JHK’s Three-Act Play
The New York Times editors seem to think that if they tell enough sob stories about illegal immigrants in their ongoing sentimental series “The Way North,” that the national debate will turn into a giant pity party and the nirvana of a human peaceable kingdom will come true, with no consequences — except for more interesting cuisine in states that formerly subsisted on Salisbury steak and pie.
The New York Times, like just about every other institution in the progressive orbit, has surrendered its collective brain to a morass of feelings, longings, and promptings that leads ever deeper into a wasteland of dishonesty. As a long-time registered Democrat who started voting in the year of Watergate, I resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. And especially where nothing matters less than clear thinking and straight talk.
We could start with the practice — especially popular on National Public Radio — by which illegal immigrants are called “undocumented,” as if some unjust bureaucratic mistake was made in their journey across the border and to blame them for it amounts to persecution. It is really too obvious to belabor, except to say that the cumulative effect of such programmatic lying, day after day, will eventually discredit the basic principles of social justice, if it hasn’t already.
The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that therefore everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education. In fact, the surplus populations of industrializing European countries were off-loaded onto a more sparsely-populated New World that also happened to be in the throes of rapid industrialization (including industrial farming), offered a lot of cheap land under plain terms, and held a bonanza of untapped resource wealth in everything from timber to iron ore.
A few things that progressives leave out of the story these days: immigration was rigorously controlled at its ports of entry, and particularly at the height of immigration between the 1880s and the 1920s. A lot of people may have been pouring in from foreign lands, but they were carefully scrutinized on the way in, and not a few were sent back. Secondarily, these immigrants were required to assimilate into a recognizable common culture. There was no handwringing over the question of whether children from Italy or Lithuania should have to learn how to read, write, and speak in the English language. A strong consensus required it of them, and it must be fair to say that most of them were eager to enter that new common culture. We also conveniently forget that immigration quotas were severely restricted in 1924, not out of meanness, as the sentimentalists would suppose, but because the public and its representatives correctly apprehended that the situation had changed in some of its obvious particulars, requiring a consensus about limits.
In the 21st century, The USA is no longer sparsely populated, except in the regions that are typically hostile to settlement anywhere else in the world — places where there is no water, or too hot, or too cold, or too swampy. North America is a settled continent at a moment in history when virtually every nation including the USA can be fairly considered over-populated. It is also too obvious to belabor the point that fossil fuels have produced an algae bloom of human reproduction and that, whether we like it or not, the decline of fossil fuel is certain to lead to a decrease in human population. The question is how disorderly and cruel that journey might be if we don’t make the management of contraction a supreme political priority. And managing the movement of people into this country is a necessary part of that.
Currently, progressive America is pretending that the conditions of the 19th century still prevail here — boundless material resources and land for the taking — and that we can happily accommodate the overflow from our equally overpopulated neighbors, Mexico and the countries of Central America, any way they can manage to get here. The sentimental approach as represented by The New York Times, is exactly what will prevent the kind of hard choices that national leadership is faced with. Both established political parties could founder on this issue.
It’s rather funny that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016 titled her current book Hard Choices, because that is the chief pretense of the party she represents. The last thing Hillary wants to do is take a stand on anything, other than her entitlement to live in the White House.
Coming in August
World Made By Hand 3
Pre-order:
My local indie booksellers… Battenkill Books … or Northshire Books…
or Amazon…
Published as an E-book for the first time!
The 20th Anniversary edition
With an entertaining new introduction by the author
Bargain Price $3.99
Amazon Kindle …or … Barnes & Noble Nook …or… Kobo
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
|
Order now! Jim’s new book
Click here for signed author copies from Battenkill Books
|
Order now! Jim’s other new book
|
Paintings from the 2023 Season
New Gallery 15
GET THIS BLOG VIA EMAIL PROVIDED BY SUBSTACK
You can receive Clusterfuck Nation posts in your email when you subscribe to this blog via Substack. Financial support is voluntary.
Sign up for emails via https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com
Load the illegals onto C130s and ship them back, more-or-less to the countries they came from. Let the people there take care of them. If it costs them enough, maybe they will begin to try to clamp down in emigration to the US. Right now it’s a cheap way for them to unload their surplus population. Also, apparently the immigrants are paying for the trip north. At minimum it will take them a while to save up enough to try again, at best they will decide not to pour any more money down a rat hole and just decide to stay home.
Absolutely correct! I heard yesterday that these illegals are being “airlifted” to California- wrong direction- they need to be “airlifted” back to their countries of origin.
As long as even 10 percent manage to game the system and stay here, they will keep coming. The presumption should be that they are here illegally and should be deported immediately- not that they need to go through lengthy “hearings” that allow them to stay indefinitely- at our expense.
I know JHK probably self identifies as a moderate liberal but I would categorize him as a mainstream conservative (not a tea party member)–sober, wanting to conserve what is best in our society, inclusive and financially responsible. Moderate or mainstream conservatism does not correlate or mean neocon, fundamentalist or hater either.
djc
“I know JHK probably self identifies as a moderate liberal but I would categorize him as a mainstream conservative (not a tea party member)–sober, wanting to conserve what is best in our society, inclusive and financially responsible.”
That’s almost exactly the conclusion I came to three years ago, when I looked at the positions of his that disagreed with the liberal consensus and why he disagreed with them.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2011/07/james-howard-kunstler-swims-against.html
Aren’t labels part of what got us here? Do they matter anymore? In the words of Hildebeast; What difference does it make?
A lot of difference, that is what divides us, turns us against one another, distracts us, makes us listen to the propaganda. The ‘sweet words on the tongue, that grow bitter in the belly’.
Jim, is an American. A common sense addicted, facts matter, shut the fuck up and listen American, as he slaps the faces of the Party Establishment… go Jim. Go Jim Go.
Jim, was kind though. He could have related America to Rome and slavery, and told how the ruling parties both like immigration ‘reform’. The Dem’s get voters, the Pubs get cheap labor, and the Roman Church gets pews filled. Who loses? Americans. Go Jimbo.
Another American, Gov Jindal (R-LA), just said another Rebellion is brewing… he’s right too.
But we will all lose, left right and center, in a new world, made by hand. If we do not understand the lessons of history, and see the messages behind the ancient symbols; The Phoenix that rises from the ashes… is the rich, that burn everything down, to profit, and own and arise, wealthier and more powerful than before… the real Rebellion must be against the men behind the curtain…
Thanks Jim
Jim, you fail to mention that the “cheap land under plain terms,” and the “bonanza of untapped resource wealth in everything from timber to iron ore,” was available only because we decimated the indigenous populations who already for tens of thousands of years occupied these lands. kC
The indigenous populations of the Americas were doing a pretty decent job of decimating themselves despite the uppermost projection of a population of 90 million or so before the Columbian exchange. True, what smallpox did not do, force of arms ultimately did. But the notion of bloodthirsty invaders wrecking The Garden is absurd and ignores the cross-cultural exchanges at the frontier and the complicity of the indigenous themselves in their own destruction. There is no moral justification for the excesses and the histories have been necessarily rewritten — just finished “Old Hickory’s War”– but world history is replete with examples of man’s inhumanity to man (the migrants across the land bridge from Asia may have exterminated the “indigenous” 10,000 years ago) and our ancestors were no exception. So does that mean we are not eligible to debate the present immigration issue within the context of national sovereignty? It should be abundantly clear by now that we are already where Canada is vis a vis Francophone versus English speaker. The notion of E Pluribus Unum that still prevailed in the immigration wave of the late nineteenth century has been abandoned in favor of diversity regardless of social cost.
I submit a telling question to be asked of recent arrivals from the South would be which team they support in the World Cup.
(the migrants across the land bridge from Asia may have exterminated the “indigenous” 10,000 years ago)
I agree. The Brazilian “Nordestino” (Northeasterner) looks a lot more like the Australian aborigines than the “Asian man” we associate with the “native” American. If you can’t find any photos of them, they have short squat skulls, curly hair, and protruding ears. Brazilian miscegenation is making the pure bloods more and more rare, but they are still unmistakable.
FYI; The Brazilian northeast is mostly a desert area, and thus somewhat protected by land.
Likewise, the Mongolians may have finished off the Caucasians (such as Kennewick Man) who were here before them. They may have come from the Lake Baikal region and/or across the Atlantic Ice during the last Ice Age.
“bloodthirsty invaders wrecking The Garden is absurd”
Absolutely correct. The native Americans were quite war-like, just like the rest of our species. They killed each other for territory, took slaves and did just about every other atrocity you can name. But they did live much more sustainably with the land than we European descendents do. But a peaceful “Garden of Eden”, no f’ing way.
I would like to believe we have come a ways from the 1700’s but human nature is what it is . When you really get down to it is still Mano-a- Mano.
Do you now feel better about our treatment of the native people?
Let’s face some facts: The Native American population was estimated to be between 6 and 10 million at the time of Columbus’s arrival. According to the 1890 census, this population was 300,000. That’s right the greatest genocide ever committed occurred right here in the good ole’ USA. But don’t worry yourselves…The Monroe Doctrine made their disposal all legal and proper. Entire tribes were made extinct. Their tattered remains were rounded-up and marched off to concentration camps euphemistically known as Indian Reservations.
So go back to Europe if you feel that way. There could have been no America without their dispossession. Are you really sad about being here instead of them? You’re being existentially inauthentic.
Such a childish remark coming from someone who accuses me of being, “existentially inauthentic”. To deny the genocide inflicted upon these noble people is inauthentic.
Here we go again – “go back to Europe”. Huh? and who are you to tell someone what to do?
He is not denying genocide, he is justifying it.
FFkling — genocide implies willfulness on the part of the predator. Since the majority of indigenous in the New World died of disease – so much so that a trade in human slaves for labor evolved as a direct result — this does really not fit the definition. The Europeans had no intention of killing off their future cash crop labor force, nor did they have any knowledge of microbial disease transmission.
Janos is correct. If you are deeply upset at the notion that your North American existence has been made possible by heinous crimes – that you are, in effect, an accessory to a criminal enterprise – then to continue in that state is ‘existentially inauthentic.’ Every day of your life is a lie only making you guiltier, and you’d be better off going back to the land of your ancestors where the memories of their predations against others are long forgotten.
Janos seems concerned with your mental well being. This may in fact be childish. In any event you may want to investigate the historian’s fallacy, which has to do with the projection of present attitudes and ideologies upon past historical actors.
Florida Power-
You are engaged in a cute game of deceptive rationalization.
Obviously you are not familiar with the definition of genocide. According to the UN convention on genocide, five categories of activity are genocidal when directed against a specific “national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Those five are: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of group; Deliberately infliction on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The US government is guilty on all five counts.
You are a pathetic apologist who prefers to engage in a game of semantics rather than face up to some hard truths.
If you want to learn about the American Indian you should read Dee Brown’s, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. There you will read about the systematic destruction of the Indian in the second half of the 19th century. Read, Learn, and Weep.
One course I have taken suggests that the numbers of indigenous at the time of Columbus’ voyage to be anywhere between 20 and 90 million. This includes the North and South continental land masses as well as the islands. 90% were wiped out for the most part by diseases for which they had not developed immunity as the Europeans had owing to centuries of contact with typical farm animals unknown in the New World. The only disease which may have traveled the opposite direction was syphilis. Since the natives died off the Portuguese traders, well established along the African coast, offered up Africans for trade as slave labor for the New World plantations.
If “bloodthirsty invader” could be applied to any of the Europeans the Spanish would fit the bill better than the English (according to the observations of the priests who accompanied the Conquistadores) which makes it rather ironic that the North American gringo is today regarded as the historical nemesis.
No, “the greatest genocide” was not right here in the USA but in the Americas as a whole. Those of us coming of age in the late 20th century have a far different perspective regarding the actions of our ancestors, who in their own minds were defending themselves from treacherous savages. Are we supposed to hamstring ourselves with guilt, beat our chests and wail over the actions of others long ago? The best we can hope for is to learn from it and try to live the golden rule. Necessity, however, is amoral. Hence JHK’s notion that we must come to grips with the various crises of our time and manage to live within our means.
I think JHK was putting the situation of our postmodern immigration policy in a historical context- a relevant historical context.
I would venture to say the historical context prior to 1850 is totally irrelevant. And your post is prosaic. Everyone knows the anthropological details of the settlement of the Americas- just as we understand the automobile without a review of Otto Mobile’s 19th century innovations.
“Everyone knows the anthropological details of the settlement of the Americas…” Well I beg your pardon — I had no idea you were in the house. But if I may ask:
Since the human migrations out of Africa the species has been bumping into itself. What happened in 1850 that so altered the political economy of this continual friction that you proclaim all prior history to be irrelevant? Poor FFKling, who spends his days weeping with historical guilt, might get at least a partial reprieve.
i will venture to state both political parties have foundered on this issue and many other problems with govt policy.
i got the impression that clinton was campaigning during her tax paid for tour of the world as sec of state. most of her “hard” choices have been so far removed from anything like what a mother has to make in other countries…has she ever had to choose between buying groceries or paying rent? it must be really hard to choose between Harvard or Yale? According to Palin, once you become a nationally recognized media figure, you have an entourage of consultants making every decision for you…what to wear, how to do your hair, what to say, etc.
As SecState, its really just following policy directives. One assumes SecState is in agreement with those policies. Therefore she is in agreement with, say, giving away millions to 3rd world dictator Islamist puppet states, and generally making all the prescribed chessboard moves in the great game that we have been playing since 1945.
In addition to all of the very good points you made, I keep hearing a new narrative that tells me that all of these new immigrants will be paying in to Social Security and that, what with lower birth rates amongst the Anglo population, that will be what saves SS and Medicare. Thereby, of course, negating the need to deal with the real problems, nicely hiding the consequences of the pending energy crash in plain sight.
Failure to deal with a problem today seldom makes it easier to deal with tomorrow.
Craig
I have been hearing that as well. As someone who has been studying this issue for a while, I saw a discrepancy between what was being stated in the press, and what I was hearing from people and seeing for myself. A relative of mine lives in NYC, and she pointed out that there are legal immigrants not only NOT paying into SS, but going straight onto SSD without having worked a day in their lives.
We all saw, after the Boston bombing, something I had been seeing but being told didn’t happen, that immigrants were receiving welfare.
One woman here legally who I know personally, told me that as a condition of being allowed to live here and apply for a green card, she was not allowed to receive any sort of benefit, not even unemployment, for something like 5 years. It apparently varies widely, the conditions that apply. In other words, ICE discriminates.
To sum up, we are being told lies, because large numbers of the immigrants we have right now are taking more than they contribute, and I don’t see how this new bunch would be any different.
exactly! Any scenario in which these hoards crossing the border are a “good thing” is nothing but lies and b.s. from the propagandists on the left.
One would think that at some point the immigration debate would become a discussion of the meaning of sovereignty. I think until the issue is truly “in the face” of the culturally narcotized rather than an abstraction in the pages of the NY Times there is no hope, Cantor’s defeat notwithstanding. The corporatocracy will prevail in the quest for ever-lower wage rates and ever-greater shareholder value. Nations be damned.
Fortunately Hilary appears not to garner slavish regard among the masses. I tried to find the tongue-in-cheek “I’m Ready For Oligarchy” T-shirt after hearing of its legal troubles with her campaign (if anyone knows of a source please advise). I intend to wear with impunity – especially when espying the Lexuses and Range Rovers with the fading Obama-Biden 2012 stickers alongside the I’m ready for Hilary stickers – at parking lots here and there.
“…other than her entitlement to live in the White House (again).”
As if it were a vacation rental for American royalty with a really long walk to the beach.
Isn’t it?
Well, who would you rather have the Democrats nominate? Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley, Brian Schweitzer, Andrew Cuomo, Elizabeth Warren? Matthew Yglesias thinks that it doesn’t matter, as the Democratic Party is surprisingly unified, so someone will emerge to champion their positions, including the ones about immigration that our host dislikes, if Clinton doesn’t run.
http://www.vox.com/2014/6/14/5802564/democrats-are-more-unified-than-ever
Speaking of Warren, she was the benefit of the same women’s vote that would help propel Clinton to the nomination and presidency should (when) she runs. Read between the lines, and you might see some rational self-interest, not just sentimentality, in the push for immigration reform.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2012/11/diversity-strikes-back-post-election.html
Immigration Reform is just bureaucrat speak for Amnesty – which means lower wages, ethnic warfare, the division of America via a new language etc.
As Lyndon Johnson once said about politics, nothing happens by accident. (He was certainly not the only person to articulate that.) So it is with the current attempt to make the resistance of the alien invasion from the south seem cold-hearted and mean. As always, economics is driving the NYT’s position on this. There are vested interests in the US who see a massive influx of risk-taking and hardworking workers as a potential bonanza. Just a couple of days ago I saw an article which identified the newcomers as eventual potential buyers of many of the unsellable houses in the country! Is not Walmart worrying about reduced same-store sales? Solution: bring in more consumers! Plus, how about all those low paying food-service jobs? The newcomers will gladly take them, keeping wages nice and low so corporate (i.e. unearned) profits can stay nice and high. Get the picture now? So what if the livability of the country ratchets down a bit more? So what if the newcomers are virtually enslaved and lose their culture in the process? The whole objective is to keep the economic status quo going a little while longer, at least for the rich. The newcomers are just a new crop of “pigeons” to be mulcted.
“Just a couple of days ago I saw an article which identified the newcomers as eventual potential buyers of many of the unsellable houses in the country!”
Last year, former NYC Mayor Bloomberg suggested sending all the immigrants to Detroit, where that would be one of the results. When I moved here from southern California, I found the idea of a major city full of abandoned house and vacant lots was unimaginable. In Los Angeles, there were always immigrants to move in. And in the areas where immigrants do live, like Hamtramck, the neighborhoods are full of activity. But I doubt Detroit can return to being a bustling city of 2 million on the strength of small businesses serving immigrants and their families alone. That’s what makes Bloomberg’s suggestion such a daft idea. If there were enough ways of making a living to support them, then Detroit wouldn’t be so empty in the first place.
Speaking of Detroit, the annual fireworks show is happening tonight. The city is in bankruptcy, but Ford Motor Company has taken up the sponsorship. The people demand their entertainment, so the show must go on.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2014/06/detroit-fireworks-show-continues-for.html
In Bloomberg’s defense, I do have two studies at my blog showing that immigrants do not contribute to crime and do contribute to thriving neighborhoods.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2012/06/fantasy-and-reality-about-immigrants.html
That written, Kunstler’s points about illegal immigration and the carrying capacity of the world and the U.S. still stand.
“But I doubt Detroit can return to being a bustling city of 2 million on the strength of small businesses serving immigrants and their families alone.”
This raises the question of how wealth is created. If it were just a matter of plopping down X number of people in a set geographical area then why would there have been migration at all? Could they not have done the same sorts of things — as in taking in each others’ laundry — in their homeland? Services arise within the context of a true wealth creator, which is either grown, mined, or manufactured.
The Blacks ran it into the ground just like they did Haiti. Imagine if Haitians were sent to Iceland and the Icelanders sent to Haiti. They would turn Haiti into a paradise in one generation. The Haitians would just die in Iceland.
Janos, you might need to brush up on the history of Haiti… Just saying.
Cheers!
They still haven’t cleared up form the Earthquake. They’re watin’ for Whitey to do it for them. Same thing in Detroit. Blacks didn’t build these cities nor will they maintain them.
Thanks for that AKlein — The Times (RIP) is hardly “in the progressive orbit” as Jim says. Rather it should be thought of as an arm of the government, or better yet the de-facto government (i.e. the oligarchy). Therefore your explanation is the one that makes the most sense.
“Thanks for that AKlein — The Times (RIP) is hardly “in the progressive orbit” as Jim says.”-rollie.
Agreed.
This was the paper that amplified the “WMD” message back in 2003 and that delayed breaking the “warrantless wiretapping scandal” for a year (so as not t ‘confuse’ voters during the election) in 2005… They’ve done nothing but bend over backward to cleanse the white house’s bottom – with their tongues – for at least the past 30 years.
Oh, that and the fact that they submit anything that even *looks* like it might be sensitive to a CIA representative for final approval does ‘sorta-kinda’ make them an extension of the federal government…
But that’s nothing new:
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Yeah, placing the NYT (or the LAT, WP, WSJ or even USAT) in the ‘progressive’ camp makes no sense. And the results are in.
“As always, economics is driving the NYT’s position on this. There are vested interests in the US who see a massive influx of risk-taking and hardworking workers as a potential bonanza.”-AK.
This is some clear thinking. I’ll be exploring and expanding along these lines in my commentary later.
Thank you. What you said needs to be said. Apparently, over and over again because nobody, in power anyway, wants to hear it, let alone do anything about illegal immigration in this country.
Where I live on the west coast, Seattle is a sanctuary city. This means that the Rule of Law regarding legal immigration, any legal immigration is null and void. Any discussion with the authorities about limiting, or regulating, or even having legal immigration is considered the height of rudeness. You (an American Citizen) are considered a subversive.
Right here in Bellingham, WA where I live, some immigrants from South Africa set up a company, called Yamato Engine. This company was raided by ICE in 2008. Over a third of its employees were found to be in this country illegally. When ICE did their job and arrested them for deportation, then DHS head, Janet Napolitano came in and issued work visas to people that didn’t even possess enough English skills to say “Thank you”.
The jobs these illegals were taking were real jobs paying real money. Jobs real Americans were dying to have (during) the Great Recession, and still are. When questioned about her actions Ms. Napolitano said: “We don’t do that kind of thing here in this country.” Meaning, we don’t have and don’t enforce legal immigration policy in this country. How else do you expect to keep the natives under control?
We cannot feed our own, educate our own, care for our own, employ our own, house our own, feed our own, but talk about legal immigration and regulating our own out-of-control population, and expect all hell to rain down upon ones head. One in six Americans is on some kind of public assistance. Approximately 50-million Americans are on Food Stamps. The country is broke and bankrupt (if anybody bothered to even take a casual look around). But our criminal shyster politicians will not even do what they vowed to do when they took office — fulfill one of their primary duties — to provide secure borders in this country, and to provide for the safety and security of its peoples.
I don’t know why there is not rioting in the streets. I don’t understand why real Americans are not rising up and burning the place down. This is their country, not the worlds, but our politicians act like they plan on filling the United States of America with the populations of a whole world. This appears to be what immigration looks like today.
Anyway, thank you for weighing in on this insanity. Whatever happened to living in world where reasonable minds prevailed?
“Sanctuary city”? That explains a lot and why this area (I live in Bellevue, WA aka “Little Mumbai”) has become so bad so fast. I plan on making my escape to the coast ASAP- I’d rather face the radiation from Fukashima than what’s happening here.
By the time there are riots in the streets over this immigration invasion it will be too late, as we’ll be outnumbered 20 to 1.
Do you know what the locals refer to Bellevue, WA as? “New Los Angeles.”
“Right here in Bellingham, WA where I live, some immigrants from South Africa set up a company, called Yamato Engine. This company was raided by ICE in 2008. Over a third of its employees were found to be in this country illegally. When ICE did their job and arrested them for deportation, then DHS head, Janet Napolitano came in and issued work visas to people that didn’t even possess enough English skills to say “Thank you”.”-blame/e.
Sounds about par for the course. I’ll be addressing this kind of corruption in my commentary.
Thanks for bringing this up.
The sad truth is that the US NEEDS illegal immigrants, unless Americans want to pay $5 for a head of lettuce and much more for other vegetables as well as fruits. There is too much money in illegal immigration, just as in the war on drugs.
Also (’cause I don’t like moreover), our natural population growth does not support our economic growth ambitions. The hurdles to legal immigration are often insurmountable, so where is the increased spending going to come from? More debt?
The system is flawed and needs either a serious overhaul or a reversion to the simple and downsized federal government of circa 1812.
1812? As far as I know, slavery was legal in every state back in 1812. Are you suggesting that we revive the institution of slavery?
From Wikipedia entry “History of Slavery in United States”:
“While the Constitution protected the slave trade until 1808, in the first two decades of the postwar era, state legislatures in both the North and South made decisions to free many slaves, resulting in a dramatic rise in the number and proportion of free blacks in the United States by 1810. Most free blacks were in the North, but in the Upper South, the proportion went from less than one percent of all blacks to more than 10 percent, even as the number of slaves was increasing.”
A number of northern states has taken steps to outlaw slavery before 1812, such as Vermont and Ohio.
See the following entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_and_free_states
With all due respect, what kind of normalcy bias drugs are you taking? More to the point, what exactly are you talking about? Gone to the grocery store lately? We already are paying $5.00 for just about everything. Maybe you are just being sarcastic with your comment about the (failed) war on drugs.
The whole theory about population growth and economic growth is invalid, a death trap, one of those hockey stick charts. The whole thing as it currently exists in untenable, unlivable, and unsustainable.
You sound just like these corporate oligarchs who justified the destruction of this country’s economy, and things like out-sourcing, by talking about phony choices: “Do you want your stuff made abroad cheaply, or do you want it more expensive and “Made in USA”?” Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter. It is the same stuff.
Why is it sad? Seems to me all parties are OK with the arrangement. If Americans want those jobs, let them compete for them. It’s the same for engineers in India, the only difference is that the harvest is information and the highway is the internet.
“All parties” are NOT ok with this arrangement. The 1%ers are, and the two sides of the same coin political parties are. The Americans seeing their middle-class jobs being exported overseas, or replaced by under-the-table sub-min. wage jobs right here are most definitely NOT ok with it. Of course, our opinion doesn’t count. Big difference.
We can’t compete with coolies without becoming coolies. A Nation is supposed to protect us against this kind of thing. Borders are or should be economic as well as physical. Free Trade breaks down Nation – which is why Marx loved it. Everyone hates the tariff – the builder and maintainer of nations.
So instead we should pay the difference via Social Services and Welfare? While Agri-business triumphs over us? Socialize the whole affair, drive out the immigrants, and train Whites to work these jobs.
“The sad truth is that the US NEEDS illegal immigrants, unless Americans want to pay $5 for a head of lettuce and much more for other vegetables as well as fruits.”-Ungaro.
Yep. We have all heard this before… I’ll be getting to this.
Thanks Ungaro.
Its blackmail… accept illegal immigration or I’ll make you pay $5 for a cabbage.
Well guess what, you’ll be paying that much for cabbage soon enough!
In my neck of the woods, illegal immigrant watch continues… I see them everyday in the neighborhoods of McMansions I pass through, pressure washing the porches, mowing the lawns… spreading the wood chips.
Everything about the aesthetics of suburbia is maintained by illegals. Those crews did much of the house building, now do much of the yard-maintaining. Though not all.
Sometimes, for inexplicable reasons, the calm is shattered by a overweight white man with ear muffs astride some sort of gas-powered shredding device. I’ve talked to these specimens- they are quite proud of this behavior. Obviously they love it- their shrieking commotion is never heard during normal business hours- but on evenings and weekends.
But the illegals sometimes work all day, so there are a few crews here and there. I like to make eye contact- the reaction is always a super big grin. I would like to think I’d be as happy never paying taxes and being able to freely return to some southern paradise nation with a shiny new truck and spending money.
The reality is that BOTH sides of the aisle love mass immigration from third world countries. The Democrats view these people as instant Democrat voters, while Republicans see them as cheap labor. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to mass third world immigration. The Immigration Act of 1965 received support of 74% of Democrats and 85% of Republicans in Congress.
BTW, it’s too late now to do anything about immigration. The US is hooked on cheap labor like one of Walter White’s customers. I was in upper Manhattan last Friday. There was a lot of construction going on in that area. I did not see a single construction worker who was not Hispanic.
If you were to poll some actual, y’know, non-1% Americans about open borders, you might get a slightly different take on the issue than you would by only listening to millionaires on Bubblevision. Yes, the plutocrats love their cheap, non-unionized labor force, not having to pay decent wages or benes to their gardeners or nannies, etc.
However, you get quite a different take on the situation once you leave your McMansion gated community.
When did it matter what the 99% want?
Like I said, there is nothing you can do about immigration now, it’s past the point of no return. Adapt or get out of the way, gringo.
“The reality is that BOTH sides of the aisle love mass immigration from third world countries. The Democrats view these people as instant Democrat voters, while Republicans see them as cheap labor.”-Crue.
Essentially the Truth.
My problem with this is little essay is that it is as disingenuous as the discourse it is critiquing. You are not interested in hard choices. You have made up your mind and are presenting the issue as no choice at all. You certainly don’t want to entertain the reasons why someone could make a different choice. Such a choice you dismiss out of hand. And if the people you disdain are sentimental, your own hatred and contempt pretty clearly shows through, and they are emotions, too.
Jim, the reason we are in the state we are in have to do with the fact that corporate capitalism loves cheap, exploitable labor–they are the ones who gave us globalization and NAFTA and GATT, not the sorry bastards who feel bad about the plight of people in Latin America. Why not point your rhetorical guns on our overlords, and stop kicking the cat.
Spot on, James Levy, spot on. What makes hordes of economic refugees want to come to the US? I don’t believe that great numbers of people willingly give up on their homeland to come to the US. Effectively, they are being driven out by economic circumstances, just as they are enticed here for economic reasons (not to their advantage either, but less obvious). Who is driving this carrot and stick? Answer: cui bono.
“I don’t believe that great numbers of people willingly give up on their homeland to come to the US.”-AK.
Folks do not know how true that is. I’ve seen this issue from both sides of the border (I’m not Latino, b t w) and the risks are legendary and they are terrifying to the people making the journey – and they do it anyway.
Why do they do it?
Do you really want to know the answer to that question?
Before someone reflexively barks: “liberal!” or some other nonsense, this __Does Not Mean__ that I’m in favor of a loose immigration policy.
When I look at this issue, I’m most interested in what it indicates about causal factors, and what risks are indicated in the near and mid-term future… Everything else belongs on a soap-opera at this point. We don’t have a functioning democracy -for all intents and purposes [*] We’re not in a position to ‘vote in’ substantive policy changes.
You’ll have to find a different country for that.
Cheers!
— — —
[*] Jimmy Carter said as much to __Der Spiegel__, and he should know. He’s been ‘railing against the wind and tide’ for 40 years.
Yep, follow the money. Since the overlords are the final arbiters in this clusterfuck of human bondage, a path to controlled contraction (in all respects) will be ignored, or even aggressively shunned.
…And this “demographic on the march” aspect of our predicament is rubbing raw even before the real, perceptible impact of climate refugees is thrown into high gear. …And that’s even before the INTERNAL massive migration (in search of water and arable land) has kicked in! Oh my, we are well and truly on the road to perdition when the trickle becomes a flood and the overlords belatedly attempt a retreat from the horrors that they’ve assiduously built in the service of the stone-hearted god of profit.
“Since the overlords are the final arbiters in this clusterfuck of human bondage, a path to controlled contraction (in all respects) will be ignored, or even aggressively shunned.”-Oz.
Jared Diamond said as much in ‘Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed’:
A ruling elite finds a willing combination and does it until it peaks, when it stops working as well they double-down and do it some more.
When collapse is imminent they punish and/or kill counter-suggestions and do it until they’re dead.
At this point, I’m no longer depressed by this. I find it comforting, somehow… 😉
MD, Most innnnteresting! (I’ll certainly defer to Mr. Diamond’s research on this point. 😉 )
“When collapse is imminent they punish and/or kill counter-suggestions and do it until they’re dead.
At this point, I’m no longer depressed by this. I find it comforting, somehow…”
Just how they’ll become dead is a subject for speculation, but since the ruling elite have been so busy beating the empathy out of one and all for as many nickels as they can rub together, if it should be via a length of cordage or a high velocity projectile, it won’t trouble me terribly. It’s another case of lying in the bed that one has made. No wonder there’s a panicked determination to “keep an eye” on everyone. The project of sneakily turning the dispossessed upon one another should be considered part of the same process, but this cannot be perceived by Authoritarian “thinkers” and boosters. Take a look right here in this comment section! If these opinions be real (which we can never be assured of), this country is going down in a welter of mistaken and idiotic bloodletting and a horrendous waste of human potential, driven by mountebanks, charlatans and downright deluded fools who have forgotten (or never learned) how to think or act in a socially constructive manner. No, this is not a time for misplaced/misguided pity (including the inwardly directed).
Beware Authoritarians, the Great Pretenders, Users and Despoilers… but I don’t need to tell you that. 😉
“Beware Authoritarians, the Great Pretenders, Users and Despoilers… but I don’t need to tell you that. ;-)”
OMG, so much beer spewed out my nose, that I have to re-fill!!! Classic poast – metaphors galore!!!
Rats pissing on cotton – rubbing nickels?!… (my bad)
I read recently that the financial sector accounts for about 40% of GDP. This is mostly activity that diverts resources from the real economy of making things. 40% drained from the economy. Illegal immigration, how much? Probably a small fraction of that but big diversion for the knuckle heads. Let’s just move on–forget the about the swindle that is Wall Street.
Nice point. But why handle the _Strategic_ threat when you can distract the masses with all the little tactical-threats?
Kids love ttheir boogey-man stories.
I like the way you’re thinking about this. Thanks.
That “capital” you reefer to (40% GDP) is not diverted, as you suggest – it is merely created out of thin air, using majikal derivative calculations – high volume millisecond style.
Are there really any *real* investments where capital and labor still provide “benchmarks,” given slave labour offshored and outsourced? Even the factories are now offshored. The cost of shipping is very much becoming the limiting factor in the bean counter realm of accounting…
Jews always love immigration. The fewer Whites, the more power they have. Also they love both the cheap labor and the cheap votes as they play both sides against the middle. Strangely enough though, they take the opposite point of view when it comes to Israel. They are now deporting large numbers of Black Africans. Care to explain Lev?
“Jim, the reason we are in the state we are in have to do with the fact that corporate capitalism loves cheap, exploitable labor–they are the ones who gave us globalization and NAFTA and GATT, not the sorry bastards who feel bad about the plight of people in Latin America. Why not point your rhetorical guns on our overlords, and stop kicking the cat.”-Mr.Levy.
Thank you!
Thanks, Jim, for addressing the core issue that humanity faces. Everything else (resource depletetion, etc.) is just made that much more impossible to resolve, unless the global growth is decreased.
Sustainable Growth is an oxymoron. “Sustainability” has become a popular term; and is often used incorrectly.
From a report (titled the Brundtland Report), “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Because “sustainable” implies “for a long time compared to a humane lifetime,” and because the arithmetic of continuous growth leads to large numbers in modest time periods, it is possible to state, “Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.” Although this is absolute, it is ignored by many who speak about “Sustainable Growth”.
It is even said that there is no population problem in the U.S. because our current growth (as of 2011) is only 0.7%.
The formula for calculating exponential growth doubling times would have you divide a constant of “70” by the growth percentage. As such, IF our population growth were to continue at 0.7%, in only 100 years, our population would double.
As of March 1, 2013, the U.S. had a total resident population of 315,602,000. Can you look around yourself and imagine that in a little over the life expectancy of a child born today, the U.S. would have to accommodate 631,204,000 people?
Zero Population Growth (ZPG) is when the births + immigrations = deaths + emigrations.
The immediate achievement of ZPG of the U.S. would help to:
1) Reduce the rate of destruction of the environment;
2) Reduce shortages of vital resources such as water;
3) Preserve resources for the use of future generations;
4) Slow the rise in many taxes that are necessary to pay for growth;
5) Slow the rise in cost of housing;
6) Reduce the competition for jobs;
7) Stop the growth in congestion, pollution, and urban violence;
8) Slow growth of Government, litigation, & ever more restrictive Social Engineering;
9) Preserve American representative democracy;
10) Set an example for those parts of the world that are experiencing rapid growth
Currently, a person living in the U.S. consumes 10 to 50 times the global resources of citizens of developing nations. For this reason, and others, our ability to limit immigration is going to be increasingly difficult. As global resources become more and more scarce, our ability to control our borders will become more and more difficult.
ZPG is going to happen… whether we want it to happen or not. This city, this state, this country, this globe is finite. Although the implementation of ZPG is going to be an incredibly difficult change to bring about, humanity has three options:
1) Voluntarily limit both the natural population increase (births) and the artificial population increase (immigration) to a combination of values that equal zero;
2) Continue on our present path, and wait until the population is so large that limits on births will have to be imposed by our government (as was done by China);
3) Continue on our present path, have no governmental restrictions, and let the population grow until nature cuts down the population by increasing the death rate (disease, starvation, war, anarchy, pestilence, etc.)
I’ll take what’s behind Door #3, Monty!!
(When the overarching ethos is short-term profits, ‘options’ are invisible.)
“ZPG is going to happen… whether we want it to happen or not. This city, this state, this country, this globe is finite. Although the implementation of ZPG is going to be an incredibly difficult change to bring about, humanity has three options:”-Loca.
Re | Options 1-3; 1 and 2 require more control of events in a strategic way than we’ve seen. Option 3 is most likely at this point and it’s not ‘Zero’- population growth, it’s ‘Negative’-growth or, to use the JKH-ism ‘die-back’… (Russia already went through a decade of this, which it may turn out was a blessing in harsh disguise).
Cheers!
Good point, JHK and I think many who vote Democratic feel the same way, especially if they are aware that “globalism” has many moving parts.
It is in fact, Bill Clinton who ushered in NAFTA as a destructive trade force, but need I say more.
The Neoliberal agenda is in fact very much a part of the Democrat as well as the Republican ethos. The Republicans got cheap labor for their CEO class and the Dems got more votes. But since the Reps don’t get votes out of these masses, they have identified with their constituents who are fighting for resources and jobs.
Yes, I have often pointed out Ellis Island as a controlled point of entry to the US and a quota system. You are right to mention the population and resource issues–not to mention assimilation.
But that’s not what this is about. Quietly in the blind spot of MSM is a globalist ideology which out of necessity is the break-down of the modern nation state with a social contract to its people. Now we are mere free trade zones, colonies, if you will of banks and transnational corporations.
Our trade deals being fast-tracked like the TPP and the TIPP says it all. The NASCO Corridor is another tip-off and the Sovereign wealth funds where wealthy Arabs and other transantionals are renting our infrastructure through our banking system (JPMorgan) with guarentees of profits. (see Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia). This has happened as a result of low revenues from an ever disintegrating system.
Our media would have us all think that nothing has changed in America since the 1960’s while in the background we are being transformed into small groups fighting for scraps against eachother while those on top enjoy untold riches which are kept outside this country.
The globalism agenda is none other than a giant wealth grab by the top 1% of the world, while telling the little folk that they are being protected and oh, look the poor from other failed states want to come and join the late great USA.
So are you ready to admit that Communism was always the baby of the 1%? That’s Your hard choice.
“It is in fact, Bill Clinton who ushered in NAFTA as a destructive trade force, but need I say more.”-
Nope, you don’t.
Funny how people keep forgetting that, AND the fact that ‘Glass-Steagal’ (correctly referred to as Banking Act of 1933, specifically Section 20) was neutralized was neutralized by Clintons.
And there are actually people who think that we need another Clinton in office?
Well, “Time makes more converts than Reason”-Tom Paine.
Cheers!
Overpopulated is the key issue here
Actually, rational resource allocation would have led to a more manageable outcome.
But in a world where Gini Coefficients of .40 or worse are considered ‘okay’ and human resources aren’t invested in, in any useful way (just ‘giving them religion’ is a proven non-entry) then it might as well be ‘overpopulation’.
Cheers!
I’m fine with Salisbury Steak and fries but then my family is already diverse. That’s right Janos, and it is why I dream of grinding your face into the floor sometimes. But hey; only when I’ve not better things to do, and that’s almost all the time. Perhaps I should consider a lawsuit.
New York Times editors having compassion? I’s possible I suppose but I suspect the idea of kicking the can down the road by importing new scab labor to keep the game going as it is a while longer has far more appeal to them. The age of globalism demands a global citizen, one ready to gallivant about the globe in search of the current lowest wages and am I crazy it think that the New York Times supports globalism and really does not give a shit about the sob stories?
I too resent being taken for a ride to the place where anything goes and nothing matters. Where clear thinking and straight talk are considered a breach of good manners and etiquette. Where lies and deception are the soup de-jour and total strangers think they are the boss of you because they have a badge. Like here last week concerning certain comments.
And while I have written what I have the most sad thing about the times we live in is our festering lack of concern for others.
On a lighter note you can now see my Potato Box.
The age of globalism demands a screwer and a screwee. Without that we would all stay home. That is the best reason for why we will never have a one world government or a one world currency. How the hell are you going to screw somebody then?
Is this a backhanded apology? Your way of admitting that not only are we are right, but that we always were – and that you and yours were wrong all along. You idealistic dupes were serving the Corporations and the New World Order. How does it feel to be such a dupe?
But don’t worry, your policies will have long term effects. We will be engaged in ethnic tribal warfare in North America for centuries now because of your “vision”. And there will be no neutrality. You will be on our side whether you like it or not. But whether we take you in is another story. Read that classic short story, A Man without a Country. You are Plain Buttons!
Be quiet and polish your scrambled eggs.
“The age of globalism demands a global citizen, one ready to gallivant about the globe in search of the current lowest wages”-K Dog.
Gallivanting across an economically ‘flat’ world, no doubt.
Isn’t Friedman so very wise?
[not]
How Hard a Choice would it be for you, dear reader, to leave your home, family, culture, language…life…. to venture to El Norte? how desperate must one be to undertake such a journey? Those who do, have historically been the ones America has desired to have as citizens….risk taking, go -getters with a drive for something better. The flood of illegals on our southern borders, I think have no other option and are here trying to survive. The question is why? Mexico is a large exporter of oil and has lots of resources along with other central American countries. What is lacking are economies that serve the populations, that provide opportunity to LIVE. 70 years of one party rule, political instability, oligarchs, etc are now threatening our borders and sovereignty. It is time our gov’t/businesses has a talk with those to our south and tell them to get their act together to open their economies for greater participation. One of the world’s richest men, Carlos Slim is a Mexican that fortune needs to be re-distributed.
“The flood of illegals on our southern borders, I think have no other option and are here trying to survive. The question is why?”-Noel.
This is asking one of he right questions… Thank you.
Our money is corrupt. It is a Ponzi scheme. That is not debatable, that is fact. It is unconstitutional, and should be abolished. Now 100 years into this fraud, and the way America counts things has been utterly corrupted with Substitution, Weighting and Hedonics which when coupled together completely misrepresent the economy and its health. So we have a zombie population, deadened with drugs and plied with booze, anesthetized with porn and sports, stupefied with an education system that produces a state of cognitive dissonance, and placated with an matrix like reality where they can shoot up and destroy entire towns in their electronic gaming world. It’s all a lie. All of it. there is no truth in any of it, no heart to be found in the modern world. Our souls are holes. No matter what you pour in, it vanishes. What is the root of all this evil? Money. Unsound, fake money. Bring back real money, and people’s choice will change radically. They will no longer be interested in paper with arcane, rather ridiculous symbols. They will want silver and gold.In our world today, people will kill each other for a pile of paper. I mean even Jesus got 30 pieces of silver. Hard choices are not hard when money is real.
“It’s all a lie. All of it. … Hard choices are not hard when money is real.”-seawolf.
It’s true that our markets are anything but ‘free’ at this point, that we have a centrally-planned economy optimized for Speculation and that Price Discovery has gone to hell.
That being said, the road to ‘sound money’ requires a lot more than a change of opinion.
This post was small minded, mean spirited and hateful.
Mostly hateful…
I doubt the feminized shaming ritual has much lifespan left, maybe I’m wrong but I rather think it works when the bread box is stuffed enough to share the bread but it won’t work when the scraps have to be fought over.
And I doubt the feminine shaming ritual has much effect beyond dopey whites, so its governing potential is naturally limited by demographic reality.
Can you shame the likes of Charles Rangel or the California Latino politicians, nope not a chance. No sense of shame there, just greed and ambition, perfect pawns for the oligarchy.
An example of the failure to be of the feminine shaming ritual, Leland Yee. Him and his cohorts allegedly were in the arms import business and what do they do when caught but slur the FBI with the hate word “racist.” Leland Yee is the future, not some rich middle class white kids of privilege ready to abase themselves at the slightest hint of displeasure on someone’s part.
newworld,
So funny that you brought this up.
Leland was SO not the target of the investigation he got scooped up in.
He barged in on a buy-bust operation aimed at his buddy and B-List Chinatown gangster ‘Shrimp-Boy’, and he wouldn’t let the fake buyers alone – he was that horny to *close the (fake) deal*.
They busted him b/c he left them no choice.
BTW, this opens a window into why he’s really in the docket: He’s Living In The Past. He just didn’t keep up, that’s all.
“This post was small minded, mean spirited and hateful.
Mostly hateful…”
You jest, n’est-ce pas?
whether we like it or not, the decline of fossil fuel is certain to lead to a decrease in human population. The question is how disorderly and cruel that journey might be if we don’t make the management of contraction a supreme political priority. And managing the movement of people into this country is a necessary part of that.
The Eugenicists love when you talk dirty to them like that. Just who will be in charge of managing this contraction? The corrupt government that is nothing more than a division of the corporations that enrich the WWON (World Wide Oligarch Network)? Hardly, unless you want them to badly enough, and then maybe, if you beg on hands and knees, they might be inclined to begin mass euthanizations under the guise of popular insistence.
I was watching Vice last night on HBO and they had a humorous segment about the implications of China’s one child policy. China is an example of what happens when concentrated power meddles with the natural order of sorting things out. Apply the lesson of China’s one child policy to your suggestion an inevitable natural contraction be unnaturally managed — what may already be bad enough will most certainly be many times worse.
At this point, if and when there is a contraction and or Collapse, it’s best to do nothing and adapt to the circumstances as they manifest.
Now Was That, Then Is This
“The Eugenicists love when you talk dirty to them like that. Just who will be in charge of managing this contraction?”-Colden.
No one, actually. There will be pretenders, of course.
“At this point, if and when there is a contraction and or Collapse, it’s best to do nothing and adapt to the circumstances as they manifest.”-Holefield.
That’s the most effective course of action at this point.
Cheers!
I have argued for years and years that the “progressives” are pushing a 19th century “wild west” immigration policy based on the fiction that the United States is a land of wide open spaces in the 21st century.
Kunstler’s essay also makes that point, but far more eloquently than I have ever been able to.
I have not read Kunstler write much on immigration, but I have figured that his views would be along the lines of what he states here.
1). He is not afraid to speak up against the “progressive” political establishement when he feels it is wrong, even though many of those who agree with his warnings about resource scarcity and the untenable suburban settlement model are members of that political cult.
2). He obviously does not buy the Sierra Club copout of “think global and do nothing”. In his other views he clearly believes that sustainability problems must be dealt with not only at the global level but at the national and regional level, and thus he has no intention of running away from the immigration issue simply to placate the half-wits of the far left and far right. (progressives and libertarians)
“…the Sierra Club copout of “think global and do nothing”
Is the Sierra Club a government agency? A cabinet position? An incumbent political party? A powerful multinational, banking or insurance oligopoly? If not, then precisely what are they supposed to ‘do’ about overpopulation?
I wish they’d talk more openly about it too, but believing there’s some magic political interest group out there that can instantly cure our national “head in the sand” attitude about population and the environment is a bit loopy.
Well you are right, the Sierra Club isn’t much of anything, especially since they threw the environmentalists out of their organization.
They took a gigantic bribe that stipulated that they never speak out against the negative effect of mass immigration. A few dissented and left. At least they got paid off – other big environmentalists gladly went over to the Left or always were. Green is the new Red.
“but believing there’s some magic political interest group out there that can instantly cure our national “head in the sand” attitude about population and the environment is a bit loopy.-HARM.
I like it when little sparkles of clear-thinking appear.
Thanks for this.
Well said JHK. On this issue the democrats will do nothing because further immigration will garner votes for them. The republicans will do nothing because this labor arbitrage benefits their sponsors in the corporate world. Left out are all the rest of us.
On top of the issue.
Cheers!
One more thing. illegal immigration from Mexico is not only tolerated but inculcated by the Elite because it’s cheap labor and the Elite have proven that labor arbitrage is something that will never go away. Slavery, the real kind, may be in our future — labor arbitrage will see to it. The question is, will it be the near or distant future? I hope it’s later. For now, the Mexicans come to America illegally to do cheaply with a smile on their faces what Janos won’t do because he’s too busy complaining about the Mexicans on the internets all day every day. See how that works? Get out and get busy, Janos, and maybe the illegal immigrant problem might abate.
No, it too late for that. Once Mexicans rise to the level of management, they only hire other Hispanics. Surely you didn’t believe they weren’t ethnocentric just because you aren’t? Just kidding – I know that exactly what you people assume.
But yes, there are lots of dumb Whites and they should be taken while young and taught to work in the fields. In the White Republic we will have to pick our own crops. Glad you are on board with this. I’m not sure I want you there, but it’s not up to me.
Jim, from reading the responses on this blog, it appears that many are not dealing with the true issue of population overshoot.
Instead there is a debate on issues of compassion; or, on economics; or, tradition; or, jobs; or, whatever…
The truth is too radioactive for any politician or news media to even acknowledge. That is the absolute necessity of limiting “growth”.
Those interested should research the work of Dr. Albert A. Bartlett, an emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 1969, he started giving a lecture titled, “ARITHMETIC, POPULATION, and ENERGY”. Here is a link to a YouTube video of his lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_VpyoAXpA8
Although Dr. Bartlett died last year, by 2001, he had given this lecture more than 1,742 times. At least once before the U, S. Congress.
In the lecture, he basically states that mankind has a choice. Either make the Hard Choices necessary to reset to a life not based on Growth; or, be aware that if we do not, nature will do it for us.
He points out that most of the things humanity is currently struggling to achieve will only make Population Overshoot happen that much sooner.
No politician is going to address this. Nor will we likely here of it from the usual media sources. However, if you watch Dr. Bartlett’s lecture and do not recognize the finite nature of Limits to Growth, you, too, can continue on until nature balances things out.
Whites aren’t the problem. We don’t even maintain our population. So a White America is more environmentally sound than a Brown America which breeds prodigiously – at least on this issue.
“Jim, from reading the responses on this blog, it appears that many are not dealing with the true issue of population overshoot.
Instead there is a debate on issues of compassion; or, on economics; or, tradition; or, jobs; or, whatever…
The truth is too radioactive for any politician or news media to even acknowledge. That is the absolute necessity of limiting “growth”.”-Loca.
The really Hard Truth is that by the time ‘overshoot’ is an issue, it’s too late for an organized response… b/c the issue would not have arisen if the relevant decision-makers had been on top of their game in the first place.
Usually, it turns out that the folks with the greatest power over the situation were the culprits (intentionally or not), which is why the issue evolved as far as it did.
So who limits growth? High-speed Impact with Reality, that’s ‘who’.
Cheers!
It isn’t necessary to categorize this article as anything but clear-headed, rational thinking. We don’t need to label such thinking; all we need to do is recognize it’s correctness.
I am a Catholic, but must tell you that the special interest group that is most in favor of illegal immigration from the South is the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. They understand that the only way to keep the pews and offering baskets full is to flood the country with Hispanics; and even that is not a sure thing. There are simply too many interests at the trough to implement a rational policy on immigration.
Woe be unto a modern society that cannot control its own sovereignty.
All those that feel ‘so sorry” for these children coming across the border, why don’t you adopt a few,bring them to YOUR home and raise them on your nickel to adulthood..BTW,why is there no mention of the parents & their behavior that send a 4 year old into a foreign land? If a law abiding,legal US citizen did this with their child here, they would be prosecuted…Who’s willing to step up to the plate and adopt?
crickets,crickets,crickets……thats all I hear …
No kidding. What upper class whites really mean when they whine about the “cruelty” or enforcing the law is, “I really want a cheaper nanny and gardener”.
I imagine a time in the future where Canada struggles with hordes of illegal immigrants from America (with illegals from Mexico trailing behind) sneaking across the border to escape oppressive heat and failing crops, even as its own people crowd into the Yukon and Northwest Territories. At some point, they will determine that enough is enough. Ugliness will surely ensue.
Fun-fact: Immigration from the US into Canada has jumped “300% since 2009″…
Cheers!
I have a wry smile on my face when I read the plaintive bleating of sheep complaining about “their” pen being sullied. The myth of America runs deep – even amongst those who are outliers and should know better.
This country was never “yours” to begin with; your ancestors were brought here to work and extract wealth for the owners. That you developed some kind of entitlement, as if you actually had possession, is the very exact reason why you are being eliminated.
Think about it from the owners’ point of view – they have this large population of tenants, many 3-4 generations old, who have developed a mentality that they have some kind of rights, some kind say, when in actuality all they are are squatters who need to be moved off the land.
Welcome to the strategy that solves all of these problems – get rid of those who believe in sovereignty, who were raised in an era of gun/self-defense rights, and replace them with serfs from other lands who have absolutely no conception (or expectation) of anything other than what an overlord tells them.
As we launch down the shark fin decline curve, who do you think will be able to most effectively fill the manual labor requirements to replace the petro-energy slaves? The land whales inhabiting Wally-world, or poor, toothless gnomes that can be ordered about without question?
Our future is our past – before we go stone age, we first need to retrace medieval feudal Europe/Japan, then slave holding Rome/Greece.
All this complaining about what is happening, and what is going to happen, is a poor waste of time that would be better spent on trying to figure out who to position yourself as a field master.
My grandfather was a refugee from Germany after the dissipation of WWI and the ensuing inflation and political chaos. He told my mother that patriotism in the US was being fostered to get the productive masses to help the “owners” (as you call them) to gobble up the world by war both economic and physical. He prognosticated that once the “owners” had achieved their goals, they would “cut the populace loose”. Perhaps we have arrived at that point.
You know this an excellent point and I agree with it.
Exactly. That’s what Hitler was fighting against. And his Socialism was Local, not Global and funded by the Bankers.
Yes. I agree. You just wrote a good summary of Howard Zinn’s work. : )
Zinn hated everything about America. And this kind of crap has been fed to generations of college kids. And that’s why we ended up with a globalist pawn like Obama.
One last thing Theodore White LBJ’s press flack or biographer, forget which wrote that the 1965 Immigration Act was the worst piece of legislation he passed thru. It unleashed anarchy, and I really doubt the transformation president Obama can stop this anarchy at Cuba Norte levels of government control because of this very anarchy.
To tie this in with one of Mr. Kunstler’s themes, this push for more immigrants supports the mortgage racket. Bear with me as I have a hard time articulating this stuff, but it is something that has concerned me for a long time.
Along with the suburban sprawl, you have the problem of an expensive government left in place in the cities with dwindling populations. This wouldn’t be the crisis that it is, the jobs leaving, because people living in Clifton Park don’t exactly walk to work either, you can live in one place and work in another. However, in places like Schenectady, the government is still operating as if there is industry here shouldering a hefty amount of the tax burden, and if the residents have plenty of money to throw around. People have moved out to places like Malta to escape supporting these expensive ‘legatees’, and even the legatees have moved out to Saratoga County or wherever, when it is legal to do so and even when it is not.
So, what to do? You or I might make sure that property and sales taxes only went to maintain necessary services to the residents, with the associated costs. No, that doesn’t allow our ruling classes to live it up in high style, rub elbows with the rich, generally be better than the rest of us. A solution? Fill in the vacated neighborhoods with masses of people on welfare. No, they don’t pay their own way, but slumlords can afford to pay relatively high property taxes and still make a profit, so these people are valuable to the elected officials, as are the legal immigrants from third world countries. The illegals are valuable as well, but they can’t vote.
On the plus side, the undocumented invaders seem to share JHK’s passion for train travel. It is also very unlikely that they will defile the landscape with the modernist bullshit that JHK despises so much.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. 11 million illegal immigrants isn’t immigration, it’s a tidal wave. Just remember that all of their problems immigrate right along with them. Mexico is a failed state, with over 70,000 murders in the last three or four years and you want to make them a majority here? If you want to see the effects of illegal immigration, look at South Central LA. Don’t go there, however, because they’ll kill you. Even the LAPD knows better than to send Anglo officers into the barrios. It’s hard to be against immigration, because the first thing out of people’s mouths is “You’re a racist,” and that pretty much settles that. Frankly, I don’t wanna have 11 million Swedes here, or Germans or anybody else for that matter. We have enough people here already. Mexicans are projected to become the largest group in this country by around 2050. Take a look at how well things are going in their own country.
Actually I’d take in a million Nordics in a heartbeat.
11 million? That’s the official number – the one they’ve used for decades. It’s more like 30.
And the child migrants aren’t new either. I was in Mexico in the 1990s. I encountered “unaccompanied minors”. These children- approximately 5-6 years old, were begging for food in the middle of the desert without an adult in sight from horizon to horizon. So they’ve been coming for decades. It just takes 70,000 of something to break through the wall of white noise that separates Americans from reality.
The trash blew around freely in those pre-nafta days and the border towns were pretty ugly. I got my share of we gonna kick your ass gringo catcalls as I worked my way south. These kids though- they are just offered up to the world, put in the hands of God. Its a catholic thing, you wouldn’t understand.
Tellingly at the compounds these kids are kept, the clergy is of course let loose on them.
“These children- approximately 5-6 years old, were begging for food in the middle of the desert without an adult in sight from horizon to horizon. So they’ve been coming for decades. It just takes 70,000 of something to break through the wall of white noise that separates Americans from reality.”-Truthiness.
You saw the same thing that I did.
find it utterly bizarre that there are folks acting as if this is a new development. Nope. It’s just scaled up to F5 levels now.
This will serve as a wake-up call to the folks with critical-thinking skills intact.
The others weren’t going to wake up anyway… 🙂
Cheers!
Excellent article, JHK! “Anything goes and nothing matters” pretty much sums up the current “progressive” agenda. Why are we not allowed to defend our borders, and stop this invasion (it’s past the point of “immigration”)?
As stated, things are different that they were in previous centuries- we’re out of space and getting low on resources and we need to take care of our own people.
A sudden large influx of any poor people will put a huge burden on a city. It happened in my town, when over a 25 year period the Mexican population grew to 42%. This torpedoed most of the schools, which were unprepared for an impoverished student body. Then there was a huge crime wave. In a town of 175,000 we were plagued with as many as 26 murders per year. Finally the FBI and ATF stepped in and the murder rate went down to zero. But we still have sub par schools and depressed property values. Oh, and very high taxes to pay for all of the “services.” Our east side school district has a 99% poverty rate. On the west side the rate is 65%. Now some evangelicals are bringing in people from all over the world through a group called World Relief. It’s unbelievable. Just when we started seeing some real progress in the Mexican community in terms of education and a second and third generation of pretty ambitious kids, we are now hosting people who aren’t even used to running water. We are planning to move in about two years and hope to be able to sell our house.
Whichever way we got here, we have what we have. And we have a lot.
320+ million people and growing fast. The 3rd largest nation in the world behind China and India.
Jim is right though, liberals AND conservatives want to remember a past America that actually behaved in a different way. We want to remember OUR America, but it’s usually the case that wasn’t the way our history actually happened.
Back to the population issue. It is clearly unsustainable in it’s present form. I always laugh when I read where some clueless idiot says stuff like, the Los Angeles area will absorb another 10 million people over the next 20 years. They say it without a hint of understanding of what that might actually mean for the people living in that area. Taxes? Education? Water? Waste? Housing? Voting? Transportation? Law enforcement?
We have so many clusterfuck triggers that we’ve ramped up or ignored that are going to slice and dice our ass severely in the coming years. We are clearly showing all signs that we don’t want to or can’t MANAGE the impact of massive population growth.
It might sound odd to say it, but America has a frontier culture. For much our history, America had a vast physical frontier that essentially shaped our culture. You see it expressed in the juvenile response of the NYTimes to immigration and people who want everyone to pack a gun. They’re both expressing sentiments that would have fit nicely into, say, 1770.
Climate Change and Peak Oil are not going to give us time to bring our frontier culture up to speed on contemporary issues. We will try and fail to deal with them, in part, because our culture is not up to speed.
Except for the gun part, I totally agree with you. See my post below.
Please talk with Be. Last week or so she actually talked about polluting outer space and other planets. Pollution is a concept related to a biosphere and as far as we know, the other planets of our system don’t have any.
I find it interesting how upset people get by immigration, or the attempt at immigration. I hear otherwise sane people get really upset at other people who didn’t have the fortune of being born on the piece of land called ‘The USA’, try and get here, where the ‘standard of living’ appears better than where they were from.
If we weren’t taxed, and there were plenty of jobs, as was the case in early America, it wouldn’t be an issue. The fact that someone is punished for something they can’t control is completely obscene!
I also find it interesting how for as much as James hates TPTB (The Powers That Be), he still talks as if they are the answer. I suppose that as long as they hold some ‘power’ over others, they can direct things a bit, but as they have that ‘power’, they will never use it to help others, only themselves!
Just my two cents!
Your two cents is worth less. Is it “punishment’ to keep people out of an elevator that is full? Or a boat? Be thankful you were born here and help maintain America by keeping out the unfortunates who weren’t. If you want, if you feel bad, you can send money to them. Or go live with them. But don’t overturn the boat just to make yourself feel good.
Jim, after voting for Obama twice (like you), there is no way in hell I would vote for Hillary Clinton, that supreme grifter, for US president. Will you swear off voting for her in 2016, regardless of the Republican zombie or fossil that she is to run against?
I agree, in part. Clinton is not even close to being the answer to anything other than moving chairs around on the deck. But at the same time, NONE of the GOP candidates surfaced so far offer anything other than tried and failed policies.
If we’re honest with ourselves, the fact is, both parties don’t want to deal with the realities we face. They both have become parties for big corporations and the 1%. No surprise. That has been the history of political parties for MOST (not all) of their history.
Our choice comes down to who will do the least amount of damage.
Sad. But that’s the choice.
Also, I don’t believe Clinton will get the nomination. Too much baggage; too thin skinned and too wrong on the issues of the day.
I think someone else will step up.
Ultimately, the people and (mostly now, big corporations and the 1%), get the POTUS they want.
Much of what I just wrote sounds contradictory. It is. It’s also our contemporary politics, which is why the system doesn’t work.
If the next POTUS is ALL down with big corp and the 1%, we will speed up the worse elements of The Long Emergency by at least a decade.
I tend to agree with you that Hillary Clinton cannot win the nomination. She was handily defeated by a guy who had less than one term as a US senator under his belt, no substantive executive experience of any kind and who’s middle name was the same as the man that his ne’er do well predecessor George W. Bush had vilified as out to destroy the USA. Here in Portland, Oregon, Hillary’s speeches were well attended but eighty thousand people showed up to hear candidate Obama speak.
But times have changed and I don’t think we can willing omit the peak oil narrative from our decision in 2016. Worrying about who will do the least damage, a sort of weak-form utilitarianism, is no longer the proper decision method. We’re just rearranging the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic. Why not sit out the election to accelerate the collapse? We know it’s going to messy regardless. The political system is failing. Why not just let the patient die in hospice rather than attempting to resurrect false hopes? The future awaits us.
Is the New York Times still owned by Carlos Slim, the Mexican Gazillionair? The might explain the papers position on the issue.
Not to change the subject, but there’s trouble brewing in Iraq, in case you didn’t know. Secretary Kerry is there right now. Before he left he was asked by a reporter what his priorities were, meaning in Iraq. He answered “To see a transgendered bisexual appointed ambassador before I leave office”.
Don’t expect any positive results from Kerry’s visit to Baghdad, to say the least.
–BRH
“Is the New York Times still owned by Carlos Slim, the Mexican Gazillionair? The might explain the papers position on the issue.”-BRH.
Thanks for bringing that up.
Cheers!
Does it matter who is behind our current immigration policy and why?
Let’s look at the bottom line. The Earth is vastly overpopulated.
Technology has allowed our species to greatly increase our numbers. Does it matter if neo this or neo that are responsible or planned it this way?
I don’t know, nor does anyone else really know the Earth’s carrying capacity, nor how long it takes after we hit this limit for nature to take its course and reduce the population accordingly.
One thing we do know is the majority of humans have to struggle every day to stay alive. That is the true measure of carrying capacity.
Unbridled immigration lowers the average standard of living in a society of finite resources. Isn’t that obvious? The best we can ultimately do is to severely limit immigration, but that only postpones the inevitable. Right now I think we, as individuals, ought to be spending a lot of our time trying to figure out how we’ll survive the necessary lower population reset.
BTW, I don’t think we will go extinct. In fact, I believe ultimately the future will be glorious – for the survivors.
“I don’t know, nor does anyone else really know the Earth’s carrying capacity, nor how long it takes after we hit this limit for nature to take its course and reduce the population accordingly.”
The U.N. has estimates the earth’s *sustainable* carrying capacity (meaning w/out FF inputs) ranges from ~.5 billion (assuming we all have an American lifestyle) to ~4 billion (assuming we all have the average lifestyle of a Sudanese).
I agree.
I don’t think ordinary people will understand what we’re up against until 3 things happen on a regular basis:
a) gas shortages
b) power outages
c) empty or shortages at supermarkets
If it happens quickly–>public panic, hysteria.
If it happens slowly—>immigrants will say, “This is just like what we left!”
No matter what speed the next step down happens at, the majority of folk will react as if it came out of nowhere. . .
Hah! Just like Hillary’s “What does it matter”. We will never forget the Jewish role in opening our borders. Never.
Hah! No one really cares except you and your ilk.
So you admit it then?
Really never gave it any thought.
What saddens me is you being so extreme, yet at the same time have an appreciation of how our true destiny ought to be off-planet. What a waste!
“BTW, I don’t think we will go extinct. In fact, I believe ultimately the future will be glorious – for the survivors.”-BtB.
And that depends on a lot of factors, most importantly: Timing.
Mr. Kunstler , thank you once again for a small but powerful dose of sanity. I look forward to your courageous insights every Monday.
The problem is crony capitalism and globalization.
The US decimated Mexican small farm agriculture with NATFA, which created the displacement from rural Mexico. It was done in the same way it decimated much of manufacturing in the US and Canada — free trade for corporations.
The Border Patrol is an army of 40,000 and only makes life miserable for the LEGALS while illegals continue to come.
If they want to shut it down, then start fining employers $10,000 for every illegal they employ. But that will never happen because the corporations benefit hugely from cheap undocumented labor.
Just wait until Obama’s TPP and TTIP get passed – -that will be NAFTA on steroids for the whole world, to benefit the corporations and the billionaire class.
“If they want to shut it down, then start fining employers $10,000 for every illegal they employ. But that will never happen because the corporations benefit hugely from cheap undocumented labor.”-upstater.
It’s funny how that step kept getting missed.
Cheers!
Like a number of issues at this extremely advanced age of industrial human society, the real wranglings behind the immigration debacle are damned illusive.
I don’t understand all the rearranging, trashing, and jettisoning of the deck chairs.
The only real issue at hand is the imminent dieoff and possible extinction of the “algae bloom”. At any rate, I believe that we are so close that everything else is merely noise.
~toktomi~
The population of North America may well have passed the threshold of long term sustainability at the beginning of the oil age, at least in terms of the high living standards that they have enjoyed. It is likely that industrialized societies are so far into population overshoot now that the issue of immigration should not even be under consideration; however, people are not generally aware of how temporary the fossil fuel extension of carrying capacity will turn out to be, with most collective behaviors and policies being driven by the usual emotional and ideological impetus rather than by any sense of physical reality being interpreted through a lens of science and applied logic. We live in a world of exponentially expanding population and resource demand, with resources concurrently diminishing both in quantity and quality. In other words, the human race is on a collision course with nature, and a journey that will not likely end without significant sacrifice. As surplus energy wanes, we will see widespread economic decline and waves of immigration to regions with greater command over the resources that remain. The problem is that, with ever diminishing surplus resources, and this is especially true of energy, there will necessarily ensue an aggregate decline in living standards. So irrespective of your political or philosophical leanings, you should be asking yourself: Am I prepared to live more simply, more frugally, in the face of declining resource quality and availability? And under such circumstances, does it make sense to increase the number of people with whom I must compete ever more vigorously for access to essential resources that are in decline? And since this conflict over supply and demand over key resources will only increase over time, how will my children fare? How will my actions or inaction affect their lives? Each individual will have their own threshold, but I would assert that even the most ‘progressives’ among us will reach their limits at some point, perhaps within the next generation, given the current trajectories of industrialized societies and the physical constraints that they will be facing.
Yes, think globally but act locally. We can’t save the world, but we can limit the population in America. And that means no more fast breeding Central American, Muslim, or Black African Immigrants. Whites aren’t the problem as we don’t even have a replacement level birth rate. Only political correctness attempts to hide these basic facts. Environmentalism must jettison this diseased philosophy – and return to its Conservative roots.
We are facing a world problem of resource depletion and over population. The only way our “deciders” can see as a way out is war and population decrease on a massive scale. The wars to steal others oil and metals will not solve the big problem and that is to many mouths to feed period.
The solutions weather man made or natural will take care of the latter. I have to think that the massive CHEMTRAIL spraying initiative underway now is part of the man made solution.
So do not linger on the small crap you hear day to day. Plan accordingly get yourself right with your inner self and those you love and prep for the inevitable.
Enjoy every day the SHTF days are near so make the best of it now.
Zero Population Growth will not be achieved peacefully. Humans are in competition with each other. Part of that competition involves outbreeding “the other” and taking their share of the pie. A multi-ethnic, multi-religion society like the United States makes this dynamic even worse. Most Americans don’t look out over their society and see a common “us.” They see little groups, defined by ethnicity and/or religion. Nobody wants to see their little group go away or be displaced by another. We only have to look at the demise of mainline Protestantism to see what happens when one’s group stops breeding in sufficient numbers and maintaining its cultural dominance – the Episcopal Church and United Church of Christ, as well as the Yankee upper and upper-middle classes they catered to, are basically things of the past. That we ever managed to get such a group to commit cultural and demographic suicide is amazing…and unlikely to be repeated.
Yes Whites are very weak now and we wont see the Blacks, Asians, Muslims, Hispanics do what they did. Obviously Liberalism is a Death Cult. The failure of the group that gave birth to it is the proof. Further proof is what’s happening in Europe as Liberalism has turned the Continent over to Islam. Sick people.
Ya, and these were the people who founded the United States, now gone, forgotten and despised.
I am sure that cheap labor and new voters is a big part of the agitation for immigration reform. However, I also think there is a genuinely religious, specifically Judeo-Christian, dimension too. The bible followers believe that humans have a magic power over physical limitations. In the same way that Jesus created wine from water and also fed the multitudes with a single loaf of bread, the judeo-christian cornucopian economists like Juilian Simon and Ben Wattenburg (and Steven Landsburg) are always proclaiming that more humans are an indisputable good and always end of creating more wealth through the magic of human inventiveness and genius. To them, a diminishing population must be supplemented by immigration and more babies, because more is always more. Physical resources are never an issue, because the human genius is limitless. These cornucopians are unshakeable in their assertion that “Malthus was Wrong, Malthus was Wrong!” Alas, I am confident that Malthus will have the last laugh.
Yes there is the Idea that Man can bring Utopia into existence by Himself – by magic or the magic of technology or “free enterprise”. Real Christianity denies that fallen man can do any such thing. And that only God can deliver such a thing.
Rationalists would or should agree more with the religious. Obviously we aren’t solving our problems and aren’t anywhere near a Millennium. And any real advance will be slow. Technology per se brings as many problems as it solves. Only the wise use of it can bring some improvements to some people – but usually at a cost to others or to the environment. Only by moving our industry into outer space could solve the environmental issue.
In as much as I enjoy Jim’s writing, I was looking forward to hearing his opinion on how Germany, Frankfurt in particular, is becoming a new London for the world’s financial theater and how US petro-dollar is being gradually pushed out of the game. Will US go as quietly as Britain did after WWII? Not a chance, in my view. Hence, we can expect more “local” wars and “revolutions” and potentially more natural disasters of the like of Fukushima – which in Asia is referred to as an “attack” and not as an accident. B this maybe due to their local propaganda and not because of the real attack, because otherwise admitting that such a thing happened because of a design oversight (oops, “an accident”) is painfully humiliating.
“In as much as I enjoy Jim’s writing, I was looking forward to hearing his opinion on how Germany, Frankfurt in particular, is becoming a new London for the world’s financial theater and how US petro-dollar is being gradually pushed out of the game. Will US go as quietly as Britain did after WWII?”-joomlabliss.
This is forward looking (into the s/t). Nicely done. Thank you!
What seems to be missing here is the reality that we are all in this together. The world is a unified system, regardless of borders, solid or porous, regardless of governments or government policy. What happens “out there” will impact us all whether we like it or not.
It is beyond honest debate that Africa and Latin America were systematically destroyed and stripped of wealth by the European conquerors, most recent of those being the United States. Even a cursory reading of the horrors directed by US military forces and advisors in places like Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Chile, and so on, is enough to give a decent person nightmares. There was little the people of those countries could do to stand against such forces. Lest you call me an anti-American liberal, keep in mind that the people themselves have little control over foreign policy, even though we have in many ways benefited from it, up until now.
This being a unified world system, the US has set up a situation where large quantities of wealth are increasingly concentrated on one side of an inherently porous or semi-porous border. In chemistry we call this an “osmotic potential”. As long as that differential exists, it will draw people from one side to the other. I’m talking about broad, predictable patterns here, not the individual moral choices. However, speaking of such choices, if the wealth of your country was stripped in such a way, and you had a family to feed and protect, and you had the opportunity to move your family to a place that was safe and relatively wealthy, and that place also happened to be safe and wealthy in part because they took much of their wealth from your own country by force and subterfuge, you might not feel so bad about making the choice to get there by any means necessary. And you might not be a bad person for making that choice.
Not that any of this necessarily means that stable immigration policy isn’t important. Nor that the influx of immigrants isn’t causing significant social upheaval in this country. Frankly I don’t know what the short-term answer is, if there even is one. Nor do I trust our public policy makers to make any decision with the best interest of the common people, domestic or otherwise, in mind. So, any answer that comes from them is immediately suspect. That goes for the pro-immigration liberals, as well as the right-wing Tea Party/Minute Men hard-liners.
What it does mean, in practical terms, is that the debate about immigration has been focused on the wrong things all along. What it does mean, is that maintaining a strong wealthy society in the middle of a chaotically collapsing world can only be done by being meaner and nastier than everyone around you, in defense of your circumstances. Whether this is an existential choice worth making is very questionable.
On an individual level, I find a state of humble poverty and a generous spirit preferable to any other option on the table. In terms of public policy, the answer, if there is one (something that is highly questionable this late in the game), can only be to seek to bring the rest of the world system into positive balance, and relieve the pressure on our borders from without. Consider the contributions of permaculture if you need an example of how this has been done already on a small scale.
You accept defeat. All those excess billions in the 3rd World are doomed – and not our responsibility. Our responsibility is the people within our borders. We can defend those borders and we can expel the invaders. Eisenhower did it. So can we.
It isn’t that I’ve accepted defeat. I don’t see the immigrants as an enemy in the first place. They’re just people, and I refuse to turn everything into a fight for dominance. Though I don’t expect someone like you to understand the difference.
I work in health care, both in the formal sector and the informal, the conventional and the alternative. I spend every day doing everything I know to do to help those who come to me, regardless of their background, and it is my intention to continue to do so to the best of my ability, regardless of the consequences, for as long as I can. I wish more people would do the same.
Being a citizen means putting your fellow citizens first. A universal nation is a logical absurdity. It’s Ok for a doctor to try and help everyone. That’s what the oath means. But that’s a special vocation – not the same as being a citizen. If you can’t understand the difference you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
It is the very definition of virtue to think of the Other before thinking of oneself. I fail to see why that doesn’t apply to good citizenship. Your assertion that that is grounds for terminating my voting privileges is simply that – an unsupportable assertion.
Nice thought but impracticable to say the least. Taking in the worlds overflow of low skilled people in need of work, welfare and other paid for by us benefits can not be a solution for a country that borrows money every year to pay its commitments and fulfill its obligations to protect the citizens from those that would harm or enslave us.
Unchecked border crossings are a form of invasion for whatever reason these people are breaking the law and draining our resources.
The unchecked immigration of illegals here is a direct threat to National Security and those in power who advocate it or agree with it are subversives and should be tried in public and then HUNG with no exceptions. The people of this country better wake up before their doors gets kicked in and you are interned for not being a good comrade for the Obumma Peoples Liberation Army
You’re missing my point entirely. They are going to keep coming as long as there is a disparity between our two countries. We have the tools to lift others to a reasonable standard. If we were to use them I believe it would go a long way toward stemming the tide of desperate immigrants. As many unemployed citizens as we have here, there’s no lack of manpower ready to be deployed for the benefit of humanity. What we lack is the collective will to invest in them. That’s a far more difficult problem to solve of course, but this focus on the “bad people” who are “invading” “us” is a serious impediment to finding that will and doing real restorative work that can provide a reasonable living to the people who see little other option than to come here. And, as an added benefit, the same toolkit can just as easily be used to build wealth and resources and develop jobs in this nation as well as anywhere else. As I said, take a look at permaculture, for just one example of what is possible. All that is lacking is the political will and the relatively small amount of economic investment necessary to get the ball rolling. Focus on that, not on enemies manufactured by the media.
Obama was saying today there has been negative growth in wages for the past 15 years. How can wages grow when every year 2.5 million 3rd world immigrants, legal and illegal, are flooding into the country … at the same time the country is being de industrialize? Check out the speech Ted Kennedy made in 1965 when he sponsored the immigration bill that year. He states the demographic makeup of the US would not change and only about 6000 people per year would come into the US.
In a lead article recently in Mother Earth News the editor implored its readers to practice ‘negative population growth’. No doubt many readers of that magazine, college educated white middle class, have only one kid or no kids at all. The reality on the ground however, all along the southern border, where even now as I write this thousands of indian peasants are massing to cross the Rio Grand, makes those precious sensibilities seem a little ridiculous.
–BRH
For expressing my truth the Q-shticking has begun as Krugman threatened it would. Perhaps there will be a short video of a cue stick being shredded through a wood chipper on my web site soon. I’ll be looking for a used stick.
Take your medicine. The Q Stick is the much needed Rod of Correction. When did you awaken to the evil of immigration? Late, right? When it impacted you perhaps? Join the big selfish club.
When did I awaken that’s easy to answer.
The Population Bomb
A Book by David R. Brower and Paul R. Ehrlich
I read it in 1973.
All this talk reminds me of black holes. The average educated
person knows what they are, and scientists know they exist, but nobody really has any idea what it’s like inside of them. I imagine it’s like staring into Nietzsche’s abyss.
We will have to go through the keyhole to find out.
Your boy Shel. A great Jewish “American”.
http://topconservativenews.com/2014/04/billionaire-sheldon-adelson-opposes-immigration-in-israel-while-supporting-it-in-the-usa/
The problem with a “melting pot” country is that, while many foreign born citizens are hard working patriots who respect the country, a number of them eventually pay for their foreign born family to then immigrate. These newcomers often do not work for their passage, and thus do not always have the same work ethic or patriotic respects (they still feel loyal to their country of origin). Adding insult to injury is that they are often moving to the very country who attacked or destabilized their home. Animosity or a sense of entitlement can result.
They don’t work for their passage? How’d they get here, hitchhiking? You said their family brought them here and they feel entitled? Prove it.
They family members of immigrants who eventually immigrate don’t have a work ethic? Have you been to a restaurant in the last twenty years?
Animosity or a sense of entitlement in second generation immigrants, huh? Prove it. Find an entitled second generation immigrant who loathes America. Find one. Find one. Find one. Give me a name. Name one. I will apologize if you can name one.
You misunderstood. I am referring to first generation immigrants who are bringing over their immediate family, partners, or friends. Although, some being brought over can be quite young.
My immediate and/or extended family has members that comprise of African, European, Middle-Eastern, or Latino descent. I also live in a region of the USA which has the largest enclaves of all of the previously mentioned ethnic groups. It is very hard for me to prove this. It is just my own observation, and nothing more.
At this point, I am really not sure that these are problems that “impotent” governments can legislate away.
QUOTE: “The future cannot be legislated. All that can be done is to anticipate its most important movements and to clear the path for them. That is exactly what we try to do.” ~Peter Kropotkin
Same problem, prove to me that first generation immigrants’ immediate family/friends/etc. who come here are entitled/filled with animosity. An example.
Good Morning Sestants, You want names I have plenty, Try Olga Yevtushenko, I must have picked her fat A@@ up on the bone box fifty times. Came here as a religious refuge on your dime. Half a mouth full of teeth, heart problems. There’s no health care in the old country you know. She has free housing, free health care, dental care free, prescriptions free, free utilities, etc. etc. Never worked a day in this country and never paid a shiny dime in taxes. And she bitched every time I carried her fat ass down the stairs about why we took so long. She could speak rudimentary English but refused to and preferred to request a translator. Again on your dime. I also had a tenant with five kids. He worked 60 hours a week in a paper mill and saved enough money to move to Florida and buy a house. He said he never wanted to see cold weather again. His wife would go out a sweep the sidewalks in front of the property a couple of times a week. They come in all stripes so generalizations are not really fair.
The problem with a melting pot is it becomes a cauldron.
As to Mexico and Illegal immigrants, it is clear that a growing number of immigrants either feel the USA wronged them through its policies, wars, and economic system; or are crossing as a last resort for survival. The former will surely grow in the wake of global economic woes, peak resources, climate change, and our indifference in policies. The later will likely escalate too, maybe until we end up with a scenario eerily similar to the Gothic War (376-382) which precipitated the fall of Rome.
Hey Ruins I looked the Goth War; nice analogy and some good scholarship there, really quite appropriate. The Goths being refugees from violent Huns and moving into the empire, asking Rome for protection. Rome let them in but couldn’t feed them. Goths end up killing a Roman Emperor and defeating a Roman Army, and causing general havoc across the land, ending with Rome itself being overrun and sacked a few decades later.
Sounds like what’s happening here.
–BRH
Can you believe how many Plain Buttons we have here? Men without Countries, Men without Chests, Heartless, Mindless, Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with the slaves.
Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saint’s’ does a good job of describing the situation confronting the West, not just what’s happening on our own borders but of masses of sub saharan Africans and Muslims moving up into Europe, It’s really historic and unprecedented. Nobody knows how it will end up, but it probably won’t be good.
‘Camp of Saints’ has to be the most prescient novel of the 20th century.
I see some posters here show signs of white guilt and blame America for everything that has gone wrong, as if the collapse of the 3rd world is somehow our fault, and now its time for us to pay up. I don’t know about you but i’m proud of my Yankee ancestors. I don’t feel guilty about a goddam thing. How about you?
–BRH
You’re missing the point: the collapse of the 3rd world is somehow our fault. Its political and economical situation has been heavily affected by our colonialism and imperialism. Irag is an artificial country carved up by Britain out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of WW I. It jams three irreconciliable groups into one pressure cooker.
Iraq was invaded because the U.S. needs assured access to its oil. Nigeria is a mess because we demand its oil. The boundaries of most African nations bear no relation to their natural ethnic divisions; they exist because that’s how the West redistricted them for its benefit.
Iran had a democratically elected president in the ’30s, Mossadegh, until the CIA overthrew him because he wouldn’t give away his oil to the U.S. Look how that turned out.
Saudi Arabia is run by a tiny elite that we bribed to give away their petroleum.
And so on and so forth. Look, I’m not saying we should feel bad about stealing other nations’ resources for our comfort and benefit. Every era needs its Empire. Let’s just not kid ourselves about it.
That’s Iraq, not “Irag”.
BackRow, you don’t feel ashamed at all about, say, killing all the indigenous people who were here first? You think we shouldn’t regret that? Make an argument for that being ethically okay. Make one.
Here is an argument with stuff like facts and figures that the collapse of the Third World is indeed our fault and serves our purposes: http://www.gwu.edu/~soc/docs/Eglitis/Global_Poverty.pdf
Mine is not white guilt, it’s human guilt.
“Camp of the Saints”- spot-on when it comes to describing what’s happening to the west. Ironically I came across it in an article decrying its “racist” viewpoint.
Should be required reading for open-border aficionados and all those who refuse to see the downside of “diversity”.
Yes and apparently he was actually inspired in the spiritual sense. He went down to the beach one morning and he had a vison: they were “there” in his mind’s eye, but in a very vivid way, almost to the level of appearing physical. Thus he is a Prophet. We should have heeded his warning as Nineveh heeded Jonah.
You think immigrants feel “the USA wronged them”? Prove it. Find one, just one, online comment from an immigrant claiming they came here because the USA wronged them. Half of immigrants (you said either/or) came here because we fucked them?
I’m not even asking you to ask an immigrant, just search online for five minutes. Find one comment backing up your claim.
First, you will find none. I guarantee it, unless you consider La Raza some kind of revolutionary movement (cough cough, Alex Jones, cough). You’ll find some racists, sure, but then you’d have to prove that half (again, you said either/or) of immigrants are racists. Get to work.
Second, why would they come here if we wronged them?
I’ll concede if you find a comment, otherwise this is conjecture and non sequitur.
I do not think all immigrants feel that way. I do think a small, yet growing, number of them do. Some might be justified. Others might find us a convenient scapegoat, and jump on the bandwagon.
The Mexicans have been taught that we are the enemy and have stolen their land. Google Reconquista and you will realize how crazy your comment is. Off the richter scale.
I don’t say they don’t have some real grievances. I’m just responding to your completely erroneous assumption.
I’ve heard of them and googled them again. Are they of significant numbers to reflect a majority immigrant belief system? I seriously doubt that. Is the KKK considered an accurate representation of the white majority belief system?
Most Whites agreed with segregation and White superiority before it was beaten out of them. The KKK were merely the hard core and the activists. Likewise, the Mexicans will take as much of North America as we are weak enough to give them. Why wouldn’t they? MECHA and La Raza are just the hard core activists.
I agree with Ruins – Mexican immigrants are swarming into the US as a direct result of NAFTA which began the hollowing out of US manufacturing by first moving it to Mexico before sending it overseas.
Then the existing non-industrial small agriculture of small farmers was wiped out by huge exports of fossil fuel Federally subsidized industrial production of corn and other foods which undercut Mexican prices. This drove peasants and small farmers off the land – first into the maquiladora factories providing cheap labor for multinational Corporations but then even those jobs declined as those factories were moved overseas primarily to China. The irony is that these small peasant farms were NOT using huge tractors, machinery or fossil fuel supported agriculture. If you want to stop these desperate hordes from pouring over the border then we need to stop the hundreds of billions in subsidized fossil fuel corn and other exports. This is a key part of dealing with Peak Oil with justice.
Secondly, as others have pointed out these immigrants are far from lazy – they are doing some of the jobs “Americans” consider beneath them like non-mechanized parts of agricultural labor, roofing, and most ironic taking Green transit trains, buses or walking to work on the hugely inefficient “landscaping” companies.
Huge numbers of these workers board my train every day to travel from Hispanic enclaves like Dover, NJ or Morristown to work in the
upper middle class towns like Chatham or Summit where they drive and work on the incredibly wasteful and planet destroying trucks pulling trailers of industrial level riding lawn mowers etc to mow lawns which used to be mowed by neighborhood high schools kids with either small gas mowers or better yet manual push mowers.
How long this industry will survive rising Peak oil prices is a very good question. I would add it to Kunstler’s list of airlines and autos as a doomed economic segment.
Thirdly, given their desperation, it will be almost impossible to stop these climate change, offshored refugees who will risk death to try to find a better life in the colossus of the North. The only thing which dented US immigration rates was the 2008 crash. In the future we can expect more and more climate refugees who will take small boats, risk desert crossings or do anything as a matter of survival.
I don’t think anybody is seriously questioning the work ethic of the hispanic immigrants here. I think the problem is that the majority of the hispanics who are fleeing their problems in Central America don’t fully understand the issues facing the US, like the astronomical trillions of dollars we owe other countries or the severe water shortages facing the Southwest states right now. Jim Kunstler mentioned the overpopulation issue and the only long term and humane way to approach that issue is for people to postpone sex until later in life or to use condoms and birth control. Unfortunately, I see too many poor hispanics trying to support five children on low paying landscaping and restaurant jobs, and no matter how hard one works in those jobs the wages are still going to be in the $8 to $12 per hour range.
“too many children”
jhk mentions manipulation through our collective humanity and desire for peace. most immigrants from the south are highly superstitious catholics who follow that “human kingdom” decreeing birth control as a sin. what a lie about god. what kind of god wants people to have children they can not support? men will not live past 45 working that hard! and they do not live as long as 86.
that could be a blessing for our ss retirement system. on the other hand, they promote a lifestyle that can not be sustained. mexicans operate machinery very well and like to use machines often. the reason they choose handpicking jobs is because they are easier to get and the owners pay cash under table; owners are just as desperate as spics. where do you think all the workers went during the construction bust? back south or started a landscaping business. they are getting the best of both worlds.
no, i do not feel sorry for any of them.
Most US citizens do not understand the issues facing us and overpopulation’s role in it! While a majority of Americans finally admit to global warming and Climate Change, Peak Oil and Peak everything are probably only known by 10-15% of US citizens as the Corporate media spins out the tall tales about “natural gas for 100 years” the shale oil bonanza allowing export etc etc.
Historically the biggest way to control population besides birth control and abortion rights is the demographic transition – increasing education and basic income along with social security so people do not feel they need offspring to support them in their old age. None of these were helped by NAFTA economically squeezing farms off their land into factories and then no work even in those.
My question for years has been – how is that borders are “free” for goods but not people? It illustrates directly the Capitalist and Propertarian ethic that material goods are worth more than human beings.
As I work in IT there is another major category of immigration for H1B “professional” visas – basically this was a way to undercut US skilled IT and professional labor by importing hordes of Indians and other workers. Just as undocumented farm labor and other labor is a way to get cheap labor…
As a manager of some of these Indian IT workers I know most are afraid to speak out and are exploited by the job shops which oftentimes take 2/3rds of their pay basically for nothing more than just issuing a pay check with no health care, vacations or other benefits.
I have sympathy for all human beings everywhere – the problems of Peak Oil and Climate Change will strike us all although of course the 1% will be more protected but even they will die in fierce storms and weird events…
We need GLOBAL solutions for all humanity not just any one country. The US will be unable to keep out climate refugees in the future…
I wonder how many Ukrainians are already getting their tickets to the USA?
“Historically the biggest way to control population besides birth control and abortion rights is the demographic transition – increasing education and basic income along with social security so people do not feel they need offspring to support them in their old age. None of these were helped by NAFTA economically squeezing farms off their land into factories and then no work even in those.
My question for years has been – how is that borders are “free” for goods but not people?”
Education and basic income ARE essential to get people out of poverty and away from feeling pressured to have a large number of children to support themselves in old age. One of the problems with allowing such a large number of refugees into our country is that in the absence of economic growth, we end up concentrating a large number of poor people into a few areas. We tried that with the public housing projects several decades ago and large number of young blacks ended up joining gangs instead of finishing school and getting a job. Needless to say, a lot of the old blacks who were depending on their sons to support them ended up disappointed.
This time around, this kind of failure is going to happen all around Suburbia and when housing prices really fall, there will be a lot of unemployed landscapers and handymen.
people vs goods
i see the disproportionate reproduction rates of citizens and migrants as a way of milking the system. you see a woman/man with a bag over their shoulder and you send them back, you see them with a minor and they are welcomed with open arms. amtrak must yield to cargo trains if the corporations pay the fees. so, in a way, people are pimped out. people are used to justify getting monetary support at all levels.
then there is the actual human trafficking…how desperate do these people have to be? south america is not poor. they collect tons of taxes. venezuela has an awesome social program. nafta made sure they would not have to come here in order to experience mcdonalds and walmart.
Unless your are a native American, we are all occupying territory acquired through bloodletting and deception. Andrew Jackson campaigned on “Indian Removal.” The Mexican-American war and the Texas war of “independence” ceded everything from east Texas to Santa Monica.
Most Mexicans are, at least in part, native Americans. Mexican president Benito Juarez was a full-blooded American Indian..I think of it as akin to the red man taking America back.
I live in Houston where the Hispanic population is approaching 40%. It is easy to turn JK’s essay on its head and state that the Mexicans are simply taking back what was stolen from them.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The only reason the US is overpopulated is due to its high-energy consumption lifestyle. Quoting from Hendrik van Loon’s 1927 “America,” if people want to get out of (or into) a country they will get out (or in).
Wow, a second page of comments in 11 hours. I haven’t seen that since August of last year. Looks like our host has hit a hot button with this week’s topic. All the rest of you can continue on about immigration; you don’t need my help. Instead, I’ll follow up on a couple of topics I didn’t get to in earlier entries here this month.
In “Coasting Toward Zero,” our host stated that “We surely don’t know what to do about relations between men and women.” That was the week after an unstable person under the influence of the Men’s Rights Movement killed a bunch of his fellow students at UC Santa Barbara. I first encountered the Men’s Rights Movement online, and I thought they were a sick joke, so I played one on them. At the end of my experience, I concluded they were disturbed enough and organized enough to be almost dangerous, like the Sovereign Citizens Movement. After the past year, I’ve decided both have graduated to becoming minor yet real threats.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2014/06/recycled-comments-about-mens-rights.html
In “Heads, You Lose,” our host discussed ISIS. That same week, another blogger compared the outfits of the ISIS fighters to Jedi. She had earlier written that if the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had worn Jedi outfits, we’d have been taken more seriously. So, she had an attack of “I told you so.” My reaction was that ISIS wasn’t the Jedi. They were the Sith. They may be strong in The Force, but they serve The Dark Side. All they need are red-bladed light sabers.
http://crazyeddiethemotie.blogspot.com/2014/06/isis-looks-like-sith-not-jedi.html
So you are against equality for men? Think that women should continue to have more rights than men in court, both domestic and divorce? That men should continue to be mocked in popular culture and discriminated against in hiring, both in the public and private sectors? Shame on you.
Speaking of the need for equality, look no further than the disgusting custom of baby boys being cut (circumcised) for no good medical reason. Girls are protected against any genital cutting whatsoever, yet approximately 50% of boys are circumcised in the US. Most advanced countries gave up this practice years ago. Why is the US so backward?
Impaler, did you even bother to click on the link? If you had, I you’d find I was actually hiding a favor for the MRA people online inside the trick I was playing. I was proposing giving them a safe space to discuss their ideas. They didn’t want it. Instead, they’d rather be in an environment where they could be as big a bunch of jerks as they wanted despite the risk of ridicule and attack. In the process, they exposed themselves as a bunch of organized loonies. That’s what I didn’t like about them, not any of the positions you listed. Next time, attack what I actually write, not some strawman you construct.
Call ’em what they are…..undocumented democrats. As to the little ones…..nits become lice.
“Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
—- Col. John Milton Chivington[15][16]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre
What about the Whites who were killed and tortured? The Women raped? You’ve chosen to identify with an alien race instead of your own people. You don’t belong amongst us.
Wanna throw around nasty little phrases like “nits make lice”? People deserve then to know the origin of such a phrase. Draw your own conclusions.
You are wrong about me. I hold my people to a higher standard because I think that at least some of us are capable of meeting it. I refrain from chastising out-groups because I have no comparable influence over their membership, and I have no experience at all of their particular trials.
You would have us continue the same tired pattern of us against them tribal warfare that keeps the world locked in perpetual combat. You would operate all of society on the iron rule. I believe in the golden rule. You preach a discredited racialist ideology that not too long ago washed half the globe in blood. Let us never do that again. The coming crisis is going to be difficult enough as it is.
May we reach out to those who are hurting however we can, and may cooler heads prevail wherever possible.
Well said!
Good point,. No Non-White ever dreamed of multi-culturalism, environmentalism, or going to the stars. Why would we expect them to care now that we’re on the ropes? Only Whites can fulfill White dreams. Logically, you should be a White Nationalist. Just drop the multi-culturalism – that’s a bad dream.
Fuck you.
Speaking of “Hard Choices”, I highly recommend Matt Taibbi’s new book “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”.
It graphically contrasts the disparate treatment of Wall Street investment banks and investment bankers that have been given a Get Out of Jail Free Card by Obama and the Clintonistas, paricularly US Attorney General Eric Holder, on the one hand, and the strike hard knock heads policing routinely endured by poor people in large US cities who are just trying to make a living, on the other hand.
Believe it or not, it’s quite common now for police in US cities to round people up for such offences as Obstructing Traffic, Smoking in Public, Drinking in Public, Urinating in Public, or simply “Matching the Profile”. It seems that a common policing strategy in the US is to just round up people for very minor offences, search them to see if they’ve got drugs or weapons and then charge ’em and pressure them to plead guilty even if they’re innocent. Meanwhile, the bankers get off “Scott Free”. This is the “Hard Choice”. Sick…..
That’s Louisiana law.
Jim, out of everything under the sun to rant about…you pick immigration right now and come down on the world’s losers? Why oh why do you think they are coming here, James? Grinding poverty. Why oh why are there so many of them to begin with, James? Grinding poverty (bigger families just so they have more future support, you act like they’re senseless breeding machines, it’s a survival strategy and you know this).
And what causes this poverty, James? Inequality. That’s it. Their nation (I’m speaking of Mexico cuz brother, you sure hate Mexico) is a failed state. Why oh why? Inequality. Resource inequality. State and global resource inequality. These people are fucked because of the West and you kick the poorest of the poor? Why?
You’ve got some kind of immigration trigger. You always come back to this. Is this even in the top twenty major crises of this week? I know the border is on fire, but does that even rank right now?
What will you tell the immigrants of tomorrow fleeing their sunken homelands? You do realize we will be among them, right?
You think these people have some kind of vision of a promised land? They’re dying.
Oh, but the dying must assimilate. You seriously are demanding that the world’s fucked have to act more Merican while they’re drowning? You sound like my grandfather. What, precisely, will they be assimilating to? The culture you already hate? Why should they do that?
There is no way to stop this flood. Yes, it’s dysfunctional and disorderly. What do you think an emergency looks like? And you’re still comparing this to “the offloading of surplus Europeans”? What are you talking about? The modern immigrant is leaving a burning building, not looking for new territory.
Backwards, buddy. You’re thinking is backwards. Oh! the Mexican hordes! You sound like Alex Jones.
Disgusting.
“The modern immigrant is leaving a burning building, not looking for new territory.”-sestants.
Nice line. Effective.
I think that most of the disconnect (including the reflexively racist ranting) is an attempt to put distance between what has already happened to these refugees, what it means, and what is going to happen.
There’s a lot of wishful thinking going on here.
To be completely objective is to be insane. A Human Being has to have a side. You are with the invaders so you have picked a side. The Mexicans strictly enforce their borders btw. All real countries do. As a Liberal, you have no idea how the real world works. But you will little brother, you will.
Janos:
Yes, yes, I have no idea how the real world works, I do not understand the underlying, systemic inequality at the root of our society. I’m a dreamy Liberal who doesn’t understand what power means, that life is an zero sum game being handily won by the ruthless. I don’t understand and have never experienced the politics of your world.
Oh wait, yes I do and have, both in theory and in personal, non-objective, totally subjective experience. I understand it. I hate it. As a sentient being, I don’t fucking like it. As a sentient being, I have the consciousness to understand that this is the way the world works and that it sucks.
So, yeah, I’ll take sides. I’ll side against privilege.
Janos,
I have clearly stated that I’m not in favor of a loose immigration policy. I am on the side of What Works, but you wouldn’t know what that is because you lack the hands-on experience as well as the relevant data.
This ill-informed jaw-jacking of yours accomplishes squat except to isolate you, which is not something that you want if you clearly appreciate what is coming.
Grow the up, little man.
Thanks, Mister. That disconnect is what’s important.
sestants – Will you open borders people be happy when the US reaches 500 million lost souls? How about a billion? At a certain point, the US itself will be a third world country (in many places it already is). Whites will no longer be a majority by 2050. Does that make you happy? To paraphrase Pat Buchanan – a country that cannot control is own borders is no longer a country.
what in the hell happened to this site’s management. they tell me to log on, then send me a password, no one could remember, then the comments only go to about ten, when it says there are 165, o yes, and it would not let me log in because of too many bad tries, even though the password was supplied in the space by the management.
What the hell?
Great IT company, did they work on healthcare before?
Sincerely, rexl
How to read the older posts? When I click on “Older Comments” the page scrolls back to the top of the same page. Cay you help, please?
Just right click on the older posts and then click on open. I responded to your insanity. I don’t hate Indians (not Native Americans, we’re the Native Americans). We needed to conquer them and we did. I go to Pow Wows sometimes. The Pure Bloods are sometimes very beautiful and yes, as a People they have captured our imaginations in a deep way. Even in Europe. But we can never be part of them. They don’t want us – why would they? Instead we should realize that our attraction stems from longing for what they have that we have lost: their own tribes and culture. We need tribes of our own. We lost that during the formation of the Nation State and later Industrialism.
This is the real answer, the noble answer. Being a White groupie to them is the height of ignobility. You’ll be merely tolerated at best. And of course the diehards will hate you and want you gone. And you’ll have no defense against that since they are right in a deep way.
Kunstler hits the nail(s) on the head(s). The one I keep referring to is the one about the immigration waves during ~1880-1920, within which three of my grandparents arrived from Greece. They had to pass health and economic tests. The grandfather I remember was happy to be an American, while still being solidly within a Greek immigrant culture, anchored by the Greek Orthodox Church (which is still going strong in San Francisco). Greek-Americans had no welfare programs. Despite the rigors of surviving The Great Depression, the first generation born here were educated, spoke unaccented English at a high level, and became thoroughly integrated into general society: registered nurse/research assistant, teacher, master printer/typographer, sheet metal worker at the Naval Shipyard (Uncle Harry), etc.
The USA is still some kind of ‘shining city on the hill’, else the millions would not still be trying to enter. By allowing all to enter, without examination or qualification, eventually renders the hill unhealthy and uninhabitable.
Ron Pavellas
The USA is still a “shining city on the hill”? How. How? Make an argument. Make. An. Argument.
Like I said in my comment: millions of people still want to get to the USA, however they may view it metaphorically.
Way back to Page 1:
http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/hard-choices/comment-page-1/#comment-171281
Cut ‘n’ Paste.
Ozone did this for me…
Pay it forward.
Cheers!
Yep. Works, just tried it.
First page from Peter “load ’em up in C130’s” to Janos “Qshticking, etc”.
Give it a whirl 😉
This is probably something that you don’t want arriving with your immigrants:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-23/mapping-africas-totally-out-control-ebola-epidemic
😉
Not to mention polio, measles, SARS, MERS- and incurable TB.
Meanwhile In Ukraine, the ‘Long Emergency’ just got a lot shorter:
http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/shrinkage-kiev-doubles-the-price-of-cold-water-shuts-off-hot-water-14612/
Are you “Ready for Hillary”?
https://www.readyforhillary.com/splash/bus
This is a rather strange campaign slogan. Typically, one prepares or “gets ready” for disasters such as war, tornadoes, blizzards, global warming, floods, peak oil, etc. One ordinarily doesn’t prepare or “get ready” for good fortune, like winning the lottery, finding a $10 bill on the side walk, etc.
Are you “Ready for Hillary”?
Are you ready to be told ‘not interested’?
😉
And for you strong-male, macho types out there, there’s the Ready-for-Hillary Lucky Doggy Bowl for thirty bucks.
https://www.readyforhillary.com/store/items/lucky-dog-bowl
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the oil refinery at Baiji, the country’s largest, has fallen to ISIS.
Not much about it in the media tho (nor about Ukraine). John Kerry is in country, but “Seeing an LGBT Ambassador before I leave office”, and Global Warming, seem to be his main concerns. Don’t expect any positive results from his visit there, which seems to be mostly for show.
The big news here is 2 Puerto Ricans, one armed with a knife, another with a gun, knocked off an all night convenience store in Willimantic (aka Heroin Town), escaping with a tip jar full of change, and greatly upsetting Mohammed, the proprieter. Police are following all leads.
Such is life in Connecticut, formerly known as the land of steady habits, in the year 2014.
–BRH
TISA—-TINA (There are no alternatives
Here’s something we should all be aware of.
We have various trade deals in the works internationally. We’ve heard of TPP, TIPP and now in case you haven’t heard of it there’s also TISA!
[Public Services International (PSI), a global trade union federating public service workers in 150 countries, has reported that TISA threatens to allow multinational corporations to permanently privatize vital public services such as healthcare and transportation in countries across the world.]
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24486-wikileaks-tisa-global-trade-deal-kept-more-secret-than-the-trans-pacific-partnership#.U6ebUylrz7s.facebook
How do you lefty dummies think cultures fail? Simple. Cultures in decline allow themselves to be overrun by foreign filth for short term gain. The commie Ds get 15 million new voters giving them a permanent super majority……the terminally stupid Rs get cheap docile unskilled labor which suppresses general wages. And what about the shock troops……the MS-13 criminals with the face tats? Good luck converting them into pleasant little social democrats. But what do you lefty freeloaders care….as long as you get your free medicinal and steady disability checks for the bad lower back……
Yes, the Democrats played the long game here. The Republicans went for profit and will lose power. But the profits will continue so the real power brokers and their clients are satisfied. The ordinary Republican who believed these higher ups is a complete sucker.
Janos: Prove it. Prove that the immigration crisis was part of the Democratic political strategy. Prove your assertion that it was a conscious, deliberate policy of the Democratic party to get votes.
Well I’m sure you have problem believing that Republicans just wanted them for cheap labor? So why believe the Democrats are 100% pure and free from self interest? You think Hillary or Obama are like that?
I grant you that there are many true believers out there at the low and middle levels just as there are on this board. They make the deception possible. I mean this kind of immigration is utterly destructive yet they are hell bent on it – in violation of their vows to serve America and protect us from invasion. The starry eyed idealists don’t make it that high. And since it is so bad for America, what other motivation could they have? And now even the Republicans want their votes since they realize how close they are to losing all influence. But too late: the Democrats have these people in the bag. And of course the Democrats don’t mind the cheap labor either.
Prove it. Prove that “cultures” fall BECAUSE they “allow” themselves to be overrun by filth. That assertion cannot be proven. I will give you a hundred years to prove it. What are you talking about, the Barbarians? People fought the Barbarians. Prove your assertion. Prove. It.
The Chinese fought the Barbarians and won (Huns). Later they fought and lost to the Mongols and Manchus.
Rome lost to the Germans after weakening themselves thru decadence. Germans tried and failed against a strong Roman Empire.
America may fall to the Southern Barbarians without a shot being fired – but I doubt it. We’ll fight at some point but first we have to regroup as a Race and focus on certain areas. Obviously the Southwest is largely lost already.
Whenever a politician (or anyone else, for that matter) talks about making ‘hard choices’ it invariably means they are deciding to do something that will help or protect themselves/their friends/their class at the expense of everyone else.
Tight immigration controls coupled with extremely loose controls on capital is a recipe for exactly the radical (and rapidly increasing) inequality and concentration of wealth and power occurring now. When labor cannot freely move, but capital can, the labor/capital market fails. Currently we have the state controlling global labor to the advantage of global private capital sucking all of the remaining wealth of the system to the elite. As the recent NASA funded study concluded, this won’t end well for anyone.
Either labor is allowed to move across borders as freely as capital, or both should be equally restricted.
Sounds good but doesn’t make real sense. If labor can’t move across borders, then the Corporations have to listen to the people who are already here – and unions can have real power. That’s why Chavez was utterly against the illegals. How could his union have any power if he was always being undercut by illegals?
For the record, I’m utterly against free trade for the same reason Marx was for it: it undermines nations. The Tariff is the instrument of nation building par excellence.
No, the corporations don’t have to listen to the people already there- they essentially can freely move their capital (factories, etc., etc.) to anywhere the labor is cheaper, while labor is stuck within national borders. That was the point.
Here Here! I totally agree that it is ONLY in the interests of the plutocrats to allow goods to move freely while real human beings can not! This is the sort of “freedom” supported whether they realize it or not by Propertarians who claim to be “Libertarian”. How does it increase liberty or freedom when 42% of the world’s wealth is roped off by plutocrats, when public beaches are fenced off by private property, when plutocrats claim whole islands as their private domain with nobody else free to enter?
As Woody Guthrie so aptly put in these verses from “This Land is My Land”:
“As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on that sign it said “No Trespassing”
But the other side of that sign said Nothing
That side was made for you and me!”
Validation to place in the ‘Geography of Nowhere’ file:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2014/06/22/seph_lawless_photographs_abandoned_malls_in_his_book_black_friday.html
More validation from an unexpected quadrant:
http://watchfullepisode.com/anthony-bourdain-parts-unknown-season-2-episode-8-detroit/
(Can be streamed on Netflix…. if they’ve paid the extortionists, a.k.a. service providers, the required vig. I don’t think watchfullepisode has ponied up, as there are a lot of stoppages. Peek around.)
i love that show.
“The New York Times, like just about every other institution in the progressive orbit, has surrendered its collective brain to a morass of feelings ..”
The collective media brain knows where its money comes from and that is ever more simple growth. Media corporations are largely restricted to their immediate geographical area. Their size is dependent on the size of the local market.
How many copies of the Toronto Star sell in NYC or Helsinki?
Immigration boosts the size of the local market. It also boosts the most profitable segments of advertizing – new home sales, car sales, consumer goods sales and finance. Take a look at any newspaper and you’ll see their revenue stream weighting.
Mass immigration is their cash cow, not per capita incomes, equality, low unemployment or lower carbon emissions.
The “morass of feelings” works as a business model. It is very smart. It just doesn’t share a vision of what makes a nation work.
Cheers,
John Meyer
“The “morass of feelings” works as a business model. It is very smart. It just doesn’t share a vision of what makes a nation work.”-JM.
Only the truth… Cheers!
Can’t get over how many of the posts here on this topic seem implicit with belief that if the “West” (white folks) indulge a self-destructive act of penance then somehow the clock would be set back to when the human population was, say, around that of the 19th Century. Look, do the math, there’s no way today’s global population can be accommodated, even if all could be socially/culturally engineered to accept minimum caloric intake through a straw, and otherwise satisfy with life more that of chickens crowded together as in industrial poultry production.
Forget about parsing blame – game over. There are too many of us globally, so survival will be very spotty if at all, but only in those few remaining areas not yet so overpopulated as to have crushed out sustainability at a level that makes the effort seem worthwhile.
Does the US retain prospect of being one of those “spotty” locals of survival? Not with the defaulted immigration policies of today which are rapidly eroding that prospect. Our only chance here in the US is to give up this “celebrating diversity” BS, accept instead that there are real, contentious and consequential differences between cultures – most particularly those that can accommodate a 21st scientific view of reality as opposed to those yet living life based upon 9th century tribal lore. Society requires enough homogeneity to maintain civil law.
Bravo, well said. The unexamined life is not only not worth living, it will not go on living.
As many have said, Political Correctness is a bastardized offspring of Marxism and Puritanism. Cotton Mather’s revenge perhaps for abandoning Puritanism?
The Brown and Indian lovers are out in force. Perhaps they’ve failed to notice that these people hate the Blacks? Thus the precious little fools are betraying their own pc vision. They are choosing one side against another. But Heaven forbid they choose their own people. Whom the gods wish to kill they first drive mad.
“Look, do the math, there’s no way today’s global population can be accommodated”-Cavepainter.
I agree. That’s why there’s a concept of ‘die-back’ popping up in reference to JHK, constantly.
“Forget about parsing blame – game over. There are too many of us globally, so survival will be very spotty if at all, but only in those few remaining areas not yet so overpopulated as to have crushed out sustainability at a level that makes the effort seem worthwhile.”-Cave.
Well said. Couldn’t agree more. Getting comfy somewhere and subsequently overrun is a high-probability risk.
“most particularly those that can accommodate a 21st scientific view of reality as opposed to those yet living life based upon 9th century tribal lore. Society requires enough homogeneity to maintain civil law.”-Cave.
And I agree. But… that would deal-out a lot of folks commonly considered ‘Western’ culturally, wouldn’t it?
[chuckle]
😉
Cheers!
they could be accommodated if they did not all congregate in a few cities and the govt. did not go to war.
I love the way many CFNers politicize every topic brought up here. You are wearing blinders. The issue is overpopulation. How, who or why our country is being overrun by immigrants is secondary to finding solutions to the issue, or determining there is no solution, and then deciding how to go forward.
Another shining example of the results of our public education: lack of knowledge of how to think critically.
Yes, systems thinking. When something goes wrong on a space craft, you look into all the w’s: who, what, where, why, when – Kipling’s five honest serving men. Sure you want to fix the technical problem, but you also want to know who screwed up so you can educate, discipline and/or terminate them.
In terms of solving the problem, understanding the why is essential. If you don’t know why it happened, how are you going to make sure it doesn’t happen again or keep happening? Once the why is understood, the how to fix it may be obvious.
Bill, you’re better than this. Read Bimelow’s “Alien Nation”. He’s been fighting the immigration lobby for decades now. He describes his typical casual contempt for Whites who talked about the Jews opening the borders – and his stupefied amazement when his research revealed that we were right. He didn’t become a White Nationalist btw. He holds the Vdare.com position of valuing high IQ people no matter what their background.
Even as we speak, the Right is analyzing the children’s crusade. The evidence is massive: the Regime began to contract with bus companies almost half a year ago. Another massive scandal is shaping up.
As far as this generational immigrant thing goes let me say this. My Nonno came over from Northern Italy, the Alps. Obviously it was easier to find a job then , circa 1920 after the” War to End All Wars”. He made it a point to learn our language,English, although with a strong accent. Worked 60 hours a week in a stone quarry, and raised 5 kids of which my Mom was one, also an immigrant. All screened at Ellis Island. I am only second generation. I have never received squat from the feds except maybe an education, roads, cops, and fire protection. My Dad spent time in Japan and Korea between 1945 and 1952 and I feel I paid for this crap with my literally 40% percent tax rate (if you add it all up). I don’t really make any money until July. I’m retired and I still do maybe 10 hours a day. We give too much stuff away in this country just to buy votes.
You must love Dean Martin’s “When the Moon hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, it’s amore.
Seriously I have nothing against Italians. The Jews blamed the Mob on them even though they had been involved up to their eye balls. But since they controlled Hollywood, they could make it stick. The Godfather was an exception and showed the Jewish role.
The Italians are more White than the Greeks. In the North, they are very White, much like Northern Europe. The Greeks were occupied for centuries and have absorbed a lot of Turkish genes unfortunately. Sicily probably has a lot of Arab genes since they were occupied for awhile as well. Even the Maffia started out as something good – a way for the local people to resist evil government.
You are right about the Jews and the mob. The Jewish mobsters were about as violent as the Italian. Meyer Lansky and Charlie Luciano were friends from childhood. Luciano actually respected the Jewish mobsters. The only reason Lansky wasn’t a member of La Cosa Nostra, which he helped found, was because it was Italian-only.
Not something I’m proud of as a Jew, but all of us aren’t effete snobs.
This is for BTBill;
I knew about Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and other Jewish mobsters 1900-1950 and how tough they were. They had some pretty good Tommy Gunners in their ranks too, real hard guys who took no sh-t. Also, did you ever hear of Murder Inc? I used to wonder if there were any men like that in Poland and Russia when the SS showed up and started murdering the Jewish population, men who would put up some resistance. There were a few, like the Bielsky Brothers in Ukraine. I found out the Russian NKVD had already done a number on them in the 30s (as the Russian pulled out of Kiev in July 1941, before the German advance, the NKVD shot 100,000 prisoners before they left) All other able bodied men had already been drafted into the Red Army.
–BRH
The migration of muslims into Europe may be unprecedented in a sense but don’t forget a couple things. The first is that Muslims have already ruled large swathes of Euope, that is, Spain and Italy and Sicily. And they also took a shot at France. The Muslim Turks ruled the Balkans for centuries also tried to conquer Austria.
Also remember that “muslims” have been around for only 1400 years. Migration from the middle east into Europe is nothing new and started long before there were Muslims ie in the neolithic agricultural revolution.
A lot of Europe bears the genetic imprint of this neolithic invasion. Hitler, for all his aversion to things Semitic, bore a form of the Y chromosome in common with a large percentage of Jewish men and which had its likely origins around 25 thousand years ago near the horn of Africa. And which is strongly associated with people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages of which Hebrew and Arabic are two.
Invasion from outside is an old thing. A long list: Huns, Mongols, Magyars etc… Also, the first sapiens inhabitants of Europe were likely brown skinned. This is according to DNA recovered from skeletal remains of pre-historic and pre-agricultural Europeans. De-pigmentation was likely a more recent thing which first occurred in Asia and moved into Europe later on at least in part with the first farmers migrating from the middle east and Asia Minor.
I’m not arguing that the modern day migration into Europe and/or the Americas is of no consequence or that it’s a benign thing. I’m just providing a bit of context. As far as subsaharan Africans go (and for all their alleged biological “other-ness”), they’ve had significant genetic inputs from Eurasians who migrated south during historic and pre-historic times.
Black Africans aren’t of “pure blood” any more than Europeans bearing white skin. Both contain substantial genetic imprint of others. The coast of Africa and the Nile provided conduits for people moving north AND south.
Whites were once widespread throughout Asia and the Middle East. Google the “Beauty of Loulan” to see the tall blondes and redheads who gave China so much before being destroyed by the “grateful” Chinese. Their DNA and material culture shows them to be related to the Celts.
The Persians were White as were some of the Pharaohs. Thus the ancient invasion may not have been as alien as you think. The current invasion of Europe is however. An unspeakable work of darkness by the evil powers of this world.
Excellent, excellent post, JHK! I don’t see how anyone could logically argue with a single point. And it’s interesting that many posters have signed on to to argue. But none of these posters, thus far, has used logic. I would like to hear from one of them (any one of these argumentative pro-immigrationists) about why their pro-population growth arguments are worthwhile or sustainable for the United States. (Arguments that economic growth is always good are inherently illogical – on a website of this nature.)
On a different matter, James Howard Kunstler, are you aware that the link to “older comments” does not work? In my opinion, which I have advanced several times and once to you personally by email, the best fix to this problem would be to elimination “pagination” of comments altogether – and let them all post to one single page.
Easy and quick – please have your tech guy try it. And please, anyone who writes to JHK, suggest the same thing. Easy and quick and probably free!
OK – here’s my favorite passage for the week:
“Currently, progressive America is pretending that the conditions of the 19th century still prevail here — boundless material resources and land for the taking — and that we can happily accommodate the overflow from our equally overpopulated neighbors, Mexico and the countries of Central America, any way they can manage to get here. The sentimental approach as represented by The New York Times, is exactly what will prevent the kind of hard choices that national leadership is faced with. Both established political parties could founder on this issue.” – jhk –
Both parties need to founder, that’s becoming the only hope – and it’s becoming a slim hope, at best.
Meanwhile – for the huge percentage of commenters who want to get some of this incoming immigration stopped or slowed – here is a well-vetted organization dedicated to that. Great website, good discussion boards, rated tops among National non-profits.
http://www.numbersusa.com
“I’m not arguing that the modern day migration into Europe and/or the Americas is of no consequence or that it’s a benign thing. I’m just providing a bit of context.” – volodya –
Yah – it’s really too bad that “race” gets mixed up in this discussion. The loss of culture and local (native-born?) community is not a good thing either – certainly NOT at the scales at which it is happening today.
And v – you are equating slow movements of populations at the speeds of small human groups on foot – with today’s jet airplane migrations of large numbers of humans directly INTO intact communities.
And remember that slow human immigrations were mostly resisted (sometimes economically, sometimes socially, and often violently) by the human groups that already occupied the migrants new areas.
I think you’re comparing oceans and oranges.
You write “race” as if race were unreal or at least of no importance. But you probably worry about the snail darter and yellow belly sap sucker – as your own race marches towards extinction.
The enemy is still inside of you. Expunge him. But you can’t until you know yourself and you can’t know yourself until you have a self. Right now you are part Prog and part Programming. Choose to be real. As Gudjieff said, “Life is only real then, when I am.” Choose Life. And Life means being part of a greater wholes, such as family, culture, nation, and race.
The Individual is a cell or “Holon” – an imaginary conceptual particle which is simultaneously a complete whole and a part of a larger order. You yourself are composed of holons just as you are a Holon in a larger structure. The introduction of minority holons weakens our structure – giving it feet of clay that will crumble beneath the weight of this huge and complex society. And who can exist without feet? When the feet crumble, we shall topple. Watch out below…
Several commenters (Mr. Darling, you’re the one that sticks out in my mind) have argued that stopping illegal immigration is “kicking the cat.”
So I’ll ask your alternative. Changing immigration law to fine employers of illegals a punitive enough $ amount to MAKE them STOP would also stop illegal immigration. But it would leave the “cat” just as damaged, with the same broken ribs and bleeding liver.
I’d stay home and try to make things better in the land of my birth; if I were that “cat.”
—————————————————-
One more thing – for any of you immigration proponents. How large should the population of the US be allowed to grow?
Do you think 50 years is a long time, or somehing??? It is not.
“Several commenters (Mr. Darling, you’re the one that sticks out in my mind) have argued that stopping illegal immigration is “kicking the cat.””-progress4.
Actually, that can’t take credit for that phrase. I haven’t posted my review of this week’s post yet (it’s a 2-parter).
What I did agree with was a) we need to prioritize. Wall Street’s taking us down faster than a illegal migrants, and there are other issues higher on the hit-list and b) emphasizing this issue as a stand-alone issue is ITSELF an appeal to knee-jerk reactive, unclear thinking.
Again, I am not for a laissez-faire/’come-one-and-all’ immigration policy.
Cheers!
The “return to older comments ” function is not working.
Right click “Older Comments” then left click “open” in the drop down menu.
Thanks J.S.!
Here’s my (belated) World Cup predictions based upon what I witnessed last night:
1) If Mexico wins East LA will be burnt to the ground.
2) If Mexico loses all of LA will be burnt to the ground.
3) If somehow the USA and Mexico get into the finals and the USA wins and Mexico loses, all of California will burnt down from Eureka to Bakersfield.
That’s where I’m putting my money!
–BRH
So I logged in Monday PM, and read almost all the 80 posts made – and most seemed quite sane, logical, and coherent. Now I log in 1 day later, and there are literally 200 more messages.
Were they all as sane? Were they as logical (MEGA spam?!? I digress)?!…
All I see are posts from P2C and Vlad, mostly arguing with themselves. Apparently, the subject of immigration really *RUBS* them (the right/wrong way?).
All I see is an over-populated planet, and economic interests exponentially depleting every last resource (trees/minerals/oil/gas), and leaving nothing for “their” *EXTERNAL COSTS*, other than wastelands polluted – air/land/water.
PCR seems to come at this whole thing with an entirely different perspective – pre-emptive nuke strikes. I kinda wish he would explore the ecological/environmental impacts of society as a whole, given the current gasaholic conundrum – but he has a point as well.
So does our exponentially increasing population die off from starvation/disease, or nukes… It’s a good question.
All you see are Prog’s posts and mine? Do you have a problem with your eyes? What percentage of the posts do they come to? Kdog feared for your sanity. I fear for your mathematical ability.
All I see is an over-populated planet, and economic interests exponentially depleting every last resource (trees/minerals/oil/gas), and leaving nothing for “their” *EXTERNAL COSTS*, other than wastelands polluted – air/land/water.
Because caring for someone’s sanity is something you are incapable of.
You fear someone has mental health issues so you say “I fear for his mental health” right where he can see it – and on a public board no less. Sure Kdog, you’re all heart. Amazing. And then project the sin onto me. It’s the old Liberal two step.
This is what we call shadow work. I’m a reality therapist – and you are my patient.
OMFG, he has a point, K (I’ll give him 0.2% for this). Unfortunately, what Vlad doesn’t realize, is that K knows me fairly intimately (no, we’re not lovers, so don’t get your ghey hate on). I’d argue that there’s not a single human without mental health problems (if you count those with at least 100 IQ). Liberal 2-step – heh, nice one, diggin’ pretty deep for that… 6-fig-salaried-govt-stalka == shadow work?!…
All I see are posts from P2C and Vlad, mostly arguing with themselves.
.
.
Yes, Zrcrypdik, they are *masta’debaters*
There are issues much more important than which side of an artificially-created boundary a person lives.
Immigration law is civil, not criminal. Undocumented residents are not criminals; they are as “illegal” as someone with an unpaid parking ticket.
JHK and P2C and Janos are our RI’s. (Resident Impediments misusing the Web) distracting attention from real and serious global threats.
So does our exponentially increasing population die off from starvation/disease, or nukes… It’s a good question.
Maybe they die laughing reading your bizarre posts? Ozone, stop drinking so much. Try to be a bettah mahn.
May you find the 1,000’s of images of mutants, googling “techa river mutants.” I know what I saw, about 15 years ago, in ’98…
Armless/legless mutants, mutants with 3x sized heads, cyclops (yeah, where is that *IMAGE*)…
Yes, all white inbreds. Sorry to break your heart, Vlad. *THEY* (Ruskies) poured all the toxins from producing Plutonium into the river (techa), and covered up the 3 explosions (Chernobyl-sized)…
Paul Krugman said, You can’t have a welfare state and open borders. This is one of the few intelligent things he has ever said. So of course, you his knock off disagree with it
ZrCrypDik Said – Janos, you are a total sock, devoid of any emotion. Complete *HATER*/./
You gunna school me on lake techa (river) now?!… *PLZ*!!! I’d like to hear how much you know about that atrocity…
(FSK’N SOCK PUPPET) We’ve all had enough of your hate and vitriol. You really contribute about 0.05% of your 142 IQ… (WORK ON THAT)
You’re the one taking pleasure in it – because they were White. You condemn yourself by your own words.
So that’s you’re 0.05% of 142 IQ?!? *COME ON MAN*!!!
I know you can do better than that. I *totally* know that. Plz, don’t let me “down” ;)~
SRSLY. no reply about river techa (Russian Plutonium refinement)?!?
I know you’re not that *MINDLESS*.
Yes you can. We have it now.
Ah the Resident Impediment we haven’t heard that term for a year at least. Man you just busted yourself big-time.
Bad emphasis, this is better.
Ah the Resident Impediment we haven’t heard that term for a year at least. Man you just busted yourself big-time.
Don’t be down on yourself – Obvious 6-fig-salaried-govt-stalkah/troll (Snowden wannabe – hehe, *NOT*!).
Need I quote PCR? (Yes, I need to!):
“I experience this every time I write a column. Protests from those determined not to be unplugged arrive in emails and on those websites that expose their writers to slander by government trolls in comment sections. Don’t believe real reality, they insist, believe the false reality. ”
And Janos the drunkard (claiming I’m Ozone-drunk) is so clueless – rly? I’m Ozone? Kinda flattering, to say the least (his 0.05% of 142 IQ *gleaming*)…
Ouch!! So the long emergency has also taken your sanity and made you a psychopath devoid of empathy. I had thought you were of stronger stock than that.
If a human being is “an illegal” there isn’t much hope for us is there. Oh wait, maybe further extreme fractionation into nations run by fascists who control borders under scrutiny (your word) of uniformed (and tatooed James don’t forget that) gang members and blaming humans for being born or attempting to move on the surface of the planet when they don’t have that right will help us in this transition?
Do you really think so?
If you don’t defend freedom for all you are not defending freedom. Remember that when they come for you. For me, I see your smug feeling of having your National Dokumenten in order to be very similar to the smug feeling of being able to drive to wall mart.
What happened to caring about facades on buildings to please pedestrians or demonstrate that we care? Should we put those on the prisons we build for those who couldn’t afford immigration lawyers?
“made you a psychopath devoid of empathy. I had thought you were of stronger stock than that. ”
Who U reefer to – be succinct…
He’s referring to JHK but forgetabouit. He is just another mindless republican wanting his cheap labor or another mindless Democrat wanting their cheap labor. He is out to dilute your citizenship. The key point:
M-I-N-D-L-E-S-S
Probably has a lot of stock in the Corrections Corporation of America too.
I refer to one of my heroes, a great author JHK. I also refer to anybody else who believes we should sometimes ignore human rights.
Article 13 Declaration of Human Rights:
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
Just curious. Is it possible to have a comprehensive welfare state and open borders at the same time? Has it ever been tried in human history? There are probably about 4 billion people who would like to come here and get on state and federal assistance.
Have you ever found yourself in a foreign country without proper papers? Show up in Mexico without an ID or passport; tell them you want free tuition, food stamps, section 8 vouchers for a free place to live, pocket money, the right to vote in their local elections, citizenship, the right to bring in all your relatives who want the same thing. See how that goes Let us know how it works out.
–BRH
Also tell the local Mexican Police Commandante you’re a citizen of the world and don’t believe in any fascist borders; Papers? We don’t need no stinking papers. What’s more I’m not speaking Spanish talk to me in English, my language. Now where do I sign up for freebies?
Good luck!
–BRH
I meant free as in freedom, not free as in beer. The freedom to pay your own way or work or travel on your own means or visit you own parents is hardly a “handout”.
There are millions in this world who are unable to visit their own parents because people with no empathy like to call them illegals. Where do you stand on that issue?
Oh and some folks braver than I do travel without their nazi papers. Take a look at the great humanitarian work of Garry Davis for example.
Is anybody besides me wondering if Volodya is ok besides me or do you all think this is a big joke.
I’m seriously concerned. These fuckers get mean.
My own absence has been primarily because I’ve been sick.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/31/iraq.egypt.mubarak.reut/
people are not free to destroy infrastructures designed to make our lives on this planet orderly and peaceful. no one is stopping the flow of legitimate activities. the people who determine what is or is not legitimate activity should be locals. there is so much internecine conflict all over the globe that law is being abandoned. that is not true liberty. people need a consensus and focus on what they have in common, what the world courts have defined as being human. we have a lot in common with south americans and the middle east has tons in common. westernizing them is wrong, like britain was wrong in 1700s. however, we still have taxes and international trade. the genie was let out when the usa ceased being isolationist and acquired a standing army.
Global Neoliberalism at work:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/06/obama-latest-betrayal-tisa.html
When you are finished hacking page links can you please make sure they work normally! It’s only common courtesy like carrying out your trash when hiking a public trail.
‘Older Comments’ link works fine but if you go there then you can’t get back. Best to open the ‘Older Comments’ link in a new tab.
This is just plain sloppy.
Really to anybody who knows anything about software this is a dead give-away. Do you really want that?
Not every Progressive welcomes illegals. I, for one, think that illegal aliens should all be deported (though I do feel sorry for people who were brought here as small children and now America is all they know).
We don’t even know how many illegals are here already. Could be 11 million, could be 30 million. And no matter what I hear about (a) they take jobs Americans don’t want and (b) they contribute to society, it’s a fact that they have killed the construction industry for American workers.
I was cave diving in Mexico a couple of years ago, & I was talking to a guy that worked in the dive shop. It turned out that he was a certified underwater welder. He worked for an American company and made about $70 dollars an hour. He lost his job when he was undercut by other Mexicans who would do the same job for way less money. That’s why he was working in a dive shop for very little money. So ironically they take away jobs from each other too. Europe has a similar problems, particularly France, where the immigrants are Muslims. I only had two kids because I believe in zero population growth. Pretty funny huh? I hate to say it, but I believe that unlimited immigration will turn this country into a third world toilet, just like it is in Mexico right now. Oh well, so it goes.
Boy, people are so deluded! We are not free; no one is. I love liberty, not freedom.
Freedom is a nefarious term. It makes you believe it is possible. We are constrained from birth, be it by gravity or time or disease or family or economic condition. Take your pick. Freedom is like happiness. You can’t find by looking for it, you can’t create it by construction, you can’t enjoy knowing you have it. It’s just there, magically, for the briefest of moments. Then it’s gone, usually forever. it’s a whisper in the wind.
Seawolf,
Why do I feel like you’ve written something profoundly true, here?
(That feeling might be fleeting as well).
Anyway, nicely done. Cheers!
I’ve seen a bit of commentary that puts a lot of blame on the US and western powers for the plight of poorer countries.
OK, let’s not minimize the effects of colonial and commercial exploitation. But’s let’s not make too much of it either. Local elites in poor countries find it much to their own advantage to use the excuse of western predation as a cover for their own predation. You’re poor? You’re kids are malnourished? Blame the yanqui.
Don’t start thinking of the foreigner as innocent victim. They’re not. Local stupidity and criminality play a much bigger role in local conditions than anything the evil foreign government or corporation does.
I’ve seen it a million times. It’s highly gratifying for Americans to think of themselves as so almighty powerful that they’re to blame for the shitty living conditions and political oppression in foreign countries.
Do you think Arab governments don’t think the Palestinian refugee problem isn’t a god-send? You don’t think they get up every morning wondering what they can do today to further the continued existence of Israel? Both are extremely convenient distractions from local mis-rule and thievery. It’s all Israel’s fault. It’s the same with the US. It’s all the Americans’ fault. Makes me laugh that so many people fall for it. Especially Americans.
The US is a player. But don’t over-estimate US power. The USA is a relative newcomer on the world stage. The world as we see it isn’t a creation of the US. And nobody listens to Obama or Kerrey.
Mexico is a fuck up? Well, Mexicans fucked it up. It’s in their power to fix. Or not.
Very valid points. I hope things are going well with you. If they are not I’ll blame the yanqui.
It’s flying-time again in High Finance;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-25/chairman-chinas-largest-copper-producer-commits-suicide-jumping-hotel
And
Some people got some ‘splainin’ to do;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-25/unforgettable-winter-bank-americas-explanation-17th-worst-gdp-print-us-history
At least deworm all the newly arrived undocumented democrats, recruited from the slums of central america…..and screen them for VD and TB……and fumigate them for lice.
Why must we all continue to pay for your sense of penile insufficiency?
Anybody else hear this?
US economy contracted 3% last quarter.
the weather is being blamed, not $100 a barrel oil.
hispanics burglarizing homes of elderly white people as they sleep in Bristol, Hartford and West Hartford. One old lady was beaten up last nite in WHartford when she woke up and confronted intruder. Jose Quinones was arrested by police after a foot chase thru town. 23 year old negro shot in the head yesterday at a barbecue in Hartford. DOA. Suspect at large. This is how it is now in the Nutmeg State, the place Mark twain called the most beautiful place on earth.
As for us, our role is to eat the sh-t, smile, and say it taste good.
Libs, is this what you wanted? Happy now?
–BRH
“Anybody else hear this?
US economy contracted 3% last quarter.
the weather is being blamed, not $100 a barrel oil.”-BRH.
Uh… Yep. That’s what my last post was about;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-25/unforgettable-winter-bank-americas-explanation-17th-worst-gdp-print-us-history
“As for us, our role is to eat the sh-t, smile, and say it taste good.”-BRH.
What about the part where they p*ss down our collective backs and tell us “it’s just rainin'”? … *That’s the best part*… /s
“Libs, is this what you wanted? Happy now?”-BRH.
At this point we are well past any meaningful political process, so party-preferences and political nomenclature have no meaning.
There are simply those who are maintaining some grasp of fact-based reality, and those who just want to go sit in a corner and brush their doll’s hair…
BRH, I think you know this. You just can’t help humoring the goof-balls, can you?
😉
This site gives good testimony to how powerful is the human psyche’s need for anxiety reducing alternatives to objective reality. Denial, that is. The more obvious being belief in super natural beings that can be cajoled into intervening on our behalf (miracles) against the indifferent forces of nature, even granting eternal life. The less obvious are those of secular nature but which are no less “taken on faith”. Those of the “ism” type, such as communism, capitalism, egalitarianism, humanism and (of more recent edition) environmentalism.
All preach a gospel of sorts proclaiming that only if all humans would embrace the “truth” then the escalating human population could be accommodated, …..in perfect harmony, no less. For instance, closest to the heart of the vegans and vegetarians is fervent belief that if we all switched to hummus and tofu current global population could be fed and made healthy, along with added bonus of no more species extinction.
READY-set-GO: All harvestable species will be wiped out as the world descends into civil break-down that accompanies overpopulation. No elephants, no upland gorillas, no rhinos, no big predators, no sea turtles, no nothing that can supply protein or be sold for profit. That means no national parks, no wildernesses, no preserves,…..no nothing. How so???? Funding for protective policing will continue to shrink as taxable income shrinks and unemployment rises. Evidence here in America — no less than in Third World countries — is unavoidable, societal and physical infrastructure can’t keep up.
Oh,…….that’s right, I forgot, America is exceptional. Keep open the floodgates of immigration.
Yeah, seriously dude “what were you thinking”.
“READY-set-GO: All harvestable species will be wiped out as the world descends into civil break-down that accompanies overpopulation. No elephants, no upland gorillas, no rhinos, no big predators, no sea turtles, no nothing that can supply protein or be sold for profit. That means no national parks, no wildernesses, no preserves,…..no nothing. How so???? Funding for protective policing will continue to shrink as taxable income shrinks and unemployment rises. Evidence here in America — no less than in Third World countries — is unavoidable, societal and physical infrastructure can’t keep up.”-CavePainter.
True – but only if the rate of collapse is slow. If it accelerates (which it appears to be as capacity to stabilize disintegrates) then the rate of national-park + BLM wilderness to strip of ‘game-stock’ collapses. People will be too busy fighting each-other to exploit the wild (initially).
Wildlife tends to thrive in places that are territorial ‘no-man’s lands’. I never saw more wildlife in Korea than inside the DMZ (this was way back in the day). And firing ranges on military reservations are swarmed with deer to this day (take note).
Cheers!
MD would you agree its the Kalishnikov rifle, the AK47, that’s gone a long way to wiping out wildlife, ‘specially thru out the 3rd world, Rhinos, Hippos, Elephants, Tigers … 150 million have been manufactured since 1948, seems like every criminal, terrorist and rogue state have them? They’re cheap and easy to operate. Its particularly cruel to shoot a large animal with he 7.62×39 round its not that powerful and the animal suffers a long time before it dies.
(This is not an original thought on my part. RL Cheever came out with a book titled ‘The Gun’, about the AK, back around 2009)
–BRH
BRH,
The 7.62 X 39mm round works great on man and deer-sized targets. Using it on a rhino seems like a really not-nice way to kill a big animal. Never tried that personally, so wouldn’t know.
About the AK-family of fire-arms: there’s a reason why there’s so many. They work and they’re not just for ‘bad-guy’ groups and nations. Finland (a nation with a great rifleman tradition) developed variations on the AK-theme.
US Arms sales-folk may not like it, but the AK is a design classic that has ‘good bones’ (sturmgewehr ’44). But you know this.
For all you gals out there, there’s the new Hillary Clinton “Lucky Dog Leash” for your Man, so that he won’t run away and chase other women, like Bill Clinton does. Hillary says that you can also use it to P…ssy Whip your man if he starts acting up.
https://www.readyforhillary.com/store/items/lucky-dog-leash
“Hillary says that you can also use it to P…ssy Whip your man if he starts acting up.”-Puck.
Well, whatever trips your trigger…
Cheers!
Any word on that porno film Hard Choices? When is the release date?
There are different Orca races or subspecies. They avoid each other and don’t mix.
http://www.cryptozoonews.com/new-orca/
“Any word on that porno film Hard Choices? When is the release date? “-Janos.
Good point, Janos. The “Lucky Dog Leash” would make a great prop for one of the scenes.
Very Creative!
Cheers!
BTW,
Nobody is actually trying to make a porno or even a soft-core absurdist satire… It’s just a running joke.
🙂
Cheers!
USA, don’t feel singled out:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/25/-sp-boat-migrants-risk-everything-for-a-new-life-in-europe
“Hard Choices?” How about The Rant of the Angry White Men, instead? For years I have believed that Kunstler’s Long Emergency will soon come to pass. That much is fine. But pandering to common disaffection and base, racist sentiment is unpalatable, to put it kindly.
Janos: get a life. Go hug a Mexican or something. Your little wet dream of a world reserved for White People is never coming to pass. I feel sorry for you.
The Authoritarian’s very worst nightmare…
“Revolution is overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls ‘The Manufacture of Evil,’ in which merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive governments to concentrate wealth and commoditise everything including humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ on greed to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.” — Robert David Steele
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38903.htm
Lest we be lulled into Pollyannaland, breaking/tipping points come only through mass deprivation. …The vector[s] of which are yet to be positively determined, but a biggie would be: overpopulation. Duh, that puts all kinds of nasty stressors on anything calling itself a society. Therefore, at this particular time of rapidly declining ACCESS to damn-near-everything, it behooves governments to realistically study just how many ‘folks’ their land-masses can support at a subsistence level. (If they’d like to retain something like a cohesive state going forward.)
BTW, Egypt ain’t gonna get it done by means fair or foul. Perhaps they’d be well-advised to send half of their angry young men on over to Israel, who’d be more than happy to accommodate their fellow region-dwellers in the Land of Milk and Honey and boundless opportunity. Right?
Got food and water?
A comment to the article, cross-referenced to zerohedge:
“- when police departments lay down their newly aquired military gear, armored Humvees, and submachine guns, I will have hope.
– when politicians address the actual problems of their constituents instead of bending every rule to benefit the upper class, I will have hope.
– when corporations are barred from having their employees occupy public office, and ruling in favor of their former employers, I will have hope.
– when the justice system is relieved of every former corporate lawyer for Monsanto et. al., I will have hope.
– when fundamentally basic things like medical care, having a roof over one’s head, food, water etc. are recognized as a basic right of all human beings, I will have hope.
Until then I am stacking food, gold, silver, lead, charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur…and sharpening my guillotine.”
The Authoritarian’s very worst nightmare.
Great one Ozone. A related thought I have is that once the movement to take back the people’s power begins it won’t be stopped. Legions of citizens have already lost all faith and trust in our institutions. Institutions who’s staffs are stuffed with self serving minions out for themselves, not out to benefit society.
A great example is to have the internet policed by young self-centered somewhat educated baby-killers back from the oil wars. The authoritarian stench of this reeks to high heaven with such an odious unpalatable odour of injustice and inappropriateness that no thought shall be given to compromise. All we need is our Tunisian fruit seller because Bush, Obama and their parties have fucked the pootch beyond any chance of redemption.
I’ll never forget when I was ‘Osho’ here and the harassment I’ve endured. Trust has been lost. Too long have we been complacent with the Manufacture of Evil.
“What I did agree with was a) we need to prioritize. Wall Street’s taking us down faster than a illegal migrants, and there are other issues higher on the hit-list and b) emphasizing this issue as a stand-alone issue is ITSELF an appeal to knee-jerk reactive, unclear thinking.”
– mister d –
I disagree, Mr. D. And I speak as one with a substantial (by middle class standards) and well-diversified portfolio. And yeah, the twin insanities of quantitative easing and stock market bubbles have benefited me quite well since 2007, but
BUT
You could take away ALL of the stupid machinations of Wall Street and the FIRE economy, and you could wipe out ALL of my digital “money” in all of these Wall-Street-type-accounts, and I and my family could be OK*, if
IF
The United States were not filled with people to past the point of what is ecologically or environmentally sustainable.
IOW, money gets a big MEH,from me – but family, relatively clean surface water, and an intact community of relatively common souls sharing a relatively common culture – that is priceless.
And without these last things absent a highly functioning modern society, death waits in the wings – and I’d argue that much of the meaning of life has already exited.
OK – my last post went to the last page, but this post “appears” to reside on the third page. And clicking the “older comments” link takes be ABSOLUTELY GODDAM’ NOWHERE EXCEPT HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!
Your comment software SUCKS, AND APPEARS TO BE VERY POORLY MANAGED – JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER.
(And I’d write you in person, but you’d just slap me around verbally.)
Maybe that’s why you have 10,000+ page views the first day, and almost nothing after that.
Maybe that’s what you want?
It’s certainly what you have.
WHO THE HELL KNOWS WHERE THIS WILL POST?
2ND PAGE? NEW 3RD PAGE? NO ONE SEEMS TO GIVE A FUCK, ANYWAY!
Well, that mostly unseen diatribe went to the 2nd page, wonder where this one will go???
On a note more worthy of discussion – there is a completely unaddressed question that hangs over this website and many others like it, and that is the “Timeline to Collapse” question.
Sure – to pick immigration, but it works for many issues – if collapse is going to occur in the next decade, then it can be argued that the 30,000,000 growth in population due almost entirlely to LEGAL immigrants and the children of LEGAL immigrants will not matter.
IOW, in collapse we in the US are mostly going to suffer and die in large numbers, so what’s another 30,000,000 human souls who left their families to compete and die here?
But – if collapse is in 50 years, then we’ve got 150,000,000 new souls in the US, mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants – and now we’re talking about some REAL suffering and death; and maybe enough US-caused global environmental damage to take down all global ecosystems that support worthwhile human life.
But some of you argue that JHK is “mean,” and “racist” for suggesting that US population growth be reduced.
HHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE LIKE THAT?
tHEY DON’T CARE?
tHEY HATE LIFE?
i
Only in the good Ol’ USA, I was recently in Florida for a month (April). I just heard one of my nieces was scooped – up in CT for having a fixed blade knife with a blade longer than 4 ” without a fishing license. Sure she was speeding but what does that have to do with it? Sheet I travel with a hatchet and a large buck knife with a Tanto blade in the tool box. I guess I qualify as a felon in CT. I wont.let my daughter travel without pepper spray or a knife. Not to mention the Red Sox mini bat I got at Bat-Day back in the “60’s at Fenway which she keeps under the seat of the Volvo!
Apparently, that mostly unseen diatribe went to the 2nd page, wonder where this one will go???
On a note more worthy of discussion – there is a completely unaddressed question that hangs over this website and many others like it, and that is the “Timeline to Collapse” question.
Sure – to pick immigration, but it works for many issues – if collapse is going to occur in the next decade, then it can be argued that the 30,000,000 growth in population due almost entirlely to LEGAL immigrants and the children of LEGAL immigrants will not matter.
IOW, in collapse we in the US are mostly going to suffer and die in large numbers, so what’s another 30,000,000 human souls who left their families to compete and die here?
But – if collapse is in 50 years, then we’ve got 150,000,000 new souls in the US, mostly immigrants and the children of immigrants – and now we’re talking about some REAL suffering and death; and maybe enough US-caused global environmental damage to take down all global ecosystems that support worthwhile human life.
But some of you argue that JHK is “mean,” and “racist” for suggesting that US population growth be reduced.
HHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE LIKE THAT?
tHEY DON’T CARE?
tHEY HATE LIFE?
i KNOW, they ALL must believe that, “‘They’ will think of something, so the US landmass can support 500,000,000+ consuming, eating, and shitting human beings by 2055.
I’ll probably clock out by about then.
It’s gonna’ suck for those still living, though.
Short. Sighted. People. are killers.
But, don’t you think it’s wrong to inflict your death wish on everyone?
Prog,
I’m beginning to get the notion that you’re unimpressed by anecdotal evidence and live in some kind of protective, information-deleting cocoon. 😉
Seriously though, we’re (without doubt) in the MIDST of collapse, it’s just that [to paraphrase a recent can’t-remember-who] it’s not yet evenly distributed. The Long Emergency has already begun, and was probably exacerbated by the last few “administrations”.
This will help to grok the trajectory:
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-broken-thread-of-culture.html
Here’s a germane comment attached:
“Regular people (in the US at least) have become aware of the shrinking circle. I spent most of the past ten weeks traveling in the US as a research anthropologist with a short list of questions about what government is for. What shocked me (and I’ve been doing this kind of work for a decade or so) was the universality of diagnosis of political corruption – in particular the fact that our leaders don’t serve the interests of regular people, but serve their own interests and the interests of their wealthy sponsors. That insight might not be groundbreaking, but what is groundbreaking was the fact that this diagnosis was shared by everyone – from the left to the right, from the most sophisticated to the least, among the poor and relatively well-off. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a political consensus like that. ” — Andy Brown
IOW, it’s later than you [APPEAR to] think. (Apologies if I’m mistaking your timeline inquiries.)
JHK says progressives are leaving a lot out of the story. As they always do.
Mark Danner in an article in the New York Review of Books refers to Dick Cheney as “shallow, provincial and uninformed” and later as “blinkered, ignorant and ideological”. It makes me laugh every time I hear things like this. The pot calling the kettle black. Because the opposite is every bit as true. Progressives are every bit as shallow, provincial and uninformed and blinkered, ignorant and ideological. The hilarious part is that they have no idea.
Progressives LOVE to say they’re data and evidence oriented (unlike their ideological opposites). Multi-culturalism? A good progressive is all for it. But, good grief, look for data and evidence. Lots of it all over the world and not much of it in support of the concept.
Look north. English and French do not get along worth a damn. No seriously, they don’t. Boring, old Canada subject to kidnappings, bombings, murders, martial law, referenda on secession? That place is as sober minded as they come and they can’t make a BI-CULTURAL and BI-LINGUAL country work, never mind MULTI-CULTURAL. But the progressive, true to form, has no idea.
Look to Belgium. A de-facto two state country – Flem and Walloon can’t stand each other. Stodgy old Britain with all its parades and pomp and ceremony has a reasonably good chance of cracking up with the Scottish referendum on secession in a couple months.
You want more? There’s loads. It would be tedious to recount it all. But the “progressive” stoutly disregards facts and evidence anyway. Never mind the constant news footage and accounts from people who’ve seen it and who are under-foot right in the neighborhood, the progressive still doesn’t have a sniff. Blinkered, ignorant and ideological as Danner says.
And so the “progressive”, in defiance of a surplus of “facts and evidence” plainly visible right under their nose, continues to tout utopian delusions.
JHK says that in the good old days immigrants were required to assimilate to a common culture. He’s right, that was the case. No really. E pluribus unum and all that. And, you know, it worked.
Very well said. Societies are Fragile things – like romances. And yes, they depend much on myth and the discretion of the unsaid. As you point out, even peoples very close culturally and genetically sometimes can’t get along – what to speak of peoples as alien to us as Blacks, Mexicans, or Somalis.
Switzerland is a masterpiece of political engineering with their different cultural zones. But there is a limit: obviously something like that wouldn’t work with a culture as predatory as Islam – or a people as incompetent as Black Africans. Such a solution requires generous amount of good will – and the desire to live and let live. These things are noticeably absent in religious fanatics or welfare basket cases – who will convert to Islam if that’s what it takes to keep the gravy train flowing.
Let me address the Liberal Monsters directly: Even as we speak the people of Sweden are being replaced by Somali and Black Muslims. Parts of Sweden ave levels of rape greater equal to New York City. But it’s “all good” to the Liberals who smile their bland, mindless, self satisfied smile of evil.
One more summation of all of this:
All pro-immigration, pro-US-population growth arguments fit into one of three categories:
1. Economic growth is always good.
2. Increased human diversity is always good.
3. Various moral platitudes, such as:
a. we are a nation of immigrants
b. it is racist to oppose immigration
c. immigration is pay-back for all those Indians “we” killed
d. immigration is pay-back for all those slaves “we” owned
e. immigration is pay-back for all those countries “we” ruined
f. ad hominem attacks always prove all pro-immigration causes
g. etc. etc,
Anyway – I’d VERY MUCH ENJOY hearing an argument from any of you multitudinous pro-immigrant, pro-population growth advocates that does not fit into one of these three categories.
I’ve been asking this question in various places and in various ways, for several years now, and so far the only sound in response is
http://www.freesound.org/people/damonmensch/sounds/121511/
Yes ultimately they believe Whites have to die. Their own people! Talk about being pawns of the Devil.
So by saying “we” you deny kinship with Whites? I’d put it another way: we were just doing our will, which was to conquer – just like every other people who had the capacity. We weren’t more evil, just more powerful. We don’t feel the same way now but we shouldn’t wipe ourselves out because of that. We also tried to do good sometimes. In any case, justice is a matter of individuals for the most part. If we want talk collective justice then we have to be fair: is anyone going to give us back the lands stolen from us by Turks, Arabs, Han Chinese, Blacks, and Mexicans? They aren’t going to just give them back nor is the UN going to try and make them. Whites are only oppressors and never victims according to those folks.
Kunstler has totally fallen off the xenophobia truck this week.
Economic growth doesn’t always involve using more resources. Immigration in the state where I live (Texas) helps lower prices. Lower prices usually means lower wages, which is not usually good for economies, but economics is rarely just linear algebra. It is highly complex and what we have seen is that in Texas, the economy has a lot of ways of compensating for more population.
I am not pro-population growth. I am pro contraction. However, I do believe that it is the United States responsibility to use our vast wealth and influence to help Latin America get their shit together, and that means accepting that the Mexican border is an organic, breathing membrane, and it will be impossible to keep people out. If we build fences, they will dig tunnels. They have used submarines.
Trade policies and trade agreements have been engineered to enrich the American elite, and it’s time for that to stop.
Here we go again. Post a comment and it becomes inaccessible. Like this one buried at the end of the second page.
Great one Ozone. A related thought I have is that once the movement to take back the people’s power begins it won’t be stopped. Legions of citizens have already lost all faith and trust in our institutions. Institutions who’s staffs are stuffed with self serving minions out for themselves, not out to benefit society.
A great example is to have the internet policed by young self-centered somewhat educated baby-killers back from the oil wars. The authoritarian stench of this reeks to high heaven with such an odious unpalatable odour of injustice and inappropriateness that no thought shall be given to compromise. All we need is our Tunisian fruit seller because Bush, Obama and their parties have fucked the pootch beyond any chance of redemption.
I’ll never forget when I was ‘Osho’ here and the harassment I’ve endured. Trust has been lost. Too long have we been complacent with the Manufacture of Evil.
Stop Children What’s That Sound
“Working for the FBI… Sittin’ in a nest of bad men, whiskey bottles piling high!!!”
youtube.com/watch?v=lP94PlEtsEQ
“A great example is to have the internet policed by young self-centered somewhat educated baby-killers back from the oil wars. The authoritarian stench of this reeks to high heaven with such an odious unpalatable odour of injustice and inappropriateness that no thought shall be given to compromise.” – k-dog –
OK, K – If this is a slam at Mr. Darling, I consider it completely unjustified. And if it’s not a slam against him, then what in the HELL are you talking about?
And this is a test. This comment is posting to the alleged bottom of the second page of comments, but not linked to any one comment.
My guess is that it will post to the bottom of the third (new) page of comments – but who really knows, given the behavior of this wackadoodle software package.
If your comment is only a test then I don’t have to respond.
But I will.
Baby-killers, that’s plural. That means more than one, multitudes, so trying to twist what I wrote as an attack on a specific person here is inappropriate unless their are individuals here who be not real and are but an aggregate of individuals working for a government agency. We have had commenters here who never sleep. But if that’s what you meant why ask me. I don’t see any reference to our purdy-cat anywhere in anything I wrote.
You spend a lot of time confusing issues and I’m wondering why.
“IOW, it’s later than you [APPEAR to] think. (Apologies if I’m mistaking your timeline inquiries.)” – ozone –
Oz, thanks for the shout-back, and the perspective. And yeah, I have ZERO doubt that we in the US are living in* collapse. And I buy the druid’s thing too, “This is what collapse looks like.”
But certain wheels are going to stay on the clown car until the fuel tank registers empty and the battery blows up. One of these things is our empire-sustaining military capabilities and adventures. I can see this going for another 20-30 years, maybe longer; and even as 75% of the citizenry lives in tent cities, watching TV on a big screen (like in 1984) and shouting USA! USA! USA all the Way!
And another thing that appears (tragically) to be likely to continue is the waves of incoming immigrants into the US. If the US has “collapsed” as you suggest, then these folks would not be coming into massive govt. schools for their kids with free breakfast and lunch, would they? No collapse there? AFDC and school lunch programs keep getting bigger and bigger – and that’s just one tiny example of a government FILLED with programs that encourages impoverished and desperate people to come to the US and then breed like crazy.
Total economic collapse doesn’t scare me, O3. I’m as ready as I’m gonna get, with some preps in place, but more importantly with an intact (relatively, haha!) supportive family nearby, and a community of life-minded souls, and farmers, and such – who might actually survive, even eventually thrive, albeit on a much lower scale.
Total economic collapse in 3 decades, though – with a US population of 430,000,000 – I’m not sure that anyone other that the elite of the elite would survive that. And that idea scares me. And it pisses me off.
So I’m stand by my statement – Time to (total economic?) collapse matters a great deal.
“You spend a lot of time confusing issues and I’m wondering why.”
– kdog –
OK, K, thanks for (sort of) clearing that up. And I don’t know why your post made me defend Darling – except that he’s the only recent Whereeverthehellistan veteran who has talked about his military service here on CFN. And I’m sure he can defend himself (and I’ll look forward to him doing so) but I’ve been unable to work for a couple of days due to back trouble, which I’ve never had before, and none of the pain pills make me high and happy in the least, and your slam at vets as “baby-killers” pissed me off, plus I can’t write free association without commas worth a good motha’ fsck. ;;)
Anyway, K9, any confusion is in my mind or your mind. I’m just me, we’ve talked by email. Nothing I’ve ever said on CFN about myself or anything else is anything more that the God’s honest truth, or my honest opinion concerning the Same.
Sorry about your back, I’ve had a fever for over a week myself bouncing between 100 and 102. Seems we are both pissed this week.
Personally my mind entertains a difference between those who legitimately defend their country and those who serve evil. Putting a gun in someone’s hand and giving them a uniform and calling them a ‘vet’ doesn’t just make it all good to me. It is a big candy wrapper that wraps up a lot of sour disgusting shit.
The entire war on ‘terror’ has been bogus from day one and I’ve no kind things to say about the participants.
And MD, he seems nice enough. He’s not jumping up and down calling me OSHO like the other one did. Back then with a full beard I did strongly resemble him. But now with an improved look it’s pretty hard to find an insulting comparison for me. I’m too damn good looking.
Now this whole thing about ‘God’s honest truth’ might very well be true but I already know socks are allowed to lie through their stitches. And remember; “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”. So best not to try and convince me. Let’s just get along.
Good my temperature hasn’t got this high.
WTI Crude 106.5.
At 102.5 I get so weak I can hardly do anything. With oil running a 106.5 temperature the economy is going to feel pretty weak too.
Perhaps your fever is due to global warming? Remember, pain is the craft entering into the apprentice. And weakness is the evil humors leaving the patient. You are now healthier unless it was some kind of cyclical virus.
“And MD, he seems nice enough. He’s not jumping up and down calling me OSHO like the other one did. Back then with a full beard I did strongly resemble him. But now with an improved look it’s pretty hard to find an insulting comparison for me. I’m too damn good looking.”-K Dog.
Why would I want to call you names K?
There’s a whole level of dialogue internal to this community that I just don’t get…
People are funny!
“none of the pain pills make me high and happy in the least”
23% CBD, 1% THC. Trust-you-me, the ghad-damned cure! Unfortunately, not what the medi-mj smokers (eek – *eat* it) want…
Now, I just wrote a nice little response to K-dog, which disappeared. And NOW, I see the the entire (new) third page of comments has disappeared. My opinion is that JHK or his tech guy is probably diddling around the the comments page, but it could be something more nefarious. Don’t ban me, bro!
Now might be a good time to end the “automatic pagination” of comments. It appears to be causing lots of trouble.
Thanks for considering it, anyway!
“IOW, it’s later than you [APPEAR to] think. (Apologies if I’m mistaking your timeline inquiries.)” – ozone –
Oz, thanks for the shout-back, and the perspective. And yeah, I have ZERO doubt that we in the US are living in* collapse. And I buy the druid’s thing too, “This is what collapse looks like.”
But certain wheels are going to stay on the clown car until the fuel tank registers empty and the battery blows up. One of these things is our empire-sustaining military capabilities and adventures. I can see this going for another 20-30 years, maybe longer; and even as 75% of the citizenry lives in tent cities, watching TV on a big screen (like in 1984) and shouting USA! USA! USA all the Way!
And another thing that appears (tragically) to be likely to continue is the waves of incoming immigrants into the US. If the US has “collapsed” as you suggest, then these folks would not be coming into massive govt. schools for their kids with free breakfast and lunch, would they? No collapse there? AFDC and school lunch programs keep getting bigger and bigger – and that’s just one tiny example of a government FILLED with programs that encourages impoverished and desperate people to come to the US and then breed like crazy.
Total economic collapse doesn’t scare me, O3. I’m as ready as I’m gonna get, with some preps in place, but more importantly with an intact (relatively, haha!) supportive family nearby, and a community of life-minded souls, and farmers, and such – who might actually survive, even eventually thrive, albeit on a much lower scale.
Total economic collapse in 3 decades, though – with a US population of 430,000,000 – I’m not sure that anyone other that the elite of the elite would survive that. And that idea scares me. And it pisses me off.
So I’m stand by my statement – Time to (total economic?) collapse matters a great deal.
Not us here in Ft. Meade….maybe the boys over in Langley are having some fun with the JHK site…….
Ft. Meade indeed!
LOL
MrDarling,
To pick up an earlier thread, now lost …
The AK rifles, what I was trying to say is there’s just so many of them wildlife anywhere doesn’t stand a chance. No doubt its an effective weapon. Cheever predicts it’ll be around for another 150 years.
The 7.62 round itself has about the same ballistics as the old .30-.30 Winchester, the first smokeless powder bullet (1895)
All of Africa seems to be armed with those things, including poachers. In Paul theroux’ latest (and probably last) book ‘last train from point verde’ or some such, he travels thru Angola without seeing one living creature besides poverty stricken human beings. Everything else has been shot. (with AK47s)
–BRH
It’s hilarious seeing Naturalists trying to jump thru hoops. They can’t stand the Black Africans who don’t give a rat’s ass about the animals they love – but obviously they have to pretend the natives are great.
Kind of like the editor of Mother Earth News talking up zero population growth when 2.5 million 3rd worlders are entering the country each year, and the Sierra Club refusing to come out against illegal immigration. Left wing politics trumps all, including common sense.
–BRH
BRH,
It kinda adds insult to injury when groups of Mexican nationals move into the national forests to set up dope plantations, labs and other forms of ‘entrepreneurial activity’.
There’s nothing like hiking in the Cascades or Sierras and ‘stumbling upon’ a toxic-waste dead-zone left behind by a mobile meth-lab. The Sierra Club must really appreciate that.
This country is chock-full of people that have NO idea how far it’s gone, and they are completely out of their depth.
They’re trying to fix today’s issues with yester-decades proposals…
Killing off the wildlife is a horrible shame. Angola was the most affordable place to by an AK for at least a decade ($45 USD).
The ‘Lord of War’ did his job well, there…
OTOH, across the border – In Namibia _ it’s a different story. Wildlife thriving in many areas – just goes to show what a little economic-maintenance does for a place.
In Other News: I’ve been reading ‘Witch of Hebron’ and I’m at the part where young Jasper’s just run off… any more spoilers?
Hug a Mexican? What for? I refuse to be a pall bearer at my own funeral. Let us burst our caskets, dig our way up, and bury those who sought to bury us.
The strongest impression I have of “Hard Choices?” is that it is simply absurd.
I’m not saying that what J H K is suggesting about what needs to be done is absurd. He’s right about that. It’s that he’s saying it now and who he seems to be saying to.
This is a big topic, so I will address it in two (2) parts. The first will be a very brief overview of the historical context as it applies to where we are going. The second will be an exploration of what plans we can actually make, going forward.
The question of ‘what is to be done’ about immigration been a repetitive American theme – at least since the Native Americans were asking the question about the forcible migration of Europeans – onto land that had been theirs longer than any culture known to history had occupied the British Isles.[1]
These Ur-Americans *tried* to throttle the expansion of what we would now call ‘diversity’ in the parts of America that they knew. By then – just like now – by the time the phenomenon was widely recognized as an issue, it was too late.
I’m not interested in delving into the past or hearing attempts to apologize, excuse or justify conquest and ethnic cleansing (by anyone) with schoolyard rationalizations. Right or wrong, the bodies are in the ground now. I’m bringing it up because it has bearing on what happens next.
The fact is that those people that are for all intents and purposes _Native_ to North America did not disappear, they still exist as 500+ recognized and relatively cohesive tribal groups. Contrary to the opinions of some, they are not all shattered and scattered people that will be blown away ‘like chaff before the wind’ of The Long Emergency. Many are keenly aware of themselves as survivors – with all that entails: mentally, physically and logistically. . . You will be seeing and hearing from them again as things ‘unwind’.
The other fact is that before the Germans were the largest and most complained-about immigrant group [2] there was a large influx of _involuntary_ immigrants; the people of African ancestry.
They are still going to be around after the Collapse process. That needs to be taken into account by those conveniently forgetting that “diversity” is just a nice-sounding word used to sell demographic phenomena already in progress.
Neither group wanted any part in the European Project on these shores – originally anyway [3]. Quite the contrary. They wanted things to get back to the way they were, un-invaded and/or un-kidnapped. Unfortunately or not, Life had other plans.
The Future is not exactly ‘what we make it’. That facile B-S gets plowed-under when time and resources get scarce.
With those examples in mind, all appeals for or against immigration – open/closed, strongly regulated, whatever – have to be considered on the basis of what can actually be *done*, not emotional outbursts about someone else’s, mystical religious or racial fantasizing or any other sort of wishful thinking.
— — —
[1] By ‘known to history’ I do not mean known only through forensic evidence unearthed from peat-bogs and burial mounds. The Celts are known to history, you could also say that the Picts were to some extent. Any culture(s) before them are referred to by their artifacts (The ‘Beaker-People’ for example)… Farther back than that and your in ‘Tuatha-de-Danann’ territory… and that’ll still leave you a few millennia short.
[2] The Germans were, in the late-18th and throughout the 19th Century and Benjamin Franklin disliked them, fearing that they couldn’t or wouldn’t assimilate.
[3] Initially, feelings changed o/c after a few generations. Where are your people then? Where you find them, that’s where.
No, many of the 500 tribes are long gone. Of the remaining ones, some are just scams with people who look Elizabeth Warren who like to smoke cigarettes and pretend to run casinos for the people who really do.
There are real tribes too, though many of them are very watered down now with White blood. Another trend: reservations being over run by Mexican gangs. Some of wiser Indians (not Native Americans – Whites are the Native Americans. The Indians were just living here. A nation is not a geography but a People.) are part of anti-immigration lobby. After all, their treaties are with us, not the Mexican Government. Their lands and benefits are in grave danger.
A great Leader of the Cherokee kicked the Blacks to the curb a few years ago. They were the descendants of the slaves the Cherokees had. The Chief said, These freemen will suck us dry.” Great Wisdom indeed.
“No, many of the 500 tribes are long gone. Of the remaining ones, some are just scams with people who look Elizabeth Warren who like to smoke cigarettes and pretend to run casinos for the people who really do.”-Janos.
The situation is out West.
BTW, The “500+” figure are those that are currently recognized by the BIA (It’s actually 566). I’m not discussing the hundreds of tribal groups and bands that were wiped out by the migration.
EDIT: “the situation is __different__ Out West.”
Heads up,Clusterfuckers!
My antivirus software is giving repeated warnings specifically about this website. I’m running AVG. When it secures the threat and I try to load the comment thread I get another warning, as follows:
“”;”Exploit Blackhat SEO (type 1720), kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/hard-choices/”;”Secured”
=====================
Sooo – If you’re reading this and not running some sort of antivirus program, you’re most likely infected.
Let’s see if this will post. Good luck to all!
And JHK, while your tech guy is fixing this virus – that might be a very good time to have him stop the pagination of comments.
Just a suggestion that just occurred to me. hah!
Progress4,
Concur about the very strange activity. Didn’t want to say that in the clear but what the hell now, eh? I’ve been handling issues of my own logging/leaving the site – but that’s just par for the course these days.
tnx.
– quit spammin’ like your best-bro Vlad. I’ll bet that’ll make worlds of difference.
Peace out. (lulz)
“Hard Choices?” | Part 2
I delivered an overview of some of the relevant background to the ‘immigration issue’ in my previous post.
At this point I’d like to share a true story that encapsulates the problems besetting us:
About twenty years ago there was a major renovation and construction project with a budget of over 10 million (unadjusted dollars) and over 100 workers.
I drove onto it one morning – just as the demolition sub-contractor was releasing his laborers – and I thought that was very odd, b/c they had never started at night before, and I knew for a fact that reverse-cycle work was not on the GANTT chart… So when I got inside the project trailer I mentioned it to the project manager.
“Yep. Got changed last night”.
“Huh”.
I had a feeling that there was a story behind this and that I was about to hear it, so I stayed quiet.
The PM turned to me and just stared. There was no one else in the trailer.
“I’ll be needing you to put out fires today. Immigration’s coming”.
“How do you know?”
“None of the Italians are here”.
We had three guys from Porto Bari that we were told to find jobs for.
“Is that why the demolition guys worked last night and they’re leaving now?”
The PM laughed, turned and walked to the coffee pot.
“Yep!”
The demolition sub-contractor – a staunch Reagan/Bush supporter – had forty-seven Mexican nationals whom he paid $16/hour on paper, and $8/hour in cash on payday.
“Funny how they always know…” I commented.
“Isn’t it?”
He laughed some more and we got set up.
Fifteen minutes after the lunch-break two INS vehicles posted at the gate of the job-site, and two more parked in front of the trailer, blocking most of us in the process.
The agents hopped out accompanied, presented their credentials and began searching the job for people to take.
Ten minutes later they came back with a dark-skinned young man who had refused to empty out his wallet for them (following the instructions of the PM).
He was brought into the trailer to explain the situation to his boss (the PM) with the agents looking on. It turned out – to their apparent surprise – that the young man was a US citizen and the son of the one of the companies owners. They went back outside, glanced around and left.
Back in the trailer the accosted youngster was thanked for following instructions, and then told to move his car and take a ten-minute break.
Meanwhile another young man remained in the trailer, diligently filling out his hiring paperwork at a table in the back.
The Project Manager turned to him and said: “So, what did you think about all that, Jimmy?”
Jimmy turned in his chair with a broad grin. “I thought that I was about to have a very bad day, I don’t mind tellin’ ya!” in a Dublin accent. We all laughed ourselves sick.
As I mentioned, this happened decades ago, and decades ago the USA was in __no shape__ to deal with the issue simply b/c – at the end of the day – there was a lot of money to be made by breaking the law.
Should ‘we’ have done something about it? Of course. Could we have? Of course not. That’s not what America is really about.
Money is the final arbiter here. Those jobs that couldn’t be off-shored or automated out of existence were laid siege to by ‘in-shoring’ people w/out a legal right to work in the US – and therefore ‘very flexible’ in terms of pay, safety and benefits, and didn’t Walmart and it’s ilk just love that?
If you find an untenable situation that people be seem to be habituated to, barking at the rank-and-file malefactors should be one of the last items on the punch-list. Most of the damage is done by people in the best position to do it – which in our case simply means that nine out of ten times, it never gets handled by institutions specifically set up to do that.
So my questions indicated at the beginning still stands: who are J H K’s appeals directed to?
A US government that can’t be bothered to enforce it’s own laws, and that spends a sizeable percentage of the taxpayer’s time finding new ways to break more? [1]
Corporations which not only reap the benefits of lax immigrations laws (just ask the nation’s largest employer, Walmart Inc.)? But continually engage the next in a series of progressively predatory labor policies.
The remnants of a middle-class stripped of any meaningful engagement in the political process?
Law enforcement and regulatory agencies that have not only been compromised but in many cases __re-purposed to actually serve__ organized crime?
Who? What?
I agree with what J H K would want – in a better world than this one – but in this world it sounds like nothing more than whistling in the dark.
Time might be better spent planning damage-control, and figuring out what’s going to be left to work with after the party is over.
— — —
[1]
If Winston’s Churchill’s words are any guide, they might be the LAST entity to appeal to for help:
“The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”
~ Winston Churchill
Hello? We’re there now.
Good summary. Some of the German National Socialists intellectuals predicted massive colored immigrations generations before it happened. It’s the logical course when Capitalism breaks free from any and all moral restraints. And didn’t Liberalism do a great job reigning it in!? For all its cant, Liberalism is just the ideological component of Capitalism. In its extreme PC form, we could even say its new religion. And Marxism and Marxists? The berserker warriors who helped usher in the Liberal State. And the final state when things have “moved on.com”? A new Medievalism, with green high priestesses, urban peasants and the countryside reserved for the elite alone. Capitalism for the very few and a degraded socialism for the rest of us.
Do you like old German Uniforms more or less than the uniform you wear?
In other words, stop making sense!
That doesn’t answer the question. I smell a warm breath of gas lighting.
This is just the paranoia we’ve warned you against. It’s not my fault we were right and that you all were so, so, so wrong!
Yet here you are against the illegal invasion! Imagine what your 20 year old self would say. Or your old Anti-Fa comrades. You flirted with that, didn’t you? Fess up. But welcome aboard anyway. Better late than never. Whatever your past sins and mistakes. Our is not a caravan of despair.
No your slog of disgusting is no caravan of despair. Hoo-Ra-Ra
So, do you like old german uniforms more or less than the uniform you wear?
“$16/hour on paper, and $8/hour in cash on payday.”
Wholly sh!t – skyscrapers to *MARS*!!! Ayup, same wall-o-text sock puppet (6969). Soker iz *multitudes* (kinder and gentler, EvEn)…
As I told you *LAST TIME* – I hope you’re enjoying those adobe huts on the Tejax border.
kinder and gentler is better 🙂
K-Dog,
If I knew what Zr’s comment meant or was referring to, I’d reply to him (since he seems to be quoting me), but I need a translator?
Can u ‘terp?
Despite all, DJIA still close to 17000.
Saudi Arabia has put its armed forces on high alert.
ISIL threatening to move into Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
I think we have a serious situation developing in the Middle East, the kind that bring civilizations to an end.
As someone stated here earlier, this ISIS seem like the kind of blokes who like to blow up pipelines, refineries and well heads. I don’t know maybe I’m wrong on this.
–brh
And we intend to now openly arm the Sunni rebels in Syria as we have been secretly all along. Of course only the “moderate ones – as if we can really tells who is who. In reality, we are now arming ISIS.
Precisely. You’re on a little ‘roll’ tonight, aren’t you?
Between her book “Hard Choices” and her “Ready for Hillary” website, one could reasonably conclude that likely next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, is Off-Her-Rocker, right?
https://www.readyforhillary.com/about
But isn’t this rather typical of civilizations in decline? Towards The End, the leadership becomes rather weird and warped, right?
JHK,
Wow! You sure stirred the pot with this one.
You write “…requiring a consensus about limits.”
That was ’24. Congress, much less the body politic (what’s left of it) can reach a consensus on nothing.
Then there is the problem of business interests, who want the illegals (construction, drywall, lawncare, childcare, farming, etc.) Those interests will muddy the waters anyway they can to keep a supply of cheap labor and suppress the working class (legal and illegal).
There is the problem of geography: a 2000 mile long border to defend, much of which is located in scrub and desert. The cost of a Great Wall is prohibitive. Tunnels, boats, and good old fashioned smuggling is cheap (unless your the one paying the coyotes).
There is the problem of failed states south of the border. If you can’t support your family down there, you may well see fleeing to Norteamerica as the only choice.
And on top of everything else, we have the bubbling human rights disaster of the unaccompanied minors. What the heck do you do with tens of thousands of kids coming across the border?
We, homo-sapiens, are a migratory people. When conditions in the home territory get too bad, we move on to greener pastures. Been doin’ it for 50,000 years.
Despite the hand-wringing on the part of all Parties, illegal immigration will continue until either collapse of climate chaos makes it impossible or undesirable. That’s just the facts, jack.
An antidote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkAoosVLkA
Damn dweebus that’s a great tune and one of the few on-target video’s we have seen in here.
.
.
.
Now as to who’s going to wax the floors down at the local mall. The answer is simple. The undocumented unemployed Americans forced out of competition for job placement in their own country; that’s who.
K-dog-
There is, almost always, a song for every occasion. 😀
Found a great one: Fake Town. Scroll to the bottom. Disregard all the true and useful information above the song since you aren’t interested.
I didn’t use youtube because Mr Kunstler doesn’t like the big display.
http://www.dailystormer.com/was-the-gary-oldman-jew-apology-completely-and-obviously-sarcastic/
Mister Darling, great posts.
Who are JHK’s appeals directed to? Good question. I would say people outside the Oligarch Consensus.
The political establishment is bought and paid for as are institutions like the NY Times. No point appealing to them. They’re part of the Oligarch Consensus. They set up this very system.
The benefits to the O-C of an open southern border are immense (at least temporarily), that is, a deluge of compliant laborers who work for chicken feed, whose presence serves to suppress wages for the pre-existing population. This is nothing new. And it’s not a new observation.
But the ill-effects are piling up, (not to the O-C but to everyone else) not only from un-restricted illegal immigration, but from the torrent of offshoring. The two work hand-in-hand.
We’ve seen paid shills for the O-C on this site, who tell us to accept offshoring and illegals because it’s the natural order, it’s un-stoppable, it’s fair, it’s just, it’s a measure of retribution. So don’t argue, don’t fight it, your interests are illegitimate, you had it coming. So move on, it’s the NEW NORMAL.
“A deluge of compliant laborers who work for chicken feed, whose presence serves to suppress wages for the pre-existing population. This is nothing new. And it’s not a new observation.”
But it’s always new when it happens to you. And shills paid with bills taken from the till that comes from me and you.
“Who are JHK’s appeals directed to? Good question. I would say people outside the Oligarch Consensus.”-volodya.
Can they do anything about it? No? So why ask them?
*Unless* he’s prompting the public-at-large for something else, like what … resistance?
Oh yes, we know how well any hint of resistance is received, no matter how law-abiding and constitutionally protected.
This is the problem in late-stage scenarios, the capacity to fix itself, irritants minor, -major… anything really, falls apart. It’s why large/complex systems _collapse_ instead of gently crumbling away.
Part of the propaganda war is to re-define the terms of the debate.
As an example: I used the words “re-define the terms of the debate”. I could have just said “lie”. Using a blizzard of verbiage obscures real meaning. This is what effective lying does.
Besides, the word “lie” is so base, so un-intellectual. No, to make people feel like they’re part of the educated elite, you use a great many words where one or two would other-wise suffice. “Bullshit” IOW.
You see, you do have to camouflage the lies, you have to make lies sound reasonable, maybe surround them with plausible sounding opinions, communicated by respectable sounding presenters. Presenters with credentials, preferably Harvard degrees and hopefully Nobel prizes: that is, “bullshitters”.
That’s where institutions like the NY Times come in. They’re skilled at making it feel slimy and un-becoming to talk about self-interest. Especially your own, especially if you’re not part of the Ivy League elite, especially if you’re just a couple generations removed from dust-bowl destitution.
Grubby money, filthy lucre, yecch, blecch. They look down their nose at you, they try to make you feel unworthy of a decent living especially if your parents were laborers, that is, White Trash. The worst.
The picture is painted in lofty/high-minded ways that no decent person with a moral sense (un-like a low-life like me) can fail to respond to.
But respond in ways that benefit the O-C.
Don’t despair. Maybe, just maybe, with a great deal of self abasement you can have some meek and minor aspiration to the decency and purity of your betters ie give up any thought of defending your remaining wealth and income.
JHK talks about “national leadership” making “hard choices”. That’s a joke. National leadership?
There is not one damn thing “national” in this alleged leadership in that they serve no interests but those of a very narrow slice of the US citizenry. The choices are already made and they weren’t – ahem -“hard”, they were easy, sleazy and self serving.
“There is not one damn thing “national” in this alleged leadership in that they serve no interests but those of a very narrow slice of the US citizenry. The choices are already made and they weren’t – ahem -”hard”, they were easy, sleazy and self serving.”–volodya.
We’re in agreement.
My b-s detector loudly !pings! when the word “national interest” is used by the top-5 MSM vendors. It’s a good time to hit ‘mute’ and ‘record’ simultaneously.
“The choices are already made…”-v.
This is when words like ‘diversity’ and ‘sustainable’ come in. They function like globs of lubricant slapped in the public’s collective crack – by political porn-set production assistants.
Oh, but they want you to have a good attitude about it… Eye-contact is “so important, so very-very important”, you see. [*]
— — —
[*] shades of ‘Sy Abelman’ intended.
EDIT: naturally, “word” needs to be plural…
“You see, you do have to camouflage the lies, you have to make lies sound reasonable, maybe surround them with plausible sounding opinions, communicated by respectable sounding presenters. Presenters with credentials, preferably Harvard degrees and hopefully Nobel prizes: that is, “bullshitters”.”
This is minor quibbiling but the lies don’t even have to sound reasonable if the ‘bullshitter’ is a source of authority. Presentation via authority makes the most sour sweet. The delicate taste of social justice becomes overwhelmed in a thick super-sauce of programmatic lying. The fine cuisine of the age of reason is buried in the fast food of a nation too distracted on how to get from point A to point B to notice any loss of delicate and important flavors. And creatures of habit that we are; the appreciation of fine cuisine is forever lost.
Burn Harvard to the ground.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject;
http://www.kvoa.com/news/mexican-military-chopper-crosses-the-border-shoots-at-agents/
“safety is no accident”…
Cheers!
“And we intend to now openly arm the Sunni rebels in Syria as we have been secretly all along. Of course only the “moderate ones – as if we can really tells who is who. In reality, we are now arming ISIS.”-Janos.
And if that’s true J., this is one *helluva* way to run a business;
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-27/america-deluded-us-slams-angry-iraq-pm-will-buy-russian-jets-instead-fight-against-i
What’s the point of inciting a war if you don’t get to arm both sides, I ask you!?
/s
😉
It’s called “managed conflict”. We did it in Vietnam as we helped the Soviets and they helped the North Vietnamese. But that was so indirect. This all much more convenient and cost effective. With every war, they get stronger and we the people get weaker.
Did you hear about the comedy they’re about to release about assassinating Kim Jong Un? He’s not pleased and says don’t do it or it means war. Wouldn’t it be something if this stupid movie lead to a terrorist strike? Or would that make them happy perhaps?
It wouldn’t be the silliest thing to start a war over. There’s a track-record;
http://listverse.com/2011/12/16/top-10-bizarre-wars/
O T O H, adding a n*clear exchange to the mix sucks all the ‘fun’ out of it… Well, at least it would be a limited exchange. So, there’s that /s
! Tschau Verizon ! 🙂
http://rt.com/usa/168752-germany-boots-verizon-over-spying/
Sometimes breaking up __is__not__ hard to do.
🙂
Tah!
Inter racial harmony took a hit this week in New Haven, CT, when 2 black dudes, in town from nearby Waterbury (another garden spot on the map), riding tandem on a stolen bike, beat an elderly Hispanic man to death while he was waiting for a bus. (Ponder that for a moment, those of you who grew up when America was at least half way civilized) Police nabbed the duo right away. Not sure what the motive was; maybe a robbery, maybe just for fun, who knows?
We are all worried about CTs new gun control laws (one mistake you’re a felon) but this week in New Haven and Bridgeport Feds took down 2 gangs, 157 gangsters, one of which appears to be black, the other Hispanic, who were selling illegal guns, as well as drugs and women, along the ‘gold coast’! Something like 100 guns were recovered, some reportedly used in murders, along with a lot of other illegal stuff.
We have any Yalies looking in here? i went to state U, not being part of the elite, just a plebe.
that’s what’s happening in New Haven, birthplace of the American industrial revolution and the US oil industry, founded by Puritan Minister James Davenport who brought his flock in from London, home to Eli Whitney and Oliver Winchester, now a bloodsoaked 3rd world welfare colony.
–BRH
They kill dogs too. Last week they held one down and cut his throat. Satanic Scum. This is a more typical mindless shooting.
http://clashdaily.com/2014/06/bad-cop-video-man-confronting-cops-shoot-dog-strong-language/
Overshoot/extend and pretend/trainwreck – same old story, for millenia.
I’ve seen all these archeologists recently, trying to explain away 10,000 year old/8,000 year old/6,000 year old/(ad nauseum) civilization extinctions, as merely volcanoes/tsunamis/meteors (i.e. planet-made, not man-made). None have yet had the guts to approach the thing based on an exponential population “virus,” which harvested all living things (trees/wildlife/meat/food) well beyond self-sustainability, and left nothing but clearcut desert destruction in their wake. Just take a look at how idiotic the Venice design was – clearcut all available forests, and sink their timbers deep into the bog for a foundation…
Balance/harmony are not in the vocabulary of the *external cost* exploiters. Depletion/pollution are their only words (but *you* demanded it, so they made “MOAR”).
Oh, and who whuz the jack-@$$ poasting that bit about NOAA adjusted global temps, and linking an article which showed the NOAA numbers (bogus btw – way off and wrong), and the non-adjusted ones (total sh!tz&gigglez)? I’m pretty sure the North Pole has almost completely melted away, revealing trade routes here-to-for nonexistant & oil/gas mining sites, global glaciers pretty much 30-50% melted (800,000 years worth), seasonal fires in Western US are now non-stop, ocean levels are up about 1 foot submersing many landmasses, superstorms are no longer 100 year events but bi-annual, Texas is a mega-dust bowl where all they can do is “pray,” etc ad nauseum… Koch bros (COKE? Haha, moar liek cock, coach or cotch) need to work their PR a bit bettah…
NE-1 else notice that the US soccer team appears to be a bunch of South Americans?!… Ah, bread and circuses, indeed (that’s gotta be some conflict – your sports heroes are the immigrants you despise)…
Overshoot __extend and pretend__trainwreck
Three domino tiles all falling down.
Overshoot __deal and be real__get-through
Three domino tiles but only the first falls down. So to which fate are we assigned?
Sadly the first, for while the second is possible it ain’t gonna happen. The first scenario always lead to doom for to do more than __extend and pretend__ requires knowledge. Times past the knowledge was missing and now the knowledge is simply absent. Same difference.
Could argue numbers all day and all for naught. Why? I shall explain.
You may see in ZrCrypDiK’s data that which you did not know but you won’t take it in. If you don’t trust ZrCrypDiK you won’t trust his data. Conditioned from birth by promises and threats; your authority figures; those who you will believe, are very well defined. If you even know you have been so conditioned you are of a rare lucky few. The rest of you haven’t a clue as to what the condition your condition is in. You are automatons, and from sea to shining sea none of you know why we are having all this trouble from our republic. You are no more capable of divergent action than a Myan hayseed of a thousand years ago.
Divergent thoughts are easy but action requires a consensus and the world remains sopped with hayseeds.
You eagerly live the lives you are living feeling as if you planned it all out yourself. But you haven’t and now with your paedophilic father about to slide it up your ass your going to go out of your way to convince yourself that this is the way it was meant to be.
Good sons and daughters you are.
You eagerly live the lives you are living feeling as if you planned it all out yourself. But you haven’t and now with your paedophilic father about to slide it up your ass, you’re going to go out of your way to convince yourself that this is the way it was meant to be.
“the condition your condition is in”
I have to admit, the first time I heard that song was during the Big Lebowski movie, but it sounded so much older (1968)…
“Divergent thoughts are easy but action”
But why “act”, when we can simply *PRAY* to the sky ghadz!!! I mean, didn’t one of them (the *ONLY* one – haha) talk to Dumbya (43rd Pres), and put him at easy every night (Schizophrenia is *NOT* a mental disorder!)…
I know, real bad attempt at devil’s advocate…
No No No
Let us please not *PRAY* to the sky ghadz!!!
There are no sky ghadz!!!
Those other times it did not work or those civilizations would still be around!
Prayer is the heroin of the complacent and the cheese-puff of the desperate.
Having a private line to the almighty as I do I just asked him what he thinks of prayer. He hates it; he wants his bambinos to be strong independent creatures fully capable of figuring out how the world works and to live in it accordingly. Prayer does not enable this and perpetuates boring creatures.
Unless all you are doing is saying ‘thank you very much’ it is not OK. And if you ask for any shit at all then prayer turns out to be a blasphemy and really pisses him off.
Then he said that those of you who think you have a special relationship with him that others don’t have are really deluded about what reality is, your place in the universe, and why you are here.
Except for me and that’s only because I have the special phone. The one the NSA can’t tap.
Some clarification.
Divergent thoughts are easy but action requires a consensus and the world remains sopped with hayseeds.
Divergent thoughts are easy only to those who can understand how they have been manipulated.
Action existing as it does in the real world makes the requirement for a consensus.
Here’s an upside to when the lights go out: we’ll be able to sleep again like people were meant to. Not the eight hour coma of the alarm clock slave (now whittled down to six or so) but the double sleep, with the “watch” in the middle. Go to be after dusk, get up after a few hours, socialize or just muse, and then go back to sleep until early morning.
http://www.alternet.org/story/154424/the_8-hour_sleep_myth%3A_how_i_learned_that_everything_i_knew_about_sleep_was_wrong?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
Nice article but after I read it my browser was seizing up. But I pulled the plug, rebooted, and now everything is fine.
You still have not answered that question about uniforms. But I won’t bother you about it more tonight. It’s late on the West Coast.
You always make accusations like this after I’ve offended you in some way, usually ideological. Now part of meditation is review, so please review your mind stream and find out exactly what I said. For instance, was it the Indians aren’t Native Americans? Or that Liberals are and have always been the dupes of the Corporations and Banks? Etc.
Not that it will do any good and for the umpteenth time, but I am not affiliated with the military or government in any way.
Now, I just wrote a nice little response to K-dog, which disappeared. And NOW, I see the the entire (new) third page of comments has disappeared.
.
.
P4W, Asoka may have gone silent but this kind of monkey business is just what Asoka could do as a government agent, after K-Dog blew Asoka’s cover and he had to assume other CFN identities. Keep us informed of other Asoka subterfuge. Good work, P4W.
Let us please not *PRAY* to the sky ghadz!!!
There are no sky ghadz!!!
.
.
Hmmm… This is exactly Osho’s position, K-dog. If you are not Osho, as you maintain, you may be a follower, or you may be Asoka. I’ll be watching you carefully.
And the role of the government sock is to confuse and muddle.
I already know you are watching me carefully.
Thanks for the back-and-forth and hither-and-yon concerning the paradigm behind NOT making the hard choices necessary to face ongoing and oncoming predicaments, youse guys.
This link is posted at the top of the page, but perhaps was missed because of off-subject wanderings. (Got Trust? — likely not.)
I found it most helpful in explaining where we are now and where we’re headed. Sure, at its’ base, trust plays a huge role, teaming up with emulation and adulation. I think it shows what societal conditions are needed to even contemplate making the hard choices, because they have to be seen as a right and proper benefit.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-broken-thread-of-culture.html
“Arnold Toynbee, whose monumental work A Study of History has been a major inspiration to this blog’s project, proposed that civilizations on the way to history’s compost heap always fail in the same general way. The most important factor that makes a rising civilization work, he suggested, is mimesis—the universal human habit by which people imitate the behavior and attitudes of those they admire. As long as the political class of a civilization can inspire admiration and affection from those below it, the civilization thrives, because the shared sense of values and purpose generated by mimesis keeps the pressures of competing class interests from tearing it apart.” — JMG
After reading the essay, it’s fairly obvious that what Lady Clinton is busily engaged in, is what I call, “polishing her turd of a reputation”, and desperately attempting (but failing, according to the slumping sales numbers) to appear to have concerns and relevancy that match the public zeitgeist. This is how bureaucracy becomes larger and larger… those at the top (that benefit the most from fringe wealth [unjustly] flowing to the center) NEED to have as many dependents as possible. Their continued ’employment’ depends on the power center and thus loyalty is ensured by strict control of access to the goodies. (Those goodies are degrading day upon day toward the basics: food, clothing, shelter, transport, as you may have noticed.) The patches and badges are different, but the uniforms are the same.
Sidebar: Played a graduation party yesterday, and the high-schooler is going right to work, two days hence. Good news? She goes to board and work on a horse farm (the galumphing beasts she knows and loves). That will most certainly come in handy.
Yes, correct. All Asian political philosophy is adamant on this point. The Upper Class sets the tone and the common people will imitate them. If they are corrupt, all is lost. And ours has become so, caring about nothing but money and power.
One objection: he always talks about America in this objective way. He has no loyalty to this country, nor did he ever. That’s kind of telling don’t you think? Another sign of decay in my opinion. The whole intellectual class – except for the paid whores and starry eyed believers – has adopted this stance. What did Yeats say? The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity?
You say America is not worth identifying with. But their and your Howard Zinn type stance leads to a paralysis of the will allowing the Elite to do their will and open the borders. Chicken and the Egg, which came first?
In truth, Greer has been a passionate liberal ideologue for most of his career. Now he’s posing as an objective intellectual since the policies he advocated are revealed to have been pernicious and suicidal.
So do you like the old German uniforms more or less than the one you wear?
I just got around to reading Archie this week but chronic readers here know I read him regularly. My mutterings about Myan hayseed brains poisoned by religion; brains not having the self-awareness to understand, control, and cultivate their internal drives, desires, and beliefs has nothing to do with his discussion of mimesis. My inspiration came from reading ‘Ninety-two in the Shade ‘ yesterday. A book which gives insight into why we as a nation are intent on paddling up the creek in a concrete canoe.
The question as to why of society is paralyzed from making hard choices looms over thinking brains these days. Archie and I look for answers, each in our own way, both of us being self-actualized.
And as for the Myans I may be wrong. They had Ayahuasca. But I’m kidding. I don’t advocate or believe that drugs lead to enlightenment.
I dropped a closing anchor tag and will reproduce the link text as intended:
My inspiration came from reading ‘Ninety-two in the Shade‘ yesterday. A book which gives insight into why we as a nation are intent on paddling up the creek in a concrete canoe.
The question as to why of society is paralyzed from making hard choices looms over thinking brains these days. Archie and I look for answers, each in our own way, both of us being self-actualized.
And as for the Myans I may be wrong. They had Ayahuasca. But I’m kidding. I don’t advocate or believe that drugs lead to enlightenment.
Hillary Clinton’s brother runs an immigration scam called “Greentech” producing environmentally friendly cars. Apparently, Greentech to date has only made 5 cars.
http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/4410120-74/greentech-visas-chinese#axzz35wIAbFEZ
Off-topic, but that (germane to corrupt political nepotism) article generated 16 separate ‘watchers’ and ‘info-gatherers’. I know, that’s just the way it is, but it doesn’t make me any more comfortable with it.
Starving the truth and rewarding lies, damn lies and [cooked] statistics…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38931.htm
PCR also speaks to ‘credible government’… I’m beginning to sense a recurring theme here.
I know that the situation our society is in is very complicated, but I find one simple thing about our citizens that seems to be prevalent: financial penis envy.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel a lot of people are envious of rich people’s wealth, and a lot of the unrest in America is a result of that.
The wealthy have either inherited their fortune or play the game much better and harder than average working people. I’ve interacted with a lot of rich heirs over the years, and many of them are dufuses, who I couldn’t imagine would be at their present level if not for their family history. I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to hate them for their good luck.
To earn one’s wealth often requires one
There is some sort of malicious code on this website.
At least that’s what AVG is telling me, over and over.
Chrome won’t let me post at all. This is a try with Firefox.
And I’m appending it to your (incomplete?) post bill, because the “reply to all” box is not visible @ the bottom of the page.
I use Internet Explorer. Other than me having fat fingers, I have no trouble posting.
On a related note, I use Outlook for my email, and for the past month have been averaging over 200 junk emails PER DAY! That’s over 70,000 per year. About 6 weeks ago I had to change my security level from high to medium because the “high” level wasn’t allowing certain programs I use to run. So I presently have the choice of abandoning the necessary apps I use or getting flooded with spam.
I could get a new email app, but my ISP really only uses Outlook. To get a new app would require me getting a new ISP, which would mean printing new business cards with my new email address. Oy vey!
And now the automatic fill function on my iPad won’t accept “vey” and keeps changing the word to “vehicle”. Maybe “Oy vehicle” is a sign that the future of happy motoring is grim.
I shouldn’t complain. At least I have a place to sleep, don’t go hungry and still am earning a living. It’s all about perspective.
Well, that sort of worked.
Still don’t have the reply to all box.
Anyway – we’ve got what? A couple of hundred posters who agree with Kunstler that immigration should be reduced. And we’ve got dweebus and, of course, pkrugman*, saying, “O, deary me, Mz. Scarlett – we cain’ do nuttin’ about controlling no border!”
Which is incorrect, of course. And it also ignores the REAL problem of excessive US population growth, which is due to LEGAL immigration, and quasi-legal immigration. (visa overstays are only one example, here.)
Minds are like concrete on the pro-immigration side, all mixed up and permanently set – to plagiarize a bumper sticker fragment.
If you’re interested in information and solutions, though, check out this page – and send these folks some money.
https://www.numbersusa.com/solutions
Sorry. To continue, to earn one’s wealth often requires a certain ruthless narrow focus that may be sociopathic. These people become easy to hate.
Many of our issues today result from wealth overshoot. Once this type of individual starts, it is often impossible for them to turn off the drive and sit back. Since they are so good at what they do, they keep on accumulating wealth way beyond what they really need, resulting in diminishing wealth available for the rest. As time passes, for the public to get those resources requires more and more ruthlessness.
I used to believe it was all about greed, and though that plays a part, I’ve now come to think a lot of the lust for accumulation is probably a result of a personality disorder. No wonder why so many are envious of the wealthy.
Hillary may be no good but we can wait for Chelsea. She doesn’t care about money. At all. It’s pure coincidence that she married into money and is paid for doing nothing. It just worked out that way. She’s just like “you and me”. And she and her husband are so admirable the way they are able to make their “mixed marriage” work. She didn’t let yarmulke get in the way of taking care of business! And he is a lucky man to get such a selfless young sea cow!
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2666265/I-tried-care-money-I-says-Chelsea-Clinton-married-hedge-funder-lives-11m-home-paid-600-000-NBC-doing-nothing.html
“I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel a lot of people are envious of rich people’s wealth, and a lot of the unrest in America is a result of that.”-BtB.
I think it has more to do with people figuring out that they are being __paid to go broke slowly__ … at best, and they’re told to be grateful for *that*.
This isn’t what they signed on for. There is a resurgence of class-war tension, but ‘Envy’ hasn’t got a lot to do with it.
Priests and scout masters all over the great republic are firmly behind the importation of tens of thousands of turd world street kiddies….and would like to meat them in person……
… and take matters, firmly ‘in hand’…
.
.
.
.
.
horrible isn’t it?
“Selfish, Selfish”…
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/06/san_francisco_housing_policy_it_would_be_a_better_city_if_twice_as_many.html
The world would be better off if San Francisco doubled it’s housing density, apparently… /s
Just build more stuff. That’s the ticket!
😉
(yes, I’m being sarcastic)
And in Afghanistan, there is one clear winner:
http://www.dw.de/un-agency-worried-about-surge-in-afghan-opium-production/a-17738748
… opium.
Cheers!
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Isn’t the face of the Sphinx the face of Obama? An enigma to some, but not to us. Compare it with the Face of Christ on the Shroud of Turin. There is no comparison. You will love the one and hate the other or love the other and hate the one. Choose.
To be the Falconer is best. But if you can’t, then strive to be a good falcon.
No Sphinx is mentioned. I think you are here to confuse and muddle.
The Sphinx has the face of a man and the body of a lion. See what happens when you focus on beating someone and not on the love of knowledge? The ego destroyes the winged life, the life that doth abide in joy. Renounce it.
More confusion muddling and murky mess.
And the answer is ???????????????????????????????
I answered your question of last night this morning. See above. Why don’t dogs ever look up to the sky? SPACE is a fine symbol of Divinity, the Urgrund, the ground of all Being, the Land Beyond the Trinity. A Dog that looks up can become a wolf again and worship by howling at the moon. When are you going to regain your innocence?
No you did not answer the question. I was not asking if you were affiliated with the military or government in any way because that you can lie your way out of. But deny that you wear a uniform.
That is something I knew you could not do.
And believe me buddy (in the Canadian sense) I don’t focus on ‘beating’ you.
Is this some kind of Gay slug? You would know more about that than I. Still beating the Tea Bagger drum I see. Why don’t you rent the Legend of Bagger Vance? To become innocent again.
Nothing gay about it.
What kind of uniform do you think I wear? Other than my White Skin, I have none. But that’s not a uniform in the ordinary sense of the word so – I deny I wear a uniform. There, you said it I couldn’t do it.
Janos,
There is *another* beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man: a Manticore. The legendary manifestation of all The Wasteland’s savage intentions.
A Manticore, eh? Sounds cool. English major? Have any epiphanies lately? Read Blythe’s series connecting the Epiphany of the Poet with the Satori of the Zen Master.
Am I not beating Kdog’s ass in the American sense?
If your ego needs to feel better thinking you are beating Kdog’s ass let the victory be yours. I can give you that; for free!
Thank you for conceding defeat. I accept you concession. The universe, both gross and subtle, is now open to you. Fly beyond the earth – touch the sun with your hand. It feel cool to the astral touch.
No defeat. That is why it says ‘for free!’ at the end. It was put there quite deliberately; on purpose because I knew you would come back exactly as you did.
You were crossing your fingers when you conceded. Check out the Kol Nidre prayers where Jews absolve themselves of keeping all vows ahead of time.
Thus you remain bound by your mind forged manacles.
You do seem to be driving him to distraction Janos.
K-Dog! Don’t give into it buddy! Hang in there! Rope-a-Dope!
An odd thing to say considering you had to read my comment on top of yours before you submitted yours. Perhaps both of you should take you egos for a walk around the block.
Interesting stat: No new malls have been built since 2006. More: the creator of the indoor mall hated strip malls, thinking them vulgar. This Gruen, wanted to recreate the Austrian village! A Kunstlerian who went wrong. He recanted a few years ago in horror of what he had wrought saying that he never wanted to build such a Pyramid (my word (for Kdog)).
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-shopping-mall-140552841.html
More validation for all things Kunstlerian:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-27/chinas-replica-manhattan-results-yet-another-ghost-city
Forgotten malls, empty skyscrapers… entire cities de-listed before the project completed.
Stillborn into a economic void, so to speak…
;]
They also built a Swiss Village or something. This is one of the sadder parts of the Chinese miracle/debacle – a complete imitation of the West. So strange for such an ancient and fanatically proud people. Don’t they see it? Can’t they?
Before we leave this topic never to return, here’s some material from a brilliant author of spoken word, Joe Frank:
“Now, what does it suggest when people undergo the rigors of a terrible journey in a truck, in order to have jobs that nobody else wants?
To comb through the garbage of a richer society’s Outback, and accept – in a bottom-feeding kind of way – the lowest position in the food-chain, in order to gain a foot-hold in that food-chain”-Joe Frank, Escape From Paradise.
I find comparisons to Mexico interesting, b/c there are one-percenters who look to Mexico as an example of how much lower things can go in America, **completely forgetting** that the reason that there is any __Mexico__ to look at (at that level of corruption and dysfunctionality) is b/c Mexico has a richer country to lean on.
I’m no longer nauseated by the manifest stupidity of this. I view it differently now.
The fact that the countries of Central America, with a few exceptions, and to a lesser extent Mexico, are in a state of total collapse, under the control of vicious gangs, mired in poverty, ignorance and filth, is not well known here.
This American Media sucks. We are not even getting a true picture of what’s really happening on our southern border. How are these kids getting across 1000 miles of Mexico? Who’s helping them? Why did they come? This seems like a big story, one that a professional news organization would want to get to the bottom of.
I have a feeling a lot of kids are not making it thru Mexico; if there is an organization or an individual who is encouraging children to make this dangerous trip they need to be held accountable.
I wonder how many kids are lying dead along railroad tracks, or on the side of the road in some craphole Mexican village?
–brh
This is the best BackRowHeckler that I have ever seen.
Oh thanx K dog.
I’m at work, have a minute to check this site.
I think most everyone here will agree, no matter where they stand politically, or how flinty their heart is (P2C, Vlad) the little ones who made it here have to be properly taken care of and protected.
If families cannot be located there are a lot of people across the US who might want to adopt them.
It really is a vexing problem. Not to belabor the point, but this is exactly the impossible scenario presented by Jean Raispail in ‘Camp of Saints’. And its not just here. Hundreds, maybe thousands of migrants are drowning in the Med,trying to cross from Africa in rickety unseaworthy craft, desperate to get into Europe. It seems to me there’s an existensial crisis going on right now in the 3rd world, one that’s really not understood or acknowledged. But the evidence of it is washing up on the shores of Europe, and chaos on our southern border.
–BRH
Well, there is no way thousands of kids are travelling thousands of miles without some sort of encouragement, They have to be helped and the truth ferreted out.
True, and there is a common denominator.
Wrong….lots of us don’t agree. Indigent nits become welfare lice.
Well a very small hole can sink a very large ship. Your sentimentality is common and their plans depend upon it. Stop being predicable and soft.
Now why should we care if they don’t? Sure we can take care of them. Build holding facilities right on the border. One end of the building is America and the other Mexico. Tell the Mexican authorities you are releasing children back into Mexico and if anyone cares, they can come and pick them up. Do it at part of the border where there is a real fence and they can’t just walk right back in. Ideally, there would be a Wall covering the entire border. And every couple of miles there would be turnstiles or one way gates leading from America to Mexico so the illegals could self deport.
Now back to you. You’ve read Camp of the Saints a few times and meditated on this issue many times. Yet you still are missing the key that will save us: we have to stop caring about people who aren’t our responsibility. If you care, give to the missions. The Missions work: they are largely what got us here to begin with by their medical care in the 3rd World. I’m not against helping others, but not at the cost of our own well being and survival.
Rush says there is proof that the Regime started to advertise for bus drivers back in January. So it is orchestrated – how well organized on the Mexican side, I haven’t heard.
“This American Media sucks. We are not even getting a true picture of what’s really happening on our southern border. How are these kids getting across 1000 miles of Mexico? Who’s helping them? Why did they come? This seems like a big story, one that a professional news organization would want to get to the bottom of.
|| I have a feeling a lot of kids are not making it thru Mexico; || if there is an organization or an individual who is encouraging children to make this dangerous trip they need to be held accountable.
I wonder how many kids are lying dead along railroad tracks, or on the side of the road in some craphole Mexican village?”–BRH, (my emphasis).
Thank you BRH. I’ve driven every one of those miles and you don’t know how likely that is. The whole thing bothers me.
“An odd thing to say considering you had to read my comment on top of yours before you submitted yours. Perhaps both of you should take you egos for a walk around the block.”-K Dog.
Perhaps…
But K-Dog, does any of this banter actually matter? I’m not here to hurt your feelings, man… 😉
“I think most everyone here will agree, no matter where they stand politically, or how flinty their heart is (P2C, Vlad) the little ones who made it here have to be properly taken care of and protected.”
– marlin –
Well, thanks for the shout-out, backrow. And I’m politically middle of the road and nothing like flint-hearted, at least in the opinion of those who know me. (Most of ’em, anyway. hah!)
You’re buying into the Obama approved, mainstream media creation about the “little ones” hook, line and sinker. I’ve seen the pictures that are being fed to us, too. I’m not buying “children” and “little ones” all that much. I suspect the average “unescorted minor” is much closer to age 17 than he is to age 7. And I also suspect that the majority is male, by a fairly large margin.
And somebody is “escorting” these people. I’ve traveled in Mexico, too. You don’t just walk – not for long, certainly not across the whole country. IOW, this is a pretty well organized operation, and the “escorts” are there – apparently just not the parents.
And yeah, Marlin, sure we need to take good care of these people, at the same time as we carefully and courteously help them return to their own home countries.
Also – a couple of you are over the top about Mexico as a “third world shithole,” etc. etc. Mexico has a vibrant middle class and more economic growth in many sectors than does the US. Of course Mexico has problems. To me as a gringo, it has worse crime and greater stress of day-to-day living than the US has, right now at least.
But that’s definitely the direction the US is heading. All we need is for our population to pass some critical (as yet unknown) number of people, with a permanent underclass – and we’ll be just like Mexico, except with greater distances, greater fuel usage, and a much colder climate.
I was born here, I don’t really have much choice since I”ll refuse to emigrate no matter how bad things get here.
I’m very afraid that many of these new immigrants and/or their children are going to rue the day they came into the US – and end their days longing for the close-knit walkable communities in the “old countries.”
Joe Frank, relevant to the topic:
“And I felt that I was lifting these people up from the vice-grip of poverty’s lockjaw, and giving them the opportunity to become self-sufficient, to send money home, to live in better circumstances than countless generations that had proceeded them.
They say that you can give a man a fish that will feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime and generations beyond.
Or you can lend a man a fish, in which case he will owe you a debt of gratitude – as well as the fish.
And if you charge him a rate of interest, then you have to send a loan-shark after him, and then he eats not only the fish but the borrower as well.
And people feed a fish to a larger fish with the intention of catching yet a larger fish, and as the saying goes: “little fish have greater fish upon their backs to bite them, and larger fish have even greater fish and so on, ad infinitum”.
So, I was offering these immigrants an opportunity to work at jobs that Americans scoff at, that they don’t want any part of. To lift themselves up by the bootstraps and improve the quality of their lives. . .
But then (finally) INS agents pulled me over, and discovered the immigrants. . .I was arrested and I was found guilty on every charge…”- JF, Escape From Paradise.
Check it someday. Every track is a crazy-tragi-comic novella.
Remember when whacking OBL was going to solve all our problems with terrorism?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-06-29/isis-declares-caliphate-crucifies-9-syrian-rebels-being-too-moderate
Oh, those hoople-heads love a good boogey-man story, don’t they?
🙂
The immigration debate, like the hair product Afro Sheen, is about cultural sensitivity, and, most importantly, it’s about SHARING.
Speaking of “anything goes” and “dishonesty”, can you really rub Afro Sheen on one’s skin?! I thought that one used Afro Sheen on one’s hair? The name “Afro Sheen” implies an Afro hairdo that is bright, clean and shiny with an attractive gloss or “Sheen”, like the actor “Charlie Sheen”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIROU8DdcJA
My 11:40 post was specifically to backrow, I linked to your comment MD, because I couldn’t get my browser to go to the bottom of the page to :”leave a reply” to the whole thread.
And again, JHK, your webpage has some kind of viral trouble. I get the same “1170” virus message from AVG whether I try to view the page with Chrome or Firefox. Chrome locks up and won’t do anything, Firefox will let me post, but it takes a lot of effort.
I did a search for “virus 1170” and it appears to be some sort of embedded code – not a true virus. Whatever that means.
NSA, CIA, FBI, Homeland Insecurity – can anybody in the alphabet agencies get this problem fixed, thus saving JHK the trouble.
We ought to get something for all that tax money.
G’night to all.
G’night Langley.
“Exploit Blackhat SEO 1720”
NOT “1120.”
My bad.