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Markets

If you take your cues from Consensus Trance Central — the cable news networks, The New York Times, WashPost, and HuffPo — Trump is all that ails this foundering empire. Well, Trump and Russia, since the Golden Golem of Greatness is in league with Vladimir Putin to loot the world, or something like that.

Since I believe that the financial system is at the heart of today’s meta-question (What Could Go Wrong?), it would be perhaps more to the point to ask: what has held this matrix of rackets together so long? After all, rackets are characterized by pervasive lying and fraud, meaning their operations don’t add up. Things that don’t comport with reality are generally prone to failure so sooner or later they have to implode.

Financial markets have been surging supernaturally on “liquidity” since 2009 — and by “liquidity” I mean “money” (digital credit from thin air) supplied by the Federal Reserve, in rotation with the other sovereign central banks, BOE, ECB, BOJ, PBOC, from whence it pings ‘round the world, wherever the lure of the main chance sparkles. Trillions wafted into the stock and bond markets, levitating them as a sort of stage-managed misdirection from the sickening spectacle of wobbling real stuff economies. In 2017, The Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded an astounding 5,000 point year-on-year upzoom, with 12 months of gains and no loser months, and a string of 71 record highs.

America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, acted as if pumping up the stock markets was the only thing that mattered. The result was a Potemkin economy, a glittering Wall Street false-front with a landscape of “flyover” squalor and desolation behind. The Fed now works at cross-purposes with itself by raising the Fed Funds rate a quarter-point every few months, and supposedly “shrinking” (ha!) their balance sheet — dumping bonds onto the market plus “retiring” termed out bonds, which allows the Fed to disappear the principal paid by the borrowers, namely the US Treasury, or the quasi-governmental werewolf called Freddie Mac (The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), which bundles all kinds of janky mortgages into giant bonds the Fed buys in order to artificially pump up the real estate market. Did your eyes glaze over yet? That’s the great thing about finance: it’s bewildering, so that when shit goes wrong, nobody notices until its way too late.

What could go wrong with that program? Well, if you dump billions of bonds on the market, you will change the supply-and-demand equation in the direction of too much supply, and interest rates will have to rise when there isn’t enough bid from the demand side — especially if the US Treasury is creating ever more new bonds to make up for ever-greater deficit spending at the same time the Fed dumps bonds into the market. And if, for instance, the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond goes up past 3.00 percent, well that may be all she wrote for the US government’s ability to service its monstrous debt. And it may be tits up for the real estate sector, too, because mortgage rates will rise, and fewer people will buy houses. The Fed’s latest actions boil down to a lame attempt to have some maneuvering room to once again lower interest rates and refill their balance sheet via a QE-4 orgy when the economy heads south in a way that even the US Bureau of Labor Statistics can’t obfuscate.

The ECB and the BOJ have already made noises about curtailing their vacuuming up of securities, so the liquidity rotation may end altogether. The new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has at its centerpiece the lowering of corporate income tax from 35 to 21 percent. The hidden agenda may be to hope this can act as a substitute for the dwindling central bank liquidity injections. The tax cuts and other new gimmicks would increase the federal debt by at least $1 trillion over a ten year period (and, by unofficial estimates, probably much more) paving the road to national bankruptcy with good intentions. But, of course, quite a few wise men in this culture have declared that deficits don’t matter. My own view is that they don’t matter until they do, and then you’re pretty screwed.

In the background of all this is an array of perilous real world events playing out that include especially potential conflict around North Korea and the Middle East. China’s banking system is a fun-house of scams and dodges that don’t add up anymore than ours do. The whole wicked pottage of EU / Brexit issues simmers away, along with the EU’s fatal flaw of lacking any fiscal discipline among member nations, so government spending has no relation to sovereign borrowing. NATO’s aggressive military posturing on Russia’s borders is pointless, stupid, dishonest, and provocative. Nobody knows what kind of gambit Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia will try next. Iran demands to be recognized as the regional hegemon. And our dear exceptional nation, with its restless Deep State black box “assets,” is capable of all sorts of mischief at home and abroad.

Any of these things could shove American markets into criticality, as if they don’t have enough built-in fragility already. Manipulation of the markets by the Fed and its water-carrying Too Big To Fail partners have deprived the markets of their chief function: price discovery, the ability to discern what things are really worth. Markets are therefore functionally useless and their uselessness is a giant hazard. No society that depends on money can work for long if nobody knows the true value of things, including the value of money itself. The price of attempting to live in a culture of pervasive dishonesty is that a re-set is inevitable. When it happens, it will be hugely destabilizing.

I expect the DJIA to move down sharply before the third quarter, rebound a little, and eventually bottom at 14,000 or lower by this time next year. I’ll call the S & P to settle in under 1,000. The NASDAQ may be the weakest, since its FAANG members — Facebook , Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google (aka Alphabet)— are among the most mis-valued stocks, and the most based on vaporous products and services. Call NASDAQ to land at 2,700. Calling for a US dollar index (DXY) of 79 by December. Calling for gold $2,500 and silver $60 twelve months from now. There it is, like so much meat on the table.

Bitcoin and other cryptos have a superficial appeal as a wealth safe haven supposedly out-of-reach of avaricious governments — if you don’t consider everything else that’s wrong with it. (Yesterday, Dec 31, Australia’s biggest banks froze the accounts of Bitcoin investors.) I think the safe haven idea will prove fallacious. Governments are already finding ways to interfere, using taxation schemes and shutting down exchanges. Bitcoin’s other claims on “moneyness” look bogus as well. It’s too unstable to be a medium of exchange, and too difficult to even access when need to sell, and you certainly can’t price anything in it as it shoots up and crashes every day. Bitcoin went way up because people — or maybe just algorithms — saw it going way up, so they hitched a ride. The rush to the exits will be brutal. Its final resting place will be zero, but perhaps not without a trip or two to nosebleed levels in 2018, especially as other markets wobble in the first half of the year. Bitcoin $50-K wouldn’t surprise me. But I’m not among the buyers. Enjoy the show.

2018 is the year that fragilities in the shale oil industry challenge the narrative of the “miracle.” The industry hasn’t made a net red-cent since it ramped up ten years ago. It’s been running on debt, a lot of it junk financing (high-yield, high-risk, covenant-lite). The producers have been fracking and pumping all-out for several years to maximize their cash flow to service their loans. But these shale wells deplete by 80 percent on average after the first three years, and have to be replaced by expensive new wells, which require ever more debt financing. The truth is that shale oil and other “unconventional” oils just don’t pencil out economically. Their success in recent years was part-and-parcel with the central bank credit flood. As that credit flow gets choked down in 2018, oil companies will go out of business at an impressive rate. If the price of oil goes up to $80-a-barrel, as a result, it will be very damaging to what remains of the US economy of real stuff.

US Politics

 Donald Trump survived in office a whole year. Imagine that! After the 2016 election, I figured that the top military brass would give him the bum’s rush inside of three months, in short a coup d’état. Their action actually has been much more subtle: they just ring-fenced him with generals. Since he seems to regard them as his generals (“my generals”), then he’s apparently okay with that, like a boy in the nursery with his toy soldiers. And apart from the fact that the constitution calls for civilian control of the military and not vice-versa, I’m okay with that… for now. He’s got chaperones, at least. This is admittedly not the ideal disposition of American political power.

I did not vote for the Golden Golem, and I don’t esteem his abilities, but the incessant and rather hysterical attacks on his legitimacy, especially by members of Consensus Trance Central, display a mendacity out of George Orwell’s direst dreams. I never believed in the ludicrous Russian collusion fantasy, and find it difficult to believe that the editors of The New York Times do. So far, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted two high-profile grifters (Manafort and Gates) on financial shenanigans involving business dealings in Russia dating from years before the 2016 election, plus one National Security Advisor (Michael Flynn) for speaking with the Russian Ambassador (who, exactly, are foreign ambassadors supposed to speak to if not government officials? And otherwise what are they here for?), and one entry-level foreign policy wonk (George Papadopoulos) who never even met Trump. I believe the grave and solemn Mueller is on a fishing expedition. Aficionados of DOJ tactics know that prosecutors can always fetch up the proverbial ham sandwich to indict, if there’s nothing else at hand.

Then there is the very troubling behavior of FBI employees (Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe), plus some members of Obama’s inner circle (Susan Rice, Samantha powers) in the twilight months of his term. And remember, Robert Mueller has been the erstwhile James Comey’s mentor and true-blue friend going way back. It just looks flat-out like a bunch of Deep State lifers are out to get the Golden Golem. The so-called “optics” are terrible.

Since crashing stock markets are liable to turn Trump into a mad bull, at the same time that Mueller will have to put up or shut up, I predict that long about the vernal equinox Mueller will come up with some Mickey Mouse charges against Trump, or his people, and be promptly fired by the president. General Flynn and the baby foreign policy wonk will be pardoned, and perhaps others. Probably not Manafort and his chum (though their prosecution might fail.) Democrats will go apeshit and batshit both, with talk of impeachment and constitutional crisis, but I don’t think any of that will stick. Congress may have more to worry about with tanking markets and other symptoms of an incipient economic train wreck. The effort to dump Trump would aggravate the tanking markets.

It is also plausible after the disclosures of recent months that the Russian meddling investigation could blow back on Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, Clinton allies, and possibly even some of Obama’s people (maybe even the former president himself). The evidence for Obama-era FBI involvement in the Christopher Steele file is already out there. There is yet to be a satisfactory elucidation of the Loretta Lynch / Bill Clinton Phoenix tarmac meet-up, nor to the circumstances around HRC’s lost emails and private server, nor the Anthony Weiner laptop, nor to the Uranium One matter. The casual observer sees much more circumstantial criminality in these matters so far than any Trump collusion-with-Russia hypothesis provides.

I venture to predict that ex-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigns her House seat in disgrace as the case of her Pakistani grifter IT aide, Imran Awan, moves into the courts.

Trump firing Mueller will drive his Dem-Prog adversaries to new heights of hysteria but their wrath may be so ineffectual that they will fall back on their stock-in-trade, ginning up more sexual panic. This calls into question the pathetic state of the Democratic Party leadership. It’s so sclerotic these days that it makes the Whigs of 1856 look dynamic. They have no program for the compound emergencies the nation faces. The party machinery is in the hands of bought-and-paid-for errand boys, gender crybabies, and race hustlers. Their allies at The New York Times and CNN look ever more ridiculous peddling daily paranoid fantasies and styling themselves as advocates for “the Resistance.” Their cadres in the Ivy League outposts have turned into the most shamelessly illiberal gang of intellectual despots since Mao’s Red Guard roamed the earth.

I’m not persuaded that the Dems will necessarily stomp Trump’s Republicans in the 2018 congressional and state races, as seems to be widely assumed for the moment. I’ll predict, rather, that in 2018 we get the first stirrings of a new party forming to battle both tired old clubs. Trump now “owns” the fate of the stock market and the economy it wags, having bragged on it all year. He and the Republicans will be blamed if it falls out of bed. But my gut feeling is that the voters are even more sick of the Democrats and their victim-mongering. Their coffers are empty, despite jumping through every hoop that Wall Street held out for them. (Did all the money disappear into the maw of the Clinton Foundation?) Finally, on a personal note, I blame them for driving a stake through Garrison’s Keillor’s heart with their reckless sexual witch-hunting, and I don’t forgive them for that, no matter how many tits he may have tried to touch backstage.

Elsewhere on This Planet

Economic savant and international man-of-mystery James Rickards says that Trump and his generals are going to whap North Korea upside its big chunky head soon after the winter Olympics are concluded in South Korea on February 25. But as Trump averred in the election campaign, he is not inclined to state in advance exactly what we might do in a military situation. Maybe the rumor is true that we have interesting new weapons capable of turning Little Rocket Man into a Post Toastie without harming the mass of innocent North Koreans. I’d have to give 50 percent odds that whatever we do in Korea turns out to be an epic illustration of Murphy’s Law, since our track record in foreign military adventures since VJ day in 1945 is pretty scant in the “win” column. The Balkan War, maybe… Bush One’s Gulf War sort of… Grenada (for Godsake)… what else…?

Kim Jung-un may not be able yet to deliver an atomic blast to Rodeo Drive, but he can likely lob one into Tokyo on a five minute flight path. Look at the map. The Japanese must be nervous about it. They were once a world-class military power, in case you don’t remember the banzai era. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to revise Japan’s pacifist constitution — engineered by US advisors during the post-war occupation — to allow for a robust military. I wouldn’t be surprised if something lethal jumps out of a lacquered black bento box in the direction of Pyongyang around the same time the US goes for that whap upside NK’s head.

And there’s Seoul, of course, less than 20 miles from the DMZ and within range of a supposedly huge array of North Korean heavy artillery. The theory is we have a slim window of opportunity to deal with this rascal before he equips himself to do some major mischief in the world. I don’t believe this is just a bunch of shuck-and-jive cooked up by the arms merchants and their friends. It’s real and existential and very messy. Something is going to happen there.

China has a pretty firm mutual defense treaty with North Korea, and perhaps reason to want to keep the regime up-and-running as a buffer zone. But do they really want to jump feet first into World War Three defending Kim? I guess we’ll find out. In the meantime, China’s president Xi Jinping has got enough on his plate trying to safely land the high-flying, but wobbling, debt-saturated Chinese economy. Odds are that it’s going to be a rough landing. In which case, maybe war is the answer, as a way of distracting the Chinese public’s attention. But what sort of war? Cyber-sabotage? EMP blackouts? Good old-fashioned mutual nuclear destruction? Grinding old-school land campaigns? Naval battles? It’s a dangerous game and Xi does not look like a risk junkie — more like prudent ole Uncle Xi. So I’ll predict that whatever blows on the Korean Peninsula, China will try to stay out of it, even if it makes faces and jumps up and down a bit.

Russia can only benefit from steering clear of war, though its recent offer to act as an intermediary between Kim and Trump was a smart move. (Maybe they remember how Teddy Roosevelt negotiated a peace settlement in the Russo-Japanese War of 1907.) They have little to lose and prestige to gain. Despite what you hear about the unholy thuggery of Vladimir Putin, it seems to me that what he wants most of all for his country is to attain the condition of a politically and economically normal nation — after the 75-year-long misadventure with communism. I suspect Putin and others in Russia would have liked the country to become more fully Europeanized in tone and style than it has been allowed to be, with NATO playing war games on Russia’s border, and US monkeyshines in Ukraine, and sanctions against it for really no good reason. So, Russia has been shoved back into its cubbyhole as a nation not quite of Europe, with sinister Byzantine overtones and ancient exotic Mongol influences.

This quasi-isolation has some benefits for Russia, for one, the imperative to develop businesses and industries for import-replacement, that is, for becoming more self-sufficient. Russia has a lot to work worth, with the world’s highest oil production, lots of ores and minerals, untold hydropower, and endless timber. It can make its own stuff, and Russian citizens are free to try starting businesses. The country may even benefit from climate change with expanded croplands. Russia is already approaching food self-sufficiency after the long catastrophe of soviet farm collectivization.

Meanwhile, Europe desperately needs Russia’s oil and natural gas, so they must know that using NATO troops and armor to make threats is a hollow gesture. Notice that Russia is stockpiling gold reserves, where the USA is just selling the stuff off. (China is stockpiling, too. Like mad.) When other currencies implode, there is reason to believe the world will be introduced to a gold-backed Ruble and Yuan, “money” backed by money. They’ll be able to buy stuff they need. Will we? Will a gold-backed currency shove aside the US dollar as world reserve currency? The precursor to that will be China’s effort to establish oil trade in its Yuan.

Europe has stumbled along economically for several years on Mario Draghi’s promise to “do whatever it takes” to keep the EU’s member nations from falling into the black hole of debt deflation, namely, buying every bond that the sovereign governments and corporations issue. That kept the game going, but the structural imbalances in EU banking are now so extreme that it is hard to see a way out besides an EU crackup. The Merkel-led immigration-and-refugee policy looked like a bad bet from the get-go and is liable to get worse when the whatever-it-takes liquidity dries up and the EU member countries fall into recession (or depression) and there’s no more money to pay for all those refugee settlement centers and the social services that have been provided. There won’t be enough gainful employment for Germans, Belgians, Frenchmen, and Swedes, let alone for immigrants and refugees.

I’ll predict that starting in 2018 we’ll see efforts to ramp up deportations of these newcomers. Racist? That will be the knee-jerk hue-and-cry. But the epithet is losing its punch as the effects of Merkel’s open door policy are felt on-the-ground in the obvious hostility, xenophobia, and aggression, displayed by Islamic settlers. The defeat of ISIS on the Middle East battlefields in 2017 suggests that they will be ramping up terror operations to Europe. European nationalism movements will grow in 2018 and gain intellectual respectability as the defense of European culture is taken seriously. Middle European states such as Hungary and Poland have not given in on the EU’s demand to accept immigrants and refugees from Islamic lands. Their example will be followed. Politicians in the rest of Europe will consider the “Just Say No” option.

The United Kingdom enters 2018 especially vulnerable to economic travail. The estimated cost of Brexit at tens of billions of pounds sterling, and the potential loss of business, especially banking, is one mighty headwind. The other, less talked about, is the dwindling of the UK’s oil and gas reserves. The equation is simple: fewer energy inputs equals lower economic activity. The only way around that is the popular central bank strategy of recent years: money-printing and accounting fraud. You can’t base an economy on that, and the truth will become painfully self-evident this new year in Great Britain.

Suddenly this last week of 2017, anti-regime demonstrations are busting out all over Iran. They are said to be protests over poor economic performance and the regime’s squandering of resources sponsoring mischief in other lands (Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, etc). Folks are getting killed in the streets. The Revolutionary Guard — the zealots who took our diplomatic personnel hostage in 1979 — have promised to squash the protest. Many Iranians must be good and goddam sick of mullahs and ayatollahs running the joint.

Otherwise, it’s beginning to look like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia (KSA) would like to rumble with Iran to beat back their influence outside their borders in the region. Iran has had plenty of opportunity to play with its military hardware in recent decades: in the Iran-Iraq War, arming Hezbollah to battle Israel, in support of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, and lately in Yemen’s civil war. KSA, on the other hand, has been buying jet planes and bombs from the US for decades, with nary a chance to put them to use. MBS seems eager to test-drive this schwag.

A real dust-up between the principals would put a lot of the world’s oil supply at risk if oil tanker shipping in the Persian Gulf were interrupted. China and Japan would bear the brunt, but the whole world would feel it. Kicking the clerics out of government in Iran might tone down the unnecessary religious hostilities between Sunni and Shiites that has played such a big part in the creation of failed states throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Iran has plenty of economic problems inside its own borders.

The disarray in other areas of the vast MENA region will continue in 2018, whether regime change in Iran happens or not. Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan are permanently failed states, with Egypt ever on the verge. Syria will stabilize as a much smaller economy, propped up by payments from Russia for hosting naval and air bases there. This part of the world has suffered ruinous population overshoot in the industrial age, especially the states that produced oil. The desert ecology can’t support all these people as the industry falters and shrinks. Even as the situation worsens, the swollen populations will generate more children. When they can no longer decant themselves into Europe, the real misery starts.

You may have forgotten there is a place called South America. Its many nations have been in a pleasant political coma for a decade or so, except Venezuela, which is in cardiac arrest, organ failure, and brain death. There will be a bloody revolution there this year, and Venezuela’s oil industry will be crippled, adding to the world’s oil supply problems.

The Closing of the American Mind

2017 was a spectacular year for intellectual collapse among the political Left, but especially for its subsidiaries on campus. The trauma of Donald Trump’s election victory put this faction into a fugue state in which no opportunity for coercion and persecution of imagined enemies could be missed. The victim-oppressor politics spawned by the critical-theory-for-lunch-bunch has produced an ideology in which “inclusion” means segregated dorms, racially separate graduation ceremonies, and (at Harvard) closing down age-old men’s and women’s voluntary social associations. And “diversity” means as long as you express the exact same ideas we do. The presidents, deans, and faculty of colleges around the country have turned into the most obdurate enemies of free thought since the Spanish Inquisition, a gang of cowards and villains who disgrace the meaning and purpose of higher Ed.

Highlights of the year in Social Justice Warrior Land include the violence around Charles Murray’s lecture at Middlebury, the Antifa riots at UC Berkeley, the “Day of Absence” ritual at Evergreen U in Washington State where white people were banished from campus, and the Lindsey Shepherd star chamber tribunal at Laurier University in Toronto (I know, that’s outside the USA). In all of these cases, college presidents, deans, and faculty acted contemptibly, supporting coercion, persecution, antipathy to due process of law, the willful betrayal of common decency, and a folio of shockingly stupid ideas — such as the proposition from the chair of the Purdue University Engineering Department (one Donna Riley) that academic rigor is a symptom of “white male heterosexual privilege.”

As it happens, higher education is approaching its own state of implosion, since college has become, most of all, a money-grubbing racket tuned to the flow of exorbitant student loans for exorbitant college costs. Higher Ed’s fate is tied to the financial sector, especially the bond market, since college loans are lately being bundled into janky bonds just like the NINJA mortgages of 2007 were. The entire US college industry has been in a hypertrophic blow-off for decades, and the gross expansion of facilities, programs, and costs has developedan inverse relationship to the value of a college education. I predict that a shocking number of small four-year colleges will go out of business this year. Students who had not completed their degree requirements will just be shit out of luck.

Concluding Thoughts

2018 will be a tumultuous year of shake-outs and loss. The watchword for the year should be “lean.” Individuals will be shoved into leaner modes of living. Companies will suffer despite the new lower tax. Financial rewards will be lean. Nations will have to seriously start planning to get by on less, to downscale, and jettison programs that don’t jibe with the mandates of reality. 2018 is the year that the world comes un-stuck from the past ten years of pretending that it’s possible to get something for nothing. For 2018, it’s full speed ahead into the long emergency.


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James Howard Kunstler is the author of many books including (non-fiction) The Geography of Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, Home from Nowhere, The Long Emergency and the four-book series of World Made By Hand novels, set in a post economic crash American future. His most recent book is Living in the Long Emergency; Global Crisis, the Failure of the Futurists, and the Early Adapters Who Are Showing Us the Way Forward. Jim lives on a homestead in Washington County, New. York, where he tends his garden and communes with his chickens.

556 Responses to “Forecast 2018 — What Could Go Wrong?”

  1. manysummits January 1, 2018 at 10:10 am #

    “For 2018, it’s full speed ahead into the long emergency.” (James)

    Sounds about right Jim,

    Happy New Year

    • K-Dog January 1, 2018 at 2:24 pm #

      “For 2018, it’s full speed ahead into the long emergency.”

      The line grabbed me to and probably anybody else who read the book but for now we lull in Kardashian holidays.

      James threw enough mud at the wall so something has to stick. He has his bases covered and he did say go ahead and believe the opposite of what he would post here last week in his las article. I don’t care about the accuracy right now. It was well written and for now the taste of that is more important than the accuracy.

      Thank you James for the new info such as what is happening in Iran among other things.

      Happy New Year to ALL

    • Gonga Din January 2, 2018 at 1:35 pm #

      Aye, and if the actual events don’t bear out, I am sure truth and reason have died. In any case, it’s good consciousness elevation.

  2. Ol' Scratch January 1, 2018 at 10:29 am #

    Thanks for the hard work Jim. With Greer’s prognosis due out on Wednesday, should make for some good comparative reading.

    As for the job of forecasting itself: who in the hell knows anymore? 2017 marked the official slipping down the rabbit hole, and it’s all through the looking glass – darkly! – now.

    • ozone January 1, 2018 at 11:42 am #

      Ahhh, thanks for the reminder and zeitgeist adjustment, Ol’ Scratch.
      May you have a productive New Year — I’m sure there will be plenty of deals to propose (via a buttload of wishful and delusional thinking) and mountainous piles of shocked and bewildered souls to be swept up! 😉

      • Ol' Scratch January 1, 2018 at 12:22 pm #

        Ain’t that the truth! On Greer’s recommendation, I’m reading John Galbreath’s The Great Crash 1929. Then as now, people who should have known better succumbed to the foolishness of get rich schemes of every manner and stripe. Hardly surprising though when you stop to consider that our entire debt-based financial system and the industrial resource extraction economy it fuels are both nothing more than giant, elaborate Ponzi schemes as well. With so much foolishness out there, it’s hardly surprising that so many would be willing to trade their very souls for a piece of the pie as well. But hey, it makes the deal, it pays the price, as I’m fond of saying.

    • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 12:13 pm #

      Second that thanks on the hard work.

      As we all sit here and ponder how it can continue to degrade and never seem to be even close to collapse, our discussions and my experiences in local government are starting to paint a clearer picture of what exactly is happening, at least for me. As people lose their homes and/or walk away from them, the change cannot be seen by the texting commuters that fly past them late for work. All seems the same, all is ok. Houses do not disappear of jump up and down to signal “danger Will Robinson, danger”. Some institutions that hold the paper actually fill these lost income sources with families (especially police families) who are allowed to live rent free to maintain the structures if nothing else. Displaced home owners who move into Mommy’s basement or take up cheap rentals now have more cash (credit) to spend on everything from college for the kids to new 8 year car loans. As homeowners bail out of “ownership” and hedge funds and lawyer owned LLC’s buy up properties and turn them into rentals and group homes, dwindling home ownership numbers has signaled a new tactic for Trenton. Governor-elect Pot Head has promised and will deliver an assault on the remaining homeowners through increased property taxes fueled by smaller or no state aid to municipalities and through accelerating the “affordable” (rental) housing construction all at the expense of home owners. So as the situation degrades the appearances of normalcy remains. Nobody sees it, nobody cares, off to work, two jobs now instead of one.

      On the World scene, Iran and the ME will always be the place to watch for the main event. Surely the ghost of Allen Dulles still haunts the palaces of Tehran in ecstasy as violence and “revolution” once again appear at least to be back in style. All in all, the New Year will be just like the Old Year, just a little more stinky, a bit more ugly and less prosperous for the bulk of the population just enough to allow us all to take it and hope that this is the last hosing we will get. In the end, no one will care how bad it gets for the next guy as long as it not as bad for them. Pick ’em off one by one and no resistance can be had. When each asshole is the center of it’s own universe, galactic conquest can be had one universe at a time. Resistance is indeed futile.

      • Robert White January 1, 2018 at 7:43 pm #

        You need to watch Frank Capra’s Sgt. York again, Walter B.
        The movie watching American public must know how to shoot turkeys by now given the amount of people that have seen that movie over the last decades since Capra produced it, eh.

        If Americans are indeed oblivious enough to get picked off then I’m sure Chuckles Darwin would say that is adaptive on scale with evolution. Herd behaviour is not adaptive when the herd is followed like Lemmings, but human beings have the capacity to think outside of herd mentality when their lives are at stake. Most know on a general level that they too are at risk in a system at risk.

        RW

  3. shotho January 1, 2018 at 10:40 am #

    Nary a hopeful prospect in sight, unless you consider debt default to be hopeful in the sense that it must happen in order for the world’s nations to restore sanity in its dealings with each other and the billions of its inhabitants

  4. venuspluto67 January 1, 2018 at 10:47 am #

    I agree with you about the current state of the Democratic Party. The last time Governor Scott Walker was up for regular re-election, the Dems imposed from the top down with no discussion and no real alternatives, the lamest, most pathetic candidate they possibly could. (Can you say, “taking a dive”, boys and girls and non-binaries?) This pretty much killed any willingness I had to place any faith and trust in this cadaver of a political party, and State Senator Julie Lassa drove the final nail into that coffin by killing in committee a bill that would have legalized medical marijuana in Wisconsin. Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye, he said in his letter!

    And this upcoming election cycle in Wisconsin? It would appear that we have a first-class clown-car Democratic primary taking place for the gubernatorial race, with sixteen or maybe seventeen candidates throwing their hats into the ring. Clown-car primaries do not make for a strong showing for a political party in the following primary election.

    To be honest, the “bat-shit and ape-shit” behavior of the authoritarian left has turned them into a piss-poor counterfeit of the neo-cons, complete with the aggressive stupidity I have until now exclusively associated with the dumb rednecks who need Rush and Fox News to say what two-plus-two equals today. It doesn’t exactly make me want to run out to the polls and fill in the arrow on the ballot for the Democratic Party.

  5. lateStarter January 1, 2018 at 10:50 am #

    2018 – It smells a lot like 1928.

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    • malthuss January 1, 2018 at 12:12 pm #

      You must be kidding. Things are much worse now, imo.

      • lateStarter January 1, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

        No. I am not kidding. While I agree that the scale this time will make the events that played out back then seem like a walk in the park, the general mood is similar. As our host points out: What could go wrong?

      • windward January 1, 2018 at 7:10 pm #

        “…We can devise all the clever schemes imaginable to clean up politics and get money out of campaigns, but it won’t work until the American people collectively give up on certain fond illusions: the Horatio Alger myth, American Exceptionalism, and the whole mass of magical thinking that boils down to the belief that God loves America because we’re so virtuous, handsome, and smart, and that we, too, could win the lottery. Well, we’re not necessarily any of those things. The truth is that we lucked into adverse possession of a mostly empty continent in a temperate zone with lots of resources, and straddled east and west by two huge moats. We had firearms and resistance to smallpox, and the original owners didn’t. Virtue had very little to do with it…”

        http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/10661-stone-cold-sober-an-interview-with-mike-lofgren-author-of-the-party-is-over

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 11:42 am #

          “Virtue had very little to do with it…””

          …And it never does….

        • lateStarter January 2, 2018 at 12:43 pm #

          Thanks for the link to the Lofgren interview.

  6. Paulo January 1, 2018 at 10:52 am #

    Terrific job with this one. I find absolutely no fault with any of your ‘guesses’, except for all those unknown unknown unknowns. 🙂 Great work, as usual.

    I wouldn’t mind seeing the Market collapse for two reasons. One, it would be great to see Trump wear that one, or hear who he blames it on. Two, it’s just so goddamn phony and meaningless as a measure of how business actually works; you know that quaint old idea of seeing a need, save startup funds or obtain financing, build and sell a product/service, and pay back the investors with a fair return? Instead….

    Speaking of quaint, after 8 years of Obama and 1 of Trump the old GW looks like an old fireside Grampa in comparrison. You could actually see through him as he talked about ‘his base’ and how much money they would make. At least people are actually seeing the Clintons for what they are these days and understand how Obama was in the pockets of the banks.

    Now, if someone would just hack into Trump’s tax returns my year would be complete.

    When Carter was forced out so was decency. It’s been downhill for a long long time…and speeding up big time.

    • windward January 1, 2018 at 7:26 pm #

      That’s right about Carter. He told us what we needed to hear and Reagan told us what we wanted to hear.

      About seeing a need and trying to do something about it, I wonder whether you have tried it. If so, did you succeed and how hard was it?

      • aibohphobia January 2, 2018 at 2:09 pm #

        “seeing a need and trying to do something about it, I wonder whether you have tried it. If so, did you succeed and how hard was it?”

        Yup, done that. I once knew an illegal alien from Barbados who came to the US and started a courier company. She hired Americans to run the packages around. I tried to get her into a couple of “Women in Business” groups; found an immigration lawyer to try to get her a way to legalize her status–She WAS an employer after all, and if the US kicked her out there would be five unemployed Americans shortly after that. Nothing worked as advertised, and she finally told me, “You are very sincere, and I can tell you are trying very hard to help me, but none of your ideas seem to work.”

        • windward January 2, 2018 at 7:46 pm #

          That’s what I have found. The resistance to anything new and the iron grip most people have on what they know or believe is the first and greatest obstacle to progress. If you can overcome that the rest is easy. If you live that long.

  7. 100th Avatar January 1, 2018 at 11:00 am #

    Some fragile people used social media to express how deeply offended they were by NYTimes photos that showed chopsticks upright or leaning on a bowl accompanying an article about an asian steak house or something. deeply offended. snarky comments ensued. photo retracted.

    victimhood epoch

    • harryflashmanhigson January 1, 2018 at 11:45 pm #

      It’s because it’s part of the funeral/death rituals in Japan. It’s a big deal here YOU DO NOT STICK CHOPSTICKS IN YOUR RICE! They take it seriously.

      • 100th Avatar January 2, 2018 at 12:15 pm #

        That doesn’t mean EVERYONE MUST!

      • Walter B January 3, 2018 at 9:12 am #

        Bloody Lance, is it you? I thought Fetnab did you in.

  8. DurangoKid January 1, 2018 at 11:07 am #

    Is it just a coincidence the western press version of the Iranian protesters’ complaints are congruent with the Washington Consensus? Specifically, ‘Iran is not supposed to behave like we do.’ Seems like the thin end of the wedge.

    • Ol' Scratch January 1, 2018 at 12:33 pm #

      Not buying any of it either. No doubt the three letter agencies are knee deep in that mess, as I believe they are in North Korea as well. I’d go so far as to guess that the Lil Fat Man is even dancing to their tune for being allowed to stay in power. He’s playing the part of comic book villain just a little too perfectly, I think.

      • outsider January 1, 2018 at 1:12 pm #

        The Iranian protests, coming as they have after Trump’s dirty trick move to decertify Obama’s hard won deal, are just too perfectly timed. Methinks it is the NGO’s (really just CIA fronts) doing their typical thing. What will they name this new Color Revolution – as it blows up in their face, just like the last one did early in Obama’s tenure?

        • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 2:43 pm #

          Yes, they’ve cut social media already. If the Colors, not all “peaceful students” either, persist, the Revolutionary Guard will kill hundred or thousands of them to maintain the Islamic State.

  9. michics January 1, 2018 at 11:08 am #

    Good over view Jim. I read it every year and appreciate the work you put into it. A couple points I’d like to make are that I’m continually struck by how uninformed the public is. Whenever any political discussion arises among my friends they reveal just how much they do not know about the world events. But yet they believe Trump will be the savior.
    Also if the stock market crashes it’s time to go open season on putting elites in jail for misdeeds. Take their mansions away from them and send the message to the business world to clean up their act. Oh, wait a minute. That would likely take the DOJ and Congress and they are politically corrupt. Oh well I can dream can’t I !!!

  10. hmuller January 1, 2018 at 11:21 am #

    JHK, good observations on the SJW crowd. They are the American Red Guard and like their namesakes are already turning on one another in chaotic self-destruction. Their values, goals, and beliefs never carried any weight among us deplorables in flyover country.

    Ditto with the Hollywood and media elite on their high moral horses preaching cultural Marxism – telling us what we should think, what we are allowed to say, and whom we should elect. They stand exposed for the wretched degenerates they are.

    2018 will be a year when even more which is hidden will be exposed. The political and financial elite have much to fear. Time to pack your bags for GITMO, Hillary and friends.

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  11. stelmosfire January 1, 2018 at 11:23 am #

    Here I sit all broken hearted paid my dime and only farted! I believe you may be right on the money this time JHK. Excellent job. I’m not prone to out loud laughter but this missive invoked several. Great job!.

    • windward January 1, 2018 at 7:35 pm #

      There goes Roadway a mile a minute,
      Big fuckin’ rig and nothin’ in it.

      • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 11:46 am #

        There goes Roadway a mile a minute,
        Big fuckin’ rig and nothin’ in it.

        Windward,

        Very esoteric comment…you must be or have been a trucker….

        • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 12:02 pm #

          There goes Roadway a mile a minute,
          Big fuckin’ rig and nothin’ in it. – wind

          ============

          I love short pithy poems like this.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 6:56 pm #

            Q,
            There once was a man from Nantucket…

            I got a million of them!

        • windward January 2, 2018 at 7:49 pm #

          elysianfield, I did use a truck stop restroom once.

  12. ozone January 1, 2018 at 11:31 am #

    Jim,
    Thanks for venturing into the unknown future with a good will and some objective addition and multiplication… and we’ll not overlook things exponential while we’re at it! (Not an easy thing to gauge.)

    As to this very important tidbit:

    “I’m not persuaded that the Dems will necessarily stomp Trump’s Republicans in the 2018 congressional and state races, as seems to be widely assumed for the moment. I’ll predict, rather, that in 2018 we get the first stirrings of a new party forming to battle both tired old clubs. Trump now “owns” the fate of the stock market and the economy it wags, having bragged on it all year. He and the Republicans will be blamed if it falls out of bed. But my gut feeling is that the voters are even more sick of the Democrats and their victim-mongering…”

    What I’ll be looking for (with popcorn and libations close to hand) is, once again, what will be the actual numbers of lumpen lumps emerging from their cocoons of consent-manufacturing infotainment to make their marks on ballots or press those touch-screen “buttons” of dubious validity? Exit polling numbers are getting harder and harder to find and I contend there is a very deliberate reason for it; a loss of faith (by simple accounting and percentages) that the democratic process can truly make changes for the betterment of the “little people’s” lives is something that those who were “duly elected” by the [supposed] people’s wishes would not like revealed.

    Regardless of an interesting new start-up party, if the whole shebang is perceived by us lumpies as thoroughly rigged and unaccountable, the “duly elected” are going to have an awful tough time claiming they have a mandate for *any* of their foolishness and venal collusions. This is a dangerous situation that can only fester and swell; lest we forget (and boy-howdy do we ever TRY), this nation’s citizenry is very well armed. It matters not the official story, that fella in Las Vegas had plenty of firepower on hand to get the job done, even without all the hoorah about “help”. Think of this little lesson if applied to the Washington landfill rat-shoot. It would become an untrustworthy, heavily fortified armed camp faster than you can say, “swamp critter vermin”.

    Will of the People, my ass…..
    (As an outstanding example, where the fuck did Barry O’Blammo come from anyway? Was no one else available or as slickly veiled to do Wall Street’s bidding? His role as an unknown quantity and excellent purveyor of snake oil probably had much to do with his incredible meteoric rise.)

    • outsider January 1, 2018 at 1:01 pm #

      It’s easy to dump on Barry’s eight lost years, but he did save us from Bomb Iran McCain and Bibi’s college buddy Romney. For that I will always be grateful, even as Obama did nothing to stem The Hegemon’s inexorable slide into the abyss.

      Barry also saved us from Hillary in ’08. In the primaries she actually received more votes than he did. That’s twice she received the most votes and lost. No wonder Hillary’s such a bitter old lady now.

      • ozone January 1, 2018 at 1:20 pm #

        outsider,
        I do take your point, but just take a look at those (ahem) “choices”, if you will!
        Thus is *my* point handily made. 😉

        A productive New Year to you… and don’t wait around for saviors or fixers! As JHK is urgently implying, time grows short.

  13. Bro Jobe January 1, 2018 at 11:38 am #

    “When other currencies implode, there is reason to believe the world will be introduced to a gold-backed Ruble and Yuan, ‘money’ backed by money. They’ll be able to buy stuff they need. Will we?”

    No. China and Russia also possess one great advantage over us, come Collapse: the military and police have the guns. Keep the army well fed and put them on the streets, and the mob will put up and shut up, even if they have recently acquired a lot of nice consumer goods. In the US it will be Mad Max time, at least as long as the gas and bullets are around.

    After an economic collapse, both nations have the manufacturing base we lack. Russia has oil, China tech to trade for it, and China has the navy to impose its will on the region to secure deep-water wells to keep the oil flowing.

    I also see 2018 getting ugly. Trump was just a symptom of our decline and desperation, North Korea just another brush war even if a nuke or two get dropped. In the end, Trump’s and Kim’s fates will be forgotten as the American project, as we knew it since 1945, winds down into a tragicomic last act.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 2:49 pm #

      They also don’t have primitive Blacks and Browns in every large and medium sized City just waiting for the mayhem to begin. But Russia does have a huge Muslim problem. Chechens are very dangerous to name just one Muslim group. And Moscow is full of them.

      • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 11:48 am #

        ” Chechens are very dangerous to name just one Muslim group. And Moscow is full of them.”

        Janos,
        I mentioned this to Finc, or one of his iterations, months past, and he opined that Chechens are not an issue….

      • cj969 January 4, 2018 at 2:12 pm #

        “primitive Blacks and Browns”

        Unlike those oh-so-sophisticated, Sherry-swilling Trump voters in Appalachia.

    • SuperDave January 2, 2018 at 2:22 pm #

      Me thinks you are not aware of Chinese navy. if we are to assume our host (JHK) is correct, and we end up living in a world of constrained petroleum…the Chinese Navy will not be an issue more than a few hundred miles from China. However, the US Navy (a largely nuclear navy) will be able to project force for a long while to come…The Chinese aircraft carrier uses gas fired boilers and its propulsion system is janky at best. They put to sea with a tug in their task force specifically for the carrier. They will not be forcefully taking anything by sea where deep water wells currently are.

      • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 6:58 pm #

        SD,
        Cruise missiles are the new carriers….

        • SuperDave January 3, 2018 at 10:17 am #

          Cruise missiles are very handy to blow thing…but without any Guided Missile Cruisers, is China going to be able to get them within range of anything to blow up…and Cruise missiles are not incredibly useful from taking hard assets you don’t want to destroy or for subduing(and enslaving) populations of resistant folks.

          • SuperDave January 3, 2018 at 10:18 am #

            Cruise missiles are very handy to blow things up…but without any Guided Missile Cruisers, is China going to be able to get them within range of anything to blow up…and Cruise missiles are not incredibly useful from taking hard assets you don’t want to destroy or for subduing(and enslaving) populations of resistant folks.

          • elysianfield January 3, 2018 at 11:19 am #

            SD,
            China will develop a blue water navy…but the new generation of cruise missiles put our carrier task forces at risk in the seas around their mainland.

  14. pequiste January 1, 2018 at 11:45 am #

    “What could go wrong?” JHK asks.

    Well, by the bleary vision resulting from a new year’s eve bender and the clear knowledge that another calendar cycle has begun —

    –almost everything! (Like Jim points out.)

    My joy at the prospect of Hillary’s right-hand girl, Huma Abedin ( with personal laptop sharing of state secrets with Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner) getting a turn under the microscope with possible dissection under a formal and proper criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, helps warm the cockles of my heart in this chilly first day of the year.

    Conjecturing all sorts of outcomes from a criminal indictment of Ms Abedin; could Mrs. Clinton also finally get a turn on the ducking stool?

  15. robert magill January 1, 2018 at 11:48 am #

    Actually 2018 doesn’t really begin until January 30th and Trump’s State of the Union offering. We won’t know until then if the US can survive the decade as a First World entity. I suspect that The Donald of old; the Deal -Maker- Artist- in- Chief will reappear with the goods.
    Look to the North for our salvation. My totally humble prognostication.

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    • outsider January 1, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

      Ah, Trump’s SOTU speech. That’s one speech that I happily miss each year. I can’t stand all the hyper partisan standing O’s that the GOP will explode into on cue. I wonder if Ryan and McConnell feel at all uncomfortable as the gullible public stares at their ugly mugs for an hour while The Donald bloviates. It was even worse when brainless Princess Pelosi was sitting back there.

      I applaud and enjoy your annual efforts at prognostication, Mr. Kunstler, even if predicting the near-term future is a near futile endeavor. If only one or two of your observations come to pass, you have done a heck of a job.

    • Elrond Hubbard January 1, 2018 at 1:05 pm #

      Look to the North? I’m nobody’s idea of a saviour, but I’ll do what I can. 🙂

      Here’s one suggestion: the U.S. could amend its constitution and replace the ‘state of the union’ report with a requirement that the President present himself or herself on a regular basis, live and in person, and respond to verbal questions from Congress. The presidency used to fulfill the ‘state of the union’ requirement with an annual written report, but this has long since devolved into a High Mass of empty rhetoric and compulsory standing ovations. Y’all can do better.

      • ozone January 1, 2018 at 1:29 pm #

        Elrond, you sez,
        “The presidency used to fulfill the ‘state of the union’ requirement with an annual written report, but this has long since devolved into a High Mass of empty rhetoric and compulsory standing ovations. Y’all can do better.”

        Do you really think so? Your confidence is inspiring, but I’m not so optimistic. (Are you seeing more of those pragmatic Mid-westerners than I? A lot of what I hear is the delusional mind-fuckery of the, “if-we-just-get-the-right-POTUS-in-there…” variety. Not much “doing” at all in that way of “thinking”.)

      • outsider January 1, 2018 at 1:32 pm #

        Yes, scrap the ridiculous SOTU speech. Why not have a “Question Time,” like the UK Parliament does when they grill their PM? But that’s no doubt too much democracy for us.

        BTW, I have no idea what Robert Magill meant by “looking to the North for our salvation.” Surely he didn’t mean Canada. Or maybe I’m not getting the joke.

        • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 2:53 pm #

          Indeed. Justin Trudeau has stated openly his support for the Globalist Plan to replace Whites with minorities. Canada is well on its way to becoming a failed State. When all States (but One!) fail, then the Global Super State can step in and “save” them. They have to destroy the Global Village in order to save it, you see.

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 10:16 am #

          outsider

          Prime Minister’s Questions gets half an hour every Wednesday but it tends to be a yah-booh, Punch and Judy show (albeit politely restrained) rather than anything terribly helpful. Even the seating arrangements in the House are designed to aid yah-booh politics, with people trying to shout at one another over the no-man’s land in the middle, which is why the new Scottish Parliament went for a less confrontational configuration, which has nevertheless failed to produce anything overly inspiring!

          But yes, even half an hour a week answering questions by Congress and being unable to just shout ‘Fake News’ at them would be better than reading out a prepared speech.

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 3:25 pm #

            I have never understood how or why asking questions of an individual or a group of scumbags with sordid reputations for compulsive lying and answer avoiding is a desirable thing. Try watching C-SPAN for more than a minute without throwing up or chewing through your own wrists if you need an example.

      • tahoe1780 January 1, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96aZjH_sAdA

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 9:40 am #

          “Justin Trudeau has stated openly his support for the Globalist Plan to replace Whites with minorities.”

          [citation needed]

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 9:41 am #

            Sorry, tahoe, that was meant to go under Janos’ comment.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 2, 2018 at 9:58 am #

            The source is either the generalized fever swamp of the racist far right, and/or the business end of Janos’ digestive system. The MLA style guide doesn’t specify a proper citation in either case.

            In reality, he’s probably referring to some anodyne remark or other. Even if Janos provided an actual, verifiable quote, it would be something innocuous that triggers the shaved chimps among us and puts the remaining 99.99999% to sleep.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 10:26 am #

            “The source is ….and/or the business end of Janos’ digestive system.”

            Thanks for putting that imagery in my head, Elrond (not). What comes out of the input end is already disturbing.

            “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

            Matthew 15:11, apparently.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 11:52 am #

            “Even if Janos provided an actual, verifiable quote, it would be something innocuous that triggers the shaved chimps among us and puts the remaining 99.99999% to sleep.”

            How utterly dismissive.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 2, 2018 at 12:24 pm #

            How utterly dismissive? Much as it is the fate of the ridiculous to be ridiculed, it is the fate of the ranting monomaniac to be dismissed.

            Janos claims there is a plan to ‘replace whites with minorities’. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. All the evidence Janos has ever provided points to his own deficiencies.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 1:13 pm #

            “Janos claims there is a plan to ‘replace whites with minorities’. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”

            Elrond,
            When I first was exposed to the thought that current immigration policies were other than benign, I was incredulous…I am not entirely convinced otherwise, but now see the issue as more than one-dimensional.

            Janos’s position on immigration is arguable.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 6:02 pm #

            Really E? You still think they may (add italics) be benign? That is beyond belief.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 7:07 pm #

            Janos,
            No, I said the issue is “arguable”…the argument is not on whether Immigration is positive or needed in this country, but rather if it be by nefarious design…you know, either it is a conspiracy of our enemies, or the bumbling feel-good. politically correct actions of wrong-thinking SJW’s.

            Elrond is not evil…he is wrong-thinking…and Canadian to boot…the horror….

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 7:13 pm #

            What if the ignorance is willed or intentional? Christianity comes to the rescue her and makes its contribution to moral theory. Such a condition is Sin. A willing to be less than one can be or to make others less than is their right to be.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 11:13 am #

            My position on immigration is more nuanced, and more sympathetic to the American working class, than most people here probably realize. I seldom get to articulate my actual thoughts on the matter, though, because so many people on this site, not just the obvious candidates, seem to consider furrin peepul as an evil in themselves.

            When people start talking about their fellow human beings using the language of infection and infestation, I get ornery, and I fight back. I won’t have it, and I won’t take part in any debate not having the equal humanity of everyone as a fundamental premise. Humanity comes first; states, laws, rules and interests come later. Show me that’s possible here, and then we can have a debate. I don’t see it coming anytime soon.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 12:19 pm #

            Elrond

            If I could recommend your post, as I can in the comments section of the ‘Graun’ (lately become rather anodyne to me in comparison with the ideological high jinks on this website), I would need to recommend it in kilos. Or tonnes.

            Thank you.

            I wonder if you are familiar with ‘our’ [washes mouth out] Katie Hopkins. She threatened to leave the UK if the population did not vote for Brexit. She is still here, although even the scurrilous Mail Online finally got rid of her:

            https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/nov/27/katie-hopkins-mail-online-column-contract-ends

            We so want her to go stateside – maybe Janos, BRH and Malthuss could sponsor her between them. You’ll love her and she’s a blight on our national culture. Please…take…her…

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 2:06 pm #

            Alba, Brexit passed. Though whether they will comply with the Will of the People is another matter. Always willing to help…

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 2:13 pm #

            A weed is any plant where you don’t want it. Just so foreigner – they belong in their own lands. Be kind to the stranger? Millions of strangers isn’t “the” stranger – but a swarm of locusts. An invasion that must be pushed back. At number like these, people become no more than locusts, whatever color they are. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million (or whatever number he cited) is just a statistic. Thus the Church always endorsed “subsidiarity” or solving problems at the most local level possible.

            But then of course, Federal bureaucrats would lose their jobs and bennies. What’s worse, the ruin of a nation or losing their careers? We know the answer to that one….

            Bureaucrats want these problem people. And at the numbers where they are a problem. That’s their bread and butter. As Yeats said, the Centre has not held. Or to paraphrase the Man in Black, the Circle has no remained unbroken.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 2:48 pm #

            Thank you for your kind words, GreenAlba. As for Katie Hopkins, I hadn’t heard about her before now. Let me see… oh. Oh, dear. I see.

            Now, I know that crossing the Atlantic has become an increasingly popular option for media personalities who have worn out their welcome in Britannia — Piers Morgan and Louise Mensch come to mind. But we can only juggle so many hot potatoes, and here in Canada we already have Ezra Levant and Gavin McInnes.

            If you were male and liable to be led astray by superficial female charms, I have a couple of names I would try to tempt you into taking off our hands instead. Their names are Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy (the latter of whom got fired from her job after praising the “rising in white racial consciousness” at Charlottesville — where, remember, a guy plowed a car into a crowd, killing one and injuring many). They are true exemplars of the adage: ‘She ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 2:52 pm #

            Janos, whatever you are behind that screen name: It’s tempting to treat you as a figure of fun, and I do so with relish as and when it suits me to do so.

            But if rhetoric like that is even remotely representative of the truth about you, you lack very little to be a true and living monster.

            Delete your account.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 3:31 pm #

            Janos

            One sign of a person who still has humanity is that when they know about, for instance, six million Jews being murdered, they do not see a statistic, they see one human being murdered, but they imagine it six million times over. It overwhelms them. It stays with them their whole life. But they refuse to think of those six million as a statistic.

            You have failed as a human being. You are incapable of shame.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 11:11 am #

            “Delete your account.”

            “You have failed as a human being”

            “Four legs good…two legs bad….”

            Janos,
            I guess the verdict is in…to save the sensibilities of our foreign guests, you must kill yourself….

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:06 pm #

            elysianfield

            I feel it would be better if he just toned down the lack of compassion for his fellow humans, but I don’t think deleting his account, even if he did it, would be quite the same as committing hara kiri.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 6:30 pm #

            Alba,
            I think you fail to see the method that Janos uses to spread what he considers the truth. Janos is a lone voice in a wilderness filled with enemies. His posts seem to be devoid of humanity, but his method is sound. He pounds what he considers to be truth at every opportunity…and he does so without differentiating gray areas…areas that if he did so would dilute his message, it would certainly soften the message and make it more palatable… but he does not have the luxury to do so. Say it often enough…say it loud enough…generate Socratic dialog.

            Every issue is a nail, and he has but a hammer. You do not have to agree with everything he says…I don’t. But you have to admire his courage in keeping his message on point, to his personal detriment…his name has to be on every Federal-Alphabet list imaginable…probably no-fly also. He may probably be on “double-secret-probation” on this very site. It is an absolute certainty that he could not get a job playing piano in any federally funded house of ill-repute.

            He is not evil, and may actually be more introspective and more empathetic than most on this site…probably a real softy.

            Or not….

          • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 8:12 am #

            elysianfield

            Well I did surmise at one point that he might be some kind of Walter Mitty character, so who knows? 🙂

  16. marcus1 January 1, 2018 at 12:02 pm #

    Thinking the Fed has to shrink their balance sheet is as quaint as thinking “Old Europe” matters in world affairs, very pre “W” thinking. Think 4 trillion is a large asset entry? Call me when it’s 40 trillion. The Ponzi has a way to go.

  17. TiredOfTheTreadmill January 1, 2018 at 12:10 pm #

    It sure seems as though the the financial house of cards is poised to crater in 2018, but it has felt that way for a decade or so and they somehow keep the rackets running. Of course, I see more and more homeless people begging at street corners each month. I can’t imagine what it’s going to look like this summer at the major intersections as the beggars crowd each other for the prime spots. Their Long Emergency is already underway.

    Looking beyond the financial realm, 2018 looks to usher in an era of less civility across the spectrum. Less courtesy. Less decency. More “in your face” uninformed opinions being expressed. More across the board doubling down on stupid, even when confronted with contrary facts, which used to be the exclusive domain of whack-a-loon conservatives. It’ll move to the mainstream. More proud ignorance. More hope trampled. More general shittiness across the board. So, while we may see other aspects of life lean down, there will be an abundance of shit to fill the void. Just my guesses. The months ahead will tell the story.

    • chipshot January 1, 2018 at 12:54 pm #

      Agree. One of the most overlooked influences a president has is the tone and demeanor they set for the country.

    • windward January 1, 2018 at 8:01 pm #

      “…Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data…”

      https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-convince-someone-when-facts-fail/

      • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 9:43 am #

        Seems it’s an intrinsically human failing – this article is interesting, if rather longer than the Scientific American one:

        https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

        • Elrond Hubbard January 2, 2018 at 11:53 am #

          “Rationality belongs to the cool observer, but because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith, and the naive faith requires necessary illusion and emotionally potent oversimplifications which are provided by the myth-maker to keep the ordinary person on course.” — Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: Study in Ethics and Politics

          Niebuhr is uncharitable toward the average person, who is generally quite capable of keeping up if they’re not denied the necessary tools. (An example of such a tool would be access to independently-minded and non-co-opted news media willing to pose hard questions to those in power.) But his diagnosis of how power structures maintain themselves via control of the public narrative, thereby depriving people of those tools, is quite apt.

          Without those tools, the narrative grows dishonest and then decrepit, as the gap between the story we’re told and the reality we see around us grows wider and wider. This is the moment we’re in now, with the narrative openly failing. And this is when we need to be most vigilant against jackals (Hi, Janos! *wave*) who sense the opportunity to inject their new, openly poisonous narrative into the mainstream.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 7:10 pm #

            Personal attack here.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 11:18 am #

            Insert personal attack here? Okay: you’re ugly, and your mom dresses you funny.

            Every word and deed, Janos. Depend on it.

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 11:55 am #

          Alba,
          I.ve yet to read either articles, but I expect that they would demonstrate that disparate “facts” will not trump direct observation/experience…however scant, once an opinion has been made.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 12:26 pm #

            elysianfield

            It’s a while since I read the NYer article but I think the gist was that even direct observation will be trumped by other factors, like wanting to fit in with a group, wanting to feel validated etc.

            ‘Facts’ (see Kellyanne Conway) are different from facts. Facts refer to things or events that have been observed by somebody or calculated by somebody on the basis of something observable. For Kellyanne, you choose the ‘facts’ you like, even if there’s a photo showing with absolute clarity that your ‘fact’ is observably not true. ‘Facts’ compete, in a popularity contest. Facts can be lonely and unloved.

            As Francis Bacon famously said, ‘people prefer to believe what they would prefer to be true’.

            It takes mental effort to believe things you’d rather weren’t true. I’d like climate change not to be true. But I choose the truth, even though it isn’t at all comforting.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

            I realise my definitions are a bit on the hoof. It was a fact that the sun was burning hydrogen and turning it into helium long before anyone or anything was there to observe it!

  18. malthuss January 1, 2018 at 12:17 pm #

    Will Debbie go to prison?
    Should she be executed?

    Her brother has run the investigation!!!!!!!! Insiders.

  19. Collin27 January 1, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

    Good post.

    The subtle point of the death of the petro dollar / rise of the petro-RMB trade currency is so far out of reach for the idiots on CNN that the American public is going to really get violent when they realize that imports will rise significantly when our oil trade is no longer the main currency platform.

    • TiredOfTheTreadmill January 1, 2018 at 12:49 pm #

      Even if the mob gets violent due to rising prices on imports, I doubt they will understand, or care about, the petro-dollar component of the reason. All they will know is that the overpriced coffee they need to get them through another commute to another shitty day at their meaningless, shitty job has become even more overpriced. The drug prices, which are the lubricant that keeps this crap heap rolling, are going up!

      On a positive note, more people with the ability to catch a clue may begin to start living life with meaning instead of just chasing a dollar. Maybe…but the dollar chasers are like locusts, consuming everything in their path, including those who are not dollar chasers. All I’m betting on is our interesting times get more interesting in 2018.

  20. malthuss January 1, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

    WILL ANY OF THESE MONSTERS GO TO PRISON?

    Support this blog on PatreonSupport this blog on Substack
    Support this blog via Patreon or Substack
    • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 3:06 pm #

      Indeed that is the Question. I fear not. Trump is too much of an Insider to do it, I fear. His person, policies, and presidency may indicate some real diversity of opinion among the Elite, which is all to the good of course. The hatred against him is very real in other words. But past a certain point, he simply will not go. Brining Hillary and Clinton Foundation to Justice would be a gesture of Civil War. And her aegis of protection probably extend to Huma as well.

      But stranger things have happened. And maybe the Anglo-American-Jewish Elite are due for a serious fracture.

    • outsider January 1, 2018 at 7:37 pm #

      Malthuss,

      It doesn’t appear that Jeff Sessions is in any hurry to put them there. Indeed, what’s up with this supposed Trump loyalist anyway? Without Sessions’ recusal from this Russia farce, would we even have Mueller? Sessions didn’t even have the sense to resign when Trump tweeted that, if he had known that Sessions as AG would have recused himself, he would never have appointed him in the first place.

  21. noel bodie January 1, 2018 at 12:32 pm #

    Jhk, always lots to think on from your yearly effort. Thanks for all your good work! To me, the past year became a flashing warning signal of the power and success of the libertarian right: from being out gunned by the Bundys to out manuerved by ol’ Mitch to steal a supreme to the shady doings of Bannon’s sugar daddy Mercer and of course Rupert and the Kochs always fiddling about. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Bruce Rauner in Illinois are just two examples of many libertarian guvs who are wreaking havoc on their states. The tax bill for “the donors”…aka libertarians…. devos in ed, stacking the federal bench,gutting epa,interior,fcc, attacking net neutrality and green lighting Sinclair, divide and conquer techniques on race and gender but never class. The churning of opinion and manufacture of consent from libertarian think tanks which number in the multiples of tens nationally. The republicans have gone over to the libertarian dark side and the flat footed dems are wringing their hands about dreamers and gender politics. The populace has no idea of the fight that is being lost.

    • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 12:51 pm #

      The population has no idea about anything nb, and most will come right out and tell you that they simply do not care either if you ask them. Far too many come right out and admit that “they do not have time for any of IT”, “they really do not want to talk about IT”, they cannot do anything about IT so why care about IT. Unfortunately, the bastards are stupid enough to cast votes mostly for “party” lines because, after all, who doesn’t love a party? The general population of this nation is not even capable of caring about anything besides themselves. How can they be entrusted with any power to change anything anyway? They answer is that they are not given such power. Go back and watch the movie “Executive Action”. When asked what the public will thing about JFK’s assassination, we are quickly told, “They will think what they are told to thing, what they are programmed to think”. That’s how it works.

      • noel bodie January 1, 2018 at 1:12 pm #

        You are so right. Further, as jhk likes to remember 1850, if one looks at the policies of the modern “party of Lincoln” one would agree they hold the policies of the dems of the old south. The parties have switched their policies following Nixon’s southern stategy and lbj’s embrace of civil rights

      • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

        Yes, I was charged by a Pit Bull just the other day. The owner grabbed her before she could do any damage. He said “sorry” and put her inside the house. I waited for him to come back out and asked him, “What’s the big idea? Don’t you think she should be tied up?” He replied, “No”. Why not? Cuz she’s not mean. He turned away from me angrily.

        He thinks he’s living out in the woods by himself, evidently. And he doesn’t want to be responsible or aware of anything that contraindicates his fantasy – like the needs of other people. Or that his dog feels differently about other people than she does about him and his family.

        The moral? Democracy is contraindicated. The right to vote is something to be earned by service and education and financial solvency.

        • hmuller January 1, 2018 at 10:45 pm #

          Maybe the pit bull vehemently disagreed with your politics.

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 9:36 am #

          Janos

          It’s early days for the Non-Sequitur of the Year prize to be awarded but you’re definitely in there with a chance. You have many other supporting claims from previous years to back up your nomination.

          And you criticise other people for talking about ‘the particular’. Brilliant. Extrapolate from one dog-owner with insufficient insight about his mutt to removing the vote from someone (just one tiny example) who’s been bankrupted by having the temerity to fall ill in a country with a healthcare system not fit for a civilised nation*.

          Still, at least under your proposed system all those black servicemen and women would get the vote for disproportionately joining up to go to foreign places in an attempt to keep your fuel tank full. But like their poor white counterparts, many of them are there because their other options are limited by the circumstances of their birth. I sometimes wonder if the quote “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses’ should be taken off the Statue of Liberty and used as a recruitment slogan for the military.

          You could replace the plaque on the Statue with something like:
          “Made in Paris and fully paid for by the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ who told you it wasn’t OK to illegally invade Iraq and destabilise an entire region, and are now being vilified as they try to absorb the human mess you created.”

          http://www.messynessychic.com/2012/06/22/made-in-paris-the-statue-of-liberty-1877-1885/

          *Pre-invasion Iraq had a world-renowned hospital in its capital city centuries before the US was even a twinkle in a pilgrim’s eye. And before its cultured cities were flattened by the combined forces of Bush and Blair it offered a system of healthcare to its citizens that Americans could only dream of. Despite being governed by a psychopath.

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 9:44 am #

            Cheese-eating surrender monkey, oh boy I love that!

          • outsider January 2, 2018 at 10:17 am #

            GA,

            I agree with your most excellent suggestion to have “The New Colossus” removed from the Statue. Emma Lazarus’ poem has done incalculable harm to the country, which is still taking in the world’s tired, poor, and hungry even as it lurches from crisis to crisis.

            BTW, the French may have been opposed to W’s & Blair’s destruction of Iraq, but they took the lead in pushing for the bombing Libya, convincing a reluctant Obama to join them in the mayhem.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 10:31 am #

            Walter B

            I believe it originated with The Simpsons, but was picked up by Bush’s fans as an insult because they wouldn’t get behind him.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 10:51 am #

            outsider

            I totally agree with you that America has been very welcoming over the years. I don’t think it can be expected to solve the world’s problems. At the same time it has exacerbated many of them too by meddling in other countries for its own strategic ends. The US and the UK absolutely need to own the mess that started with Iraq but seemingly ripples out forever.

            Psychopathic dictators are a massive moral problem for other states. Saddam was a bit like Stalin in his liking for finishing a speech to his nervous acolytes by having a few of them taken out the back and shot, to keep the others on their toes. However, like the equally psychopathic torturer (via his goons, obviously), Assad, he kept a certain secular lid on things.

            I think it is genuinely difficult for people in other countries to know what to do for the best, even when they sincerely only want to help save lives, as in the example of watching Gaddafi brutally killing his own people. And in this case the United Nations did rule that he was violating international law.

            Murphy’s law does tend to intervene, as JHK points out. I agree it has ended in utter chaos.

          • outsider January 2, 2018 at 11:35 am #

            GA,

            I forgot to wish you a happy and prosperous new year.

            That said, how do you know if Saddam, Assad, and Gaddafi were/are the monsters that the federal government and mainstream media claim? All were/are secular rulers in charge of lands with no democratic traditions.. They all did much to bring their countries into modernity. It’s far too easy and lazy to label them psychopaths. Personally, I’m not about to believe the exaggerations and lies coming from TPTB in countries like the US & UK hell bent on destroying them. Such countries have perfected the art of the Big Lie.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 2, 2018 at 12:11 pm #

            GreenAlba (re Janos): “It’s early days for the Non-Sequitur of the Year prize to be awarded but you’re definitely in there with a chance.”

            Nailed it. I was going to say something, but you beat me to the punch. A true bigot, Janos can find confirmation for his prejudices in a glass of water or a ray of sunshine. Show him bird poop on his car, and he’ll find a way to blame the Jews for it.

            Re: your reference to the mess we (i.e., the West) made in Iraq and environs, the firestorm set off by the U.S. invasion in 2003 seems to have finally burned itself out. With Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman running the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, matters have moved on to the next phase, taking place in Yemen.

            In 2018 the barbarous wars in Iraq and Syria may finally be coming to an end
            The new area of instability in the Middle East today is further south in the Arabian Peninsula – the war in Yemen is now the bloodiest and cruellest in the region

            http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-iraq-isis-yemen-saudi-arabia-iran-trump-wars-coming-to-an-end-a8133356.html

            “I spent most of the last year reporting two sieges, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, which finally ended with the decisive defeat of Isis. This was the most important event in the Middle East in 2017, though people are already beginning to forget how dangerous the Isis caliphate was at the height of its power and even in its decline. Not so long ago, its “emirs” ruled an area in western Iraq and eastern Syria which was the size of Great Britain and Isis-inspired or organised terrorists dominated the news every few months by carrying out atrocities from Manchester to Kabul and Berlin to the Sahara. Isis retains the capacity to slaughter civilians – witness events in Sinai and Afghanistan in the last few weeks – but no longer has its own powerful centrally organised state which was what made it such a threat.

            “The defeat of Isis is cheering in itself and its fall has other positive implications. It is a sign that the end may be coming to the cycle of wars that have torn apart Iraq since 2003, when the US and Britain overthrew Saddam Hussein, and Syria since 2011, when the uprising started against President Bashar al-Assad. So many conflicts were intertwined on the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields – Sunni against Shia, Arab against Kurd, Iran against Saudi Arabia, people against dictatorship, US against a variety of opponents – that the ending of these multiple crises was always going to be messy. But winners and losers are emerging who will shape the region for decades to come. Over-cautious warnings that Isis and al-Qaeda may rise again or transmute into a new equally lethal form underestimate the depth of the changes that have happened over the last few years. The Jihadis have lost regional support, popular Sunni sympathy, the element of surprise, the momentum of victory while their enemies are far stronger than they used to be. The resurrection of the Isis state would be virtually impossible.”

            The full article is worth reading.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 1:09 pm #

            Yeah, some Zionist Jewess wrote that, no doubt with a long term plan to down the United States. Nothing to do with the Statue per se as far as is known. But on the other hand, it is some kind of Masonic or Pagan thing, so who knows? The two forces are allied against the Whites and their Civilization. But of course the Left is part of that too, so it’s all hunky dory in your book – thus your “religion” of White reparations unto death.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 1:23 pm #

            outsider

            Saddam wasn’t known as the Butcher of Baghdad because of the mainstream media in the UK or the US. He is credited with the deaths of at least 250,000 people (by Human Rights Watch, not The Guardian). The estimate is considered to be a conservative one, because organisations like HRW know how easily they lose their vital reputations by producing statistics that might be exaggerated. It also excludes the people who have died as a result of his invasions of Iran and Kuwait. He gassed thousands of his Kurdish population, including children.

            I won’t start on Assad, but he employs torturers too. I don’t believe his reputation has been fabricated. I have friends with friends in Syria – Assad’s methods have never been a secret to those who live there.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 1:37 pm #

            Janos

            “Yeah, some Zionist Jewess wrote that, no doubt with a
            long term plan to down the United States.”

            Making stuff up again. I do wish you wouldn’t.

            “Nothing to do with the Statue per se as far as is known.”

            I didn’t suggest it was. My main point was the unfortunate fact that many of America’s poor – black or white – have traditionally seen few options available to them other than the military. Sometimes this has helped them – sometimes it hasn’t. I have no views on the statue or what you embellish it with.

            “But on the other hand, it is some kind of Masonic or Pagan
            thing, so who knows? The two forces are allied against the
            Whites and their Civilization.”

            Here you have lost me. I genuinely don’t know what you’re talking about. Matron tells me you haven’t taken your medication today – I think maybe you should.

            ” thus your “religion” of White reparations unto death.”

            I have already requested that you stop telling me what I think.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 2:08 pm #

            ousider

            Sorry, I just realised I didn’t return your good wishes for the new year. Or rather I did type them at the start of my comment but it got edited a couple of times and I lost the good wishes without realising.

            So, indeed, all good wishes for 2018!

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:04 pm #

          Janos,
          This is your second reported encounter with an aggressive dog…you mentioned fending off one with a book bag 12 months(or so) ago…is this this same animal, or the same incident?

          Dogs seem to know who they can trust. Perhaps you are a cat person?

          You know, “Dog” is “God” spelled backwards…makes you kind of think, yeah?

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 1:13 pm #

            Well you don’t walk anywhere, right? Thus your lack of sympathy. Pit Bulls are dangerous and a danger to pedestrians. The owner seemed like a nice guy, but had no comprehension or sympathy either. But he got very defensive and then angry very quickly, so at some level I think he knew he was wrong.

            I’ve had other near misses as well. At the last gun show, I saw a hiking staff that doubled as a stun gun. It might be the answer. Regular stun guns could only be used if the monster was upon me. And I’d be fumbling to get the thing out. The Staff would be well nigh in my hand. And in itself might prove a deterrent. If the Monster chose to close with me after that, well it would be in for a shock.

          • aibohphobia January 2, 2018 at 2:27 pm #

            My morning walk used to take me past the fenced yard of two vicious dogs. They would actually jump vertically and snap at people on the sidewalk.
            I got some Beggin’ Strips (R) and started throwing them to the dogs. Pretty soon I had them sitting up for a snack–No barking or snapping, at least at me! The owner came out to complain one day, but I just told him, “If you don’t like it, keep your vicious dogs inside or tied up.”

          • ozone January 2, 2018 at 6:39 pm #

            aibohphobia,
            Well y’see there, you’ve applied reason to the situation and had a decent and amusing result!
            HOWEVER, you’ve surrendered a nice case of constantly-victimized puling and the nurturing of a simmering resentment and bitter hatred (unlike one overly prolific poster). …Satisfying revenge fantasies are also regretfully cast aside. /s off

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 7:22 pm #

            Janos,
            Don’t walk anywhere? I only start the car or tractors up once every two weeks…the orchard is 1/4 mile away…all I do is walk.
            I do have sympathy…Pit Bulls were unknown as “trash dogs” in the late 70’s…the first one I ever encountered in the back of a pick-up truck shredded my nose… I got too close. A Surgeon put it back together.

            A 3-foot staff with one end weighted and the other with an iron point and ferrule is just the medicine for pits…and other varmints…or Canadians….

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:03 am #

            Thanks Ozone. His Put Bulls were behind a fence, unlike mine. You are so helpful and vicious.

            E – your suggestion is better. But I want some hi-tech power, a Wizard’s Staff against their brute force.

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 11:24 am #

            Do you live in a warm part of the States, elysianfield? If you come up here, make sure you bundle up. Don’t want any parts of you freezing off.

          • K-Dog January 4, 2018 at 9:59 am #

            If you had a good soul dogs would be fine with you, As it is they function as personal Bodhisattvas who are incessantly trying to tell you about yourself. You just need to listen.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 4:41 pm #

            “Do you live in a warm part of the States, elysianfield? ”

            Elrond,
            I live 20 miles from the ocean (As a crow would fly, if it was foolish enough to attempt the feat),

            As I post this, it is a frosty 59F outside.

  22. JohnAZ January 1, 2018 at 12:37 pm #

    Happy New Year from 75 deg. Phoenix.

    Good forecast! Two observations:

    JHK forecasts are too abrupt, with big changes happening within the next year. The 1% elite have the economic power (see Davos) to manipulate the world markets to smooth out big bumps to prevent damage to themselves. Trends are more important here, long term analysis plus bubble analysis to try to avoid 2008 catastrophes.

    No. 2 is while this forecast is one of the most accurate trend forecasting forecast I having been tracking, the huge question is, what the heck do we do about it. Here the political split happens. Who can fix the problems? The free market with its ability to react to issues relatively short Order, or the Federal government. JHK has spoken endlessly about the inability of the Feds to fix anything. Trump’s economic minions have pushed the free market as the best way to face future crises. Keep the Feds out of the way as much as possible. The strapped voters sent a message to the Federalists that their methods have failed when they elected Trump. Will the free market do any better, the proponents have their chance now to see. Failures of both sides to modify our economic direction will usher in the Long Emergency, big time.

  23. Petro January 1, 2018 at 12:40 pm #

    Clearly, a lot of thought and time went into this piece, which I will acknowledge first. I can’t speak to the accuracy of every statement of fact, but one that popped out at me was “and one entry-level foreign policy wonk (George Papadopoulos) who never even met Trump.” This was just one of countless lies the administration threw out there in their utter panic about the Mueller investigation.

    I know JHK, as a former reporter, values accuracy, so: Papadopoulos DID, in fact, meet Trump—at a small-ish meeting with some big shots around the table (as an “entry-level wonk?”). Trump himself tweeted a photo of the March 31 meeting (these people are so incredibly stupid).

    Of course, one does not need to meet someone face-to-face in order to make mischief on their behalf (if that is what happened), so in a way it’s a minor point. But I don’t think Jim would want to be found repeating lame obfuscations from the Golden Golem of Greatness.

  24. chipshot January 1, 2018 at 12:48 pm #

    If JHK is writing/talking, I’m reading/listening. With great interest.

    Lots of scary stuff there. For me the scariest paragraph is about
    the US selling gold while China and Russia buy it, creating potential for the Yuan to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Given that we produce little of what we consume, this country could be plunged into desperation if our currency becomes almost worthless outside our borders.

    Think Jim’s biggest mistake is predicting the timing of a stock market/financial collapse. He may be dead right on the what and how, but the when is the most difficult thing to predict, and forecasts tend to get blown off or marginalized when they fail to occur within a specified time frame (i.e., Paul Erlich and the Population Bomb).

  25. wet dog January 1, 2018 at 12:55 pm #

    Between Jim’s predictions and Desdemona Despairs’ “50 Doomiest Images of 2017”, things are looking bleak. The despair arising from nearly every avenue you look is disheartening.

    Industrialism is winding down and we’re going to rip apart every last inch of the biosphere to keep our “standard of living” the same. That won’t work, and I worry about all the little kids I see – I look at them as I would a whole town of Russian kids in 1934, knowing 20 million of them would be slaughtered only 10 years on.

    I don’t know if this universe we’re in is “over the line” between hell and purgatory (using Dante’s dividing line), but it sure looks like it. Tolkien described our situation as “the fate of Arda marred” (paraphrased): a sad, humble view of our predicament.

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    • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 11:33 am #

      Industrialism is winding down and we’re going to rip apart every last inch of the biosphere to keep our “standard of living” the same

      WetDog.

      This may be true if you believe causal effects be entirely human…however, if you spend some time searching under the bridges in your area, you will find no one who can afford to do otherwise…why are not the climate change/carbon footprint” proponents not there in residence? They should be easy to find…just listen for the whimpers of pain as they mortify their flesh with old rusty coat hangars and barbed wire removed from dilapidated fences.

      I have no respect for those proponents of human cause that are not living the life of privation they would have us endure. I liken them to the whoring, greedy televangelists, like Bakker and Swaggert…superficial, unctuous, duplicitous.

      Your premise is correct…humanity will deplete the Earth. There will be no concerted, viable effort otherwise. It is a Human “thang”….

  26. patrickd January 1, 2018 at 1:21 pm #

    500 years of usurious murder and theft isn’t going to end in 2018, and Jim’s prognostication reveals the complexity of the scams being orchestrated to keep it all going. Lies, and more lies, are the order of the day. Jim, keeping abreast (no pun intended) of all this stuff is going to make you batshit crazy. None of it makes sense to me, and that’s the point of a scam, it only makes sense to the scamsters, who know it’s all a lie and a screen to keep the fools and the johns confused while their pockets are emptied, their bank accounts empties, their homes and jobs stolen. It’s not supposed to make sense, it doesn’t make sense, and it never will.

    I cannot imagine that it will end, because what will the scamsters do with themselves? Their joy in life is simply to rake in stolen bread (it’s sweet, remember?). Why would they ever stop? But I guess it could end if outside forces take physical possession of the banking families and either bring them to justice in a hastily arranged court of justice (not existing courts), or the populace decides to decorate lamp posts with their bodies. I don’t think either of those options will happen, but who knows.

  27. wet dog January 1, 2018 at 2:27 pm #

    And for that airhead, Donna Riley, who said that academic rigor is a symptom of “white male heterosexual privilege,” this is one of my favorite quotes from old Fred Reed, on the SJW insanity:

    “Schools of engineering and science will mostly resist enstupidation – the definite integral will prove an absolute barrier to affirmative action – but liberal studies, the heart of civilization, will remain dead.”

    Yup, the definite integral is myognist, racist, and IQist.

    • beantownbill. January 1, 2018 at 2:39 pm #

      I dunno about that. I graduated from an engineering and science school, and I’ll tell you, my fellow grads didn’t know what was really going on.

      • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 3:18 pm #

        Then they shouldn’t have had the right to vote until they did. But one could assume they were competent in their field? That’s something, isn’t it? And aren’t you jumping rails here?

        • beantownbill. January 1, 2018 at 5:50 pm #

          I do agree with you about not being allowed to vote until you know what’s going on. I also agree that the right to vote ought to be earned, and that in our complicated world democracy isn’t now the best form of government. In theory, the best form of government is either no government or a benevolent dictatorship – 2 extremes. Unfortunately, they both have serious flaws. Remove the flaws from either form and I’d be for it. Of course, then we could make an argument that we could remove the flaws from democracy, too.

          • outsider January 1, 2018 at 8:21 pm #

            Flaws cannot be removed – not entirely anyway. You can’t have flawless systems from deeply flawed human beings. Anarchism will never be anything more than the idle dreams of college students at pot party bull sessions, who may have thumbed through a few pages of “Atlas Shrugged.” The end of government is supposed to be the final stage of Marxism – the Withering Away of the State. But Marx didn’t predict how long that would take. Could be centuries. In the meantime wars always seem to get in the way. As Randolph Bourne said: “War is the health of the State.”

    • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 3:17 pm #

      Yeah, that’s gold. How would you like to walk on one of her Gay, Feminist, Afrocentric bridges?

  28. Robert White January 1, 2018 at 2:30 pm #

    Very excellent macroeconomic/political synopsis, JHK. Unfortunately, the Steel ‘dossier’ is completely legit, and the Deep State security complex knows it all too well. Moreover, I’m a Remote Viewer, and I Remote Viewed Orange Jesus Cheeto-head-in-chief in the Russian Federation hotel room whilst the Russian Federation Intelligence Officers were covertly recording everything that was going on in that hotel room from an adjacent hotel room next door to Orange Jesus Cheeto-head-in-chief’s hotel room. In brief, if Orange Jesus urinates on Putin’s parade for the upcoming election, Putin will release the Urinating Russian Federation Hookers tape recording
    of the GGG & Hookers to the Golden Showers section of PORNHUB
    for some real political implosions across the board USA.

    My prediction for the USA in 2018 is that it is certain to implode across all domains from political to economic. This is the year that will usher in the demise of 20th century ‘Capitalism’ and the third world banana republic of the USA.

    Happy New Year from CANADA, eh.

    RW

    • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 3:28 pm #

      You’re falling behind the Dialectic. They’ve already begun to walk all that back. The Public doesn’t buy it. There’s nothing older than yesterday’s paper or a failed smear campaign.

      You’ve got to keep up. Try harder. The Dialectic waits for no man! And millions died in the old Soviet Union because of the fake science of Lysenkoism. That’s apart from the millions who were systematically starved to death in Ukraine or the other millions starved and worked to death in the Gulags.

      • Robert White January 1, 2018 at 4:06 pm #

        I’m skilled in Intelligence, and I know how the ‘white hats’ feel about someone as loose, and ignorant, as Trump. The Western Security Complex knows that Trump is going to get them all killed.
        They know that Trump was a huge mistake socially, and politically, and they don’t have what it takes to dominate the world stage, and win the hearts & minds of the masses. Tactically, the Western Security Complex knows that they have to play ball on a global scale, and Trump plays ball only with his ruling id impulses.

        The Intelligence community knows that leadership is everything on the world stage, and they are collectively embarrassed that they allowed Trump to pass the vetting stage so he could fuck any chance the United States of America might have had going forward. Bottom line is that ‘the public’ does what they are told to do by the Western Security Complex, and the Western Security Complex knows they made the wrong choice when they turned the other cheek throughout the vetting process.

        Checks & balances are actually there for a reason, eh, Janos.

        And the security complex is NOT impressed with itself, or Trump.
        Someone will have to pay, and it’s NOT going to be the Western Security Complex bosses if they have any choice in the matter.

        RW

        • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 4:35 pm #

          You need to have a Balance in order to write a Check against it. But the Liberal Left has nothing in their moral account and serious people don’t believe a word they say.

          • Robert White January 1, 2018 at 5:18 pm #

            The USA Intelligence community is comprised of Civil Servants that base their allegiance on the state, and not on
            party affiliation. They are non-committal with respect to politics as they are invariably tasked to assist both Repubs & Democrats, and remain neutral politically as silly servants paid by the state. Moreover, when it comes to the Security Complex they have a fiduciary duty to always remain professionally non-committal to political party affiliation.

            The so-called ‘left’, in the case of Trump, is acting as the man on the omnibus with respect to American political consciousness. And whilst leadership on the ‘left’ is morally bereft of worth, the voting public on the left has much political capital still on account.

            RW

        • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 5:07 pm #

          The rank and file of all of our government workers is probably very intelligent and well intentioned. Perhaps they are even benevolent and caring about what is moral, what is right and what is prudent for the greater good. Unfortunately for all of us there are those who command them and who hold almost all if not total power over what is done in the name of “national security” at the expense of anyone who gets in the way. The Dulles brothers, the Bush and Clinton Crime Families and a great number of other self centered, self serving miscreants have held and still hold far too much control over what there “white hats” do to enrich those at the top at everyone else’s expense. There is the true evil that will never be stopped until the host dies, and we little people are all powerless to stop it.

          • Robert White January 1, 2018 at 5:37 pm #

            We the people are ‘the Government’, and Government is not powerless to stop political, and economic, liabilities like Trump. Get your points, but I disagree because right does indeed rule over might when the stakes are high enough. And the stakes are extremely high throughout the entirety of the Western Empire as an ongoing concern front-and-center these days, eh.

            Heck, take a good look at JHK’s high stakes prognostications for 2018, and then ask yourself once again if the left has no moral compass left to plot out directives, Walter B. JHK is as ‘leftie’ as they get in NYC, man.

            Have to disagree on this one.

            RW

          • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 6:14 pm #

            Disagreement is critical for progress to have meaning RW. Yes might may not make right, but it certainly is able to maintain the status quo for those with the most sophisticated arsenal. All this talk about gold backing up the dollar is really rather mute. We do not need silly heavy bars when large exploding devices can be called down from above without effort upon any who challenge our power. I understand how it works (so also do the American Indians) but my only concern with such a system is what I was told growing up about the force of arms. It was said that the biggest, toughest bullies had to fight constantly to maintain their power. It was also possible that many little guys could get together and overpower the King of the Hill. Those who are living such good life at the top may be required to imbibe of the nectar of denial on a regular basis to feel secure in their hegemony, but this does not guarantee supremacy forever. I suppose “enjoy it while it lasts” is the best advice, right?

          • windward January 1, 2018 at 8:41 pm #

            That is an interesting dialogue, Robert White and Walter B. I can’t participate, but it reminds me of Bush v. Gore and the Citizens United ruling, and these classic explanations:

            The Athenians to the Melians in 416 BC:

            “…since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must…”

            – Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

            To the defenders of a besieged city who were crying outrage, Pompey said:

            “Stop quoting laws to us. We carry swords.”

            – Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106 BC – 48BC
            [Plutarch, Life of Pompey]

          • BackRowHeckler January 1, 2018 at 10:44 pm #

            The Soviet Union must have seemed rock solid and unassailable to people living in it right up to 1989, propped up by the ubiquitous Cheka/NKVD/KGB the way it was.

            brh

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

          ” Western Security Complex knows they made the wrong choice when they turned the other cheek throughout the vetting process”

          Sooo, the WSC allowed Trump to be successfully vetted? What would have be the alternative to “turning the other cheek”? In real terms? Proactivity?

          • Robert White January 2, 2018 at 4:09 pm #

            The alternative was Dr. Ben Carson, or Mitt Romney, but the criminali wanted Trump due to his ability to create irrational exuberance. And we got WW3 posturing instead.

            RW

    • windward January 2, 2018 at 8:28 am #

      “British sources confirm Donald Trump’s Pee Pee Tape”

      “…Many expect that if and when Putin decides to finish Trump off, he’ll do it by releasing the infamous “Pee Pee Tape.” This comes in light of timely new information that says three different sources have confirmed the tape…”

      http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/british-pee-pee-tape/7092/

      • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 11:22 am #

        I think all the Trump-haters out there are going to be sorely disappointed when they see that no one gives a piss about the pee pee tapes.

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 1:53 pm #

          I can’t stand the man (hate would be an inappropriate word – contempt I’m OK with) and I don’t give a stuff about the peepee tapes.

          But then I don’t want to see him impeached at all. Regardless of what comes out about Russia I want him to take full responsibility for whatever he achieves (or breaks) in a full term, including America’s reputation around the world. His supporters need to see the whole balance sheet in black and white.

          I certainly don’t want to see bookshops stocked with ‘What I Would Have Achieved if the Haters Hadn’t Stopped Me’ from now till his life support gets switched off.

          My only proviso is that if he’s going to get us all blown to kingdom come, then yes, with the benefit of by-then-useless hindsight, I will wish they’d got rid of him in time. But hopefully there are grown-ups who will keep him from the worst he can do.

          • windward January 2, 2018 at 8:05 pm #

            That is a good point. It reminds me of the Germans after WWI who believed they lost the war because they were “stabbed in the back”, and those of us in the USA who believe that we would have won the Vietnam War if the peaceniks hadn’t gotten in the way. I wish they had gotten in the way about twenty years sooner. Windward, USN, Nha Trang, 1968-69.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 8:12 am #

            windward

            I don’t envy you. And it was all so misguided. We’re thankful to Harold Wilson that he kept the UK out of it, despite the…ahem… invitation, on the basis of that ‘special relationship’ that only matters when it matters.

            I have a daughter working in Singapore just now (60-hour weeks for 40 hours pay, it seems!). She’s just back from visiting a friend an English friend who lives in Viet Nam and followed the tourists down those scary tunnels (not her idea). Who’d have thought, all those years ago?

            I also have a cousin born in New York. One of her brothers didn’t make it back from Viet Nam – he got shot in the spine the day before he was due to come home. For some bizarre reason they sent his mum a tape of his last agonised gasps.

            But she got $10K (I think) from the government, which paid for a trip home to see her family in the UK. Price of a human life, eh…

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 8:13 am #

            just ‘an English friend’, obviously 🙂

        • windward January 2, 2018 at 11:13 pm #

          “…Whatever Trump’s intentions, this kind of frequent outright lie is, as many have noted, exactly what totalitarian regimes do in creating situations in which truth itself is meaningless…”

          https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-02/just-a-reminder-this-isn-t-normal

  29. pequiste January 1, 2018 at 2:40 pm #

    I’ve just learned what important story line will be voluminously covered by the journalists non-pareil over at MSNBC and CNN:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/celebrity/don-lemon-sweetly-smooches-boyfriend-live-on-cnn-on-new-years-i-love-you-baby/ar-BBHKuBE?li=BBnb7Kz

    • tucsonspur January 1, 2018 at 4:41 pm #

      Turns the old song topsy turvy:

      One day she left without a word. She took away the sun.
      And in the dark she left behind, I knew what she had done.
      She’d left me for another, it’s a common tale but true.
      A sadder man but wiser now I sing these words to you:

      Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet
      But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.
      Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet
      But the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat.

  30. FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 3:52 pm #

    With the severe weather anomalies of 2017, only the mental anomalies of American politics and the rearguard battles of the Trump administration with of the oligopoly of the global media could successfully compete.

    Throughout the year, the national revolution in the United States and its leader Trump struggled to survive, at the same time blackmailing the rest of the world with the threat of collapse of the remnants of stability.

    However, in the course of a year the Washington anti-crisis manager using various means, including blackmail, managed to build such an enviable portfolio of contracts for weaponry and other American goods for hundreds of billions of dollars, causing even more jealousy from the establishment.

    At the same time, with his tough methods, he forced even the allies, like Saudis, to seek protection from the Kremlin.

    In general, the slightly camouflaged pair of Putin and Trump, the good cop/bad cop tandem, ended the year with political profit at the expense of all the other players.

    The main course of events in 2018 – both in US and in the world – will be the introduction of rigid national and international Financial Control systems under the general motto of “digitalization of the economy.”

    The pressing existential problem of the entire world elite, including the American, is the prevention of the collapse of the world financial pyramid, the controlled deflation of all dollar and derivative financial bubbles.

    Even such seemingly traditional measure for Republicans as tax cuts today has a slightly different meaning – creating not only and not so much incentives for the return of capital and jobs to the US, but more – creating an external justification for backstage hard pressure and control over the behavior of corporations.

    Under the preserved decoration of the “market-based economy”, the Soviet-like State Planning will arise.

    It will be camouflaged in the market forms of external capital transactions to preserve political stability and the smooth evolution of the new social structure, not to bring down still operating market sectors within the created “currency zones”.

    On the technology side: The development of “digital economy”, AI systems for recognizing persons and situations, telecommunications and electronic control for fighting out-of-control drones and vehicles is the main trend not only of the New Year, but of the whole political cycle.

    The necessary computational power for these tasks implies the presence of a developed energy sector with the potential for significant growth.

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  31. akmofo January 1, 2018 at 4:16 pm #

    The commies at CNN and their brethren at the State Department are mainly ignoring or downplaying the current Iranian mass revolt against the Ayatollahs, but the situation in Iran is a big thing. And it’s the real thing! It deserves much more than a passing mention in a paragraph. Iran ties in to many problematic situations around the world, from Syria to Iraq to Saudia to Yemen, to Gaza and Lebanon, to resurgent Russian influence in the Middle East and their nuclear project in Iran, to the North Korea nuclear standoff.

    It is thanks to Iranian oil that North Korea still survives. North Korea doesn’t have anything to trade except missile technology. Missile technology that Russia and China already posses, but Iran doesn’t.

    Without Iran, Russia would lose Syria and would lose all access to the Middle East, period. Without Iran, the Kurds can reclaim their lands and establish independent Kurdistan. Without Iran, Iraq can finally be stabilized. Without Iran, no Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria and no Hamas in Gaza. Without Iran, Saudi oil is safe. Without Iran, stability in Yemen can be re-established. Without Iran, Russian mischief can be easily blocked and the Russian induced nuclear arms race in the Middle East curtailed and reversed.

    • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 4:20 pm #

      Mofo, have you been co-opted by Mockingbird or just too much science fiction?

      • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

        I willing to re-examine my statements. Show me where I’m in error.

        • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 4:45 pm #

          It is ridiculous to assume that the unlawful street protests could lead to anything else, but another “color” revolution and another failed state – get the permit and protest all your soul desire.

          • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 4:53 pm #

            A dictatorship, and a thieving theological dictatorship at that, is not a legitimate form of government. If you are an illegitimate government, so are your laws.

            To your second point: I understand your skepticism, even cynicism, but Iran is not Arabia.

          • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 4:59 pm #

            A a thieving theological dictatorship?

            Good example of dual morality standards.

            But anyway, Iran is an important player in ongoing political settlement in Syria.

            I am starting to suspect a foul play in Iranian situation by some force opposing such settlement – with lots of money infused to keep the fire going.

          • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 5:05 pm #

            Another consideration: to keep the mob organized, with Iranian wireless internet shutdown, someone had to infuse some external wireless technology to keep FaceBook, What’s Up and other wireless apps going.

          • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 5:36 pm #

            Ask the Iranians. They’ll tell you exactly what happened to their pensions, what happened to their standard of living, where they think it all went, and who is responsible.

            What’s the political settlement in Syria, Putin gets exclusive rights to the oil and gas in Syria? What do the Kurds and other Syrians get out of it, continued Assad dictatorship?

          • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 5:55 pm #

            What’s the political settlement in Syria

            Political settlement is usually a process when they stop killing people, including burning them alive, drowning in cages or simply eating their hearts and start negotiating who gets what.

          • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 6:33 pm #

            Absolutely. I’m very familiar with Arab savagery. I live with it every day. Still, there are many nations in Syria that are not Arab. Their grievances have been completely sidelined. Should their grievances be addressed, they can fill the vacuum now occupied by the Arab Jihadists.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:21 pm #

            “I am starting to suspect a foul play in Iranian situation by some force opposing such settlement – with lots of money infused to keep the fire going.”

            Finc,
            Oh, really?

        • outsider January 1, 2018 at 8:42 pm #

          Since Bibi hates Iran so much, and has wanted the US military to blow it up for him for the past 20 years, I figure that the “theological dictatorship” can’t be all bad.

    • beantownbill. January 1, 2018 at 6:02 pm #

      Are these demonstrations more effective than the ones several years ago? Can the current ones possibly succeed?

      • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 6:40 pm #

        Short answer, Yes.

        The younger generation, who are the vast majority now, don’t want anything to do with the ayatollahs.

        • beantownbill. January 1, 2018 at 7:14 pm #

          Let’s hope!

  32. akmofo January 1, 2018 at 4:20 pm #

    MSM IN FULL BLACKOUT MODE ON IRANIAN PROTEST
    https://youtu.be/D48O7_V3MQM

    • janet January 1, 2018 at 6:17 pm #

      There is plenty of MSM coverage of street protests in Iran:

      Trump Calls for ‘Change’ in Iran, Sides With Protesters in Bloody Street Battles
      Newsweek 5h ago

      Iran knows how to silence protests. If only it knew how to listen
      Opinion The Guardian 6h ago

      Iran protesters stage biggest demonstrations since ‘Green Movement’
      In Depth NBCNews.com 3h ago

      DEC. 31 LIVE BLOG: Iranians Take to the Streets in Massive Protests
      Blog Voice of America (blog) 13h ago

      • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 6:59 pm #

        That’s what you call plenty? That’s what I call pathetic!

        • janet January 1, 2018 at 7:58 pm #

          I just gave a sample to prove the point. There is much more MSM. Hardly a “blackout” on MSM!

          Leaked meeting notes show how panicked Iranian regime considered stopping deadly protests: ‘God help us’
          Fox News 11m ago?

          Chicago Tribune
          Death toll rises to at least 13 after Iran protests have violent night
          Chicago Tribune 2h ago?

          Wall Street Journal
          On Iran, Trump Administration Encourages Support for
          Protesters
          Wall Street Journal 2m ago?

          Wall Street Journal
          Trump Backs Protesters in Iran
          Wall Street Journal 19m ago?

          Reuters
          Iranian protesters attack police stations, raise stakes in unrest
          Reuters 4h ago?

          WFTV Orlando
          Iran protests have violent night; at least 13 dead overall
          WFTV Orlando 1h ago?

          Common Dreams
          With Veiled Regime Change Threats, Trump and NeoCons Blasted for Exploiting Iran Protests
          Common Dreams 6h ago?

          Aljazeera.com
          Anti-government rallies break out in Iran for fifth day
          Aljazeera.com 2h ago?

          Gizmodo Australia
          Iran Moves To Block Social Media Apps, Mobile Networks As Protests Spread
          Gizmodo Australia 2h ago?

          Daily Mail
          ‘This is nothing’: Defiant Iranian president Hassan Rouhani makes light of protests that have left 12 people dead in a …
          Daily Mail 5h ago?

          TheBlaze.com
          Death toll grows in Iranian protest crackdown
          TheBlaze.com 9h ago?

          Common Dreams
          There’s Something Different About These Iran Protests
          Common Dreams 12h ago?

          Reuters
          Explainer: What has brought Iranian protesters to the streets?
          Reuters 20h ago?

          Brinkwire (press release)
          Protesters arrested in Iran on second day of demonstrations
          Brinkwire (press release) 21h ago?

          Newsy
          Dayslong Anti-Government Protest In Iran Is Largest In Nearly A Decade
          Newsy Dec 31, 2017?

          • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 8:17 pm #

            They were silent for 6 days. They should have been leading with this story and should have had 24hr non-stop coverage, that’s how important this is. Instead, they were quiet, hoping the regime will silence the protests. The coverage by the alternative media forced their hand, and even now they still lie by omission and misrepresent the situation in favor of the ayatollah regime.

  33. Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 4:37 pm #

    https://thirstyville.wordpress.com/2017/12/30/cops-another-case-of-he-reached-for-his-waistband/

    Body cams released. Straight up execution. In other words, if you are holding your hands above your head as ordered, and they get tired and move down an inch, they are technically “moving towards his waistband”. Something aint right here….

    • tucsonspur January 1, 2018 at 5:28 pm #

      And a new “game” is played: swatting

      Will the bastards compete—for the title? “Sultan of Swatting?”

      Tragic.

  34. Ishabaka January 1, 2018 at 5:17 pm #

    it’s the end of the world as we know it.

    • janet January 1, 2018 at 6:18 pm #

      End of the world as white people know it. Business as usual for people of color.

      • outsider January 1, 2018 at 8:55 pm #

        Typical of you SJW racists, Janet. And not very original either.

        • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 10:03 am #

          Now we both know that only white people can be considered racist, right? And our resident Goddess has shown her hand here with her solution to the world’s population issues – kill all the white people and split up their stuff. Should be workable right, for didn’t this work only just recently in South Africa? Or not. In either case a world of stone age primitives really does not suit the white people lifestyle, so perhaps eliminating us all would be doing us a favor. One thing is for sure, and that is if we allow it to happen, then we deserve it.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 6:29 pm #

            “In either case a world of stone age primitives…”

            In other comments I have considered you to be better than this. Disappointing, even though it was the second time.

            “Now we both know that only white people can be considered racist, right?”

            Nope. Pretty much anyone can.

            “Cause everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on
            Prove they can be better than at any time they please”

            Kristofferson (Jesus was a Capricorn)

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 7:26 pm #

            Sorry but I have never heard the word racist applied to anyone other than a white and usually simply because of a word that they may have used rather than an action they have taken. I have always lived and worked among many blacks and have witnessed just about every one of them demean other blacks of different skin tone, and especially Hispanics and Whitey and have never, ever heard the racist word applied to their behavior. Nor have I seen it applied in the media for black on white crimes. What I say I do not say lightly. I humbly ask anyone and everyone to point me in the direction of even a single case of someone other than a white person being called a racist. I like what you profess, that it goes all ways but I have never seen it myself.

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 7:28 pm #

            Oh, and Stone Age Primitives are people of any color and any gender that live by violence without regard for the rule of law or concern for any others.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 8:21 pm #

            Walter B

            I misunderstood your use of ‘stone age primitives’ – understandably, perhaps, since you appeared to be opposing the concept to ‘white people lifestyle’.

            I’ve witnessed or been part of conversations and read discussions about racism (against Europeans) by e.g. the Chinese or Japanese (more so in the past, but nevertheless…). That’s just an example.
            It’s not the kind of institutional racism that pertained under Apartheid, but definitely a belief (if what one read was true) that their own people were innately superior to other peoples, which satisfies me as a definition of racism, although there are others.

            I can’t comment on how widespread such views were as I’ve never gone into it in that much detail, but I’ve certainly been aware of it as a phenomenon.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:08 am #

            If Whites are in the minority, and the power structure is Non-White, then it’s institutional – as in many prisons among convicts. Or at minority dominated public schools. Many White kids have endured years of hell. Perhaps you’ve lived a very sheltered life and don’t know. But if you don’t care to know, that’s some else again.

  35. FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 5:46 pm #

    Iranian riots – Turkey coup against Erdogan 2.0?

    Iran’s Intelligence Ministry says it has identified and arrested some of the agents behind riots, which followed the recent protests against economic conditions in a number of Iranian cities in recent days.

    http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/01/01/547511/Intelligence-Ministry-Iran-protests

    We need to wait and see what’s going on in Iran, but so far some circumstances confirm my suspicion of Miadan-like event, provoked in Kiev by Bundesnachrichtendienst – German intelligence (BND).

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    • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 6:14 pm #

      My guess the next move will be to paralyze the country via mass protests and work strikes ala Poland of the 80’s. PressTV can broadcast live play by play commentary General Jaruzelski. If they want to put on a theater of the absurd might as well stage it with some humor.

      • akmofo January 1, 2018 at 6:43 pm #

        ..play by play commentary ^by General Jaruzelski..

  36. janet January 1, 2018 at 5:47 pm #

    You may have forgotten there is a place called South America. Its many nations have been a pleasant political coma for a decade… –JHK

    You are right, JHK. Much of South America is very pleasant… a pleasant safe haven among the most cordial and hospitable people I have ever met. I have to admit though, the price of gasoline in Venezuela has “skyrocketed” to 38 cents (that is less than four fiat dimes in US currency for a gallon of gasoline).

    Although some believe that the Long Emergency will affect everyone on the planet, that is just not true. South America still has rural places with a year-round growing season and plenty of know-how. Sunlight and rain are plentiful. Temperatures are pleasant. The Long Emergency will not be felt at all in many parts of South America.

    If you think your future is in peril, do something about it. You may believe US economic collapse is inevitable. I know that suffering is optional… with proper planning and preparation. Expats in South America are enjoying the good life now, even in the cities. Learn Spanish and everything gets even better.

    https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/012616/7-best-countries-retiring-latin-america.asp

    • FincaInTheMountains January 1, 2018 at 5:58 pm #

      Sunlight and rain are plentiful.

      What about penicillin?

      • janet January 1, 2018 at 6:04 pm #

        Plentiful. Cheap. I’ve travelled all over South America. In some countries antibiotics are over-the-counter. Drug costs in general are lower. For example, in Buenos Aires 15 days of penicillin cost USD$3

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 9:58 am #

          “In some countries antibiotics are over-the-counter.”

          And aren’t we all just paying the price, as researchers struggle to keep up with antibiotic-resistant bacteria threatening to make it impossible to carry out even simple operations or have a baby safely?

          As regards all those safe places which will be havens while collapse takes place elsewhere, I’d suggest waiting to see how long they manage to avoid ‘everyone else’ turning up on their doorstep. ‘I’m all right, Jack’, offers very limited hope for the future. People will move more slowly, but hunger will still make them move.

          Richard Heinberg’s ‘power down’ idea was so much more sensible than walking (sorry, driving) towards the cliff edge at speed but no-one was listening. And what could be worse to nations brought up to worship the sacred economic free-for-all than ‘planning’ (holds up cross and garlic…) for the future?

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:25 pm #

          “, in Buenos Aires 15 days of penicillin cost USD$3”

          Janet,
          If you’d listened to your mother, you wouldn’t need the penicillin….

    • hmuller January 1, 2018 at 11:03 pm #

      There may be some lovely places to live in South America. But when Janet touts Venezuela it calls her judgment into question.

  37. janet January 1, 2018 at 6:00 pm #

    If you believe the US is headed for economic collapse, civil war, or worse. There is no need to spend your income on firearms and munitions waiting for the end, when you can enjoy life elsewhere.

    Get out of Dodge!

    Guy who’s been to 135 countries shares 9 where you can live well for $1000 a month

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/countries-where-you-can-live-well-for-under-1000-a-month.html

    • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

      Those who run will only die tired. Since death is inevitable, some of us find far more satisfaction in the idea of standing and fighting and forcing those who would take our shit to not only incur as many losses as we can inflict upon them, but to make them earn the right to spit on our dead faces.

      • janet January 1, 2018 at 8:03 pm #

        “Those who run will only die tired.” –Walter B

        LOL! The point is you don’t need to run anymore once you get settled in a country that has two hour afternoon lunches and a slower way of life in general.

        Maybe what you are really looking forward to is to “incur as many losses as you can inflict” … which I find really sad, to quote Donald.

        • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 8:50 pm #

          I am sorry madam, I should not write metaphorically, it really confuses people and that is not my real intent. What I really meant to say is that I have waded into a fight right here at home by forcing myself onto our Township Committee to battle two incompetent and two corrupt career politicians from the inside. It is a thankless job played to an empty house for a group of people that could not care less. But I could no longer sit idly by and allow for pathetic governance to go unchallenged. My battles are constant and stressful but last year I was actually able to force the slugs to pay off $2M in interest bearing debt. We were the only one of 454 municipalities in the state that did so and with municipal interest rates doubling every year now, well you understand. . I take my victories where I can get them and take solace in the good fight.

          Please tell me that you too are an active member of your community and that you not only care too but that you actually get up from your keyboard from time to time and do what has to be done in the streets to make your place a better place too. So many whiners, so few people of action, so much work to do. It really helps me to cope when someone tells me that they appreciate the hard work and sacrifice like the Good Doctor last week or if when someone reaches out and tells me that they too not only care but are willing to put their ass on the line like me. We need workers not whiners you know or surely we shall all perish without a fight.

        • windward January 1, 2018 at 9:21 pm #

          Difference between men and women.

          But the ancients often wrote about battles “And the women were worse than the men.”

          Janet, how did you manage to travel all over South America?

          You can bug out if you want to. I’m with Walter B. I want as much justice as I can get. And “The Man Without A Country” ought to be enough warning. Even if you can find a new one, it will never be as good as the original.

          • janet January 1, 2018 at 10:24 pm #

            Windward:
            Bus. Airplane. Taxi. Colectivo. Light rail. Motorcycle. Chiva/Escalera (see photo link below) Horse. I did not just go to cities. I went deep into the heartland off the beaten track. I have seen how to weather the Long Emergency without killing human beings.

            https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQImife5pu5BtLZ5-ZRXqyR16zRkMGeRijNHcdgaFXrJuBQ7e82

          • windward January 1, 2018 at 10:48 pm #

            Janet, what I was wondering is how you managed to afford it. Most of us couldn’t come up with $400 to fix the car, according to several studies.

            But I could not ask that question. I suppose I would not answer it except to say NOYB. I am a little jealous that you could make the trip. Most of us couldn’t.

          • janet January 2, 2018 at 12:18 am #

            I had a real job when I lived in the US, with generous vacation benefits. With real money you could make it stretch in South America, especially in the 80s. For example, back then there was a cheap unlimited travel air pass just for Brazil. I started in Manaus visited several places in Brazil (favorite city was Curitiba) and ended up at Foz do Iguaçu, then walked to Paraguay.

            Traveling by mochila is not expensive and more fun than sitting at home fondling guns waiting for, hoping for, the chance to “incur losses” … all the while moaning about how the country isn’t what it used to be. Duh!

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 10:14 am #

            An old hippie woman I knew did a lot of travelling very cheaply back in the sixties throughout Europe. When asked how she pulled it off, she explained that she, like many women throughout time carry a common currency on them at all times that is readily accepted in trade for food, clothing and shelter. So yes, it is doable at least for those who can trade services for sustenance. And it is not so like the snotty little wench that you are to whine about moaning to some one that actually gets off his dead ass and works within the law and within the community to try to bring about positive change? Even more vile when all you’ve got for a solution yourself is a rant about wiping out Whitey.

          • outsider January 2, 2018 at 10:41 am #

            I must admit that Janet’s vision of South America sounds lovely. I have read similar descriptions before, and would like to go before I die (but probably won’t). Her detractors just sound jealous.

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:32 pm #

            ” she, like many women throughout time carry a common currency on them at all times that is readily accepted in trade for food, clothing and shelter. So yes, it is doable at least for those who can trade services for sustenance”

            Walter, why do you suppose that Janet is able to quote penicillin prices” You may be preaching to the choir.

      • ozone January 2, 2018 at 10:55 am #

        Walter B,
        If a particular place has bestowed upon me many blessings, I find no moral rationale to abandon it to reavers and practitioners of smooth wealth extraction. (One is overt and the other covert.)

        Nothing in this world is necessarily “easy”, so I see no reason to make it easy for those who respect nothing.

        **An aside: As a New Year’s resolution (something I normally avoid like the plague!), I’m compiling a mental list of those whose “opinions”/”responses” (diarrheal blitherings) I can completely disregard on this comment board. It will save a lot of time and trouble in both the reading and the replying. Plus, I’ve realized that their snarling insults and complete lack of respect and civility indicate what they would do with power over others; therefore I prefer to give them none by way of acknowledgement. (Got four already, and it’s only the 2nd day of January! lol)

        • ozone January 2, 2018 at 11:07 am #

          …I’ve been all over the world on the cheap as well, and I like it just fine where I’ve settled. Yes, there are uncountable pleasant and beautiful places in the world, but most should be left to those who traditionally inhabit them. They’ve put in the work and the respect. Resentment toward those who barge in and “take”, simply because they have the wherewithal to do so, is the common norm.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

            Yet you have no sympathy towards Whites who are being pushed out. But yet no doubt you had the sense to run when things got too dark as well.

            Such a profound disconnect between your politics and your own experiences. Classic Leftism/Anarchism.

        • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 11:08 am #

          You are wise indeed friend. Sometimes I just seem to let my human weakness’s get the better of me. I appreciate your insight and will do my best to utilize it myself. Bless you, Happy New Year to you as well.

          • ozone January 2, 2018 at 2:03 pm #

            Walter,
            I’m not so sure it’s a “human weakness” to respond to/refute an obviously provocative comment. I happen to think it’s woven into our mechanics of survival. What’s disgusting about the whole enterprise is the deliberateness of it — for whatever reason. Examining the purposes might at least provide for warnings of future assaults. (Yes, I consider it an assault; there’s nothing innocuous or accidental about it. You can figure that consequences would be far different in “real life”.)
            So far:
            Sadistic fun.
            Thought-stopping.
            Paid provocation to blunt the thrust of a blog-owners ideas.
            Information gathering.
            Targeting of “enemies” by honey-trap pretense.
            Intimidation.

  38. Mike H January 1, 2018 at 7:08 pm #

    Well your thoughts on what may be the year to come have a focus on the unrestrained allocation of money across the globe better known as capitalism or corporate capitalism. I would not disagree about the current bubbles in assets across the spectrum or about the details of money creation. I think this is not a temporary aberration which will suffer the usual marketal-societal correction. The clues to this come from MMT or modern monetary theory which makes it clear that banks of whatever dissuasion and particular central banks have always created money but now do so unrestrained by any historical sanctity about debt ratios, in short, they can do this forever as the money is not real in any sense at all. The use of a gold standard is interesting but again just a method to convince users of worth or substance. So the imbalances will become more diverse and wealth missappropriation more severe. We are now in a new epoch of the existence of humanity. So there may be gyrations in markets but the funds will flow forever and nobody will pay any attention to debt after all it is merely a measure of how much money has been created and used and the value of stocks and hard assets is but the same. The change to this misallocation will require political change or severe institutional overthrow and replacement and a completely new way of thinking about how power and the people are brought back into a harmonious sincroneous relationship. Similarly the wellbeing and overall financial wellbeing of the people similarly requires such overthrow and replacement.

    The reality as you have already made plain is the Long Emergency, the denial that oil as the foundation of everything modern on this planet is now terminally in decline with varying rates. There are a lot of people on this planet who already are not members of the oil using elite societies. Most get bye on about $2 a day. 2018 will continue to see this trend extend to most so called western societies or industrialised societies. That eventually reverts back what can naturally be harvested from biology and the sun.

    I would also suggest that the atmospheric imbalance of both stored heat and the increases in gases which restrain the proper loss of heat from the planetary surface as it rotates daily are now making themselves felt and will again increase in intensity over 2018. This will add more stress and create more failure in the biological world of flora and fauna. We will add to that stress and dimunition of our world wide biological genetic history and stocks as we continue to consume minerals and materials to sustain the worlds population mass. Thus the weather will become more uncertain, unusual major weather events will arise across the globe, and episodes of life threatening climatic variations will continue for humans, death for some as a result will continue to rise. Here again we are in a new epoch and will simply become more and more uncomfortable and even distressing. If your poor or heading in that direction you daily staples are going to get less interesting and meagre. Every one the globe is going to continue to have arguments about water. Any such of these could trigger an unexpected outbreak of inter-national violence.

    Given that the United States will continue to do things that are uncooperative to international harmony, violent and destructive for some societies and continue to foster enmity, the issue becomes is 2018 the year the US blunders into creating a major armed conflict or does it continue to act as the bludgeon of Israeli foreign policy and the destruction of all or any perceived enemies to the State of Israel. I do not think that the House of Saud is merely playing with new toys and frolicing about in its wealth, the politics of the world of Islam or the Umma are frought and on a knife edge of discord, the enmity between those of Shia persuasion and those of Sunni persuasion go back centuries. The very core of the being of Iranian nationalism and polity is the battles of the past between these religious viewpoints. Iran’s problem is that the House of Saud is sufficiently blighted by its prejudices to allow the Jews and Israel to destroy their Islamic brothers providing they are not Sunnis. The House of Saud has no interest in the continuation and resurgence of Shia Islam. A lot of noise but the inter regional violence will continue. Neither Russia or China have any skin in the game here. Putin has pulled back Russian assets to Russia for good reason, the US has convinced the Russians and the Chinese that they would mount a major offensive against either of them. The risk of a colossal clusterfuck vis a vis both and all three is very very high. It will be a Black Swan if and when.

    Nothing will done about North Korea unless it is an act of complete and unadulterated myopism by the US. The key point is will Russia and China both stand back and watch a US unilateral military offensive in North Korea? The Russians already have in the Ukraine but would they do nothing about North Korea? after all North Korea’s neighbours, China and Russia are not going to like the US engaging again in some military frolic in Korea. Does the US really want a rerun of the 1950’s and the Korean war? because that is the only viable option if you want to disarm North Korea, any talk of high tech weaponry and such wizardry is simple fairy dust, to do North Korea you have to do it by foot. We all know how the last effort went, except then the North Koreans did not have a dozen nuclear armed missiles to add to the party. Expect a lot of ummming and aaaahhing and chest thumping otherwise it will be back to the 50’s. Now as the US has pissed on the UN they wont have the cover of UN support to do Korea 2.

    The emotional thing is that none of this had to be, did it? Welcome to 2018 indeed. And again thanks a lot for your forecast. Fascinating.

    • Robert White January 1, 2018 at 7:58 pm #

      Beyond a certain Debt to GDP ratio debt becomes thermodynamically unmanageable, and Western nations have exceeded manageable Debt to GDP ratios since the Great Financial Crisis. They did not spend money on infrastructure, Research & Development, Education, or Small Business. All QE went to Stock Buybacks.

      Thermodynamic Zero Sum GAME OVER.

      p.s. I’m pretty sure the Americans are going to start blowing shit up to mask the QE unwind.

      RW

      • windward January 1, 2018 at 10:09 pm #

        That’s what I’m afraid of. I don’t see how the USA can ever recover from the arrogance that resulted from ruling the world during the 1950s when oil was cheap and plentiful and we had overwhelming nuclear weapon superiority.

        Also during that time, the population of the world was still low enough to encourage wishful thinking. And global heating would have been considered as crackpot as communism if anyone had mentioned it, despite evidence that it was happening even then and would become a catastrophe if we didn’t do something.

        The Trumpists and all right-wing nut jobs think we still live in that long-gone world. The only way I can see for us to avoid “blowing shit up” is to reinstate the draft. In other words, I don’t see any way to avoid it.

        • outsider January 2, 2018 at 10:59 am #

          I served in the time of the citizen-soldier when new draftees were paid $134/month. Many were college grads with a hatred of the Vietnam War. And the draft eventually caused massive street protests, which forced Nixon to end it.

          The all-volunteer military was the master stroke of The Empire. Does anyone think that the Afghan War would have gone on for 16 long years and counting if it was still in place? And that’s not to mention the other military debacles which have happened since 9/11. Without their sons being drafted to fight and die, the middle classes go to sleep.

          • windward January 2, 2018 at 9:18 pm #

            That is what I believe, outsider. If all of us were required to serve, most of us would know enough to choose responsible leaders.

            That service may be other than military, but military service for many would be necessary so long as the USA intends to be an empire. I suspect that many would choose it. Eventually the desire for empire would disappear, after enough of us have directly suffered the consequences of it.

            Although that is a moot point, given how close our civilization is to catastrophe. We have run out of time to change course.

            I have found that there is tremendous resistance to universal national service. Chalmers Johnson, author of several books on the sorrows of empire, served in the US Navy in the early 1950s. He said that, in those days, national service was a requirement of citizenship. Now, after nearly forty years of a volunteer force, it is common to hear the following: “National service is slavery.” “Don’t surrender to the war profiteers.” “What about my career?” “I had other priorities.”

            Those who serve today in the volunteer force also have a response. “The Army is in Iraq. America is at the mall.”

            Here is another of my opinions, about gasoline rationing. When the stockbroker must bargain with the homeless man for coupons to fill up his Beemer, we might have a chance to solve our problems.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 8:31 am #

            windward

            You are right – I’ve said that myself in the past. And it is interesting to see how leaders (I can think of two of yours offhand) who have made avoiding active service an art form are nevertheless keen on sending other people’s children to far-off lands (usually with oil fields under them).

            Talking of which, I like your point about gasoline rationing.
            I remember an anti-Sarah Palin joke that circulated when she did, along the lines of ‘if God wanted Americans to have most of the oil, you have to wonder why he left so much of it under the Middle East’.

          • windward January 3, 2018 at 6:12 pm #

            GreenAlba, the gas rationing plan looks especially good to me since I am more likely to be the guy living under the bridge.

            If Sarah Palin couldn’t bring us to our senses, nothing will. The evidence that she didn’t is overwhelming.

            I got that line a little wrong. It should be “America is not at war. The Army is at war. America is at the mall.” The other services have their version.

          • windward January 3, 2018 at 7:12 pm #

            For an excellent summary of the Trump disaster don’t miss

            http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/donald-trump-damage-bigly/

            “…Even before the tax bill, Trump’s first year had caused great harm to the nation…”

            Charles Pierce writes about the scariest part:

            “Trump’s New York Times Interview Is a Portrait of a Man in Cognitive Decline”

            http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14516912/donald-trump-new-york-times-michael-schmidt/

            I have not yet read any of the news today [1/3/18] about Bannon v. Trump. Some headlines:

            “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President”
            “Trump Tower meeting with Russians ‘treasonous’, Bannon says in explosive book”
            “10 explosive revelations from new Trump book”
            “Donald Trump just took a flamethrower to Steve Bannon”

            And to be fair and balanced:

            “10 wild claims about Trump’s White House from the upcoming book ‘Fire and Fury’”

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:11 pm #

            windward

            Thanks for the references. Re cognitive decline, I have seen footage of him in interviews 20 years ago. His views were already what they are, but there is absolutely no doubt that he could put a coherent sentence together back then. The contrast with his current utterances is alarming.

      • BuckP January 2, 2018 at 12:26 am #

        In response to the 2009 financial caused by failed mortgage securities, the Fed bailed out the TBTF banks to the tune of 29 trillion dollars created out of thin air. Catherine Austin Fitts, ex Asst. HUD Secretary under Bush I, said that they could have paid off every mortgage in America for 8 trillion dollars.
        My nephew works at a steel mill in the western US owned by a Russian company. The workers in these US mills are all union and receive top wages and benefits. My nephew is in management and is also well compensated. My family and I are big fans of the NHL and many of their Russian players. Plane loads of Chinese tourists land here in Las Vegas everyday ready to relax and have fun. My son, who works in retail at a mall on the Strip, waits on many Chinese tourists, who he says are friendly and eager to try their English with him. They are integral to the Vegas economy. A psychologist friend, who is a U S citizen, still has parents living in Iran.
        When the MSM starts pounding out the drumbeats of war on behalf the New World Order, Deep State or whatever, I will not be fooled again and count me out. I hope all fellow Americans do the same and see the next false flag for what it is.

        • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 10:40 am #

          eager to try their English – BuckP

          ============

          Ingrish

          • ozone January 2, 2018 at 11:28 am #

            Q.,
            Actually, they were inquiring as to the location of the nearest pool hall. 😉

          • BuckP January 3, 2018 at 2:36 am #

            Q. Sheik
            They talk funny, but all jokes aside, they sure drop a lot of dimes here in Vegas.
            China and Russia are coming after us with the petroyuan backed by gold which is about to enter the scene. They are stockpiling gold and we will soon see if our fiat dollar hegemony can survive a reality check. BTW, they are not afraid of our best military money can buy. If you can’t beat North Vietnam or Afghanistan you better tread lightly as Walter White so famously stated.

  39. PeteAtomic January 1, 2018 at 7:19 pm #

    Happy New Year Emergencies there, Mr. Jim

    I think any significant interest rate increases will kill any economic growth out there right now. I don’t think the majority of workers out there have the incomes to buy into a mortgage if a rate were to go back to even 6 or 7%. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US gets right back into a 2008 situation with mortgages.

    What’s the ‘up and coming’ industry out there? Marijuana production? virtual reality?

    If that’s all we’ve got, then you’ve got to be kidding me, seriously. Yes, there are practical & useful applications for both, but to expect that these types of enterprises are gonna seriously get the US out of entropic collapse is nuts.

  40. Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 8:56 pm #

    John McCain wins the White Renegade of the Year award – again. JS.

    Here is Mr Hood.

    The threat to John McCain’s world order, in his mind, seems to come entirely from the Right. As he put it:

    We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on earth by tearing down walls, not building them.

    What truly separates John McCain from a typical cuckservative is how he grounds this worldview in American tradition. Indeed, much of his own prominence and reputation comes from his bloodline as the scion of Navy aristocracy, fighting to uphold, as the title of his book put it, the “Faith of My Fathers.” His ideology is a kind of twisted patriotism, in which the legacy of blood, history, and tradition is exploited in order to destroy all three. The gaps in this absurd creed are filled by simple opportunism, as when John McCain calls a fellow senator of his own party a pawn of the Russian government and then goes on to decry “those who would worsen our divisions.”

    John McCain is the White Renegade of the Year—and of his entire generation—not just because of the concrete actions he has taken to ensure the United States will become a Third World country. John McCain defines the racial dispossession of European-Americans in high-sounding, utterly mistaken terms, as our becoming “a more just and prosperous country, coming ever closer to the ideals set down by our Founders.” The Founders, all of whom by today’s standards were elitists and white nationalists, would have no idea what he was talking about.

    For Senator McCain, the inability or refusal of America to defend its own interests and identity becomes not an embarrassing example of multicultural weakness, but a proof of American leadership and strength. This is dangerous because it has a twisted appeal to Americans who love their country. Selling weakness as strength, impotence as power, and foreign adventurism as patriotism is more attractive than leftist rhetoric about America being founded on white racism or genocide.

    However, ultimately the ideas of John McCain and the radical Left lead to the same dark end. Unless the United States is specifically defined as the creation of a people, a creation of Europeans, it exists as nothing more than a landmass and an administrative entity. It is revealing that John McCain’s slogan when running for president in 2008 was “Country First,” but when President Trump actually defined that country by saying “America First,” John McCain denounced him.

    There is, of course, good news to end this profile in treason. The political creed of Senator John McCain has become as decrepit as the man himself. Ultimately, his vision depends on the very European-American majority he has worked so hard to undermine. Non-whites are far less eager to embrace military crusades abroad, since they do not suffer from the messianism of whites, and have far less faith in the military and in government than do naïve white Baby Boomers. Though John McCain considers American identity to be infinitely malleable, the embrace of “white privilege” by America’s elites and non-whites means any attempt to exert our will overseas will be seen as yet more white supremacy. The election of President Donald Trump and the rise of socialist movements on the Left show American workers have lost faith in the liberal internationalism Senator McCain champions.

    Senator John McCain’s time has passed—but what a price we have paid for it! It’s up for debate whether John McCain’s own state of Arizona will even be part of this country in a generation, let alone a “red state.” Senator John McCain could have been an American legend, a man who could have defined nationalism for an entire generation. Instead, he will be remembered only in one of two ways. If we win, he will join Angela Merkel and F.W. de Klerk as a traitor. If we lose, the new non-white America will remember him only—if it all—as a fool who helped enable their takeover, and who was just another white male racist anyway.

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    • outsider January 2, 2018 at 11:09 am #

      A most excellent passage, Janos. I don’t wish the death of any individual, but, given the state of McCain’s brain cancer, it seems safe to say that he won’t be with us at year’s end. But there’s still Lindsay Graham, who has already taken his place.

    • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 11:34 am #

      Selling out your fellow service members runs in the family.

      Admiral McCain betrayed the crew of the U.S.S. Liberty before his son betrayed other prisoners of war in Vietnam.

  41. Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 9:03 pm #

    It’s increasingly hard to get real Winter temperature data since the “Weather Men” and Weather Wimmin prefer to give the wind chill temperature or how cold it FEELS. This is indicative of how far our culture has retreated from objective reality.

    • BackRowHeckler January 1, 2018 at 9:07 pm #

      Vlad, best just to go outside and look at the mercury thermometer.

      brh

      • Janos Skorenzy January 1, 2018 at 11:39 pm #

        But how do I know how cold Fargo, ND is if they say it feels like forty below o’er thar?

        • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 12:40 am #

          According to the Google block on my cell phone the temp in Fargo is minus 12F and feels like minus 32F.

  42. BackRowHeckler January 1, 2018 at 9:03 pm #

    Dashboard thermometer read -11dF on drive home this morning, and a Nor’ easter is forecast for later on this week. Right now it has warmed up to 0.

    Meanwhile, heard on NPR today that US population has topped 326 million, with about 1.8 million added in 2017, almost all from 3rd world immigration. Also NPR gleefully reported the native white population is poised to fall below the 60% mark, which for them seemed to be cause for celebration.

    326 million and growing. All in need of housing, cars for transportation, and above all generous supplies of energy to keep the whole show going. Is there enough cash and energy on the entire planet to guarantee this number of people what we’ve come to know as the American way of life? And don’t forget there are about 4 billion poverty stricken people on earth eager to make their way here or to Western Europe and get into the social welfare system. There’s nothing to stop them from coming.

    brh

    brh

    • janet January 1, 2018 at 9:11 pm #

      There’s nothing to stop them from coming, brh. Nor should there be. Social welfare is a good thing. Besides, they all have something to offer and they become net positives in short time. Live and let live for God’s sake!

      • dolph9 January 1, 2018 at 9:25 pm #

        In your opinion, then, the population of the United States can keep on rising to infinity.

        If not, put a number on it.

        • janet January 1, 2018 at 10:59 pm #

          “keep on rising to infinity” –dolph9

          Not going to happen. There are only a few million workers on the waiting list, and given the current system they’ll be waiting somewhere between half a century and three and a half centuries, so these workers will be dead before they receive their green cards.

          Growth also comes from people like Walter B, Qshtik, and others already here who had several kids, who then had several kids, etc. : the majority white population is also responsible for growth.

          Anyway, it isn’t immigration that is driving population growth. You could hermetically seal the borders tomorrow and population growth would continue. Reproduction is what happy people do. Immigrants living here (with or without “documents”) have a right to do it, too.

          With waiting lists of 50 to 350 years, immigration is not a threat, it is a joke. Most will not live long enough to get a green card. As I said “rising to infinity” is not going to happen.

        • Walter B January 1, 2018 at 11:17 pm #

          There are many who think and openly profess that overpopulation is an impossibility here on planet Earth. I have heard them argue with all sorts or rationale ranging from the endless amounts of sustenance that will eventually be provided through the use of 3D printers and recycling of all sorts of waste and other technological means. Maybe they are right and we are simply too stone aged in our thinking that something as magical as human population growth can ever be a problem. Perhaps we should all get back to fornicating for profit and bringing in any and all of those poor, tired, huddled masses so we can share the wealth freely with all. After all Welfare is a great idea and does not cost any of us anything right? And there is plenty for everyone because all they have to do is hand out magic cards to keep them all fat and happy and resting peacefully in front of the TV’s and on the street corners. Yup, I am just too cynical and so stupid that I was fooled into thinking that I had to work hard for a living for going on 5 decades now. THAT is the problem. I am the problem! I am going to make it a point to stop thinking ahead from now on and simply go with good feelings, that’s the ticket, I feel better already.

          • janet January 2, 2018 at 12:22 am #

            “I was fooled into thinking that I had to work hard for a living”

            Just like immigrants, except most of them probably work harder for less pay and complain less. They love the USA, while others are thinking the country needs to be changed or they have “lost” their country, or they no longer recognize their country. Sad.

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 3:07 pm #

            Not really “just like the immigrants” dipshit. I worked side by side with “immigrants” for decades and worked them all into the ground, to even their surprise. And though I made more doing it, I paid them $20 an hour over 20 years ago, ran the business and did all the sales and engineering work as well. They DID work hard for me because I treated and paid them well. And there is an unwritten rule amongst those of us who work for a living and that is if you bust your butt to get the job done, you earn the right to bitch. Not that you could ever understand that. Those that “earn” their keep on their backs have different benefits I suppose. Working to implement actual solutions also puts guys like me in a class that clowns like yourself cannot even conceive of so I suppose I need to be extra understanding to you and your shortcomings. I am finding that very hard to do BTW due to you shitty and confrontational attitude.

      • PeteAtomic January 1, 2018 at 9:35 pm #

        Maybe they can all trim marijuana plants & work at recycling centers. McDonalds might be a coveted job in the near future.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 1:21 pm #

      Even the Romans in their decadence still loved themselves. Never in History have a People willed themselves out of existence. So strange and sad. And the demonic glee from the Left! And the vast indifference from the so called Right who only care about money and their own personal family or circle. Such a retreat from civilized values amidst a cornucopia of wealth and technology.

      • Walter B January 3, 2018 at 9:40 am #

        Wow JS, you are not going to get any of your detractors commenting on THAT statement! How insightful and so very well put. Yes indeed, even in this age of I Am The Center of The Universe mentality you may have it exactly right, far too many Americans really do not like themselves. After all, if you are the only one touting your own wonderfulness, perhaps it is not enough backing to fool even yourself. And the violent left is certainly demonic. That is why they view this destruction with such glee. Violence is the tool of the Cast Out and the Fallen and those who bow down before them live by it as well. The materialistic Right and all of those who value wealth and creature comforts over all on all sides, well they can only worship one master you know. Good work JS, thank you.

  43. PeteAtomic January 1, 2018 at 9:09 pm #

    CNN is using their deep news analysis and ‘experts’ to weigh in on the forecast for the next year with such heavy questions such as; “Who will win the world series?” “What will win the Oscar for best picture in 2018?” and “Which country will win the most gold medals in the winter Olympics?”

    Seriously, no wonder CNN is the most trusted news source for unfortunate patients stuck unconscious on an ICU somewhere.

    • BackRowHeckler January 1, 2018 at 9:40 pm #

      Ya, a lot of deep thinkers over at CNN.

      brh

    • outsider January 2, 2018 at 1:15 pm #

      With Russia out of the Winter Olympics purely by political pressure from the US, I will not be watching. It disgusts me that my country would do such an obnoxious thing with the rest of the world cowardly falling in line. The Olympic movement has been dead, anyway, since they allowed the pros in.

      • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 1:24 pm #

        Likewise. I’ve never tried to get anyone kicked off a forum, yet Leftists revel in doing so and never cease to try and get their enemies silenced. Such a retreat from Civilized Values and the First Amendment. They are unworthy of that which has been bequeathed to them. No wonder they just want to turn it over to aliens. For them everything comes down to revenge for being made to go to church or brush their teeth.

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 2:32 pm #

          The First Amendment has sweet FA to do with your being tolerated on a blog or not, if you’ll pardon my French. It just means the government can’t put you in jail for spouting whatever you want to spout.

          Personally I would leave it entirely to the person running the blog to decide if a person had overstepped the mark. And if I thought a critical mass of people on the blog habitually overstepped the mark, I’d go and read a book instead and leave them to it.

          • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 5:16 pm #

            Or write a book, he, he,

          • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 6:10 pm #

            Meanwhile thousands of men in Europe languish in jail for speaking out against the betrayal of Europe to Islam. No 1st Amendment there. Which do you like better? The American system where people are free to speak or the Euro-Anglo one where they are not?

            I’ve never heard you speak out against the end of free speech in England, so I wonder.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 6:34 pm #

            Thanks, Walter, but I’ll settle for the reading. I have no such aspirations.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 6:35 pm #

            “Meanwhile thousands of men in Europe languish in jail for speaking out against the betrayal of Europe to Islam.”

            I’m getting tired of saying this, but again, Janos, *citation needed*.

            You should get Amnesty onto it.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:10 am #

            Water is Wet – citation needed. This is a variant of the Big Lie technique Hitler warned against. Complete denial of reality.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 4:09 am #

            Janos

            You misunderstand the nature of the kind of statement that requires a citation. Deliberately. Which makes your statement more of the big lie technique than mine.

            “It’s a lovely afternoon” does not require a citation if it comes from either me or you. We can both take it as read that we have our own subjective ideas about what is lovely and that the afternoon accords with those. Sensible people know this.

            “This afternoon Donald Trump said the North Korean leader had turned green” would require a citation (a) because it sounds like something than needs to be checked and (b) if it’s not easily verifiable by being quoted in a variety of reputable sources (amren is not a reputable source, and neither is the Gatestone Institute).

        • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 8:53 pm #

          try and get –Uh, try TO get.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 8:37 am #

            ‘Try and get’ is OK if you’re definitely going to succeed – or so I remember being told in school. If the trying isn’t necessarily going to end in getting, it has to be ‘to’.

  44. beantownbill. January 1, 2018 at 11:45 pm #

    Marlin,

    I have a trip planned to Eastern Connecticut on Wednesday. I was going to come home on Thursday, but now I’m going to leave on Friday. It will be a fun trip back (sarc). The weather in metro Boston has been miserable. Our temperature has risen to 12F. With the wind, it feels about 15 degrees cooler. Looking at my landscaping, our plants won’t survive. Neither will a lot of people. I hang out with a bunch of oldsters and many of them are sick.

    Our heating system hasn’t stopped pumping. Given that it’s forced hot air, the atmosphere in my home is so dry that the relative humidity inside is lower than the desert – literally. I went out and bought two humidifiers, so it’s not bad now. Under normal conditions, the hotel I stay at is very dry, so I’m packing one of my humidifiers, too.

    I think I’m going to take off to Florida for awhile at the end of this month so I can shorten my winter. I don’t want to live in this shit. Maybe I should listen to Janet and move to S. America (nah, ain’t gonna happen, but that’s how I feel right now).

    • BackRowHeckler January 2, 2018 at 12:25 am #

      I assume you’ll be headed to one of the casinos, Bill? What the heck is the status of the casinos that were going up in Mass? Actually we are building two more here to compete with the Mass casinos. I know you like to place a bet, and I do too, but reliance on gambling casinos for some sort of economic renaissance by these NE states seems pretty desperate, don’t you think?

      I was watching the webcam outside Sloppy Joes in Key West last nite, it was all T shirts and shorts, and skimpy New Years eve cocktail dresses on the young ladies.

      thanks for the post, Bill. God Bless You and have a Happy New Year.

      brh

      • beantownbill. January 2, 2018 at 11:27 am #

        Marlin, I wish you a healthy, happy and prosperous 2018.

        Yeah, I’m going to Foxwoods. I like to gamble. I’ve thought about why over the years, but I’m still not sure the reason. I’ve had a good year, and saved some of my discretionary income specifically for this, so the money is there and I won’t get hurt.

        The Boston area casino in Everett, MA is being built. I’ve seen pictures of the construction – they’re getting closer to completion. I think they’re planning to open the middle of next year or thereabouts.

        The new casino will take away a lot of Connecticut’s business. Plenty of Boston gamblers will go to Everett, but CT. should still get the New York crowd. Gambling is not a good thing in a bad economy. Should economic conditions get worse, there’ll be less discretionary income available for gambling, and the big casinos will not do as well as expected.

        Even though I like to gamble, I think casinos are very bad for both individuals and the country in general. What do they produce? You can go to the movies and spend $30-50 for entertainment, or go gambling and blow five grand. Which is more destructive?

  45. Pucker January 2, 2018 at 2:14 am #

    Tim….

    “McVeigh’s disgust with government grew deeper. He came to believe that his racial status as a young white male counted against him. He viewed himself as a victim of reverse discrimination, and grew certain that government affirmative-action guidelines were blocking his way to civil service jobs with the state and federal governments. He and his old friend Jack McDermott had taken the toll collector’s test for the New York State Thruway Authority. Sometime later, they received their test results. Even with McDermott’s veteran credits, he had ranked low among the thousands who had taken the exam. McVeigh was right at the top. He scored 100, and the addition of his veteran’s points gave him a ranking of number two on the list. When he received a letter asking where he would like to work along the Thruway system, he answered almost anywhere except the New York City area. He expected that he would be hired soon, but when weeks passed, then months, he convinced himself that he was not being hired because he was white. “The equal-opportunity shit bothers me,” McVeigh said years later. “The job should go to the most qualified person, regardless of race. You can’t tell me that within a year’s time, two slots wouldn’t open. As a white male, I got put out of a job.”

    American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing
    by Lou Michel

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    • Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:56 am #

      Great cover story, wasn’t it? Very compelling. They’re good at what they do, or at least they used to be. The narratives have grown a bit threadbare of late.

      • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 2:12 pm #

        So Whites AREN’T discriminated against? And Men as well? And thus White Men doubly, a negative twofer?

        You admitted they were the other day. Evidently you sublimate this into your desire for revenge – event though your erstwhile allies would increase the persecution were they to triumph.

        Irrational. The Fall of Man degraded all of our faculties. Adam, was a natural genius, saint, and undying physical superman before he ate the apple offered to him by the woman. I feel for you brother. I offer you my hand. Now don’t go and hit your head against my knuckles. Maybe it will jar you into higher functioning….

        Zen Master Rama told his female disciples that he could “bump” their chakras up into higher functioning.

  46. Pucker January 2, 2018 at 2:46 am #

    “McVeigh’s disdain for the government was building. With his sister Jennifer he started sharing stories he’d read about the Rockefeller family, and how U.S. currency was once backed by gold until the gold standard had been scuttled in favor of paper money that McVeigh viewed as worthless. On top of that, he said, there was the mountain of spent credit called the national debt. The brother and sister’s discussions sprawled in myriad directions, from the Bible to the pyramid and its crowning all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill. McVeigh was reading more antigovernment books and pamphlets, and he shared them with his inquisitive younger sister. He wanted to expand her perspective, though some of the claims in the literature seemed bizarre and inconceivable to Jennifer—including one writer’s contention that the government was building massive crematoriums and 130 concentration camps to exterminate individuals who disagreed with federal policies.”

    American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing
    by Lou Michel

    • FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 3:14 am #

      In the sick consciousness of McVeigh was implanted an idea – to solve a cockroach infestation problem, let’s burn down the house.

      We (Trump and I) have a better idea – let’s get rid of the cockroaches.

      • Pucker January 2, 2018 at 4:20 am #

        Active Nihilism vs Passive Nihilism….

        What would Bakunin say?

    • Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:55 am #

      McVeigh was a CIA operative patsy. Period. OKC was a proof of concept trial run for 9-11, as well as a justification for cracking down on domestic terrorist groups, real or imagined.

      • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 11:37 am #

        Was it a fertilizer bomb or a hot wired building?

      • Walter B January 2, 2018 at 5:36 pm #

        From “the Devil’s Chessboard” by David Talbot:

        During the 1957 Suez crisis, a group of foreign policy officials and commentators gathered for dinner at the Washington home of Walter Lippmann, the conversation turned to Egypt’s defiant leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. One of the guests jested, “Allen (Dulles), can’t you find an assassin?” To the group’s amazement, Dulles took the comment in dead seriousness. “Well first you would need to find a fanatic, a man who’d be willing to kill himself if he were caught”, said the spymaster, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. “And he couldn’t be an outsider. He’d have to be an Arab. It would be very difficult to find just the right man “.

        Yes, the Patsy must fit the exact mold of a patsy for the deception to be believable, though a few small lies can fill in for any minor shortcomings. All of these deceptions require just the right patsy.

  47. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 2:57 am #

    the enmity between those of Shia persuasion and those of Sunni persuasion go back centuries.== Mike H

    Well, let’s be fair here, Mike.

    Nothing compared to hundreds of years of blood-letting for “religious reasons” between Catholics and Protestants in Europe.

  48. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 2:59 am #

    Trump, in his speech on National Security, in addition to compulsory program consisting of declarations of US greatness, attacked the so-called Hillary Clinton doctrine, according to which the spread of democracy around the world (in her understanding of democracy) is the most important national interest of the United States and all other interests must be subordinated to it.

    Including the national interest, consisting of unwillingness to receive a blow with nuclear fist on the muzzle after the next color revolution!

    The latter is especially relevant, since in his speech Trump announced the so-called “nation building”, including the construction of “Ukrainian Nation”, a multi-trillion dollar mistake, contrary to “the national interests of the United States”.

    And it may very well be that the successful passage of tax reform through the Senate and Congress is a direct consequence of this Trump speech.

    • outsider January 2, 2018 at 1:01 pm #

      Fincaln,

      It’s looking more and more like Putin’s critics were right. Some say he should have rolled the tanks into Kiev to stop the illegal coup in its tracks, and been done with it. The US would have done nada, except complain about Russian imperialism as it enacted more sanctions. Now, he’s been put in a bind by his own caution, I’m afraid.

  49. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 4:07 am #

    The main course of events in 2018 – both in US and in the world – will be the introduction of rigid national and international Financial Control systems == Finca

    Executive Order Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-blocking-property-persons-involved-serious-human-rights-abuse-corruption/

    Here it begins…

    • FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 5:11 am #

      I should think that use of little children for ritual sex and other ritual activities constitutes a “Serious Human Rights Abuse”.

      • Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:24 am #

        The relentless march towards a truly global, all electronic currency continues.

  50. Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:23 am #

    You’d think the MICC strategists would try to mix up the playbook occasionally, if only for aesthetic purposes, but 2018 appears to be just more of the same old grind. Trump has evidently been either captured and neutered or, like the Great Orator before him, he was a willing stooge all along. Knowing how DC operates, I’d guess the latter.

    ***********************

    https://www.globalresearch.ca/what-is-happening-in-iran-is-another-color-revolution-underway/5624505

    What Is Happening in Iran? Is Another “Color Revolution” Underway?

    By Brandon Turbeville
    Global Research, December 31, 2017

    A familiar sight is taking place across Iran tonight and it has been for the last three days. Protests are taking place in numerous cities citing grievances and demanding that the Ayatollah and Iranian President step down. For a few days, the protests remained non-violent but now violence has indeed flared up as protesters have laid waste to a number of government properties and those belonging to “pro-government militias.”

    Neo-cons in the American media and the U.S. President are all demanding that Americans stand with the “Iranian people” and the “protesters” in their “fight for freedom.”

    The reason this sight is familiar is because we have seen it in Egypt, Libya, and Syria in the past as well as in Iran itself in the late 2000s. Protests that turn violent, a subsequent crackdown that either is violent or is reported as such, and the weight of American propaganda against the target government are all “Arab Spring” repeats that are themselves nothing more than the color revolution/destabilization apparatus that has been used by the West in countries all across the world for decades, particularly in the last twenty years.

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  51. Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:31 am #

    By the way, nice photo and peaches on the Patreon feed, Jim!

  52. Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 7:51 am #

    The WaPo – whose subhead now ironically reads Democracy Dies in Darkness! – posts yet another bit of comedic political disinformation today:

    By Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer
    January 2 at 6:00 AM

    Why North Korea succeeded at getting nuclear weapons — when Iraq and Libya failed

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/01/02/why-north-korea-succeeded-at-getting-nuclear-weapons-when-iraq-and-libya-failed/

    My rule of thumb when it comes to the MSM in general, but the NY Times and the WaPo specifically, is that whatever they’re breathlessly hyping, I assume it’s a complete lie or distortion, and then ask whose agenda it serves. The North Korea canard serves a lot of nefarious agendas (distraction from other far more ominous events hiding in plain sight, implicates other “axis of evil” [fill in the blank here] state actors for providing assistance, provides continued impetus for support of obscene MICC budgets, provides a pressure point to draw in both China and Russia militarily, etc.) and simply makes no sense on the face of it as a legitimate threat.

    Although, you have to admit, Kim as a classic cartoon villain certainly makes for good copy. I could definitely see Kim and Trump teaming up for a series of Hollywood blockbusters after their “fearless leader” days are over. Maybe throw in Ahh-nold, Sly, and Chuck Norris (no doubt with Christie Brinkley in tow) as well to completely seal the deal with the geriatric Baby Boomer crowd.

    • pequiste January 2, 2018 at 8:34 am #

      That the Beloved Pudgy One is a cartoon villain straight out of a Marvel comic book and would make for a legendary life-imitates-art big screen spectacular; is apodictic. However, I would suggest your “heroes” are just a wee bit dated (actually they are way past their use by date and are rancid.)

      Let the masters of today’s, Weinstein-less Hollyweird, provide you Scratch, Janos, and adoring proles, millennials and Urban-dwellers everywhere, a super-hero made perfectly for our hyper-politically-correct landscape!

      I propose the mightly invincible, African “Black Panther: to save the worlds from impending conflagration:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjDjIWPwcPU

      Propaganda you can count on.

      • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 11:19 am #

        Interesting new (to me) word as in “We hold these truths to be apodictic…etc…etc.

      • Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 11:53 am #

        LOL! Yeah, I’m getting a bit long in the tooth myself these days. Just turned over 60 last month, so I’m definitely putting the Ol’ in Ol’ Scratch these days.

      • sprawlcapital January 2, 2018 at 12:37 pm #

        Black Panther may be the world’s first Jamaican superhero.

        • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 7:53 pm #

          “Black Panther may be the world’s first Jamaican superhero.”

          Sprawl,
          3rd World perhaps….

  53. janet January 2, 2018 at 10:04 am #

    “My rule of thumb when it comes to the MSM in general, but the NY Times and the WaPo specifically, is that whatever they’re breathlessly hyping, I assume it’s a complete lie or distortion” –Ol’ Scratch

    In other words, you are prejudiced. You do not know what independent journalists do. You pre-judge content based on source, instead of using criteria to determine whether the content is factual and accurate.

    • pequiste January 2, 2018 at 11:31 am #

      The sources you mention are powerful utensils (of the Established Order- – Evil Fuckers) and you janet, are also a tool.

      Journalism today is propaganda disguised as infotainment.

      You do have your advance ticket purchased for the premiere of “Black Panther” don’t you?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9UZo32KMk

      Dey be Kangs and shit y’all.

      • Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 11:50 am #

        That ho be a useful idiot, yo!

      • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:51 pm #

        “You do have your advance ticket purchased for the premiere of “Black Panther” don’t you?”

        Any of the readership, by a show of hands, ever deal with members of this group? You, with all respect, have no fucking idea….

  54. Ol' Scratch January 2, 2018 at 11:48 am #

    Awesome article and video on the MICC’s next big thing in full spectrum warfare. Talk about bang for the buck! Slaughterbots! There will be NO defense!

    https://thebulletin.org/%E2%80%9C-much-death-you-want%E2%80%9D-uc-berkeleys-stuart-russell-%E2%80%9Cslaughterbots%E2%80%9D11328

    • Walter B January 3, 2018 at 9:57 am #

      Wow, what a Conspiracy Theory Scratch. None of THAT can be even remotely true now can it since if man were meant to fly he would have been born with wings, right? Oh wait, I can’t use that one anymore can I? What other bullshit catchphrase or cliché can I utilize to make that bad idea go away? What’s that you say, I will have to accept reality and deal with it? Why, nobody else does….

      Great work there my friend, thank you. I will add it to my growing list of reasons why Eternal Rest sounds a lot better as every day passes.

  55. volodya January 2, 2018 at 12:06 pm #

    Maybe it’s just me but Bitcoin looks like a direct challenge to the authority of national establishments all over the world. The gangsters and murderers that run those varied places would not take such challenges lightly. Thus, you hear talk of China shuttering bit-coin exchanges.

    I find it wondrous that nobody’s been able to find out who the designer of bit-coin is. I find I so wondrous that I don’t believe it. I rather believe that intel agencies know exactly who he is. In fact, given the epic incompetence of American intelligence, I find it rather more likely that an org like the Mossad sussed him out long ago.

    In fact, I give it substantial odds that “satoshi” or whatever his real name is, sleeps with the fishes given his intolerable effrontery. Maybe his passing is recorded in police logs as just another missing person or an accidental death or an apparent suicide. Maybe his grieving relatives buried him not having a clue as to what he’s done or how he really met his end.

    Or maybe he’s been renditioned and confined in a place that has less than zero scruples about extracting finger nails or teeth other body parts until “satoshi” has been wrung dry of every detail he knows, everything he’s done, and the name and location of anyone remotely connected with this. And then of course they can’t just let him run free. Can they? Of course not.

    But if by chance “satoshi” really is unknown and lives and breathes, I would hope he has the sense to keep his trap shut, to resist the urge to go public. I would caution “satoshi” that he may think he’s covered his tracks but that there’s 50 ways to fuck that up and if he’s a genius he’ll think of 25 of them.

    The best thing that could happen for “satoshi” is that Bit-coin goes bye-bye. Maybe then with the passage of the years and the exigencies of new and changing times, the attention of the people he’s pissed off will be deflected.

    If by the most unlikely chance he reads this comment and is sitting there chuckling, I would say that old age sucks but it’s better to get there than not. Then, with a bit of luck, “satoshi” cracks and withers and gets to become an old man filled with regret. Like me.

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    • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 12:54 pm #

      ” I would caution “satoshi” that he may think he’s covered his tracks but that there’s 50 ways to fuck that up and if he’s a genius he’ll think of 25 of them”

      Volodya,
      Great comment…I will not forget it.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 2:16 pm #

      Mickey Rourke and John Hurt, forget the name of the movie. In any case, there’s fifty way to leave your “lover”.

  56. ..Captain America.. January 2, 2018 at 12:14 pm #

    MUGS, PUGS, AND THUGS.
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/npx7gggmiz0i2mw/Mugs.pdf?dl=0

    Sent from the New Republic.

  57. thwack January 2, 2018 at 12:35 pm #

    I was the victim of a hit and run driver two weeks ago.

    He knocked me off my motorcycle, waited a few seconds, and then slowly drove off (white SUV, dark tinted windows, Arizona plates BLX 6071)

    Dear sir, you need to change your name to LUCKY MOTHER FUCKER, cause if I could have caught up to you I would have beaten you silly, AND STOMPED ON YOUR THROAT.

    Starting for 2018, the next time someone hits me, the first thing Im doing is puncturing the sidewall of one of their tires; I don’t care if you are Mother god damn Theresa….

    because if you decide to run?

    at the very least you are going to do it on a rim.

    Yeah faggot, you may have got away this time; but your days are numbered; more and more people are getting woke to the fact police don’t take this crime seriously.

    Therefore I predict a severe beating in your future.

    Also, I have a shout out for all law enforcement:

    If you command a driver to stop his car, and he refuses?

    You have my permission to DUMP ON HIS ASS!

    Empty your entire clip into the driver.

    Send these worthless, P.O.S drivers to hell where they belong.

    • pequiste January 2, 2018 at 12:56 pm #

      Glad that you survived the accident Thwack. Hope your injuries are minimal and that you have a rapid recovery.

      I sincerely hope your assailant is caught and punished. Sue his ass – everyone understands a civil lawsuit of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

      Hit and run drivers definitely deserve some overwhelming justice in the form of a severe beating and then fullest prosecution by the Law with attempted murder being the charge.

      I was almost hit twice just over this New Year’s holiday weekend.

      I was tempted to ” fire back” at the scumbags’ vehicles but there were many people around the parking lot both times.

    • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 1:00 pm #

      Thwack,
      Nice to have you back…limping or otherwise.

      Reminds me of an old joke once heard on HBO…Blacks have a habit of naming their children after luxury items that are out of their reach…You know, “Jade”, “Ruby”, “Car Insurance”….

      Just Sayin’

    • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

      Welcome back Thwack, what kind of a bike was/is it? Make? Engine cc? Did you break any bones and such?

      • thwack January 2, 2018 at 4:04 pm #

        Physically, Im alright.

        Mentally?

        Im still a bit disturbed from discovering how common this crime is?

        While doing some research on the topic using Google, I noticed it happens everyday, all the fucking time?

        H&R drivers have actually been seen on survaliance video getting out of their vehicle, inspecting their damage, looking back at the pedestrian laying in the road, then hopping back in their car and driving off.

        Other times, the same victim has been run over several times because none of the drivers would stop and pull the victim out of the road?

        Or they find dead people in the morning who were hit the night before.

        Or, my favorite, people shift back and forth between reverse and drive trying to dislodge the body stuck underneath their SUV

        So Im scratching me head thinking “what planet did I land on?”

        Are people really that cruel and evil?

        Man, I gotta really amp up…

        pour some liquor on my cereal and stand in front of the mirror more…

        or I’m finished.

        • tucsonspur January 2, 2018 at 4:24 pm #

          Arizona plates? You’re lucky. Usually they like to finish you off with a shotgun. Then stop for a couple of blasts. Drinks, that is.

          • thwack January 2, 2018 at 7:29 pm #

            Arizona plates? You’re lucky. Usually they like to finish you off with a shotgun.

            *********

            Deep in a Baltimore ghetto?

            They are lucky they only hit me, because Baltimore niggers are among the most savage, impulsive, vicious and ugly in the known universe.

            You fuck with these niggers and they will set your grandmothers house on fire.

            Poison your dog.

            At least 3 times Ive seen late model cars parked on the street;

            every window smashed

            every tire flattened

            all head lights and tail lights busted,

            and nothing else touched.

            Some of you know the kind of niggers Im talking about?

            Parts of Baltimore look like 1945 Dresden. Lots of untreated mental illness. Then you gots lots of blacks walking around with concrete blocks on their shoulders, listening to music instructing them to shoot, stab, assault anyone who annoys them…

            Some racist white man once wrote that black people are “half child and half devil.”

            Im not saying its true; but I know why he said it.

            Its possible the driver of the SUV drove off because he thought I was one of em?

            Come on white people,

            share your nigger horror stories?

            Janos?

            Is that you Janos?

            Is that me?

          • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 7:51 pm #

            “Come on white people,
            share your nigger horror stories”

            Thwack,
            As I obviously am confused as to my race…I must decline.

    • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 2:05 pm #

      t police don’t take this crime seriously.–Indeed.

      • elysianfield January 2, 2018 at 7:35 pm #

        Malthuss,
        C’mon man…Hit and run involving an injury is a Felony in most states…You know…Hard Time….

        • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 8:46 pm #

          I cant find the data. I had read many do not even get investigated.

        • thwack January 2, 2018 at 8:49 pm #

          You’re thinking like a square ely.

          Investigations are expensive, time consuming and resource sinks.

          If you hit and run, you have a very good chance of avoiding prosecution because “they” have to prove who was driving?

          Some people stick a screwdriver in their ignition and report their car stolen.

          Then, even if you ID a driver, they can claim they thought they hit a deer.

          So you see how depending on how lawyered up the person is, they can stall, and stall, and stall,

          delay, delay, delay…

          until you give up.

          or your lawyer gives up.

          or the police give up.

          I think many “civilians” are under the mistaken impression that the State cares about you as a person, a citizen…

          Well the truth is they don’t; they care most about the State.

          You know what a government worker told me when I mentioned chasing down the next driver that hits and runs on me?

          “well, don’t do that; just repair your vehicle; THATS WHAT INSURANCE IS FOR”

          You know what I said to her?

          “well, maybe you should buy some rape insurance for yourself and your daughter, and your grand daughter, so when y’all get gang raped by a pack of niggers… you don’t hafta call the police or catch the perp…

          you can just go get your snatch repaired by the pussy dent and collision shop…?

          You’ve been living in a dream world Ely.

          You better wake up before niggers do it for you.

          Just sayin

          • malthuss January 2, 2018 at 8:56 pm #

            I had read of a hit and run and the story was by a victim.
            Details are fuzzy.
            1 in 6 gets caught?

          • elysianfield January 3, 2018 at 11:26 am #

            “You’ve been living in a dream world Ely.”

            Thwack,

            …Ex Cop says otherwise….

            Just schoolin’

    • aibohphobia January 2, 2018 at 11:51 pm #

      For $4.95, you can look up the plate online, here;

      http://www.license-plate-lookup.net/search/results.php

      But the state cops should be able to locate him/her at no charge.

      • aibohphobia January 2, 2018 at 11:57 pm #

        For $4.95, you can look up the plate online, here;

        http://www.license-plate-lookup.net/search/results.php

        But the state cops should be able to locate him/her at no charge.

        Also,
        The worst people in terms of car assault are diplomats. If you ever have the misfortune to drive in Washington DC, figure out what diplomat plates look like and stay the h*ll away from them! If a diplomat wrecks into your car, insurance won’t pay and you can’t take them to court. There is literally no recourse from an encounter with a diplomat car. It is apparently part of diplomatic immunity…

  58. amb January 2, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

    Same as it ever was. Humanity continues to bungle forward (and obviously, so far on its timeline, doing more good than harm since we are still here). The only thing that changes is that technology speeds forward, leaving the Humanities behind in the dust. Every culture, society, city or empire has always had the same conditions, and they only get altered and amplified by technology.

    We won’t accurately know what is going to happen with any aspect of existence until it happens. Forecasting and predicting is a fool’s errand.

    There is only significant change or improvement in life, when it first occurs inside the hearts and minds of the people. Change starts with YOU.

    • 100th Avatar January 2, 2018 at 5:11 pm #

      “(and obviously, so far on its timeline, doing more good than harm since we are still here).

      More good than harm? By what metric?
      Reproduction, population?
      Humans have experienced more harm from one another than anything else save bacteria and viruses.

      More good
      To the planet?
      To the animal brethren?

      To biological life?

  59. sprawlcapital January 2, 2018 at 1:05 pm #

    The outdoor air temperatures reported here are in degrees F., and are actual temperatures, not wind-chill/feels-like temps.

    Yesterday, New Year’s Day, a new record low was set for the date in Des Moines, Iowa: minus 19 degrees.

    This is remarkable in that we have seen many new record high temps in recent years, but not record lows.

    Back in the 1960s and early 70s I recall that minus 20 was not uncommon. I had thought those days were over. It’s actually encouraging that we can still have such extreme cold.

    The cold weather has some benefits in that it kills many insect pests and keeps tropical diseases out of our territory. It may also re-set the biological clock of plants like the lilacs in our yard, which in recent years have leafed out prematurely and then been damaged by frost.

    Happy New Year! Thanks, Jim, for this blog!

    • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 2:23 pm #

      The wind chill only “feels” that way when it’s blowing. And if your are dressed warmly, you won’t “feel” it as much. Such subjectivity is depressing. The objective temperature as per the mercury is more important.

      Of course wind chill is real phenomena, but it should be only for the local news about local conditions. And of course, it is dangerous when it is cold or even cool Fifty degrees can kill slowly via hypothermia. The Easter Islanders were freezing when the Europeans met them: no wood to build shelters in a non-tropical climate that goes down to the fifties during the winter, with heavy winds and rain. Even the tropics can chill people badly. The poor chimps!

    • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 3:35 pm #

      Des Moines, Iowa: minus 19 degrees. – sprawl

      ============

      It drives me wild to hear my brother-in-law pronounce the s in Moines or Illinois. How, in 71 years of life, could he not notice that those final s letters are silent? How could he not notice that the past tense of ‘stole’ is stole, not stoled? Well, that’s neither here nor there. The subject is cold temperatures.

      I spent 3 winters at Duluth AFB, MN – 1962, 63, 64. I once experienced a reading of minus 38F. Things are different at negative 38F. For one thing the air is denser and sound travels faster. An F106 taking off on the runway a half mile away sounds like its right there in the lot where your car is parked.

      We heard from locals that you could hock up a wad of flem and spit it straight up in the air and it would come back down and land with a clink. But, no, this was just a myth to bedazzle troops who hailed from below the Mason-Dixon line. Cars driving at 60 mph on Lake Superior was not a myth.

      • thwack January 2, 2018 at 4:09 pm #

        It drives me wild to hear my brother-in-law pronounce the s in Moines or Illinois. How, in 71 years of life, could he not notice that those final s letters are silent? How could he not notice that the past tense of ‘stole’ is stole, not stoled?

        ****************

        Not that it matters but,

        what color is he?

      • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 6:18 pm #

        Oh all that’s interesting. I’ve always loved the stories of Jack London about the Far North, which he experienced for a time. In my favorite, “To Build a Fire”, the protagonist was told by an Old Timer that no man should travel on the Klondike when it below fifty below. At fifty below, your spittle will freeze before hitting the ground. But most importantly, you are in danger of death if your feet get wet. No matter how much you run, you will not be able to dry them out and warm them up in time before they freeze. You will have to build a fire, and that means exposing your hands – and you may not be able to do it before they freeze as well.

        He goes out anyway and starts saying to himself, “It’s not that bad. Some of these Old Timers are kind of womanish. Any man who is a man can do it as long as he keeps his wits about him.” Sure enough he falls thru the ice into a little hot spring that never freezes very well. You can imagine the rest.

        London is a towering figure. Not only an author, but an adventurer and early American National Socialist. His “Iron Heel” about a brutal Plutocratic takeover is ripped out of tomorrow’s headlines.

      • capt spaulding January 3, 2018 at 11:23 am #

        I was up in Duluth last weekend. I got up in the morning, and it was so cold, I saw a hen walking down the street with a capon.

        • elysianfield January 3, 2018 at 11:31 am #

          Captain,
          Nice play on words. Around my neck of the woods, they place capes…like a blanket, on horses during the cold weather…never seen a cow so equipped…wonder why…I mean besides “racism”, of course.

  60. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 1:41 pm #

    It looks like it is going to be an exciting and dangerous year.

    Will the January freeze be followed by a February confiscation?

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  61. janet January 2, 2018 at 1:44 pm #

    “It is two and a half minutes to midnight”

    (2017 Doomsday Clock Statement Science and Security Board
    Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

    • beantownbill. January 2, 2018 at 4:08 pm #

      They could make it not sound so bad by counting in seconds: it’s 150 seconds to midnight. Then they could move the clock seconds by seconds – it’s now 142 seconds to midnight.

    • thwack January 2, 2018 at 4:20 pm #

      Malthuss,

      1. how many white children have you produced?

      2. Are you blaming non white people?

      3. What about all the white women walking around childless?

      I regret to inform you that I do not seek your nomination to produce white children.

      I will not run, and if called, I will not serve.

      Just sayin

  62. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 3:49 pm #

    1982. Moscow. Lubyanka KGB Headquarters.

    A guy walks in, goes to a reception desk:

    — Hello, I am an American spy. I would like to surrender.

    — Do you have a weapon?

    — Yes, Sir, I do.

    — Please follow to Room 5.

    The guy walks to Room 5:

    — Hello, I am an American spy and I do have a weapon. I would like to surrender.

    — Do you have a communication device?

    — Yes, Sir, I do.

    — Please follow to Room 8.

    The guy walks to Room 8:

    — Hello, I am an American spy and I do have a weapon and a communication device. I would like to surrender.

    — Do you have a mission?

    — Yes, Sir, I do.

    — Than what the hell are you doing here? Go and do your job!

  63. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 4:14 pm #

    Puin about homosexuals:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=224&v=WhZOi2y75SM

    • akmofo January 3, 2018 at 10:58 am #

      Pretty much the same as the EU’s Mogherini reaction to the Iranian’s revolt against mullahs.

      The day before, of, and after Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, she is tweeting against it. Seven days into the Iranian street protests and her tweeter goes dead silent. Not a word. Nothing.

      Mogherini’s husband is a lobbyist for Gazprom.

      • FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 1:25 pm #

        What do you have against Gazprom? Or do you prefer heating your house with firewood?

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=74&v=WhZOi2y75SM

        • akmofo January 3, 2018 at 4:00 pm #

          What’s wrong with using oil and gas delivered from free and democratic Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, Libya, etc? Why should Gazprom be the only game in town?

  64. Pucker January 2, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

    It is a bit strange that if we don’t like a particular despot (e.g. Saddam Hussein) that we’ll drop a huge bomb on a school full of kids and then justify it by blithely declaring that “Saddam’s bad!” (Why not just whack the particular despot?). I wonder why we communicate in this way? Weird….

    McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City (which had a daycare center in it). McVeigh justified it basically by declaring: “It’s tragic, but the Federal Government is Bad.”

    This may be major brainwashing Blowback?

    In the 60 Minutes McVeigh interview, neither McVeigh nor the interviewer nor the victims’ families could see the ironic horror in the brainwashing? Maybe this was what McVeigh was trying to show?

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  65. Pucker January 2, 2018 at 5:10 pm #

    According to the McVeigh book, this is the Mother-of-All Gun Shows:

    http://www.tulsaarmsshow.com/homem.html

    Apparently, lots of undercover Fed’s cruise the gun shows.

  66. tucsonspur January 2, 2018 at 5:20 pm #

    Here he is, another Harvard highbrow doffing his high hat, into which he should heave a huge dump.

    Hopefully off to his Final Destination, private equities firm Lindsay Goldberg, this former Obama Treasury Secretary seems hard put to remember the trillions Osama Obama added to the debt.

    This hideous hominoid continues the attack on the Golden Gladiator of Gotham:

    https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/former-treasury-secretary-lew-says-125300506.html

  67. 100th Avatar January 2, 2018 at 5:22 pm #

    “It is also plausible after the disclosures of recent months that the Russian meddling investigation could blow back on Hillary, the Clinton Foundation, Clinton allies, and possibly even some of Obama’s people (maybe even the former president himself). The evidence for Obama-era FBI involvement in the Christopher Steele file is already out there. There is yet to be a satisfactory elucidation of the Loretta Lynch / Bill Clinton Phoenix tarmac meet-up, nor to the circumstances around HRC’s lost emails and private server, nor the Anthony Weiner laptop, nor to the Uranium One matter. The casual observer sees much more circumstantial criminality in these matters so far than any Trump collusion-with-Russia hypothesis provides.

    I venture to predict that ex-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigns her House seat in disgrace as the case of her Pakistani grifter IT aide, Imran Awan, moves into the courts.”

    It seems that democracy, whatever that is, does die in darkness… as, apparently, do cheap slogans.

  68. Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 6:22 pm #

    Justin Trudeau is now called a White Supremacist for deporting many of the aliens he called to come in. Too many parasites too fast it seems. For all their rhetoric, they do have a saner policy than America’s and his grandstanding to make Trump look bad has now backfired since it was against that saner policy.

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/08/24/diversity-no-longer-a-strength-justin-trudeau-oversees-largest-deportation-increase-in-canadian-history/

  69. Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 6:31 pm #

    http://shoebat.com/2016/11/03/british-girl-murdered-and-chopped-up-at-kebab-restaurant-and-served-to-customers-by-muslims-case-reopened-by-police-suspect-sex-trafficking-gang-was-involved/

    But how if Knives have been banned? We all know how law abiding Muslims are. They would never go against the Law. Did they use Light Scimitars?

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    • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 6:59 pm #

      Janos, I know it may come as a total surprise to you, but it often happens that banning things doesn’t result in them disappearing off the face of the earth. But you knew that.

      I imagine running people over with your car is probably banned in the US too. Or selling heroin. Or walking into a school with a machine gun and shooting kids and their teachers.

      “We all know how law abiding Muslims are.”

      I don’t suppose you actually have the slightest clue, compared to any other demographic. We are aware of your imagination, though.

      And most knives aren’t banned. Carrying them around in a public place is banned.

      You seem to find the whole concept confusing. Here is a comprehensive list of what you can carry and what you can’t even own, so that you can avoid being apprehended should you ever choose to visit our country and its terrifying inhabitants.

      https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/knives-offensive-weapons-and-law

      If you’re on any kind of list as a promoter of Nazism, though, you’re unlikely to get any further than passport control. Thankfully.

      • thwack January 2, 2018 at 7:36 pm #

        Here is a comprehensive list of what you can carry and what you can’t even own,

        ************

        (please don’t tell niggers about muriatic acid)

    • Janos Skorenzy January 2, 2018 at 7:18 pm #

      Exactly. That’s one good reason why banning is often such a bad ideal. Only the Law Abiding abide – leaving themselves defenseless against criminal elements like these. Glad you’re not disputing this story. How does it make you feel to know that your country has millions of these now? And by some estimates, a hundred thousand or more English girls have been groomed?

      Same thing wherever in Europe they are. Streets that were formerly safe for women at all hours are no longer safe at any hour. Thanks Liberals!

      • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 8:41 pm #

        “How does it make you feel to know that your country has millions of these now?”

        Millions of people murdering young girls? You’re at it again.

        “And by some estimates, a hundred thousand or more English girls have been groomed?”

        You give me the estimates (dubious sources have no value, so please don’t insult me with anything from amren or its ilk) and I’ll give you my opinion. Nice to know that Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish girls have been left out of your nightmare. One girl groomed – anywhere, by anyone – is one too many.

        “And by some estimates”, so you told me further up (or perhaps it was just your estimate), thousands of white men are languishing in European jails for peacefully protesting the Islamic takeover of Europe. Yet you haven’t given me any evidence yet. And I repeat, amren isn’t evidence.

        In the UK context, the Office of National Statistics is an example of what evidence looks like. Or police crime statistics.

        • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 8:44 pm #

          And I’d say Damascus was one of the safest cities I’ve even walked through at night, before its current nightmare started. Not a drunken or drug-addled yob in sight.

          • GreenAlba January 2, 2018 at 8:44 pm #

            *ever*

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:20 am #

            Citation needed. Your personal experience is meaningless to me since you are incapable of interpreting it accurately.

            An estimated one out of five women in the Peace Corps are raped on assignment in the 3rd World. The Peace Corps refuses to admit this or keep accurate statistics.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 4:23 am #

            Janos

            Again, you misunderstand the nature of a statement that requires a citation. Again, deliberately.

            If I say ‘I’d say [expression of an opinion] Damascus was one of the safest cities I’ve ever walked through’, you can take it that this is a reflection of my experience, which is valid as my experience. I have not suggested that it is anything else. I am not aware of crime statistics in Damascus before the war, but if you have any reputable ones, that would be interesting.

            I think they’d be difficult verify, it being a dictatorship an ‘all – likely one of those cases of ‘we create our own reality’, a bit like production figures in times past in a Soviet factory (‘we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’, as the joke used to go).

            We do not need a citation proving that you were attacked by a staffie when out walking. I hope the difference is becoming clear.

        • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:35 am #

          Remember, your Sociology 101: In group, Out group. Ring a bell? They treat their own women one way and other women another. Surely you can grok this much at least.

  70. StillFarmin January 2, 2018 at 8:04 pm #

    JHK is a fun writer and a great domestic social observer, but I would sooner take financial advice from a whacko on the street corner.

    Sorry, there ain’t no “meat” in words.

    Instead of “calling” for things, why not show us your portfolio allocation? I’m particularly interested in your short position on the NASDAQ especially what with today’s first-session action in the books.

    Oh, and:

    Why did Trump call Papadopoulos a great guy (in response to a direct question about him) if he had never met him? Let’s see …

    Option 1 – He is a shameless liar.

    Option 2 – He has no clue and is making it up as he goes along in a transparently embarrassing attempt to keep his head above water.

    You pick.

    Mr. K knows better; but he’s got an audience to serve.

  71. ozone January 2, 2018 at 8:27 pm #

    Prezdenshul statsman tuff tawk. And so early in the year too!
    Just so you know: Our dear leader’s is bigger than their dear leader’s – is.

    “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
    17,412 replies 18,264 retweets 42,919 likes

    (Actual tweak… er, sumpthin’… approx. 7:50 pm on Jan. 2, 2018)

    • thwack January 2, 2018 at 8:58 pm #

      Kim Jong Un never needed an intercontinental ballistic missile to deliver a nuclear weapon to the U.S.

      He always has the option of dressing it up as a LGBT refugee and rolling it across the border in a wheelchair.

      Juche bitches

  72. akmofo January 2, 2018 at 9:09 pm #

    Telegram

    is a non-profit cloud-based instant messaging service. Telegram client apps exist for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows NT, macOS and Linux. Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio and files of any type.

    Telegram was founded by the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov. Its client-side code is open-source software but the source code for recent versions is not always immediately published, whereas its server-side code is closed-source and proprietary. The service also provides APIs to independent developers. In February 2016, Telegram stated that it had 100 million monthly active users, sending 15 billion messages per day. According to its CEO, as of April 2017, Telegram has more than 50% annual growth rate.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(messaging_service)

    Many are unaware, but according to credible sources, it is this msg’n software that is responsible for the current struggle in Iran between the forces of modern youth and those of theocratic senility.

  73. FincaInTheMountains January 2, 2018 at 9:46 pm #

    The American plans for the creation of miracle weapons are becoming increasingly insane, which indicates that assessments of regular weapons are becoming more realistic, and consequently the aggressiveness of NATO in the near future should decline.

    This time we are talking about stealth airborne aircraft-carriers that invisibly deliver invisible bombers close to the targets.
    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/01/air-force-could-test-flying-aircraft-carriers-next.aspx

    You probably will laugh your ass off, but at the previous historical stage, the Americans really believed in their own propaganda that the most common American weapons are unbreakable, unsinkable, and generally do not sink in water and do not burn in fire.
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/f-15-eagle-amazing-fighter-130100575.html

    The second good news is the official announcement of the friendship of the two followers of St. Patrick – Prince Harry and President Obama. As I wrote several times before, President Obama is the grandson of President Kennedy – the man who prevented a nuclear war. And Prince Harry is probably the most aristocratic nobleman in Europe, the blue color of his blood greatly exceeds the blueness of the blood of the Windsors, not only because of his mother Princess Diana, who leads her bloodline from the Merovingians, but also thanks to his biological father James Hewitt, who was born in Ireland and leads his bloodline from Rainald De Bailleul de Knightley.

    https://www.geni.com/people/Rainald-De-Bailleul-de-Knightley/6000000006794800926

    The bad news is that US policy and Russia’s policy in the Greater Middle East came into collision just when Hillary Clinton’s intervention in the region was waning. Although it is possible that it was her intervention at the previous historical stage that gave the encounter a weight and confusion that would be very difficult to unravel, despite the mutual desire of Trump’s administration and Putin administration to avoid confrontation over this issue.
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-warns-trump-foreign-interference-165322010.html

    That’s just the point, that the real reason for the possible deterioration of relations between Russia and the United States is a misunderstood Trump’s Jerusalem demarche.

  74. BackRowHeckler January 2, 2018 at 10:47 pm #

    GreenAlba, if you’re looking in …

    In Paris, New Years Eve, that young female police officer, surrounded by jeering Africans, kicked around on the street like a soccer ball, nearly kicked to death in the City of Light.

    Curiously, she never drew her weapon, just lay on the cold pavement and absorbed the kicks. The young Africans seemed quite animated and proud of themselves

    As a defender of all things Muzzy, and hater of all things European, what do you have to say? She deserved it? Its Trumps fault? (after the bombing of the Synagogue in Malmo, Sweden last month I had to go thru about a half dozen articles to see who actually carried out the bombing. The first five blamed President Trump, finally I found one that named two Syrian refugees)

    brh

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    • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 5:39 am #

      “As a defender of all things Muzzy, and hater of all things European, what do you have to say?”

      I’d say we have a problem here with the establishment of a credible premise.

      1. “as a defender of all things Muzzy”. Leaving aside your inability to use the correct adjective, you would need to provide some evidence that I am a defender of all things Muslim. I think you will find that difficult. I would direct you, for starters, to the response I gave to the person commenting on the Rochdale grooming gang, which went along the lines that I was very glad that the gang were all now in jail, which is how I would feel about any other abusing gang, whatever their ethnicity, hair colour, height, weight, favourite football team or anything else. Still, if you think you can find in my comments any actual evidence that I am happy with crimes committed by Muslims, please do present it.

      There may be some confusion in your mind with the long comment I was obliged to write in response to your extremely ignorant and bigoted ‘question’ about the ‘Muzzy mayor of Londonistan’. Again, if you can find anything in that long comment that suggests I feel any leniency towards Muslim criminals, then please do present it.

      2. “and hater of all things European”. As a Europhile, I would again invite you to present some evidence. Creating false logic in your own head does not count.

      Now, on to the incidents you describe… I have not read about them, but you can take it that I abhor violence of any kind. I abhor it equally if it is perpetrated by a Muslim, a white supremacist or a bushman of the Kalahari. Or even a white policeman shooting a black man he wouldn’t have shot if he’d been white.

      As (bad) luck would have it, I was in Paris the day of the Bataclan attack. My children were trying to get in touch with me (the battery in my phone was dead) but fortunately I was, at the time of the attack, on a local train, with a friend I was going to stay with (her children were trying to get in touch as well to see if we were safe). So please do not have the temerity to presume (‘make up’) my opinions on psychopaths of any persuasion with assault weapons (you seem to have rather a lot of them in your country who are as white as the driven snow). It was just as well we were already on the train, as the stations in central Paris were immediately shut down following the attack, so it would have been even longer before we’d been able to reassure our families that we were all right.

      Now, here’s the bit you’ll find difficult. My (English) friend is married to a French man. They have three half-English, half-French children. I trust you are following me so far. Their younger daughter is married to a Tunisian – yes, you’ve guessed it, he’s a Muslim. I can’t tell you whether or not he’s a practising Muslim because I don’t know. I do know that they have three adorable children. We’re now at half-Tunisian, quarter-English, quarter-French – I do hope your head isn’t exploding. Mine isn’t, because in mine they are just three adorable children. And he’s an extremely good husband and father.

      His wife (my friend’s daughter) is a paediatric nurse. Mohamed (yes, afraid so) works in a warehouse – not because he isn’t clever enough to do anything better, but because French society is a wee bit racist and it’s rather harder for a brown-skinned job applicant to get the same chance as a white-skinned one. When (back in 2008) I spent a few months working in the Paris office of the firm I then worked for, a white colleague volunteered this information to me as well (I was already aware of it – I spent four years in France when I was young). She said it with some embarrassment on behalf of her compatriots. Mohamed just works hard and does everything he can so that his children will hopefully have better chances in life than he had (bad timing, perhaps, given why we’re all on this site).

      I also know that the Parisian (and other) banlieus have particular problems as a result of this racism and the ghettoisation and isolation to which it has contributed. This sets a context for crimes that may be committed in these areas, but it does not excuse them (you will see I mentioned this problem of paradox in a previous post regarding David Cameron’s speech about ‘hoodies’). People who appreciate the existence of paradox in life tend not to be loud, shouty bigots.

      Now, BRH, the thing is that there’s no more of an association between Mohamed, the good husband and father, and the psychopathic murderers we didn’t quite encounter than there is between Janos and Martin Luther King Jr. I wish you could have a chat with Mohamed, but I think we’d all end up being embarrassed for you. I doubt very much that, sitting in his livingroom, with his family, you would talk as you do when you’re hiding behind a keyboard. I think even you would feel stupid.

      When my children were young, they got the lessons all young children get about ‘stranger danger’, as in you don’t talk to strange men (maybe they say ‘people’ now, I wouldn’t know – but we have to accept that the ‘people’ who present the most danger to young children – or not so young children – in this context, are men). Almost exclusively. You’re a man. And yet there’s no association between you and the notional person children know as ‘the bad man’ that they need to be careful of because he doesn’t wear a sign on his forehead saying ‘bad man’. You can’t pick him out by his colour either. He might even be wearing a ‘dog collar’ to hide in plain sight.

      I do hope this has helped.

      • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:41 am #

        And please note that ‘to which it has contributed’ means exactly that – no more, no less. I realise you don’t really do nuanced thinking, so I just want to make that clear.

        • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 11:49 am #

          you are such a bore.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 1:27 pm #

            You express yourself so eloquently you put us all to shame.

            How was it you addressed me, again, last time? Ah, yes, GREEN SLIME. And they say Americans are hospitable and believe in free speech.

            So the racists ask rude, ignorant, confrontational questions and then get all huffy when they get a proper answer. Like a stroppy teenager.

          • Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 4:31 pm #

            Re GA’s last sentence below:

            I had to look it up.

            stroppy:

            adjective. strop·pi·er, strop·pi·est Chiefly British. Easily offended or annoyed; ill-tempered or belligerent. Origin of stroppy. Perhaps alteration of obstreperous.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 5:33 pm #

            Thanks for helping out, Q-Shtik.

            When I come across a US word or acronym I’m not familiar with on the site I check it out too. That way we both learn.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 6:58 pm #

            And a boor. She corrected my use of Pit Bull to Staffordshire Terrier above, just to feel superior. Except she’s wrong. That breed may well be a related dog or one of the antecedents to these American Monsters, but it’s not exactly the same thing.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:22 pm #

            Apologies for my terribly serious mistake, Janos. I thought you mentioned a ‘staff’ in another post, which I took to be a staffie, as we call it.

            But if that’s what you think is important…

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:24 pm #

            And you should not impute motives to people when you don’t know them. I had no motive. But again your imagination is king.

        • BackRowHeckler January 5, 2018 at 12:23 am #

          Sounds like once the Muzzies take over western Europe and impose Shariah Law they’ll let you live a little bit longer than the other Christians and Jews.

          In short they’ll kill you and others like you last.

          brh

          • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 8:24 am #

            What a bizarre idea. None of them know me. I doubt they frequent this site, which is pretty much the only place anyone has heard me say anything about them, other than when I and my friends or colleagues are denouncing horrific Jihadi attacks, along with everyone else.

            You read too much into things. It’s a common problem. So I’d be expecting no special treatment, but thanks for thinking of me.

  75. BackRowHeckler January 2, 2018 at 11:06 pm #

    Wait, another heartwarming Parisian tradition:

    ‘1200 cars torched New Years Eve, 2018’

    the work of ‘French Youths’

    Macron, Burkha Merkel, this is what western Europeans have voted for election after election. Some cynics might say they deserve what they get. They are after all big supporters of the EU and the EU’s open border policy. Of course some eastern European nations have told the EU commissars to eat sh-t and take their esteemed 3rd world refugees and shove them up their ass, and in these countries I don’t see hundreds of cars torched in the street, and female police officers kicked nearly to death on New Years eve.

    brh

    • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 11:50 am #

      Cynics? Or realists?

  76. BackRowHeckler January 2, 2018 at 11:26 pm #

    On the same night, New Years Eve, another police woman was shot in the face by an assailant who shouted ‘Allihu Akbar!’ She’s dead. Macron’s response, “We must send more cash to the immigrant heavy suburbs”.

    It almost beggars belief.

    brh

    • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:26 am #

      Why do they even bother carrying if they’re going to let themselves be kicked around like the other one did?

      In contrast, a female Mountie fired repeatedly into the body of Jeff Hughes in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She was terrified on the unarmed, 135 pound Mr Hughes, a White Nationalist who had called the police because some druggies wouldn’t quiet down. She was surrounded by half a dozen other armed Mounties, yet she was still terrified, apparently. Yet they all seemed far more interested in him than the druggies. She was never disciplined but moved to the wilds of Ontario or Quebec.

      • BackRowHeckler January 3, 2018 at 1:35 am #

        See the video from Mesa AZ?

        Poor sucker was crawling as commanded but apparently didn’t crawl fast enough and took 5 .223 rounds the head.

        They’re good shots and quick on the trigger out there in Mesa, Az.

        brh

        • capt spaulding January 3, 2018 at 2:29 pm #

          Five .223 rounds to the head huh? That should be enough to make him a Republican.

      • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:26 am #

        “She was terrified on the unarmed, 135 pound Mr Hughes,”

        http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/neo-nazi-sympathizer-fatally-shot-by-nanaimo-police-didnt-fire-flare-gun-probe-told/article588298/

        It appears he was armed with a flare gun (coroner’s report, not news media). And it appears it wasn’t him who called the police about ‘druggies’ but that:

        “Jeffrey Hughes, 48, died in a hail of police gunfire on Oct. 23, 2009, about 90 minutes *after the manager of his Selby Street apartment block told 911 dispatchers that Mr. Hughes was armed and talking about shooting police*.”

        Now I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if the manager of his apartment block was misguided or entirely justified. But the guy had a flare gun in his hand. He didn’t fire it. I’m sure you agree with our host when he says black youths with imitation guns in their hands are asking for trouble – if you do you will have to apply the same logic here, only more so because it wasn’t an imitation.

        Not that I’m making any judgement on the overall sequence of events but I do think you should be a little more assiduous in trying to put the full picture together, so that people don’t think Janos Skorenzy makes stuff up. Heaven forfend.

        • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 11:42 am #

          you lousy nazi.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 1:35 pm #

            The truth will set you free, Malthuss 🙂

            I will ignore your ad hominem. I see you aren’t coping. And that you are confused.

        • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 1:30 pm #

          Muslima police women are notoriously quick to shoot as well. It stand to reason: above and beyond any prejudices against traditional White Men, women of all stripes simply don’t trust themselves to be able to arrest people twice their size and strength, namely most men. So they’re going to shoot if there’s any question in their minds, either rightly or wrongly, of non-compliance.

          No State explanation of her poor judgment was ever forthcoming. She disgraced her uniform that day yet apparently she still wears it.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 1:42 pm #

            It works so much better here, because the police aren’t armed, except with truncheons. You should see the look on a hard man’s face when he’s arrested by a 5 ft 4 female officer. They don’t say anything because they don’t want their mates to know. It’s hilarious.

            I know this because my husband used to work as a forensic medical officer on behalf of the police. He always said the some of the smaller female officers were like Rottweilers. Scary and effective. And no guns.

          • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 1:44 pm #

            And before you make any disingenuous comments, I’m talking about officers dealing with bog-standard criminals, not elite terrorist units, who do, believe it or not, carry weapons.

  77. BackRowHeckler January 2, 2018 at 11:33 pm #

    Think of James Joyce walking the streets of Paris in 1924 in quiet contemplation, thinking of the imminent publication of his classic ‘Ulysses’.

    Or Hemingway and Fitzgerald throwing a few back on some summer evening at the Metropole in 1926.

    When was ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ written?

    And look at Paris now

    brh

  78. Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 11:40 pm #

    Many of you, I’m sure, remember Cold N. Holefield who used to post comments here at CFN. He has had his own blog for what I believe is several years now where he gets to express himself in his own inimitable style — generally long vitriolic rants. Here is his blog’s address if you’d like to take a look:

    https://catcherinthelie.wordpress.com/

    His most current offering, dated today, deals with the Israeli Mossad. Unless I am misunderstanding something Cold’s position on Jews is similar to Janos’s.

    In the last two paragraphs today he mentions Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation in which he accuses the comment section of being rife with Mossad agents.

    I check in nearly every day to see if there is anything new but it has become a frustrating experience for the past few months since he did away with his comment section. He is unwilling to entertain any opinions but his own. I have often wanted to communicate with him but there is no longer a way to do it unless one has his personal email address, and I don’t.

    • Q. Shtik January 2, 2018 at 11:52 pm #

      If Cold is monitoring these CFN comments I would like him to know that an expression he used in his second paragraph should be ‘stock in trade’ not ‘stock & trade’.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 12:29 am #

      He is like a son to you so I understand your pain. You also adopted that crazy guy who was good at science. Can’t remember his name.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 10:37 am #

      His most current offering, dated today, deals with the Israeli Mossad. Unless I am misunderstanding something Cold’s position on Jews is similar to Janos’s.

      The more you know, the less there is to like. Although, once again, painting it strictly as “a Jew thing” is using too broad a brush. It’s a Zionist thing, which definitely piggybacks on Judaism as a religion, a philosophy and a secret-society cult, but is much more narrow than that. It comes down to two things only: money and power, and the mystical belief in a self-selected global supra-elite.

      And so it bears repeating once more: not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews. But it’s still notable that Jews hold an overwhelming number of key positions atop all the world’s key professions; investment banking, politics, media, and academia, most notably. My guess is that Jews, whether official “club members” or not, are just naturally more easily influenced and sympathetic to the cause, whether they’re aware of any manipulation or not.

      • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 11:44 am #

        Zionism is the small picture.
        Nepotism is the BIG picture.

        I doubt Lady Rothschild is a Zionist.

        • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 3:50 pm #

          You’d be wrong.

      • beantownbill. January 3, 2018 at 11:59 am #

        At the heart of most of the world’s Jewry lies a kernel of Zionism – a desire to see the Jewish people’s return to their native land after almost 2,000 years. So to be anti-Zionist, to my mind, is to be anti-Jewish, no matter how hard you try to paint that over.

        • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 12:09 pm #

          Even Israeli’s will tell you it’s not that simple.

          • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 3:15 pm #

            I know, I know, Q. Israelis, not Israeli’s.

    • K-Dog January 4, 2018 at 12:11 am #

      How does the FBI feel about Mossad agents infiltrating blogs and performing their own data mining? Or are these agencies two sides of the same coin like our intel is with the Brits?

      If they are going around wearing black suits and white shirts they cold give real G-Men a bad name. I would think territory here would be a concern and be well defended. Appearances matter. History tells me they can’t be a big factor unless they had the power to call in Fusion Center resources as has been done. That would be an audaciously ill-mannered structure so I think Hole is wrong.

  79. FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 5:08 am #

    A connoisseur of the Shakespearean theater Prince Charles made a fatal mistake comparing Putin with Hitler, since in retrospect it is clear that the most important issues related to Brexit and the election of Trump were resolved during the celebrations associated with the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare.

    http://www.justjared.com/2016/04/23/president-obama-visits-old-globe-on-400th-anniversary-of-shakespeares-death/

    The friendship of Prince Harry and President Obama must mean that the Western Red Project is being restored.

    Whose button is bigger? – Theoretically, good news should be attributed to the fact that my hypothesis about the frank fools play by Trump and Kim was confirmed in a most direct way, but such a deflation of a nuclear threat in our time could be a little unsettling.

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  80. thwack January 3, 2018 at 7:21 am #

    a hoax call was placed to the 911 center in Wichita, with a man saying he’d shot his father and was holding his mother, sister and brother hostage inside a house, authorities said.

    Police went to the address they were given, and that’s where Andrew Finch, 28, was shot to death. Police said that the responding officer shot him because he moved his hands toward his waist. Finch was not armed.

    ******************

    alright,

    since Im in the land of all the smart, college educated, PHD white people…

    How would you divide up the charges in the case?

    WHO would you charge and what would you charge them with if you were the prosecutor?

    The reason I ask is because it appears they need the help?

    They arrested the one guy who make the fake call, but they seem confused about what to charge him with?

    BTW, I actually started laughing when they showed the photo of the Tyler Barriss character; because he actually looks like a real life troll.

    Kinda like a tanned version of Golem.

    One paradox of the case is the potential logical conflict of clearing the cop who did the killing, while charging the hoax caller with murder?

    Seems to me it can’t be murder if the shooting was justified?

    Notice how quickly the cops deployed the good ol “he reached for his waistband/made a sudden move” excuse?

    and,

    and,

    they still have not revealed the name of the cop who did the killing?

    If somebody kills you, do you forfeit your right to know the name of your killer if it was a cop?

    I feel bad for white people because when the cops roll up, stick guns in their face, and slam em on the ground… they are totally confused and disoriented.

    Me?

    I always know some white person called the cops on me.

    I won’t even sneeze because I know the cops can consider that a “sudden movement” and shoot me dead…

    Just sayin.

    • pequiste January 3, 2018 at 9:24 am #

      In a vile and disgusting episode known as “swatting,” this cold-blooded murder of Mr. Finch, whose only crime was being in his house, not making any disturbance, and not committing any crime, requires swift and sure justice which will not happen under any circumstance.

      It was just the occassion to send in a platoon of armed-to-the-teeth, battle-ready, trigger-happy, civil servants who don’t like to be put in harm’s way. An anonymous? 911 call from California started the chain of events leading to murder-by-cop. Huh?

      As I understand the situation the reprehensible felon Bariss should be charged with murder in the first degree and if convicted be given a death sentence.

      The cop should at minimum get charged with voluntary manslaughter but I’m thinking this is going to go away as members of the Blue Fraternity cover for their own pretty well. The Government doesn’t like bad press.

      I fear it will wind up just like the Australian woman, Justine Ruszyk, in Minneapolis who was gunned down in cold blood by an Yzlamik Somali cop last year. The case has disappeared, the murdering cop not heard from again – all for the victim’s “crime” of calling the police herself for noises in the neighborhood and wearing pajamas.

      • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 1:38 pm #

        If you fight back against a “Canine Officer” who is mauling you, you could go down for decades. They are Police you see. But if a Police handler abuses the same dog, it’s just a misdemeanor. Sam Francis called this state of affairs “Anarcho-Terrorism”. Justice is long gone with the State applying the Law selectively according to the needs of the State and the whims of the local police department, confident of being backed up by Uncle Sham.

        Another: If you kill a pregnant woman, you may well be charged for a double murder – even if the same woman was going to get her “fetal parasite” removed at State expense.

        • thwack January 3, 2018 at 2:48 pm #

          My favorite is when 3 different cops yell 3 different commands AT THE SAME TIME:

          DON’T FUCKING MOVE!

          PUT YOUR FUCKING HANDS UP!

          GET ON THE FUCKING GROUND!

          *brace yourself*

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 6:53 pm #

            Yeah, I’ve watch some of the videos: It’s a feeding frenzy. More cops arrive and start screaming too. The fatal kicker: a tased person can’t follow orders cuz they don’t have control of their bodies. This enrages the Blue Pit Bulls further: they’re being disrespected! They keep thrashing around screaming. Maybe it’s a good idea to then put tape over the mouth and put a knee in their chest?

            A young healthy person could probably take all that. But older, heavier, sicker, after being tased? Maybe not.

    • elysianfield January 3, 2018 at 11:53 am #

      “I always know some white person called the cops on me.”

      What color are you?

      Not that it matters….

      Just sayin’

  81. pequiste January 3, 2018 at 9:30 am #

    I’m looking forward to the 2018 roll-out of a near-autonomous police officer robot or military dog robot by a private company that only accepts crypto-currency for the lucrative government contract it proposes.

    Bureaucrats will be standing in line to make competitive bids to buy the latest bit of high-tech and big-ticket gear to help their local forces.

    Have any of you tried any sassy back-talk to a fucking God-damned computer?

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 10:40 am #

      Watched a bunch of AI stuff yesterday and this morning while working out. Pretty scary where they’re headed with all that stuff, and the scariest part is that for the most part that dire future has already arrived.

  82. Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 10:20 am #

    Ahh the wonders of the North American jet stream! You can pretty much make bank on the fact that when it swings west we out here get the Canadian arctic blasts and the east gets gets warm, wet weather, as the warm humid air from the gulf gets swept north and east. When it swings east, we get a high, warm and dry winter (which usually indicates an epic fire season in the spring), while the east gets buried under arctic cold and lake effect snows. The weather forecast here says dry and unseasonably warm as far as the eye can see, with sunny and bright daytime highs in the upper 40’s-lower 50’s, and this at 7,200′ altitude! Huddle up east coasters, gonna be a long, cold winter until spring arrives!

    http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/03/us/cold-weather-arctic-outbreak/index.html

  83. Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 11:13 am #

    Nice article from The Intercept on the CIA’s original Frankenstein’s monster and the fictional subject for The Good Shepard:

    WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

    Documents Reveal the Complex Legacy of James Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief and Godfather of Mass Surveillance

    Jefferson Morley
    January 1 2018, 7:15 a.m.

    https://theintercept.com/2018/01/01/the-complex-legacy-of-cia-counterintelligence-chief-james-angleton/

    • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 3:35 pm #

      You are a trip.

      Do you live in city or country?
      work or farm?

      • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 3:48 pm #

        I’ve lived in and done both. Maybe that’s why I’m a trip?

  84. FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 11:30 am #

    I know it is a bit early to talk about it, but wouldn’t be wonderful if Prince Harry married a nice Russian girl from a good family?

    It would definitely increase his chances of ascending to the Russian throne and be remembered in History as a man who reunited the Church of England with Russian Orthodox Church.

    What do you think, GA?

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    • beantownbill. January 3, 2018 at 11:50 am #

      You’re forgetting that Harry’s family was originally German. Such a marriage would be ironic.

      • FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 12:43 pm #

        Harry is definitely more Irish than German – just look a him.

        And the Irish Orthodox tradition of St. Patrick miraculously survived through the centuries of prosecution.

      • FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 1:00 pm #

        Besides, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, was born in Stettin, Pomerania, Kingdom of Prussia as Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg.

        She was the one who saved the young United States of America with her Armed Neutrality, denying the British he Naval Blockade of their American Colonies.

        Not all Germans are bad, you know. Just is that when they’re bad, they’re really fucking bad.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 12:23 pm #

      I doubt Harry’s all that concerned with family lineage at the moment. I’m sure genetic sexual attributes are much more on his mind these days. And why not, unlike his rather dopey looking older brother, he’s a healthy enough royal specimen too.

      • FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 12:46 pm #

        I don’t mind. He could keep Meghan on the side.

    • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 1:52 pm #

      Hi Finca

      He’s only fifth in line to the throne, after Charles, William, George and Charlotte, so barring something similar to the typhoid outbreak that did for the love of Queen Victoria’s life – combined with a total lack of antibiotics – I think we can safely leave Harry to do his own thing. But I do love the generosity of your offer 🙂

  85. malthuss January 3, 2018 at 11:51 am #

    . It is apparently part of diplomatic immunity…

    Yes, part of the UN agenda. Weaken the USA and destroy it.
    Rockefeller donated the land for the UN.

    • FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 1:05 pm #

      Why are you so much against the UN?

      Or do you prefer that we cut each other throat without discussing it first?

      • malthuss January 3, 2018 at 3:32 pm #

        A conversation means nothing, or everything.
        Talk can be cheap, or all too dear, even deadly.

        You need education. Check the Birch Society, ‘History of the UN.’

        Thats where Alex Jones got some of his information.

  86. Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 12:04 pm #

    Prop or not? Today from the WaPo, the undisputed master of beltway bullshit:

    NSA’s top talent is leaving because of low pay, slumping morale and unpopular reorganization

    By Ellen Nakashima and Aaron Gregg January 2 at 10:00 PM

    The National Security Agency is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy service’s leadership and an unpopular reorganization, take higher-paying, more flexible jobs in the private sector.

    Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists, according to current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter. The potential impact on national security is significant, they said.

  87. Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 1:49 pm #

    I am a queen.”

    At the end of the 1970s, an apartment block was built near downtown Kiev for the scientists of the Paton Institute of Electrical Welding. One prominent worker was assigned a four-room apartment, which, in the Soviet Union, was like a mansion in the Hamptons. No one deserved this apartment more than this scientist, who had been on the design team for the T-34 tank. She was one of the countless unsung people who helped achieve victory over Germany in what the Soviets called the Great Patriotic War.

    However, a well-connected member of the Communist Party decided he needed the flat more than she did, and through underhanded scheming, he was able to wrest the apartment from this scientist and her family. After a year of bitter complaints from the residents of the apartment and city officials, however, the party apparatchik decided to give the flat black to those who deserved it.

    Something similar to this happened in America on December 18, 2017. Jean-Marie Simon—human rights activist, school teacher, and lawyer—had a first-class ticket on United Airlines, only to discover that she has been bumped into economy. Jean-Marie Simon demanded an explanation from the crew, who explained that Miss Simon must have accidentally cancelled her ticket.

    In economy class, she found herself sitting next to a Texas congressman who explained what he thought had happened:

    He told me that it was [Sheila] Jackson Lee, a fellow U.S. congresswoman who regularly does this, that this was the third time he personally had watched her bump a passenger . . . then he asked me if I knew whom Jackson Lee represents in Congress: Bush International Airport in Houston.

    When Miss Simon complained publicly about what had happened to her, the Congresswoman accused her of racism.

    Sheila Jackson Lee has a reputation with air crews. Once in 1998, she berated a Continental flight attendant because her seafood meal was not available on that flight. She yelled, “Do you know who I am? I’m Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. Where is my seafood meal? I know it was ordered!” This sort of thing was so common that Continental’s vice president of government affairs called her to say that if she continued to be rude to employees she would no longer be welcome on Continental Airlines.

    The VP apparently hadn’t got the message. “You don’t understand,” she has been known to say. “I am a queen, and I demand to be treated like a queen.”

    Sheila Jackson Lee (Credit Image: © F. Sadou/AdMedia via ZUMA Wire)

    A year later the congresswoman was on another Continental flight and couldn’t find her purse. She left the plane and went to the terminal to look for it, but had actually left it on the plane. The plane had pulled away from the gate when she got back, and the staff explained that aviation regulations do not allow aircraft to go back to the gate. Again, she blamed racism. But she was reunited with her purse. The pilot tossed it out the cockpit window.

    Congresswoman Jackson Lee treats her staff like airline employees. She calls them “stupid,” “morons,” or just “stupid mother fuckers.” One aide said that the experience of working for her was like serving in Iraq. She insists on being driven everywhere at taxpayer expense—even from her Capital Hill home to Congress, which is said to be a distance of only “200 paces.” She insists that drivers run red lights and drive on highway shoulders.

    Part of this is, no doubt, the typical self-importance of our rulers, but Sheila Jackson Lee also seems to have a touch of the African “big man” syndrome. Also, some blacks seem to especially enjoy lording it over whites.

    Once when I was in the military, a group of sailors were watching the Stanley Cup playoffs on television in the day room at Naval Station Great Lakes. A black petty officer forced them out so that black sailors could watch the NBA Playoffs. There were plenty of other television sets the blacks could have used, but the petty officer simply seemed to want to flex her authority.

    Jean-Marie Simon got a taste of this muscle-flexing, but will she learn from it? I don’t know her personally, but people with her resume do not tend to be race realists. They tend to support the very policies that are allegedly meant to right historical wrongs but that disadvantage whites. Such whites no doubt believe that blacks, Muslims, and Hispanics will thank them.

    This is unlikely. Non-whites are far more likely to see white retreat as weakness rather than generosity. This will only increase their contempt for us, and as their numbers grow, their demands will increase. Unless we start defending our interests now, we will be no different from the Kiev grandmother who had to give up apartment to the apparatchik. And when that day comes, we will never get our apartments—or our institutions or our nations—back.

    JS: Blacks are so not worth it. As Jefferson said, Our Culture is totally alien to them and will remain so. They don’t have any feel or affection for the Democratic Ethos, which rules the roost today. And as for the Hierarchy which I promote – well they simply don’t make the grade by and large, apart from any other question, like why would they be in our lands to begin with. We should have picked our own damn cotton. Or at least sent them away when they weren’t need any more. But industrialists and other farseeing entities sensed they would be useful to them. They were right and we all are paying the price now. It’s only going to get worse too.

    • thwack January 3, 2018 at 2:39 pm #

      What?

      We were here first you frothy cunt;

      I oughta beat you with your own dildo you fucking cave ape.

  88. Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 2:56 pm #

    This is a post from above. It’s simply too important to languish in the past. It’s a response to a long awaited explanation from Elrond as to why he never defends “the workers” against immigrant invasion. I assume he means native Whites but can’t bring himself to say it. Even to say it is to give credence to their existence. And strategy is All to these folks. Why doesn’t he, then? Because he’s too busy bashing them for them for being so ignorant in their non-acceptance of replacement. He never gets around to it! Other than that, he is very sympathetic – he says.

    Here then is my response.

    A weed is any plant where you don’t want it. Just so foreigner – they belong in their own lands. Be kind to the stranger? Millions of strangers isn’t “the” stranger – but a swarm of locusts. An invasion that must be pushed back. At number like these, people become no more than locusts, whatever color they are. As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million (or whatever number he cited) is just a statistic. Thus the Church always endorsed “subsidiarity” or solving problems at the most local level possible.

    But then of course, Federal bureaucrats would lose their jobs and bennies. What’s worse, the ruin of a nation or losing their careers? We know the answer to that one….

    Bureaucrats want these problem people. And at the numbers where they are a problem. That’s their bread and butter. As Yeats said, the Centre has not held. Or to paraphrase the Man in Black, the Circle has not remained unbroken. How can Circle circle sans centre?

    PS – We eagerly but patiently await Scratch’s explanation, be it howsoever paltry, of his contradictions anent discrimination against White Men.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 3:26 pm #

      Well then, dear Janos, since it was without a doubt rich white men who have caused this state of affairs, how would you propose we solve it? Are these not your beloved kin for which you have boundless admiration and respect? Are they not, then, assumed to be smarter and wiser than you and I – mere sub-mortals – and who are we to make plans to put asunder the good works that they, in their infinite wisdom, have wrought?

      Surely you don’t imagine that the grossly inferior colored races just took it into their pitiful heads one day to go invade whitey-land, what with all the “opportunities” such a journey entailed in the 19th and early 20th centuries?

      • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 6:37 pm #

        Of course not. You can imagine what I’d do to these White traitors. Read Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Infernal Cantos. Traitors are down at the bottom with Satan himself. And there you are with you avatar OF Satan. Coincidence?

        • Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 7:11 pm #

          The Divine Comedy has been sitting on my night stand for at least 3 years. I just went and checked and found that the ribbon is between pages 162 and 163. The book is big and thick at 791 pages. My intention initially was to read every word of my 100 Greatest Books collection but now it is becoming obvious I’m not going to make it. The misnamed ‘Comedy’ is a repulsive torture manual. As an atheist I don’t believe there are any rewards or punishments awaiting us…thank God! Similarly I am stalled out at roughly halfway through the Holy Bible. Why should I force myself to read a lot of repetitive mythological BS that I am not enjoying.

          I see many reasons to be forgiving of my fellow man’s failures.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 7:29 pm #

            Get on of those little whips and punish yourself for your sin of sloth. You’ll see things in a whole new light. Why not get a hair shirt too? The more you suffer now, the less time you’ll spend in Purgatory.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 5:12 pm #

      PS – points for “anent,” although I suspect you just thesaurused it.

  89. Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

    Fascinating read about the early days of The Donald’s presidency.

    Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President
    One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administration’s shocked first days.

    By MICHAEL WOLFF
    Illustrations By JEFFREY SMITH
    Election Night: It “looked as if he had seen a ghost.”

    January 3, 2018 11:53 am

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-fire-and-fury-book-donald-trump.html

    Support this blog on PatreonSupport this blog on Substack
    Support this blog via Patreon or Substack
  90. Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 3:41 pm #

    I will restate what I wrote above:

    The language of infection and infestation is not to be applied to human beings, full stop. Human beings are not weeds and they are not locusts. I yield to no debate on this point — none. Let others debase themselves how they will.

    To marry the rhetoric of eliminationism with Stalin’s maxim is to aspire to the highest of crimes and call it justice. If at long last, the person behind the screen name Janos Skorenzy truly embraces the meaning behind this rhetoric, then I call him a monster for good and all, and may god have mercy.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 4:33 pm #

      Uh oh! You called him out in bold. I guess this means fisticuffs after school down by the bike rack then. My money’s on you, Elrond. I hear Janos is a queen.

      • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 6:07 pm #

        My money’s on Elrond too, as you would imagine, Scratch.

        Janos just wants a great big safe space all for himself and his ‘kind’.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 6:33 pm #

      Stalin is in your camp, not mine. But obviously he didn’t get to the top of the heap without a lot of knowledge of human nature. And let’s face it, he hit the target with that one. You’re great at attacking and projection, but do you love all equally? Let me rephrase that, cuz if you loved all equally you’d be a monster. Do you idealistically “care” about all groups equally? Of course not. You favor Non-Whites as you all but admit. I can only hope that you don’t carry this prejudice into your professional life as so many do. In fact, it’s hard not to since it is enshrined into Oceanic Law on both sides of the pond, both ponds.

      • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:02 pm #

        “Do you idealistically “care” about all groups equally? Of course not. You favor Non-Whites as you all but admit.”

        Master of the false dichotomy – as you are of the non-sequitur.

        *as you all but admit* – translation: ‘as I have tried so hard to make you say but have not succeeded; I will keep pretending you actually said it’

        The reason I have never ever seen anything to suggest Elrond favours non-whites is that it’s all in your head, because or your false logic. (Why does everyone and everything in your world have to have capitals? Does your subconscious want to write in German because of your hero?)

        The thing you fail to understand is that not everyone thinks primarily in groups in the first place. Your psychological limitations are your own.

        • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 7:28 pm #

          *because of*

        • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 7:40 pm #

          Why then does he never get around to defending Whites against Non-White racism? I assume that like you, he doesn’t believe it exists. And since it is a priori non-existent, the countless Whites who suffer from it are equally non-real.

          Pretty good trick for those of you who can manage it. Makes your life a lot easier no doubt. Simple Black/White dichotomies. Blacks good, Whites evil.

          You do think in groups too, just different ones. Your Class takes the place of race. And the interest, concern, care, compassion, etc that should go to your own people of the lower classes, goes instead to immigrants and other races. Lower class Whites are just lumpen mensch material, inferior and uninteresting. You don’t get points for helping them, or at least not as many. Non-Whites in contrast, are great. Lots of “Points’ for helping, befriending, adopting, and marrying. Muslims? Even better – twofers for the most part. Race and Religion are both Non-Western and against the Native Culture. LOTS of PC Points….

          • Elrond Hubbard January 3, 2018 at 10:04 pm #

            Janos,

            I have no interest in appeasing your distorted world view. Go criticize someone feeble enough to give a shit about your opinions.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 11:31 pm #

            You have no answer because I’m right. You don’t care what we think, and that’s why Trump won and Brexit won. Those are cucked halfway measures but my point is your attitude. Worse (for you) and better (for us) things will be coming and you will react in the same way.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 7:13 am #

            Janos, your logic always ends in the illogical. You have stated on many occasions that you think level of education should be a criterion for being allowed to vote. Yet it is well established that level of education was one of the major factors in the Brexit vote, the least educated being the most likely to vote for Brexit. Under your system, Brexit would not be happening.

            And yet I still do not subscribe to your system. I just think the education system should do better – if it did rags like the Daily Mail and The Sun, and people like Rupert Murdoch would hold less sway in the democratic process.

            Remember the quote I provided before? When Rupert Murdoch was asked why he was so much against the EU, his answer was ‘when I go to Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they ignore me’.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 7:28 am #

            And your entire comment about groups is undiluted drivel. You know nothing whatever about where my compassion goes in practical terms.

            And in your distorted and sick world people choose who they marry for points. In mine they marry for love, which is why I don’t know one single woman who falls into your bitter category of ‘cashing out her marriage’ while I do know one whose husband is gradually going blind, so she has been the main breadwinner for decades, and another who is also the main, cheerful and hardworking breadwinner because her lovely husband had a brain tumour years ago and he goes from treatment to treatment, able to function pretty well as a human being and a husband but not as a financial provider. You are clueless. Thankfully our civilised country doesn’t charge him for his treatment – we all pay for that and willingly.

            I don’t get points for anything, discretion being the greater part of charity, as well as valour.

            Drivel – unending drivel.

            I’m nominating your for Arrogant, Presumptious Ignoramus of the Year as well.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 7:30 am #

            *you*

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 7:40 am #

            And now I have to attend to Mammon, as those bills don’t pay themselves. I don’t wish you the good day that I would wish anyone else, since you make such malificent use of them.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 11:50 am #

            “And in your distorted and sick world people choose who they marry for points. In mine they marry for love, which is why I don’t know one single woman who falls into your bitter category”

            Alba,
            No? Not one? As a wife of a Doctor, you might be less inclined to view yourself through that particular lens? You know not one women who married for security? You are, I am sorry to say, being disingenuous.

            A woman’s wealth her beauty,
            A man’s beauty his wealth….

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 11:55 am #

            “Janos,I have no interest in appeasing your distorted world view. Go criticize someone feeble enough to give a shit about your opinions.”

            Elrond,
            Your dismissiveness is becoming more vitriolic…how are things on the home front?

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 11:59 am #

            *Presumptuous*

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 12:15 pm #

            elysianfield

            And you, Sir, are being as presumptuous as Janos. You are not owed an explanation of my private life, but you shall have one, in the circumstance.

            I married my husband at the age of 58 (I met him when I was 48). I had brought up my children by myself (useless first husband, nothing to do with money) and ignored men for over a decade while I was doing that and paying off my mortgage, entirely by myself.

            So, the modest home we both live in now belongs entirely to me (i.e. not legally part of the marital assets). Because, elysianfield, my husband, who was not my husband then, decided to have an adventure setting up his own business in his 50s.

            Sadly, despite his best efforts and his entire life going into said business, the bank (RBS, latterly heavily criticised for its very dodgy treatment of its small business customers), pulled the plug and he lost his savings (including pension), his business and his home (which was worth more than mine). So when he moved in with me (what else was I to do?) he came pretty much in the clothes he stood up in, although I do have a very nice ebony-framed antique chaise longue in my livingroom, which was pretty much all I could accommodate (and which, in fact, should have gone to the administrators along with everything else in his flat).

            Since then he’s got back on his feet. He works for the NHS, again. But his savings still don’t add up to the value of my flat (our home), which will, in any case go to my children when both of us are gone. Before we were even married, I changed my Will so that, should anything happen to me, he would have the right to stay in my flat for the rest of his life at no cost. Now he has that right anyway, because, Dear Reader, I married him.

            You apologised to me once before for misjudging me.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

            And he’s not a Doctor, he’s just a doctor. Doesn’t even wear a tie to work (unhygienic, so frowned upon).

          • Elrond Hubbard January 4, 2018 at 2:49 pm #

            elysianfield: “Your dismissiveness is becoming more vitriolic…how are things on the home front?”

            They are well, thank you. By your repeated use of the word ‘dismissiveness’ you mean to suggest that I should focus more on such merits as are, in fact, present in Janos’ posts. (Clearly he reads, and clearly he’s not stupid.)

            I believe I’ve addressed this concept twice already, but I’ll repeat myself once again: Janos is an eliminationist. He accepts the idea that some homo sapiens have the same status as himself, while others have the status of vermin or subhumans, lacking all rights. He accepts this not just tacitly, but affirmatively — he pursues it as his agenda. I do not, cannot and will not demean myself to debate such a creature. So long as such a position forms part of the spectrum of opinion, my response will be not engagement but implacable, scorched-earth opposition — opposition ad cladem in saecula saeculoram.

            You want me to give more credit to the tasty parts of the cake, when I’ve already seen the turd get baked into it. No. Thank. You.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 4:59 pm #

            Alba,
            I do not know you, so how could I judge? For you to say that in “your world” that security is not a primary (or primal for that matter) inducement to some/many marriage would suppose that you understand and are able to sound all women’s motives…and all women are not, permit me, Saints.

            Please do not suppose that I was speaking to your condition, as I am aware that marriage for love, physical and otherwise, is the primary motivator for men, perhaps less so for women, but an undeniable certainty for many…but not all…NEVER all.

            I was not judging you personally, but rather questioning your Pollyanna-ish perceptions…if you thought, however, that I was conducting an assault on your personal motives…I would, in the strongest terms, reply in the negative.

          • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 5:11 pm #

            Elrond,
            Dismissiveness implies sloth. It is much easier to just call someone a racist Nazi asshole than it is to formulate a measured rebuttal of a statement that one might have to justify to his peers.

            You have fallen into a pattern…why answer at all if all you are going to present is an Ad Hominem attack? You have twice mentioned your rationale as not giving credence to anything Janos writes.

            Well, You are just a Canadian Asshole, and a Commie, Too. (An example of your recent class of response…I would not post this save to serve as an example). Much easier to write, and on some level…satisfying.

            Sorry

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:29 pm #

            That’s OK elysianfield. I was initially only responding to Janos’ repeated insinuations about women ‘cashing out marriages’. I find it offensive, given he paints with an extremely broad brush.

            I only know one person, within my circle of acquaintances, who didn’t work during her marriage, even if the rest took a few years out when their children were young, or at least their one year of maternity leave with each child, if that was all the family could afford. Women here pretty much all have jobs when they get married, and I have seen statistics (sorry, don’t remember where – it was years ago) showing that ‘marrying up’ is much less prevalent where there is closer economic equality between the sexes.

            Women would be ill advised to rely too much on their other half’s hypothetical future salary – it won’t do them much good if he runs off with the secretary and they have to keep food on the table themselves. Again, a minority of men, but a statistically significant one. I take very little for granted, owing to experience and natural caution.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:31 pm #

            Not experience of the ‘secretary’ scenario, I hasten to add 🙂

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 7:31 pm #

            Wrong, Elrond. I’d be willing to give all races their own nations or at least homelands, in the case of the very small or scarcely human (Abos, IQ of 60 or so, huff gas and sleep on roads!). You’re the one who is unwilling to give Whites anything at all. You’re projecting your evil onto me.

            I admit some White Nationalists have extreme ideas – ideas I don’t hold to. I never like Pierce’s genocidal fantasies and I still don’t. At the same time, I can’t regret the White conquest of the Americas, brutal though it often was. There’s more to life than morality – or to put it another way, survival is the first morality and expansion the second. But we often bit off more than we could chew, thus other races have taken Hawaii and taken back (to the extent we ever had it) large part of Florida.

            In contrast, morality is everything to you folks and thus you turn it into a weapon and a money maker as well. Our way is far more honest if nothing else. You all make it all in all and thus take it out of its natural place and then try and make it do other things. Very unwholesome and weird. Can you not even kill, make war, and make money in a natural and honest way?

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 7:36 pm #

            Alba: Marrying up is less common when there is economic equality. Isn’t that circular reasoning – or would be if it were even true? In fact, marrying is less common when there is economic equality – far less common. Why would women marry when there are no resources to be gotten? Or when the State will take care of them and their spawn? And why would men marry women who don’t need them, won’t honor them, and are ever ready to ruin them?

          • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 8:36 am #

            Janos

            I married when I was economically self-sufficient. My home is my own. Economic gain had nothing whatever to do with it.

            Previously I married when I was the higher earner, so he did quite well out of me before his selfishness became too much to put up with.

            You can describe generalities if you like, coloured as they are by bitterness. But you can’t speak for all of us.

  91. Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 4:47 pm #

    Keep the British slang commin’, Greenie, I love it;

    bog standard. (Britain slang, pejorative) Utterly basic, ordinary, or standard; unremarkable, unexceptional, etc.

    My greatest fear is to come to the end of my days and have my life described as bog standard.

    • Ol' Scratch January 3, 2018 at 4:55 pm #

      So you’re aspiring for meritoriously punctilious then, I take it?

      • Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 10:39 pm #

        Punctiliousness and pedantry are mere sidelines.

    • GreenAlba January 3, 2018 at 6:00 pm #

      Glad to be of service, Q-Shtik. All in the service of broadening people’s horizons. I’ve certainly broadened mine on here.

      The only words I avoid are ones that mean something entirely different in US English and UK English. Like ‘fag’ or ‘R/randy’.

      I’ll try to keep you supplied with the odd new one from time to time – to add to life’s colour.

      My spelling remains this side’s spelling. I accommodate yours (I’m well used to it in my professional life) and I trust you can accommodate mine.

      There are many references available:

      http://www.tysto.com/uk-us-spelling-list.html

      http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2015/05/10-lesser-known-british-and-american-spelling-differences

      But for a bit of random fun, I hope you might like this:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

      Although in fairness I have since come across an explanation of why you all say this!

    • stelmosfire January 3, 2018 at 6:27 pm #

      Q, not to compromise OPSEC, but I am still in the lurch as to your future new years plans for a cross continental trip. I recently underwent such an odyssey as yourself. Traveling 8000 miles across the great American west after the “Great Eclipse.”. No way would I pack as MA. does not recognize any “PERMITS” to carry. A full canister of bear spray will kick ass for a small hostile force. Anyway, Take care and keep it between the lines!.

  92. Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 7:04 pm #

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/manafort-sues-mueller-justice-department-over-russia-probe-203630181–politics.html

    The beginning of a counter-attack? Thank God. It’s long overdue.

  93. Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 8:24 pm #

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/faith-and-reason-love-greed-and-mrs-jellabys-babies-this-week-richard-finn-op-continues-our-1540373.html

    This whole issue started back in the 19 Century, if not before. Dickens called it “Telescopic Philanthropy” or the great burning desire to do good at great distances. But its advocates have come a long way since then: they brought the objects of the charity into England itself to make things easier on themselves and to increase the extent and scope of their “good” works. The People they overlooked they still overlook – their own people. In other words, physical distance has been eliminated but social distance between themselves and the White underclass has been increased. Thus the Evil has been conserved, only changing its form, and actually increased since one’s own people are one’s First concern by any legitimate moral standard.

    Dickens character, Mrs Jellaby, is said to have been based on a real person – an English Aristocrat in Scotland whose circle knitted sweaters for natives in the Congo (which they didn’t need) while her Scottish tenants froze and starved, ultimately to be thrown off the land altogether in favor of sheep.

    • K-Dog January 3, 2018 at 11:49 pm #

      There’s a lady who’s sure
      All that glitters is gold
      And she’s buying a stairway to heaven
      When she gets there she knows
      If the stores are all closed
      With a word she can get what she came for
      Oh oh oh oh and she’s buying a stairway to heaven

      • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 12:51 am #

        Jellaby! And hundreds of millions of her spiritual children.

        During the “clearings”, hundreds of thousands of Scottish peasants were thrown off their land. Sheep were profitable, they were not. Ironically, all things Scottish were in vogue with the British upper class: fake clan tartans, bagpipes, the works. And of course the Scottish Lords wanted into the new way of life. Thus the two Aristocracies came closer together – at the expense of the Scottish people. The only ones who could have done anything were the Elite Scottish regiments, but they were far away fighting for their Masters in the Crimea. And what could they have done? They had been defeated long ago, despite their valiant effort.

        One grotesque young Scottish Lord traveled around London followed by a Piper and a Poet, milking the fad to the max. He would fly into a rage when he heard that his people were fleeing, yet he did nothing to help them. In contrast and at least to their partial credit, some of the Scottish Lord fulfilled their ancient obligations and helped their people settle elsewhere, mostly the maritime provinces of Canada.

        • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 6:51 am #

          Janos

          If you’re attempting research at least get the terms right. The historical outrage you refer to is the Highland Clearances.

          A clearing, as you should know, is an open space in a forest, especially if cleared for cultivation.

          But one should not be surprised. Your motivations in reading anything are so limited you so often entirely miss the point. And the point here is that you mistake the category that matters. That the landowners and the tenants were both white is irrelevant (and should tell you something). The category that matters in this case and so many others is class – or simply just wealth.

          And yes, those of the upper class could be grotesque. The observation that power corrupts is not limited geographically. Nor is the kind of ignorance that makes people knit cardigans for people in the Congo. Although, sadly, that is far from being the worst horror inflicted on the Congolese by Europeans – Leopold II, who was entirely white, showed the world what savagery really meant.

          • K-Dog January 4, 2018 at 10:07 am #

            “Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror–of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision–he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
            The horror! The horror!”

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 12:40 pm #

            Indeed, K-Dog. If only one could believe Janos would ever see into his own soul with the insight of Kurtz.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 1:57 pm #

            Again with the picayune, boorish, school marmish corrections. And again, a quick pivot away from the poor Whites and back to the Black Africans. In a word, Jellabyism.

            I, at least, never said all discrimination was based on Race. I’m a Socialist after all. The National Elites of the West, many of them among the nascent Global Elite, have used the rhetoric of race to cover their pillaging of their own lower classes. And their paid Mandarins cover for them by teaching Jellabyism.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 3:01 pm #

            “Again with the picayune, boorish, school marmish corrections.”

            You’re welcome. I know you aspire to perfection in everything. You being an übermensch an’ all.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 3:06 pm #

            Sorry, an Übermensch. Imagine me asking why you sprinkle capitals around the place for no reason, then leaving one off when it’s in actual German.

        • Elrond Hubbard January 4, 2018 at 12:43 pm #

          Atlantic Canada indeed, and the anthems of the displaced still ring out there of an evening:

          Sound the pibroch loud and high
          Frae John o’ Groats tae Isle o’ Skye
          Let every clan their slogan cry
          Rise and follow Charlie

          Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
          Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
          Tha tighin fodham, fodham, fodham
          Rise and follow Charlie

          It’s a rousing tune; click the link to hear John Allan Cameron’s* definitive rendition. On a side note, it seems editorial standards have fallen at The Independent. The Bleak House character is named Mrs. Jellyby, with a ‘y’.

          * My uncle!

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 2:11 pm #

            A useful correction I will attempt to abide by. Unlike some….

            Jellybism must crushed howsoever it is spelled or howsoever it is named.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 2:44 pm #

            Thanks Elrond. Yes, rousing and he has a good voice, your uncle.

            In return I offer you the haunting voice of Karen Matheson (of Capercaillie) singing about the Clearances. 11th comment down provides the lyrics in translation, including an unkind word about the (lack of) charms of Manitoba):

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bIhwcjzYns

            And, in a spirit of BOGOF (that was for Q.Shtik’s collection), a second, but not about the Clearances this time, just because she has a lovely voice:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5muVg_ZWek

            Every year I have a week in Glenelg, a tiny village opposite Skye (the drovers used to tie their cattle together and make them swim across to the mainland). In addition to having a palindromic name and being linked with Glenelg on Mars…

            http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-19976650

            …it has a set of crumbling barracks built by General Wade to put down those who ‘rose to follow Charlie’. You can see them on here: http://www.glenelgscotland.com/

            As mentioned in the Mars article, the Knoydart clearances, part of the Highland Clearances, started in Glenelg in 1853.

            Apologies to JHK for this historical digression from things clusterfucky – Janos started it 🙂

            Re Mrs Jellyby, perhaps The Independent seeks to compete with the reputation of the Graun:

            https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Grauniad

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 2:49 pm #

            Janos, you suck the joy out of life and the life out of joy.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 3:10 pm #

            You don’t like being questioned and corrected, I see. You prefer to be the one who does that.

            I’ll take correct or meaningful corrections, preferably done without snark. Needless to say I’m talking about facts or grammar. Philosophically you have to convince me with valid arguments in debate. Very few can correct me there.

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 3:20 pm #

            More false logic. Yawn…

            You’ll have to excuse me – the dog needs food and a walk.

    • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 7:00 am #

      G.K. Chesterton was also strong on the hypocrisy of loving in the abstract but being unable to get on with your neighbour next door. Neighbours can be any colour, though, Janos, and there is no ghetto that didn’t start with a very small number of ‘different’ people. If you contribute to ‘white flight’ and the ghettoisation of towns and cities by being picky about the colour of your neighbours and refusing to live next door to them and get to know them, you do exactly what both Dickens and Chesterton warn against.

      I see you’re now throwing in your hat for Hypocrite of the Year as well.

      • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 2:00 pm #

        Oh so now viciously persecuted Whites don’t have the moral right to flee violence and death at the hands of Blacks and Browns! The Terrorist, Nelson Mandela, called Whites who fled South Africa, Cowards. What a monster.

        • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 2:54 pm #

          God Almighty, Janos, go and soak in a hot bath with some aromatic candles. Or something.

          • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 3:05 pm #

            In other words, Whites should just accept death at their hands? As some kind of reparation, perhaps? Thousands of Whites have been cruelly murdered by Blacks in South Africa since the outbreak of “freedom” btw. Did you not know or do you not care?

          • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 3:16 pm #

            I wasn’t talking about South Africa I was talking about American towns and cities.

            All murders are foul, no matter who commits them.

            You didn’t mention life (or death) under Apartheid, bizarrely, in terms of statistics.

      • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 5:25 pm #

        ” Neighbours can be any colour, though, Janos, and there is no ghetto that didn’t start with a very small number of ‘different’ people. If you contribute to ‘white flight’ and the ghettoisation of towns and cities by being picky about the colour of your neighbours ”

        Alba,
        Do not confuse color/race with culture. The term WOG was used in your class-conscious culture before Ni**er was used in ours, I would expect. Whites self-segregate, primarily to avoid crime and other disturbances/outrages which are the direct result of cultures that will not assimilate. A good neighbor is one that you do not know exists…irrespective of color.

        • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:47 pm #

          “A good neighbor is one that you do not know exists…irrespective of color.”

          I think Dmitry Orlov would disagree. Your neighbours will be part of your social capital in the new economy! The ones who know you and your history of kind words towards them are the ones who will keep an eye on your house when you’re out, once the police are unaffordable.

          Re the ‘w’ and ‘n’ words, I hardly need tell you that racism of that sort was very prevalent here in earlier decades, with signs by landlords back in the 50s famously including ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’. One hopes such things are consigned to history, but some survive and probably always will (if not quite so crassly).

          My country (well, principally England, actually) is not lacking in racial tensions in certain hotspots, but they simply don’t compare to those in the US. And our police still mostly manage without guns, unless they have reason to believe their quarry is armed, which is also much less prevalent over here, for obvious reasons.

  94. FincaInTheMountains January 3, 2018 at 9:24 pm #

    Now, after the officially announced friendship of President Obama, the heir of the Irish Kennedy clan, and Prince Harry, whose biological father also had the most direct relationship with Ireland, and no one is embarrassed to bring old scores to the fore, I think it is necessary to remind CFN Nation what I wrote a year ago.

    If anyone saved the world from a nuclear war, then John Fitzgerald Kennedy undoubtedly occupies a place of honor in this row. And it is clear that mighty forces wanted to unleash that war, and Cuba was more of an excuse than a cause. Already just for this memory the 35th President of the United States will remain ever green, and thanks to him we can still demand the continuation of the banquet.
    And personally, I associate JFK with Moscow, or rather with the flight to Moscow, and the green color is associated not with absinthe or with Islam, and not even with credit notes of the Federal Reserve, but exclusively with Ireland, not only the Catholic, but also Orthodox. And in general, in the Irish Catholics, in contrast to the orange Protestants, there is something Orthodox and green.

    John Kennedy was born May 29, 1917 in a famous Irish family. His father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, was a well-known Boston bootlegger and stock speculator who, having moved to New York from Boston, managed to create on Wall Street a system of so-called “boiler rooms” – centers for economic intelligence and disinformation – with which he managed to manipulate the stock market and, four times driving it into a corner, each time cleaning up still unregulated New York Stock Exchange.

    Having thus raised the art of the Irish pirates to geopolitical heights, at the very beginning of the Great Depression, he received funds that could not be estimated or controlled, and a century before privatization of the Soviet property he managed to prove that a talented thief could steal money faster than an equally talented counterfeiter could print.

    But unlike his current followers, he used these tools not only to create bordellos, but also to overcome the crisis, to a large extent contributing to the coming to power of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932.

    The newly elected President decided to use his knowledge and experience of the best specialist in banking and stock market scams to create the Securities and Exchange Commission, the head of which he appointed Joe Kennedy.

    In this capacity, Joe Kennedy Sr. made impossible the repetition of his own scams and was rumored to be the author of not only the Roosevelt anti-crisis measures to regulate the stock market, but also the main opponent to William Hartman Woodin, whose job he expected to take, supporting the FDR in the election.

    He handed over this opportunity to his son, who half a century later, but half a year before the fateful Oswald’s shot, nearly finished off the Woodin reform of 1933, essentially recreating from the ashes financial Phoenix, born in 1910 on Jekyll Island as a result of the marriage of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. with Nelson Aldrich’s daughter.

    While all these Shakespearean passions were boiling, the future President of the United States John Kennedy went to school, preparing for his future exploits ala Tom Sawyer, in particular, improving his skills in toilet terrorism (he blew up a school toilet).

    After leaving school in 1935, he lost his favorite training ground and tried to console himself with trips abroad. Taking into account his merits in the field of preventing nuclear war, I believe that as a result of this trip, he can safely be awarded the palm tree not only in toilet terrorism, but also in admiration of beauty, as on the way to London the acute aesthetic perception of reality forced him to visit Kenya in order to enjoy the beauty of Lake Victoria.

    It’s hard to say how much the aesthetic and beneficial presence of the future US President John F. Kennedy influenced the fact that nine months later one of these beauties – a stately girl named Habiba – gave birth to an extremely capable boy.

    His abilities were so outstanding that he managed to enter a school where Anglican missionaries taught science and art to the sons of Kenyan leaders. Moreover, in 1958, he casually caught the eye of the special envoy of Senator John F. Kennedy, who had become chairman of the Bureau of African Affairs at the US Department of State, and this boy’s ability impressed the special envoy so much that the latter recommended to Kenya leader Tom Mboya to include the talented young man in the program “Airlift to America”, which from a pitch of senator Kennedy, allowed 81 of the most gifted Kenyan students to study in the United States.

    Although Habiba’s son was initially unable to enter the continental US, but in September 1959, he began his studies at the University of Hawaii in Maui, and a year later, in the process of studying Russian, a girl from the highly respected Protestant family Anne Dunham fell in love with him.

    Her father was a distant relative of President Truman and even more distant relative of George W. Bush, but the enlightened morals of Hawaii overcame the racial prejudices of that time, and in February 1961 the brilliant Kenyan student and distant relative of US Presidents Truman, Madison, Bush, etc. were married, and in August they already had a son – the future US President Barack Obama.
    Moreover, the further education of the father and mother of the future President Obama, John F. Kennedy, who by that time became President Kennedy, paid out of his personal funds.

    Given the sad fate that befell the descendants of John F. Kennedy, it is gratifying to observe the remarkable successes of the son of a man to whom the 35th US President provided an opportunity to study at the University of Hawaii and learn about the advantages and disadvantages of Jeffersonian democracy in its very heart.

    P.S. I must say that I used to have a link to a high-quality photograph of Habiba Obama in her youth, but now it is totally missing from the vast wilderness of the Internet.

    The missing photograph of Habiba explains everything – because of such women the empires collapse and whole countries change their religion.

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  95. Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 11:24 pm #

    You also adopted that crazy guy who was good at science. Can’t remember his name. – Janos

    ===========

    Are you talking about that guy from way way back (7-8 years ago)? If so, his handle was SEB and they were his actual initials.

    • Q. Shtik January 3, 2018 at 11:28 pm #

      I’m surprised nobody had anything to say about Cold N. Holefield and his blog.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 3, 2018 at 11:28 pm #

      Yes. Him. Any news?

      • Q. Shtik January 4, 2018 at 12:57 am #

        No. He complained of some serious illness and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he died.

        I don’t know how you see ME as someone who adopted him, unless having a blog conversation counts as adoption.

      • beantownbill. January 4, 2018 at 1:06 am #

        As I remember – maybe incorrectly – in one of the last posts from him, he stated he had cancer.

        • Q. Shtik January 4, 2018 at 1:11 am #

          Bingo!

          Then that would explain his long absence.

  96. pequiste January 4, 2018 at 1:12 am #

    Isn’t anybody here in the least bit curious about the fire at Bill and Hillary’s place in Chappaqua, N.Y. ?

    So many things leap to mind as both having started the fire:

    – Hillary cackling by a crackling fireplace that became unattended during a run for some Chardonnay refills.

    – A John Podesta over-exuberant Spirit Cooking class.

    – Fun time Secret Service contingent lunchtime bourbon and BBQ session.

    – At home D.I.Y. cremation gone sour.

    And just consider what irreplaceable items were consumed as a result:

    -Huma’s perfumed love letters.

    -Hillary’s cover-sheeted, hard-copy State Department classified, taken home for spare-moment and toilet-time review.

    – Cancelled checks for certain dossiers and other DNC miscellaneous expenses.

    – Thank you presents from Rosatom’s subsidiary Uranium One.

    – Bills porn collection? ( isn’t that included at the Presidential Library?)

    Thank goodness no injuries were reported.

    • Ol' Scratch January 4, 2018 at 10:25 am #

      Didn’t realize they had a fire or I would have FedEx’d some gasoline.

    • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 12:50 pm #

      “Hillary cackling by a crackling fireplace that became unattended during a run for some Chardonnay refills.”

      Surely she doesn’t drink that sweet rubbish. I’d have thought she could run to a nice Sauvignon Blanc, at least.

      • Billy Hill January 4, 2018 at 3:04 pm #

        Down here in Hickville we call it pool-ee few-say if’n we’re uppity folk.

        S. Blanc is fine if you like the taste of green grass.

        I and my rowdy friends prefer a hearty mawl-beck with our chitlins and gravy.

        • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 4:25 pm #

          I agree a pool-ee-few-say is much better than SB (although I tend to go for a pool-ee-few-may myself), but I only get that on special occasions, as it’s a bit pricey over here, because of the tax.

          However… I see that you folks really, really don’t do irony, just like they say. I was having pop at Herself, nothing else. Sorry if the irony got Lost in Translation.

          Cheers. Slainte. À la vôtre. (all sans ironie)

        • ozone January 4, 2018 at 8:06 pm #

          Billy,
          Myself, I prefer the piquant complexities of a well-aged (at least a couple months) and tenderly transported (not too many dents in the box) Cardboardeux. 😉

      • pequiste January 4, 2018 at 5:18 pm #

        Perhaps, as Madame Secretary Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit (hat tip to one Kurt Schlichter for that delightful, teasing, and full-bodied appellation controlee) is a New Yorker by adoption, former U.S. Senator from the great state, plus Chelsea is married to a man of Jewish heritage; she has gone full tilt Catskills renegade and not some snobbish oenophile.

        I’m thinking her most favourite and “top secret” go-to sip and swill could actually be Manischewitz Concord Grape – you know the one.
        She was, after all, broke after leaving the White House way back when…..

        Purple Drank, anyone?

        • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 5:57 pm #

          If she fancies a bit of rough, we can offer her a few bottles of Bucky:

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckfast_Tonic_Wine

          “Buckfast is widely drunk in Scotland where it has become associated with the loutish ned culture.”

          Never tasted it, myself, but it’s c-h-e-a-p, hence its popularity among the neds (another one for Q.Shtik – pure Scottish this time).

          Cheers.

  97. lsjogren January 4, 2018 at 8:43 am #

    Regarding the higher education racket:

    I have been an advocate of abolishing student loans.

    Of course the price gouging universities would scream bloody murder and exert political pressure to prevent this from happening.

    So how about this compromise:

    Keep student loans legal, but only allow them to be issued by the institution the student is attending.

    If the student gets a quality education, they will be able to have a successful career and pay back their student loan.

    If the student gets a shoddy education, they won’t be able to pay back their loan, and the university suffers the consequences for its fraud.

    • K-Dog January 4, 2018 at 10:08 am #

      Uber Duber

  98. ozone January 4, 2018 at 11:04 am #

    What’s that I hear faintly in the near distance? Oh… okay… it’s the chortle of trolls delighting in their success at steering a “conversation” that will never be anything other than a deliberate exercise in thought-stopping and voluminous drivel. (I still contend that there’s a huge sadistic streak in all this that should be a potent warning to all aware people. As was sternly declared in days of yore: “Prepare to defend yourself.”)
    ******************************************************************************

    OKAY, that aside, let’s take a peek at finance vs. the lumpen and one aspect of future shenanigans that head down the smooth and pleasant path to the next attempted iteration of the fascist utopia. Slavery and indentured servitude by stealth. (Hell, the manufactured consent of the cult of Convenience is ushering this in with very little resistance.)

    JHK sez:
    “Bitcoin and other cryptos have a superficial appeal as a wealth safe haven supposedly out-of-reach of avaricious governments — if you don’t consider everything else that’s wrong with it. (Yesterday, Dec 31, Australia’s biggest banks froze the accounts of Bitcoin investors.) I think the safe haven idea will prove fallacious. Governments are already finding ways to interfere, using taxation schemes and shutting down exchanges.”

    So, here’s one scheme: ” Runaway Train Towards Full Digitization of Money and Labor” — Peter Koenig

    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48519.htm

    Cashless in India. Forgot alllllll about it, didn’t you?

    “It caused massive famine and thousands of people died, as they had suddenly no acceptable cash to buy food – all instigated by the USAID Project ‘Catalyst’, in connivance with the Indian rulers and central bank. It was a trial. It was a disaster. If it works in India with 1.3 billion people, two thirds of whom live in rural areas and most of them have no bank account, the scam could be applied in any developing country – see also India – Crime of the Century – Financial Genocide http://thesaker.is/india-crime-of-the-century-financial-genocide/

    I believe Koenig (former World Bank staffer) is based in Switzerland, which is ‘normalizing’ the process. Read all about it. While you struggle to remain solvent, plotting and scheming (and “lawmaking”) by those of the knighted class proceed apace in order to separate you from whatever meager buffer against penury that you may have.

    “What Could Go Wrong?” (As JHK implies, probably a LOT.)

    • volodya January 4, 2018 at 1:57 pm #

      That’s exactly it, history not repeating, but rhyming most ringingly.

      How many times have we seen this movie? We saw Academy Award performances during the – cough – “pax Romana”, which was sort of paxish if you don’t count the numerous rebellions against onerous and extortionist taxation policies of the Romans. What was conquest all about after all if not to grab whatever you can from the conquered?

      What we have here nowadays is much the same but maybe not as brutal ie refuse to pay and the legions march in and rape everything softer and pinker than themselves, crucify a suitable number of wretches as an example, enslave the rest and cart everything off. But, who knows, maybe we’ll get there too.

      Because the point of it all really is to cart everything off. When cash is all digital the task is made immeasurably easier. No coins and bills under the floorboards, or stashed in hoards in holes in the yard. Just a few clicks, some whirring of mainframes and voila, your bank balance is GONE.

      And, as you astutely observe, somehow it’ll ALL be legal. Yes, they’ll have the grey and the learned and the greatly wise to explain the necessity. And who are you to argue? Will YOU understand the lofty ideas, the arcane terminology? Let’s don’t be silly. Of COURSE not. it wasn’t meant to be understood by the likes of us.

      Me? I’m just a simple mule skinner, unworthy from the day I was born. But like night follows day, and like one act of the play follows the last, the “betters” will push their inferiors too far. They always do. They never fail to make that mistake.

      And then what happens? The “betters” get the boots and new “betters” come along doing the same as the old ones, but for half the take.

      Nobody learns from history, especially our men of action at the pinnacle. And besides, as whatshisname said, they make their own reality. Right?

      • ozone January 4, 2018 at 4:17 pm #

        whatshisname?
        Oh yeah, that would be Ol’ Turd Blossom. A fine moniker to promote the respect and esteem of the staff of the highest elected officer in the land… (Jesus wept; we knew then the pooch was well and truly skrewt.)

  99. San Jose January 4, 2018 at 12:54 pm #

    The 4.4 earthquake in Berkeley last night woke me up with a jolt. No doubt they will blame it on Trump. Perhaps it was the death knell of free speech on the campus.

    Jen in San Jose

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  100. Q. Shtik January 4, 2018 at 1:27 pm #

    a very nice ebony-framed antique chaise longue in my livingroom, – GreenAlba

    ============

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/chaise-lounge-or-chaise-longue

    But truly Green, longue vs lounge aside, and despite the particulars of how you came to be married to your current husband, Elysianfield is on the money about your disingenuousness.

    To say that in your world people get married for love is similar to Janos saying “when hostilities broke out” rather than “when Germany invaded Poland” as though (as Elrond pointed out) there was “no agency.”

    The bride-to-be does not set up an Excel spreadsheet to enumerate and tote up the pluses and minuses of her prospective husband – nothing quite so deliberate and crass – but she nevertheless does just that subconsciously.

    My wife (nine years my junior) likes to tell of the conversations she had with her parents (especially her mother) about me.

    . He has a college degree
    . He has a good job
    . He’s Catholic
    . He’s tall
    . He’s polite
    . OK, he doesn’t know a pork chop from a lamb rib but nobody’s perfect

    This, Greenie, is how spouses are chosen.

    • pequiste January 4, 2018 at 1:36 pm #

      Unless participants are a member of a “diverse” culture/religion where marriages are arranged for the kiddies; also those where girls are provided as chattel for family and clan alliances; or in the anomie-enveloped West, as a almost a TeeVee’s “Wheel of Fortune” or Ebay on-line auction type activity from where “mail-order brides” and the more up-to-date internet dating sites get their fame and revenues.

      Face it Q., you’re a hopeless, old-fashioned romantic you are. Stay that way please.

    • volodya January 4, 2018 at 2:02 pm #

      yeah and as a prospective husband I had some teeth left in my head and no open sores. Which I never failed to point out to potential mates.

      • Q. Shtik January 4, 2018 at 2:22 pm #

        Ahhh ha hahaha

        • volodya January 4, 2018 at 2:32 pm #

          what are you fake-laughing at? You think these things don’t matter? You think it’s all a matter of your pristine character? Assuming the prospective wife is a virgin and even if she’s not she knows what’s coming (pun intended) come wedding night and for a stretch thereafter.

          • Q. Shtik January 4, 2018 at 9:51 pm #

            I’m laughing at your honesty about the degradation of the body over time. My maternal grandfather died with 3 teeth ‘in his head;’ Washington is said to have had only one.

    • Janos Skorenzy January 4, 2018 at 3:02 pm #

      I explained the reasons for Germany’s invasion of Pole Land. Their casus belli was adequate in this case. I don’t say this for everything that they did or intended to do in the East.

    • GreenAlba January 4, 2018 at 4:53 pm #

      “chaise lounge?”

      I do hope you are not expecting us to import that linguistic barbarity into the UK. We are only 22 miles from France at the nearest point and we find no difficultly in using the original term, pronounced as it should be. I doubt anyone here has heard of a chaise lounge. Lordy, even eBay can cope with the proper term:

      https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/Chaises-Longues/38186/bn_1633573

      I’m surprised you picked it up though – the allusion to said piece of furniture was only made tongue in cheek, in intended ironical contrast to the person arriving with nothing more than the shirt on his back. I am learning, though (mental note: Americans do not like things to be other than very, very straight – no irony, no tongues in cheeks, as little linguistic fun as possible).

      “This, Greenie, is how spouses are chosen.”

      You are obviously able speak for Mrs Q. I can only speak for myself and the people I consort with (I wouldn’t be attracted to gold-digger types as friends, so don’t know any). In my experience people meet in a relatively small range of places, on the whole. Hence one of my nephews, who is an architect, is married to an architect, because they met at work. Doctors are often married to doctors. (As a total aside, my nephew would rather be farming, as he did a bit of volunteering during a period of redundancy after losing his job, so he’ll do well with the combination of skills, in the ‘new economy’, perhaps.) I don’t think either of them was especially thinking about their bank balance when they got together.

      And neither was I. I was looking for companionship, primarily, and that’s what I got. First time around I married someone earning less than me and in a less good job. I was in France and my parents were some 1500 miles away and weren’t consulted, so I’m personally unfamiliar with your list approach. I left him because he turned out to be an extremely selfish person to live with, not because of his income.

      Good wishes, Greenie.

      • ozone January 4, 2018 at 8:28 pm #

        “… (mental note: Americans do not like things to be other than very, very straight – no irony, no tongues in cheeks, as little linguistic fun as possible).”

        GreenAlba,
        Forsooth! But I pray you not judge us all by the grumblings of a few unimaginative pedants! (Zounds, I repeat myself.) Many of us enjoy a good snigger or even a hearty guffaw from time to time. 🙂

        • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 5:03 am #

          Glad to hear it, Ozone. But I admit it’s hard for people to discern that one’s tongue is firmly in one’s cheek over the ether. It’s just that we Brits have irony in the blood (it’s ‘Made in Scotland from Girders’). We can’t help ourselves.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irn-Bru

  101. pequiste January 4, 2018 at 1:43 pm #

    Well, I don’t know about Jim’s financial forecasts about the Dow Jones Industrial average for the year, but the famous index has just reached and passed the stratospheric and magical number of 25,000.

    Wall Street and other enclaves of fatuous, unlimited Fed money-printing,crytocurrency and silicon wealth are, as you might imagine, thrilled.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH01FhqMdc8

    • FincaInTheMountains January 4, 2018 at 5:21 pm #

      enclaves of fatuous, unlimited Fed money-printing

      Who told you it’s unlimited? It’s not.

      • pequiste January 4, 2018 at 6:32 pm #

        “The numbers are daunting if not shocking: $12.3 trillion of money printing, nearly $10 trillion in negative-yielding global bonds, 654 interest rate cuts since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.”

        From an official mouthpiece of the Evil Bastards: CNBC

        https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/13/12-trillion-of-qe-and-the-lowest-rates-in-5000-years-for-this.html

        $12.3 trillion is enough money creation in 10 years only, to pay 60 percent of the U.S.A.’s debt!

        What else would be feeding the current cryptocurrency, housing, and Wall Street bubbles, Finc?

        All that filthy lucre floating and sloshing around, from Hong Kong to Bermuda and everywhere in beween. Monaco and Corfu are nice too.

        They, The Federal Reserve in America, indeed any governmental or collective (E.C.B.) central bank, can make as much money appear as they like or are commanded to you silly goose.

  102. ozone January 4, 2018 at 3:59 pm #

    V.,
    A’fore we get dragged into the weeds again…….
    You sez:
    “That’s exactly it, history not repeating, but rhyming most ringingly.”

    Yes indeedy! And on that salient note, Greer’s predictions are here!! (Said with the tone of “The Jerk”: “The new phone book is here, the new phone book is here!”)

    https://www.ecosophia.net/a-dangerous-year/

    “…an astonishing number of people in today’s industrial societies labor under the bizarre delusion that when we make the same old mistakes and get the same overfamiliar consequences, we’re actually doing brand new, innovative, unparalleled things that will inevitably succeed in ways nothing has ever succeeded before, and how dare anyone suggest that we might learn something from the lessons of history! Now of course when somebody proposes a course of action, it’s simple common sense to ask “Well, what happened the last few times somebody tried that?” Try raising that obvious and necessary question in today’s collective conversation, though, and you can count on being shouted down with ringing cries of “But it’s different this time!” — JMGreer

    V., Oopsie. (And what *you* said. 😉 )

    On that trenchant note, I must go plow ———— the snow (you filthy-minded sods)!

    • Billy Hill January 4, 2018 at 4:16 pm #

      History teaches us that we do not learn the lessons of history. That and the Law of Unintended Consequences, along with a $2 bill, will buy you a cup of coffee. Somewhere.

      • elysianfield January 4, 2018 at 5:44 pm #

        Billy,
        Interesting you mentioned the $2 bill…are you aware of why it came to exist? I was told many years ago that it was printed to be used as payment to enlisted soldiers who at that time were paid in cash…so that towns around bases would be able to see the economic impact and benefits of bases/soldiers in their community.

        Sort of a counter to the “No Dogs or Soldiers” thang….

        • Billy Hill January 4, 2018 at 6:47 pm #

          My comment was merely a salute to inflation. The turn of phrase used to be “X and 10 cents will buy you a cup of coffee at Y.”

          I thought it had utility in horse racing where the standard bet was $2 but I am out of my depth here. Thanks for the schooling.

  103. tucsonspur January 4, 2018 at 6:03 pm #

    So what’s coming? Inflation? Deflation? Stagflation? Or just continued constipation of government, banks and markets?

    Tax cuts like Trump’s have stimulated economies to some extent in the past, for various periods of time. I doubt they can have the same effect as 40 billion to eighty billion dollar monthly injections into the economy by the Fed.

    I guess that deflation was pretty much halted. And that’s good because it’s tough to roll back, untaxable, and makes debt difficult to repay by increasing its real value.

    But why no inflation? From what I read it’s because people and businesses are not borrowing or spending the money. So it sits in the banks? I just can’t figure it.

    I understand that the Fed wants a certain amount of inflation to make the debt/deficit sustainable. You know, real output plus inflation, minus borrowing costs, must be greater than taxes minus spending.

    It seems that inflation in this country has never really been that bad except for the late seventies-early eighties. Then, Volcker actually boosts the fed funds rate to about 20%, causing recession and rates to fall below 3% by 1983!

    Inflation was really low during most of the fifties and sixties, we still had the dollar backed by gold and fixed exchange rates.

    Deflation and inflation both seem to be tamed, and how the Fed continues to walk the high wire without falling is beyond me.

    • beantownbill. January 4, 2018 at 7:01 pm #

      By my own observations – not the government’s published figures- inflation is rampant. No family in my location can live decently without an annual income of $100,000. When I was a little boy ~ 6 yrs old, my father, the only breadwinner, was making $50 per week, and we got by. Tell me how making $100,000 now isn’t because of inflation.

      I’ve watched the price of food rise a lot. I remember when It cost $.12 for a McDonald’s hamburger, $.25 for a movie ticket, $.19 for a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, $.17 per gallon of gas.

      The purchasing power of a dollar has fallen by 97% over the last 100 or so years.

      • tucsonspur January 4, 2018 at 11:45 pm #

        Right you are guys. Inflation can creep up on you. But I was talking about rates getting up into the double digits like in 1980. In 1986 they dropped to about 2% again. Maybe I should have said hyperinflation.

        Is it coming?

        • Ol' Scratch January 5, 2018 at 7:31 am #

          I doubt it. There’s too many tools – many of them fraudulent – in the kit now. Hyperdeflation is actually the more credible threat. Hence Fed interest rates hovering near zero and the continued money printing effort. They’re blowing as hard as they can for as long as they can to keep the illusion of solvency alive.

    • Ol' Scratch January 4, 2018 at 8:12 pm #

      BB’s right. It’s mostly stealth inflation now. Prices for necessities (housing, healthcare, and food) are inflating rapidly, under the cover of the (seemingly) falling/flat prices for all the techy goodness that everyone focuses on. Unfortunately they get you there too under the guise of all the service charges, taxes, and fees that comes with using all that shit, as well as crapification (aka, planned obsolescence and planned early failure rates) of the “goods” themselves. Thus, your inflation comes in the guise of regularly repeating buys of household consumer goods every year or two, where previously you only bought the same item every five or ten. Think about it. Back in the day, how many $30-$50 corded phones did you buy to plug into your landline and how much did you pay for service?

      How does the Fed/US Treasury do it? Maybe this excerpt from Greer’s latest post will give you a hint:

      +++++++++++++

      “For the last three years, while the US stock market has hit record highs, more money has been withdrawn from US stocks than has been put into them. In theory, that’s impossible. In practice, it shows that the stock market has stopped functioning as a measure of economic health and turned into an instrument of economic propaganda. Back in the day, the US government funded its deficits by selling Treasury bills to other nations, counting on the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency to keep the market brisk; when that stopped working, the Treasury started buying its own debt through intermediaries and stashing the debt in off-book subsidiaries in various corners of the world—yes, that’s the same gimmick that got Enron in trouble. Now it’s pretty clear that the same gimmick, or something very much like it, is also being used to prop up the stock market.”

      ++++++++++++++

      What else would you expect from a government that rubber stamped the fraud that brought us the meltdown of 2008 and has now reinflated that very same bubble to even more dizzying heights? At this point, they literally have no other choice but to keep on blowing.

      • beantownbill. January 4, 2018 at 10:45 pm #

        The only way to survive financially in today’s world is to cynically realize that everyone is out to take your money (wealth). The government, large corporations, small businesses, large charitable organizations, even people on the street. JHK is so right about rackets abounding. Of course, everything is not really a racket, it seems that way. But how do you know which is which? The short answer is you don’t, so play it safe and assume the worst until proven otherwise. Try to be conscious of the pervasive scams.

        For instance, I never buy anything, or pay for anything from a phone or email solicitation.

        Here’s just one of very many scams: Once we got phone calls from several of our daughter’s friends and business acquaintances asking if she was all right. She was on vacation and these people received emails from her requesting one or two hundred dollars be
        sent to her because she had her handbag stolen and had no money or credit cards, and she was in a bind. I knew she would have called us if she had a problem, not people she worked with, so I assumed this was a scam. We called her and she verified her pocketbook wasn’t stolen. I figured someone had hacked her phone, spoofed the number and emailed her contact list.

  104. BackRowHeckler January 4, 2018 at 9:06 pm #

    Yeah, Malthus, in Manchester CT the manager of a Korean Fried Chicken restaurant shot his cook in the head because the cook had offered up a bad review on yelp. You might think it was an all African affair, but it wasn’t; the shooter had a Korean female accomplis. Did I mention this happened during business hours, right around dinner time, smack inside the restaurant This is in a massive mall built in the 70s where some pretty nice apple orchards use to be. When it was put in I’m sure they envisioned mom, dad, buddy and sis showing up in the family Chevy for a happy day of shopping and lunch. What it turned out to be 40 years later is a hangout destination for welfare cases from all over the state, a dystopic space for gang warfare and illegal narcotic sales.

    The dead cook had 7 kids by 5 different mothers but he was only 26. He lived in Hartford with his mother.

    Also since New Years a gang shootout at the courthouse in Waterbury involving dozens of upstanding citizens, shooting in Hartford, Bridgeport and New London.

    I guess you could say, here in CT, New Years has started out with a bang.

    brh

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  105. BackRowHeckler January 4, 2018 at 9:10 pm #

    in 2018, it seems like Western Civilization is marching toward its last stand, its day of reckoning. By the looks of it the chances for survival are slim.

    brh

    • beantownbill. January 4, 2018 at 10:48 pm #

      Tsk, tsk Marlin, don’t despair. We’re just going through rapid change, which usually brings rough times for awhile. We’ll get out the other side ok.

      • Ol' Scratch January 5, 2018 at 7:35 am #

        Unless we don’t. Our circumstances exactly mirror the USSR in 1990: a fading bankrupt super power trying desperately to maintain its image throughout the world by throwing its own citizens and institutions under the bus left and right.

  106. BackRowHeckler January 5, 2018 at 12:00 am #

    Hey GreenAlba it looks the Muzzies have reached the shores of Ireland yes the enchanted green island Ireland. How do I know? Well today one of them, an honored guest, went on a stabbing spree in Dublin; bunch of folks got carved up and one Japanese tourist, stabbed in the back, unceremoniously died.

    that pretty much rounds out western, northern and southern European countries whose citizens have been murdered by honored Islamic guests. Only eastern Europe has escaped. It occurs to me the elites in these beleaguered countries could give a sh-t less; protected at all times by private security, their kids safe in private schools, living inside gated communities, they get to burnish their non-racist bona fides, feel smug, feel good about themselves, present themselves as big internationalists; at the same time condemn their lesser countrymen as bigots and xenophobes (like in the US) Its a win win situation.

    brh

    • janet January 5, 2018 at 12:19 am #

      “Hey GreenAlba it looks the Muzzies have reached the shores of Ireland…”

      Hey, brh, you are falsely defaming Islam, the religion of peace. I guess you didn’t watch the court appearance of Mohamed Morei today. But, hey, don’t let that stop your anti-Muslim bigotry.

      Mohamed Morei stabbing people disqualifies him from being a Muslim just as Stephen Paddock shooting from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel disqualifies him from being a Christian, no matter what the cultural or religious upbringing of either one was.

      4 hours ago – Teenager, 18, charged with murder of Japanese man in Dundalk shouts ‘I’m no gay’, ‘F*** you’ and ‘I’m no Muslim’ in courtroom during brief hearing. Mohamed Morei, 18, was brought before a special court sitting at Dundalk District Court this evening after the killing of Japanese national Yosuke Sasaki …

      • BackRowHeckler January 5, 2018 at 12:25 am #

        Name is Mohamed, must be a Baptist.

        brh

        • janet January 5, 2018 at 12:44 am #

          Name is Stephen Paddock, must be Shia.

        • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 7:08 am #

          Name is Barack Hussein Obama – must be a Muslim and born abroad if you’re as thick as Donald Trump.

        • FincaInTheMountains January 5, 2018 at 12:53 pm #

          Name is Barack Hussein Obama – must be an Irish born in Hawaii to a black son of JFK.

      • janet January 5, 2018 at 12:43 am #

        US Christian Soldiers and US Airstrikes and US Sanctions Have Killed Millions of Muslims. Muslims Cannot Compete with the Scale of Brutality Committed by so-called “Chrisitans”. Both Islam and Christianity Are Religions of Peace. Their Warriors are not Muslim or Christian.

        =======

        “Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children.

        The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to ‘an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq.’”

        Similar figures for Afghanistan, he reports, could bring totals to four million or more.

        As Ahmed points out in his article, the majority of those killed in these wars and those suffering most from these wars, statistically speaking, were Muslim — a stark contrast to the common view that radical Muslim terrorists are the deadliest group in the Middle East. Rather, it would seem the American military are the worst killers, and the death toll resembles religious genocide. In 2009, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy:

        “How many Muslims has the United States killed in the past thirty years, and how many Americans have been killed by Muslims? Coming up with a precise answer to this question is probably impossible, but it is also not necessary, because the rough numbers are so clearly lopsided.”

        Or, as Ben Affleck famously quipped to Bill Maher last year: “We’ve killed more Muslims than they’ve killed us by an awful lot.”

    • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 5:41 am #

      “Hey GreenAlba it looks the Muzzies have reached the shores of Ireland yes the enchanted green island Ireland.”

      Hey Back Row Heckler…

      I’m not long up and missed the episode you describe, but have just checked it out. I see that one Japanese gentleman was horrifically killed, as you say. Even the Mail Online, that patriotic exaggerator of all things ‘furrin’, mentioned that the other casualties (in a separate attack) were two Irish people, rather than a bunch. However many there were, it is horrific and needs no exaggeration.

      Now, I think I made it clear in a previous post – or two – that I have no tolerance whatsoever to Muslim crimes of any kind, any more than I would if the crimes were committed by someone of your own racial and religious purity. However, I am familiar with the Irish, to some extent. Hey, I’m even married to one. They have a certain familiarity with barbarity being imposed on them (first by the British colonialists, in more recent times by the thugs of the IRA (pure white and some of them even claiming Christianity as part of the heritage in whose name they murdered and knee-capped).

      They will survive this latest outrage, believe me. And it will not stop these people…

      http://www.thejournal.ie/locals-ballaghaderreen-syrian-refugees-tv3-documentary-3674184-Nov2017/

      …from continuing to show their practical (Christian?) hospitality to the Syrian refugees who have landed on their shores.

      Manchester, which recently suffered a Jihadi attack, was, like Birmingham, and so many places in Northern Ireland, a victim of home-grown terrorists. They didn’t deport all Catholics, or even all nationalists, as I recall.

      In past centuries, Barbary pirates lifted an entire Irish coastal village and took them off to be slaves. They were never heard of again. And yet, the Irish, who, you’d have to admit, have long memories, don’t refer to their current visitors as Muzzies. They are aware that evil is distributed throughout human society.

      The Irish would laugh somewhat sardonically at your mental image of ‘the enchanted green island Ireland’ – leprechauns, one presumes, and gentle peasants saying ‘top o’ the morning to you’ and ‘if I was going to Glendalough, I wouldn’t be starting from here’. That Ireland? How endearing.

      If they Irish need a reminder (they don’t) of what evil looks like, they they can look at their homegrown organised criminals. For a taste, you could do worse than watch either of the two films made about the real-life journalist, Veronica Guerin.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Guerin

      You might like the bit in the eponymous film where John Gilligan, the drugs baron, is with his goons, and has one of his victims tied to a chair, telling him that just killing him would be banal – wouldn’t send out the right message – so he’s ‘afraid I’m going to have to hurt you’. With a rather large knife, that is.

      Don’t worry about the Irish, BRH, they’ve seen it all before and worse. They’ll cope.

      • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 5:58 am #

        Oops, I even forgot to mention that the IRA atrocities were part funded by the ‘patriotic’ Irish in your country, who had ‘done well’ and had plenty of cash to spend on Kalashnikovs and AK47s. Remember ‘NORAID?

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID

        Thanks for that, guys.

        • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 6:35 am #

          BackRowHeckler

          I’m tempted to ask if you’ve ever been outside of your own country. But I suppose that would be rude. And I couldn’t be rude to someone who’s treated me with nothing but courtesy on here, could I?

          And bunny hopping across the planet in a hermetically sealed plane and getting into a hermetically sealed car at the airport to go to a hermetically sealed hotel might not count either. I mean ‘been outside’.

          I’ll give you an example. When I was 20 I was a student and had no money except what I could earn in the holidays. I went to Tunisia with a friend who’d gone, at 19, hitch-hiking to Algeria. She and her male friend got a lift with a man who turned out to be a local minister of education (see, they have schools and everything in these places). He offered her a job, right there and then, so she stayed in Oran, then in Mascara, teaching English, for a couple of years.

          So, we went to Tunisia. We hitch-hiked through France (somewhat insanely and irresponsibly, at times, from the hard shoulder of the ‘autoroute du soleil’) and picked up the passenger ferry to Tunis.

          We were skint, as mentioned, so while the Europeans, as a whole, travelled on the upper deck, we slummed it with the Tunisians – no bunks, just a room full of reclining chairs. It was a bit smelly when they all took their shoes off (24-hour voyage) but otherwise they were perfectly civilised – and a majority were men. These were ‘guest workers, as the Germans say – on their way home for their annual month’s break.

          On the way over, a bunch of young Tunisian men invited us to a little get-together they were having. Basically they’d got together and were dancing and clapping, local style, having some innocent fun celebrating their trip home.

          On the way back to Marseille, the atmosphere was sombre. No dancing. They were back for 11 months of hard grind and less friendliness than they’d have got if they’d had lighter skins.

          Back at the port, it turned out there had been a cholera outbreak while we’d been away. Luckily we’d got vaccinations before we left the UK, but the Tunisians stood in line, quietly and politely, while their documents were all checked to see if they’d also been vaccinated. We were ushered without question to the front of the queue, because… well I don’t need to tell you why, do I? It was embarrassing.

          That’s what I mean by ‘been outside’. You see more of how things really work.

          And Malthuss, I don’t really give a flying **** if you think I’m ‘such a bore’.

          • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 6:53 am #

            PS we had to get out of a WHITE FRENCH lorry driver’s lorry one time because he thought exposing his bits to us was a fair swap for the lift. My friend called him a ‘pauvre con’ as we demanded he stop and got out. But the nice one who bought us lunch and then introduced us to his family made up for that.

            No trouble at all in Tunisia, although we got the trains there, since they were dirt cheap. People on beaches trying to sell you cr@p could be annoying but that was about it.

            ‘Lorry’ was for Q. It being a girl’s name an’ all chez vous.

      • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 7:36 am #

        Re the enchanted isle, my husband, when he was training to be a doctor in Dublin, paid his way through medical school by joining the Irish Territorials (true). He spent most of his time guarding nuclear power stations (true) against an organised onslaught by the minority, but growing and devious, leprechaun community. They really shouldn’t be tolerated. They’re out to take the island away from the good Irish peasants.

        • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 7:55 am #

          And before I depart to do some work, here’s a flavour of the humour of the enchanted isle:

          American tourist: Hey, Paddy, where’s the road to Glendalough?

          Irishman: How did you know my name was Paddy?

          American tourist: I guessed.

          Irishman: Well guess your way to feckin’ Glendalough.

      • elysianfield January 5, 2018 at 11:20 am #

        “I am familiar with the Irish, to some extent. Hey, I’m even married to one. They have a certain familiarity with barbarity”

        Alba,

        Ho Ho! You will see this comment again…

        The moving finger, having writ moves on….

        • GreenAlba January 5, 2018 at 1:20 pm #

          I see what you did there – truncating my sentence.

          As with all these situations (presumably) the 64 thousand dollar question is ‘what would Trump do?’ Answer: he’d do that too 🙂

  107. FincaInTheMountains January 5, 2018 at 5:16 am #

    Me Too?! Oh, please…

    http://telegra.ph/file/09fdb500254b447bc0705.jpg

  108. ZrCrypDiK January 5, 2018 at 5:25 am #

    All day long!!! Wearing a mask of *false* bravado!!!

  109. FincaInTheMountains January 5, 2018 at 10:46 am #

    I must say that the struggle with Hillary and other threats of nuclear war, despite their apocalyptic nature, is a tactic, it’s a ripple on the water, but the relationship with Iran and the Kurds in conjunction with the transfer of the American embassy to the Israeli capital Jerusalem is a strategy, these are deep currents, and since we are still living in the era of global dominance of the West, this is a World Project!

    The thermonuclear fire has nothing to do with the purifying fire of the Second Coming, and since two days later it would be good for Orthodox Christians to remember that on the their actions depends the response to the question of whether the expulsion of the Jews from the Holy Land has ended, that is, what place in the Holy Scripture it is written about us.

    And any US president guided by the true American interests should act not only for improvement relations with Russia, but also for increasing pressure on Iran to force it to recognize the state of Israel and establish diplomatic relations with it.

    The tax reform that Trump miraculously managed to pass through the Senate and Congress in the last days of 2017 is undoubtedly Trump’s greatest victory and a masterpiece of world politics for the following reasons (most important last):

    1. It is part of the plan to revive the American economy, which the new Cold War with Russia is incompatible with, since the current US position fundamentally differs from the situation in which it was in 1946. Then the US, as a country issuing the world currency, were on the ascending curve, that is, the dollar pyramid expanded, and now it is shrinking.

    And it does not shrink in connection with any actions of Russia, but in connection with the fact that after the collapse of the USSR, the US has already reached the maximum of the dollar zone, extending it to the whole planet, and now any war can not help the American economy get out of the crisis of competitiveness.

    2. Inside the tax reform, Obamacare is being reformed, since it cancels the individual mandate – the most unpleasant point of Obamacare, which may have been built into the law by Hillary Clinton precisely for its failure, or, perhaps, needed at the initial stage of the reform.

    But now, when the Treasury began to receive taxes from the amounts that companies used to buy health insurance for their employees and write them off their taxes, its cancellation has already allowed Trump to equate it with Obamacare and declare it canceled. And all the positive features of Obamacare are now in Trumpcare, which really becomes a key part of his tax reform and his plan to withdraw the US economy from the crisis of overproduction of debts. After all, we are talking about two trillion dollars EVERY 5 years of additional income to the budget!

    3. Now try guessing who got those 2 trillion every 5 years for 25 years before Trump’s tax reform?

    Ah, you are a smart one indeed – the flying monkeys of Hillary Clinton, since it was in 1992 that she was declared the “Tzar” of medical reform.

    In fact, we are talking about even larger amounts, which the group supporting HillBilly Clinton had lost, but this will be discussed in another post. And in this post it will be a question of a golden cap in 2 * (25/5) = 10 trillion dollars – a very convincing argument to subordinate the entire population of the flying monkeys in North America to Hillary!

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  110. FincaInTheMountains January 5, 2018 at 11:13 am #

    The loss of funding of such magnitude is, of course, a terrible blow, and the Flying Monkeys will be recovering from it long enough, but Hillary herself has already dealt a series of preemptive and retaliatory strikes:

    For example the loss of Roy Moore in Alabama and the quarrel of Trump with his main strategist – Steve Bannon over this.

    Or the supply of arms to Ukraine: the sale of large-caliber rifles to Ukraine is possibly Trump himself, but anti-tank Javelins is a typical artistry of the State Department = Hillary Clinton. Well, or the New Year attack on the Russian airbase Khemeymim – there’s no need to guess who is behind this – it’s enough to remember the New Year’s greetings of the Russian Federation, handed over to 150 Russian diplomats with families on December 29, 2016.

    It is easy enough to distinguish one from another – all it is necessary to see how the incident is used by the American media in the investigation of the relations between Trump’s election campaign and Russians by Mueller’s commission. And Trump only reacts so far, but he reacts all over the frontlines.

    In particular, Manafort’s appeal to the court with a complaint that Papa Mueller took him up on charges was out of touch with the official mandate of his commission to investigate Trump’s relations with the Russians.

    And the fact that in response to this complaint the very next day Congress concluded a deal with the DOJ on the verification of the limits of Mueller’s investigation says not only about the removal of Clintonoids from the leadership of the Republican Party and the increased influence of Trump after the adoption of tax reforms, but also about the serious concerns regarding targeting by Russian S-300 radars of American fighters in Syria, because Trump understands that Putin will no longer forgive him on the grounds that it’s not him, but Hillary Clinton.

    And judging from the fact that Hillary Clinton, in response to this threat, went on a frank attempt at a coup ala “Trump gone nuts” that seems to have just been suppressed in New York and Washington, Putin let Trump know that only a prison cell or a chair for the culprit of all casus belli can satisfy Russia.

    And Bastinda intercepted this conversation, and from this, in turn, it follows that Putin intended her to listen in.

    And what persuaded her to go to the extreme measures is that Putin hinted in sufficiently transparent way, that he will not think twice before using nuclear weapons in Syria.

    In short, Happy New Year, Monkeys!

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