-class city back then.
I know. It’s hard to believe, given the more recent developments in American life — the salient one being the extreme and perverse financialization of the economy. That is actually what you see manifested on-the-ground (and up-in-the-air) when you visit New York these days. To be specific, what I saw sitting on a bench along the High Line — a walking trail built on an old railroad trestle through the former Meatpacking District into Chelsea — was all the wealth of the flyover states funneled into a few square miles of land on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
As I watched the endless stream of tourists and hipsters stride by in their selfie raptures, I pictured the various downtowns of the Midwest I’ve visited over the years — St Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Detroit, Akron, Dayton, Cleveland, Louisville, Tulsa, and many more — and remembered the incredible desolation of their centers. There was no one there, certainly no tourists or hipsters, really no activity to speak of. They were ghost cities. The net effect of financialization has been the asset-stripping of every other place in America for the benefit of a very few cities on the coasts, and especially the financial engineers within them.
Thus, the ironic rise of New Yorker Trump as the avatar and supposed savior of all those people “out there” in their dying hometowns and beyond. And their tremendously bitter enmity against the “blue” coastal elites, of which Trump is a nonpareil exemplar. History is a trickster.
What I also saw sitting on that bench facing west along the High Line, but also everywhere else I traipsed around the island that day, was the stupendous array of construction cranes against the sky, hoisting slender condominium towers into the clouds, many of them fifty stories and more. To me, it was a very ominous sight. Business cycles can be traced far back in history, but the cycles of these late techno-industrial times have been marked by the most extremes of extremity, and the current one is the dooziest of all.
And, of course, real estate development probably tends to greater extremes as a cycle within the greater economic cycle. Real estate booms and busts have come to characterize modern times, along with never-ending war and ecological carnage. The reason real estate rises and falls so dramatically is because it takes so much time to get these mega-projects permitted and to arrange the complex financing, and then built, then to market the units within. A project gets underway under one set of economic circumstances, and by the time it’s completed, things have changed. Say, a foreign country such as China or Russia puts capital controls on money fleeing its shores, and suddenly there are no foreign billionaires and oligarchs bidding on apartments in New York as a supposedly safe stash for their wealth. That dynamic is underway right now… as the cranes continue to hoist I-beams and glass claddings into the sky.
It’s easy to see that the skyscraper boom in Manhattan is going to end in a fantastic real estate bloodbath. It will accompany the general crash of the debt-fueled financialized economy, like the clanking, groaning, musical score of a horror movie. Unlike previous real estate debacles, these scores of skinny condo towers will not recover, even if they are sold in bankruptcy for dimes on the dollar. They may never even become slums. They will simply be uninhabitable cells in decrepitating buildings that can’t be maintained, because the capital won’t be there to enable it and the financing model based on the deconstruction of real estate rights — i.e. condo-ization — will be dead.
The skyscraper bust will also mark the end of the hypertrophy of New York and, eventually, of all mega-cities like it. They’ve exceeded a scale that will permit them to be maintained and repaired, and when financialization founders on its false foundations, there will be nothing left to support that way of life.
Great Fall Reading… JHK’s new book!
“Simply the best novel about the 1960s.”
Read the first chapter here (click) on Patreon
Buy the book at Amazon or click on the cover below
or get autographed copies from Battenkill Books
Other Books by JHK
| The World Made By Hand Series: | |
Book 1: |
Book 2: |
   |
|
Book 3: |
Book 4: |
|
|
 |
 |
  |
|
Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
|
Order now! Jim’s new book
Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill Books
|
Order now! Jim’s other new book
|
Paintings from the 2023 Season
New Gallery 15
GET THIS BLOG VIA EMAIL PROVIDED BY SUBSTACK
You can receive Clusterfuck Nation posts in your email when you subscribe to this blog via Substack. Financial support is voluntary.
Sign up for emails via https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com
Jim,
A cross section of the city would show a decaying and festering substrata with a 100+ year old sewer and water system and a subway on the brink of total meltdown. Certainly a new kind of Potemkin Village.
The water system is well maintained. It’s not Flint, and they’re gradually building the third water tunnel, which will allow maintenance and repair on tunnels 1 and 2. Maybe they spend more than needed on it, but the decay is addressed. And the sewerage system as well: one reason docks around NYC are collapsing is that the water is now clean enough to allow shipworms to bore into wooden pilings.
And the subways aren’t on the brink of total meltdown. That was 1980, when the city felt like Calcutta with snow. They’re certainly suffering under the strain of increased ridership, and poor management. That, however can be more quickly fixed than crumbling architecture in the system, and requires political will and vision. That is the real deficit in the country, and it’s not just NYC that suffers it.
The financialization of the economy is perhaps why we see the rise of crypto currency. I still think it could all blow up, but its so interesting seeing a alternative that at least some people are buying into.
I’m hoping the rise of cryptos accelerates the demise of the dollar and a transfer of wealth to those already in cryptos. Me being one in cryptos of course. If I can see some of these dollar-laden smug fucks get their collective asses handed to them before I die, I will pass on a happy man.
If the cryptos replace the zombie banks that would be a major triumph.
Do you think that “crytos” are based on anything more substantial than the dollar?
I’m glad you will pass on a happy man, because you sound like a very sad and angry one now.
To Shotho:
No, cryptos are not based on anything more substantial than the dollar. Even less so as they do not have the US military and tax laws to enforce and require their use. However, if they are perceived as a safe haven when the dollar falters, they could change how things work quite rapidly. All based on a electronic blockchain. It’s about emotions and perception, not what it’s based on. Like I keep telling the whiny gold and silver stackers in the conservative world who watch cryptos climb 1000’s of percentage points while their pm languish. You know, that “tangible” asset that’s fully controlled, yet based on something real. Maybe a mix is a better plan?
Not sad and angry at all. Just tired of the over abundance of dolkar chasers and hustlers in our society and being a smart ass about it. It’s a role I play some days. Always catches the cranks off guard.
The long-term success of the cryptos seems unlikely. It might be better to think of them as a mania, set an exit point, and bail out when you get there.
The servers that enable the internet are, if we think about it, either wholly owned by government or located in places that would be easy for government to seize and control.
So if cryptos become the standard for world trade, government will seize control of it. How long would it take _all_ of the NSA’s best supercomputers to mine entirely through all possible blockchains of bitcoin, or any other crypto? Not too long, I would bet. What happens to bitcoin data located on a server which is seized by its local government? Likely, that government will own it, or destroy and regenerate it.
What you want, TOTT, is for bitcoin to remain the province of kooks until you can get your profits out of it and put them somewhere that has a low profile for the revenoo-ers…
So the future is Pyongyang?
I thought the cities of China had towns of empty condos Spain has tracks of new urban areas which are also ghost towns.
American already has throwaway cities like Camden NJ and the dystopia JHK imagines is already here. All JHK has to do is look sideways and see the present for what it is, No need to look up and imagine the next future crash, the signs of massive clusterfuck are already here.
A big financial crash. Maybe I’ll become unemployed from it like the last time maybe not. If I do become unemployed recovery will not be guaranteed. The certainty is that a crash will happen not that the exact time will be predicted. Capitalism has the characteristics of a cancer, inappropriate growth. It might seem that growth is always good but the seeds of excessive and inappropriate growth spawn disaster. It is built into the system because there are no controls.
The system will crash again, it must. JHK is imagining multitudes suffering in the near future but the truth is multitudes are suffering now. A characteristic of our economic system is that it makes financial victims of economic crashes vanish so we, and this week, JHK can forget about them. He must have or he would not be looking to a future for victims because then he would see them around him. Don’t look up, look sideways.
My city, another port city also booms. I live in a house I could not possibly afford had I not bought it years ago. The opulence of these times has blessed the fortunate of Seattle and it has ignored everyone else.
With each bust and boom cycle of contemporary capitalism’s ungoverned speculative growth, victims are created along with a fortunate few who do make big bank in the boom time. As our environmental catastrophe develops and shortages of raw materials manifest each boom and bust cycle will create ever more victims and ever fewer successes. Misery will flourish until we are in one long bust and only have a very small percentage of owners like Trump who prosper.
That is the way it will be unless we change things. You may be a sociopath like Grayenphil and be all right with things as they are. If you are, you can ignore the tent city armies that march around our cities looking for work. Your ignorance is bliss.
Or you can be like me and want something better.
Good points K-dog. Also, a valid point about sociopaths like Graycenphil. I have encountered his type before. They could drive through 50 continuous miles of Mexico City slums and the only thing they would notice is the poor condition of the roads and how it affected their ride.
And why would you even think that?
Reading your posts. But also kinda messing with you. Although it is interesting that you strive to post first and often on a blog in which you disagree with the author’s ideas and that of his readers. I am always leery of such saviors.
You are misreading my posts. Messing of course, is fine. I enoy a laugh too.
I do enjoy JHK’s writing. HIs fiction is great, his insight is sharp but his predicions are way off. If nobody else has posted I certainly will. But what would be the point of a blog where everyone agreed? That wouldn’t be any fun.
What everyone else here agrees on is that you are a paid troll.
And, yet again, you’re wrong.
K-dog, you sez:
“With each bust and boom cycle of contemporary capitalism’s ungoverned speculative growth, victims are created along with a fortunate few who do make big bank in the boom time. As our environmental catastrophe develops and shortages of raw materials manifest each boom and bust cycle will create ever more victims and ever fewer successes. Misery will flourish until we are in one long bust and only have a very small percentage of owners like Trump who prosper.”
I witnessed this growth of misery too, and it never went away for most of “the folks”. We happened to be both fortunate AND aware in the last crazy run-up of house prices before the last crash. We wanted to get the hell out of where we were living (regardless of the convenience) because of freakishly escalating taxes. (Apparently, the town managers thought that the majority of their working class constituents were as well-padded as the very richest amongst them and decided to raise the taxes 6% per year for 6 consecutive years. Impoverishment, nice and gradual.) The bust/waking to reality came about in about late spring of 2006. We could have gotten a bit more for our “home” had we white-knuckled those last couple years, but I’ve always believed in reading the writing on the wall rather than throwing buckets of whitewash on it or hurrying by with blinders firmly attached. Now, do I feel sorry for those who got caught in that particular price collapse out of greed? Not much; they paid the price (literally) of inattention and irrational exuberance.
Anyhoo, those whose incomes were viciously slashed during this entire debacle of financialization and the highly desirable service economy (rather than the production of real things) are still with us, and in worse shape than during the Bush regime. Let us face the simple fact that the Oblammo war-crime continuation program promoted nothing but feel-good gloss and fluff, doing a whole lot of nothing for these victims (except maybe revealing the horror that they were finally and truly on their own; YOYO, baby).
The next crash will create even more financial desperados… I would predict that the newly-disenfranchised of this next wave will be *much* larger in number; I’ve seen how close-to-the-bone and deep in debt those around me are living. Ain’t gonna be pretty, especially in a culture that glorifies violence as a problem-solving strategy.
Unicorn fart-sniffers everywhere will disagree… whether by delusion or remuneration.
BTW, as far as JHK not looking sideways; it’s my opinion that he does that *most* of the time, and also is the subject of most of his commentary. (Just take a gander at where he lives.)
Who says things are okay as they are? Now I’ve sen a few sociopaths who hope things will someday be like they are in the long emergency, but I hope that’s not anybody on here.
Preparing for a potential hurricane to come through doesn’t mean you’re cheering for the hurricane. Apparently, it’s not pleasing to some if we watch for signs of that hurricane while everyone else is self absorbed taking selfies and blowing sunshine up each other’s backside. Oh well, I don’t really get off on popularity anyway.
TOTT,
A fine riposte to [yet another] unicorn fart-sniffer! Oh, excuse me, it’s selfie and posting to Faceplant time yet again… must rush.
I too, get a little short ‘n’ snarky with those who criticize me for being awake, aware and trying to prepare just a little something for the next victims of those that ain’t [awake and aware].
Lay back, Gracie, this won’t hurt a bit… and we’ll take gooood care of Guy-in-a-hole too; don’t you worry ’bout a thing.
So who ever said we shouldn’t prepare for a a hurricane? For that matter, who said anyting about selfies?
I believe you are mistaken about a great many things, including the two above.
Forget about it Graycie. I will aim for being much more direct and literal next time. But I do have to ask you a question, are you a Boomer by chance?
Graycenphil,
What we are not mistaken about is that you are a paid troll.
Yes, you are mistaken about that too. To think that anyone would be paid to post on here is delusional. To consider my posts trolling just reveals insecurity about your own thoughts. Justifiable, to be sure, but insecure just the same.
Tiredofthetreadmill, I was born at the end of the baby boomers, if that’s what you are asking.
I, like so many others, have a love/hate relationship with New York. I felt the same way in the 70s, and on some strange level even miss those days.
I too agree there will be a real estate crash; there is just too much new construction and the number of cranes is amazing. But there have been mnay crashes in the past, and many predictions of the end of New York. But the city will recover from this crash too, and go on to be an even better city than it was, as it always has.
Mr. Graycenphil or should I say, Mr. Sociopath. You sure take a beating on this blog. Glad to see you’re still hanging in here. A little optimism is good for the soul, even though I mostly disagree with you.
As far as New York is concerned, I never think about it and why should I? It has nothing to do with my life and I would just as soon care about Mumbai.
Funny thing, you never think about New York yet you mostly disagree with me. Why does that not surprise me in the least?
Perhaps you shouldn’t talk about things if you never even think about them.
“The net effect of financialization has been the asset-stripping of every other place in America for the benefit of a very few cities on the coasts, and especially the financial engineers within them.”
This asset stripping has not been limited to “every other place in America”. Try the whole world.
“What I also saw sitting on that bench facing west along the High Line, but also everywhere else I traipsed around the island that day, was the stupendous array of construction cranes against the sky, hoisting slender condominium towers into the clouds, many of them fifty stories and more. To me, it was a very ominous sight. Business cycles can be traced far back in history, but the cycles of these late techno-industrial times have been marked by the most extremes of extremity, and the current one is the dooziest of all.”
Just to the north of where you sat James is the Hudson Yards mega-development that utilizes the air rights over the Penn Station rail yards. That’s reputed to be the largest such development since Rockefeller Center. Yes, during my month in the Big Apple, I was amazed at the amount of construction. Hardly a block in Manhattan and Brooklyn was without a construction project of some sort or another. It exceeded what I witnessed in the UAE in the run up to the 2008 crash.
Generally speaking, whenever you see tower cranes stretched out from horizon to horizon, a crash is soon to follow.
The city used to have this wonderful edge to it before everything got so terribly precious. The infestation of money has led to a place I don’t recognize anymore with cookie-cutter people and everything out of sight for the middle class.
All this has an expiration date, though since most of the ‘wealth’ is dressed up accounting fraud.
Yeah, the interesting things about the city are gone, like the place in Times Square where you could buy a fake newspaper headline. Stupid little shop but I used it a few times. Now probably replaced by a Starbucks, selling bitter over-roasted coffee at an extreme markup.
Jane Jacobs talked about the dangers of too much money, as well as too little.
Too much money is a real thing. Like vultures, trillions of dollars circle the globe looking for investible opportunities, ending up in stock markets that rise, magically, without reason, like limp dicks on viagra.
And what does my GOP want to do about it? They want to cut taxes and throw trillions more dollars into the hands of people whose trillions already circle the globe. Meanwhile the infrastructure of our once mighty nation falls deeper into disrepair.
The only valid solution is to RAISE taxes, especially on the very rich, and put that money to work on those water tunnels, subways, roads, bridges, sewer systems, electrical grids and all the other trappings of a civilized world. Sadly, that’s not going to happen with this clown car of politicians in DC and most state houses. But they’ll line up and wave the flag as they take birth control away from women and issue blood curdling screams that a tranny person might use a restroom.
As a nation we’ve lost our fucking minds. Putin is ROTFLMAO.
Morality comes all at once – not just the parts you are comfortable with. Abortion is like fast food – a desire for quick, “unhealthy” (immoral) solutions to a the problem of “hunger” (desire for love). If we get rid of fake money, we will naturally get rid of fake a lot of things. Obviously trannies won’t be allowed to corrupt society. That’s a growing cancer and you are utterly unaware of it. Putin doesn’t allow it or Homosexual corruption of the public square either.
Janos, I read you every post and have come to the conclusion that you’re just an asshole.
Finc’s czar says he’s not going to run again.
Madge, you are a Majestic Ape.
I remember the Fulton fish market. The Coffee Cup. The Moshulu.
I don’t know, Jim. I’ve been to KC recently and it’s a rather vibrant town with an active scene. There’s quite a few hipsters living there. I do agree with you on the real estate extravaganza going on now. Just in my small town of St. Pete there are several new condo projects going up (there is nothing else being built, just condos). My wife and I often remark on them wondering who the hell can afford these things at $400k and up (quite a bit for FL), especially when there are hundreds of units to be sold. Yesterday We drove by a house for sale, listed at $1.05mm. It was about 2500 sq ft, recently remodeled, in a nice neighborhood. But 1 million? How disconnected from reality have we become?
And Detroit, believe it or not, is doing much better these days. It’s agreat city, with some very bad years, but it is coming back.
That is really utter horse shit Graycenphil. I was there for a New Urbanist conference in 2016, and the center was utterly desolate, except for the ballpark and one adjacent street of honkeytonks.
Jim,
And those neighborhoods with houses you can put on a credit card. Lots of money for a new sport arena, though – following the predictable setting of priorities now.
MOST OF THE DAMAGE DONE TO THE U.S. AND THE WHITES CAN BE LAID AT THE FEET OF THE KENNEDY PROMOTED 1965 IMMIGRATION ACT THAT OPENED THE FLOOD GATES TO 3RD WORLDERS – THE VERY PEOPLE THAT WE DELIBERATELY KEPT OUT IN PRIOR YEARS FOR GOOD REASON. ONE JUST HAD TO LOOK AT THE HELL HOLES THOSE PEOPLE MADE OF THEIR OWN COUNTRIES.
ANOTHER BLOW CAME FROM JOHNSON’S THE GREAT SOCIETY PROGRAM THAT ENSHRINED LIBERALISM, SOCIAL ENGINEERING AND THE WELFARE STATE – WHICH IN TURN ALLOWED MINORITIES TO BECOME PERMANENT WARDS OF THE STATE AND A POWERFUL VOTING BLOC FOR DEMOCRATS AND BECOME A CANCER AS WELL, ONE THAT EATS AWAY AT OUR CITIES.
DETROIT IS A CLASSIC ADVANCED CASE OF THIS. A 3RD WORLD CITY THAT ONE WOULD NORMALLY SEE IN SOUTH AFRICA OR THE LATER STAGES OF MUGABE’S ZIMBABWE.
DURING THIS ERA ANOTHER THING HAPPENED. THE TAKE OVER OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BY THE WHITE CHRISTIAN LIBERAL AND JEWISH ELITE.
OUT WENT THE WWII DEMS WITH THEIR WORKING CLASS ECONOMIC POPULISM AND NATIONALISM AND IN WITH SOCIAL ENGINEERING(IOW ATTACKS ON WHITE CULTURE AND WHITES IN GENERAL), PROMOTING THE WELFARE STATE AND GROWTH OF GOVERNMENT, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND NASCENT NEO-GLOBALISM, ETC.
Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act. It had been under study for over a decade. Eisenhower ordered the review in 1952 because the US was criticized for discriminatory immigration policies which favored Northern Europeans beginning in 1921. The 1965 Act brought us into modern era and in compliance with UN Resolutions and the policies of other western countries. The new law favored reuniting families and bringing in skilled workers regardless of national origin rather than, as you imply, allowing large numbers of lazy racial minorities who contributed nothing to American life but drained the economy by relying on social welfare programs.
As a pure number the US has the highest number of citizens not born in the United States. However, as a percentage of the population, the US immigration has ranked in the low to mid 20s for more than decade.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/11/18/is-the-u-s-the-most-immigrant-friendly-country-in-the-world/#4f4d31885a1d
There is only anecdotal evidence by extreme right wing neo-nazi websites, and no reputable objective evidence that this immigration policy has caused social unrest or economic hardship. It is simply an excuse to blame “everything on foreigners.”
I will leave you to read the studies and the numbers for yourself.
https://theconversation.com/us/topics/immigration-policy-6888?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI1tLmhIDk1gIVClqGCh03lAMDEAMYASAAEgIhH_D_BwE
That’s crazy, Dumb. The Elite voted to replace the American People. A House divided against itself cannot stand. And they hope for a controlled demolition which then keeps them in power in perpetuity: a Judeo-Masonic Elite who rule over coloreds forever, like the Brahmins old India. The few remaining Whites being the outcastes, relegated to the most remote areas if they want to avoid being humiliated and assaulted on a daily basis. The poorest people in Jamaica are just such Whites who do just that for just that reason.
Agreed, malthuss,
But why are you shouting at us?
LBJ wielding his magnificent pen.
https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/09/how-the-1965-immigration-act-shaped-americas-population/407626/
” believe it or not, is doing much better these days”
He is full of these bromides. He is likely to come back at you with a pocket of finely stitched success if he can find one in Detroit’s torn an tattered suit of collapse. He picks an chooses facts which benefit him and he ignores those truths which do not.
Well, don’t we all? That’s what passes for thoughtful discourse these days.
And when were you guys last in Detroit? And how much did gas cost in the 70s Kdog? Can you charge an electric car at home?
I read Downtown Detroit is being gentrified.
I have not been there, so I dont know.
One tale is of a young Australian, lured by cheap home prices.
Moves there and is killed by his Black tenant, over over due rent.
Downtown Detroi is indeed being gentrified. If Mr. Kunstler missed that when he was there, he must not have been looking for it.
You have clearly missed something; perhaps you should visit again. We were there a year ago and were quite impressed by some of the changes. There are young people moving into the city, improving neighborhoods and starting small and medium businesses. We had no problem parking on the street (which can be a good sign or a bad sign) but we had no problem with someone stealing the car either. That would not have been the case a few years back. They even saved the DIA and banks are putting money into the city.
The city certainly faces many problems, and success is not guaranteed. But if you were downtown and did not see hope, you really missed something. Many parts pf the city are still pretty desperate, but downtown has been doing quite well. As I say, you should go take another look.
If Blacks can be kept out, then neighborhoods could be rebuilt. How does one do that in today’s America? White Dispossession and minority empowerment are the very life blood of this decaying society. It’s too far gone to reverse.
That’s who you sound like. You’re 3PO? Right? From “Star Wars” right? The little golden dude?
So I guess it’s NOT.
It’s cheap to someone looking to get $1MM out of China. When that spigot is shut off, look out below.
Remember that an investment of 500k used to bring a visa, so that sets a floor under prices.
Hey I’m getting ready to visit the Texas Napa Valley and do some wine tasting. Eat your heart out California! We don’t need your Pinot Noir’s!
So Jennifer Lopez’s 24-million $ Manhattan penthouse with two huge terraces and lots of dead animal skins, featured in today’s NYT, might not sell so she can scale up?
I hope JoLo gave a large donation to her native Puerto Rico.
As the old saw goes: New York will be quite the place, if they ever finish it.
The best book I’ve read on the transition from NY being a productive industrial economy that earned its keep through manufacturing is The Assassination of New York, about the collusion of FIRE to turn lower-valued industrial land (and the manufacturing economy of Manhattan that you saw in 1962 and Jane Jacobs wrote about in The Economy of Cities was a thriving, unique, high-value ecosystem that supported a highly-pai middle and working class) into high-value residential land, as in the meat packing district. Worth a read, JHK.
It will accompany the general crash of the debt-fueled financialized economy, like the clanking, groaning, musical score of a horror movie.
Right now, we are pretending that the debt is payable. But it’s not payable, and the largest components aren’t even the mortgages on Manhattanproperty (which is better built than the houses of ticky-tacky out on the exurban fringe). Rather, it’s the unpayable Debt for local and federal pensions, including social security.
The Trump tax plan has a solution for that. One component of it is an “adjustment” because the Feds think that the official inflation rate overstates inflation. So they will reduce the official inflation rate, and then crank the inflation, destroying the value of debt. It seems to be the only way to cut pensions that cannot be paid without actually cutting the dollar amount of pensions.
33 Liberty Street, NYC.
Fire at the Federal Reserve.
Those old days of industrialized urban areas was because that’s where the railroad network existed in those days. In the 1800s our cities were dense and compact and the rails served that geography, hence inner city industry. My hometown of Baltimore grew up exactly that way, a city on the water from which rails were later extended west. Railroads in the USA started in Baltimore. (Railroad history is my passion.) The Interstate Highway System put an end to centralized industrial zones served by rail. Though many industrial zones still exist, much has transitioned to the exurbs.
Case in point is the huge B&O RR warehouse that is the backdrop for the Camden Yards baseball park in Baltimore, my home town and another hollowed out and blighted 2nd tier asset-stripped city Jim could have included in the list, space permitting. This warehouse used to receive daily boxcars of finished goods that were stored there for local delivery to wholesalers, retailers, and residents. These local deliveries were made by horse drawn wagons and later by motor trucks.
These days, massive new automated, mechanized warehouses fill industrial parks along the interstate system where Amazon and dozens more internet and catalog retailers stash billions of dollars of inventory for regional and local delivery. This trend will continue as Amazon invades the grocery space. Another case in point is the IBM parts warehouse in Memphis, adjacent to the FEDEX airport there so that high priority parts can be put into the airlift system late at night and still be delivered by 10AM the next morning. The transport utility that underlies the distribution function dictates modern warehouse siting decisions, just as it did in the good old days of rail.
I’ve a sentimental nostalgia for old steam railroading but that’s not logical as we simply must make progress and move on. I like the idea that hollowed out, blighted cities “could” be rebuilt as vibrant spaces for LIVING where we can walk to most of what we need, without a damned car, or maybe even have transit systems again. That’s the way it used to be in our cities, you could walk to a corner drug store, beer stube, butcher, etc., all owned by local owners. I know, I’m 70, I grew up with it as a kid, BTDT. But then Wall Street funded big box roll-ups of most mom and pop retailers and zoning laws got tweaked by the auto industry to make damned sure we had to drive everywhere to get anything; gawd forbid the house on the corner could actually become a starbucks with the owner living upstairs and we could socialize with our neighbors in a friendly setting.
Vision? Hah! Someone wake me up, I’m dreaming. My GOP doesn’t give a shit about any of this, they run this nation on behalf of 395 billionaires on the Forbes 400 List, the rest of us may as well go eat shit and die.
Then, why do you continue to call it ‘my’ GOP?
Blacks turned every large City in America into a nightmare. We learned nothing from that and brought in 50 million Hispanics who do the same. You are dreaming indeed since you won’t even recognize the problem – but I bet you are subconsciously canny enough to avoid the areas where they dominate.
I’d highly recommend the book The Assassination of New York. A diverse, unique, creative manufacturing economy (not a smokestack one) was deliberately targeted and killed off.
JHK has covered the ground on autos and housing colluding to turn land into privatized profit with public expense. This collusion also came at the expense of investing in real growth and economic functioning.
Maybe now that oil is too expensive to support sprawl we can start living in places like Baltimore again.
One more book: read the slaughter of
Cities for a tale of how rowhouse-rich white ethnic neighborhoods were targeted for destruction.
I can’t figure out what you mean concerning Social Security.
If you mean that it is a government welfare program, you are mistaken.
If you mean that the money the federal government owes to the Social Security Trust Fund, just like the money it owes to any other creditor such as the Chinese, will never be paid, I am afraid you are correct.
Allow me to refer you to this article from 2012, whose numbers are out of date.
Some choice excerpts:
“What you have to do is look at the present value of all the expenditures now through the end of time. All projected expenditures, including servicing the official debt. And you subtract all the projected taxes. The present value of the difference is $222 trillion.”
That’s how indebted the USA is at present: we would need 222 trillion dollars now to balance out all promised future expenditures.
“The official debt is something that has to be repaid, and the government is committed to principal and interest payments. But the government has other commitments, like Social Security payments, health care and Medicare payments, Medicaid payments, and defense expenditures. And it also has negative commitments, namely taxes. So you want to put everything on even footing. Most of the liabilities the government has incurred in the postwar period have been kept off the books because of the way we’ve labeled our receipts and payments. The government has gone out of its way to run up a Ponzi scheme and keep evidence of that off the books by using language to make it appear that we have a small debt.” (Emphasis added)
Btw, as to SS being “welfare,” it definitely is: poorer contributors get a higher dollar benefit than wealthier ones, by design. Of course, the poor live shorter lives so this probably balances out.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-keeps-22-million-americans-out-of-poverty-a-state-by-state
Recall: people earning over 32k per year pay income taxes in SS benefits.
Now, Kotlikoff makes an important point about the difference between liabilities for interest and social security:
“So take my mom. She’s 93. The government is paying her Social Security benefits. That’s a liability, an inflation-indexed liability. That means that if inflation goes up, her check goes up. What happens if inflation goes up to your interest and principal payments on government debt? They don’t change at all. So inflation can water down the real repayment of principal and interest, but it won’t water down Social Security benefits.”
Now, take a close look at the recent Trump tax plan. Look up “chained CPI,” and realize that someone is trying to do something about inflating away the value of those future SS benefits, by having inflation that isn’t actually called inflation. If the COLA doesn’t adjust, then benefits will remain the same while taxes pour in.
Hope that’s clearer.
Higher dollar percentage benefit, I meant. A poor person will obviously receive a lower overall benefit than a wealthier one, based on “contributions.”
No, the government does not pay Social Security benefits. You do not understand how Social Security works. Anyone who repeats or believes the vicious right-wing lie that Social Security is a government welfare program is a member of the vicious right wing mob that has destroyed this country. Your reference to taxes alone indicates that you are a member of that mob.
No, the poorer among us do not get a higher dollar benefit from Social Security than the rich do. But they should. Then they would get back at least some of the money the greedy right-wing savages stole from them.
There is something seriously wrong with anyone who refers favorably to anything Kotlikoff writes or says or believes.
These things are clear.
“…Either way, if we can get you to believe that taxing the rich is bad for you, then we will get richer. The beauty of this con job is that it hides our true intent: We’re rich, you’re poor, and we’d like it to stay that way. And like any good con, rather than stealing your money, we just persuade you to hand it over voluntarily.
“But we’ve been playing this con so long that we rich folk have started to con ourselves into believing that there is no limit to how much we can enrich ourselves at your expense. This epidemic of greed is crushing new investment opportunities before they can arise. The irony is that it was always you who enriched us, not the other way around. Back when we paid our fair share and invested in growing the middle class, prosperity always trickled up….”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/11/republican-tax-cut-for-rich-economy-215696
On Social Security and the deficit see Dean Baker’s article:
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/lesson-for-reporters-social-security-does-not-add-to-the-budget-deficit
Look,someone with a .gov website address pays benefits. You can check for yourself here:
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/tr/2016/lr5c7.html
I’m guessing that they are “the government.”
Now, take any line of benefits payments. Scaled very low earnings for 1940, for instance, means the worker earned 25th percentile wages for his career; medium earnings means 100th percentile wages of the average wage. So scaled low earnings workers earned 1/4 the wages of medium workers.
The scaled low worker in 1940 got 1990$ in benefits. The medium worker, who earned 4x as much, got $4467. If he had gotten 4x as much, proportionate to his “contributions,” then he would get $7960, a shortage of $3500. That’s not, I think, because he is getting cheated but because Social Security is designed to pay more benefits to lower-earning workers.
Can you explain to me a) where I have misread the SS website and b) how this does not qualify as welfare to lower-income workers?
Now, I didn’t quote Kotlikoff “favorably,” I cited him. That’s what people who want to be taken seriously in a discussion do: they provide citations (like, to actual social security websites with actual numbers, not fairy tales). You have a problem with Kotlikoff and his numbers, but Instead of saying why, you delivered an ad hominem against him and me. I’d love to read someone who takes apart his numbers, especially since they seem to be a part of background informing the Trump tax plan and the plan to undermine COLAs. In other words, if Kotlikoff is right or wrong, his argument has real effects, and if you know it to be wrong, yo ought to demonstrate or link to a demonstration of that fact.
CFN is not a great place to put forward a “unicorn farts and rainbows” argument.
In reply to “DrTomSchmidt October 12, 2017 at 9:25 am” below, since there is no reply button for that comment:
Well, at least you didn’t begin with “Let’s take a look at your comments, shall we?” But you came close enough. For instance, explaining how to be taken seriously. But I suppose you won’t get it.
The question is not who issues the check. The question is where the money comes from. Social Security benefits are not paid from the general revenue of the federal government. It is not a government welfare program. It does not affect the deficit. But I suppose you won’t get this either. Did you read the Dean Baker article I cited?
Don’t go down a wormhole by claiming that since Social Security is funded with payroll taxes – TAXES! – and since it is a government program, you were right all along. “That old tax and spend government is busting the budget and we are just 350 million people sucking on the tits. Except for the job creators, of course, like our President and the other millionaires and billionaires who without question earned every cent they ever got. God bless them.” [“We may see the small Value God has for Riches, by the people he gives them to.” Alexander Pope]
Look again. Where does the money for Social Security come from? It comes from the people who will eventually get it back. Only from them, and only back to them. Unlike the general revenue – TAXES! – it is not taken from them and spent on the general welfare and government operations, which are not necessarily to their benefit.
The Social Security program is managed to make this self-funding arrangement perpetual. Social Security does not require, and by law it cannot receive, any money from the federal government. It is not a government welfare program and it does not affect the deficit, no matter what Kotlikoff wants us to believe
.
Your argument that Social Security is welfare for the poor is specious. So what if the poor make out a little better than the rest on Social Security? Why are they poor? Because for nearly forty years, thanks to the Reagan Revolution, they have been robbed blind. If they get just a little of it back on Social Security, the overall situation is still nothing but welfare for the rich.
If you were open to doubt about Kotlikoff’s claims, you would not have cited his work and quoted some “choice excerpts” without objection. It is obvious that you were promoting it. Only when I mentioned this did you come up with some wiggle words. It’s not working. If you had searched for “Kotlikoff critics” before posting, you wouldn’t have had any reason to cite him favorably. From your Kotlikoff quotes, these words alone should have been enough for you to avoid mentioning the man, if you understood how Social Security works: “But the government has other commitments, like Social Security payments…”
I am now sure, though you seem to be ill disposed towards me, that we are arguing aspects of arguments on the same side. The major thrust I’ve made is that the Trump Tax reform has a tweak to the inflation calculations, designed to lower COLAs in the future, and so cut the real expenditures on Social Security. The reasoning behind this is related to Kotlikoff’s absurdly high number, which may be real; it is at least accepted as so.
Dean Baker is correct: SS will not add to the on-budget deficit. He is also correct that SS has projected that in 2038 the last of the principle in the SS trust funds, piled up by assessing excess taxes (until 2010), will be gone. In that year, SS will be unable to pay benefits given the supply of tax dollars rolling in. My guess is that the tweak in COLAs is an attempt to push that date further into the future by paying lower benefits while reaping higher taxes due to inflation.
I assume you follow this much.
Now, as to my having made a “specious” argument about SS being “welfare”, we need some common ground. Webster defines the former as “having a false look of truth or genuineness,” while one definition of the latter is “statutory procedure or social effort designed to promote the basic physical and material well-being of people in need.”
If you accept these definitions, then I have shown that SS benefits, decided by statute, are “designed to promote the … material well-being of people in need.” Ergo, welfare, per the definition. Does my citing actual numbers from the actual agency appear false, or true? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
SS has done a tremendous job of preventing elder poverty and ameliorating it. Of course, and you can check this at the following link
https://dqydj.com/the-net-worth-of-different-age-groups-in-america/
It currently function as as a system that largely taxes the young and working to transfer dollars to the older and retired. In other words, to transfer wealth (check the link) from people in their 20s whose median household net worth is under $10,000 (I would consider this poor) to people over 55 whose median household net worth is $194,000 and change. Looks like the current system, especially since the Reagan-era increase in SS Taxes, is one that robs the poor “blind.” I assume you are in favor of not transferring wealth from the poor to the rich; I assuredly am not. What changes do you propose to set this right?
As far as getting the money paid in to SS back, as you wrote. I have a brother who has paid in all his life. Due to a chronic illness, he will likely die before ever collecting at 67; he might make it to 62. Its easy to estimate his total taxes paid between him and his employer at 10k per year over 29 years, for a total of 290k, before interest on that amount which would easily double it. With no minor children to collect, he will not receive a dime of it.
Anecdotal, of course, but it makes the point about the system: it transfers wealth from the sick who die young to the healthy who live longer. Question: would you support a bill allowing people who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses to stop paying in to the system? I think of those people, like my brother, as especially impoverished.
In that sense, then, Social Security is anti-welfare, as it afflicts the poorest and sickest to the benefit of the wealthiest and healthiest segments of the population. Since you are anti-oligarchian in rhetoric, I cannot believe that you support this.
Bjorn Ulveus and the American Ladies against Agneta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyIOl-s7JTU
I remember when I returned from the retraining courses and saw this clip on a friend’s vid. How then I hated Bjorn Ulveus! Offended such a girl! If he happened to be in Moscow then….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AhQPrcuJoQ
Horror! It would be better if she sang that … American – what can I say! But she sings well, very well. It turns out similar only to the dark-haired product of eugenics in this group:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrXcGuomwco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCR0ep31-6U
Fink,
Stop the shit and see if you can add something that respects the subject at hand…… or get your own fucking blog. Now you’ve become nothing more than a pest (as opposed to a formerly mildly entertaining pest).
Actually, I thought it was perfectly in tune of the subject at hand. We just have completely different internal optics.
I’m not exactly sure what you’re getting at here but, if you lived through the 70’s as a young man, you were in love with the caucasian goddess, Agnetha. But, I must say the gaynor woman certainly gives her a run for the money
All I am sayin’ – you keep whining and your ladies should change locks on you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE_3YU-1QCk
America is no doubt different. The people are different too. There is a sadness to it, a nostalgic poignancy that hangs in the air like a beer slider fart. It’s like we figured it out belatedly, that we had it so good in the 1950’s at the expense of the rest of the world, and now the worm has turned and they’re having it good at our expense. There is a generation of Americans, the 60+ guys that made a good go of it, are well off, and now sure they can fix things with a guy that looked like the guys who ran things when they were younger; a no nonsense doer, a man of action. What ever ails the world will be fixed, and fixed best, fairest, quickest, and most efficaciously by an OLD, WHITE, GUY. He will flop, as there is nothing behind him. He’s the guy in Parenthood, who’s into everything but knows nothing, is in debt to gangsters, and needs his daddy to bail him out so he can go to South America.
LOL! Old white guys are indeed having their last hurrah at everyone else’s expense. They so smart! It was all to be expected, but that won’t make it any less painful for those they exploit on the way down. More troubling still, they could well get their wish and be the last generation to enjoy the sweet fruits of industrial capitalism, of which financial capitalism is just the inevitable swan song. When all of that notional (read: fictional) wealth evaporates, as it most certainly will, the wailing and gnashing of teeth will begin in earnest, and Ol’ Scratch will be right there in the middle of it all, delighting once again.
“Fictional” is right. Money is a piece of paper with “BREAD” printed on the front and a bunch of promises on the back. It is not bread, of which there is far less than there is of paper and promises.
Remember when we called money “bread”?
It’s not the old white guys one should worry about but the young ones, high on meth and speeding around corners in the wrong lane.
‘high on meth’ … all tatted up, sporting a nose ring, a stolen Glock shoved down into his pants.
brh
By definition, only Whites can fix a White society. They’re the only ones who want to after all. And the America you say you love, was a White Society – by Us and for Us. Your kind twisted everything and created the cult of guilt that has destroyed us. Love? You hate America and always have. And the idea of replacing the White people behind the white picket fences with dark people was always just a fantasy, and a wicked one at that.
Look how he capitalizes each term and every letter in his condemnation, as if the answer is YOUNG BLACK GIRLS. But if you’ve done any teaching or gone to college, you know that they’re as dumb as rocks even when they aren’t complete horror shows.
“By that rationale a pig would cease to be a dirty animal?” Vincent Vega.
“Yeah but we’d have to be talkin about one charming mother fuckin pig.” Jules Winnfield.
You can dance all you want, but Donald Trump got elected because he was an old white guy. He didn’t get elected because he is one charmin mother fuckin pig.
You remind me, Seawolf, of the month I spent in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, earlier this year. Having grown up as a teenager in 1950s America I was certainly impressed with the valiant replication of that era by extremely prosperous Chinese. I nicknamed an essay I wrote about it ‘Alphaville with Buicks’. That it is an industrial-grade police state is never in doubt; but the material opulence, exuberant capitalist optimism of the people and strong belief in upwardly-mobile progress was nostalgic and charming. It will be poignant when it goes bust, after such a short run of frivolity.
And that the middle-class Chinese are enjoying their prosperity at our expense is never in doubt. I was repeatedly amazed at the way the average citizen admires the U.S.A. Wish it was mutual.
It is no better on the left coast. Santa Cruz County, relatively sleepy back in the day has unfortunately developed a creepy L.A. vibe as wealth from all manners and places makes it way here. The change is striking in the sheer congestion, the expensive cars, clothes, The bulldozing of beach cottages to erect architectural monstrosities which appear to be vacant most of the time. Not sure what the worst part of all this is, the attitude that comes with it – as in “the money makes me something” and that L.A. hair. Agree the thing is a house of cards but with GS henchmen in the House (white) you can be pretty sure all stops will be pulled to keep the wheels turning and money churning.
Our coastal monstrosities in the East will be reclaimed by the sea. So will yours, because erosion does not respect social classes.
You and I will live to see this. Cold comfort.
Not before millions are spent attempting to shore up (no pun intended) the problem. With billions of dollars of real estate populating the barrier islands up and down the Atlantic coast, states will pull out all the stops to keep the beaches, but in the end our Mother will have her way.
Good point, Bro Jobe. I’ve been wondering for awhile at what point all those trillions of tons on concrete that make up Manhattan will force the whole island to crumble into the sea.
I know nothing about geology but the very thought of that much sheer weight on a slender island on the Atlantic coast is pretty astonishing.
I agree with your views on Santa Cruz. Some monstrous new homes on West Cliff Drive between Bay St. and Natural Bridges. They should enact an “ugly tax” for architectural horror.
Jen in San Jose
http://www.wildfermentation.com/which-book/
“Agree the thing is a house of cards but with GS henchmen in the House (white) you can be pretty sure all stops will be pulled to keep the wheels turning and money churning.”
I, too agree. Those predicting breakdown of the system do not appreciate how far we have to fall and how much power the people at the top possess*.
This country will not accept anarchy as long as there is any alternative. Things will get hard for those on the margins, but the wheels will turn as long as the population is maintained at this level or higher.
Only population reduction will end the cycle.
*Check out the Defense Production Act, under its Emergency Provisions the powers of the executive branch are essentially limitless.
The problem with all these future “vertical slums” is that they won’t work out during Collapse, especially for those who would still have real wealth to buy them up.
They’ll just start falling apart, like Bangkok’s dilapidated “Expansion Towers” of the novel The Windup Girl. It’s set about 100 years after our world collapsed in the mid 21st Century under what JHK calls “The Converging Catastrophes” of our era.
That process is just beginning and I’m thinking that rural land, not 50-story condos, is a much better investment.
“That process is just beginning and I’m thinking that rural land, not 50-story condos, is a much better investment.
Bro,
With all respect, I would opine that the smart money is way ahead of you….
Shhhh, don’t tell the others, elysian. They aren’t ahead of me; I already put a lot of money into land. Find a place far from the bedroom communities with soil, water, and not too many roads.
Get to know the folks there already. Go hunting and fishing with them. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Bro Jobe,
“The Stacks” of Ready Player One look nice too! Wonder what the rent is, and how do we make some “credits” to get into one?
Here’s a trailer. The first few seconds are all you need to see regarding real/unreal estate. The rest is a descent into dystopian violence and fantasy world hell of electronic devising. (C’mon, we must have it; we deserve it!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiK2fhOY0nE
Oh, boy! I loved Steven Spielberg so much before he totally broke bad!
Congratulations Steven on your high position in the Ministry of Propaganda of the Black Project.
This is where the Steven Paddocks and Donald Trumps of the world come from.
I know just how you feel Jim. I also grew up in NYC and left at 19. It had an upper class then to be sure and there were parts of Brooklyn even then such as Park Slope that were pretty pricey. Still it was a place that ordinary people could live, work and raise a family. it wasn’t just all hipsters.
Was in for a visit recently and arranged to meet my mom at the Metropolitan Museum of art *which was a favorite spot of mine as a kid). OMG! The lines stretched all the way down the front steps and down the block. I forked over all sorts of money and finally met up with my mom. It was pretty crazy.
And yes, while I love the High Line and walk it whenever I’m in town, I just don’t get all the high rise construction surrounding it. Who on earth are all of these people and where did they get the money? Where are the ordinary people supposed to live? The ones who build these towers, clean the streets, police them, teach the kids etc? I keep wondering if this is all a giant Ponzi scheme and at some point it will all collapse.
And yes, all of the hollowed out towns where there is no future. Just drove through Richford VT and it’s street after street of empty storefronts; what a depressing scene. It’s no different than parts of Ohio, MI etc. Lots of drugs as well.
It does feel as if all of the money has been siphoned away from us ordinary folks and been vacuumed up by the elite few. I’m not sure just how it happened or was allowed to happen. I know that until I left my job recently I hadn’t had anything but a “cost of living raise” in years and was making far less than I did in the mid-90’s. After the recession though I was glad to get a job and tried to ignore that I made more 20 years ago.
“I’m not sure just how it happened or was allowed to happen.”
There was a lot of seduction involved. The rough farmers were replaced by agribusinesses manned by immigrant labor because it was so much more “efficient,” and they could offer more choices all through the year. The displaced farmers were mollified by an easier life offered by a “growing” economy. But is was (and is) all credit-fueled.
Once we started out on the limb in the ’60s the need to keep the game going became more and more important as the consequences of returning to ground got more and more painful.
When your main fuel for, and most important product of, the economy is credit, the people who keep the credit flowing occupy the top of the heap.
Epicur & Mountain gal,
Now we’re getting somewhere! I consider this whole “era”* as an object lesson. There’s a chance for learning and a true way forward after the inevitable population collapse.
Things have to be done differently and fascistic hierarchies will not allow the human species to survive with any realistic ideas about our being bound to natural cycles. We could continue the delusions and go extinct of course; won’t that be fun?
Epicur,
A fine encapsulation of wha’happen. Elegant and simple. (As opposed to the phony “explanations” and the arcane incantations that spew from the priests of Economic Science.)
*The concept of an “era” here is squeezed down into human terms and as such, indicates a very short number of oil-subsidized years.
Where are the ordinary people supposed to live? M gal
===============
Over in the Joisey boonies.
…And the Joisey boonies will return to the swamplands that once they were. Interesting times ahead!
I like to reminisce about that most magical time when N.Y.C. was the Rialto of the Age and Broadway meant something special:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klu_rjDMEkk
This morning’s words of wisdom expose one of the many reasons that we love ya Jim. Even as a man who grew up right in the middle of it you can still see past the bright shiny lie of the façade to understand the beast and the evil within. I grew up about a half hour West of Oz and it was always easy to see it out there on the horizon. It attracted so many for the availability of so much stuff that could be found (no Internet back then) and of course the endless sources of entertainment. We used to love to go in to Polk’s Hobby Store which had the finest collections of lead soldiers. Our local miscreants from the other side of town headed in frequently to snatch up bags of weed and eight balls and the occasional visit to Plato’s Retreat. Yup, everything there right at your fingertips. Most everyone was so distracted by the pretty colored lights that it was easy to overlook the army of homeless beggars and hookers lurking in so many places.
Last year on the ferry back from the Statue of Liberty as my daughter and I sat on the top deck looking over at all of the shiny new glass, cranes and construction over there I referred to the island as the Heart of the Evil Empire and remarked that all of the money flowing into it was stolen from other places around the country from the theft of pensions and “investments” of people that could ill afford to lose them. I received a few turned heads and glares from the locals on board, but none would challenge what I said. The truth cannot be argued with.
Having spent all of my 45+ working life in engineering and in maintenance I am especially impressed with your ability to understand that building such monuments to wealth will be dwarfed by the requirements to maintain such structures and such systems, as history continues to prove to us every day. It cannot and will not be done. Build them, use them, run them into decrepitude then replace them. Not only unsustainable, but a ridiculous waste of human effort in the first place. Boy, the mega-wealthy sure are a burden on society aren’t they. Thanks for being there again for us all my friend.
How would you demolish these aeries? Thermite seems to work well, although messy.
<>
Are you sure they were locals? The locals might be the first to agree with you.
Weird, stripping out my quote of your comment in the middle… “I received a few turned heads and glares from the locals on board, but none would challenge what I said. The truth cannot be argued with.” I’m new here.
Walter,
The same can be said for our crumbling highway system. We keep building new, sleek highways but don’t have the money to maintain the millions of miles of roads falling into disrepair. Scrapping passenger rail in order to clear the way for roads and cars was, like the suburbia it spawned, a criminal waste of resources, and a criminal gift of corporate welfare to the auto industry. (I know our host, Mr. Kunstler, said it first).
Yes we were sold out with the promotion of the highway system and the neglect of rail system to be sure. Many other countries have not made the same mistake have they?
My parents, long retired, decided for some weird reason to leave St. Francis Village, the Catholic retirement complex on the shores of Benbrook Lake in South Ft. Worth (and not far from the abode of the fierce Marguerite Oswald).
Hunting for a place to buy in the dying little towns of the south Texas panhandle I happened to see crews ripping up the railroad tracks. Why they were doing so was not clear but boy it sure gave me the creeps. It was the railroad that enabled the formation of capital that birthed all those towns in the desolate Texan wasteland (adorned with sweet names like Marble Falls). Take away the railroad connection and what do you have left. Tenuous and more tenuous are the connections.
Could have had a beautiful cut stone house for twenty thousand smackers. Of course there was absolutely nowhere to work and few places to spend money even if you had it but the isolation had its own eerie charm.
If you are nostalgic for the New York City of the late 1960’s, watch the movie “Midnight Cowboy”. Even then, large parts of the city were not middle class. I remember one cover of Time Magazine in those days with a picture of abandoned slum housing in Brooklyn, done in by the city’s Byzantine rent control laws and street crime.
And replaced by alien races without pride and with no tradition of maintaining much of anything.
People are so far gone that they think you can replace the very people themselves and still have the same Nation and Culture. And that’s just crazy.
Yeah Times Square was pretty bad by about 1970,
“Now, Barclays is out with its Skyscraper Index, which shows a correlation between construction of the next world’s tallest building and an impending financial crisis. In fact the report even suggests that the rate of increase in height could also reflect the extent of that economic crisis.
Drawing on Barclays’ report we put together a timeline of the construction of skyscrapers and the financial crises that coincided with them.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/skyscraper-index-skyscrapers-signal-financial-recession-2012-1?IR=T#the-long-depression-1873-1878-1
“China is home to the world’s second-tallest building. Cue the mayhem.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/12/the-worlds-tallest-buildings-may-come-with-a-curse/?utm_term=.77f62c3d40e6
I can’t imagine climbing this behemoth. I walked 3600 vertical feet up the Grand Teton in Sept.after the Great American Eclipse. I thought I was gonna croak! I didn’t huff’n puff like that since humping’ hose in 400 degree heat.
I used to live in Boston because it was alive and bustling, unlike say, Cleveland, which rolled up the sidewalks as soon as it got dark. But now that I’m older, I don’t need that action. I don’t need to go clubbing. I’ve been to all the museums numerous times. I’ve been to all the sights. I don’t need the fast pace anymore. Now I’m kind of a sitting-in-my- rocking-chair-on-my-porch kind of guy. I just want to look out over the woods. In a word, pastoral.
PASTORAL NOMADICS.
http://wholeearth.com/history-whole-earth-catalog.php
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
With soooo many colleges, Boston is a young peoples town.
yeah, true. Every year, the college freshmen (in today’s world, that’s probably an extremely un-pc word) seem to be getting younger and younger. I
“Beantown. The musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot.” Shallow Hal
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/approached-by-an-israeli-for-money-in-boston-airport/
Care full Bill, be careful.
The guy was a sucker. I never would have done it. Conmen come from any race or religion. BTW! What on Earth are YOU doing reading the Times of Israel?
Maybe I’m a Jew too. A self hating one like Bobby Fischer. A lover of Man in other words.
To be fair, Masons have the same philosophy: the Group before all others. Everything for a Brother, and the Masters above all. Thus all Christians denominations have condemned them as inimical to Christian Civilization.
Last one:
“There’s a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about a tech bubble.Our Planet Money podcast team examines one possible indicator of a bubble: architecture. Very, very tall architecture.”
http://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446833225/how-skyscraper-construction-ties-into-tech-bubbles
Excellent find, thank you. One of the most useful skills that we were taught in school was the ability to see patterns. It started out in arithmetic with the number strings and the requirement to see the pattern and determine what number would occur next. Predicting the future successfully is not achieved by staring into a magic ball and casting spells but by the same ability to see the patterns of the past and project them into what will happen next. The only unknown that is never predictable for certain is the timing. The Book of Revelation says that no man will know the exact day, but that that Armageddon may still be seen as things degrade. Our host sees the effect of what overextension of systems and resources will bring yet the timing remains unseen. This does not mean that nothing will happen, because something ALWAYS happens. Denial is not an intelligent defense.
Read a publication put out by my City: 120,000 more people projected over the next twenty years, and fifty thousand more jobs. No one sees any problem with this. They can’t resist the lust to become a big city, even though not even their own model shows even the most basic viability of that. Pure hubris.
Seen this before. In the latter stages of a bull market the extremes begin to show. Like stock markets that defy gravity, claims that “the small investor (i.e., suckers!) are back in the market, the $500 coffee makers, the ultra tall buildings, the massive planned developments, the $850 gold encrusted desserts — all true examples. Saw it 10-12 years ago….money chasing homes, people lining up for open houses, lottery systems to see who was allowed to buy.
Denver now contemplates a 94-story building to dwarf anything now there. The original developer, from Miami of all places, withdrew for unexplained reasons, a “concrete” case of coitus interruptus if ever was.
The 2005 red hot housing market in the DC came to an abrupt halt one day in August 2005; full dead stop, like a light switch got flipped. One of the longest bull markets in history is nearing it’s end. It will happen, or as Jim says, it will continue until it can’t. When the money flows dry up the music will stop, smart guys will grab a chair now.
“When the money flows dry up the music will stop, smart guys will grab a chair now.”
I hope you’re right. My ass is getting sore from sitting for so long.
“When the money flows dry up the music will stop, smart guys will grab a chair now.”
I think one thing that is “different this time” is that the people in charge of the money flows have a sense of how thin the ice is and how deep the cold water beneath it is. Another thing is that so much of the rest of the world is stuck out on the ice with us – money is still flowing to the US because there is yet no viable alternative for the vast amount of dollars sloshing about.
Forgive the mixed metaphors, but the folks “in charge” know that this is nothing but a confidence game and they must do anything to keep from losing that confidence. They know that once the panic starts and the herd stampedes towards the edge it is a long way down to the bottom.
I doubt that they could keep a recession from spinning out of control and I think they doubt it too, so they “continue until they can’t.”
ROLLING END OF DAYS.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/2-big-wildfires-prompt-evacuations-in-Napa-County-12262945.php
Enjoy your space in time, and thank God for another chance to enjoy life on Earth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoORyePRbq0
-T
When you gaze upon NYC with all its skyscrapers, ponder what will happen when the electricity goes out. Imagine being on the 100th floor in your penthouse and the lights go out. No elevators. And no water, since the buildings pumps don’t work. That means the toilets don’t work. Won’t happen, you say? I commend you for your religious fervor and commitment. Clearly, you are capable of great faith. Living in a high-rise reminds me in a way to being a tank commander in a modern war. Yes, a modern tank is certainly a wondrous machine to behold. Alas, it is also a death trap. It is so heavily dependent that risk mitigation is as much a matter of faith than action, or, arguably, even more so.
The windows must be made openable so people can excrete out them. Maybe some entrepreneur can invent an aerial toilet that facilitates this and a warning bell for those below.
An outstanding column on a subject I find heartbreaking (Lost America?) and would like to thank everyone for the great comments this morning. I missed Old New York, and many other places, and I carry the regret everyday.
The way I heard the New York City of today described by a recent commenter at JMG’s new blog makes it sound like the last place in this country you would want to go for anything uplifting.
In 1952 I lived in Ship Bottom, NJ and had a job driving into New York once a week to the Washington Street market in Lower Manhattan for produce. This place only opened at night and stayed open until dawn or until everybody had sold out.
In 1955 I needed to purchase feathers for a project and found three different firms in the city devoted exclusively to selling feathers. I needed ball point pen refills and several specialty firms offered them as stock in trade.
NYC was once a viable city for the benefit of a variety of citizens but then the USA was that way too, once upon a time
Have you read The economy of Cities, by Jane Jacobs? That was once the diverse structure of the economy in NYC,
Worth a read, if not.
Uh,….once again I’m prompted to point out that without high rate of immigration (legal and illegal) the illusion of real estate value could not have been sustained as it has been, and most especially in those great expanses of inter city where infrastructure maintenance budgets lagged so behind the ever growing service demand; then there are those “doughnut” circles of suburban slums built so rapidly that revenue for keeping infrastructure at pace wasn’t available. It an’t going to stop because the Left is continuing to cultivate along the way a voting block of 3rd World arrivals — never mind that the nation’s destiny has been whisked away from will of the citizenry to default to however many foreign nationals choose to ignore our sovereignty, borders and immigration laws. Well,….too there’s the social/cultural costs of influx of beliefs and values that don’t accord with our Western principles of governance. Oops, again I forgot social equality — there are no significant discords, kum-bah-yah.
Today’s subject reminds me a ridiculous article I just read in the latest National Geographic about making Dubai a green city. Never mind the irony of referring to a desert city as “green”, this is nothing more than a technotopian dream, a farce and a boondoggle. There is a city that has no reason to exist in the first place.
Well, National Geographic is now a Rupert Murdoch rag, so….
Up until a century ago of so, men had common sense and an understanding that if the Hudson River meets the Atlantic Ocean and a nice harbor was there formed then it would make a good place to build a city. Go with the flow, utilize locations that nature had provided and enhance them for the benefit of mankind. Since then, and pretty much with the discovery of the Devil’s Excrement, man has decided that nature be dammed, I am the Master of this place, I can do the Impossible because I am Great and I have technology. Bullshit. Anyone who has logged a thousand or so miles at sea understands full well that we are limited and tiny. Nature is vast and powerful. Deserts are deserts for reasons and while man may be able to scratch the surface with temporary parlor tricks, in the end hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and every other power of nature kicks our sorry asses with great gusto and quite frequently. Man will never learn for he is not that intelligent.
It sure is nice having JHK back writing these recent posts. Refreshing — I was getting tired of Rush Limbaugh’s corrosive rhetoric here.
That’s the aspect of wisdom you aren’t comfortable with since it comes up against your chosen deadly sin or sins.
Janos…playing guru again…
I’m just a Warner, like Mohammad. You like him, right? One of his followers organized the Women’s march – and you’re not against Feminism are you? Or Islamaphobic? Alright then.
We’re not punished for our sins but by them. Nothing burns in hell but the unregenerate self. Once that is burned off, you’ll be free. That’s why Capital Punishment is righteous and affirmed by all the Saints and Sages. It begins the process right here on Earth, far more quickly and painlessly than what would happen later.
The Electric Chair and the Poisoning methods are barbaric. Far more merciful are the noose and the firing squad. But feminine hypocrisy only cares for it’s own feelings, eh? You’re not like that, are you?
I am wondering if decentralizing technology forces might take down the high rise condo boom. Other than maybe status or the view, I can’t think of a good reason anyone would want to live in those.
Video conferencing is getting so good, more people can live where they want rather than having to always meet face-to-face. Transaction related technology also means you don’t have to live in the middle of a city to easily purchase whatever you want. Blockchain technology will mean private ledger coordination and exchanges from anywhere, which could undermine centralized financial power.
My first, and maybe only visit to NYC was in 2010. It’s good we got there then, because just about a year later something very bad happened to the 42nd Street Library, the main library with the famous lions outside.
We stayed at the Library Hotel, very nice, though the room was small, within easy walking distance of the Library. We toured the magnificent building and tried getting a book delivered from the ‘stacks,” which were about seven stories of shelves accessible only to library employees.
We filled out a paper form, handed it to a clerk at a service window, and a few minutes later got the book.
What happened around 2011 was a catastrophe. An unfortunate project was started to gut the stacks, remove all the shelving, and convert the space to some sort of Internet café, where patrons would use their laptops. The books, some 3 million of them, were removed from the building and, as I recall, taken to New Jersey, where it would take more than a day to access any of them.
After outcry from sane members of the public, the removal of the shelving was stopped, but as of about a year ago, the books had not been put back. The reason: the climate control in the stacks was not adequate, that is, not up to modern standards.
The problem with that argument is that for decades, even centuries, books have been safely stored in conditions just like what existed in the old library stacks. Only a defective, bureaucratic mindset was preventing the return of the books.
As I said, this was a catastrophe, but a symptom of the times in which we live. I am so glad I got to visit the main NYC Library when it was still a wonder of the world.
Someone here may have an update on what happened to the 3 million books.
(We also walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. rode the Staten Island Ferry, and had a great old time. We travelled both ways by Amtrak and got to see the Hudson River Valley.)
Books are a problem because they contain things that contradict the narrative – such as the simple truth of racial inequality. Ideally they would phase them out or have them all on the Cloud where they are subject to easy editing.
When the Muzzies took Alexandria they burned the books, the library, and the librarians. Thus disappeared accumulated knowledge of an entire millennia.
What will be the fate of the libraries in London, Paris and NYC?
The Bolsheviks in Russia were big on burning books and libraries too.
brh
The skinny towers will collapse eventually like the peudo markets. They will not ‘stand’ the proverbial test of time. The super hurricanes of the not to distant future with 250+ mph winds will cause incredible oscillations and tremendous destruction sending some residents flying into Hackensack. The fate of theTacoma Narrows bridge awaits.
The other faulty precedent of structural engineering is the Indian Point reactor 35 miles from Manhatten, built on fault lines. The NRC proclaims; ‘we didn’t know’. How convenient. By the way, the 13 or so nuclear reactors on the Atlantic seaboard will eventually be destroyed by super hurricanes as well, rendering the east coast uninhabitable.
That’s right. When the grid goes down, from a hurricane or some other cause, the nuke plants can’t cool their reactor cores or spent fuel. Fukushima on the Hudson.
windward,
Yeah, but Indian Point hasn’t been hurricaned or earthquaked yet… so I wouldn’t worry or prepare for such trifling unlikelihoods. Besides, they’ll think of something.
(Okay, sorry for the unicorny foolishness. Just preempting.)
According to Yogi Berra ‘it ain’t over till it’s over’.
The nation has surrendered historical perspective to fanciful Utopian dreams that can only exist as digitized pixels in “special effect” movies. Being 80 years old I remember when almost all cities you can name were of such small foot print the downtown skyline could be seen from outlying wooded and agricultural surround; and I’m
speaking of Dallas, Kansas City, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, Atlanta, on and on. Now, they sprawl to almost continent size. Most of my childhood friends then living in those cities still had relatives living on not-too-distant remnants of family farms who regularly delivered veggies, eggs and other farm produce. Otherwise, local farmers (then called “vegetable men”) circulated through neighborhoods selling their produce off the back of pickup trucks rigged with bins into which was sorted the varieties of veggies. Outskirts were so close and so yet un-fenced that many low-income city folks still augmented their household larder with small game and fish. But too, leaving cars and houses unlocked was still common as was lack of fear about neighbors having (eeek!) guns. Ah, but now we get to delude ourselves with PC which insists that there are no contentious differences between cultures.
“They’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot”
That’s when Blacks where still in the Deep South for the most part and the ones up here knew better than to mess with us. Either they’re scared of us or we’re scared of them. Liberals chose the latter – the way of “virtue”, which is simply ethnomasochism and death.
Good post, Cavepainter.
how long would one of those ‘Veggie Men’ last in East Baltimore, Chicago southside or the northend of Hartford, c2017?
brh
Last winter I would often attend an old friends live model painting sessions. It was in an older warehouse albeit renovated. One day the manager of the building pops in and tells us we need to move to another section of the building the following week– which was actually a very interesting human anatomy classroom– because they booked a conference
Anyway, the next week I show up and the parking lot is overflowing. The new place we were using didn’t have a toilet so I went back to the old building where the conference was in order to take a leak. I had my dirty painting gear on and the nasty looks I received from the delusional attendees was enough to make me leave the toilet seat down and my wang doodle in circular spraying mode.
I felt good walking out that door knowing that these future pep talking, fire walking real estate superstars were going to have to wipe down something wet, or at least the ones who have to sit down.
Are you willing to give a TED talk about this kind of found art? You may well be the next Jackson Pollock AND Hugh Hefner in one, using your willy as a Brush.
http://www.wildfermentation.com/which-book/
That’ll show em, Buck!
Bill Still (or Zero Hedge) discovered a lot of insider trading in the shares of “Mandalay Bay” parent company days leading to the attack
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzbs2rHyzWw
With all due respect to Bill Still, I am NOT getting into another 911 conspiracy saga on that one.
I hereby revoke the Presumption of Innocence clause from the Deep State morons – from now on it’s there fucking job to prove they are innocent of that mass terrorist attack on Trump Voters – and their proxies – the MSM – so far is doing a lousy job at it.
And yeah, they were shorting the fuckin stock…
And serving on Obama’s committee to discuss “security” issues on infrastructures. It is interesting how it all comes out in the details, yet the people could care less. Nothing to see here, move along…..
Now, may be you understand better why I wrote:
capitalism is not only a socioeconomic formation, it is also a religion of betrayal, the religion of Judas, who, like Peter betrayed Christ, but Peter repented of his betrayal and became a saint, and Judas preferred to hang himself on an aspen, just not to admit his guilt, his betrayal, and his sin.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/light-it-up/#comment-322106
So, go and hang yourself on the nearest aspen, you money-grabbing kreeps.
There is still joy in Trumpville but one must know where to find it:
– The Chatwal hotel, one of the greatest Art Deco interiors anywhere on Earth.
– View at dusk of the Brooklyn Bridge from Brooklyn, north side
of the span.
– Best and Co. Rogers Peet, and Ebbets’ Field (Outta Business bub)
– The Gotham Book Mart (Oh shit, it closed in 2007!)
– Horn and Hardart Automat (at Third Ave and 42.) OMG another legend gone.
– City Hall Station, Lexington Ave Line, IRT. (God in Heaven, also closed.)
At this rate, the Gresham’s Law of Cities will accelerate until all that is left is gang-bangers, kebab shops, roads with a million potholes, police and fire stations, mosques, a fortified Trump’s tower and a defaced Statue of Chris Columbus in the Circle that bears his name among other artifacts of a decayed once-great Civilization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrUfJW1JGk
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
The economy built for the super-rich and those in their payroll, is coming to an end. The common man will be wise to buy himself a piece of land that he can own outright, on which he can grow his own meat and vegetables, because when the rich man’s economy finally collapses, there will be no provision for the common man and his family.
When Christ told us to Love your enemies, he didn’t mean The Enemy of the People.
Thermodynamic Condo Collapse will parallel Thermodynamic Oil Collapse IMHO. Great article on the impending demise of NYC building boom, JHK. You are a great thinker & writer, Mr. Kunstler.
I agree with almost everything that you have written over the last few years. Keep up the good work and recognize that you have yet another fan on the roster.
RW
“I’ll take Manhattan…..”
“New York, New York, it’s a helluva town……”
And my birthplace. City of Superlatives. Ha, Ha.
We all know about the iconic structures like the the Empire State building, the Woolworth building, and the Chrysler building, with its beautifully startling eagle gargoyles. Please, take a gander. See the glorious city.
https://www.google.com/search?q=chrysler+building+eagle+gargoyles&tbm=isch&source=iu&pf=m&ictx=1&fir=uNsVcQjGFiGyTM%253A%252Csdjf6N0B3T1vDM%252C_&usg=__H4cW2vIPvxB2-sKWOEKhr86Kbqs%3D&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQjYOlquTWAhVollQKHSz6CPsQ9QEILjAD#imgrc=uNsVcQjGFiGyTM:
But also remember buildings like those of Emery Roth. The San Remo and Beresford apartments on Central Park West. The Belleclaire hotel and the St. Moritz.
As Paul Goldberger once said, or something like this, New York is a treasure trove of top-notch buildings that don’t have landmark status.
And that it’s these buildings that “paint” the city’s rich visuals.
Saw a documentary on the High Line, and can’t think of a better use of that old rail trestle. On TV, it looked delightful amidst the urban density.
I guess that the economic viability of high rises depends on the usual factors of credit, interest rates, available buyers, available capital, leverage, etc.
I really don’t know much about it, but could all those condos and all that office space be “played” in the housing futures market? Or is it just homes?
The Big Apple? And did you partake? Sounds like you took the wiser course and got the hell out of Dodge to save your soul amidst primordial nature.
Even in Lovecraft’s time it had a huge Non-White population that spelled its doom. He describes how Aryan Gangs tried to keep back the dark tide, but it was to no avail since their supply was unending. One has to turn off the water before one deal with an overflowing tub.
I sucked in its energy like a sponge, and reveled in its contradictions and comestibles, always wary of its chameleons.
With my meager means, I nonetheless partook with the ample appetites of youth and folly.
At times I felt trapped in the jungle, wild beasts ready to pounce.
I was often strapped with a loaded .38, in spite of the possible consequences. “Better to be tried by twelve….”
This was before and a little after Bernhard Goetz. Goetz started to set things right, but it was too little too late.
Telepathy and the New York rumors
All my previous contacts either left or …, in general, the previous sources of information I no longer have. There are either casual interviews or telepathy. But periodically something still comes through these channels, and in general I’m happy. And you just keep in mind the channels from which I receive information.
For example, I still could not understand why Trump does not talk about the terrorist attack in Las Vegas, although the BBC, the France-Presse and Deutsche Welle all speak of it as an obvious terrorist act.
And the organizers of the terrorist act did not hide much and slipped Oswald-2.0 purely for pro forma, but in fact the organization that pull it all out, you can say marked the territory no worse than the cat in heat – the smell penetrates even through the TV screen, so tears are coming.
And during my morning walk to the beach yesterday I suddenly catch an obvious thought from above (telepathy?) that if Trump recognizes the incident as a terrorist act, then by law the investigation will have to be transferred to the same Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director, looking at the mountain of corpses (including the corpse of the American ambassador), stated that no sane public prosecutor could bring a criminal case against HER.
Where is the guarantee that his deputy will not come to similar conclusions by looking at the mountain of corpses in Las Vegas?
Meanwhile, while the investigation is being conducted by the local police, who have established links with the security of the casino system, of which the former casino owner, Donald Trump, is a part, the likelihood of finding the perpetrators is clearly not zero. Moreover, having behind the president of the United States, local police can find informants and employees not only in Las Vegas, and not only in the US.
And with this simple thought, I come home and start to check it on the Internet ….
To be continued…
Interesting. Fair to say what you’re describing here is a… conspiracy… of sorts and what you’re presenting here is no doubt a theory. In the words of the esteemed Thwack, former (ongoing, on the sly?) paramour of janet, “just sayin’.”
Good Lord, why is this not on the news? Or is it, because I canned my cable service 3 years ago now. This is ominous isn’t it?
It’s because Janos and I, Superbots, who run all media news outlets through automation and AI and a primary directive. I cannot divulge it here and now, although I’m sure Janos, Suh Suh Suh Superbot that he is, will chime in with charming inannities designed to pilfer the human soul of its will to live.
Walter,
Out in the provinces, the only available option is satellite service for Tee-Vee. A few months back, we found ourselves paying approx. $180 per month…for little more than crap. We then cancelled a good portion of the programming, and now we are paying in the neighborhood of $90…still crap, but HALF PRICE!
As we have no cell service, certainly no broad band nor antennae reception, our options are limited.
Yes Jim, there won’t be enough money to buy enough Cialis to maintain those “tall buildings”!
Our dear blogger has been beating up on the suburbs for a long, long time. Now, it is the inner cities. Where the hell does anyone go? Jerkville? Anal Village? Collapse is taking its own sweet time to get here. We have states and territories already bankrupt e.g. Puerto Rico and Illinois. Pension systems at all levels are busted with the only solution being reneging on the benefits which courts will disallow OR raising taxes OR running the printing press full time. Living in a pension bankrupt city, county or state is not a good idea dude. Get out! Jerkville might only have 5 government employees and miniscule property taxes. Go there.
As for the race issue, let me just say that the US military machine is running out of young white males usually from the Confederate States to fill out their ranks. The dark skinned immigrants ain’t filling the barracks. There is no real integrating into our society and culture. Diversity is a strength? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA….dream on.
The collapse is underway and has been for a long time. It might be a brick at a time but the thing is falling apart. All the building, all the hope so and maybe so rhetoric ain’t going to fix this turkey. It is just about done and ready for carving.
RB,
Please do remember it isn’t called “The LONG Emergency” by accident.
JHK’s surroundings:
http://kunstler.com/my-town/a-winter-tour-of-the-hidden-corners-of-a-little-town-in-upstate-ny/
(But you already knew that, I’m sure.)
Yes, I am a long time follower of the blog. But having lived in Jerkville there is no advantage to it. Not today. Not any longer. There was a time when every house had a veggie garden and chickens. An old man would come around annually with his mule and plow your plot. You could can your veggies at the cannery. You could use your seeds; they were all heirloom. You could fish in all the creeks and catch a “mess”. Most homes had their own worm beds. Jerk ville worked then. Now it is mostly abandoned and filled with people who know no more about making-do than any other citizen.
We are screwed.
One thing Jerkville citizens are good at is working the TV remote. A skill acquired recently by Mr. Jerkville Citizen is f=kking around with an I phone.
brh
“We are screwed.”
RB,
Damn straight. Something else I hadn’t realized was just how clueless and skill-less the mid-to-late-20’s cohort actually was! Wow! My dad would be disgusted at the total dependence of these “consumers”. (Yes, that’s all they are.)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-10/home-depot-panicked-over-millennials-forced-host-tutorials-using-tape-measures-hamme
It is now catabolic. We are eating ourselves and are running out of things to eat. Only 70% of America’s youth are fit to serve. The other 30% are ex-cons, drug users, the obese etc.
Glad to hear it. The idea of young White men throwing their lives away to support this Juggernaut is painful indeed. We have enough veterans to teach the young the Art of War, which will be so desperately need in the years ahead.
The dark skinned immigrants ain’t filling the barracks.
Good observation. That’s why the even dumber, more gullible, and more desperate females were recruited. And so it goes right on down the line. Will our fat little child dumplings come next, especially as they’ve already been so effectively conditioned through their use of all war all of the time immersive video games?
Traditionally, all wars of attrition worthy of the name come down to women and children taking up arms too, although those wars always involve an oppressed people (of color) actually fighting for something against a larger and better equipped oppressor (white). What happens when the Great White Race itself finds itself on the short end of the stick against oppressors of its very own race and nationality?
Perhaps recent mass shooting “terror” events yield a clue or two? Mass social apathy and distraction, punctuated increasingly regularly by ever larger random mass murder events, which, in the end, accomplish absolutely nothing other than sowing the seeds for even more of the same. Not surprising really, given the “Great” White Race’s operant conditioning to be above all else, helpless and compliant, and to foolishly continue to believe in their own “superiority.”
Do you remember the Star Trek episode (1960s original series) where the Enterprise visits a planet engaged in a multi-generational war which is all simulated by computers? In the story, the casualties are counted and then citizens from each side are forced to be exterminated to maintain the war. No one even remembers why it started, and none of it is actual combat.
With remotely piloted drones and the development of AI how far away from that fictional war?
Life imitating art.
Trumpville! Oh the humanity! The humanity!
We’re living in a Dystopia in which US soldiers guard the opium fields to sell heroin to the American people and the government massacres country music concert goers so that their buddies can sell body X-ray scanners?
Vegas: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zNqxUuyHFzc
Here we go… 911 conspiracy 2.0 – surprised they haven’t dragged Dick Cheney into that.
Lots of smoke blown out of the ass.
Truth mixed with lies to confuse and deceive. Have we not covered this already?
Official Conspiracy theory about Vegas atack is crumbling
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-shooting-20171009-story.html
Speaking about telepathy!
So you’re saying that the Las Vegas shooting rampage was really a Ji,,,had…i terror attack, but that the C..IA and the MSM covered it up by pinning it on a 64 year old schmuck with a bad back and joint pain as an Oswald-style patsy?
I am saying that by keeping the investigation out of the FBI and in the hands of the local Police Department, while giving them administrative resources of the Office of US President, Trump has a chance to bring the perpetrators to justice.
The only thing you can be sure of when reading “official” press accounts is that it will sell advertising and/or circulation revenues. After that, it’s anyone’s guess what the actual “truth” is. Truth never sold a damn thing, hyperbole always has and always will.
“Quid verum”
Pontius Pilate
Wait for moar and better alterations to the rest of the “official” Mandalay Bay Massacre story. The police now say the security guard who was wounded, was actually shot before the slaughter (occult Satanic sacrifice/jihadi operation) began.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-shooting-20171009-story.html
You knew that Pilate chap back in the day, eh there Scratch?
Pop singer ‘Sting’ — I don’t know his real name — is selling his place on the Upper West Side. Price: $56 million.
It has a great view of Central Park.
At one point in the 1930s Hart Crane, ee cummings and John Dos Passos live in the same apt building, located at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge (Brooklyn Side) It had a great view, there were some good but cheap restaurants nearby, and rent wasn’t very much.
brh
Gordy Sumner. He did a concert in CP, for AGW [warming].
Do you pray to Demi-Gods like Patton and McArthur? If not, what IS your religion? A generalized Ancestor Worship of Our Mighty Dead? You could do worse. And someone has to do it. Carry on then.
You all worship Ol’ Scratch, whether you know it or not.
Oh yeah?
Some of us actually worship the goddess, Jessica Alba.
What does worship mean?
Anyone like homespun foods?
http://www.wildfermentation.com/which-book/
Contralto
Aliens:
Vendée:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7V1lbjn8Qg
Visigoths:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQqgpqZ9NaY
Dark Germanic Genius:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZM-d2qD15E
————————————————————————–
Celts – indigenous Europeans. Managed to survive after all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcOxhH8N3Bo
“It’s easy to see that the skyscraper boom in Manhattan is going to end in a fantastic real estate bloodbath”
Of course it’s easy to see, it only happened about 10 years ago and anyone who doesn’t spend their entire life taking selfies and blathering on Twitter should be able to see it.
Here in southern New Hampshire, the price of real estate is up about 20% in the last year. Realtors are complaining about a lack of inventory and the saps are saying “I have to by a house now!”. Flippers are on the prowl for any run-down place they think they can make a fast $20k on. Builders are, once again, putting up McMansions and people are buying them with no money down and no capacity to pay.
Yep, looks just like 2005. Housing market screaming on hot money and no fundamentals, Republican dufas in the white house, and all the saps walking around saying “this time is different”.
Maybe this time it really will be different and rich aunt Janet at the FED won’t be able to generate enough funny money to put the whole mess back together again.
I always thought that Rockefeller Center complex was the paragon of Capitalist triumphalist architecture in the finest Art Deco tradition. Finc had some comments regarding this a week or so ago. Yet with all its towering, massive solidity, the human element was not forgotten: Radio City Music Hall and the skating rink, not complete without the floating Prometheus statue, are magical venues making the whole place approachable if not comprehensible. But that was the manifestation of 80 years prior.
On sunny days, one can trust the Sherry Netherland to cast a phallic early morning shadow into Fredrick Law Olmstead’s masterpiece of civil engineering.
What ever happened to the Pan Am building? Pan Am no longer exists. Does it go by a different name? Did Michael Bloomberg buy it?
And to a pastrami guy like myself, they’ve added insult to injury as the Carnegie Deli was also shuttered not too long ago. (On the Q.T. I will tell you all – at pain of being branded a heretic – that a firm out of Chicago of all places, Vienna Beef, happens to make a fantastic pastrami, as good as Zabars or Katz’s.)
DOn’t give me any lip either about Peter Luger’s; it’s in Brooklyn so that doesn’t count irrespective of the great cuts of steak and classic brusque service.
What gives with the town?
The slugs on Wall Street will have their way, now as in the past. Pity really.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7CIgWZTdgw
I can’t imagine climbing a 2000 ft behemoth. I walked 3600 vertical feet up the Grand Teton in Sept.after the Great American Eclipse. I thought I was gonna croak! I didn’t huff’ e’ puff’ like that since humpin’ hose in 400 degree heat.
“when financialization founders on its false foundations, there will be nothing left to support that way of life.”
Slave labor.
Of course they won’t call it slave labor in the USA any more than they do in China or hundreds of other places where the iron law of wages holds sway, but they might as well. I understand it is different from slavery where one person owns another, but what do you call it when you are held captive to a system?
Do not despair. Just as the Black Death brought peasants in Europe a new freedom, the coming reduction in population will do the same for survivors. The trick is to be a survivor.
In you one old republic, members enjoy housing locations near “things to do”, which are defined as clubbing, retail shopping and restaurants.
In you one New Republic, members enjoy housing locations near “things to do”, which are defined as farming, gardening, hunting, fishing, hiking, biking, camping, and building.
that ok.
let not you hearts be troubled.
may God be with you.
-onehunglo
The post WW2 policy of the United States, whether enunciated or not, was to buy the allegiance of a war-ruined Japan by opening American markets to Japanese products, all the while tolerating a Japanese market closed to American goods. This was during the Cold War and what was at stake was the shape of the post war world. And what were sacrificed were the interests of American workers in favour of the interests of the Japanese. And so started the ruin of the US interior.
In the beginning, the Japanese produced crap. Made-in-Japan was an insult. But it’s like Lee Kwan Yew said, the Japanese are the best process engineers in the world, that is, in the refinement of the production process, the betterment of quality. Plus Japanese workers worked a third more hours than their US counterparts and for a third less pay. American managers could never figure a way out of this box and so one industry after another in the US died and was buried. Without US government support Chrysler and GM would have been part of the corporate body-count.
And then, one by one, American industries stated to move their operations to destitute third world countries to take advantage of slave wages and governments that had zero scruples about repressing popular discontent, turning a blind-eye to work-place safety or environmental degradation.
The ruin that JHK describes in this week’s post, that started with Japan, turned from a trickle in the last generation into a torrent as tens of thousands of factories moved to places like Mexico and China. What you would normally expect out of this process was economic depression. But the Fed saw the situation of depressed consumer demand in the US early on and so opened the money-spigots. The effect was to depress interest rates, ignite debt-fueled real-estate manias and speculative frenzies in financial markets. And so the trade-off was outright depression for bubbles and busts. And also what JHK sees along the coasts as the funny-money produced by the Fed piled up in financial centers.
How does it end? Like all manias end. The Fed and Treasury will pull out the stops and do everything inside and outside the law to prop up their friends in coastal financial bubble-lands. And they’ll ignore the economic destitution in the interior of the country. Until the election of Trump, these fly-over troubles were dismissed. But there’s a point where financial instability like we’ve seen in the last generation, turns into political instability like we’re starting to see now, and when political instability turns into political violence and then into outright insurrection.
The problems of Harvey Weinstein, and Hollywood degeneracy in general, are pea-sized irregularities in the steadily degrading contours of the American nation-state. JHK showed us in this last post what everyone should do, that is, to do what he did and look at what’s under your nose.
ah, volodya, you very wise one indeed!!
in present state, NETWORK globalists highly effective in manipulating the human thought genome, with express intent transformative suppression of Liberty, Ingenuity, Rugged Individualism, Independent Thought, Nationalism, Spontaneous Cooperation, Abundance, and Free Will.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
– Aldous Huxley, March 20, 1962.
“I foresee the time when we shall have the means and therefore, inevitably, the temptation to manipulate the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all the people through environmental and biochemical manipulation of the brain.”
– Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era.” 1970.
“A group of researchers from Germany and the United States have published a study which concludes that doping ‘xenophobic’ populations with massive quantities of the estrogen-linked hormone Oxytocin will cure nationalism.”
– Zero Hedge, August 29, 2017.
“Human antidepressants are building up in the brains of bass, walleye and several other fish common to the Great Lakes region.”
– Charlotte Hsu, PHYS.ORG, August 31, 2017.
that ok.
let not you heart be troubled.
may God be with you.
-onehunglo
Frogs are becoming bisexual and even hermaphroditic. All according to Plan. Cue the maniacal laughter. Cut to an image of hairy hands rubbing together.
It’s not Ok, Charlie Chan. It would be funny – but only if it wasn’t true.
ah, janos, you are well-read indeed….
however, information is not knowledge….
that ok.
let not you heart be troubled.
may God be with you.
-onehunglo
The problems of Harvey Weinstein, and Hollywood degeneracy in general, are pea-sized irregularities in the steadily degrading contours of the American nation-state. ???
Brain washing people.
This may not be historically accurate, but my guess is that the US saw this as a way to rebuild Japan and to strengthen its influence in SE Asia. It may have also been motivated by a desire to make amends for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Imagine what the world would look like had the US chosen a policy of containment rather than unconditional surrender of Japan at the end of WWII.
There’s a reason Korea was left divided. Nobody saw it 60 or 70 years ago, but now Korea is the mother of all problems because they are nuclear. Somebody planned it that way or Vietnam would have ended the same way.
I can not coherently describe what is happening in the US today, including because the picture of what is happening now for those who remember what the media reported a month ago is too different from the picture of the world, drawn by the media, in the expectation that a large portion of the viewers do not remember what happened a month ago.
For example, yesterday on all Russian channels and on all talk shows (including 60 minutes, which had not been hurrying to sign up with Clintonoids before), they mocked Trump off the paunch, rejoicing that his aggression towards North Korea would soon be curbed by the Congress and the US Senate.
At the same time, they forgot that the law on anti-Russian sanctions, which is essentially a declaration of economic war on Russia, was imposed on Trump by the Congress and the Senate, and he was forced to sign this law under the threat of immediate impeachment.
But Trump did not give up, and as a result of a brilliantly conducted intrigue over the allocation of funds to fight the aftermath of the hurricanes, he destroyed the reputation of Republican leaders in the Congress and Senate who, on Hillary Clinton’s orders, organized the voting on the above law on Trump’s birthday, which began with the shooting of his closest friend Scalise, who worked in Congress as a Trump’s representative.
And if someone tells me that this is a coincidence and just does not matter in the larger scope of things, I don’t have anything to talk to them about.
Of course, I understand that I can not compete with the media and my attempts to fight the brainwashing of American citizens are doomed to failure, but the fact is that when Bolton’s words about the impossibility for the United States to reconcile with the presence of nuclear weapons in North Korea on 60 minutes yesterday, they forgot to ask whether the US can reconcile with Russia’s nuclear weapons, and why the Clintonoids are afraid that Trump will start a nuclear war with North Korea, but are not afraid that Congress and the Senate will provoke a nuclear war with Russia.
Meanwhile, in the new military doctrine of Russia, it is written in plain Russian that Russia reserves the right to a preemptive NUCLEAR strike, if the actions of the opposing side pose a threat to the very existence of the state.
And from my point of view, the law on anti-Russian sanctions, which deprives Trump of the right to improve relations with Russia, may very well create such a threat in the near future.
Think of all the great, vine ripened vegetables you could grow on an abandoned skyscraper. I bet a guy could grow a heck of a tomato on one of those puppies.
Absolutely!
And what a great exercise during a dry season making a few round trips up and down the stairs with a couple of buckets of water.
LOL!
No joy in Democrat fundraiserville.
Poor Harvey, with a face like chewed bubblegum how else is he going to get some?
He paid off the right people and supported the right issues.
Harvey liked a little on the side, that’s all.
Who doesn’t?
Hey, at least he like girls.
brh
No, thats NOT ‘all’–he is accused of rape and being foul to people, Mia farrows son being one of the many he threatened.
I’m just being a little facetious, Malt.
Your Groceries Might be to Blame for Giant Pythons Keep Attacking Indonesian People
By some estimates, half of all things found in grocery stores are made with the fruit of the palm oil plant, a versatile and cheap ingredient that happens to grow best in areas of the world where reticulated pythons thrive.
Reticulated pythons like the ones involved in two attacks in Indonesia this year are among the world’s longest and strongest. They kill by coiling around their prey and squeezing until its heart stops. Then the serpents swallow their victims whole.
It’s certainly the stuff of villains. Even when the end result isn’t death, the attacks often make international headlines.
But scientists and snake lovers say the strikes may be more than just alarming stories about reptilian foes. They may be the indirect result of our global food chain’s insatiable desire for an inexpensive product.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/science/ct-giant-python-attacks-indonesia-20171004-story.html
James, just learn Modern Monetary Theory properly, and stop worrying about the deficit and the immaterial national debt. Warren Mosler taught his grandson how to repay the US national debt in 2 minutes: just go to the Federal Bank, debit the securities account and credit the reserves account, and voila, done. 🙂
Although one should be careful what one asks for. MMT could just as easily be used to hyperinflate the economy with all the proceeds going to the usual suspects (as it is currently), followed by an intentional rapid deflationary “collapse” once all that currency has been safely converted into hard assets and/or safely sheltered in the myriad of ways that the rich have access to and the poor do not.
The US national debt is a political cudgel with which to beat the gen pop. Thus it has been and thus it will always be. In the rich’s defense, the masses completely support this scam (the better to beat each other with!), so it’s not like it requires any arm twisting to keep it in place. In the end, Americans are greedy, selfish bastards who hate one another and any foolish ideas of “common cause,” although they simply love to “rally around the flag” in hypocritical displays of public subservience. Nazi Germany was always big on that sort of thing too (Don’t think your masters didn’t notice!) as I recall (Damn, I loved mentoring young Adolph!). THAT is the core issue to be dealt with, and no amount of tweaking American national or state social systems at the margins will change any of that one bit. All ideas I FULLY support, of course!
The national debt is the money supply. Period. Once you see through the lingo, the scheme becomes obvious and even criminal. In the end I think it is untenable, but we’ll have to go through an apocalypse to rid ourselves of it.
Obama tried to reach out and bridge ethnic differences.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A6DRZlytJpQ
If the Vegas massacre was the work of Ji…ha..di’s, then why would they try to cover it up and pin it on a 64 year old fart?
Lee Harvey Oswald’s grandson says the family’s out of the patsy business.
https://constitution.com/falling-football-favorability-prompts-discussion-anthem-rules/
It’s called winning. The Owners picked a bizarre fight they couldn’t win, using their field hands, basically boys in large male bodies, many of them criminals, and almost all of them uneducated and unintelligent. I admit I’m surprised that so many fans still have a modicum of self respect. Very pleasantly surprised.
Trump has crushed these Anti-American scum. And the White Fans utterly loathe them, and the thug players as well. The Anglo-Saxon is finally learning to hate. Thank God.
White population, Bronx, NY 1925: 95%
White population, Bronx NY 2017: 4%
A big chunk of that 95% were Germans of Jewish, Lutheran and Catholic persuasion. Some mighty breweries existed in the Bronx of that time, really not that long ago. None exit any longer.
brh
America is 63% white today. It was 80% white in 1980.
No, I read 90% White, in (((1965))).
White Christians [non His panic] are NOW a minority. > 50%.
The Anglo-Saxon is finally learning to hate. Thank God.
Almost my faithful servant… ALMOST! Actually, you should be thanking ME, but I’ll forgive you. I go by many names, so it makes no difference in the end. I’ll accept the compliment in the spirit in which it was given.
What hypocrisy. The nerve of Airheadith Conscientious Decoupling Paltrow to come out against Weinstein only in a follow-up story, long after the initial story of the NYtimes and it’s nobody accusers paved the way. Only after the New Yorker and its semi-celebrity accusers piece came in with the follow-up blow. Only then does this dummy come in with “this must end now” in a courageous puff piece with photographs. Can’t waste an opportunity to look good.
Who actually respects these shallow sycophants?
Oh please can you just crawl back under that rock? Lord is this too much to ask?
Obama’s daughter was his intern.
Hillary’s fundraisers.
Yes, they want this under a rock.
Meryl Streep had more outrage over MMA then her sexual predator boss, and the sexual predator enabler(HRC) she was shilling for.
Yeah, these are supposed to be powerful women, yet they only come forward when others have done the heavy lifting – and others have paid the price of their silence. They’re not admirable people. Not the guys either. So many knew about Harvey, yet it all continued. And now they’re acting like he’s the only one? How many more Harveys are there? And is anyone going to stand up for the boys who have been abused? Or is it just “the women”? Does that include the girls? Hollywood should be forced to clean house just as the Tribe forced the Catholic Church to do so.
Hollywood should be forced to clean house just as the Tribe forced the Catholic Church to do so.
Talk about a 21st century witch hunt.
With the atheists controlling sources of information and disinformation.
The Catholic Church is pederasty.
It can never be cleaned of its essence.
Pedophilia is the Catholic Church’s DNA. It goes right back to Rome.
How many priests are in jail? For what? Give me facts.
Regarding Vikings and the World Projects
This group is not as simple as it seems. I know some of them from New York in the 90s and, believe me, the composition of the participants in 2012 changed for geopolitical reasons, and not for personal or musical.
And the Grandmother Yaga and Ivanushka mingled in this clip with Liberation is not due to ignorance of the authors, but because of the hidden meaning of their videos in general.
And the Rise of Evil is full of the same obscure and even insulting hints, as in this video for Russians.
The true history of Europe is not so much the von Savigny historical school, as the tales of the Grimm Brothers – the stories of how the good Christians of Europe live under the rule of evil Satanist Lords who overthrew the Christian kings.
Sabaton – Panzerkampf – The Battle of Kursk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6EgOVK_iYM
Sabaton – Rise of Evil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oML2CQoetRA
Corporations and the wealthy own all forms of media in this country.
They in fact direct and control knowledge.
They call it freedom of the press.
They circle the wagons.
When a chink in the armor is overly exposed or their shield droops, they are forced to give up a member.
Make a sacrifice.
The story isn’t the story.
The story is the lack of stories.
The quashing of stories.
The redirects.
The silence.
American Democracy doesn’t die in darkness.
It dies in the light.
We live in a dangerous time. People are angry, violent and more prone to engage in conduct that a generation ago would have been considered immoral and unethical if not illegal. Point in fact is aggressive and even reckless driving. More and more I see drivers refusing to follow traffic rules by tailgating, refusing to dim their high beam headlights, passing on the right, driving 20-30 mph over the speed limit, running red lights and driving vehicles with non-standard equipment. I see this more frequently with white male drivers behind the wheel of 6 ton behemoths that cost as much as some homes.
Not long ago a woman was traveling on one of our interstate highways on her way home with 3 children in the car. A driver in a large “decked out” pickup decided she was not going fast enough and began to tailgate her. Frustrated because she would not speed up the driver tried to pass and clipped her bumper putting her car into a spin at 75 mph. The car spun around and ran off the road striking a tree and killing two of the occupants. The driver of the truck did not stop. He was pursued by other drivers but sped up to over 100 mph and was never caught.
Its not just driving. It is everything we do. More and more we refuse to be civil, polite and compassionate to each other. We deserve whatever is coming.
What you are describing is conservatism in rural areas. I believe this was what the movie “The Blob” was about. In rural conservative areas, there is a clique that determines your place. Once you are part of this clique, you get to do this too. People who are liberal are ostrasized and attacked until they leave. The Blob rises up against them and police follow you all the time. Your car insurance lapses mysteriously. People call the police on you for anything. You’re overcharged for everything and all the work is substandard. There’s nothing you can do. The courts are part of the blob. But in the context of the blob, life makes sense. That is the damn hell of it all. These people want to live like this. That is why I never agree when I hear liberals describe conservative people as good people. They are not. Conservatives are all Nazi, some on the surface, some underneath. But make no mistake. They are all Nazis. They are so myopic an anus is their idea of heaven.
They are all Nazis. No you are stalinist shit.
Seadolt the scatological anal fixated simpleton.
When I see over-generalization I immediately become suspicious and tend to discount what the writer says. “They are all Nazis” is a generalization that only needs one conservative to not be to make your statement false. A more reasonable statement would include the possibilty that some conservatives are not Nazis.
I am not a conservative, but I have some conservative values. Does that make me a Nazi?
I’m kind of tired of reading fallacious statements. Try to use some real critical thinking instead. Thank you.
I agree bean. I know plenty of fascist liberals and libertarians. Regardless of ideology, at the extremes it’s either their agenda or burn the place down. What I am talking about is moderation, compromise, and civility. And before anyone says a word, (@Janus) it doesn’t matter what other people do or say. We are all responsible for our own actions. if we want to live in a fair and just society its time we look in the mirror and stop blaming others.
(@Janus) – Dumbedup
=============
I assume you mean @Janos.
Thanks. He makes such a big impression on me I didn’t know how to spell his name.
Janus is more fitting.
Janus Bifrons
To continue this thought, in addition to aggressive and angry behavior I find that people in this modern era (thank you Bill Clinton) are much more likely to lie and cover it up. Especially large corporations, but some small ones and individuals too. We lie about little things to our spouses and we lie about big things to our bosses. Even in a courtroom and under oath people will lie. I have caught myself more than once in the course of my life telling a whopper. It is amazing the lengths people will go to hide the lie; or, when caught, to defend it.
So add honesty to the list of things missing from our “common culture” as JHK likes to call it.
Skorenzy
“The Anglo-Saxon is finally learning to hate. Thank God.”
perhaps Ol’ Scratch should add a little nuance to this comment.
Hate eats one up from the inside. I don’t feel sorry for him. He has to be leading a miserable existence. He tries to take comfort from Eastern religions and philosophies, but unfortunately doesn’t understand that bad energy nullifies any attempt at happiness.
Very few can fight without hatred, only the warrior saints like Ali or Arjuna. Hatred is part of life. And pacifism is a way of death when applied to life. Fine for monks – that’s it. Buddha, for example, never taught it for the laity.
I have countless contradictions and absurdities, sure. But don’t try to reason from what you don’t understand to me. If the Burmese Buddhists don’t drive the Rohingya Muslims into the sea, Burma is finished. You get a disease while it is still small and can be got. They no doubt remember what the Muslims did to Buddhism in India centuries ago.
Likewise with the West. The Church Fathers ruled against pacifism for the Laity. That’s why we’re not speaking Arabic or Turkish now. And yes, the Crusaders in Spain knew they were fighting both the Jews and the Muslims. Together they had conquered Christian Spain and together they had to be defeated.
That’s not what Jesus taught. You cannot be a Christian if you do not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and what he revealed about himself as the incarnation of Yahweh.
Then Christianity would have died, crushed out by Islam, which of course would be fine with you. Luckily, the Holy Spirit instructed the Fathers otherwise.
Then it is clear you have no idea whatsoever what Christianity is about. You have invented some version of it to justify your bigotry and hatred of anything and anyone different from you.
Why don’t you answer my objection? Those who beat their swords into ploughshares will do the plowing for those who don’t. Your Christ is just a fag. And your Christianity just more of your Cuckoldry.
Your cruelty and inhumanity is mind boggling. Jesus taught love and faith not beating plowshares into swords. He came for the weak, the oppressed and the sinner. Christianity did survive and it continues to survive without the sword. It is called “Apostolic Succession.” If you believe that the God of all creation would allow the Spirit of Christ to be snuffed out then perhaps you should examine your own faith. This conquering and masculine version of Christianity makes a mockery of the cross. Christ’s weakness is our strength. Our strength is our weakness.
Wrong Twink: the Church survived by allying with the Germanic Roman Empire in the West and with Constantine’s Roman Empire in the East. Later they allied with the Franks and Normans – the baddest asses of the time.
It’s true that some SMALL groups eschewed the Church for this reason. But typically they quietly prayed for the Civil Authorities wherein they resided. They knew they couldn’t survive without protection. The Amish are like this. They see themselves as a Holy Order and since others carry the sword for them, they repay them by praying for them.
You have to see how the whole system works, Dumb. Btw, I think many things were done in His name that Christ wouldn’t agree with – like the Franks converting the Saxons thru the sword. And later, 3rd World peoples, or at least putting enormous pressure on them to do so.
Indeed! I’m so happy you wrote this as I was thinking the same thing after reading JS’s comments interspersed with buddhist and eastern philosophical concepts. It is apparent that his hate and frustration is driving him to seek solace, and anywhere. Rather sad, rather absurd.
Perhaps all apart of the act.
The character that he, or it, created.
I’m not a Pacifist. I have contradictions but this isn’t one of them. If the East was completely Pacifist, then the Muslims and Christians would have crushed them long ago. Read Bhagavad Gita. Krishna told Arjuna, Get up and fight. I (speaking as God) have already killed your foes. It is not on you as you are merely my Hand. Just do your duty. If you die, you will attain the bliss of heaven. If you live, acclaim and wealth on earth. You can’t lose – except if you don’t fight. Then you lose both on earth and heaven. Why? Because as a warrior, it is your duty to fight.
Mohammad understood a bit of this. He said, do not molest non-combatants, the old and monks. But those who fight with words as I do got their heads chopped off. Likewise, if the Communists win, I’m toast.
Note: At other times, Mohammad went against this, selling kids into slavery. One time he was asked, Why didn’t we offer these people dhimmi status? Mohammad replied, That is only done after there is a great slaughter in the land.
The cruelty and barbarism of Mohammadeans will be their own undoing. As it is always. There’s not one civilization that survived on this basis. It is a rot that eats from within.
” There’s not one civilization that survived on this basis.”
Mofo.
And what civilization has survived on ANY basis?
Dumbedup
“Its not just driving. It is everything we do. More and more we refuse to be civil, polite and compassionate to each other.”
Accurate observation from this vantage point. All in the name of personal freedom and mythical wealth. Will the outcome be deserved? The measure on uses is the measure one will face.
Do you hear the toll of the bells?
I do.
on uses – – one uses
perdoneame por favor
I saw a clip of one trial: after the verdict the family was calling out to the murderer, “We forgive you.” What wretchedly weak people. They hadn’t even mourned their child yet. And how can you forgive one who hasn’t asked for forgiveness? Forgiveness is a great mystery – they cover it over with pastel sunflowers and pink unicorns.
If you want to see some moral iron, read the Jewish classic “The Sunflower”. It’s a book of commentaries about the Jew not forgiving a Nazi who asked forgiveness. He just walked out of the room. One of the interesting points made: How can one forgive someone for what he has done to another? To murder one person is to destroy a world. Valid. Judaism is strong here, Christianity is wavering about this now.
Old Hasidic story: A Hasidic Master is traveling and is treated very poorly by one of the railroad officials on the train. When he reaches his destination, he met by crowds of his disciples who treat him like the “second coming” or a great guru. The official (a Jew? It isn’t specified) is abashed, and comes to beg his forgiveness saying, “I didn’t know who you were”. The Master replies, “I can’t forgive you. You didn’t abuse me, but a poor, shabby old man. Find him and ask his forgiveness”.
Very deep. Why does the official have to know “who he is” in order to treat him well? Why can’t he treat everyone well? But the way of the world is inequality, where it doesn’t apply, bowing down to those who are esteemed to be better. That hasn’t changed, but now we pretend there is no inequality at all, even where there is and where it is important.
Go watch “Dead Man Walking.” That is how you forgive. It is hard work.
“Go watch “Dead Man Walking.” That is how you forgive. It is hard work.”
DU,
It is hard work because it conflicts with basic human nature.
Janos,
You know what exiled Tibetans in Dharamshala India teach their stranded orphaned children? Above all, they teach them to be warm-hearted. You’ll see the same with Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children. In fact, they couldn’t raise a family if they weren’t such. There is much strength in kindness. I wish you that strength and understanding.
Oh Lord, give me strength. Can you not see that you have to discriminate between how they treat each other and how they treat others? In group/Out group? Hello? First class in Sociology 101?
Google the Talmud and learn my son.
Yes on the Tibetans perhaps: their religion teaches bodhicitta or universal love. But even the incarnate lamas admit their struggles in trying to love the Chinese imperialists. In one terrible incident, a Tibetan guerilla force was caught between the Chinese forces. The Dalai Lama ordered them to surrender but they refused and ended up cutting their own throats. One Tibetan warrior even defied the Dalai Lama on camera, saying he had the right to die for Tibet.
It’s not something that comes natural to ordinary people. One thing people CAN learn to do and with great advantage, is to put things out of their minds so as not to be embittered. That’s different than “forgiving” – which in my book means that the guilty party asks for forgiveness. A religious person forgives everything because they are enabled to do so by the sacrifices of the laity. A gentleman does not forgive, but rather seeks satisfaction. The Monastic Institution depends on such gentleman extending their protection to them as they do as well to wealthy donors. I wish you the wisdom to understand this.
Janos,
You forget that I’m Hebrew speaking. If I wanted to read the Talmud, I would have picked up a copy and read it long ago. The religious text is the actual Hebrew Bible — The TaNaKh. The Talmud is nothing but largely anonymous medieval Roman commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. I, and 95% of Jews don’t care to read them. 1/ There’s no need for it. 2/ It’s Roman propaganda. And there’s no need for me to google some crude English mistranslations either. Just so you get an idea how crude and completely WRONG the mistranslations of the Hebrew Bible really are, you might want to watch these:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ancienthebreworg/videos
Oh, you’re trying to pin your cultural vileness on us? Fuck you.
Complete bullshit. The Talmud is the Law Book of Judaism. Even the Reform Jews have to study it to become Rabbis. My God you lie so effortlessly that you end up believing your own lies – and that’s Psychopathology.
Idiotic. You’re have no clue to what you’re talking about.
Forgive, or you can’t forget. That’s what they never tell you.
Janos,
Do you truly believe the moral arc of the universe will be bent to your will? Should this be the case, then the degree of hubris involved is second only to our species naming themselves sapiens sapiens.
Ah, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”
Mine is just one shoulder put to the wheel. If enough of us do so, the White Race may yet be saved along with his Civilization. But of course nothing great can be accomplished without utter fanaticism, sacrifice and will.
The 1965 law re-wrote that policy, and since then America’s white population share has declined from 84 percent at the time to 62 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, the Hispanic population share grew from 4 to 18 percent, and Asians rose from less than 1 percent to 6 percent (below, left). If President Johnson hadn’t signed the 1965 law, America would be 75 percent white today, Pew estimates (below, right).
Exactly. It’s genocide. Changing the People is not in the social contract. Our Government is illegitimate who do not rule by consent of the governed.
seawolf77
Your observations concerning immigration are well taken. They are just part of the planned massive transfer of wealth we see. Without the disembowelment of our industrial base and the hatreds it has formed a more diverse population pursuing a future for their children would not have played out as it has.
2017 brought the newest buzzword.
The newest target for victim angst.
Male toxicity.
It already existed. It already had a name.
Machismo.
However that may be regarded as aspirational.
Macho man.
Sounds like lothario.
Stud
Tough guy
Male toxicity, now that, that should scare them off.
Dystopia:
https://www.google.com.hk/amp/yournewswire.com/george-soros-billions-mandalay-bay/amp/
I read that some undisclosed parties made a lot of money off of placing put options on airline stocks just prior to 911. The puppet masters place bets on the massacre of the people in a rigged game? It’s like that Star Trek (original series) episode “The Gamesters of Triskylion”.
More virtue signaling from one of the acknowledged masters (My influence is strong in this one!):
http://ew.com/news/2017/10/11/hillary-clinton-donating-weinstein-contributions/
In what can only be described as one of the most ironic statements made by any of you mentally and spiritually deficient mortals ever, HRC has evidently found money that’s too dirty even for her decidedly modest expectations! Imagine that!
Is there anything this “woman” won’t do for attention? Rest assured, I’ll be there personally to greet her when she crosses over, which won’t be too much longer now. I’ve got a very special place prepared for her!
made a lot of money off of placing put options on airline stocks – Pucker
============
One does not “place” put options. One either buys them or sells them.
However, you can “place a bet” that airline stocks will decline by buying put options.
There, sure enough, was joy in Trumpville today Mr JHK.
Consider that barometer of hyper-finance Capitalism – the Dow Jones Industrial Average: a blistering 22,872 up 42 points. And heading higher than an Elon Musk rocket ship into the furthest reaches of outer space. My pigeon entrails reflect at least a stab at 25,000 during the Christmas rally of 2017.
Then there is the riotous news that the mayor of Trumpville, who also happens to be the president of the USA plus emperor of the American Empire (TM,) would like the Federal Communications Commission ( in distant Wash, D.C. ) to pull the broadcast licence of a legendary American media giant: NBC. That NBC is headquartered in Rockefeller Center is of special note. A mere five block south of Trump’s Manhattan abode – so close they could actually throw dirt bombs and snowballs at each other from their respective turfs.
According to the N.Y Daily News, NYPD is going to have a re-examination of Harvey Weinstein sex crime allegations.
And to ice the cake – the N.Y. Yankees stage a historic comeback in winning the ALDS over the Cleveland racist nomenclature baseball team.
Joyful enough for you?
It is enough to put one in a particular state of mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol0dPJdzm1M
The help did not come
Reinforcements not arrived
We are left with only two
They fucked us over
All the brothers died
Ammunition’s running out
But we keep the lines
And we fight on
The cannon died down
Nothing to fight back with
Well, light it up my brother-soldier
We can’t fuck the death
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUC0mhV7FIQ
The Talmud (Hebrew for “study”) is one of the central works of the Jewish people. It is the record of rabbinic teachings that spans a period of about six hundred years, beginning in the first century C.E. and continuing through the sixth and seventh centuries C.E. The rabbinic teachings of the Talmud explain in great detail how the commandments of the Torah are to be carried out. For example, the Torah teaches us that one is prohibited from working on the Sabbath. But what does that really mean? There is no detailed definition in the Torah of “work.” The talmuidc tractate called Shabbat therefore devotes an entire chapter to the meaning of work and the various categories of prohibited work.
The Talmud is made up of two separate works: the Mishnah, primarily a compilation of Jewish laws, written in Hebrew and edited sometimes around 200 C.E. in Israel; and the Gemara, the rabbinic commentaries and discussions on the Mishnah, written in Hebrew and Aramaic, which emanated from Israel and Babylonia over the next three hundred years. There are two Talmuds: the Y’rushalmi or Jerusalem Talmud (from Israel) and the Bavli or Babylonian Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud, which was edited after the Jerusalem Talmud and is much more widely known, is generally considered more authoritative than the Jerusalem Talmud.
Rabbi Y’hudah HaNasi (Judah the Prince) is thought to be the editor of the sixty-three tractates of Mishnah in which the laws are encoded. The main editor of the Gemara is generally assumed to be Rav Ashi, who spent over fifty years collecting the material. The final revision and editing were most likely undertaken by Ravina (500 C.E.)
The Talmud’s discussions are recorded in a consistent format. A law from the Mishnah is cited, followed by rabbinic deliberations on its meaning (i.e., the Gemara). At times, the rabbinic discussions wander far afield from the original topic. The Rabbis whose views are cited in the Mishnah are known as Tannaim (Aramaic for “teachers”), while the Rabbis quoted in the Gemara are known as Amoraim (“explainers” or “interpreters”). The Talmuds, especially the Talmud of Babylonia, also contain a good deal of aggadah: commentary on biblical narratives, stories about biblical figures and earlier Rabbinic sages, and speculations concerning physical reality and human nature. In short, anything that was of interest to the Rabbis wound up in the Talmud, which in turn became a kind of encyclopedia of the Rabbinic mind.
As books of law, the Talmuds differ greatly from the Mishnah in style and approach. The Mishnah states its rules in a straightforward manner, usually not supporting them with scriptural references or other argumentation. The Talmuds (and this is especially true of the Babylonian Talmud) are dialectical: their predominant form is debate, in which propositions are raised, attacked, refuted, and modified through the give-and-take of argument and counterargument.
Thus for example, if a person wanted to find out about the laws related to Rosh HaShanah, one would go to the tractate called Rosh HaShanah and would find there numerous laws and customs related to the festival. Likewise, if one wanted to find the laws and customs about Shabbat, one could go to the tractate of the same name.
“Correct” answers emerge out of the process of argument that fills the Talmud and all the books written to explain it. They are tentative conclusions whose rightness is based upon the ability of one school of thought to persuade the community of Rabbinic scholars that its point of view represents the best understanding of Torah and of God’s demands upon us.
As the earliest rabbinic interpretation of the Bible, the Talmud is indispensable to understanding the laws and customs still practiced today. The Talmudic discussion and its conclusions provide us with the origins of our many laws and customs. Studying the Talmud can help us search for the many important issues and values that are essential to a thinking and committed Jew. To study Talmud is to take one’s part in the discourse of the generations, to add one’s own voice to the chorus of conversation and argument that has for nearly two millennia been the form and substance of Jewish law.
Source: A Taste of Text: An Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, by Ronald H. Isaacs , Jewish Living: A Guide to Contemporary Reform Practice (Revised Edition), by Mark Washofsky
https://reformjudaism.org/talmud
You could / should write a book.
I read a comment online. It was ‘textbooks were shredded after WW2’–true?
I just copied and pasted. Textbooks are a huge scam, being changed every other year for profit. But of course the whole viewpoint and ethos have changed. Howard Zinn’s anti-Americanism is the philosophy of America.
Lots of publicity and powerful authorities, but very little adherents.
Rabbis do not exist in the Hebrew Bible!
Rabbinic Judaism is a Roman conspiracy and a caricature of Judaism. Its theoretical deliberations are Greek in nature and therefore are alien to the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew culture. Most Jews, by a vast vast majority, instinctively reject this alien intrusion. Instead, as an answer to this Roman conspiracy and usurped authority, Jews have have adapted Hebrew nationalism based on Biblical precepts.
Absolute rubbish. I could have picked a quote from countless Jewish websites, some of them with blood curdling viewpoints like the powerful Chabad. Instead I chose a very Liberal reform site.
I applaud you for realizing that the Talmud is evil. But instead of owning it, you try to pin it on us – and that’s just wrong. The Old Testament is ethnocentric, and then the later Rabbis (the teachers of the Pharisee sect) doubled down on that) and then the Medieval Rabbis doubled down on that.
After the Temple fell, the Pharisee Sect emerged as the most powerful since they didn’t depend as much on the sacrifices and the Temple worship, but rather study. But not without a struggle: the Kairites, who reject the Talmud, say that they fought them but were defeated since the Pharisees had the Muslims on their side. Go to their site, Kairite Corner, they have some interesting things to say.
What’s a Jewish website?
Your argument, in essence, is the same as the one arguing that the ADL is somehow a Jewish organization. It is not! It is a Vatican/CIA front pretending to be a Jewish organization. Same with Chabad, Bnei Brit, and the rest of them. I learned this very quickly when I approached them for help. None was forthcoming. The same with my friends and other people I know who were in need. No help was given. But these organizations will help everyone else with legal and financial aid. These organizations are nothing but predators on the Jewish community, their nonexistent membership reflects this.
As far as the Talmud, I don’t know and I don’t care what’s in it. It is a Roman engineered graft, same as Christianity and Islam. That is why they exist. The simple reality is that the overwhelming population of Jews reject all of that nonsense.
Oh c’mon. You’re being a putz. Ok, I’ll try: A Jewish website is a website run by Jews and for Jews or by Jews and about Jewish issues. We can go back and forth on this if you like. Meanwhile if anyone is interested in the discussion I was hoping to have with you, here is a Jewish site about a brand of Judaism sans the Talmud. The Falashas (sp?) of Ethiopia also don’t have it. They lost contact with the main body of Judaism before it was developed.
https://www.karaite-korner.org/history.shtml
What help did you ask for?
I have heard similar form a Jewish woman, who asked mainstream Jewish organizations for help.
Btw,
Hebrew nationalism based on Biblical precepts, which Rabbinic “Judaism” rejected and is antagonistic to. Which tells you, they are fundamentally anti Biblical and anti Jewish, and nothing but agents of Rome.
I went fishing today and caught nothing because of the Vatican CIA Mafia agents of Rome. Geesh!
Yes, I’m familiar, Q. We call those carp. Some spell it as crap.
Everything bad done or written by Jews is Vatican or Roman. Jews are perfect and if they aren’t, they aren’t Jews. How convenient and self serving.
It’s like the Antifa viewpoint: anyone who does or says anything they don’t like is a Nazi. And they have the right to use violence against Nazis.
The past “extended” weekend was for the Kremlin festive not only because of the anniversaries of Putin and Sputnik. The best “gift” was the guilty head of the King of Saudi Arabia with the enclosed billion-dollar contracts and a reduction in the supply of oil to maintain its price. Therefore, the Russian leader spoke at the Russian Energy Week “as power having” over the world energy.
In fact, the main results of the two years of Russia’s decisive presence in the Middle East were summed up and vividly presented.
Saudi king’s visit to Russia heralds shift in global power structures
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/05/saudi-russia-visit-putin-oil-middle-east
On petrodollar, the Saudis can decide not in Moscow, but with China on the transition to the “golden” Yuan – Shanghai has already launched the exchange, and the Saudis have only to join.
But for this they need guarantees from the American air-carriers and technologies in the form of Russian C-400 and nuclear power plants.
So not all at once and not so rapidly, they will crawl with small steps, paying Americans off with contracts for useless F35s.
The end of the petrodollar will be the end of US post WWII hegemony for once and for all. It can’t happen soon enough, although the Global elite have eagerly anticipated it, having planned (for) it in the first place. They’ll of course do fine. Ordinary Americans, having long been bought off to agree to all this shit, not so much. But never fear, they’ll get through it just fine the way they always do: they’ll turn on each other, rather than laying the blame where it truly belongs. Can anyone honestly say that a nation this fucking stupid isn’t getting what it deserves? Anyone?
“Can anyone honestly say that a nation this fucking stupid isn’t getting what it deserves? Anyone?”
Scratch,
Inattention, misunderstanding and apathy leading to hypocritical rage, paid off by goodies (on credit) and “cutting-edge” teevee (also on credit)… What can you say?
No argument from this quadrant.
And, if I might borrow a memorable line of the long-faded past from one of your most devoted servants:
“You’re doin’ a heck of a job, Scratchy!”
Sorry to say, might have to give you a pass on judgement day ‘Zone. Too bad, you’ll miss all the fun!
” Can anyone honestly say that a nation this fucking stupid isn’t getting what it deserves? Anyone?”
Nick (May I call you Nick?),
No, America does not deserve that which is inevitable. When it comes to the concept of “money”, and it’s overall meaning regarding human history, the internal machinations of banks, and the political ramifications of it’s manipulation, it is said that only a handful of people in the World actually understand the processes.
We all understand various bits and pieces of the monetary system, and are prone to project results according to our understanding…flawed or otherwise…usually with flawed results.
Consider the weather…we know bits and pieces of the process…moisture, barometric pressure, the sun and moon’s influence, but NOBODY can truly predict the weather, can they?
I believe that when the US currency loses it’s reserve status…game over for our standard of living…but what the hell do I know…?
‘Field,
You may of course call me anything you like.
Monetary systems, a basic component of (especially western) civilization are politically consented to, whether the citizens whom they are subsequently imposed upon are cognizant of their ultimate consequences or not – especially when they take great pride in how “free” they are – are they not? It took over one hundred years to complete the coup after the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 set the wheels in motion, but the end game, currently in its final; stages as we speak, was never seriously in doubt.
OF COURSE the cleverly devised modern system you see today is totally undecipherable by anyone at all, including those who label themselves PhD’s in the “discipline.” Have you never suspected that that was the purpose of it all in the first place?
Back in the day, the shysters I coached were called “con men.” Now they’ve successfully relabeled themselves as “upright business men,” OR, DARE I SAY IT, FUCKING BANKERS! Even I couldn’t have foreseen the depth of their ugly black hearts!
Rest assured, I’ve got a very special place prepared for these greedy motherfuckers as well!
The prisoners keep punching the prison Sexbot in the face.
Billy Jack may intervene to defend the prison Sexbot.
Billy Jack: “A part-Indian Vietnam veteran (Tom Laughlin) kicks around bigots who pick on his girlfriend’s (Delores Taylor) so-called freedom school.”
“The prisoners keep punching the prison Sexbot in the face.”
Or not…
http://www.pigazette.com/Pig%20images/Repairman.jpg
This Harvey Wienstien story will fade out pretty quick.
I give it another week.
brh
I think it was a hostile take over.
They’ wanted him out , to make more money for themselves.
The scandal is a cover for that.
He’s a scapegoat. In old Israel, the people would put their sins on a goat and then drive the goat out of the village. My theory is that they couldn’t control the negatives, so they decided to sacrifice him. Throw the Hollywood Goyim a crust of bread. After the catharsis, things will go on EXACTLY as before. The hypocrisy is beyond belief – as if he’s the only one doing this kind of thing. And all these powerful women are such utter hypocrites and cowards, as are the guys. I love how Affleck tried to get in on the moral feeding frenzy only to be pulled in by one of the furies. The punk!
After Harvey gets “treated”, he’ll be back. Couple of years. Unless someone really gets brave and claims rape – and can back it up. That’s assuming he did rape. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was just all pressure and his weird exhibitionism.
It’s like the Muslim rape epidemic. Finally the English media made a docu-drama about Rotterham, supposed to be pretty realistic and accurate. It’s a catharsis. Everyone can talk about how terrible it all was – and then everything goes on as before. The Muslim takeover trumps everything, certainly British girls and their families.
A scapegoat. In old Israel, the people would put their sins on a goat and then drive the goat out of the village.
Hence the term.
I sense someone is making money on HW ouster. Maybe his brother.
Odd.
Written by Clyde Lewis
PREDATORY OLIGARCHY
LAWYERS CLOWNS AND MONEY
I asked my friend Lucian the other day if he was watching the new American Horror story series called “Cult.” He told me that a few episodes into it, he felt as if he was losing his soul. I have been watching it, and I think that he is right. Not only does the series play as a twisted form of social satire, it also paints a grim picture of how we are now living in times of a horrific predator oligarchy.
Some of the best and brightest journalists, writers and philosophers have tried to explain how the United States has arrived in the state of mind that it is in and have failed miserably. However, it has always been the comic book writers, science fiction authors and horror producers that have captured the world view in a way that is brutal in its honesty.
Being honest and truthful are revolutionary acts and when it is told in bit social satire we can laugh at the gallows humor and at the same time wonder if our souls are being beaten with the cudgel of justice because of the sins we ignore or passively allow.
The horror genre continues to draw large audiences in literature, film, and interactive entertainment. It might seem strange that vicarious fear and anxiety are sought out by many people; the reality is that this type of fear is safe because it is in an environment where no one gets hurt.
At least it used to be.
The phenomenon of the American Horror Story series message is that even in a rabid political climate vampires dressed as clowns know how to hammer or twist their victims into a spiral of crazed violence for a programmed predatory agenda.
Every generation faces what can be called an “environment of evolutionary adaptedness,” meaning that throughout time selective pressures when exploited can trigger thoughts of anxiety.
However, one of the biggest fears that have shaped Homo sapiens over time is the predator. The predator has been illustrated from simple feral animals, to werewolves, vampires, zombies and now clowns.
There is a striking disconnect between the plots of most horror stories and the lives of ordinary people. We rarely get possessed by demons or get chopped up by chainsaw-wielding maniacs or are preyed upon by animated corpses.
Even if modern, civilized existence offers little in the way of true peril, we still perceive that we are living in a dangerous world filled with overwrought danger. We have literally evolved psychologically and have programmed ourselves for danger detecting and handling.
But we need to determine that even when faced with the horrors of human abuse; both mental, sexual and physical – we tend to let things like this slide.
The terrifying part is that this cognitive selectivity is whole based on political hatred and bias. Politics right now is probably the closest we’ve come to a full-blown horror story as anything supernatural or paranormal in a long time.
When the pain of human beings becomes a political tool, we face a double standard when it comes to morality and the horror can be found in some of the responses human beings give when predators begin to close in on their neighbors.
If we want to grasp the true meaning of our modern moment, we should maybe send in the clowns to expose one. We now equate clowns with predators wearing corpse paint, hiding their true identity behind a sharpened smile and convincing mask of frivolity.
We are witnessing a mental war with a curious childhood icon – a clown that seems to a virus that has been turned loose in the zeitgeist.
It’s the same old boogieman; only in white greasepaint or a hideous rubber mask. The predator, whether he is a clown or a vampire has a potent and a dangerous strategy.
The warning should go out that every political party is using the strategy of fear and many sides are secretly planning a revolution in a fugue state.
Everyone seems so confused about the identity of our country or we are puzzled and conflicted about the past and so we are seeing statues of historic figures being torn down, histories being erased and soon we could be seeing book burnings and violent attacks against people who have philosophies that can be interpreted as fascist or racist or worse.
Once again, we are sending in the clowns to expose on, but for a confused and hypocritical double-standard.
If you have paid attention, the tragedy of the massacre in Las Vegas has been replaced with a new narrative and that is the nauseating revelations about Hollywood film giant, Harvey Weinstein.
What this new narrative replaces is one horrifying abuse of human lives for another and again the media when confronted with a fragmented narrative of the Las Vegas massacre moves on to exploring the true nature of our rotten-to-the-core, predatory, exploitive oligarchy.
As in the times of the John Podesta spirit cooking revelations we are now being shown that dirty secrets and dirty lies can be protected by a clique of self serving sycophants.
President Trump may not have immediately distanced himself from horrific racists clowns like David Duke, and of course this was the impetus for his racist or white supremacist label, but the plot sickens when people like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama take money from a well known sexual predator. Hillary stated that she will now distance herself from Weinstein but she still will keep his money.
So far, Barack Obama has said nothing about the money he received from Weinstein.
Are we to now level the guilt-by-association ploy that has been the modus operandi by army servile toadies in the media that have used this strategy to divide us?
That would mean that if Trump is a white supremacist because of the David Duke association – does this make people like John Podesta, Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton supporters of predatory sexual abuse?
It appears that the agenda is losing its credibility as the clowns invade. It is becoming quite obvious that the elitist agenda protects abusive, exploitive predatory-oligarchs or at least the ones they like.
President Trump was said to be a misogynist for merely joking about grabbing the private areas of a woman – now we have a major player in politics and film doing some real groping, raping and masturbating and it has been going on openly for years.
We know that since the Clinton Whitehouse, Washington DC has been run by the blackmailing dossiers that are held in classified vaults ready to be released if someone does not play ball with deep state agendas.
Things like Pee Pee Gate, Pizza Gate and Pedo Gate have all been rendered as damaging and hateful conspiracy yarns with political intentions. Is it all just conspiracy theory or should we look into the morality of who is leading us and who we spend our hard earned money to support?
The sick part is that we are now learning hat Weinstein’s behavior has been an open secret for 27 years. Isn’t this whole revelation and cover up similar to all of the so called crazy “fake news” allegations that have been forced into the realms of marginal conspiracy theory?
There are hundreds of insiders with top secret clearance that know about the contents of the Kennedy assassination documents, we know that there are other cover ups and conspiracies – and we can also have determined that there is a cover up and fragmented narrative on the Las Vegas Massacre, but of course, there are those that make it a point to troll anyone who questions motives and actions of elites who in the past have participated in gun, drug and human trafficking.
People have risked their lives and their careers revealing this stuff and many of them are often forgotten – it is a thankless and often non lucrative to be a truth teller in this world of lawyers clowns and big money cover-ups.
Why we are not surprised that Hollywood, the corporate media and Washington D.C. lack courageous reporters who are willing to report what the public has a right to know?
It would be unwise to reveal where the Vampires live and this is why the media appear are highly paid protectors of the abusers in our midst.
Metaphorically, “vampirism” continues to be applied in the assessment of certain strategic political agendas, especially by the conspiracy theorists and those who feel marginalized.
Make no mistake; the vampires are out there, looking for a new consensus, looking for new followers and they most certainly want to convince you to participate in their psychopathic way of thinking.
Political vampires are well-equipped to provide a warped sense of vampire nationalism when their false flag and psychological operations are successful.
These political vampires subconsciously provoke scandals to refresh themselves with the power of obfuscation.
There are always people who claim to be human that find ways to reduce the value of life for those they wish to erase from the planet and if they can get the critical mass to agree, they seal in blood a covenant of murder that they will say binds us together and the trying times are the only times we see just how fit we are as a people.
We can’t be content with peace and tranquility, or pull together when things go right. We have to be told we are only at our best when blood is shed or when tragedy strikes which, once again, seals the deal of a consensus persecution complex and soon a country that does not wish to wage war demands it and washes away their collective guilt in a sea of blood and fire.
It is a sick thought, but so easily entertained in a world that can’t stand the thought of life being sacred for all things. The real vampires will tell you that life is a right for some things and some people but not all things and not all people.
It is a hard task to inform people this is the way a vampire sees the world. It is a hard process to unmask vampires in powerful positions when the media distracts us with various satanic stories of the week.
The conspiracy of bringing down the United States is not a secret conspiracy but an open conspiracy. Tyranny succeeds because the victims become “willing executioners” in the absence of better choices and better information.
.
Web search – John Podesta’s daughter…
Bingo….She is the wife of lead FBI investigator in the Mandalay Bay shooting Aaron Rouse.”
http://www.puppetstringnews.com/blog/fb … hn-podesta
or not–http://www.rense.com/general96/rousefbi.html
The Founding Fathers were “horrific racist clowns like David Duke”. The Left has a consistent and in that sense, rational, world view. Liberal and Conservative normies – not so much. No actually, not at all. Thus the false consciousness, falsely venerated by decades of promulgation, is just over ripe and rotting fruit, easily thrown down.
The Left doesn’t have the answers – unless you think Revolution, Race War, Rural Terrorism, and Gulags are the answer. The answer is to go back to our roots. And Dr Duke is there waiting for you, Smiling. We’ll leave the lights on for ya.
I was reading the Costco Magazine. October, page 32.
United Way helping the African Muslim who has 6 children, in Canada. No mention of a husband or that she had a job.
How come I only learned today that S.I. Newhouse, a very big cog in the iron machine of media control in this country, and much of the world, died on 1 Oct 17 and it was not plastered all over the place?
There must have been both wailing and exuberant glee as to this media-monster’s passing.
Now if only the malignancy known as Harvey Weinstein would first spill the entire toxic load of slime regarding Bill and Hillary, the Epstein bacillus, Johnny Podesta and a few other key players in the vile game of slaves and souls for sale then that would keep the whole nation buzzing (while the Wall Street vampires suck up the remaining fluid from the still-living body.) A special guest appearance and interview on this very topic by Barry Soetoro O. would be the perfect accompaniment with a hip-hop slant. Didn’t Malia Obama have a brief internship with Harvey Weinstein to boot?
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/01/malia-obama-harvey-weinstein-internship
While maybe not a joy for Trumpville, Wash. D.C. and Hollyweird; the schadenfreude factor is off the charts for kulture vultures such as myself.
American Democracy thrives in Darkness
And pollution.
Malia was untouchable I assume. But who knows, maybe he touched someone he shouldn’t have, someone with Tribe connections. White actresses are just considered to be whores. That was the traditional understanding in the Christian West as well. Of course they gave sexual favors to get roles. What could be more natural? Not saying natural is good, but I never said women were good. Men imposed Divine Law on their lawlessness and the West was made.
I was at a party. The host had been in Holyweird for decades.
He said ‘200 male actors, all had done gay for favors.’ or done whatever.
i wont mention names, here. Big names.
Malthuss,
A similar story. In the early 90’s I spent some time in LA, as a consultant. My co-worker grew up in the LA area, and had relatives still there. One, a cousin, was one of the Hollywood Handsome, Husky Hazel-eyed and Hairy Chested leads in a once popular ’50’s Tee Vee series…played Jim Bowie, or some such. The cousin was, at one time, approached by Rock Hudson, who promised him a good shot at a movie career for… accommodations….the cousin refused, and has not worked in the business in decades.
He said he wonders about it often….Should he have taken one for the team? Fame, fortune, a shot at being a prince of the city?
It was basically what Harry W was offering…a chance at wealth and fame for a bit of unpleasant work….
“Gesetze sind wie Würste, man sollte besser nicht dabei sein, wenn sie gemacht werden.”
Trans: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
Misattributed to Otto von Bismarck
Respect? C’mon Otto, that is so 19th Century Prussia.
HOwever the same and a corollary concept is also true for succeeding in places like Trumpville, Wash. D.C. and Hollyweird.
One, like your co-worker’s cousin, might have to TAKE a sausage to make a law, $$$ deal, or film.
The Weinstein situation proves that virtue signaling is more important than virtues, and even actions.
So long as he conspicuously consumed the platform of the left, of the progressives, his actions were dismissed.
His heart, at least symbolically, and more importantly, his wallet and mouth, were in the right corner.
Elitist. The arts. Artists (tenuous as it is the claim of movie producers and actors).
Mixed race candidates.
Female ones.
It didn’t matter who they are underneath.
The sleaze, graft, inauthenticity.
It only matters what they symbolize.
Black
Woman
Open
People need to relate. Need to demonstrate through code where they stand.
Patagonia
Craft Beer
CSAs and Farmer’s Markets
Criterion Collection
NPR
Reduce Reuse Recycle
Montessori
Lululemon
Tesla
Ivy League
Pour over coffee
Organic
Mezcal
Arc’teryx
Hope
BLM
I’m With Her
# I believe her
I’m tired of describing American politics, and I think readers of this blog too.
Initially, my goal was to combat the culturological consequences of the Fourth Crusade, and American policy in this sense has lost its acuteness.
Trump fights like a lion, and the war he leads is a continuation of the war that until recently was led by Russia. And after Las Vegas this war has acquired a bloody character and will soon spread to the whole world.
But Russia seems to be getting a geopolitical respite, and even Ukraine will now decline in the level of hostility. And the attacks on the Katechon, which I hope Russia still is, will be of a culturological nature, the purpose of which will be to force Russia to renounce its role of the Katechon.
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/light-it-up/#comment-322061
Hillary Clinton obviously decided that Trump in this role will become an easier prey because of his lack of historical roots.
For the reasons outlined above, all anti-American propaganda in Russia is now being led by Hillary Clinton, behind which stands the Western Black Project = Islamic State + Millennial Reich. Thus, the goal of anti-American propaganda, combined with anti-Russian provocations, is the sabotage of Russia’s union with Trump’s America (same as Roosevelt’s America) against the union of the Reich and the Islamic State.
Hard for even me to interpret your cryptic posts Finca, so I can’t be sure what you’re getting at here. But let me just make a few points, if you’ll be so kind to indulge me.
Hillary Clinton, just to be clear, is nothing more than a figurehead for whatever sort of movement she purports to represent. Much in the same way that “Janos, the Long Winded and Ignorantly Opinionated,” purports to represent the “Great White Race” on these boards. It’s a self-nominated and approved ceremonial position of sorts, if you will.
Not sure what you mean by Western Black Project (Black Ops?), nor Islamic State or (to a lesser extent) Millennial Reich, but I think you’d have to offer up a WHOLE LOT of evidence to support the idea that Trump’s America in ANY WAY resembles Roosevelt’s America before I could ever go along with that line of thinking.
But just for the record, I trust that you know that the “Islamic State” is largely a CIA created and funded fiction, whose only purpose is to keep dumb-assed Americans stirred up and in fear, although I think we’re on the same wavelength regarding the Millennial Reich.
Otherwise, party on dude!
Hillary Clinton is a woman in room 237.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Purgbylvs
https://dailystormer.ai/trump-doubles-down-on-call-to-revoke-broadcast-licenses-for-jew-run-fake-news-media/
Hail Trump! Hail our People!
Talk is cheap. Were you at Charlottesville, standing stalwartly behind your shield ready to kick some liberal ass? Or are you one of those keyboard commandos, with a big mouth & no balls? Put some time in on the Eastern front, & then maybe I’ll listen to you.
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself”. That is exactly what’s happening here right now. See ya on the barricades (I’ll bet not).
Say thanks to Truman for opening the floodgate of European nazi filth to America – now they think they are ready to take over.
Eastern front? You wish. I don’t think there will be Eastern front.
Nazi Filth? Millions of ?–I wont post the word.
Actually, save those thanks for my faithful servant Allen Dulles (he’s right here with me now), to whom most of the credit is due.
He’d also like to add that the idea of racial (white) purity was always an inherently WESTERN idea in general, which the Deutsche, thanks to young master Adolph (also with me here), were just “lucky” enough to be the earliest adopters of.
No, it didn’t quite work out, thanks to those pesky Russians, who were willing to sacrifice so much for so little, as the Americans and Brits were so rightfully and surreptitiously pissed off that their diabolical plans for Nazi conciliation all came to naught. But that’s just how human history goes, doesn’t it? One damn thing after another, after which a suitably coherent “history” is concocted to tell the young’ns before bedtime and send them off to dreams of future madness.
But to Truman: he was a spineless little weasel chosen specifically for those qualities. He’s here with me as well, although I never acknowledge the little prick.
Scratch, you made me recall old joke of pre-computer age:
— Watson, what are you playing? Beethoven’s Appassionata?
— No, just banging on the keys…
Yeah, no it doesn’t work that way. The Sword is nothing without the Pen. And yes, to your point, the Pen is nothing without the sword. Mind and Body so to speak. From another angle, the Pen is a sword that spills ink. And the Sword is a Pen that writes in blood. Always inter-connected.
I do appreciate your courage. But I’m not sure it will be used in the right direction. At the demonstrations, White Nationalists have been harassed and attacked by muscle heads like you, Zio-Patriots in other words, guys who think tragically think that WW2 was a Victory and think America has nothing to do with the White Race and don’t even see saving it as a worthwhile issue. Indeed they see it as “White Supremacy” – a phrase the Jews have been in their muscle heads.
To you point: I’m not that big or strong or trained, but I have intervened when White guys were about to get stomped by minorities.
Bourdain is sick about Clinton not knowing about Weinstein’s problem.
Who is sick over this overrated cook’s and his crocodile tears not knowing that Hillary is a lifelong enabler of sexual predation?
Akmofo keeps talking about something called “Hebrew nationalism.”
And I thought that was the prefered supplier of delicatessen alimentation in Trumpville? Can someone please advise me on this?
On the other hand, no confusion about continued Joy in Trumpville’s southernmost, Battery Park adjacent, “working” neighborhood.
The NASDAQ can just about taste 7,000, as nearly each day of this Autumn’s trading has resulted in fresh highs for the tech-heavy index. Good times and yuge bonuses are in the bag (count on it barring a depression and nuke war) for the wanton wastrels, wunderkind and wolves of Wall Street.
(Something about the gold-backed Renminbi for oil trade was just mentioned as the possible trick or treat, turd-n-the-punchbowl for the moneymasters. )
https://dailystormer.ai/weinstein-lose-his-mind-and-tries-to-hijack-random-goys-car/
Poor Harvey’s not doing too good. Good.
He is not so important. If goys want to watch CNN or whatever, thats up to them.
If they go see ‘Hamilton,’ thats their choice.
Don’t try to get selfies with Bull Elk during the mating season, or at any other time for that matter.
https://conservativetribune.com/citizens-in-1-small-town/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=romulusconstitution&utm_campaign=can&utm_content=2017-10-12
In other news, the Mayor of San Juan was photographed wearing a t shirt that said “Nasty” – a total victory for Trump. They make it so easy. When he was down there, he was throwing rolls of toilet paper to the Puerto Ricans who eagerly caught them. How can you defeat a guy who is this cool?
GOT EMP??
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/congress-warned-north-korean-emp-attack-would-kill-90-of-all-americans/article/2637349
In the old republic, NETWORK globalists enjoy financing, manufacturing, exporting, profiting, and fomenting doom, death, and destruction, in the self-appointed belief the reduction of human population is the proper way to sustain Earth.
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. Members enjoy a career in methods of spontaneous cooperation in the discovery and development of processes that achieve a well-defined whole.
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
LIVING.
In the old republic, members are indoctrinated to living in fear, with scarcity and survival of the fittest as the theme, and enjoy choosing destructive competition in the pursuit of personal advancement, at the expense of humanity.
In the New Republic, members are indoctrinated to living in charge, with abundance and survival of humanity as the theme, and enjoy choosing constructive competition in the pursuit of the advancement of humanity.
http://funwithdad.net/funwithdad1alive.htm
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
“Likewise, if the Communists win, I’m toast.” –Janos
The 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will be held in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, opening on 18 October 2017.
Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics of China, reportedly said the country will have no problem meeting or beating its growth target of around 6.5 percent this year.
When was the last time the USA had 6.5 percent growth? Capitalism, as Marx predicted, is a losing proposition. Communism, as Communist China has shown, is the way forward.
Capitalism cannot compete with Communism. The USA is bankrupt. Communist China is booming. Communist China Is now the leader of the ‘free trade’ world.
There is no joy in Trumpville. Under loser Trump last quarter’s growth rate came in at 1.4 percent.
And under loser Trump, the USA economy posted its first job losses in seven years. So much for electing a spoiled narcissist businessman… with no governmental experience… and no military experience.
Trump is destroying America.
CASHLESS IS THE CRAZE!!
In the old republic, the assignment of a QR scan code to every product, service, and human, has enormous benefit to those that enjoy accelerating the suppression of Liberty…..and when the electronic infrastructure is hacked, real cash remains king.
https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/what-chinas-nearly-cashless-society-looks-like/
-T
Sent From the New Republic.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nv8sko6hpqm6tir/New%20Republic%20rev123.pdf?dl=0
ah, janet, you one ignorant slut!!
onehunglo speak as native Chinese citizen and former member communist party….
why you think MILLIONS of Chinese lined up to emigrate to America??
that the problem…..ignorant slut like you not think!!!
only spout propaganda on behalf of power.
onehunglo speak truth to power….
that ok.
let not you heart be troubled.
may God be with you.
-onehunglo
For the reasons outlined above, all anti-American propaganda in Russia is now being led by Hillary Clinton, behind which stands the Western Black Project = Islamic State + Millennial Reich. Thus, the goal of anti-American propaganda, combined with anti-Russian provocations, is the sabotage of Russia’s union with Trump’s America (same as Roosevelt’s America) against the union of the Reich and the Islamic State.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s bullet-ridden faces feature in latest ISIS propaganda that urges jihadists to ‘lie in wait and ambush’ the pair
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4977488/New-ISIS-propaganda-features-Trump-Putin.html
In that Union of Islamic State and Millennial Reich I am not sure that Reich is playing the leading role.
What a shame. Retreats and viniculture hobby projects of San Fran high(tech) society burn. Now the $45 of Napa plonk is going to cost $65.