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Comes August now, the month of vacancy, idleness, the slap and hiss of waves on sand, furtive romance on the dunes, perhaps, sweet corn, country roads, and county fairs, and more furtive romance, perhaps, on a blanket in the high meadow under a blood moon — and respite from the hellish host of foolish ideas, dark trends, and bad faith driving life in this demolition derby of a nation.

If one word defines the preoccupying affairs of the USA these days it’s tiresome. The entire population seems to be enacting the old myth of Sisyphus, every, man, woman, child, swamp-creature, and non-binary child-of-God in the land, legal and undocumented, pushing that boulder uphill to the tippy top, only to have it roll back down to the bottom… repeat ad infinitum.

Take Mr. Robert Mueller, for example, the sphinx-like figure looming over the political landscape with his lawyer’s attaché case full of radioactive secrets. He has already done yeoman’s service in his mission by indicting two dozen Russian Facebook trolls and Internet hackers — who will never be extradited or set foot in a US courtroom, sparing taxpayers the expense of trying them (and testing the theory of “collusion” with the current POTUS). It’s a little hard to picture old horse-face popping a third beer at the clambake, let alone the stories he might tell around the fire (with necessary redactions). When he awakes hung over in the sand the next morning to the shrieking gulls, next to someone not-his-wife, will he be overwhelmed with regret for a year spent chasing gremlins from the Kremlin? The public appears to be good and goddamn sick of him. Even The New York Times has stopped squealing about Russia. Standing by for September histrionics….

Have we reached Peak Sexual Confusion in America? Maybe it’s time we stopped handing out brownie points to people who don’t agree with some of the fundamental conditions of being a mammal, such as the apportionment of X and Y chromosomes. Of course the big idea behind that is the crypto-Gnostic wish to transcend nature, human nature especially, and fly away to the liberating vales of some boundary-less utopian ether where nobody has to be anything in particular — or else in a constant state of transformational flux, like the computer-graphic imagery that saturates our movies. Life without boundaries, I think we’ll discover, is not the Great Idea it’s been cracked up to be. I suspect the groups behind this fad are finally fresh out of new astonishments.

Had enough reverse racism? I know I have. All this howling about the horror of the white patriarchy. It will be interesting to see how the world gets on when that force of wickedness is finally vanquished. No more annoying string quartets, tedious dental implants, boring brass bushings, or hopeless theories of surplus value. Thank God for that. The unburdened public can finally give its full attention to hair care and dieting. When women and people-of-color fill all the seats in congress we can look forward to the glorious day when the USA is run as well as Baltimore.

The buzzword harkening to Democratic Party big dawgs on the Hampton lawns and the briny bluffs of Martha’s Vineyard is Universal Basic Income, the suddenly amazing proposal to put the whole country on welfare. I’m all for it — as long as we can get the Martians to pay for it. Why not? A thousand bucks a month just for walking-around money? Wahoo! You could help pump the GDP a little more by taking that dough to the nearest casino and investing it in the excellent economy-building activity known as blackjack. With a little luck, you might increase your nut sufficiently to get that longed-for sex reassignment surgery, to correct the clerical error that the stork made when you were dropped down the chimney.

Well, these are, after all, only my own personal August fantasies. I await September with as much excitement as all y’all. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m lashing myself to the mast and awaiting heavy seas.


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

500 Responses to “On the Beach”

  1. Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 9:58 am #

    Events are brewing to wake us out of the doldrums. Shithead (oh, very disrespectful of me – Mr. President Shithead) is gearing up to throw his latest tantrum about the fucking Wall and the evidence mounts that this glorious year of 2018 may be hottest ever.

    Of course then there is the looming election whereby the Property Party decides which wing to install.

    Nope, there are no lazy hazy days in this goat rodeo.

    • Gonga Din July 30, 2018 at 12:37 pm #

      I propose that the wall be fitted with turnstyles which will drive dynamos to help with the high power usage in the Southwest.

    • TiredOfTheTreadmill July 30, 2018 at 12:37 pm #

      I am curious to see how the heat of this summer plays out during this year’s hurricane season. We get a couple or more high population areas leveled by some high power hurricanes mixed with the incompetence levels in DC these days and it could make for a real interesting fall.

      Also, lots of squawking from the financial types about spookiness in that sector of the world. That sector of this phony economy that lubes all the other sectors and keeps them moving. And implosion of two in that ticking time bomb realm could be very interesting. Especially for insurance companies with obligations along hurricane alley.

      Add in the increased rudeness, crassness and “I’ve got mine, screw you” attitude that is increasing since The Grifter took office and we’re setting up for a really fun ride into winter. If we have a winter this year. Kind of like a family vacation to hell, but not back. Watching like an old Indian scout…

      • draupnir July 30, 2018 at 2:39 pm #

        I prefer the current grifter in chief, who is at least amusing, to the Clinton grifter, She can’t take a fall like Jerry Ford because she breaks, she has a few ticks that might be characterized as parkinsonian and that faceplant she performed on Memorial Day in 2016 was decidedly troubling, This is only questioning her physical fitness for the position and isn’t even entertaining or enumerating her other qualities or lack thereof. This may only be rumor, but I hear she’s considering another run in 2020.

        • TiredOfTheTreadmill July 30, 2018 at 11:33 pm #

          Still hung up on Hillary huh? Almost two years since the election and still dwelling huh? The Hillary obsessed guys, and it’s almost always guy, remind me of the type that still holds a grudge against the girl who turned them down for senior prom 20 years ago. Still obsessed with their ex-wife from their 1998 divorce. Sorry, I am not trying to single you out, but I see this Hillary obsession all over the conservative blowhard-o-sphere daily. Move on guys. Move on.

          Yes, it was a no win choice in 2016. But playing the lesser evil excuse is a slave’s mentality. It would be really nice if we could expect political leaders to be decent people we could look up to, but that concept goes well beyond any reality we might live in. The owners have taught us to be good, obedient and accepting serfs.

          • draupnir July 31, 2018 at 9:02 am #

            We have to play the hand we’re dealt, and yes, I still find the thought of Hillary offensive.

      • Exscotticus July 30, 2018 at 8:37 pm #

        >>> and “I’ve got mine, screw you” attitude that is increasing since The Grifter took office

        Yes I think we all prefer the “I’ve got yours, screw you” attitude that socialists offer as an alternative.

        • TiredOfTheTreadmill July 30, 2018 at 10:49 pm #

          Because it can only be either/or. Apparently subtlety and gray areas have vanished too. It’s only all this theory or nothing in the BS economic theory battle.

          I would like to know when absolute capitalistic purity did exist in this country, or anywhere else in the world for that matter? Thus far, capitalism seems to require heavy subsidies to keep going. A frontier with subsidized low extraction costs. A big, expensive publicly subsidized military ensuring the profit flows from the hinterlands, a la Smedly Butler’s observations. The old socialism for the wealthy and well connected, and dog eat dog capitalism for everyone else seems to be the standard operating procedure. The frontier is gone, the expenses of keeping the barbarians in line are rising, the cheap energy input disappearing…we will see how long ideological purity of any of these poorly formulated economic theories lasts in the years ahead.

          By the way, there’s likely to be quite a bit of that “I’ve got yours, screw you” going on as The Grifter in chief attempt to keep farmer suicides from increasing even further this fall due to tariffs. Stay tuned for Trump pulling Bush’s “I had to use socialism to save capitalism” shtick as they try to transition us back to about 1954. I love good science fiction and even fringe conspiracy ideas, but I’m guessing this attempt at time travel isn’t going to work out as planned.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 12:03 pm #

            >>> Because it can only be either/or. Apparently subtlety and gray areas have vanished too.

            Where is the “subtlety and gray area” when you have to cast a vote in an election between two options: a guy who wants to lower your taxes and let you keep the money you earned, or a gal that wants to raise your taxes and redistribute your money to her favored identity groups?

            Where is the “subtlety and gray area” when you have to cast a vote in an election between two options: a guy who wants to enforce the rule of law and stop the invasion force of immigrants that is displacing your nation’s culture with their own, or a gal that wants open borders for the free shit army radical free lunch brigade?

            >>> I would like to know when absolute capitalistic purity did exist in this country, or anywhere else in the world for that matter?

            Who knows who cares? It’s a straw man argument. Few are arguing for pure capitalism divorced from any social planning. But when you have nations that tax you for socialized shit entertainment that you don’t even utilize, you know that socialism has gone too far.

    • Ishabaka July 30, 2018 at 6:53 pm #

      One question I’ve never seen the No Borders crowd answer is: what would you do with the billion souls who’d move here tomorrow if they could?

      • City_of_76 July 30, 2018 at 9:02 pm #

        Who is advocating “no borders”? No one that I’ve heard of. You can do better than to repeat this GOP canard, can’t you?

        • Ishabaka July 31, 2018 at 7:38 am #

          Well, quite a few people have been in the news lately advocating the abolition of ICE. If we have no one controlling the borders, aren’t they effectively open?

        • Ishabaka July 31, 2018 at 7:39 am #

          And, you are yet another who has no answer to my question – what WOULD you do with the billion souls who would move here tomorrow if they could?

        • NRWer August 1, 2018 at 10:40 am #

          The current Democratic party, which is aligned with neoliberals and neoconservatives who have united under the banner of globalism.

          This may be the first time in modern US history where the choice is truly black and white: either Trump, who is a classical liberal who ran as a Republican, or the Uniparty, who advocate open borders, endless war in pursuit of resources, and class warfare.

          As distasteful as Trump can be in a superficial sense (mannerisms, etc.), he appears to be a remarkably consistent and fair-minded in terms of policy and his core beliefs.

      • SpeedyBB July 31, 2018 at 11:09 pm #

        Ishabaka, this underscores the fact that Americans inevitably take the short view (“next quarter’s results”) when making such decisions.

        This is the power of the Japanese and especially the Chinese. They are looking far down the road – perhaps plotting decisions, results and reactions 20 or 30 years into the future. Command economies and totalitarian societies can afford to act that way.

        It seems to have been lost on many observers who have studied World War II that there was an eminently sound reason for both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to invade and take over their neighbors: in both cases the leadership perceived an urgent need for more living room – lebensraum – for their peoples.

        They simply decided to take it at gunpoint.

        For more details please hold a seance and consult departed General WestMoreLand.

  2. DrTomSchmidt July 30, 2018 at 10:03 am #

    Get out in that garden and write us another update! Perhaps gender non-binary flowers on your plants have led to a crop failure?

  3. Paulo July 30, 2018 at 10:07 am #

    Terrific job…well said. I am also just ‘tired of it all’, particularly the SJWarriors who imply with every breath, “If your not WITH US, you must be against us”.

    I’m going to take my dog to the ‘remote garden’ and hill spuds this morning. At least I know that whatever happens we’ll have enough to keep from starving and ample wood heat.

    • Paul July 30, 2018 at 11:19 am #

      It just so happens that I was up at 06:00 this morning and like you, took my dog to my slightly-remote garden, (it’s across the road and about 200 wheelbarrow steps away). I have no spuds to hill, but I do have three, only three, lowly tomatoes that I brought with me from whence I came. I lack your confidence because on the last day of July, I have no established garden and therefore no confidence that we will not starve come Winter. Thanks for the reminder about what’s really important!

      • K-Dog July 30, 2018 at 11:53 am #

        This year’s garden is a mess. No beginners luck this year. My Sisyphean tasks keep me from watering every day. No where near enough production to keep me away from supermarkets, I would starve but the few delicious treats taste far better than store bought.

        Next year I just might try a tiny field of beans, and my spud box. I want to see how many beans I can get in a 5 by 5 square at least. The last couple of years early heat caused veggies to bolt to seed but maybe that has to do with watering. I don’t know, I’ve only been doing the farmer thing for a few years. Does anybody know if there is such a thing as a bacon flavored veggie?

        I do well with German turnips and I always have spuds.

        • Paulo July 30, 2018 at 1:40 pm #

          Hi back you fellow garden guys,

          We have well established growing systems in place at our home with two large greenhouses, a kitchen garden at the house, and the remote across the road on some property we bought about ten years ago. The remote garden has 90 hills of russian fingerling spuds, which are absolutely prolific producers…and they keep all winter. They are a great potato for boiling, mashed, etc skins on.

          I have been riveted by the ongoing collapse. It seems slo-mo, but the corruption seems so wide spread it seems like there are no more baseboards for the scammers to hide in. The Clintons have been exposed, as has the apparatus that spawned and nurtured them. The Repubs threw in with Trump for the short term win and the SCOTUS takeover, but almost daily Trump is self-destructing and becoming wildly more irrational. His tweets are an embarrasment of lies and accusations.

          My prediction? he’ll resign not too long after the Mueller probe comes out. By that time his Trade War fiasco will have begun to tear apart the economy and a recession will be underway. His corruption is rooted in his bankruptcy bailouts, and being beholden to Russian oligarchs. There will be more ‘sleeping around’ payoffs made to skanks. His CFO will spill some beans in the Cohen investigation and Hope Hicks will start telling what she saw. Trump will run rather than go through further humiliation, but the humiliation will hound him for the rest of his life. The Secret Service will be protecting him in far off countries until he dies.

          Meanwhile, I’m just tired of his tweets, his lies, his ineptness, his stupid hair, bulging belly and baggy suits, and all the crap.

          UBI? Hah. A country that cannot even provide a basic universal level of medical coverage that is affordable for all is no way going to provide a welfare/wage for all. It is too busy bailing out corporations, farmers, and buying weapons made to kill brown people.

          The good thing? The economic collapse will postpone the end of the oil age for awhile yet. There is still time to make some personal preps, people. There is a bit of time yet, and not not too much longer would be my estimation.

          • Doc Holliday July 30, 2018 at 8:55 pm #

            I have been ‘bucket gardening’ for ten years now. Empty five gallon buckets of drywall mud from one of my preferred subcontractors in quantities of 30 or 40 a year. The ground hogs are suspicious, the deer get nervous when the buckets are lined up in rows, but the squirrels still get the occasional BB shot-spanking as our yellow Lab mutt is past 13 and garners no respect from the ‘tree rats’. ‘Sugar Rush Hybrids’ tomatoes, which are the size of large grapes, as sweet as any tomato I’ve had, get tasted before they go into the collection bowl and into the house or to one of our neighbors. In years past it was ‘Big Jim’ semi-hot peppers and those closely related, merging with tomatillos, large tomatoes, and garlic with a little parsley to create the best food group around, SALSA! Drying those semi-hot peppers in the dehydrator, then tossing them into a coffee grinder (and keeping them at ‘bacon-bit’ size ), has given me enough one quart mason jars topped off to last me the rest of this life time and well into the next. Garlic planting is counter intuitive because here, in central Virginia, it is planted in November and harvested from now until September, best during a dry period, which we won’t have this year. Much of the potting/top soil in the buckets is reused next year, with some fertilizer added, except that from the tomatoes due to the ever present ‘black spot’, a mold/fungus that is airborne from too much rain, this year’s preferred weather. The crop is, still, too much for me and my neighbors to eat, but I don’t condone ‘tomato fights’, though they can be fun.
            The national news makes certain everyone knows the West Coast is all flame and ash, and the East Coast has already sunk, but none of the ‘news teams’ have comment on the FACT that the weather in central Virginia, though a bit moist, has been the coolest and, hence, most reasonable and comfortable of the last 32 years of the month of July we have experienced in this same house. The river adjacent to our house usually gets sluggish and shallow as we are 90 miles from the coast and only 135 feet above sea lever (or about 18″ of fall for every mile towards the coast), but this year, it is up and cruising and so is the animal traffic from Blue Heron to Wood Ducks even including a couple of White Egrets and an Osprey with large mouth bass in its talons. Once again, in 32 years, we have never seen Egrets nor Osprey on our property. The weather, here, is fine and the electric bill is low. Only complaint is the news is full of whiners and I want to trade in 10 SJWs for one SRW….SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY WARRIOR.

          • SpeedyBB August 2, 2018 at 11:36 am #

            Thank you for the thoughtful observations, Paulo.

            My personal “bolthole” will likely be among sociable but fundamentally intolerant Muslims and good luck to me. I have invested a huge amount of time, emotion, good will, money and what they call “socialization” with that community but do not know if it will be enough when the bottom falls out.

            From 12 time zones away the Norteamericano Punch’n’Judy looks like bad airplane thriller reading. Sorry.

        • Helen Highwater July 30, 2018 at 1:45 pm #

          If you don’t have time to water, I’d suggest you set up a drip irrigation system and put it on a timer. Drip irrigation also saves a lot of water as none goes in the air to evaporate, and you don’t get weeds because you are only watering where the plants are.

          • Doc Holliday July 30, 2018 at 8:58 pm #

            Also, catch the condensate water from your HVAC system. You will get, typically, at least one full 5 gallon bucket per day, if not two. May reduce your water bill or, if you are on a well, reduce your electric bill, plus saves wear on the pump. It is not distilled water but the next closet type.

        • Farmer Joe July 30, 2018 at 3:07 pm #

          K-Dog,

          It is heat that is causing your lettuce to bolt. I don’t even bother with the stuff any more. Far easier to grow and far more lucrative are Siberian kale and Swiss chard. They will stay green through a Seattle winter no problem. You can eat fresh salad Christmas day. Also, if you want to get started on seed saving, both are easy to learn on. Siberian kale and zucchini are what taught me.

          • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 7:44 pm #

            Talking of things bolting, I once had some broccoli growing on my daughter’s allotment which bolted when we went on holiday, then flowered. I have simply never seen so many bees on anything in my entire life – they love it. I’ve left the allotment to my daughter and her family now (I was only clearing it and starting it off for them when their baby was born) but if I ever had the opportunity again I’d leave some broccoli just for the bees.

            Given the state our bee populations are in, it’s a pleasure to see them getting stuck in.

          • JustSaying July 31, 2018 at 10:11 am #

            Swiss chard is a great crop because it is cut and grow and does not attract bugs.

            Bad year for gardening because of too much rain and insufficient sunlight. But blueberries, asparagus, and cucumbers like this stuff. Miss my peppers, tomatoes and zucchini. Basil is not too good either.

            Will look into Russian fingerlings.

      • Q. Shtik July 30, 2018 at 3:45 pm #

        on the last day of July, I have no established garden – Paul

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

        It is perfectly obvious what your problem is…today, July 30, is NOT the last day of July. By tomorrow your garden will be so filled up you won’t know what to do with all the stuff.

  4. thenuttyneutron July 30, 2018 at 10:07 am #

    Life is a beach. I am in the process of selling my house on Lake Erie because I took a new job in the DFW area of Texas. That area sucks with 108 F days all last week. It will be interesting to see how the SW parts of the USA change once oil scarcity hits.

    I would rather be in Ohio than Texas when the final reversion to the mean occurs.

    • San Jose July 30, 2018 at 11:17 am #

      It takes just as much energy to heat a house as it does to cool it. Hence cooling from 108 F down to 75 takes as much energy as heating a house from 32 F to 65.

      One of the few advantages of living SF Bay Area is that it doesn’t require much heating or cooling.

      Jen in San Jose

      • Exscotticus July 30, 2018 at 9:00 pm #

        While that energy factoid may be true, cooling and dehumidifying has a technological dependency that heating does not.

      • Doc Holliday July 30, 2018 at 9:00 pm #

        Not quite, it takes about three times as much energy to cool the temperature one degree as it takes to raise it one degree.

    • zekesdad July 30, 2018 at 11:23 am #

      Look at it this way. Lake Erie is no doubt great during mild weather, but when the wind is howling in from Canada in February, it will be nice and warm(er) (usually) in Texas. I live there, and if things really do hit the fan it’s where I would want to be. We were a country once, and could be again if it came down to it. We have plenty of land to grow food, our own electrical grid, and plenty of oil and gas as well as wind farms to keep the a/c working. Finally, there are plenty of armed citizens and veterans to defend us.

      • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 3:55 pm #

        You’re at least half brown now – with the kids far more than half. And how many of this half support Mexico?

        • SpeedyBB August 2, 2018 at 11:45 am #

          Good question, Janos. There might be a question of divided loyalties before too long, particularly if Mexico takes advantage of severe political turmoil in the USA. And why shouldn’t it, considering what we’ve done to them since back when.

          I too believe Texas could stand alone, if only for its inherent meanness (not meaning “stingy”, just “mean”. That has social currency.)

  5. Dumbedup July 30, 2018 at 10:13 am #

    Demolition derby is an apt description – particularly of our highways – which have become a microcosm of 21st century America. Every time I travel I feel more and more like Mel Gibson. Cars careening down the highway weaving in and out of traffic at 90 mph with no regard for the safety of anyone. I’m thinking about buying an old truck, supercharge the engine and add metal plating and a 50 caliber machine gun and turret on the top.

    There is more to go with the Mueller investigation. There is a cover-up in progress and our President is lying through his teeth. Who can believe that his son didn’t bother to tell Candidate Trump that he was meeting with Russians who claimed to have dirt on Clinton. Trump supporters are the most gullible people I have ever met.

    Yet, there are good people everywhere. There is courage and devotion and compassion every day. There is little else to live for in this life except to encourage people to be kind, patient and tolerant of each other. The world will not end on those terms, but it can and will end if we continue to practice bigotry, hate, violence and tolerate lying and cheating.

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    • tahoe1780 July 30, 2018 at 10:35 am #

      Who can believe that the DNC didn’t bother to tell candidate Clinton that they were paying Steele/Russians who claimed they had dirt on Trump? As a registered Democrat, I’m disgusted with with both parties; the Deniers and the Hypocrites.

      • PeteAtomic July 30, 2018 at 10:50 am #

        I hope you didn’t give any money to the DNC. According to Donna Brazile, Wasserman-Schultz lost 25 million dollars. Well, it went to HRC, so– technically, it hasn’t been ‘lost’. Embezzled, maybe– but not lost, lol

        Let me rephrase that. I hope you weren’t voting for Sanders, and gave money to the DNC. That really woulda been a double whammy.

        • tahoe1780 July 30, 2018 at 11:34 am #

          Yeah, donated to Sanders and voted for Stein after the primary fraud. https://tinyurl.com/y98h7xnj

          “The DNC reportedly argued that the organization’s neutrality among Democratic campaigns during the primaries was merely a ‘political promise,’ and therefore it had no legal obligations to remain impartial throughout the process,”

          de MOCK racy

        • njguy73 July 30, 2018 at 2:10 pm #

          $25 million? That’s a relief. For a moment there I though you were talking about real money.

    • Paul July 30, 2018 at 11:26 am #

      Dumbedup: Well said. I took it to mean the end of the world will come if we, individually and collectively, fail to seek Justice, love mercy, and walk humbly. As for myself, I will continue to water these three tomato plants. . . and wish you well!

      • Dumbedup July 30, 2018 at 3:55 pm #

        Amen Paul. Amen!!

    • Dumbedup July 30, 2018 at 3:54 pm #

      You are a closet Trump supporter if you obfuscate when confronted with facts about Trump. Sure, they are all crooks and it does matter what the DNC did; but the DNC didn’t win the election. When accused of hypocrisy and lying it is not a defense to say, “they did it too.”

      • Exscotticus July 30, 2018 at 9:11 pm #

        >>> and it does matter what the DNC did

        Yes it does. And where are the searches? The arrests? The indictments?

        When we ignore crimes for which there is ample evidence to pursue wished-for crimes for which there is no evidence, then clearly this is not about justice, but politics.

        • Dumbedup July 31, 2018 at 9:06 am #

          Democrats should be held to the same standard and pay whatever price justice demands. But the defense that others did the same thing or worse is a political defense not a legal one. One that Trump supporters trot out every time more evidence comes to light.

          That dog is not going to hunt.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

            Actually, unequal treatment before the law *is* a defense. You’ve got ample evidence of Dems committing crimes, yet no searches, no arrests, no indictments—nothing. What can possibly constitute greater Russian collusion than facilitating the sale of uranium to them?!

          • Dumbedup July 31, 2018 at 6:50 pm #

            So let me get this straight. Trump can commit any crime and all he has to say is, “no Democrats were prosecuted”?

            I’ve been practicing law for over 30 years, and I can say with certainty that each defendant must answer for the crimes with which he or she is charged. It is not a defense to say that others did the same or worse and are not being prosecuted.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 7:39 pm #

            >>> I’ve been practicing law for over 30 years, and I can say with certainty that each defendant must answer for the crimes with which he or she is charged

            No one has proven that Trump has committed any crime at all.

            If you are indeed a lawyer, then you know that DA’s decide who to prosecute—not law enforcement. If you prove that a DA’s decisions are biased, if, for example, a DA lets all Dems walk and only pursues Republicans, then that’s an abuse of process and is absolutely a defense. It’s malicious prosecution.

            And that is what we’re dealing with now: a situation where there’s ample evidence of criminal activity on the part of Dems, related to the 2016 election, and no prosecution whatsoever.

            Even worse, Mueller’s entire appointment is based on a fake political dossier—a lie. That forms the basis of other legal defenses. For example, that dossier was used to obtain search warrants. That’s a fruit-of-the-poison tree defense.

            Finally, you don’t seem to understand that Trump is a sitting POTUS. A trial first requires an impeachment. The rules of evidence and potential defenses differ vastly from those used in courts. Most importanty: the public’s opinion matters. If the proceedings appear to be biased and political, as they have already been proven to be, then it’s unlikely legislators will vote to impeach and face the wrath of their Trump-supporting electorate at home. If you believe a Republican-controlled Congress is going to impeach Trump based on what we’ve seen so far, then you’re dillusional. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. Seek medical help!

            Mueller has about 100 days left to make something happen. After that, the midterms will change everything. If the “blue wave” fails to materialize, then Mueller is finished.

  6. pequiste July 30, 2018 at 10:22 am #

    My my, but aren’t we a tad gloomy, gloomy, gloomy here in the Dog Days of summer? Although I think the point about the Ixion’s Wheel of “reverse raysism” is, for me, the most bothersome aspect of the whole shooting match (and that small matter of the permanent state of War in South Asia.)

    As good a political stewardship as Baltimore? How about Camden N.J.? There or perhaps East St. Louis as exemplars of excellence in Democrat & Black government operations.

    I really think JHK could benefit from a little “summering” himself; perhaps at the invite of a well connected Wall Streeter, Washington K Streeter, or Hollyweirder. Think of the partying and repartee at some toney manse on a secluded grove in Virginia Hunt country, Aspen, or Lake Tahoe.

    The prospect of a little slap and tickle in the dunes makes for the very modern fantasy (reality) of everyone’s favourite voyeuristic and newsworthy (for media of all persuasions) activity: Surveillance State sex. Watch for the drone and muffle any squeals of delight if you can.

    • Ol' Scratch July 30, 2018 at 10:30 am #

      Two words: Sand fleas.

      • PeteAtomic July 30, 2018 at 10:35 am #

        don’t forget crabs 🙂

  7. Ol' Scratch July 30, 2018 at 10:26 am #

    Great post as usual, Jim. Regarding UBI and other tomfoolery, it’s funny that the one thing not on anyone’s agenda is increasing the tax rates on corporations, stock speculators and the hyper-wealthy so as to genuinely address wealth disparity, the one economic issue that absolutely must be addressed. Of course UBI doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in my place of getting passed, and it wouldn’t actually fix anything if it did due to its obvious inflationary aspects, but it’ll make an excellent election season talking point for the shaved tail Dems, which is its only true purpose in the first place.

    On the other hand, NFL training camps have opened now, which combined with the annual orgy of college and high school football festivities, should keep the masses placated until well into the New Year, foolish and largely ignored midterm elections notwithstanding. And so it is that our national hallucination will continue on a bit longer for as long as it’s humanly able, reality slowly crumbling beneath our feet, only noticeable by the few who are one by one added to the casualty list, as the “lucky” remaining few compensate by turning up the volume on their devices to drown out the wailing and gnashing of teeth all around them.

    • PeteAtomic July 30, 2018 at 10:53 am #

      If you really wanna make some money during UBI, start getting into rental properties. As soon as UBI passes, you jack those rents up a grand each a month.

      You don’t think the little people are gonna keep that money, do you?

      • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 11:20 am #

        Bingo Pete, individual home ownership is a dead man walking, certainly in the more urban places. Those who have been reeling in profits since ’08 have been buying, refurbishing and building rental units for years now. If you want a glimpse of the future, look to Europe, the US is going back to that model because the government can no longer get the amounts of cash that it needs from taxing real estate with individual incomes in the dumper and going nowhere but down.

  8. tractorguy July 30, 2018 at 10:31 am #

    Peak sexual confusion, indeed. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/07/30/canadian-man-legally-lists-gender-as-female-to-get-cheaper-car-insurance-report.html

    No different than Rachel Dolezal claiming she was black to get preferential treatment on college scholarships………

    • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 10:44 am #

      Rachel grew up with3 adopted black siblings.
      There is a reason as to why she mis identifies.

      • tractorguy July 30, 2018 at 10:47 am #

        It’s still wrong, and illegal to misrepresent yourself for monetary gain.

        • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 11:28 am #

          Men need to lobby their representatives to change the law if they feel hard done by – probably less demanding than, you know, just driving more safely.

          It used to be cheaper for women to get car insurance here too, on the basis that men do actually cost the insurance companies (proportionately) more in payouts for accidents. However, the European Court of Justice ruled that price discrimination based on gender breaches EU rules on equality. Equality legislation cuts both ways.

          Men under 25 are the worst offenders of all, but presumably now they’re subsidised by under-25 women, so they won’t need to worry about driving more responsibly quite yet.

          • elysianfield July 30, 2018 at 12:20 pm #

            Alba,
            There is on the BBC, this AM, an article describing your home town of Stockton. They were not complementary…and they said it “real loud”….

          • elysianfield July 30, 2018 at 12:21 pm #

            And…the link;

            https://www.bbc.com/news/health-44985650

          • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 12:46 pm #

            I saw it, EF, on the news and thought of you! I was going to mention it, since you’d said previously that it looked better than your Stockton.

            Worst life expectancy in the country I think they said (65 for men). We were lucky to live in one of the nicer bits. And my parents were non-smoking tee-totallers. AND my dad was lucky enough never to be unemployed.

            The area had a thriving steel industry back them, but places with steel industries always have their grim parts – which get even grimmer once the steel industry goes.

            But we were only a few miles away from the North York Moors – factories are not what I remember about living in the north east of England. Swings and roundabouts.

            But Stockton does have its claim to global fame from 1825:

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton_and_Darlington_Railway

            Anyway, my parents were delighted to be able to retire – albeit very modestly – back home in Alba and saw their days out 20 minutes’ walk from this chap’s birthplace:

            http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/biography.shtml

            Scotland’s Costa Geriatrica 🙂

          • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 12:51 pm #

            And Stockton was only an interlude in my life – age 4 to 18. I spent my early years a walk from the beach in Carnoustie, which even your Prez will have heard of. No steelworks there!

          • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 1:29 pm #

            Thanks for the link ef, it included a story that might interest our fellow commenter Mr. Hubbard questioning a potential gun problem in Canada:

            https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44959010

            I look forward to a reply from our buddy from the Great Northern Wastes on this one.

          • Elrond Hubbard July 30, 2018 at 2:51 pm #

            Careful what you wish for, Walter B – speak of the devil and his horns will appear. We gave the facts a workout, and some of the opinions as well, last week, you’ll recall. I’ll take everything that was said then as read.

            In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Greektown, Toronto’s city council passed a motion 41-4 to request the provincial and federal governments to ban sales of handguns and ammunition. This to me is a sign that the council’s hearts are in the right place, but it’s not a guarantee that the policies will have the desired effect — as our local paper points out, similar efforts have been made before, without success. Gun-related deaths in Canada remain stubbornly higher than the industrial-world norm (with the notable exception of the USA, which is an extreme outlier among wealthy countries in this regard). More than stepped-up enforcement by local police, there needs to be a serious commitment from senior levels of government to address the causes of gun violence nationwide, including the underlying socioeconomic conditions that create fertile ground for criminality.

          • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 3:11 pm #

            I was hoping you would respond my friend, thank you for not letting me down. We humans may consider ourselves intelligent, yet we consistently fail to be able to run a society without the same primitive problems faced by the Neanderthals. The advent or the removal of firearms will always have little effect upon how those elements that do not respect order or one another deal with one another. In the world of today, I will say once again, that as the hamster cage becomes more populated with hamsters and resources are competed for more aggressively, while the feces pile higher on the cage floor, violence will increase and not be curbed by any actions that we so impotently undertake.

          • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 4:37 pm #

            Likewise men work longer hours than women and deserve the higher positions that naturally accrue from doing so.

          • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 7:24 pm #

            It’s not the hours you put in, Janos, m’lad, it’s what you put in the hours.

          • Exscotticus July 30, 2018 at 9:27 pm #

            >>> including the underlying socioeconomic conditions that create fertile ground for criminality.

            Sure and why not throw in world peace while you’re at it.

            The number of DGUs in the USA far exceed the number of gun-related criminal homicides. Leverage your law-abiding citizens for the benefit of all! It’s the socialist thing to do.

          • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 8:06 am #

            By the way, elysianfield, they’re not being uncomplimentary about Stockton – they’re being uncomplimentary about inequality. The point is that most of Stockton is perfectly nice and a some of it is lovely – I can tell you that because I’ve driven a milk float round pretty much all of it. In the nice places people live up to 18 years longer than in the poor places. It’s a microcosm of a national problem, as the article points out. And since I lived there, the nice places are wealthier and the poorer places are poorer, which is the point. And some of the people in the poor places can’t afford a decent place to live, while some of the people in the wealthier places have leveraged their wealth to buy more houses so that they can take advantage of the people who can’t afford to buy even one house. ‘For unto him that hath shall be given…’

            Poor people are more likely to have bad habits, partly because they lack the self-esteem that comes with having a respected place in society. They know no-one’s looking at them in a sharp suit or a slinky skirt, so they don’t have the same stake in the everyday beauty contest as do life’s winners. But they need to take some responsibility too, no matter how depressing their lives are (and they are).

            However, one thing I’m pretty sure of is that if the people in that article had been black, you’d have taken the trouble to point out that the dying 46-year-old smoked all his like and is leaving eight children behind. But you didn’t. Neither did anyone else.

            The north of England is way more friendly than the moneyed south, if you’re interested – it’s always been like that, before and after the foundries, factories and shipyards. If poor Rob here collapsed in the street in some places down south, they’d step over him.

          • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 8:09 am #

            …all his life…

          • Elrond Hubbard July 31, 2018 at 10:05 am #

            Walter B: “The advent or the removal of firearms will always have little effect upon how those elements that do not respect order or one another deal with one another.”

            That’s where we differ, Walter B, since to me at least it seems clear that the presence or absence of guns makes a big difference. For one thing, the line between those who respect order and/or other people, and those who don’t, isn’t as wide or as distinct as we like to think. We’re all capable of bad actions under the right (wrong) circumstances. It only takes a moment to earn a lifetime of regret and recrimination, especially when the means are always close at hand. How often is today’s killer just yesterday’s guy having a bad day?

            What’s more, if you’re not using poison or some other coward’s weapon, then killing entails effort, skill, and/or some measure of personal risk. Having a gun lowers the bar on all three counts. Meanwhile, you’ve heard about the boiling frog? Well, a way of life that insists on making the means to commit homicide as widely available as possible is one that insists on boiling itself. The more guns, the more opportunity, the more deaths: QED.

            My point of view, as I’ve said before, is to turn the temperature down. It works pretty much everywhere it’s tried — people are no more and no less likely to be victims of crime; they’re just less likely to die by the gun, and thus less likely to die overall. Most of the time, people are actually safer than they feel to begin with. FWIW, Walter.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 11:22 am #

            >>> if you’re not using poison or some other coward’s weapon

            So you’re going to tell rape victims that if they use guns to protect themselves, they’re cowards?!

            So a 45 kg woman is a coward for using a gun to protect herself from a 100 kg man?

            >>> The more guns, the more opportunity, the more deaths: QED.

            Totally specious logic, because laws only reduce the availability of guns for the law-abiding.

            No law stops criminals from obtaining and using firearms or any other weapon you try to criminalize. Currently in the UK and China, knives are the weapon of choice. And knives have proven themselves to be just as lethal.

            Totally specious, because making it unlawful for law-abiding citizens to meaningfully protect themselves and others from harm will increase harm—not decrease it.

          • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 11:29 am #

            Yes Elrond, we are both entitled to our opinions and for sure, and at least here in America, we are supposedly guaranteed to be free to express them as well. What has always bothered me and bothers me still is when foreigners think that they have a right to tell people who live in other countries how they should run their countries. It is especially bothersome when people from places that bowed down to the divine rights of kings and queens (and still do) give us grief here in the states about the way this nation was set up in the first place. Americans understood that in time the every government gets so corrupt that eventually it takes away all of your rights, all of your stuff and then your lives as well. THAT was and remains the cornerstone of the 2nd amendment. Countries that still love their royalty and are happy to subsidize their exorbitant lifestyles and that trust their “benevolent” rulers to care for their every need are fine by me and I will not comment on how they should conduct their business. Do what you will, I prefer to be here. Good luck with your new laws, I am sure they will protect you much better, after all every problem can be solved with the right words on paper, right?

          • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 11:36 am #

            “My point of view, as I’ve said before”

            Elrond,
            We can only agree to disagree. However, I would like to ask you an honest question; What did you do for a living? What “life experience” do you bring to the table? For me, personally, and no doubt others on the site, to give credence to your point of view, it might provide an understanding of how your point of view was formulated.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 11:51 am #

            >>> What has always bothered me and bothers me still is when foreigners think that they have a right to tell people who live in other countries how they should run their countries.

            That doesn’t bother me at all!

            What bothers me is when foreigners from failed cultures come to our country with their failed cultures in tow, and then try to replace our successful culture with their loser ones. This is known as: multiculturalism.

            Multiculturalism posits that all cultures are equally valuable and deserving of merit, when everything in our experience tells us otherwise.

          • Elrond Hubbard July 31, 2018 at 4:29 pm #

            Exscotticus: “So you’re going to tell rape victims that if they use guns to protect themselves, they’re cowards?!”

            This, in the parlance of our times, is an example of someone being triggered — a visceral response that short-circuits debate. No, Ex, I’m not going to say that to rape victims.

            What I am saying is, stop and think ahead. This has been studied, and we have numbers. When you add a gun to your household — or, I presume, to your person — you increase the likelihood of hurting yourself with it, or having it used against you, more than you increase the likelihood of using it to defend yourself. This is true in the same way that buying a lottery ticket, or going to Las Vegas, is more likely to enrich the lottery or the casinos than it is to enrich you. That’s why gambling is universally recognized as a bad retirement plan.

            The grasshopper did what he wanted to do, shortsightedly. If he felt afraid, he went out and got something to make him feel less afraid, in the moment. The ants, meanwhile, paid attention and thought rigorously about their future needs. Then they went ahead and did what they needed to do to secure those needs realistically. We all know how that story worked out. Same deal.

          • Elrond Hubbard July 31, 2018 at 4:52 pm #

            elysianfield: I’m a big ol’ nerd, and I have mostly worked at nerd jobs. If I could handle stress better, I likely would have finished grad school and ended up a professor of something or other. Hardly surprising testimony, I’m sure you’ll agree. (Just because Janos is a jackass with a garbage worldview, that doesn’t mean he was wrong when he pegged me as a ‘commissar type‘.)

            There’s merit in your point about ‘life experience’ to this extent: you have to be realistic about people. On the other hand, if there’s one thing that’s clear about human beings it’s that we’re unreliable narrators of our own experience. We tell ourselves comforting stories all the time! The most valuable thing I took away from my education — and from a few personal experiences — was that I came away with the tools to fight my own inclination to believe what I want to believe, and to adjust myself to the facts instead. That, and I never became part of the privileged class that gets to ignore the lives of working people, since I’m a working person myself.

            Last week you wrote about the difference between hands-on observation versus sterile statistics. Actually, I think you could do with learning a bit more respect for statistics, since (as I see it) “sterile” means “don’t provide the emotional satisfaction I crave”. To me, plain truth, however boring, is a higher value than satisfying my expectations. We should all know how to adjust our expectations when they’re knocked down by even the puniest fact.

          • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 5:07 pm #

            >>> This, in the parlance of our times, is an example of someone being triggered

            No, this is *me* holding *you* accountable for your words and proscriptions. I believe you when you say that you wouldn’t tell a rape victim that she can’t have a gun. I also believe that you will vote to do just that. You don’t have the courage to tell rape victims: “Being defenseless is for your own good. The stats told me so!”

            >>> When you add a gun to your household — or, I presume, to your person — you increase the likelihood of hurting yourself with it, or having it used against you, more than you increase the likelihood of using it to defend yourself.

            Fake news stat. Show the links. Show the research.

            The USA “numbers” show that there are far more DGUs than gun-related criminal homicides. That contradicts your assertion. It shows that people are not shooting themselves with their own guns, but using them to defend themselves or others.

          • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 7:16 pm #

            Elrond,
            I was not trying to put you on the spot regarding your work history…any and every vocation provides specific knowledge that can be considered valuable by others. In the famous George C. Scott soliloquy mentioning “,,,I shoveled shit in Louisiana”, there would be information regarding shovels and technique…all of some value. I do not demean any vocation, and consider knowledge gleaned from personal experience, mine or others, valuable.

            I also attended Grad School, and am familiar with statistics, their use and the weaponization thereof. I understand your point of self-aggrandizement. There are those, however, who are self-effacing, and likewise those with a clear eye of observation. I would like to think (as would we all) that I find myself in the last category…having my undergraduate education completed before any work history intruded.

          • Janos Skorenzy August 1, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

            Elrond: Oh that’s interesting. Before you dismissed my label of commissar with disdain. But now you accept it. I expect you do things like this a lot – all depending on your mood and who you’re talking to.

            Your education taught you to deny yourself in favor of the Truth? That’s exactly what it didn’t do. On the contrary, it taught you to hide from yourself and gave you the weapons to inflict your fantasies on the world. That’s what a commissar does after all. Just to jog your memory: you admitted before that the “narrative” was your all in all because it can change the world. Understanding it isn’t a high priority – you think you already do. And you probably thought that way in junior high school and you probably believe the same things now that you did then. You’re a David Hogg type but without his insane public self confidence.

            Environmentalism is all about limits, is it not? And in physical space, that means borders. Yet the immigration policies you endorse for the West is the absolute negation of limits and borders. Your narrative denies your metaphysic. You are a House divided against itself and you will not stand.

    • San Jose July 30, 2018 at 11:20 am #

      Or Elizabeth Warren, aka Pocahontas, claiming Native American heritage!

  9. PeteAtomic July 30, 2018 at 10:34 am #

    I think you’ve described the current American milieu quite well here Jim– a nation marinating & moldering in its own delusions, like a sweaty lunatic in thrall of some psychosis while flopping & straining against his leather restraints.

  10. hmuller July 30, 2018 at 10:37 am #

    “When women and people-of-color fill all the seats in congress we can look forward to the glorious day when the USA is run as well as Baltimore.” -JHK

    Very ballsy Mr K., A comment like that is bound to release the dogs of P.C. If you had your own sitcom, they would rip it from you for remarks like that.

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    • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 10:40 am #

      Indeed – Jim is hanging it out there – saying That What Shall Not Be Said.

      It’s the heat – Upstate New York in the New Summer of our dreadful time can do that to a fellow.

    • PeteAtomic July 30, 2018 at 10:46 am #

      Yeah, dynamite. That oughta stir the reactionaries quite a bit.

      I can’t wait for one poster in particular to argue that Baltimore is a wonderful, working city.

    • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 2:08 pm #

      Our host’s remark may easily be taken as offensive by some, but hiring or electing people based on race or gender is pathetic and racist and that is a fact . We have many organizations in my state that jumped into what they called “affirmative action” policies that specifically aimed at filling job openings with specific race and gender individuals, rather than on which applicants were the most qualified to do the job. It has led to placing many of the wrong individuals in positions where they are not doing what they are supposed to do properly and are costing the taxpayers many millions of dollars and sometime even lead to the loss of lives. I cannot see how such practices are even remotely acceptable.

    • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 4:41 pm #

      He has chosen sanity – and Life. Whites create prosperous cultures and most other groups do not. Why? High IQ and high Trust. Obviously we’re not doing so well now either since our Government has turned against us and many are being influenced by the alien cultures that are swarming in, supported by the same traitorous Government.

  11. akmofo July 30, 2018 at 10:47 am #

    I wrote this last week in reply to messianicdruid’s nazi trolling:

    “The issue with you is that you’re propagandized by deliberate Vatican/Roman lies deliberate misrepresentations and deliberate concealment of truth and of history. So that anything that contradicts the fake Vatican/Roman propaganda narrative, automatically elicits a hostile emotional reaction in you. The hostility is palpable even across the interweb. The reaction is classic pavlovian conditioning. The same Vatican/Nazi nonsense that we constantly see in Janos.”

    With a little editing the same basic diagnosis applies to the general condition in the US that James describes:

    The issue with the US is that it is propagandized by deliberate Vatican/Roman lies deliberate misrepresentations and deliberate concealment of truth and history. So that anything that contradicts the fake Vatican/Roman propaganda narrative, automatically elicits an emotional reaction of denial. The denial is palpable across the land. The reaction is classic pavlovian conditioning. The same Vatican/Nazi nonsense that we constantly see in US politicians.

    To that I will add that until the US starts dealing with reality truthfully, NOTHING will be addressed truthfully at its root. NOTHING, from poison “medicine”, poison phood, poison water, poison air, poisoned chemtrail weather, poison finances, poison politics, poisoned existence by weaponized Vatican/CIA institutions and culture.

    • tahoe1780 July 30, 2018 at 10:59 am #

      Its just business. https://tinyurl.com/yb2f3587

    • messianicdruid July 30, 2018 at 1:22 pm #

      I went and looked at what got you so upset. Is this it?

      “I see more problems resulting from the assumption that everyone is the same [ all balls are round ] than I do from accepting the fact that everyone is different.”

      To which you replied, “Bullshit! Nobody said we are the same. What was said is that we are related. Closely related. And that is a good thing!”

      Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, David and Absolom, were much more “closely related” than the Russians and the Judahites. What went wrong?

      • akmofo July 30, 2018 at 2:31 pm #

        What went wrong? Greed, envy, jealousy, desire to dominate over others. In other words, the things the TaNaKh tries to warn us the consequences of, and which THE NEW ROMAN COVENANT does its best to ignore and even more maliciously, legitimize as the unquestionable will of God-Caesar and his gov mafia.

        • messianicdruid July 30, 2018 at 4:30 pm #

          It seems that [ even ] being the same family is no guarantee of agreement; geneology is chance, following Spirit is a choice.

          Since I haven’t read the NRC, would you quote a couple verses that illustrate the reproof of “… my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”

          • akmofo July 30, 2018 at 7:38 pm #

            Following God-Caesar was not a choice, it was mandated by the Roman state! Those that resisted were humiliated mutilated mass murdered and their homeland destroyed.

            The passage you referenced is from Isaiah 56:7

            Correctly translated:
            “..my house the house of prayer will call to all nations”

            I’ve been saying the same to Yan. Step away from the darkness and into the path of light of YeHeVeH. Learn the Hebrew language. The TaNaKh is calling you.

          • messianicdruid July 30, 2018 at 8:08 pm #

            You seem to have me confused with someone else.

            I wasn’t asking for a correct translation. I was asking for something from your alleged New Roman Covenant which contradicted the verse in Isaiah.

            You can ask anyone around here – I have been promoting a return to God’s Law since day one [ now several years past ], so I don’t understand where you come up with the “nazi trolling” horse puckey.

          • akmofo July 30, 2018 at 8:59 pm #

            What you wrote is a lie. It is typical of Vatican/Roman misrepresentation of what is written. That’s the contradiction!

            As I made clear, it’s not “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations” but rather “my house the house of prayer will call to all nations”. That’s a big difference! The subtlety might be too much for you to grasp, but again, I made it clear for you: the TaNaKh is calling you. That’s all it does! Compare that what the Romans did to the Druids and others when they refused God-Caesar, nevermind the depravity lies theft slavery feudalism barbarism and genocidal imperialism that God-Caesar and Rome represent.

          • messianicdruid July 31, 2018 at 1:08 pm #

            You know, I’m really tired of being asked to defend denominationalism, or any other ism. As I said before:

            “You seem to have me confused with someone else.

            I wasn’t asking for a correct translation. I was asking for something from your alleged New Roman Covenant which contradicted the verse in Isaiah.”

            The subtlety of the verse is your interpretation. What I was trying to illustrate is God is calling ALL people to repentance, and ALL are welcome. This does away with your allegation of “nazi trolling”.

            I fully understand that “the way” was subverted by evil men and
            we must be aware that many false spirits have gone out into the world.

          • akmofo July 31, 2018 at 2:52 pm #

            Again, you insert Roman lies. God is not about repentance. That’s Romanism. And we already know what’s that all about. YeHeVeH is about something altogether different. But that’s neither here nor there. That wasn’t what you were nazi trolling me about.

            What you were nazi trolling me about concerns my assertion that Jews/Hebrews and many europeans both eastern europeans (particularly Russians) and western europeans (particularly Danes, Scots, Welsh, Irish) are closely related. That somehow offended you. Of-course, if I said “whites” are closely related that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow from you, nor would you have bothered to comment. So stop with the bullshit about you being “really tired of being asked to defend denominationalism”.

          • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 3:51 pm #

            In the Old Testament, descent is from the Father. In modern Judaism, it’s from the Mother. What happened? It seems that Ancient Israel consisted of different people than modern Israel does. And even the Jewish Encyclopedia admits that Edom is part of the Jewish people now, plus the Khazars, etc.

            Edom! The Patriarchs are rolling in their graves at the outrage.

          • akmofo July 31, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

            Edom was in what today is known as Jordan. In ancient times most of the area of Jordan belonged to the Israeli tribes of Menashe Reuven and Gad. The extreme most southern part of Jordan and parts of Saudia is where the Arabs lived and that’s what the TaNaKh refers to as Edom. Further south is Median (Saudia). Moses’ wife, Tzipporah, was a Midianite Bedouin Arab.

            The name Edom is derived from Hebrew word Adom, meaning red, and it’s characteric of the red mountains in that area. So Edomites are basically Arabs. Some in Roman times became “Jewish”, with the most famous of these Edomite Jews being King Herod.

            As far as being part of the Jewish people, I’d say they are. The remnants of the Edomites and Medianites are the Bedouins. There is a huge population of these living in Israel now, and they are fully Israeli. If they were good enough for Moses to marry, they are good enough to be Israelis. Your Vatican Rabbis can go fsck themselves.

          • messianicdruid August 1, 2018 at 9:48 am #

            “I’ve been saying the same to Yan.”

            That is the problem. You are treating us the same, I am different.

            “What you were nazi trolling me about concerns my assertion that Jews/Hebrews and many europeans both eastern europeans (particularly Russians) and western europeans (particularly Danes, Scots, Welsh, Irish) are closely related.”

            I have been researching this for twenty years. The Ten Tribes escaped Assyrian captivity and traveled north and west, lost their identity, and were eventually scattered among the Gentiles [ nations ]. The original inhabitants of “the isles” called them caucausians because this is the direction they came from.

            The Russians, Danes, Scots, Welsh, Irish etc. are white people, so why would that offend me? Even though they are related, each group has developed unique characteristics which should be recognized.

            It is impossible for Israelis to fulfill the prophecies given to the Ten Tribes of Israel. They took the name “Israel” to fool the church, when the should have called their nation Judah.

          • akmofo August 1, 2018 at 1:49 pm #

            It offends you because like Yan you don’t consider Jews in that category.

            As to the fate of the TenTribes, the majority escaped Israel long before Ashur’s military arrived. Many escaped by boat to various Hebrew trading colonies throughout the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic coast, and the Red Sea coast of Saudia Egypt and Ethiopia. The rest made their way by land, north and east through the Caucasus mountains to the steppes of Russia and the Danube river where they merged with the Scythian empire.

            The Israelites that suffered Ashur’s captivity, made their way to Afghanistan and from there some went to China, some to India.

            https://youtu.be/kmp8s-Ir5hM

          • Janos Skorenzy August 1, 2018 at 2:07 pm #

            Messianic is part American Indian, apparently. And he does not really have the best interests of the White Race at heart. He seems to regret that we conquered this continent and took it away from his people.

            I read one interesting theory. The Incas conquered a mountain people who were White. And indeed, the Conquistadores describe the Inca nobility as almost as White as themselves. So they must have killed the men and taken the women. One guy thought that this people were Carthaginian/Celtic refugees. Both maritime peoples, an armada fled Europe and North Africa once it became clear that Rome was going to triumph. They sailed up the Amazon until finally settling in high in the mountains, above the dangerous Indian tribes.

          • messianicdruid August 1, 2018 at 4:03 pm #

            “It offends you because like Yan you don’t consider Jews in that category.”

            I’m not offended at all. I am wondering what j-e-w-s you are talking about. Judaism is a religion with converts from many ethnicities, so of course some are white.

            I am still curious about your “New Roman Covenant”.

            “Messianic is part American Indian, apparently. And he does not really have the best interests of the White Race at heart. He seems to regret that we conquered this continent and took it away from his people.”

            I am ashamed of my people for making treaties with the former stewards of this beautiful continent, only to break them over and over. We are only as good as our word.

            I have the best interests of ALL people at heart. The only way I see to accomplish this is for all people to acknowledge the Prince of Peace and to commit themselves to His rulership.

            The Kingdom of God is a form of government, not a religion.

          • akmofo August 1, 2018 at 9:09 pm #

            There are not many converts to Judaism and never were. Again you peddle lies. Judaism is unique in that it is anti-imperialist and is particular to a particular ethnic group. Jews from different parts of the world look different because the basic premise of nazi racist theory is false. If you take iconic looking “White Europeans” and place them in India for example, after long enough they will look “Indian”.

            Jews share the same genetics, that’s been proven by genetic tests. Depending on where they are from, the expression of these genes will differ. Thus you have the multi national and multi “racial” diversity that you do in Israel, where you had the ingathering of Jews from all over the world.

            Christianity is a hoax created by the Romans. It is state spawned and sponsored psyops by the Flavius Imperial Roman family. The Father Son and Holy Ghost are Vespasian Titus and Domitian. That’s who you are worshipping, only you’re too stupid to know and understand this. Christianity was meant to entrap Jews into worshiping God-Caesar, instead it entraped Romans into ignorance and feudalism.

            If you are sincere in wanting to know god’s way in governance, study the way the Hebrews governed themselves during the time of the Judges, and prior the curse of kingship that they brought on themselves by copying others.

          • messianicdruid August 2, 2018 at 10:19 am #

            “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

          • akmofo August 2, 2018 at 10:37 am #

            Right, and this was supposedly scribed by poor local Judean fisherman from Galilee (likely illiterate) who history records were the fiercest of the anti-Roman resistance and who spoke Hebrew but somehow scribed this nonsense in GREEK. You are a moron.

          • messianicdruid August 2, 2018 at 12:58 pm #

            Go read Jeremiah 31. Are you still waiting?

          • akmofo August 2, 2018 at 1:49 pm #

            Not just GREEK
            but PERFECT LITERARY GREEK !!

            And these poor Judean fisherman scribed this sophisticated greek literature on rolls and rolls of parchment that they could never afford to buy even if they lived a thousand years and saved every shekel they ever earned. Of-course, if you believe in a bleeding shiting and peeing man-god that resurrected himself from the dead, you’ll believe anything.

            As I said, you are moron.

          • messianicdruid August 2, 2018 at 4:05 pm #

            “Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: From which some having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; Desiring to be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm.”

          • akmofo August 2, 2018 at 6:49 pm #

            Pardon me English. You is moron.

          • akmofo August 2, 2018 at 7:00 pm #

            Me wonders if them poor Hebrew fisherman from Lake Galilee, them super gifted scribes, did they make a single spelling error or grammar error or any error at all in their scribing hundreds and hundreds of pages of ROMAN PROPAGANDA in GREEK? What to say you is moron? Is this another miracle performed by man-god-resurrected-Caesar?

          • messianicdruid August 2, 2018 at 7:32 pm #

            “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.”

  12. George July 30, 2018 at 10:49 am #

    “The buzzword harkening to Democratic Party big dawgs on the Hampton lawns and the briny bluffs of Martha’s Vineyard is Universal Basic Income, the suddenly amazing proposal to put the whole country on welfare. I’m all for it — as long as we can get the Martians to pay for it.}

    Meanwhile, the catalytic financial events that will mark capitalism’s end state (that being a crisis from which there can be no recovery) loom ever closer. The air is already hissing from the overinflated asset bubbles and soon the gashes in those bubbles will rip wider than even Martian Q.E. can fix.

    • shotho July 30, 2018 at 11:53 am #

      There’s always a recovery – always. May take a long while and life might not be worth very much in the meantime, but the strong and clever will always rebuild.

      • George July 31, 2018 at 10:30 am #

        Of course there’s always recovery but not in the generalized sense that occurred after the depression or the more recent ultra-slow faux recovery after the 2008 events. The analogy I like is the one where a second table cloth is draped over a formally set table so it won’t dust up. The second table cloth then makes the table resemble a circus big top where the highest points occur over the candelabras while at other points the second table cloth is in contact with the actual table cloth. Analogously speaking, the gap between the two table cloths is the “space” where civilization may thrive, the most near the candelabras and dystopia where the two table cloths are in contact. The point: there will some recovery but most will be obliged to endure dystopia.

        Add to this that the context of this next crash is a global environmental degradation which is mistakenly termed climate change in the US as there have yet to be any noticeable changes to our agricultural base. This has occurred before: the Dust Bowl when farmers employed unsustainable agricultural practices in Oklahoma. In sub-Saharan Africa tens of millions have been displaced by a wicked combination of overpopulation and environmental degradation. Within a decade those tens of millions could swell to hundreds of millions. Ditto in Central American where, after a century of overturning governments that wouldn’t cotton up to what the Mafia-owned fruit companies wanted, there’s ineffective governance.

        If nothing can be grown on agricultural land it’s worthless. If overfishing and the introduction of toxic chemicals kill the oceans, they’re rendered worthless. The point: for all practical purposes, environmental degradation is making the whole planet worthless!

        Worthless that is to an economy based on international trade and klepto-finance. That set of tightly intertwined relationships will cease to exist so quickly windows could break from the accompanying sonic booms!

        And what will be left for humankind? A few pockets of isolated civilization and for most: dystopia.

        Gaia will get along just fine.

    • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 1:31 pm #

      In lieu of Aliens, how about asian and Belgian bomb, I mean BonD holders?

  13. wm5135 July 30, 2018 at 11:07 am #

    Will the furtive romance in the dunes end in PE or impotence? Enquiring minds want to know.

    The disgust has turned to nausea. “The public appears to be good and goddamn sick of him.” The boss has a finger on the pulse again this week.

  14. Walter B July 30, 2018 at 11:13 am #

    Wow, Jim what a blast, I love it! August may be the month that the Europeans close shop and migrate to the beaches, but if I recall properly, Americans, at least those neurotic, dopey white ones, take far less time off than anybody else on the planet. With the week or two it takes to prep at your employment before you take off and the two weeks it takes to recover once you return, is it really worth it? Not to mention that if you leave for a week, will you even have a job when you try to come back? I know many that send the wife (or domestic partners) off to the beach and visit them once or twice.

    Are humans really destined to transcend human status or will they instead degrade from it into more primitive, tribal beings dancing around in their sandals and baggy sort-of-shorts screaming Trump sucks, Trump sucks, Trump sucks? You and I both understand that without boundaries there is no order, no discipline and the result can be nothing other than chaos. But then, that is the plan, is it not?

    I am not so certain that the reverse racism, or the assault on Whitey is not in actuality, a movement towards genocide of the urban blacks as they are shipped out to the hinterlands to be dealt with so that places like Harlem and the Bowery can be converted into multi-million dollar condos. Replacing them with unofficial aliens who tow the line lest they be “deported” are a far better low income, and more docile cheap labor force. Gotta keep those fancy lawns well manicured at the lowest cost.

    The idea of UBI is more compelling evidence that the dumbing down of the population is working like a charm. Throw the fools a bit of poverty level “free money” and they will forget that they are actually being paid to stay poor and therefore subservient. It worked well for welfare didn’t it? And with each of these handout systems, there is plenty of cash to dole out at the top to your Skull & Bones frat brothers.

    So lash yourself to the mast captain and forgo the wax in your ears so that you, and some of us as well, may hear the siren’s song and not dive over the side as we pass. It remains a shame, unfortunately that we cannot plug the holes in the crew’s heads for surely they are hell bent on steering the ship onto the rocks in any case aren’t they? Perhaps overboard would be the smart move.

    • Eoin July 30, 2018 at 12:12 pm #

      But I with my sharp sword cut into small bits a great round cake of wax, and kneaded it with my strong hands, [175] and soon the wax grew warm, forced by the strong pressure and the rays of the lord Helios Hyperion.3 Then I anointed with this the ears of all my comrades in turn; and they bound me in the ship hand and foot, upright in the step of the mast, and made the ropes fast at the ends to the mast itself; [180] and themselves sitting down smote the grey sea with their oars. But when we were as far distant as a man can make himself heard when he shouts, driving swiftly on our way, the Sirens failed not to note the swift ship as it drew near, and they raised their clear-toned song: “‘Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Kunstler, great Scribe of Washington County, and the Achaeans, and free-thinkers everywhere; [185] stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy , Albany, and D.C.[190] the Argives and Trojans and fair-minded citizens endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth, and deep in the State.’ “So they spoke, sending forth their beautiful voice, and my heart was fain to listen, and I bade my comrades loose me, nodding to them with my brows; but they fell to their oars and rowed on. [195] And presently Janos and K-Dog arose and bound me with yet more bonds and drew them tighter. But when they had rowed past the Sirens, and we could no more hear their voice or their song, then straightway my trusty comrades took away the [200] wax with which I had anointed their ears and loosed me from my bonds.
      Odyssey-Book XII reprise.

      • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 12:30 pm #

        Always a pleasure to see those who appreciate the classics though we studied the Odyssey in Latin. Much easier to get through in English, thank you, well done.

        • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 11:45 am #

          Walter,
          It is a fact that I took the Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Course in 1964…had to borrow money to do so. I read the Odyssey also…speed read it, as a matter of fact.

          …It was about a guy on an adventure…as I recall….

    • Bill7 July 30, 2018 at 1:55 pm #

      The scenario you’ve outlined in the third paragraph makes much
      sense to me: virtue-signaling from the Few, while they carry out
      what they claim to be decrying…

      • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 2:19 pm #

        Yes, Bill, I was made aware of this during a recent stay in a large NJ city where this approach has been ongoing for a number of years now. Just as the “Look out for Russia” campaign masks the “China is sneaking in the back door”, distraction is the first element of deception.

    • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 4:51 pm #

      You are still failing to see the situation: there have never been enough jobs and there will be far fewer in the future. There is no other solution – except genocide. Remember after the Great War, the Morgenthau Plan called for Germany to be turned into an “agricultural state”. In other words, they planned to kill the vast majority of the German population. Eisenhower had already started with his death camps for German POWs.

      All the more reason to convert to National Socialism before UBI becomes absolutely necessary. We’ll be able to trust our Government more when it is indeed, OUR Government again.

      • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 5:56 pm #

        Oh I understand that Janos, of course there can never be enough jobs for the economies of the world have always been designed around infinite growth as our host often reminds us. The genocide that is required to counteract the failure of these economies to do the job has been accomplished in the past by ever larger war. Unfortunately for those who rule, the war that is now needed is far too dangerous and destructive to even start. The attempts to kill off many here and many there is not cutting it, we are still increasing in numbers. What demented plan will they implement next to accomplish the desperate goal that they need to achieve? A multi faceted, many directions of assault effort upon humanity? I do not think that this will work either, though apparently they are still trying. In the end they are going to have to go BIG to get it done and I think they will. When is one question and will prophecy be fulfilled in that course of action, if you know what I mean is another. Interesting, very interesting…..

  15. draupnir July 30, 2018 at 11:18 am #

    The title of the post puts me in mind of that old movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner waiting with the population of Australia for the radiation clouds from WWIII to arrive on the shores and deliver a slow and terrible death. They wisely choose to have a final big party, defiantly sing a rousing refrain of Waltzing Matilda, and then line up in their Sunday best to receive their suicide pills. The first time I saw it I couldn’t tear my eyes away and was appalled, knowing how helpless the population of the earth is to prevent a few people in power from initiating such a thing..

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    • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 11:21 am #

      Yes, ‘On the Beach’ – back when you could make a serious film about adult topics.

      Along this same line is Sidney Lumet’s incredible ‘Failsafe’ – released the same year as Dr. Stranglelove but with a far different approach on the topic of the End.

      • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 11:42 am #

        I remember reading Shute’s novel in my younger days. For the real deal, though, you need to watch Threads:

        https://www.amazon.com/Threads-Karen-Meagher/dp/B079MDZD51/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1532965106&sr=8-1&keywords=threads

        • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 11:58 am #

          Remastered version available:

          https://www.amazon.co.uk/Threads-Special-Exclusive-Remastered-2018/dp/B079FGSY8Z/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1532965699&sr=1-1&keywords=threads+dvd

          …but only in the UK. Presumably someone thinks we need a timely reminder. This should be shown in schools to all over 15s. So that when people blithely use the sick phrase ‘nuke ’em” they know what they’re saying. This gives a different perspective from the one you get playing war games with joy sticks from 2000 miles away.

          I’ve just bought the remastered edition as a reminder – not sure if I saw the whole thing when it was on the BBC. But I remember how short a time it was before even basic language started to decompose.

          Q wouldn’t have liked it.

          People with suicide pills would have been the luckiest ones on earth.

          • GreenAlba July 30, 2018 at 12:15 pm #

            New version (and Blu-ray) seems to be available in US too.

            Not exactly holiday viewing, obviously.

          • Elrond Hubbard July 30, 2018 at 2:59 pm #

            They showed Threads to us when I was a youngster at school — I don’t remember how old exactly, but I think early high school (i.e. when I was 14-15 or thereabouts). Time has dimmed my memories, but I have an impression of it being quite a bit more uncompromising in depicting especially the long-term effects of nuclear warfare than the American-produced equivalent, The Day After.

            I particularly remember the scavenging kids who grew up in the aftermath, and their unintelligible speech — as you seem to, GreenAlba. In any case, with the U.S.’s political class apparently going bananas with anti-Russian revive-the-Cold-War hysteria, I agree that now would be an excellent time for a refresher.

          • draupnir July 30, 2018 at 3:34 pm #

            I think I saw that years ago and what remains in my memory is the orphaned daughter of one of the survivors working with others in a field trying to fight off a plague of locusts with burlap sacks, getting gang raped in a barn, dragging herself to a midwife in labor and screaming when she was shown what she delivered.

            I actually prefer this outcome to the outcome of On the Beach. I can accept the thought of being personally wiped out with all of my line, and I can accept the thought of a second dark age, as in A Canticle of Leibowitz, but I shy from contemplating the extinction of the human species.

  16. sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 11:20 am #

    i am summering here in my home town, Des Moines, Iowa (the sprawl caipital of the world), where the weather in August is usually near-perfect–warm days and cool nights. Weather, in fact, that’s much like what people in Europe could have been enjoying in August 1914 if they had not been embarking on the first World War.

    In August 2014, I finished reading Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. If you haven’t already I suggest you all read that book in the month that is approaching. The book is like a time machine, and the weather in August will let you visualize even more clearly what it was like to be there, though safe in your home or beach chair.

    I am utterly amazed at the total disregard for history shown by Americans as we have let slip by without note the 100th anniversaries of cataclysmic battles like the Somme and Verdun.

    • sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 11:43 am #

      caipital {capital}
      ============
      Des Moines, Iowa is the sprawl capital of the world because the land here is the best in the world, and urban sprawl is destroying it.

      In the 1961-62 school year our 7th-grade geography teacher told the class, “The richest square mile on earth is just north of Des Moines.” He was not talking about land rich in gold, or diamonds, or oil. He was talking about rich farmland. That land, if it is still in farms, is now threatened with “development” into strip malls, or chip-board housing, or, maybe, a data center.

      The above explanation, which I have stated before in various ways, is for those new to this comment section.

      • K-Dog July 30, 2018 at 12:07 pm #

        A square mile in Iowa now has a Sisyphean task. US population is at 326,955,688. Of a square mile in Iowa your share of corn syrup from that eroding ancient prairie comes from a square only 3 and a half inches on a side. Your part of a square mile.

        Photosynthesis being a few percent efficient over a growing season should be able to produce at least a drop or two on that much area. Enough for you to taste and to provide enough energy to type out something about as long as my comment here.

        • sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 1:12 pm #

          I’m sure your calculations are correct, and this is interesting, Dog. But the pint is that Iowa land is like the Brazilian rain forest. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

          Or do you believe land is an endless resource? Or are you saying “Lighten up”?

          • sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 3:01 pm #

            On further reflection, I believe our favorite canine has been smoking his Ken-L-Ration.

          • K-Dog July 30, 2018 at 4:08 pm #

            On your share of a square mile there is not enough room to grow anything to smoke. Immigrate on!

          • sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 4:58 pm #

            the pint is [point]

            All I need is a pint a day. (Paul McCartney)

        • draupnir July 30, 2018 at 3:07 pm #

          I bought some slicing tomatoes from a roadside stand last year. They were things of beauty, big, round, deep red. Imagine my shock and surprise when I cut them and found them mealy and tasteless. The next week I complained to the girl behind the counter, as I was certain they were hot house tomatoes. She assured me that they were not. They were grown under lights in caves in Europe bedded in good, black, Minnesota topsoil. Farmers have sold their topsoil. It has been dug up, hauled away in trucks, put on a ship and sent to Europe. We are going to starve, my friend.

          • PeteAtomic August 1, 2018 at 10:43 pm #

            LOL

            I think you were a victim of a con artist, my friend.

        • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 4:45 pm #

          US population is growing due to immigration, legal and otherwise.
          refugees, etc.

          Today on the street 2 fundraisers were asking me to ‘save the refugees.’
          Im not kidding.

          • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 5:36 pm #

            Try googling “save the refugees” for a real treat. Apparently it is big business. I wonder if the Clinton Foundation works in this area?

  17. darrell dullnig July 30, 2018 at 11:29 am #

    Well, dumbedup, you are hitting on all cylinders this morning with the description of your armor plated truck with the 50 caliber machine gun. When you start firing that thing, aren’t you a wee bit concerned that some of those rounds might hit some of those good people who are, in your words, everywhere? Or does that fall into the category of unavoidable collateral damage?

    • sprawlcapital July 30, 2018 at 11:56 am #

      A bumper sticker for the Right to Life people:

      I’m a child, not collateral damage.
      ================================
      I’m donating this to the blog. Use it without fear of copyright violation.

      This should make Evangelicals think again about drone warfare and aerial bombardment of places where civilians live, like cities.

      Mike Huckabee, are you listening?

      • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 4:46 pm #

        HOW MANY LIVES PER GALLON?

        • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 5:39 pm #

          How many people do you know that have told you, “I don’t care how many of those assholes they have to kill, I need gas to stay cheap”, because I know a few. I really do and it sickens me.

    • Dumbedup August 1, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

      We are all saints and sinners. But some people try harder to be humble and kind than others.

      I drive a 2009 Subaru Outback. Last Friday I had a 3 hour drive to get back home. About 30 minutes out I was passing a truck struggling to climb a hill. I had just about overtaken the truck when a Black Tahoe come up in the right lane at 90+ MPH and jumped the left lane in front of me with only a few feet to spare. From the top of the hill I could see this vehicle continue on ahead passing and swerving at a high rate of speed. It is a common occurrence on highways these days which led to my figurative (not literal) expression.

  18. elysianfield July 30, 2018 at 11:29 am #

    Well, ladies and germs,
    In my little spot on the left coast the quality of life has not been necessarily impinged by weather, air quality nor social dysfunction. Currently (0800), we have a full overcast with mist (a daily occurrence) soon to burn off to present blue skies, without a whit of smoke, and 80F temps. The garden is in full bloom and production, the fruit trees currently offering several varieties of plums and nectarines…tree ripened…and the peaches are soon to arrive in abundance in their six or seven varieties.

    There is, however trouble in”river city”…Humming Birds. Those vicious little bastards are at constant warfare with one another…there are many spots on the feeders, yet they jealously guard open perches, fighting and swarming to deny their brethren access. It is a contact sport…claws and beaks…the strong persist, the weak denied even a taste.

    In this zero-sum life, it is an allegory for the human condition. It reminds me also that, in a land of uncountable blossoms (blackberries are in full bloom), in effect an ideal landscape for their survival, the birds, just like humans, will embrace the path of least resistance. The feeders I place (and am required to fill daily) equate to a UBI for the birds.

    Most humans will not react otherwise than do the birds.

    • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 12:01 pm #

      You raise an interesting point with the denizens of nature and the fierce competition that they live under. The carpenter bees are also extremely aggressive in protecting what they perceive as theirs. Heck, much of the animal kingdom competes so fervently don’t they. While the point can be made that we too are part of this system and must compete aggressively in order to thrive, are we humans not capable of achieving far more when we rise above these animal instincts and work together towards a higher goal? Well I know that this will never be a large scale possibility for the animal is strong in far too many, but it is an encouraging thought that we might still try as best we can to rise above it.

      • elysianfield July 30, 2018 at 12:11 pm #

        “we might still try as best we can to rise above it.”

        Walter,
        Yes, many of us do…but many more will not.

        • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 12:31 pm #

          Quality far surpassed quantity in value my friend, but you already knew that.

  19. Loneranger July 30, 2018 at 11:31 am #

    Have we checked under our beds,lately? Usually it’s my cat there, but I search for that gubmint microphone, camera, or a transcendent hacker playing voyeur with my thoughts. Keep your head down, your ears cocked, and your eyes sweeping the vast wasteland that once upon a time was ‘our’ America.

    • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 12:10 pm #

      Here in Switzerland all the cats are ‘chipped’ – we are told that it is a simple RFID device, however the other night I told the puddy that I really admired the new 4K resolution TVs and sure enough, ads for the same started popping up in the browser.

      The cat disappears for hours and I am now convinced it is reporting for a debriefing.

      • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 1:15 pm #

        for real?

        • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 2:21 pm #

          Yes, and other oddness – whenever the pussy rubs against a stereo in the study it immediately begins to play the wretched ‘Ebony and Ivory’ (this is a black and white cat).

          I am keeping a close eye on this situation. Nobody is safe.

          • Tate July 30, 2018 at 5:01 pm #

            You live in Switzerland? Don’t you have a lot of military arms caches disguised as picturesque clock towers & hay barns? Do you eat a lot of Swiss chocolate?

  20. earltwitty July 30, 2018 at 11:40 am #

    JHK is getting grumpy in his old age. I bet he was rooting against Denzel in “The Equalizer” Or against Saul in Homeland season 7. The transgender subject is amusing but I don”t take it to seriously. I think we’re already on UBI with welfare, DSS, SS, section 8, military full and partial DSS. I know two marines on full military disability and they’re 42 yrs old! One never left the country! And he gets a partial postal disability! Let’s hope they stand for the anthem, after all they sure have plenty of time to attend football games.

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    • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 1:17 pm #

      JHK is grumpy in his old age.–and why not? he has every right to be angry.

      I know two marines on full military disability and they’re 42 yrs old!
      One never left the country!
      And he gets a partial postal disability–gees.

      Obama was the EBT and Disability prez.

  21. Jigplate July 30, 2018 at 11:43 am #

    “..Even The New York Times has stopped squealing about Russia.”

    Yes, but they are still squealing about identity politics. Just when I thought that the “gray lady” couldn’t sink deeper into the snake pit of neo-Marxist progressivism, Last week, they cranked out a real doozy In the form of an Op-ed piece by one Kathryn Paige Harden titled “Why Progressives Should Embrace the Genetics of Education”
    In this starkly Marxist polemic, Ms. ( Mx ?) Paige-Harden posits that there should be some sort of genetic affirmative action to guarantee equality of outcome. This has to be one of the most extraordinarily dangerous ideas to come out of the progressive jungle in some time. She ( ze ?) makes some astounding statements that I believe point the way to where the left will be heading assuming the biological sciences continue advancing at their current pace.

    (1) “Those of us who value social justice should instead be asking: How can the power of the genomic revolution be harnessed to create a more equal society?” This statement is nothing more than a 21st century equivalent to ” From each according to their abilities – To each according to their needs”

    2) “No one earned his or her DNA sequence, yet some of us are benefiting enormously from it.”

    This statement bears an eerie similarity to President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” statement. On its face, it implies some sort of bizarre genetic redistribution scheme. And just in case you think that I’m exaggerating, Paige-Harden closes with this:

    “But just like acknowledging the reality of climate change is necessary to ensure a sustainably habitable planet, acknowledging the reality of genetic differences between people is a necessary step for us to ensure a more just society.”

    It’s nice to see that the progressive left has finally boarded the biological science train , but watch out. When a progressive says that we should “acknowledge the reality” of something, you can be sure that they have a state mandated solution to the “problem”.

    • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 2:34 pm #

      Holy shit Jigplate, is that for real? Is there really an idiot out there in a place where it can promote an agenda that might lead to someone wanting to alter our DNA for sport? What, if we are too intelligent they want to make us more stupid? If we are too healthy they would genetically alter us to be inclined to illness? I think I would rather just be outright murdered than to have to live in such a society. This would make Josef Mengele look like Florence Nightingale. Say it ain’t so – please!

      • Jigplate July 30, 2018 at 2:53 pm #

        Should have posted the link:

        https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/opinion/dna-nature-genetics-education.html

        from her Bio at the end of the piece:

        Kathryn Paige Harden (@kph3k), an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and a fellow of The Op-Ed Project, is writing a book on genetics and social inequality.

        I’m sure she is one of the crowd that is itching to change the name of Austin because , you know, white privilege. I cant wait to read her book.

        • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 11:52 am #

          I think you should read her book, Jigplate. But maybe try to read what she’s actually saying, as opposed to what you want her to be saying.

      • elysianfield July 30, 2018 at 7:17 pm #

        ” I would rather just be outright murdered than to have to live in such a society. This would make Josef Mengele look like Florence Nightingale. Say it ain’t so – please!”

        Walter, George S. Patton must be spinning in his grave!

        He might suggest that one would rather murder those that caused us to have to live in such society.

        • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 8:31 pm #

          Old Blood & Guts and I may share a couple of things in common, but his love of war is certainly not one of them. Rather, I have an affinity for the Prince of Peace who, at least in my humble opinion, displayed far more strength, valor and wisdom than any man before or since, although I suppose He had a seriously significant advantage.

      • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 11:51 am #

        Walter

        “Is there really an idiot out there in a place where it can promote an agenda that might lead to someone wanting to alter our DNA for sport? What, if we are too intelligent they want to make us more stupid? If we are too healthy they would genetically alter us to be inclined to illness?”

        No.

        No.

        And No.

        It’s no wonder human beings find it so hard to stop wars from happening.

        • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 12:06 pm #

          “Holy shit Jigplate, is that for real? ”

          So, yeah, not very holy but definitely shit.

          • PeteAtomic August 1, 2018 at 8:09 pm #

            Green Alba fighting with people on the internet, again.

            You Scotswomen are terrible.

            totally disagreeable 🙂

        • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 1:19 pm #

          Easy for the liberal mindset to blow off possibilities that frighten it, but everything that can be thought of under the sun has those that will pursue the possibility somehow. Radioactive mega bombs that can vaporize entire cities – no, they cannot exist. Microscopic viruses and chemical weapons that can be dispersed against unknowing citizens to destroy them, no it is conspiracy theory. It is great and grand that so many peaceful, protected citizens can live happy lives of not knowing or caring of what is out there that might harm them. It is important that the masses remain so sheltered. It is a shame that you would not be allowed inside Fort Detrick Maryland. It would be a real eye opener.

          I am not saying that such DNA programs are being planned, only that it is concerning that since the technology certainly exists, there are probably those that wish to employ it. Let us hope that such technologies are never utilized to promote any agenda, no matter how benevolent they might appear.

          • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 4:57 pm #

            “Easy for the liberal mindset to blow off possibilities that frighten it”

            Firstly, Walter, I’m not a ‘liberal’. So your views on my mindset are mistaken. And I’m not the frightened one here – that would be you. You see creatures in the shadows. And when someone points out that there’s nothing there, you say, ‘how dare you suggest there couldn’t be something there!’ For you, the fact that there isn’t anything there isn’t the point. There could be. So there.

            We have in the past been able to exchange courteous comments, because we agree on a lot of things, when you haven’t got your politically polarising specs on.

            But last week I learned from our exchange that Hell hath no fury like a man whose emotionally manipulative rhetorical flourish is interrupted by the cool breath of logic. You even went as far as to suggest that if JHK had any sense he’d chuck me off the site. Really. Racists: fine. Antisemites: fine. Misogynists: fine. People who insist that things went on in the basement of a pizza parlour that has no basement: fine. But reason and logic: off with her head.

            I am perfectly aware of the dangers of chemical and biological weapons and the possibility of their use against civilians. I am equally well aware of the possible misuses of genetic information. I am not stupid just because it suits your purpose to claim that I am. Nor am I a person who ‘lives a happy life not knowing or caring what is out there’ that might harm me or mine, although it suits your purpose to paint me that way too.

            But the fact remains that several hysterical posts were written following a politically motivated misreading of an article which none of the subsequent posters bothered to read. That is dangerous. And pointing that out is a person who knows and cares what the manipulative use of language has done in the past and will do again in the future. On my continent, not yours. Maybe that’s why you can afford to be so careless with words. But it’s sad to see people doing exactly what they condemn the mainstream media for doing.

          • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 5:17 pm #

            I do not recall calling you out specifically, but if the Foo Shits….well you know the rest. In re-reading the posts I failed to find any traces of hysteria other than in your last post. My apologies for getting your knickers in a twist there, I did not know that you were so sensitive. I shall try harder in the future to not rattle your cage of compromise your blood pressure. Sorry.

          • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 5:46 pm #

            I do love a ‘sorry-not-sorry’, Walter. I’ll just ignore it. You’d make a great politician. A politician’s apology – described by someone recently as a crapology. Just as well I wasn’t looking for an apology anyway. I don’t need one, thanks. I made my point.

            Have a good evening.

          • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 5:48 pm #

            When I say I made my point, I don’t mean that you got it. You don’t want to get it. You still think it’s about me, which is sad.

          • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 6:08 pm #

            While anger may be a natural human emotion, it is above all the one that we must learn to control, and even better to lose, no matter how much work and effort it may take, for it extracts a far greater price from those that harbor it than on they onto which it is poured. I am having a lot of good fortune replacing mine with sadness and it definitely helps to drive it out of you. It is sad when people fight and argue, and it is sad when tolerance for opposing viewpoints cannot be granted and is instead met with anger.

            A friend of mine from way back in the late ’60’s has spent his career as an MD in the field of in vetro fertilization. I do not get together with him often but when I do it is amazing what I hear about what the “mad scientists” have developed and are continuing to develop. Non of this stuff stays stagnant nor does it stop at any given point. It speeds onward and “upwards” every day and there is really no telling where it will lead or when. I understand that old dinosaurs like me always question “progress” but that is why I come here, for our host is by some considered to be the patron saint of the anti “infinite growth” paradigm. What better food for dinosaurs, eh? I do not fear any of the garbage that “they” will one day do for that is their destiny after all. I just sort of feel sad for those poor saps that will be suckered into it for there are always poor saps that get suckered into every scam.

    • Tate July 30, 2018 at 2:43 pm #

      That’s not a bad idea. Everyone’s DNA gets “adjusted” so as to create a level playing field. But then do the geniuses get adjusted down to match the dullards getting adjusted up? What happens to productivity when everyone is average, because we all know that innovation is the only thing that drives that number in this new age. And average people don’t contribute to productivity. So okay, everyone gets adjusted up to genius level. But then, by definition, everyone is average again. There won’t even be a variance if everyone is average, no distribution curve, everyone sits on average, just a straight line at 145? 155? 165? Will there be a heightened moral sense if everyone is an average genius? Or will some go the Ted Bundy route? Maybe a reduction in drive-bys but an explosion in white collar crime? But if everyone is a genius, how could anyone be snookered by anyone else, such as fake IRS calls from Indian call scammers? Wouldn’t happen. If no one can pull a fast one on anybody else, then everyone is going to contribute to increased productivity, if only by disavowing a life of crime? What about free riders? Wouldn’t some of the geniuses go that route? But then the other geniuses would instantly spot the cheating, and flush them from cover. They might be forced to work, but there would probably remain a variance between industrious geniuses & lazy geniuses. It wouldn’t be the fault of the lazy geniuses that they were lazy, would it? That’s their genetic endowment. Okay, so you identify the lazy genes & problem solved, right? Everyone’s lazy genes get eliminated & everyone is now an industrious genius & productivity soars. It’s a New Englander’s paradise! No more trailer-trash geniuses, only Thomas Edisons & Henry Fords in evidence. But then some geniuses rebel, claiming that their Heritage is being destroyed & other geniuses rebel, claiming that there is more to life than work. In fact, they claim that work & procreation is the problem, as these things threaten Gaia Herself. So some geniuses remain lazy on principle. Some of these continue to live in trailer parks or urban ghettoes & insist on receiving welfare benefits while doing drive-by shootings and injecting heroin & smoking crack, & others go live in caves & communes & practice yoga all day long when they’re not dropping acid or smoking pot. Both types practice free love & the incidence of venereal diseases skyrockets, but this provides employment at the free STD clinics springing up everywhere. The former type of lazy geniuses have tons of offspring out of principle but the latter type out of principle refrain from having any. But then the productive geniuses — because they’re geniuses — figure out how to extend human lifespan indefinitely. They say, why not? we’re all geniuses now, we’ll even subsidize the lazy geniuses who’re preserving their trailer-park & ghetto Heritage & having lots of lazy genius kids who are ever-expanding & threatening Gaia Herself. But then a new threat looms on the horizon: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Congo, etc. The DNA adjustment therapy has become so cheap that even these nations are getting on the genius bandwagon. But they are focusing their efforts on producing super-geniuses, & in the case of Nigeria (because of its oil wealth) even hyper-geniuses. A genius arms-race gets underway. By this time a majority of the productive geniuses have decided to foreswear technology & have resigned from the think tanks & defense contractors. They decide it’s better to write sonnets or novels & smoke pot or trip out on mini-doses of acid or psylocybin. Productivity plummets at the same time the U.S. joins the genius arms-race. No one is equal anymore, the hyper-geniuses take over & siphon up all the money & power while the miserable poor lazy geniuses remain in their trailer-park & ghetto locales preserving their Heritage.

      • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 3:03 pm #

        Jesus! You expect someone to read a giant blob of text like that?

        It can be summed up in the Gilbert & Sullivan line:

        “If everybody’s somebody, then noone’s anybody”

        • Tate July 30, 2018 at 3:34 pm #

          I decided to cut it short to FincaintheMountains length, even though that left a lot of loose threads.

      • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 5:04 pm #

        If everyone was beautiful, then great beauties would still stand out. But everyone else would still be beautiful. Any ugly people brought in from elsewhere would simply be unbearable – like an Australian aborigine in ugliness.

        But yes, smart isn’t the same as moral. And factions will always exist and continue to come into being. But if everyone was a genius, society would at least have a chance to be really good. The only other alternative was elitism – and Democracy killed that option for the common society, simultaneously opening the door for rule by Secret Elites who could manipulate the Mob.

        • Exscotticus July 30, 2018 at 11:52 pm #

          >>> If everyone was beautiful, then great beauties would still stand out. But everyone else would still be beautiful.

          I think this is true although not obvious. One could easily reason that if everyone was beautiful, our standards would adjust accordingly, such that what is considered beautiful now would not cut it in a panpulchritudinous world. That being said, my appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of my smart phone are not diminished by my knowledge that there are millions just like it. It hasn’t compelled me to seek out uncomely ones.

      • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 11:44 am #

        >>> But then do the geniuses get adjusted down to match the dullards getting adjusted up?

        That is in fact what is happening now. For decades, liberals have tried to raise the bottom through excessive taxation and entitlements. The results have been abysmal. Now they have a new plan. If they can’t succeed in raising the bottom, just change the standard of measure.

        The new standard of measure is no longer how high you’ve raised the bottom, but how much you’ve decreased the gap between the bottom and top. To reduce the gap, you don’t have to raise the bottom at all; you simply have to lower the top. And so we see once prestigious institutions inundated with the bottom ranks. Standards have been eviscerated. Diversity and quotas replace merit with non-merit. It’s working; the top is dropping.

    • GreenAlba July 31, 2018 at 11:48 am #

      Jigplate

      Of course if you actually read the article without your right-wing frightener hat on, it’s a lot less scary.

      This gives a better flavour than quoting sentences out of context:

      ‘The eventual development of a polygenic score that statistically predicts educational outcomes will allow researchers to control for genetic differences between people, so that the causal effects of the environment are thrown into sharper focus. Understanding which environments cause improvements in children’s ability to think and learn is necessary if we want to invest wisely in interventions that can truly make a difference.’

      There’s no suggestion of doing any genetic manipulation – or that they’re going slap a ‘lucky gene’ tax on you. They’re simply suggesting that the genetic research will help isolate the nurture factors from the nature factors so that you can figure out how to improve the nurture factors so that everyone gets a better shot at reaching their own potential, and and money isn’t wasted on initiatives that don’t have any significant effect.

      This is the kind of misunderstanding that can happen when you let ‘progressive’ be your trigger word. Or ‘genetics’.

      I’ve never heard of her, so I looked her up. I don’t know what your ‘Mx/ze’ is referring to as she looks like any normal Ms/Miss/Mrs to me, but whatever. And she doesn’t sound like any kind of ‘cultural marxist’ to me either.

      http://archive.is/gpfNx

      But you keep your right-wing frightener hat on if that’s what you feel most comfortable in. If the cap fits…

      ‘Starkly Marxist polemic’… Dear God, it’s no wonder you people can’t talk to one another. You don’t even know what words mean.

  22. Q. Shtik July 30, 2018 at 11:57 am #

    Damn Jim, you are so good, even when the topic is just a summer lull. Every essay a gem. For alliteration I love “boring brass bushings.”

  23. Luhrenloup July 30, 2018 at 11:57 am #

    Some thoughts on the present zeitgeist: The killing, the rapes, the blaming, the physical threats, the violence, the righteous folks screaming profanities, encouraging mayhem all the while casting themselves in the glow of virtue, Russia, Russia, Russia, the interminable DC hearings that never resolve a thing, the bombastic president, the horrible MSM, Hollywood’s mouth. I could go on for 3 more paragraphs, but will not.

    I don’t agree with most of what Jefferson Beauregard Sessions has done since he’s taken the office of Attorney General. He encourages a harsh punitive attitude for handling criminal cases, he approves civil asset forfeiture which strips suspected individuals of their funds, (how can you get a lawyer if they take your funds?) is a zealot immigrant jailer, and yet turns a blind eye to the corrupt shenanigans of colleagues.
    I watched his speech to high school conservatives; he chuckles at the Hillary taunt ‘Lock her up” because he knows there’s truth in it, but would never act on it.

    A true old-style conservative, part of a dying breed, Jefferson Beauregard’s kind will not be seen after he dies. It is not my world. I certainly desire that my views prevail, but I won’t deny Buddy his place at the table we all share.

  24. AKlein July 30, 2018 at 12:06 pm #

    Jigplate, oh how prescient you may be! The very idea of life being unfair simply must be rejected as heresy. If necessary, everybody must reduced to a common denominator. Accepting that as gospel is a matter of faith, and those who are faithless are clearly heretics. Of course, there are necessary exceptions to this rule. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

  25. JustSaying July 30, 2018 at 12:10 pm #

    …If one word defines the preoccupying affairs of the USA these days it’s tiresome…

    How true. Twelve grand a year will buy a lot of beer!

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  26. ccm989 July 30, 2018 at 12:58 pm #

    Here’s the timeline — two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the FBI presented him with concrete evidence that Russia had interfered with the 2016 elections. But Trump still went around saying “fake news” whenever he talked about the election interference. Then he goes to Helsinki where he proceeds to throw our government under the bus siding with Putin! Treason? You bet!

    But Mueller doesn’t even have to try that hard — why should he when he can get Trump for money laundering, tax evasion, witness tampering, fraud, perjury, campaign fund theft, obstruction of justice — Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, goes on trial tomorrow Tuesday 07/31 — should be interesting! Will Manafort sing like a canary or is he afraid that Plutonium will wind up in his drinking water?

    • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 1:19 pm #

      The USA interferes world wide.

      • Tate July 30, 2018 at 4:21 pm #

        Malty, Vanguard just threw in the towel on its ‘Precious Metals & Mining Fund,’ renaming it the ‘Global Capital Cycles Fund.’ ZH says it’s like ‘ringing a bell.’

        You’re interested in that stuff, no?

        • malthuss July 30, 2018 at 4:40 pm #

          I want gold to be $50,000 an ounce.

          ‘Global Capital Cycles Fund.’ ZH says it’s like ‘ringing a bell.’
          Is ZH still good? I wasnt there much but I hear old timers think its not as good as it was.

          • Tate July 30, 2018 at 4:52 pm #

            Gold’s not going there. That’s why they have a futures market in gold.

            I don’t spend much time at ZH either.

  27. CitizenG July 30, 2018 at 1:58 pm #

    Big fan of “Harrison Bergeron” story. It describes current SJW trend quite aptly (how irksome media has been jumping on that bandwagon for so long now).
    Talked to a prominent individual who works in media who described the phenomenon as pendulum swinging back. He reminded me how Joe Dimaggio was denigrated because of Italian heritage in 30’s as an example of overswing to right – identity politics seems quite different though.
    Personally, a bit concerned about 403b savings. Where to invest?

    • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 5:08 pm #

      Heard on the news this morning: Angels pitcher almost pitched a no hitter. “Journalists” feverishly dug into his social media accounts and found examples of him making fun of Gays while in High School. Thus he was attacked immediately after the game in his moment of almost triumph.

      Journalists? Or something else? They wouldn’t do this if he had been Black.

      • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 6:35 pm #

        I read this only as yet another crime of antisocial media.

        • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 3:23 am #

          All Googling showed no such story. Yoze tooze arze in Kahoots.

          • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 3:55 pm #

            Dude you are so pozzed.

        • 100th Avatar July 31, 2018 at 7:01 am #

          Clarification: I read Vlad’s comment, not the story.

  28. chipshot July 30, 2018 at 2:26 pm #

    How is the vanquishing of white patriarchy lead to “No more annoying string quartets, tedious dental implants, boring brass bushings, or hopeless theories of surplus value.” ???

    • libertysghost July 30, 2018 at 4:22 pm #

      You can’t see It? Or you won’t see it?

      • chipshot July 30, 2018 at 5:46 pm #

        Can’t. Please enlighten me…

    • Janos Skorenzy July 30, 2018 at 5:09 pm #

      If Haiti has any of those, it’s only because Whites give it to them.

  29. volodya July 30, 2018 at 2:52 pm #

    Draupnir, with respect to Hillary, can you imagine Billy Fastfuck in close proximity to the Oval Office?

    He parlayed his previous tenure in the White House into over a hundred million bucks in – cough – speaking fees.

    Can you imagine what he’d do this time around with Hillary in the Big Chair? Can you say “pay-to-play?” Those speaking fees would look like bus fare in comparison.

    Georges, Goat rodeo? I prefer to think of it as a sheep-fuck but that’s ok.

    • Georges1202 July 30, 2018 at 3:13 pm #

      Yea, Dollar Bill Clinton back in the White House. This time he is not impeachable, so no intern is safe.

      Alas, not to be. The Clintons are quietly slinking off into oblivion, Bill having done his considerable damage and Hillary to dream of what might have been. She lost to an Orange imbecile – never an easy thing to reconcile.

      • messianicdruid July 30, 2018 at 8:30 pm #

        Where did you get those orange colored glasses?

  30. the camels bell July 30, 2018 at 3:22 pm #

    “No collusion” becomes “I’m not sure collusion is a crime” becomes “okay, you got me, but every mammal does it”

    True,we are a rather young species, but defending a criminally versatility president is probably the chimpanzee talking.

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    • libertysghost July 30, 2018 at 4:19 pm #

      Did it “become that” or was it a combination of all three all the time? Of course it has been. By pretending it’s “evolved” and not debating the points you give away the selectivity of the point you try to make.

      It can “not happen” and “not he a crime” at the same time…And the last claim hasn’t happened.

      Do you ever respond to more obvious questions JHK brings…like ” is there a reason why “collusion” in the election we know happened by the DNC/And HRC with foreigners isn’t a problem with outraged press or Mueller?

      That duplicity makes all the supposed “findings” or inferences meaningless to critical minds. It’s not “defending” anyone in particular…it’s basic context supporting a coup narrative instead. So who’s the chimp really?

      • the camels bell July 30, 2018 at 4:45 pm #

        Si. Crimes are negated because other people are duplicitous.

        More bonobo than chimp.

  31. amb July 30, 2018 at 3:38 pm #

    “Don’t worry, be happy.” has got to be the foundational principle to follow. Otherwise it will be chronic paralysis and grief.

    • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 5:43 pm #

      As long as you are finding happiness in things and deeds of value, I agree wholeheartedly. Entertainment for smiles is ludicrous and only adds to the problem.

    • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 6:19 pm #

      The foundation is accepting that undesirable things cause suffering.

      Or grief.

      Or moments of less happiness.

      They will happen, and happen often.

      Suffering is not from the actions or situations, or things themselves, but our reactions to them.

      Knowing this, that it is normal, it happens, and quite frequently, and often without one’s say or control over it, one can prepare to accept it.

      When one reconciles this situation, the less discomfort, the less suffering, they will endure.

      They know it as such. It is this way.

      Life is mitigating the predestined and eventual suffering.
      You will lose everything you love and cherish. Often little by little, and sometimes, and eventually, all at once.

      Not worrying is a correct course. But to be happy? To chase it? When it does not come, you get worried.
      This is the greatest cause of human suffering and angst. Ephemeral happiness.
      Off to the next hit. Have to have it.

      Just be is trite, but so is life, we just make it more complicated in our minds.

      • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 6:41 pm #

        I am not even sure that I know what “happiness” even is myself, but I can tell you for certain that joy can be found everywhere, at any time, and in so many things that it boggles the mind. Deep felt, tear rending joy is right out there in front of our noses always and once you have developed the ability to uncover it, it is staggeringly rewarding. Unfortunately for our species, those that would profit from concealing this fact have power, influence, and now even technologies that make this damned near impossible for the masses. It saddens those of us that can see it for what it is because most will never even come close to uncovering it..

        • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 8:03 pm #

          One may find joy in the splendor and mysteries of nature, perhaps even our situation.

          And where does this joy come from?

          Current zeitgeist labels it “mindfulness” or being present.
          It is not a new concept.
          It is an ancient way.
          Because the ancients understood our brevity.

          Appreciation.
          Your witness to it?

          Knowing it too shall pass.

          • Walter B July 30, 2018 at 11:53 pm #

            Not in nature but in humanity.

          • 100th Avatar July 31, 2018 at 7:03 am #

            Humanity is not separate from nature.
            Another problem

          • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 11:40 am #

            Humanity is not separate from nature in this plane of existence, true enough. We also do not do nearly a decent enough job of living with nature either, but rising above nature can certainly be accomplished in the next plane of existence, at least if those of us that believe so are correct. If we are not then surely we will become part of nature.

  32. Tate July 30, 2018 at 3:53 pm #

    Posted by ‘JackKrac’ at AR, article on Seattle gentrification:

    “After Trump single-handedly cures cancer:

    “New Cancer Drug Deprives Trial Patients Much-Needed Income—Women, Minorities Affected Most”

    “La’Quintasha Washington has supplemented her modest income from weaving the hair of her neighbors in one of Seattle’s most vibrant areas for years by taking part in clinical drug trials at a local hospital. The hundred or so dollars she got every week wasn’t much but it helped make ends meet, especially when her son D’Shauntratvious noticed that new Air Jordans would soon be available. That’s all over now that Donald Trump has thrown financial markets and the healthcare industry into chaos by releasing a ‘cure’ for cancer last week. The money that hard-working single mothers like La’Quintasha got from the clinical trials conducted to develop a cancer vaccine is the first of many casualties expected in the fallout from Trump’s reckless intrusion into modern medicine. “How am I supposed to pay my bills?”, demanded Washington, as she refilled the empty Kool-aid cups of her young twins Jamarquando and M’shawdrackson. The plight of young families like the Washingtons will raise questions about the real motivations behind Trump’s actions and fuel further speculation about the sincerity of his desire to ‘save lives'”.

    • libertysghost July 30, 2018 at 4:10 pm #

      This was a serious article? Wow! Talk about not seeing the forest while blinded by the trees.

  33. tucsonspur July 30, 2018 at 4:00 pm #

    “Under the boardwalk, down by the sea, on a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be”. Drifters

    “The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled.”
    ? Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

    But the light begins that foretelling change, and at times a soft coolness sets in. And after an afternoon dip in the salty sea, the skin goosebumps delightfully in the soothing chill.

    Thank God it’s not something like “The Guns of August”.

    • messianicdruid July 30, 2018 at 8:37 pm #

      Or – August Osage County.

      • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 2:14 am #

        Thanks for a peek at the bleak.

  34. Q. Shtik July 30, 2018 at 4:15 pm #

    Relative to the previous thread:

    an early July Quinnipiac poll. – janet

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

    I lived and worked 2 years near Quinnipiac U. (and Yale). They could not be more “librul” and although the science of polling is supposed to eliminate biases I have to believe a liberal bias creeps into their published results.

    • San Jose July 30, 2018 at 6:18 pm #

      Q. Shtik,

      When are you going to post your motorcycle travel experiences?

      Jen in San Jose

      • Q. Shtik July 30, 2018 at 7:16 pm #

        I posted one last night near the end of the previous thread. I’m planning to re-post in this thread tonight. The postings will be in several increments as it totals 21 typed pages and I don’t want to overwhelm and piss Jim off.

        • Q. Shtik July 30, 2018 at 8:42 pm #

          Here is the re-post:

          I have been going on and on for months now about the bike trip I’ve been planning to take this very month of July. I have accomplished it and kept an extensive travel log about it which I’d like to share with the readership here. The trip spanned 13 days inclusive, July 12 thru July 24. I plan to feed out my log entries in chronological order in increments that are not so long as to piss people off. The first, just below, covers July 12 and 13.

          Thurs July 12, 2018

          The day has finally arrived, the culmination of all my efforts from last Oct. to the present: the beginning of Ferris Q. Shtik’s Big Pee Wee for the aged.

          My intention was to get underway by 9AM but I was 32 mins late (so much excitement, so many last minute details). The day could not have been more perfect for a bike ride (actually a motorscooter not a motorcycle, a 650cc Suzuki Burgman), sunny with temps ranging from 74 to 86. And nobody did anything asinine…not even one close call.

          Miles covered this first day: 314. Stayed in a nice Lodge that I found thru Airbnb; $30 for one nite including Cont’l breakfast. Clean, air conditioned, TV, etc; The Trestle Pool Lodge, 5 miles from Pulaski, NY just off I-81 about 40 mins from the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Of all coincidences, the proprietors are from near me in NJ, and what a pair they were (Note to myself: I must get a picture of them before I leave…sort of a poor man’s American Gothic). Based on their effusive recommendation I drove 6 miles to Steph’s Place in Pulaski and had dinner.

          The paper place mat in front of me said “Where Old and New Friends Meet!” Had I been tasked with creating a more accurate, though less snappy, line for the place mat it would have been “Where chubby tattooed women serve up massive quantities of plain food cheap.”

          The place was popular with the old set. At 77+ years old I may have been the youngest person there.

          Fri July 13, 2018

          If yesterday was wonderful, today, the day this trip is all about, was less so. I learned first-hand how dependent we are on technology. In the Canadian hinterlands with many miles yet to go my cell phone screen announced that my data connection had been lost. Gone was the amazing GPS. I now had to rely on printouts of turn-by-turn directions which, thankfully, I had the foresight to bring with me. I rode the last 6 miles on Rapid Road from Westmeath and entered Spotswoods Landing.

          Westmeath is a barely existing town some 80 miles from Ottawa, Canada’s Capital city. The hub of this hamlet seems to be Kenny’s, a general store and 2-pump gas station with an impressive and varied inventory of just about everything, located at a 4-way Stop intersection.

          Spotswoods Landing itself, to my great dismay, had evolved in the 60-some years since I was here as a boy, from the river and forest primeval to a maze of sand and gravel car-width pathways with travel trailers and RVs set up in some un-obvious order all around. It is nestled at the bank of the Ottawa River on its Ontario side, the other side being Quebec Province. That other side of the river, where once there was no sign of habitation, is now lined with homes and cottages in either direction. In the ’50s we used a wooden rowboat with a 5 horse outboard while today high-powered fiberglass and aluminum boats abound.

          The owner of this whole operation is Lorne Spotswood, the most recent (he is 73) in a long line of Spotswoods that go back at this site to 1840. It was Lorne’s father who took serious steps to monetize the family’s unique location on the River (he had long since ceased operation of the 2-car ferry/barge when bridges were built). He tore down 3 log cabins that had wood stoves but no amenities whatsoever (no electric, plumbing or running water) and built in their place several rental cottages.

          It is well that I was able to hang tough and not allow my wife to scheme and weasel her way into MY great adventure as even these newer accommodations (with electric, running water, toilets, window AC, etc, but no TV) would never have met her high standards of comfort and interior decoration. The operative descriptor here is “hodgepodge.” Everything from the clothes rack with its jumble of hangers – wood, plastic and wire and no two alike – to its kitchen cabinets with their jelly jar and “Beck’s Official Beer of the 19th Hole” glasses. The “furniture” may have been acquired curbside on disposal days, if there had even been curbs, which there weren’t. An end table had the look of an 8th grade shop class project that earned the student a grade of C+. Further, there are horrendous quantities of mosquitoes constantly on the attack and some bug species that bug-ologists may not even be aware exist.

          • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 12:10 pm #

            “The day has finally arrived, the culmination of all my efforts from last Oct. to the present: the ”

            Q,
            Laying the foundation for the described adventure might involve reliving the serial discussions with the wife and your other attempts to convince her that that to put your 75+ year old bones on an epic adventure, on a scooter, over a two week period would have merit.

            I have been riding for over 50 years, and even I would have some “‘splainin” to do to the wife under similar circumstances.

          • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 2:01 pm #

            Yeah Elysian, what I went through with my wife and kids is a whole ‘nother story. I basically put my foot down and said “Stop already, I’M DOIN’ IT!!”

            They wanted me to at least travel with someone, like my son-in-law who has a bike, but I nixed it…said “it wouldn’t be the same.” And my 2 key destinations and purposes would have been meaningless to him.

          • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 2:11 pm #

            My s-i-l said “what’s the story, you got a second family up there we don’t know about?”

          • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 4:02 pm #

            Why a scooter and not a bike? Cheaper? Easier to handle?

          • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 7:30 pm #

            “Why a scooter and not a bike?”

            Janos,
            Because on a scooter you can avoid the required tattoos and (optional) venereal diseases….

  35. Robert July 30, 2018 at 5:41 pm #

    To hell with a continuous wall. Build a wall along sections of the border that are consistently trespassed by illegal immigrants. Along the border with Mexico the federal government should establish permanent and well equipped military bases — as much to use the military to dissuade would-be illegal immigrants as prepare the military for the coming time in which fighting in the mid-East will be a global knock-down to commandeer the remaining, and fast disappearing, petroleum resource.

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    • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 6:58 pm #

      In Mexico, foreigners are not allowed to own property.
      They buy leases.
      Lifetime leases, often times of dubious legitimacy or irrevocability.

      Instead of walls, demand reciprocation.

      It’s only colonialism when the wealthy take over
      It’s only benevolence when the poor do.

  36. 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 5:45 pm #

    “I’m lashing myself to the mast and awaiting heavy seas.”

    Why did Ulysses forego beeswax?

    Was he enchanted by Circe? Her mere warnings and descriptions of the Sirens’ song, the impending doom, were enough to enchant him?

    He chose the torment, not without safeguards mind you, but he chose the torment.

    Why? His companions, rendered deaf and rowing away, saw the Sirens for what they truly are: wretched rockbound beasts. Quieted they had no allure. And they sailed clear.

    This tells us enough. And everything.
    Our nature.

    People seek to be mesmerized, to be spellbound, by word, insinuation, gossip, rumor, to enjoy the fleeting revelry of the whisper. The suggestion.

    It will bring us all to the rocks, and it is.
    But the exhilaration, to many and all, is worth it.

    We all know where this doomed ship is headed, we all know where the sirens are steering it, and we all know that most of us have simply made the choice to drop the oars, let the wax slip from our ears, and let this cursed and creaky ship go. Let them have it. They sing for it so much, so strongly, so often, in one unified voice.
    Have it.

    It’s not worth saving.

    Scuttled.

    • pequiste July 30, 2018 at 7:03 pm #

      Nicely put Av.

      Back in the day, Cream had a splendidly psychedelic take on the whole concept:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8hLc_nqx8g

      • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 7:54 pm #

        Certainly is. The hard land of the winter.
        Hades?

        After Demeter gave wings to the sirens, she cursed them when Persephone went unfound.
        Wings stripped, or rendered useless, they were cast to a rocky island. Monstrous beasts.

        Perhaps Hades wanted to bring them with him, reunite Persephone with her maidens?

        But the laughing purple fish?
        Psychoactives. My only explanation.

  37. DrGonzo July 30, 2018 at 7:32 pm #

    Apparently life is hell in these United States if you are white, heterosexual and male. Thanks for letting me know, JHK. I hit that trifecta, but I guess I didn’t realize just how badly life has been screwing me.

    I’ve gotta admit it doesn’t FEEL like I’m being shortchanged by society on the basis my color, gender, and sexual orientation, when I observe the daily challenges faced by many other people I interact with … but now, dude, I am WOKE to the systematic institutional discrimination against me and my kind. I am now a true modern American: I have an identity as a VICTIM! Woo-hoo.

    That said, why does Kunstler keep ignoring the indictments and guilty pleas that Mueller’s team has collected from Trump’s own inner circle? It hasn’t been just a bunch of Russians, as JHK would have us believe. And, believe me, there is much more to come. JHK may have too short of an attention span to care, but some of us actually admire the careful, painstaking building of a case that the Liar In Chief will predictably try to dismiss as fake news.

    I feel for Kunstler that the investigation is not wrapping up with the crisp predictability of a 30-minute TV sitcom, but this IS real life with its tangled maze of financial shenanigans and compromising electronic trails. We’ll have plenty of time later to get back to sympathizing with JHK’s heterosexual white victimhood.

    Life is so unfair.

    • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 8:11 pm #

      Liar in Chief.

      Is this not a transitory title?

      Not the first, not the last, but the one called upon to account for it.

      By the anointed class at the trough no less.

      • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 8:23 pm #

        Because it is not that he may be a liar.

        He is not their liar.

        And he was not supposed to take a seat at their table. At the head of it no less.

        The patrician class, their finishing school ilk, and the properly vetted will not have it.

      • DrGonzo July 30, 2018 at 9:42 pm #

        Yes, all politicians lie, if that is supposed to be your oh-so-clever insight.

        Wow, Avatar, you really smoked us with that observation. You’re just so cool.

        But Trump takes the cake. From the number of people at his inauguration to the size of his electoral victory to Muslims allegedly dancing in the New Jersey streets after 9-11 to whatever he just said on television 24 hours ago, the only “truth” for stable genius Trump is what makes him look good and makes others look bad. He has no moral compass, and he is loyal to no one but his own ego… except perhaps a family member or two. I get whiplash just trying to follow his position on any issue from one moment to the next.

        If you can’t grasp the qualitative difference between Narcissistic Lying Trump and his predecessors in the White House, who, yes, had their own agendas, but at who didn’t routinely adopt the 1984-ish tactic of telling people “not to believe what they saw or heard” but just believe His Orangeness, then I hope Drumpf delivers everything you ever hoped for. Good luck with that.

        • 100th Avatar July 30, 2018 at 10:01 pm #

          He is also the first narcissist in chief by your estimation.

          I defer to your keen insight.

          If you like your health plan, y’know, you can keep it.

          That’s hope, dummy

    • The Articulate Infant July 31, 2018 at 5:56 am #

      Gonz, are you Janet in drag?

    • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 4:06 pm #

      Whites – other than the upper classes – have been ruthlessly persecuted for decades now. And you folks aren’t tired of it in least. Just getting started in fact. Despite your Marxist leanings, you refuse to keep it about class. You accept the Elites in their bait and switch, substituting race for class. And that’s both wrong and evil, creepy and despicable.

      • DrGonzo July 31, 2018 at 11:25 pm #

        You’re the “victim” now. I get it. Oh, wahh.

        • Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 1:22 pm #

          Racial quotas are discrimination against Whites. What else would you call it? You malice is blinding you to the obvious – and to the extent of your malice.

    • NRWer August 1, 2018 at 10:58 am #

      Name one and name the crime this individual is guilty of in direct connection with Trump or the Trump campaign.

      I’ll help:

      Manafort: indicted for financial crimes over a decade ago in the Ukraine prior to his brief service in Trump’s campaign. Supposed crimes occured during his work with the Podesta Group (lobbying firm of the brother of HRC’s campaign manager John Podesta which abruptly closed down during the Mueller probe).

      Flynn: Had his 302 form altered by disgraced former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe to entrap him and force a statement. Odds are 99/1 he will be a free man.

      Your hero (Mueller) has already openly stated that the president is not a criminal target, and the only two indictments of any interest would appear to have nothing to do with him, and instead point to the unprecedented corruption within the FBI and DNC apparatus.

      Time to turn off the fake news. Look into the Smith-Mundt act while you are at it, specifically in relation to Obama’s actions before leaving office.

  38. DrGonzo July 30, 2018 at 11:43 pm #

    For the record, James, so far:

    Mueller has publicly initiated criminal charges against more than 30 people, including Donald Trump’s former national security advisor (pleaded guilty), Donald Trump’s former foreign policy advisor (pleaded guilty), Donald Trump’s former deputy campaign manager (pleaded guilty), and Donald Trump’s former campaign manager (currently in jail after bail was revoked for witness tampering).

    And he’s only getting started.

    • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 12:24 am #

      For the record, so far:

      None of the charges levied against Trump’s associates have anything to do with Russian collusion to subvert the 2016 election.

      Meanwhile, we have actual emails showing the DNC colluding against Bernie. We have actual emails showing the FBI colluding with the DoJ against Trump. We have a fake dossier produced by Team Hillary. We have Team Hillary covering up her email ineptitude including lying to the FBI and smashing cell phones with hammers. We have a secret meeting on the PHX tarmac between DoJ and Bill Clinton, following which the investigation into Hillary was suddenly dropped. We now know that Obama personally ordered the Intelligence Assessment that resulted in the Mueller investigation, with the fake dossier used as justification.

      And we’re only getting started.

      • Ricechex July 31, 2018 at 1:42 am #

        OK….so this is a bit off topic. But it is more of the Deep State trying to mandate who landlords can rent to. Housing is already a very big struggle here and this Councilwoman is calling it “discrimination” if landlords do not rent to Section 8 tenants. The story alleges that landlords do not want to rent to Section 8 because of all the red tape in getting paid. I beg to differ on this one. Landlords do not want to rent to Section 8 tenants because they are entitled and move all their family in. They destroy homes.

        Why rent to Section 8 when you can get good paying tenants that might take care of your place. Section 8 tenants are nothing but headaches and trouble. No one wants them for a reason. So now they are going to try and force us to do it.

        https://www.npr.org/podcasts/482517040/san-diego-stories

        • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 2:30 am #

          And check this out from a couple of years ago. Balack Obama wanting to brown the ‘burbs:

        • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 3:13 am #

          As I am in the place where rents have become stratospheric I know of other reasons. Section 8’s are frozen rents and a landlord can’t jack up rents as fast as the rising market is.

          Break a rule like using a hibachi on a deck where it is not allowed and it is out the door and in with a new, tenant. One that pays significantly more. I’m sure a landlord can evict if extra people move in. That would be breaking rules. Rules a landlord would take advantage of, it they wanted. Here they do in a heartbeat.

          The evicted section 8’s then ending up in homeless tents along the I-90 freeway. Growing the monster.

          For some life is no beach, for some it is already a bitch.

          • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 3:15 am #

            fast as the rising market is soring.

          • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 4:02 am #

            I’m surprised to hear that those rents can be raised so easily. So I guess that they’re not really frozen, but constantly “thawing” if that’s the case.

            What can I say. To have and have not. Landlord and tenant.
            Top and bottom. Inside and out. The heartless and the homeless. The made in the shade and the always dismayed.

          • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 12:30 pm #

            Dog,
            I am sure you have, in your mind, a reasonable perspective regarding Section 8 abuses…like hibachis….

            How many Section 8 apartments have you visited? Personally? Paws on the ground?

            Oakland California, in the late ’60’s, instituted( probably the first in the Country), what was then known as the “Turnkey” concept…6 unit two story apartments…brand new…placed in middle-class neighborhoods of modest single-family homes, and occupied by the “poor”.

            I was in dozens and dozens of these apartments, all less than three years old…some apartments were well-kept, but most were not…and ALL turnkey buildings became high crime cells in these former decent neighborhoods.

            Do you know what a pin-map is? Crimes, represented by different colors of pins, and in the case of auto thefts, connected from the point of theft to recovery by heavy twine, are overlaid on a map of a neighborhood or beat sector. The Turnkeys invariably were at the epicenter of these pins…some reminded me of spider’s webs….

          • Ricechex August 1, 2018 at 12:45 am #

            All it is a wealth distribution plan. Make everyone poor. Just like Obama Care.

            I worked one full time job and one part time job for 15 years so I could buy a home. It is my Plan B as I am in a rental and the time will come when I have to leave.

            I certainly do not want to rent my home to Section 8 tenants. I do not need to as I have multiple applications if my house comes up for rent. It is a nice little home in a nice neighborhood. I can pick and choose.

            Then, labeling it as “discrimination.” How can it be that? To have a Section 8 home, one must go through lengthy checks and adhere to certain conditions. If passed, will the next bill mandate the landlords to get their properties cleared for Section 8?

            It won’t solve the housing crisis. It would make regular working people have to compete with Section 8 tenants. Which is no competition but since they are talking about enforcement that would put landlords in a very poor position.

            My sister owns a couple of homes in the Midwest and rents to low income and Section 8. She is afraid to visit them and is always evicting tenants (she has a property manager) . Evictions cost money. The tenants know how to manipulate and constantly complain. Very entitled. They trash the houses and don’t give a damn about anything except their “benefits” and “rights.” It’s nothing short of a headache.

        • Exscotticus July 31, 2018 at 10:52 am #

          Liberals are unwilling to accept is that there will always be some degree of crime, poverty, and unpleasantness. There will always be some poo in the universe. This fact goes against their socialist vision of a one-world, open borders, peace-and-love, rainbows-and-unicorns kumbaya puppy pile.

          Lberals have tried everything they can think of to make the poo go away, or to pretend that it’s not even there. For example, they’ve tried raising taxes for perfumes to make the poo smell better. They think that if they call the poo something else, that it will cease to be smelly. Nothing has worked. For it is a law of the universe that there will always be some poo.

          For the rest of us, it is a time-honored tradition to simply deal with reality, to accept that there will always be some poo, to call it what it is: poo!—and to gather it up and place it in a corner of the neighborhood, as far away from us as possible.

          Unfortunately, this creates a pocket of malodorous unpleasantness. But we all know where it is and avoid it.

          Liberals have a new plan: instead of concentrating the poo into one area, they want to spread it out all over. They think that if we do this, no one will notice it, and the poo will suddenly cease to be poo.

          Now a simple experiment in your own home will prove that this arrangement simply doesn’t pass the smell test. But try it—try smearing a thin layer of shit all over your home. See if you or anyone else notices. See if the poo is magically transformed by its improved surroundings into freshness and excellence. I submit that this will not happen. And even if the smell is not as strong as it would be were it concentrated, this attenuation comes at the expense of everything around it, at the expense of areas that previously did not look or smell like poo it at all.

          And so, if you think about it, this truly is a parable to distinguish the Left from the rest of us. Liberals want to coat the world in shit, while the rest of us want to tidy up as best we can. We accept the poo; we simply don’t want to live in it.

          • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 4:15 pm #

            Good analogy. Or consider the lilies of the field (vanilla ice cream): even the smallest amount of poo will ruin a bowl of vanilla ice cream or any other flavor for that matter.

            Or again with the relativity: if everyone is poor, no one is poor. Or they are, but don’t know it – so it’s all good? Except it isn’t….

          • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 5:04 pm #

            Right on. I don’t want kids playing with poo poo trains.

            If the poo fits, you don’t give a shit?

      • chipshot July 31, 2018 at 7:43 am #

        You’re telling it like it is, Ex. Sad so few people are able to see that. Or willing to accept it. Or, in the case of MSM, flat out lying about it.

        • chipshot August 1, 2018 at 1:38 pm #

          My reply was in response to your post of July 31 @ 12:24am, not any of the subsequent posts.

      • RIB July 31, 2018 at 10:08 am #

        Thank you,Ex

  39. janet July 31, 2018 at 2:16 am #

    “And we’re only getting started.” –Dr. Gonzo

    And JHK saying no Russia will ever “set foot in a US courtroom” must be news to the Russian who was arrested and is sitting in a jail cell waiting to be transported to a US courtroom for trial.

  40. KesaAnna July 31, 2018 at 2:39 am #

    ” why does Kunstler keep ignoring the indictments and guilty pleas that Mueller’s team has collected from Trump’s own inner circle? ”

    Well, I cannot speak for Mr. Kunstler , but , for myself , as a general rule of thumb to be applied , guilty pleas are not something i give much weight to at all.

    i am quite certain that 99 out of 100 innocent people plead guilty anyway.

    How so ?

    first , with 20,000 + federal laws , not counting state and local laws , not to mention bureaucratic fiats that even your elected representatives never actually got to vote on ,
    the very term “innocent ” has been rendered quaintly archaic.

    There simply is no such thing as innocent in any practical sense.

    you could indict someone in a coma on some pretext or other.

    Secondly , going to court against the state isn’t a case of David versus Goliath.

    No , it is more like a 5 -year-old versus a 30-year-old.

    The state has an entire law firm on permanent retainer. ( i.e. the prosecutors office. )

    the state has a team of private detectives on permanent retainer. ( i.e. the police. )

    How many of even the richest people you know could afford to match that marshaling of force on an equal footing , and not just for a little while , but possibly for years into the future ?

    But you have already seen that question answered ; Even Presidents of the United States and billionaire oil tycoons have wilted in the face of such an unequal contest.

    third , 11 out of 12 jurors have not done even the most minimal research on the realities of legal systems , but believe that the childrens fairy tales they see on TV bare some relation to reality.

    They don’t see that prosecutors are self-interested politicians .

    they don’t see that judges commonly are some fat cats nephew who couldn’t hack it in private practice.

    they have the police confused with the girl scouts.

    Fourth , even if you do , by some quirk , or miracle, win your case you will almost certainly be bankrupt by that time.

    What sort of victory is it that leaves you living in your car and unable to pay the grocery bill ?

    it is even worse if you are married.

    will your spouse stick by you when you are a penniless charity case ?

    How do you think it is going to feel to have to tell your children that you have no future to give them ?

    thousands of people who have not done a damn thing plead guilty every day to stupid shit , and it does not mean a God damned thing.

    I really fucking wish some of you people would read something besides a god damned comic book.

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    • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 3:02 am #

      You make some good points. From a different angle, there’s a line in Clint Eastwood’s movie “Unforgiven”, where after being told that he just kicked the shit out of an innocent man, Little Bill replies, “innocent, innocent of what?”

      • KesaAnna July 31, 2018 at 3:19 am #

        Said the pimp to the whore.

        after all, granted , Little Bill didn’t own the whore house. But , as he , himself , later states , he could shut the whore house down. But he doesn’t.

        He is as much a whore as is the woman he is addressing.

        He wouldn’t know innocence if it sucked his thingie.

      • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 11:51 am #

        Yes indeed, an indictment is not a conviction and a plea of guilty is not necessarily an admission of guilt. There is no moral element in our system of law which therefore prevents our it from being a tool for justice and turns it into simply a welfare system for lawyers. Why anybody places any value in it baffles me. Anybody that does not profit from it that is. It is a joke, a farce, and one of the prime factors in the eventual destruction of America.

      • Tate July 31, 2018 at 12:45 pm #

        The only innocents in this world are unborn & possibly newborn infants. Then give it a year maybe.

    • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 12:41 pm #

      “i am quite certain that 99 out of 100 innocent people plead guilty anyway. ”

      Kesa,
      Perhaps in the “Former Soviet Union” this was the case.

      Your statement would indicate that , by extension, most people in prison would be innocent. This is usually not the case.

      What you say is accurate, however, in that the poor, the middle class, and even the “comfortable” cannot afford to be a viable participant in the “Justice System” in our country in its current state.

      “thousands of people who have not done a damn thing plead guilty every day to stupid shit”

      Kesa, I can accept your premise, but the numbers you quote seem…ambitious.

  41. tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 2:50 am #

    Talk about faded glory. It’s too bad this guy didn’t just fade out. At the same time, he’s looking sleazy and making me feel queasy and uneasy.

    Giuliani: The Geriatric Goofball of Gotham.

    He’s defending Trump right into the deep state’s dungeons:

    https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rudy-giuliani-bad-lawyer-may-184100709.html

  42. janet July 31, 2018 at 2:52 am #

    “No more annoying string quartets, tedious dental implants, boring brass bushings, or hopeless theories of surplus value.” –JHK

    This week’s screed contains too much disingenuous fake-clutching of pearls (whilst ranting the country’s too PC). This is a shame because there are real and grave global issues to address. Stopping people from using the bathroom is not one of them.

    By the way, if you are going to get dental implants, you will probably have dental x-rays taken. Turns out Herbert Clay Scurlock was a Black biochemist who pioneered the application of radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer and the use of x-ray to diagnose dental problems.

    String quartets? The father of the string quartet, Haydn, was called “the Blackamoor” because of his very dark skin, probably from Turkish-Negro stock. Black composers have continued to compose music for string quartets.

    https://www.colum.edu/cbmr/what_we_do/performance/nbmre/maggie-brown-string-quartet.html

    Oh, and about theories of surplus value… In his first year as a student at the University of Bonn, according to Jonathan Sperber’s recent biography, Marx’s classmates dubbed him “the Moor,” because of “his swarthy complexion,” i.e., his dark skin. Another biographer, Franz Mehring, says that the nickname was “given to him on account of his jet-black hair and dark complexion.” The label stuck with him until his death almost five decades later. He was judged by his contemporaries, apparently, to have physical features associated (in their minds, at least) with the Maghreb region of North Africa.

    But don’t let facts get in the way of your glorification of the great white race and its “contributions” to “civilization” … (most of which were derivative or outright stolen from previous non-white civilizations).

    • The Articulate Infant July 31, 2018 at 5:54 am #

      ‘This week’s screed contains too much disingenuous fake-clutching of pearls ‘
      Much like yours, eh Janet?

    • elysianfield July 31, 2018 at 12:46 pm #

      “Turns out Herbert Clay Scurlock was a Black biochemist who pioneered the application of radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer and the use of x-ray to diagnose dental problems.”

      Yeah,
      And there was that guy that did that thing with peanuts….

  43. KesaAnna July 31, 2018 at 3:02 am #

    ” And JHK saying no Russia will ever “set foot in a US courtroom” must be news to the Russian who was arrested and is sitting in a jail cell waiting to be transported to a US courtroom for trial. ”

    Your glee at a peon you don’t even know being put in a cage doesn’t suggest a virtue , but rather a vice.

    And that is why that person is getting fan mail from your fellow citizens.

  44. tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 4:15 am #

    What’s up with these boring brass bushings? Are they boring just because of their simple practicality? What about their functionality? I must have missed something.

    I imagine bushings themselves have to be bored.

    • The Articulate Infant July 31, 2018 at 5:52 am #

      They’re boring because whitey invented them. Just ask Janet or Dr La Cock, if whitey hadn’t come up with them they’d be objects of endless veneration.

    • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:27 am #

      Machining of brass by men in London resulted in new skills and abilities which resulted in the flowering of wester civilization. Becoming a skilled metalworker in America once was a way to be lashed to the mast to get through the heavy seas. Along the Erie canal the skill to make brass bushing and work the forges built America.

  45. 100th Avatar July 31, 2018 at 7:18 am #

    Was it not Obama on late night TV no less, saying after Snowden revelations, that there is absolutely no spying on Americans?

    the serious doozies of

    Obama skin-deep change
    And
    Clinton Inc.

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  46. wm5135 July 31, 2018 at 8:01 am #

    I can tell you one thing about anyone who is trying to establish that the FBI or the Department of Justice have any claim to truth or objectivity, they were not on any college campus of any size during the anti war movement in the late 60’s through the Watergate period. One more thing I will say is that if they were on such a campus and did not know about the presence and interference of Nixon’s boys on campus they were as clueless then as they are now.

    Oh and to those commenters here who wish to believe that the problems started with W – I believe you have occular rectalitis (Head so deep can’t see s,,,)

    Here is a phrase everyone should polish up for everyday use “and then they came for me”. “it’s a club, and you ain’t in it” Carlin

  47. FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 8:14 am #

    Putin considers the Baptism of Rus an event of a civilization scale

    The Baptism of Rus was a major turning point in our history, an event accelerating civilization, transforming spiritual strength. It determined Russia’s further centuries-long path and influenced global development.

    The Baptism of Rus is inextricably linked with the name of the Holy Prince Vladimir Equal to the Apostles, who made this decisive choice and became the conductor of faith. He was the one who first saw it as moral support, beauty, the light of truth and virtue, and a basis for renewal, for greater unity and community of peoples living in ancient Rus.

    A warrior who has gone through fierce battles and trials, Vladimir became an enlightener, a creator. Under his leadership, churches and monasteries, cities, schools and libraries were built.

    Baptism was the starting point for the development of Russian statehood, the true spiritual birth of our ancestors, the definition of their identity, the heyday of national culture and education, as well as the development of multifaceted ties with other countries.

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/58123

  48. bibliomaniac July 31, 2018 at 8:41 am #

    Sounds like Universal Basic Income won’t be as expensive as this stupid wall–“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair…”
    And the country isn’t running as good as Baltimore.

    • FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 9:07 am #

      The problem of Universal Basic Income is not in its cost, but in its consequences.

      • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:08 am #

        True, it is also fluff to distract from real issues because it would never happen. People are not just going to start caring about people who suck. Cute babies puppies and bunnies would get a UBI. People who talk to themselves without having a phone; no UBI for them. It goes against human nature. Th only reason we hear about UBI is because the media pushes the notion.

        Personally I’m OK with seeing to it that everyone has a basic quality of life. UBI is not the way to do it, but never mind my penchant for rainbows and unicorns. The fact is in America has many flavors of Schadenfreude. Chicken fried extra crispy Schadenfreude and regular Schadenfreude. Thirty one flavors of frozen Schadenfreude with extra toppings. Plenty of Schadenfreude to go around. UBSchadenfreude we have.

        We will be at war before any progress on UBI could happen. Relax, it is a dumb idea which will forever ignite and fizzle out. Nobody is going to steal your meat today. But take a dogs meat, or a mans meat, and the same thing happens. Release of a potent form of testosterone in the brain which is five times more potent than the regular stuff to be exact. That results in rage and growling. Then when the growling surges and gets loud you know what happens next.

        UBI is a hand reaching for your meat.

        • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:13 am #

          The only reason we hear about UBI is because the media pushes the notion.

      • chipshot August 1, 2018 at 1:34 pm #

        What will be the consequences if millions lose their jobs to automation, or the jobs they have don’t even cover the cost of housing, health care, food, education and transportation?

  49. FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 9:01 am #

    Dionysian period or Great Indiction

    Dionysian period, also called Great Paschal period, or Victorian period, in the Julian calendar, a period of 532 years covering a complete cycle of New Moons (19 years between occurrences on the same date) and of dominical letters—i.e., correspondences between days of the week and of the month, which recur every 28 years in the same order. The product of 19 and 28 is the interval in years 532 between recurrences of a given phase of the Moon on the same day.

    https://www.britannica.com/science/Dionysian-period

    If we add 532 to 1453 – the year of the fall of Constantinople – we’ll get a year 1985 – the year when Spotted Judas Gorbachev became the head of the Soviet Union.

    Surprisingly, the Catholic Church in 1453, like the United States in 1991, lost its geopolitical rival and the object of comparison, found itself the enemy of its former admirers and allies, the Renaissance turned into nostalgia for paganism and cultural de-Christianization, and the Catholic Reformation into Secularism or de-Christianization political.

    From a culturological point of view, Byzantine refugees, who were more than 5000 in Venice alone at the time, brought libraries with them, which contributed to the intellectual upsurge in Italy, which turned into the Italian Renaissance.

    One of these libraries, containing mathematical treatises on the conic sections of the Constantinople professors of physics, geometry and mathematics of Isidore and Anthemius, became part of the famous Bibliotheca Corviniana library assembled by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490).

    Emperor Justinian set Isidore and Anthemius to supervise masons who built the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia in order to obtain a public formula for the construction of the dome, and built the dome twice, because the masons sabotaged the first time and the flat cupola failed. Justinian’s Orders, traditional for the Roman Empire, “convinced” masons to reveal the secrets of the profession to the mathematicians Isidore and Anthemius, who creatively interpreted the results of this interaction and presented them in the form of the first treatise on the Strength of materials and the geometry formula of the dome, which turned out to be one of the conical sections – an ellipse.

    The dome of Hagia Sophia, the first in Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, was completed and still stands, and the treatise became a teaching aid for Byzantine architects, copies of which turned out to be part of Bibliotheca Corviniana.

    When King Rudolph of Denmark (1572-1608), the future emperor of the Holy Roman Empire became the Hungarian king, the Danish nobleman and his royal astrologer Tycho Brahe, whose follower Johannes Kepler used the conical sections of the Constantinople professors to describe the laws of the motion of the planets known as the Kepler’s laws, undoubtedly got access to this library.
    The creator of physics as a science, Isaac Newton, discovered his laws by applying the differential calculus he invented to Kepler’s laws, and the observation of the fall of an apple as the source of the law of universal gravitation is still an anecdote.

    Thus, the initiation of Newton as a scientist who created the scientific basis of the industrial revolution and the “new world” is a consequence of the construction of Hagia Sophia, and the real creator of the scientific method, as the dialectical unity of practice and theory, was undoubtedly the Emperor Justinian.

    • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 4:53 pm #

      Just to be clear, the ellipse was already known to the ancient Greeks, supposedly discovered by Menaechmus. I’ve also read in a few places that it was repairs to the dome that left it “somewhat elliptical”.

      Newton’s towering genius and creativity needed no initiation. It would be the same if Hagia Sophia never even existed.

      Whatever the origins, you can see here the “lower” (essentially creatively sterile and mostly emotional) forces at work attempting to control this magnificent structure:

      https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/istanbul-s-hagia-sophia-is-at-the-centre-of-a-battle-for-turkey-s-soul-1.3342259

      • FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 5:07 pm #

        Newton’s towering genius and creativity needed no initiation

        Was Newton the “Big Bang” in a flesh? I don’t think that deeply believing Newton would agree with your statement.

        • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 5:58 pm #

          I kind of like the analogy. Newton as the “Big Bang” in the flesh. But as he himself has said, he stood on the shoulders of giants. Maybe more like he caused the inflation, of science and progress in technology.

      • FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 5:23 pm #

        Also, the ellipse as a geometrical form might has been known since the Euclid, but the symphony of mathematics and applied engineering which is the Strength of Materials – the most hated subject by technical college students – I know it for a fact since I used to teach it – in a written form appeared first in the works of Isidore and Anthemius.

        • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 6:17 pm #

          Good point. Mathematics and applied engineering. The mathematics is also applied. Vision, imagination and even Art blend the two, hopefully, into beauty.

  50. BackRowHeckler July 31, 2018 at 10:43 am #

    Not to worry.

    This is the week ‘sports betting’ kicks into high gear in CT and NJ, and every other state in the union which has staked its economic future on casino gambling, lotteries, and mass spectator sports.

    In a few weeks South Africa begins its policy of taking farms from Whites (without compensation) and giving them away to Black citizens. Now we learn that ALL private property owned by white South Africans might be confiscated. The physical infrastructure of the county is already near collapse after only 25 years of black rule and this should just about finish it off.

    There are about 4 million whites still remaining in SAfrica; once they have been dispossessed, their fate is certain. Do I have to spell it out for you?

    brh

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    • Jigplate July 31, 2018 at 12:17 pm #

      On the 4th of July, My wife and I went to the Mt Airy lodge casino in eastern PA. to watch the fireworks. Because I have never before been in a casino, we decided to take a few minutes to walk around and see what it was like. I can honestly say that it was one of the most depressing places that I have ever seen. Hundreds of mostly elderly people – many with walkers, sitting lifelessly in front of buzzing machines or at gaming tables , drinking and smoking and losing their pension and social security checks. One poor bastard couldn’t even sit up without holding on to his walker. It brings to mind Quint’s speech in “Jaws” – “Y’know, the thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes.”

      • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 4:25 pm #

        So the Blacks are right to put Whites out of their misery before they get old? Or Old Whites are Ok, but only as long as they are supporting Blacks and not wasting their money in Casinos?

  51. volodya July 31, 2018 at 11:08 am #

    Or we can look forward to the glorious day when the country is as well run as California. Haven’t been there in a while but from what I’m hearing it’s a disaster, especially for the people that “progressives” (a ludicrous misnomer on a par with “German Democratic Republic”) are so particular in their concern towards. At least that’s the Democrat cant, they profess concern, they express outrage.

    But, talk being cheap, the reality is a whole lot different. To look at it with open eyes you’d have to conclude that Democrats don’t give a shit, not even a little. Blacks and Hispanics in California are in an economically calamitous condition, and as far as Hispanics go, no matter that the Greatly Learned and Enlightened in that place can’t take care of those they have, they want still more, particularly illegals. You have to laugh.

    No, really, it’s a joke. This is the state with Silicon Valley and its uncountable billions and Hollywood, that bastion of everything right and just. It’s a preposterous situation, one that has got written all over it an arrangement without a future, one flying headlong into a future without an arrangement, at least not a workable one.

    I suppose we can sit back and just watch what the boffins there come up with. I’m not hopeful. What they seem to be strenuously doing is to make the previously unthinkable (at least since 1865) thinkable. See, they’re defying the federal government in areas where the feds hold sway. At least by law. At least until now.

    See, what they’re not doing is thinking ahead. If Democratic state governments can tell a Republican administration to go stuff it, what happens when Republican governors tells a Democrat White House and Democrat controlled federal legislative bodies the same thing?

    Where is this slippery slope headed? Wanna go it alone? De-facto secession? Been there, done that. Didn’t work out so good. Four years bloody warfare followed by a 150 year Cold War, one we see played out daily in Washington.

    You can’t overstate the idiocy. I’d try to tell Democrats that if they want to win a presidential election, to nominate an electable candidate, one that doesn’t openly disdain half the electorate. I’d tell them also to quit acting like they’re “better” than the folk voting for them, this attitude having resulted in the loss of around one thousand elected seats in state and federal legislative bodies. But they won’t listen. No, they’re – cough – educated, so they tell us what’s what, we don’t tell them.

    • BackRowHeckler July 31, 2018 at 11:28 am #

      Yeah V, out in Cal …

      A few hundred thousand white, super rich, English speaking lefty elites living within fortress like enclaves in Silicon Valley and Hollywood, behind 50 ft high walls topped with barbed wire from which they barely venture out from and only then under armed guard and in convoys, surrounded at all points by 100 million poverty stricken, vengeful Spanish speaking Latin Americans (blacks already have been driven out, like in Stockton) the whites still talking in mealy mouthed egalitarian platitudes (Diversity is our strength!) but scared shitless and and on the verge of being wiped out any day, every day, like 5000 privileged European and American diplomats and their families surrounded by tens of millions of angry Chinese in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion in 1901, but this time there is no 9th US Infantry coming to save them.

      That seems to be the future of California.

      brh

    • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 11:35 am #

      Excellent screed Vol, and thanks for the new word (to me): boffin.

      • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 2:38 pm #

        I thought that word was used in a sentence like: “So, I was boffin this chick all last semester.”

    • ozone July 31, 2018 at 7:29 pm #

      “I suppose we can sit back and just watch what the boffins there come up with. I’m not hopeful. What they seem to be strenuously doing is to make the previously unthinkable (at least since 1865) thinkable. See, they’re defying the federal government in areas where the feds hold sway. At least by law. At least until now. ”

      V.,
      I’d say, “sure, let ’em try that secession thing.”
      While we’re considering that, what is their contribution to the GDP and the tax-skimming revenues. Hmmm, that ain’t hay — them’s big cabbage fields! Now you can understand why the Fed’r’l gov’t. might want to put the brakes on this thought before it even gets thunk.

      BUT! Crocs on the Golden State ground? I think that would be the livin’ end of the U S of A. I’m convinced there are a goodly number of good ol’ american boyz and grrlz that would not have a problem with gunning down their fellow citizens these dark days, but I’m telling you, that would not go down well with the other “crucibles of democracy” and a mighty portion of the populace would become instantly anti-country-servers.

    • PeteAtomic July 31, 2018 at 8:29 pm #

      watched a doc today about the conditions in downtown San Francisco. Wow. Looked like the zombie apocalypse has broken out. I don’t think they’ll stop swimming in bags of their own fecal matter any time soon.

  52. FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 11:21 am #

    A confrontation between what remains of American Foreign Policy intelligentsia and a long-tailed Flying Monkey of a New Brave World of Hillary Clinton:

    https://twitter.com/AC360/status/1024107816347295745

    P.S. Professor Cohen doesn’t look very well to me.

  53. K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:42 am #

    UBI

    Deception by Omission is often coupled with two other techniques known as “Deception by Saturation” (saturating the target with irrelevant information) and “Deception by Spin” (presenting correct information in ways that make it favorable to a specific interpretation).
    Which one is UBI? The first, and that is a quiz answer.

    Why, in a Few Years, Nobody Will be Talking About Climate Change Anymore.

    There won’t really be a quiz, But Ugo is exceptionally good in this one and has something to refresh the stale air here.

    • FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 11:48 am #

      Dog, think of UBI as an effective and relatively painless method of euthanasia of extra population.

      • K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:49 am #

        Painless like hell. My meat is involved.

        • FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 11:51 am #

          I said “relatively painless”, didn’t I?

        • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 4:36 pm #

          Remember, you are a Communist. Did you think everyone else had to make sacrifices but not you? To each according to their need and from each according to their ability.

          “My meat is to do the Will of He who sent me.” Jesus Christ

  54. FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 1:08 pm #

    Through the eyes of the Strugatsky brothers: how the Soviet Union died

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Strugatsky

    Undoubtedly, the Strugatsky brothers were the most Soviet of Soviet writers. Soviet in the sense in which this word was used by Soviet people in 1965-1982. Probably this period can be continued into the past to the border of somewhere in 1952-1953, when the real Soviet Union was dealt a death blow by Khrushchev and Malenkov and a ghostly Soviet Union appeared, the fata morgana of the Soviet Union, which defeated the Nazi Germany.

    Nevertheless, this fata morgana existed for another 30 years as a certain subjective reality, given to us in not too pleasant sensations, but not so disgusting as the objective reality of a return to capitalism, known to the people as the damned 1990’s. And the true poets of this fata morgana were the Strugatsky brothers.

    Unlike Efremov with his “The Bull’s Hour”, a surprisingly boring narrative about sexual relations of earthly communists with extraterrestrial capitalists of a female variety, the Strugatsky sincerely believed in the communist idea, which the Soviet intelligentsia formulated for itself after the 20th Congress of the CPSU.

    Moreover, they were the only ones who managed in 1962 to create an artistically authentic image of the communist society in the novel “Noon: 22nd Century”, and until 1964 managed to develop this theme to the story “Hard to Be a God”, in which it was predicted not only Afghanistan, but also career Mr. Sechin in Angola and I would even say in the Republic of South Africa.
    https://www.ft.com/content/dc7d48f8-1c13-11e8-aaca-4574d7dabfb6

    By the way, Cuba remains communist even now, and the construction of the communist society is still present there, notwithstanding that Cuba emerged as a result of Khrushchev’s operation “Anadyr”.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Anadyr

    Moreover, the purely temporal sequence of the books written by the Strugatsky, foresaw the real history of the unreal USSR, since Sechin as the prototype of the Rumata of Estor in “Hard to Be a God” was preceded by the description in 1965 of a Soviet research institute as a prototype of a communist society in the story “Monday begins on Saturday”

    https://textinart.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/guide_english_19-copy.pdf
    as the image of the Soviet research institute.

    And it was no accident that immediately afterwards appeared “Anxiety” (“Snail on the slope”) and “Predatory Things of the Century”, in details foreseeing that funnel of the geopolitical catastrophe that was formed after the collapse of the USSR and which until recently was sucking in the entire world.

    As Arkady Strugatsky told me so around 1981 this communistic “World of Noon” about the year of 1965 began to disappear before their eyes and the artistic intellectual honesty of the brothers turned their further creativity into a chronicle of the collapse of this world.

    In 1988, it ended in posthumous poisoning with the cadaveric poison of the frankly infernal “Weighed down by evil,” which Boris wrote in my opinion already without Arcadii. They even managed to identify in the aforementioned epitaph a Soviet project entitled “And the waves quench the wind” to identify the main reason for this disintegration, namely, the penetration of the Western Colored projects into Russia, united by the theory of the “humanoids”, according to which mankind broke up in two biologically different species. This theory appeared in France at the beginning of the 11th century from the pitch of Gerbert of Aurillac, and that is exactly what Mikhail Bulgakov meant, who made Gerbert of Aurillac, also known as Pope Sylvester II, the starting point of his immortal novel “Master and Margarita”.

    They say that a research institute for the history of the collapse of the USSR has been created in China, and if the Institute does not use the political history of art used to analyze the Strugatsky’s creativity, then the People’s Republic of China also risks becoming an object of someone’s similar study.

    And for today’s Russia the most important result of the application of the political history of art can be the analysis of the appearance in 1971, that is, in the middle of this chronicle of disintegration, of the most important work of the Strugatsky – “Space Mowgli”, which is undoubtedly not only the apex of the communist world view, but I’d say a premonition of the revival of Holy Russia, for which the theory of the disintegration of mankind is unacceptable in any way, and humanity, that is, Man, as the image and likeness of God and the crown of Creation remains united despite no matter what!

    • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 3:05 pm #

      This is my second Bike Trip post comprising 2 days, July 14 and 15

      Sat July 14, 2018

      Despite my continued inability to use my phone’s GPS, I had a wonderful day visiting Gayle and Paul Stewart who until this past spring were operating a most beautiful Bed & Breakfast on a gorgeous 3.5 acres of land – a point jutting into the Ottawa River a couple of miles downstream from Spotswoods Landing. I took pictures that will make Bo drool. Meanwhile, back at the landing………….

      I made extensive conversation with an older woman and her two 40ish daughters who were staying in the cottage next door and who had been coming to the Landing to boat and fish for the past 20 years running. They were all dual citizens of the US and Canada (how and why is a convoluted story I won’t trouble you with). The younger of the two daughters had two children in tow, a boy 17 and a girl 16. I asked if she (the mother of these kids, that is) worked and she said “Yes, in retail” which when pressed for something more specific turned out to be a small business selling pot paraphernalia for the past 18 years. Both she and her sister, an asthmatic, interestingly, smoked cigarettes incessantly and made gurgling coughs between puffs. In general, I saw far more smoking among Canadians than the people at home. Based on the contents of the ashtrays I estimate each of these sisters at a pack-a-day, minimum. Politically, as might be expected, they and everyone they know hates Trump and is (are?) fond of their own young PM, Trudeau. The 2 teenage kids were bummed out by bugs and lack of cell phone access.

      I know it’s a bad idea to eat packs of trail mix and Ritz peanut butter crackers and to wash it down with bottled tap water for my lunch and dinner meals…and to do this on no set schedule time-wise, and further, to start my day with a packet of oatmeal (either apple cinnamon or maple and brown sugar) which I refer to as “pablum” and which acts as a powerful and explosive laxative and might catch me unawares as I’m flying down a super-highway at 75 mph while desperately scanning wooded areas on my right for a place to dash into for an emergency dump, and for which circumstance I carry toilet paper and flushable “wipes” in a convenient compartment………deep breath……..soooo, today, after my visit to the Stewarts and their wonderful former B&B I headed for Pembroke, Ontario some 20 miles distant where there were supermarkets containing all the wonders of bachelor cuisine. I purchased a pre-roasted chicken and a pre-packaged Greek salad with a packet of dressing that comes as part of the deal. Together, and including tax, these items ran me 13.55 Canadian which at the conversion rate came to about $10.84 US. I packed them in the large space under my bike’s seat and headed back the 20 miles to Spotswoods Landing and washed these items down with a cheap bottle of Pino Grigio purchased earlier. The 20 miles became 40 or 50 due to a GPS-less wrong turn that took me on the Quebec Prov side of the Ottawa River rather than the Ontario side. I should have known something wasn’t right when all road signs were in French rather than in both French and English.

      While in Pembroke I dropped into a huge drug store where the filling of prescriptions is a mere sideline. They sell tons of women’s makeup and just about anything else you can think of except F150 pickup trucks which are the preferred ride in these here parts. My purpose at the drug store was to see if it is possible to obtain a refill in Canada of my Andro Gel Testosterone Rx at a savings over the insane cost under the US drug system. Long story short, yes, I could but would have to jump through so many hoops, yada yada yada.

      Sitting in the air conditioned comfort of the drug store sipping a Coke to revive myself from the blazing heat outside I decided to attempt a cell call home to “the ball and chain.” Pembroke being a town/city of significant size (pop 13,882) had decent cell coverage. Another long story made short…I put on my bike helmet (picture this, I’m sitting in the Rx section of this huge drug store with a motorcycle helmet on) that has a Blue Tooth device attached to its left side with a microphone bent near my mouth like a football head coach and this marvel of technology is “paired” to my cell phone and I am chatting with my wife with absolute clarity as if she were 15 ft away in the lipstick aisle.

      Sun July 15, 2018

      This is my last day at Spotswoods Landing. (Note: I realize Spotswoods should have an apostrophe before that last letter s to make it possessive but I’ll not quibble with Lorne since that’s the way he has it on his documents and website. What purpose would it serve for me to point it out? Eh?)

      After I pack up tomorrow AM I’ll be on my way to Duluth, MN, a 3-day drive, the first stop being Spanish, Ontario, some 300 miles away. Although I have not fished or gotten out on the river, today was nonetheless fruitful. I walked over to the office and settled my account with a VISA credit card. The amt in C$ was 200.01 which should come out to around $160 US. I don’t have the receipt yet.

      I had a nice long chat with Lorne who filled me in on many details of the history here. First of all I was wrong about Lorne being the most recent (or last) in a long line of Spotswoods since he has two sons and a daughter ranging from 44 to 49 and all 3 smart as whips (the boys, both engineers and the girl a “chartered accountant.” That is equivalent to a CPA back in the states. And come to think of it, I don’t know if he has grandchildren.

      Lorne explained how he made money from the property by renting out sites for the travel trailer and RV folks to park their vehicles. He also rents dock space for boat owners based on the length of their boats, and he rents his 3 cottages. He owns not one F150 but 2 of them, both red. One is devoted to plowing the gravel roadways in the winter. The other one used for general transportation he got a bargain on when a friend died suddenly of a heart attack and Lorne bought it from the estate. He also made a bundle buying a small plot of land adjacent to his property for $500 and then building a home on it. The plot and house together he says are now worth $500K (C$, I assume). In total Lorne claims his holdings are worth $5 million but he plays this down by saying “at my age I don’t need 5 million.” But Q. is not easily fooled and recognizes an inordinate interest in mammon when he sees it.

      Lorne’s wife died of a brain tumor 10 years ago. His 3 kids are likely to be set for life – God bless ’em. Besides his financial good fortune Lorne was a high school principal and receives a nice pension.

      I explained to Lorne that I had one major beef about staying here and that was the inability to use my cell phone for calls and GPS. I rode back to Pembroke (which locals pronounce as Pembric*) and dropped in at a cell phone kiosk at the mall where a girl fixed my GPS problem by turning on “roaming,” whatever that means. If nothing else this bike trip is making me more self-reliant about matters technological and about food whereas normally I would rely totally on others. (Note: When I write minutiae like this it is for my own benefit. I understand fully that no one else could possibly give a shit…so, my apologies.)

      Speaking of pronunciation, virtually every sentence or phrase spoken by these locals is ended with “eh?” pronounced as a long a “aay?” I interpret this as a speech mannerism in which the speaker is continuously asking the listener to acknowledge that what has just been said is so without actually acknowledging it. It is akin to “uptalk,” a maddeningly annoying mannerism that has overtaken American speech, where every sentence sounds like a question.

      • janet July 31, 2018 at 3:12 pm #

        Q, why don’t you self-publish your work and make money off it, instead of giving it away here?

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 4:30 pm #

          I doubt that there’s much market for it but it’s fun to share with family and friends.

          Stay tuned, some of my better humor is yet to come.

      • PeteAtomic July 31, 2018 at 3:49 pm #

        Looking forward to the rest of your adventures Q.

        I was in a town 3 hours NW of Duluth called Bemidji, while you were here.

        You’ll have to come back in 6 or 7 months and see how you like it then 🙂

        lol

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 4:24 pm #

          Yeah, it should be about 20 below. There was a day during my brief Air Force career there when it hit -38. Seriously.

      • 100th Avatar July 31, 2018 at 4:35 pm #

        “I made extensive conversation with an older woman and her two 40ish daughters who were staying in the cottage next door …”

        And? A bike ride to a convenience store?

        Worst Penthouse Letters story ever.

        • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 5:31 pm #

          Ha Ha. Good one. Spice is nice. Sorry, Q. But I do understand about those low T levels.

          Speaking of which, anybody else tired of this guy? I guess the husband is supposed to run out and stock up to keep this brute from boffing his wife.

          https://www.ispot.tv/ad/wZA8/nugenix-fan-featuring-frank-thomas

        • Q. Shtik August 1, 2018 at 10:40 am #

          Worst Penthouse Letters story ever. – Avatar

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

          Well, you would know better than I. I’ve never read any Penthouse Letters. I stick mostly to the classics.

          • tucsonspur August 2, 2018 at 2:46 am #

            Ha. Ha. Another good one.

      • Janos Skorenzy July 31, 2018 at 5:09 pm #

        TMIF: Too much information about you taking dumps. If you insist on this, please give technical information about how to bury it and with what. Someone wrote a book entitled, How to take a shit in the woods and I recommend you read it for future trips and their travelogues.

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 9:38 pm #

          You’ve heard the old expression “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

          Well, does a bear bury that shit?

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 10:29 pm #

          TMIF: Too much information about you taking dumps. – Janos

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

          The word dump comes up 5 times in 21 typed pages. Only once is it a reference to excrement. The other 4 times concern the quality of motel accommodations.

          Stick to your areas of concern: Blacks, Jews and Mexicans. Leave shit to me.

          BTW, shouldn’t TMIF be TMI?

      • Tate July 31, 2018 at 7:00 pm #

        “my Andro Gel Testosterone Rx”

        WTF? Is that some sort of gel you rub on your balls or something?

        • PeteAtomic July 31, 2018 at 8:14 pm #

          well I guess we all know what to give him for Christmas, ha ha

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 9:59 pm #

          Avatar and Janos,

          This is why they make scroll wheels.

        • Q. Shtik July 31, 2018 at 10:02 pm #

          Is that some sort of gel you rub on your balls or something? – Taint

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

          Google it. Mine is the 1.62% product.

          • Tate August 1, 2018 at 2:30 am #

            Is it helping? Are they returning to their normal size (whatever that means to you)?

          • Tate August 1, 2018 at 5:16 am #

            I apologize for typing that, Q. Shtik. I have no excuse whatsoever for doing it.

  55. janet July 31, 2018 at 3:10 pm #

    Planning for the worst case scenario is a colossal waste of time and energy. The worst case scenario never happens… and you have wasted your life preparing for it. Nobody gets out alive. Being “prepared” will not save you from the inevitable.

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    • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 6:54 pm #

      No janet no one can really plan for the worst case, nor should they for it is impossible and a waste of time just as you say. Planning for a rainy day or a change in the system that will impact we consumers negatively is simply good planning. I have spent going on 7 decades heeding my Father’s good advice of “get a job, pay your debts as quickly as possible, spend less than you make, put whatever you can aside for a rainy day”. Dad did not do much in the way of advice, but this was all of the lesson I needed and it allowed me to do what I now do in comfort. I understand that its not for everyone, but it really does work well if you can manage it.

      • JohnAZ July 31, 2018 at 7:20 pm #

        You are right on! Opportunity exists for everyone. It is up to the individual to take advantage as they can, to the best of their ability.

        That is the American way.

        Until the progressives come in to promise everyone free ride for their lives, America is the last bastion of individual responsibility.

        VOTE! Against progressivism.

        • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 8:00 pm #

          Unfortunately there are many who simply do not possess the mental abilities to fully understand that. And then there are those that have very little to offer a society physically or mentally in exchange for a return service or an income. How to deal with them is the real conundrum and I have absolutely no answers to that problem. How to deal with those that can but choose to play the system? Or even worse, how to deal with those at the top that play the system for huge profits? Rooting them out and sending them to Australia used to work pretty well, but now that the continent is “civilized” well another answer will have to be found. Personally I do not think that this nation can solve that problem, I mean what problems have they solved recently? See my point?

        • chipshot July 31, 2018 at 9:30 pm #

          Opportunity in America declined when so many CEO’s from the late 70s on shipped jobs overseas and cut pay/benefits for jobs that remained, all for the benefit of themselves and major shareholders, the majority of whom are of the 1%.

          Upward mobility in the US has become an endangered species as a result. Pay has stagnated while living expenses, especially major ones such as health care, housing and higher education, have gone way up.

          I’m guessing you’ve been brainwashed by Fox and maybe even Limbaugh.

          • Walter B July 31, 2018 at 9:38 pm #

            It still does exist chipshot though it is far more difficult to “make it pay” today than it was back in my day, thanks to the bullshit that you noted in your post. I think that the level of success that is available for those who are still motivated to go for it is drastically reduced as well, and just wait until the robots take over, how’s that gonna work out ya think? Wages have been flat for 4 decades now they say, but I see an awful lot of people in every income range working 2 or 3 or however many jobs it takes to pay their bills. Nope, it ain’t good and I do not see it getting any better.

        • Janos Skorenzy August 1, 2018 at 5:43 pm #

          AZ wants to go back to 1950. He thinks the Government made the Corporations move our jobs overseas. John, they’d be willing to bring them back as long as we got rid of the minimum wage. Slavery or De Facto slavery is also the American Way. And the Corporations are the Government now. Fascism is the opposite.

  56. tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 6:44 pm #

    This is sure to be a hot topic, guaranteed to get people fired up. A shot to the face of gun control advocates.

    A far cry from the old muzzleloader. Code. 3D printer. “Plastic” death.

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/07/26/3d-printed-guns-legal/

    • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 6:51 pm #

      Just in: Federal judge grants TRO.

    • JohnAZ July 31, 2018 at 7:26 pm #

      TS

      A huge problem with plastic weapons is that TSA security and all metal detection systems will lose their effectiveness. No regulation of guns, everyone can make their own guns, gun control will cease to exist. Not sure that is what the framers of amendment 2 had in mind.

      The effect of 3 d print manufacturing will be interesting in the future in all applications.

      • 100th Avatar July 31, 2018 at 9:41 pm #

        Metallic bullets

        Brass

        Lead

  57. JohnAZ July 31, 2018 at 7:04 pm #

    A story today is that to incorporate and run Medicare for all will cost 32 TRILLION dollars for the next ten years. 3.2 trillion per year. The estimated impact is for all corporations and individuals to pay twice the income taxes to pay for it. The corporate tax rate will go to 40%. Hey, liberals, where do all the jobs come from that are created? What creates wealth for everyone. Definitely not the government, who has never created a wealth building job in its existence. Sanders and his crew are literally out of their minds.

    Look at Canada and others with socialized medicine. Long waits for primary care, huge waits for elective surgery, DNR after 70, life decisions made by a national panel, sounds great. Look at the VA long waits for everything? Why? No MD in his right mind wants to work for a government organization. Visited Gibraltar recently, payroll tax for medical care and social security is 17% of their gross. 17%! In addition to all their other taxes.

    The sad part is that there are no better ideas. The free market does not work well with monopolies like electric companies, water companies or medical care. Obama care was a vestigial “free market” adaptation that once released is showing how fast medicine can go out of control cost wise. ACA will go bankrupt eventually, and then what?

    Is medical care a right? At what level?

    If we cannot afford healthcare, how the heck are we going to afford free education and free UBI?

    These progressives are nuts!!

    • chipshot July 31, 2018 at 7:13 pm #

      What you left out is that we will spend far more on health care in the next ten years if we stick we the current heinous system. Sorry, but Medicare for all would cost less than insurance-run health care.

      • JohnAZ July 31, 2018 at 7:31 pm #

        Okay, in the next ten years, give away twice the rate of income tax to afford a much poorer service medical system. And more for free education too. Whether you need it or not. And definitely not by your choice. A tax passed in Washington never goes away.

        • chipshot July 31, 2018 at 9:20 pm #

          Who said it would be a poorer service? Medicare is not considered a poor service. Anything that is affordable is better than a system that’s unaffordable (i.e., inaccessible) for so many.

          Medicare can be easily paid for with higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, a transaction tax on Wall St, and a reduction in military spending.

          How much do you watch Fox, John?

    • Tate July 31, 2018 at 7:32 pm #

      Break up the medical rackets. Why doesn’t the government prosecute under anti-trust law? That would go a long way.

      • malthuss August 1, 2018 at 9:37 am #

        Billions of dollars go to scams, often run by foreigners. Billing, equipment, etc.

  58. Tate July 31, 2018 at 7:25 pm #

    All righty, all you grinning thots standing in the waiting area with heart-punctuated welcome signs for the Vibrant Enrichers… Just wait until Shariah law goes into full effect. Then even with a chador protecting you from the cheek peck, you will be sent to lie prostrate before the enforcers’ whips.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6902723/saudi-man-arrested-after-he-dared-to-kiss-his-girlfriend-on-the-cheek-as-he-taught-her-to-drive/

  59. FincaInTheMountains July 31, 2018 at 7:52 pm #

    Quote from “And the waves quench the wind” by Strugatskies:

    There, behind the door, Gorbovsky was dying – an entire era was dying, a living legend was dying. The Starfarer. Paratrooper. Discoverer of civilizations. The creator of a large COMCON. Member of the World Council.

    Grandfather Gorbovsky … First of all, Grandfather Gorbovsky. He was – grandfather Gorbovsky. He was like a fairy tale: always kind and therefore always right. Such was his era that kindness always prevailed.

    “Choose the best from all possible solutions.”

    Not the most promising, not the most rational, not the most progressive, and certainly not the most effective – the most kind!

    He never said these words and he very sarcastically talked on the account of those of his biographers, who attributed to him these words, and he probably never thought of these words, but the whole essence of his life is precisely in these words.

    And of course, these words are not a recipe, not everyone is allowed to be kind, this is the same talent as an aural skill or clairvoyance, only rarer. And I wanted to cry, because the kindest of people died.

    And the stone will be carved: “He was the kindest”

  60. janet July 31, 2018 at 8:46 pm #

    “A tax passed in Washington never goes away.” –JohnAZ

    Hmmmm…. never?

    LIST OF EXPIRING FEDERAL TAX PROVISIONS 2016–2027

    This document provides a listing of Federal tax provisions that expired or are currently scheduled to expire in 2016–2027.

    https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=5057

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    • DrGonzo July 31, 2018 at 11:20 pm #

      There you go again, confusing us with facts and real information.

    • JohnAZ August 1, 2018 at 9:21 am #

      A derisive statement. But the intent is real. Taxation in the last half century has tended higher with three exceptions, RR, Bush 43 and DT. I do have a problem with the D.C. Tendency to jerk tax rates around in Big increments which leaves big finance question marks in government and business leader’s minds(see 2008). The phonies in the Deep State, both parties, will always try to spend their way out of problems. DC needs to learn to go slow.

      Hey, Janet. What do you think of the Koch Bros, bad mouthing Trump? Talk about hypocrisy.

  61. janet July 31, 2018 at 9:07 pm #

    “Not sure that is what the framers of amendment 2 had in mind.” –JohnAZ

    The framers were specific that no one has a right to bear arms because a well-regulated armed militia exists.

    “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

    In other words, people must be armed if they are part of a “well regulated Militia” and those armed people are today called the armed forces of the United States. “The people” have no right to keep and bear arms.

    Trump today supported gun control. Trump is denying the right of the people to keep and bear 3D printer Arms. As JohnAZ says: the framers were not thinking about AR-15s in the hands of citizens. Now Trump is on my side. I support Trump’s gun control stand.

    • JohnAZ August 1, 2018 at 9:40 am #

      When amendment 2 was written, the people were the militia. The Conrinental army was recruited from militia folks from the different states. The civil war armies were composed of militias from the various states, ex. The 20th Maine under Chamberlain. In those days, guns were essential for hunting food and protection. Remember the core of the founders philosophy was anti-central government, i.e. Anti monarchical. They did not want an national army on domestic soil. This continues to today. The National Guard is our militia. It’s job is to maintain order in emergencies and to back up the national forces. Both need arms.

      There is the rub. If a pioneer in Arizona was told to give up his weapons, forget it. It was needed because protection was not available from central authority, the army. The individual citizen had the responsibility to protect their family and property. Move to today. Different levels of protection exist now that did not then. So why do people feel the need to arm themselves. Because the police are not getting the job done. Why? Because technically and in numbers, they are outnumbered by the bad guys. And the response, the cops are the bad guys. I do not own a gun and do not want to, but I definitely understand people’s needs for protection.

      Ha! Rahm is being dumped by the communities in Chicago. Hope it is a trend. Chicago needs to dump the blood sucking liberal leadership it has had for a century.

  62. dilbert113 July 31, 2018 at 9:57 pm #

    Universal Basic Income should scare the heck out of anyone reading this blog. UBI means the government will start just sending out checks, say, $1,000 a month, to everyone, regardless of income. That could cause the US Dollar to be see as Government Coupons that come in the mail every month, similar to Ration Books issued during WW2 for the purchase of gasoline, butter, meats, and other basic necessities. Or for our dollar to be seen as similar to postage stamps, to be more modern about it. Now Ration Books had value–apparently, if you didn’t have Gasoline Rations, you could not buy gas for your car, no matter how much money you had. Ditto at the grocery store. And stamps have value too. . .but, they’re Not Money. If people come to see US dollars as government coupons that come in the mail every month, then people who work for these dollars will see those who just get them in the mail, and swiftly demand to be paid in “hard money” meaning, for purproses of this post, silver, gold, ammunition and trade goods. If people lose faith in the US dollar, and signs saying “dollars not accepted here” “no EBT, food stamps, etc. accepted as forms of payment” then things will get out of control very quickly. The government cannot tax or control a barter economy. . .

    • tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 11:35 pm #

      UBI – what the result will be. Ultimate Bitter Insurgency.

      Ching Chow said that “a wise man is always a student”.

      Listen and learn:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Jh4KjPP-o

    • JohnAZ August 1, 2018 at 9:47 am #

      Report on Fox on various experimental UBI communities, one in Finland and one in Canada as examples. To date, not one success. Why? People lose motivation and just quit. They lower their expectations on achievement because what is the point? The government will take care of me. What me worry?

  63. tucsonspur July 31, 2018 at 10:54 pm #

    “And then there are those that have very little to offer a society physically or mentally in exchange for a return service or an income. How to deal with them is the real conundrum and I have absolutely no answers to that problem”. Walter B.

    I guess the ‘safety nets’ provided by the taxpayers are the only current answers available. But as the population continues to grow, it’s mainly the menial jobs that will try to keep pace. Automation has already taken its toll and will continue to do so. Incessant struggle will continue for the masses.

    In whatever, 15 – 25 years, will the number on food relief be 100 million? Will housing assistance triple? The ‘monster’ grows, as Dog puts it, and the only solution in sight is more and more taxpayers holding up a bigger and bigger safety net.

    Population control is so far out of sight, even Hubble can’t see it.

  64. K-Dog July 31, 2018 at 11:58 pm #

    I see murmurings of Robots taking over but behind every robot there has to be a program and programs which can adapt to real world complexity are a long long way away. Fact is when in a few years, the remnants of what is now ambles back home along dirt roads from toiling in fields, there won’t be any robots walking back to the dilapidated rusty shipping containers they will be calling home with them. Even if such creatures were more than the pipe dreams of overactive imaginations and charlatans, the disconnected fantasies of our times, the maintenance on a human slave will be 1000 times cheaper than a robot. Spare parts will not be available anywhere anyway. The world will be filled with useless junk. Robots will all be broken.

    When the monotony of dawn and dusk saunters to and from tending crops is broken by a find from the jaded past, any young children will be mesmerized. But a swift box to the ears will set them straight. Lessons from zealous older kids will put pushes and shoves to what adults will soon teach with words. Silly talk of robots. Technology will have ruined their world and they will know with clarity what our time took from them. A new Luddism will be the religion of the land. It will be the thing which modernity must become for itt will be appropriate to the coming twilight times.

    Plastic from any real robots found along with Star Wars memorabilia and anything else will be cracked to oil in village refineries. It will be needed for tractors and to cool the first aid vans so when a peasant collapses from heat they can be revived and put back to work. Metal that can be worked into farm implements, tools, and weapons will be useful.

    • malthuss August 1, 2018 at 9:38 am #

      ?

      • K-Dog August 1, 2018 at 12:36 pm #

        The world will be populated by different kinds of men. Techno-gnosticism will be an anachronistic thing of the past in the twilight times to come. Modes of though which will correctly represent the reality of things to come will be alien to contemporary comprehension. Disneyland is not the world of tomorrow, sorry to say.

        But back to robots.

        What happens when a robot gets his feet wet. This guy knows.

        enjoy

        The Rogue Tesla Mechanic Resurrecting Salvaged Cars

        • PeteAtomic August 1, 2018 at 8:15 pm #

          neat story, thanks for sharing

  65. Pucker August 1, 2018 at 1:22 am #

    I wonder to what extent Putin himself is an outcome the Marxist-hangover, Russian gangster mentality? I recall reading that Trump has always rubbed shoulders with the New York mafia which was deeply involved in the construction business. And then there are the Clinton’s. Russians seem to refer to “The Clinton Gang”.

    “The reformers’ social darwinism was complemented by their economic determinism. It is an irony of the transition period that the reformers, intending to destroy socialism, preserved its most basic philosophical assumption, the belief that morality and law have no independent independent validity but are a function of underlying economic relations. The reformers showed little interest in the sources of the legal framework that regulated the way in which the market economy in the West operated. In fact, conditioned by years of Marxist training, they dismissed moral idealism as “bourgeois thought,” which was not based on anything real. The consequences of social darwinism and economic determinism were greatly magnified by the most important practical effect of the worldview that the reformers brought to Russia’s transformation. This was the reformers’ indulgent attitude toward crime. Influenced by decades of mendacious Soviet propaganda, they assumed that the initial accumulation of capital in a market economy is almost always criminal, and, as they were resolutely procapitalist, they found it difficult to be strongly anticrime. Because the bandits and black-market market operators also wanted a free-market economy, the reformers began to see them as “socially friendly” and reacted to the criminals’ growing wealth and property with equanimity and even approval, assuming that the gangsters would be able to hold on to their capital only as long as they were able to make it work “for the benefit of society.” 7

    David Satter
    Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

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  66. Pucker August 1, 2018 at 3:28 am #

    Satter suggests that political environments in which people are forced to parrot the Party Line against their true inner feelings leads to the moral degradation and corruption of society and general lawlessness. Sound familiar? (Many Democrats are now espousing the Universal Basic Income even though they don’t believe in it.)

    “Most of the young reformers had worked in Soviet ideological institutions where they had been expected to help “build communism.” Holding strongly procapitalist opinions, they had constantly to express views that were the opposite of their true beliefs. The resulting moral degradation instilled a ruthless attitude toward the other functionaries of the Communist regime and toward the Russian people as a whole. Their disgruntlement was deepened by the fact that the party leaders distrusted them and denied them the prospect of brilliant careers .5 In the atmosphere of dual consciousness in which they worked during the Soviet period, the reformers developed a set of attitudes that were to shape the course of reform. These included social darwinism, economic determinism, and a tolerant attitude toward crime. The reformers’ social darwinism was, in many ways, a reaction against Soviet society’s professed concern for the needy and helpless. It was expressed in a refusal to consider the effects of their policies on the Russian population. When, in one of the new government’s first acts, price controls were lifted on almost all products, wiping out the savings of 99 percent of the population, Gaidar answered objections by saying that the money in people’s savings accounts was not real because it did not reflect the quantity of available goods. 6”

    David Satter
    Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

    • Pucker August 1, 2018 at 6:54 am #

      Yegor Gaidar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yegor_Gaidar

    • K-Dog August 1, 2018 at 11:15 am #

      David Satter works for a conservative think tank. The Hudson institute.

      In 2006, Scooter Libby, of Dick Cheney fame, joined the Hudson Institute as a senior advisor. David Satter will produce any hate you pay him for and the Kochs buy a lot of hate.

      • K-Dog August 1, 2018 at 11:18 am #

        Well, not just any hate, conservative hate!

        • Pucker August 1, 2018 at 8:26 pm #

          What a Rip Off!

  67. tucsonspur August 1, 2018 at 3:33 am #

    I’m still trying to figure this one out. Cops kill the perp along with the hostage.

    http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lapd-hostage-shooting-20180730-story.html

    • malthuss August 1, 2018 at 9:41 am #

      Police killed a crazy person who had a knife or was it a scissors?

      • tucsonspur August 2, 2018 at 6:07 pm #

        Some cops fire too soon. Here they fired too late.
        How were they deployed?

        Bad judgement. The woman should not have been killed.

  68. janet August 1, 2018 at 9:24 am #

    “A story today is that to incorporate and run Medicare for all will cost 32 TRILLION dollars for the next ten years” —JohnAZ

    A story? Who is telling this tall tale?

    40% tax on the rich? It should be 94% like in the 1950s. Then UBI funding is no problem. We already have a form of UBI for those on Social Security.

    Given life expectancy SSA payments exceed FISA contributions. You are getting more out than you paid in. Old people already are getting what JohnAZ despectively refers to as “free stuff” but I doubt he will refuse to accept those free SSA gravy checks that go beyond what he contributed to SSA. That is conservative/libertarian hypocrisy.

  69. BackRowHeckler August 1, 2018 at 9:42 am #

    Russia might be stepping up and taking in some of the Boers whose farms are being confiscated by the SAfrican government. A delegation of 30 white SAfricans have recently visited Russia to discuss the matter and work out details. About 40,000 farms and ranches are on the block. “Cry My Beloved Country”, indeed!

    I think these people would be a credit to any country; the west, with the possibility of Australia, has turned its back on them, so they’ve turned to Russia. God Bless Holy Russia!

    On the homefront, editorial in the Boston Globe last weekend states Vermont and New Hampshire are too white, and must be integrated, forcibly if necessary, with Hispanics, Blacks and Asians. This should be done by building housing projects thru out these northern states in small towns and rural area. To give these New Englanders a full measure of ‘Diversity’ a program of mandatory re education would have to be instituted and all racists and bigots identified and rooted out, a process that might take decades.

    brh

    • pequiste August 1, 2018 at 10:52 am #

      Too bad the Caucasians of South Africa didn’t chuse to start a separate country as had been suggested in a number of political quarters during and right after the collapse of Apartheid. They would have had the most prosperous place on the whole continent. However, they, Boer and Anglo alike, selected the phoney baloney Kumbaya theology of the Marxist African National Congress, led by Saint Nelson Mandela and have invited a raysiss genocide on themselves and their posterity.

      Let them honkeys go somewhere else to be productive members of a peaceful society. The once fabulously wealthy, former Union of South Africa, is well on its way to be turned into a macro version of a hybrid between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Detroit.

      • Janos Skorenzy August 1, 2018 at 2:12 pm #

        One Boer official who betrayed the last hope of Boer Freedom then asked Mandela if he would give the Whites their own State. He said he’d think about it. I’m sure he though long and hard, the man who sang “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” at tribal gatherings all of his life and who called Whites fleeing Black Terror, “cowards”.

    • JohnAZ August 1, 2018 at 11:16 am #

      If it happens, it will surpass any mandatory relocation effort by the worst of all the dictatorships.

      It does beg a question. How does a polity get its constituency to intermix. How does a society integrate and overcome one of the three major sins, ethnocentrism. Can the US continue much longer as a de facto segregated society. BY CHOICE of all sides.

      Typical liberal crap. Promise the indigent free stuff and get their votes. Take away property without due process, typical third world behavior. Progressives, please go to Latin America where you belong. Unfortunately that will only increase the outflow North as the situation worsens.

      • chipshot August 1, 2018 at 1:40 pm #

        Fox or Limbaugh talking points, John? Or a combination?

      • BackRowHeckler August 2, 2018 at 11:24 am #

        JohnAZ

        This pretty much already happened in Zimbabwe, and to a lesser extent in Venezuela.

        The results are there, for all to see.

        brh

    • elysianfield August 1, 2018 at 11:16 am #

      ” To give these New Englanders a full measure of ‘Diversity’ a program of mandatory re education would have to be instituted and all racists and bigots identified and rooted out, a process that might take decades.”

      Yes, those haughty Vermont residents, men and especially the women, need to experience diversity…good and hard….

      In all honesty, the “thrust” of the article…so Stalinist in it’s solutions, sound to me like fake news…I would have to read that article myself to believe it would exist. Sorry, BRH, but this strains my credulity.

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

        Oh ye of little faith. Haven’t you divined their intent to utterly and irrevocably change America into something different via creative demographics? And to will the End is to will the Means….

        https://www.amren.com/news/2018/07/new-hampshire-94-percent-white-asks-how-do-you-diversify-a-whole-state/

        These States cannot survive without minorities. Or even grow. There aren’t even any hairdressers for Black women? How is that sustainable? How will Black women exist there? Build them and they will come. And since they are coming, they must be built.

    • PeteAtomic August 1, 2018 at 8:20 pm #

      the Boer farmers are specialists. They’d be a great addition to Russia, or North Dakota, or Saskatchewan (for that matter).

  70. FincaInTheMountains August 1, 2018 at 10:17 am #

    Robert Mueller referred lobbyists, including Tony Podesta, to Manhattan prosecutors

    https://www.vox.com/2018/7/31/17637426/robert-mueller-ukraine-lobbyists-tony-podesta-vin-weber-greg-craig

    Putin’s hackers did hack Hillary and Podesta and Putin has video recordings of the participation of the above-mentioned individuals in certain rituals I’m afraid to write about, but to write the fact that Hillary and Podesta participated in the organization of terrorist attacks in the US to justify the need to disarm Americans, I’m not afraid.

    In addition, according to neighboring rumors, Putin has the entire archive of the operation to overthrow Gaddafi and incontrovertible evidence of Hillary Clinton’s participation personally in the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria, as well as the creation of weapons stores in Mosul, the capture of which turned the “moderate” rebels against Assad into ISIS.

    Moreover, these evidences were in Ambassador Stevens possession, which actually caused his murder.

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  71. volodya August 1, 2018 at 10:31 am #

    If the Fed has got uncounted trillions to feed into the monster-maw of the greatest, most all- encompassing criminal society the world has ever seen, and maybe ever WILL see, then surely to jesus they can scratch up a few bucks for the average joe. They can, can’t they? We can dream can’t we?

    See, the guys that run things, ever oblivious, never even giving the slightest thought that the peon like us have eyes and can see and can think uncomplicated thoughts like why the fuck do they get to engorge themselves and guys like us don’t even get to wet our beaks?

    To the extent that they give acknowledgement, they would tell us that we are thinking unworthy thoughts, that these complaints have no validity, that we are fomenting class warfare.

    JHK is right on the larger point, if you want a Venezuelization of the USA, this is one way to do it.

    Trillions for the rich, impoverishment for the poor, has already got it well on its way.

    • ozone August 1, 2018 at 6:16 pm #

      V.,
      Yes, it already *is* class warfare, there’s no need to foment what the elite have been prosecuting for generations uncounted.

      You sez:
      “See, the guys that run things, ever oblivious, never even giving the slightest thought that the peon like us have eyes and can see and can think uncomplicated thoughts like why the fuck do they get to engorge themselves and guys like us don’t even get to wet our beaks?”

      See? Now there’s common cause for you, if only duh peephole could see beyond their consumerist indoctrination, addictive appetites and the insistent urgings of their genitalia. …….Oops, I’ve dreamt too bigly right there. Oh well, plan H it is then!

  72. Q. Shtik August 1, 2018 at 12:00 pm #

    This is my third Bike Trip post comprising July 16, 17 and 18.

    Mon July 16, 2018

    I went to bed early last night, around 10. I woke at 4:30 and didn’t even bother trying to catch a few more winks. Went right to the kitchen, made coffee and carefully packed up my bike. I had to leave behind 3 bottles of Stella, an untouched bottle of Merlot and a few food items. I pulled away from my cottage at 6:07 AM, thankful to start moving because the mosquitoes were swarming. Later in the day a local sitting outside a Tim Horton’s (Canada’s version of Starbucks) told me the bugs/mosquitoes were the worst in his memory. He theorized the cause being the exceptional heat and humidity this year. This poor guy, a former truck driver, has been unemployed 2 years. I excused myself to go inside for a cup of coffee and he asked if I’d spot him a cup. I did and he ordered a “medium double double.” I had to ask what that meant…medium size cup with double the normal amount of cream and sugar. He went outside to be with his old, large, panting dog. I stayed inside to charge my phone which was down to 14%. I felt bad for this character because he was articulate and interesting but had been dealt a bad hand. His name was Jeff, named after Jeff Bridges by his mom who had an obsession with the actor when he was young and up and coming. Jeff told me this with a scoffing tone as if to recognize the silliness of how he came to be named Jeff.

    There is a certain camaraderie among people on bikes. Whether you encounter them during a coffee break or while gassing up there is always a conversation like: “where you from?…where you going?…how many Ccs is your bike?…what year is it?” Many have women riding with them. Some are pulling small trailers so they can bring more shit with them. It seems you just can’t have enough shit. This one couple was in the home stretch of a 14,000 kilometer trip (about 8700 miles). Another couple (retired) in the motel room next to mine have this gorgeous blue 2013 Honda Goldwing with matching trailer and they have put 40,000 miles on it.

    So, anyway, I drove 320 miles today exceeding the 314 I did on day one. Around 300 seems to be an endurance limit for me for a couple of reasons: The weight and snugness of the helmet begins to seriously hurt my ears. Wind gusts and the buffeting of passing trucks is (are?) constantly shaking the helmet. The worst is a blunt-nosed tour bus coming at you at 80 with only 8 ft separating you. The wind blast feels like you have been smacked very hard in the face with a thin pillow. You’re thankful not to have been blown off your bike. God knows how it must feel to riders without windshields.

    A few observations: 1) They still have ESSO stations in Canada…never made the switch to Exxon. 2) Cow shit stench is similar but not identical to that of horseshit (noted as I passed a couple of dairy farms). 3) The “Trans Canada Highway, Rt 17” has vast stretches where you won’t see another vehicle, in front or behind, for 5 minutes. It is mostly a 2-lane highway, one in either direction.

    There is so much I could say about the dump I’m staying in tonight that I’m not even going to bother. Not often, but sometimes, I tire of focusing on the negative.

    Tue July 17, 2018

    I am sitting in the lounge/breakfast area of a motel in Marquette, MI at 9PM while I wait for a load of laundry to dry. My ride from Spanish, Ontario was 301 miles. After all the recent heat, today was shockingly cold…about 62 all the way with a persistent buffeting wind in my face. I crossed back into the US at Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced Sue Saint Marie) which is located roughly where the 3 largest of the Great Lakes come together. You cross a couple of bridges over water and pay a $3.50 cash only (no EZPass) toll. You pull up to a booth, hand them your passport and they ask a few routine questions: Where are you going? For what purpose? Since I don’t fit a shit-list profile they don’t even ask me about the load of weapons and drugs concealed in the cavernous storage space under my seat, hahaha.

    I had one riding scare today. There are long stretches of the Trans Can undergoing resurfacing/repair. At one point all vehicles were forced onto the shoulder composed of freshly poured deep gravel that had not even had a roller run over it. Too bad there is no video of my bike wobbling through this. I nearly went down and what a lovely law suit it would have made…assuming I survived. Once in the States (i.e. Michigan) it was a straight shot west on Rt 28 until I exited into Marquette.

    Bikers are out in force. When you encounter one coming toward you it is the custom to casually extend your left hand in roughly the direction of 8 on the clock face. Viewed from the other persons perspective this would be 4 o’clock. Failing to hail your fellow road warrior I think would be considered rude and so this unwritten rule of etiquette has a compliance rate of about 95%.

    This morning I stopped at a trading post for coffee and gas. I took the coffee outside and sat at a picnic table on the porch. I observed the cast of characters that came and went. Many were 70+ and shared some common features: bad knees, fat bodies and ugly feet. In warm weather women always wear sandals while men may or may not. Apparently in all their 70+ years there are many people oblivious to the ugliness of their feet (not that my dogs are any better)…misshaped toes, nail fungus, huge bunions, etc. The menfolk more often had the good sense to hide their feet in sneakers which would invariably be old, dirty and loose fitting white sneakers sporting the N (New Balance) logo.

    True to my observation, an old dude in shorts hobbled out of the trading post on hairless legs with creaky knees, lumpy varicose veins and an explosion from mid-calf to ankle of purplish capillaries resembling the Crab Nebula. He stroked a half foot long goatee as he stopped to inquire about my bike’s Ccs (a measure of an engine’s displacement in cubic centimeters and an indicator of its power) and all the other usual bike questions. He and his 2 fat sisters were on a quest to visit every gambling casino in the region. I told him about my long bike journey. He said “ride safe” and I appended “ly” under my breath. I said “I always try to” and he replied “what more can we do but try?” and I allowed that that was so and he pointed upward and mumbled something about “the man upstairs” which I didn’t catch and apologized for my impaired hearing and he chuckled and said he had spent 14 years underground and was half deaf himself. Maybe he had been a miner and there is something about that line of work that leads to deafness…I have no idea. This is a typical example of a summer-vacation-on-the-road type of conversation.

    Wed July 18, 2018

    I am starting to get behind on maintaining this hand written travel log (I am actually writing at 3:52 AM Central time on July 20).

    When I set out from Spanish, Ont on 7/17 I entered my GPS destination as the street address of a motel named the Cedar Motor Inn which I had selected in my earlier research based on its relatively low room rate. When I pulled in I was impressed with the look of the place and its freshly re-surfaced and re-lined parking areas. I had been expecting more of a dump (Note: you may have noticed, I tend to use the word dump a lot) but this looked quite nice. I was rather exhausted and slow in getting off my bike, removing my helmet, rubbing my sore ears, and making sure the kick stand was at a good angle. I inserted my hearing aids (I can’t ride with them in under my helmet as they take up too much space) prior to finally entering the lobby to check in. I had not bothered to actually reserve a room. On the front door a message was posted, “Sorry, No Vacancy.” What!? Oh Shit!! I entered anyway. The desk people told me not to panic because there were 3 other motels a few thousand feet down the road, one right after the other (all under the same ownership) and that one of them – an 8 Days Inn – had a few rooms still available. I registered there but had to pay a considerably higher rate. I did a load of laundry but didn’t bother with dinner since I had had a late lunch on the road.

    Next morning after a really nice breakfast that is free with the room I pulled out headed for Duluth rather late at 11:30 but that was OK since the drive would “only” be 270 miles per Google Maps. A hundred miles into this jaunt I stopped for gas and coffee and to remove my helmet, scratch my head and rub my sore ears. There was a group of bikers on a break there as well…maybe a dozen bikes, almost all Harleys, each with a driver and his woman. In one week’s time this group had driven from central Pennsylvania near Penn State to Yellowstone Nat’l Park in Wyoming and were now on their way home. They had, earlier this day, passed thru or near Duluth where I was headed. They told me the roadways I would be on were mostly excellent and newly re-surfaced. As I was ready to depart their leader handed me this neatly rolled up rag with a message printed on it and he said “this is to clean up any oil mess you might have and inside is something that may help you with any mess in your life…we are a Christian Biker Club.”

    As I barreled along toward Duluth I spotted something on the right-hand roadside and quickly discovered it to be a deer, not 3 feet off the road. He looked at me as if he had been trained to look both ways before crossing a street. I tooted my tinny, un-macho, Asian-made horn and the deer turned around and hopped back into the woods from whence he had come. Thank God! You do not want to hit a deer with a car much less a bike at 70 mph.

    The routes specified by the GPS (Rts 2 and 53, if memory serves) took me thru Superior, WI, over some bridges, into Duluth and right up to an EconoLodge a stone’s throw from the former Air Force Base I had spent my 3-year military stint at. The facility had ceased being an AFB many years ago but there was still an Air National Guard (ANG) unit, the 148th Fighter Wing, and the Duluth International Airport on these premises as there had been when I was there from 1962 to 1965.

    Again, I foolishly did not make a room reservation in advance but luckily there were still a couple of rooms available. Considering that “Econo” precedes the word Lodge in this motel’s name I thought the $120 room rate was pretty steep but I was able to negotiate $99 for 2 nights since they were weekdays. I wanted to stay 4 nights but that involved a weekend with much higher rates and, in any case, they were booked solid. I suggested they would surely get a cancellation and if so I’d like to stay on 2 more nights at the same $99 rate. They said to keep checking often for a cancellation but that my room rate would go up to $161. I complained about this and they said I could discuss it with the General Mgr if and when they got a cancellation.

    Getting back to my initial check in at this motel, I was standing at the counter with my helmet, looking bedraggled as I always do at the end of a long day of riding, when a guy asked if I was the owner of the Suzuki Burgman. This touched off a conversation that literally ran on for 2 hours. Steve (his name) was there at the tail end of one of his innumerable long distance bike trips over the years. His current bike was a 1200 cc BMW with a large luggage compartment mounted on the back (known in the trade as a ‘top case’), and 2 smaller compartments, one on either side of the rear wheel. Steve had every conceivable item of equipment, gear, gadget and gizmo that you could imagine. He had an expensive camera. He had something called Spot that tracks you via satellite for personal security purposes. He had rain gear and a $500 helmet. There is nothing that he didn’t have. To my astonishment he did not use a GPS but rather paper maps. He told me about trips where he would log 700 or 800 miles in a day. I was incredulous. He asked if I had heard of the IBA, the Iron Butt Association, which, to be a member of, you need to ride 1000 miles in a 24 hour period. It’s like being a super triathlete on two wheels. He had done this twice and here I was an exhausted wuss after a little more than 300 miles. Besides your common tiredness from clenching both hand-grips until you feel pins and needles and the unconscious tensing of leg, arm and shoulder muscles, there is a danger of becoming mesmerized. You may find yourself staring for 20 mins at some specific thing on the back of a boat trailer you’re following and begin to hallucinate.

    • stelmosfire August 1, 2018 at 1:23 pm #

      Nice write-up Q, your lucky with the deer. I had the same problem a few years back about 1 AM cruisin’ home on the Bimmer rt. 57 in Granville, MA. except the deer ran into the road instead of the woods. I hit him square in the side of the head with my headlight and his front leg got all wrapped up in between my fender and front wheel. I didn’t go down luckily but the deer was dead. If he was two feet further into the road I would probably be also. As soon as I got home I called a buddy and we went back up and scooped him for the venison. Bad for my bike and deer, good for us.

      • Q. Shtik August 1, 2018 at 1:39 pm #

        WOW! Hard to believe you didn’t go down. You bring up a good point though. I am committed to 2 things: I don’t drink then ride and I don’t ride after dark. As eyes get old night vision is impaired.

        By ‘Bimmer’ I assume you mean BMW. I thought it was pronounced Beemer.

        • stelmosfire August 1, 2018 at 7:17 pm #

          Right again Q, it is a Beemer a 1968 R60/2US with 65,000 miles on the clock.

          • Q. Shtik August 1, 2018 at 9:54 pm #

            I pulled up a video of one: kick start and appeared to be shaft driven. I’ll ask the question that everyone always asks: How many cc?

          • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 12:39 am #

            Saint,
            I also owned a ’68 R-60…bought it in 1970…sold it in 1981. Back then, as you will recall, it held the coast to coast speed record…as no other bike would make the distance without a breakdown. 600 CC, 32hp as I recall. A real tractor.

          • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 12:42 am #

            Saint,
            My apologies…it was a 1967. I currently own two BMW’s. One a 1956 R-60 (Rebuilt by Capitol Cycle…remember them?), the other a ’62 US model converted to a VW engine, that I am currently assembling on the rack.

          • stelmosfire August 2, 2018 at 8:13 am #

            Q, it is a 600cc, the Germans usually used a number in the model name to denote engine size like a BMW r60 would be 600 CC,s or a Mercedes 450SL would be a 4500cc V8, they were not big on giving names to bikes and cars like the USA, Mustangs and Impalas for instance. Yes only kick start and shaft drive. The US in the model name was because it had telescopic forks instead of the Earles forks the BMW bikes had up until that time. I,ve had it for 38 years and am the second owner. I’ve always had German machines but I could never afford new. I’ve still got 3 ancient MB’s.

          • stelmosfire August 2, 2018 at 8:17 am #

            Yea EF, I have dealt with Capital Cycle in the past. The’re still in business. My bike could use new mufflers but man is the price steep.

      • BackRowHeckler August 2, 2018 at 11:16 am #

        Guy 2 years ago from Vernon, CT, rode his MC up the Alcan highway all the way to Alaska. 2nd day in state he hit a moose and was killed.

        brh

        • Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 11:26 am #

          hit a moose and was killed. – BRH

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

          OUCH!! The moose probably didn’t get a scratch…those suckers are BIG.

          • Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 11:35 am #

            But getting back to Elysian and Stelmo,

            Youz guys are obviously much deeper into the bike scene than I am. You seem to know what those metal things called wrenches and such are. Mechanical-wise all I know is that wheels are round.

          • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 11:56 am #

            Q,
            The basics of riding involve keeping the machine wheel-side down….

            Love your posts. Did you by any chance visit any pool halls on your trip? Great stories ala “Fast Eddy Felson” would be welcome. Robbing the rubes with a Q-Stick….

          • Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

            Great stories ala “Fast Eddy Felson” would be welcome. – EF

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

            Elysian,

            Sometime today when I post the events of July 19 there is mention of pool but, alas, not all that you are hoping for.

        • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 12:05 pm #

          BRH,
          Years ago, when my younger brother was a patrolman, he was chasing a Japanese sports bike..high speeds, and a long chase over 10+ miles, for some violation or another. The chase continued to rural roads in the county (He was city PD) that were curvy. He lost sight of the bike and rider, but around a corner came across a deer in the road that had been freshly cut in half. Hours were spent searching the area for the bike and the body, but no, the rider remained upright and escaped…no doubt with a story to tell.

          The story is implausible, but my brother is not taken to fantasy.

          • Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 1:28 pm #

            Elysian,

            Correction: My mention of pool happens on July 20.

    • Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 1:40 pm #

      How many Ccs! Isn’t there a rock song about that. Axe Ozone (please someone). Shades of ham radio hams asking about band width or power. Just can’t get away from the techo-nerdic gnostics.

  73. volodya August 1, 2018 at 12:09 pm #

    K-dog, never mind that “climate change” used to be called “global warming”. Never mind that the shift in terminology inserts the unworthy notion that the people touting “data and evidence” as evidence of their intellectual superiority may not have as solid a grasp of the subject matter as they insist.

    It’s “settled science”? Sez who? Around the year 1900 they were saying that physics was “settled” aside from some trimming around the edges. Then came general and special relativity. Then came quantum mechanics. Who would have thought that an orbiting satellite is traveling in a straight line through curved space? Who would have thought that GPS wouldn’t work for beans without taking into account of time passing more slowly the deeper you are down a gravity well (gravitational time dilation)? Who would have thought that particles can be in two places at once (superposition) or can travel from point A to point B without travelling through the intervening barrier ( quantum tunneling)? NOBODY, that’s who, not without a few guys with the guts and vision to make it so.

    So when I hear “settled science” I start hearing people with closed minds, that can’t bear dissent, that will not entertain the thought that they might not have the whole and complete picture or might be dead bloody wrong. I thought the Inquisition was over and done.

    Let’s leave aside for the moment my frequent assertion that there’s nobody as full of shit as an “expert”. I know, it’s wearying to constantly hear it and you just want to scroll past. But goddammit, it does seem to me that “expertise” is the concrete box that “experts” think inside of day-in and day-out, in aid of their own careers and professional and class solidarity. But never mind all that.

    Let’s just say for the moment that we face climate armageddon. It does look to me that the people doing the touting of facts and evidence that we’re doomed are the ones least likely to change their personal living habits to effect their personal carbon output. They “need” the SUV, they “need” the overseas holiday via jet-plane, they “need” the proliferation of gadgetry (especially energy sucking electronic devices) much more so than the people they talk down to and condemn as being attitudinally and behaviorally deficient.

    Would they ditch the automobile that nowadays weighs as much as a WW2 armored patrol vehicle? Would they take public transit? Would they walk to the neighborhood grocer with a string-bag? Would they even stop doing something as trivial as going to the coffee-shop with its throw-away and unrecyclable cups?

    OK, so never mind that their own actions leads one to doubt the veracity of their assertions or leads one to question their motivations. I mean, could this climate change stuff be all about money? Perish the thought.

    Reality doesn’t much give a damn about what we think. We either tailor our personal and collective behavior around its dictates or we get flushed. You see the swirl in nature on the grandest scales. Look up at the sky. Look to Sagittarius A* in our own Milky Way. What is a galaxy but a colossal swirl of stars and dust and gas around black-holes, nature’s most gigantic shitters?

    If there’s even a hint of limits that would apply to the people doing the screaming, or heaven forfend, corporate donors that fund universities and think-tanks, this whole climate change thing will go down the memory hole. But of course limits will never apply to them, only to us. This is one way that the whole enterprise gets discredited, the other way is to stridently denounce anyone holding contrary views or anyone exhibiting any skepticism.

    I mean, could it possibly be that the next glacial cycle was offset by our carbon output? Would we want the northern hemisphere to be encased in ten thousand feet of glacial ice, ie six or eight million cubic miles of it? Or have the arctic ice pack extending as far south as Spain? That’s what happened the last go-round. Would we want any explicit public discussion of the options facing us? Of course not and that’s how the scientific community covers itself in disrepute, by acting as a brake on free and open inquiry and discourse.

    We can’t handle the truth? Who sez?

    • K-Dog August 1, 2018 at 12:27 pm #

      It is about the science and not the confusing speculations naysayers contend. Reality doesn’t much give a damn about what we think and the systemic failure of meat calculators to accept reality by deliberately spreading confusion makes me dizzy.

      • volodya August 1, 2018 at 12:31 pm #

        EXACTLY the point. It’s about the science.

    • Exscotticus August 1, 2018 at 12:35 pm #

      Here’s a bona fide example of mendacity on the part of climate-changers.

      Records show us that temps are increasing. They don’t tell us how or why or what to do or if we should even do anything at all. Temps are rising—that’s all we know. Everything else is conjecture.

      It seems highly plausible that 8 billion humans burning umpteen million tons of fossil fuels have something to do with it. But even if that’s true, the solution is to mititgate the world population—not institute a “carbon tax” to increase “gender equality”.

      If climate-changers were serious, they would address the problem at its most probable source—world population—instead of using it to push their SJW agendas.

      • chipshot August 1, 2018 at 1:29 pm #

        “It seems highly plausible that 8 billion humans burning umpteen million tons of fossil fuels have something to do with it.”

        C’mon Ex, connect a few dots.
        Fact #1: CO2 works traps heat (like a blanket).

        Fact #2: CO2 in the atmosphere has risen nearly 50% in the last
        150 yrs, most of that in the last 40.

        Fact #3: Burning fossil fuels creates a lot of CO2

        Fact #4: Humans have been a boatload of fossil fuels in the last
        150 yrs, again most of that in the last 40

        Fact #5: Temps around the world have been rising measurably in
        the last 40 yrs

        Fact #6: The oceans have absorbed a substantial amount of the
        CO2 we’ve created–up to 50%–mitigating (temporarily
        anyway) the warming and change to the climate

        A more reasonable conclusion is that it’s highly likely our burning ff has directly caused warming and the climate chaos we are seeing.

        Do agree w you that addressing world population is a critical part of any solution.

        • capt spaulding August 1, 2018 at 1:48 pm #

          Overpopulation is at the root of most of the world’s problems, from pollution to energy shortages, etc. My guess is that the world will ignore that fact, and leave the solution for nature to deal with.

          • FincaInTheMountains August 1, 2018 at 1:59 pm #

            That’s exactly what the Black Project been telling for at least last millennium.

          • ozone August 1, 2018 at 6:46 pm #

            Capt.,
            Ah yes, we are now ripe for the coming plague. Overstuffed cities, overstuffed international conveyances, general ignorance, really deadly pathogens (both natural and man-made) and yessiree Bob, there’s lots more. (We all love surprises, don’t we?)

          • malthuss August 2, 2018 at 10:49 am #

            I disagree. The population explosion [of Non Whites, Whites are decreasing as a percent of total] makes the problems more obvious or increases them.
            All White majority nations are being ruined.

            1940–1970 United States 90% White.
            1970 Mestizo’s 4.5%, 2010 16.3%

            https://www.census.gov/newsroom/cspan/1940census/CSPAN_1940slides.pdf

            Pat Buchanan writes that……………..
            “1900 3 white men for every black man 9-3
            2050 3 black men for every white man” 9-3

            This change is 9 to 1, an incredible change and visible now in every white nation in the world. There is no need to go to Africa to see the unfolding disaster. Africa is coming to you, thanks to your white politicians obeying — orders. Gypsies also breed like locusts and must swarm to rich pickings to survive.

            White altruism and — cunning has caused this demographic disaster and the white mistakes continue. Free Medicine and do gooder SJW white doctors (paid by Western taxpayers and charities) to save Coons so they can breed.
            Free food to save Coons so they can breed.

            Etc, while white women have taxpayer funded abortions and compelling most white women to go to work instead of being a mother and home duties wife.
            Gypsy women have 6 or 7 babies each as do many —.

            White breeders have been selecting the best stock for improving cats, dogs, sheep, horses etc for 2,000 years. Imagine if for 150 years (1900 to 2050) the same breeders deliberately sterilised the best and encouraged the stupidest, laziest, most violent and the ugliest to breed. That is what whites have done with the human stock of the world.
            Blacks are not to blame for sticking it in nonstop, shunning condoms, never pulling it out, making women pregnant, and then being a deadbeat dad. That is nature at work.
            [r selection vs k selection??]
            White man has defied nature by saving these primitive beasts and gypsies from disease and starvation. Nature will win and the victory will be horrible for all humans – not just Coons. Gypsies also are dragging down humanity towards the end of civilisation. There are far too many human passengers, freeloaders and parasites, and I mean especially Coons and gypsies and Muslims.

          • Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 2:33 pm #

            Well said, Malthus. Carlton Coon couldn’t have said it better. Whites aren’t the problem in terms of their own population, but they (we) are the problem since we enable the fast breeders, the r’s, to increase and then invite them into our own lands – which is simply madness.

            My Theory: A Cloward-Piven strategy – one that goes far deeper than the Democrat/Labor attempt to seize power. They don’t understand that all this is going to crash the system. The High Elite do. This is their way to lower the population of the Earth AND to gain power forever. Two birds with one stone.

        • Exscotticus August 1, 2018 at 5:18 pm #

          @chipshot, we’re basically in agreement. I’m simply unwilling to say burning FF is the sole cause. 8 billion humans may be enough to cause warming regardless of FF. And there may be natural cyclical forces at play as well.

          Sadly, we’re in a political reality where a doctor in the UK can be sacked over pronoun usage. There’s simply no political solution to population growth. Even if Western nations mitigated their population gradually via attrition, liberal open border “free everything for all” policies would simply encourage other nations to breed more and take up the available space and opportunities. Western cultures would soon fall to breeder cultures.

        • JohnAZ August 1, 2018 at 8:37 pm #

          You are correct on every count. Would like to add that the cause of CO2 warming is due to the resonant frequency of the CO2 molecule. Happens to be in the infrared band, which means it traps infrared radiation, i.e. Heat.

          The real problem with global warming is that doing anything to make any substantial difference means such a huge dislocation to the way humans like to live. Overpopulation can be solved by either gelding every 2 out of three males, or spaying the same proportion of females. Everyone wanting to volunteer sign up here. That is the preventive approach, also the theme of the Inferno by Dan Brown. Other approaches are not too popular, euthanasia, murder, pandemics, etc. Not too many people will sign up to any of the above.

          Fossil fuels, anyone who has read the Long Emergency understands the impossibility of replacing fossil fuels. Every single person on the planet requires an outlay of energy to exist. Again people let see who will sign up to not driving, freezing in he winter, boiling in the summer to avoid using fossil fuels. Alternative energy sources will never get us to the point that we are at now. So all you volunteers to give up your fossil fuels, sign up here.

          Here is the rub! Peak oil is going to force the world to come up with something new. There will be a very unpleasant response to the decline in oil. Including a fall in population, how and in what form, who knows. It will not be pleasant.

          For now, everyone better learn how to adapt to higher temps. And some short term bad news may be that when the poles lose their ice caps, currently happening, the earth’s air conditioner will be gone. Mother Gaia’s ability to blow off heat will be vastly reduced.

        • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 11:51 am #

          Malthuss,
          Your post, aside from the invectives, is difficult to argue against. I do not think that “orders” are being carried out so much as garden-variety and much-evidenced human ignorance bringing to fruition that and other observable flaws in human nature. Sympathy and Empathy can be flaws if misplaced and poorly acted upon.

          Consider the over-loaded life boat.

        • elysianfield August 2, 2018 at 12:29 pm #

          ““It seems highly plausible that 8 billion humans burning umpteen million tons of fossil fuels have something to do with it.”

          Chipshot,

          Yes, those are observable facts, quantifiable, and scientifically reproducible.

          Fact#7 Your reasonable conclusion does not weigh with the gravitas that the empirical method must provide. The facts you list may or may not be causal. A theory, maybe a good one, maybe even accurate, but a theory still.

          Consider that a solution to your conclusion requires massive changes in human living. Consider the disruption and human misery. The quality of the science should be held to a higher standard with such impacts.

          Further, if it is to be considered that “Climate Change” is anthropomorphic and causal, should not all humans be addressed/impacted in the potential solutions…China, India, Africa? Why give them an exemption if the issue is proved to be truly existential? This gives a basic lie to the need for action.

          • chipshot August 2, 2018 at 7:08 pm #

            elysianfield-

            So until the evidence reaches case-closed, irrefutable, undeniable status, we shouldn’t do anything? Even though it would be far too late to reverse the damage, with the prospect of an uninhabitable planet on the line?

            We shouldn’t do anything b/c the massive changes in human living will cause disruption and human misery? How ’bout the disruption and human misery already being experienced, with a whole lot more to come from ever worsening climate chaos?

            And even though the US is by far the leading producer of greenhouse gases over time, we shouldn’t do anything until other countries take action?

            You’d have more credibility if you just admitted you don’t want to do anything b/c you’re not willing to give up your lifestyle.

          • elysianfield August 3, 2018 at 12:42 am #

            chipshot,
            Yes, until the evidence of human caused climate change has reached your “undeniable” metric, we should not consider massive societal changes. We know that climate is changing…we know that it might possibly be irreversible. If your premise be correct, then why give 1/2 the human race, the majority in emerging industrial countries such as China and India, a decades long exemption from the Accords…the Climate may be spiraling in a death cycle of CO2 cause and effect…but lets allow China to put one coal fired power plant on line weekly? Where is the urgency? The rationale?

            China is developing a middle-class, a mobile one…I am not so sure that China has not surpassed the US as a leading producer of “greenhouse” gas…

            I would be happy to do my share, accept my burden, insofar as all others do the same. China. India. Malaysia…everyone. I am not tempted to give up my lifestyle unilaterally without reason, without effect, for what might be a political expediency that has nothing to do with climate.

          • chipshot August 3, 2018 at 7:58 am #

            elysianfield (paraphrased):

            “I’m not going to change my lifestyle or reduce my carbon footprint until it is proven without a doubt that it is a direct cause of climate change, even though there is a preponderance of evidence of that being the case, and the survival of all life on earth (certainly homo-sapiens) is on the line.”

            “Nor will I attempt to do anything until other nations do, even though the US has contributed more emissions over time than any other and deserves to be a leader on the solutions.”

            I don’t believe in God, but if there is one, he/she/they/it probably isn’t happy w that attitude.

          • elysianfield August 3, 2018 at 12:01 pm #

            “I don’t believe in God,”

            Chip,
            Here we are in agreement….

      • K-Dog August 2, 2018 at 12:42 am #

        The end of the SJW agenda is soylent green for all.

        • capt spaulding August 2, 2018 at 8:15 am #

          IT’S PEEEOPLE! IT’S MADE FROM PEEOPLE!

  74. FincaInTheMountains August 1, 2018 at 12:44 pm #

    Finca, July 29, 2018 at 4:22 pm

    And I do not know what this victory is, but the fact that it takes place is written in large letters on the forehead of Jim Jordan, a congressman from the largest state of Ohio, when he announced his intention to run for the post of Speaker of the House.

    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/round-the-bend/#comment-362258

    I still do not know what’s going on, but Manafort case is seemingly falling apart?

    Prosecutors in Manafort trial say Gates might not testify

    http://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/399884-prosecutors-in-manafort-trial-say-gates-might-not-testify

    In conjunction with the Twitter attack by Trump this morning, the circle around the enemy troops is closed and we are closing in on a kill!!

  75. FincaInTheMountains August 1, 2018 at 1:23 pm #

    I guess the materials that Trump got from Putin during the Helsinki summit are really explosive.

    May I draw your attention that collecting foreign intelligence information is not considered illegal and that’s exactly what various intelligence services around the world do, including American CIA, Russian GRU, British MI6 and so on.

    Also, it is very legal for Russian President to supply American President with intelligence information within the framework of cooperation on anti-terrorist activity signed by Putin and Obama a few years back.

    For example, a terrorist act was stopped in St. Petersburg thanks to American intelligence information passed on to their colleges from the Russian FSB.

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  76. volodya August 1, 2018 at 1:53 pm #

    BackRow Heckler,

    It’s amazing that the ones that tell us that the morally correct things are “open borders”, who tell us that government issued identification for various purposes including voting is an unwarranted infringement, themselves live in gated communities, and require government issued ID to get past the gate keepers to perform various services for the inhabitants of these restricted places.

    But, if questioned on these seeming anomalies, the people that live in these compounds will ask with wide, innocent eyes, oozing reasonableness and rationality, whether it isn’t reasonable to know the identity of someone who is setting foot in your home and its environs. And aren’t walls sometimes warranted given the level of violence and lawlessness?

    Now, you might think all this passing strange given a couple things. First is the assertion by this same class of enlightened people that crime is WAY, way down. But, if it is, then what’s the necessity for walls? What’s the necessity for knowing who exactly is setting foot in your private enclave? I mean if crime isn’t a problem?

    And if walls as a barrier are a valid and reasonable remedy for a community of people wanting security and who want to limit access to their living space, then why aren’t walls a valid remedy more generally on a national level, for the citizenry as a whole?

    • BackRowHeckler August 2, 2018 at 11:14 am #

      Good points, V.

      I have asked libs who live in gated communities around here “What’s with gates and high walls?”

      “It’s for security.”

      “Security from who.”

      That pretty much ends the conversation.

      Some of these libs are big on ‘gun control’, too.

      brh

  77. FincaInTheMountains August 1, 2018 at 2:03 pm #

    In addition, according to neighboring rumors, Putin has the entire archive of the operation to overthrow Gaddafi and incontrovertible evidence of Hillary Clinton’s participation personally in the transfer of weapons from Libya to Syria, as well as the creation of weapons stores in Mosul, the capture of which turned the “moderate” rebels against Assad into ISIS. == Finca

    Judging that right after that post Kunstler server suffered a sudden failure of service for several minutes, it may be exactly it – the detailed materials on Benghazi attack and formation of ISIS.

  78. volodya August 1, 2018 at 2:18 pm #

    Ozone, you bring up points worthy of consideration.

    Let’s take history as our teacher.

    Question: what happened to the Roman Empire when it lost its north African territories to the Vandals, not to mention other bits and pieces of its domain?

    Answer: it lost a vital proportion of its tax-paying populace. And this helped to plot the Empire’s historical trajectory from that point on.

    You might ask another question. Given massive tax cuts to the Americans most capable of paying tax, how would you therefore plot the historical trajectory of the USA going forward? I mean, given the example of past history.

    OK, no matter, it’s not a mystery as to why a regime might resist losing territory. It puts into doubt its viability. It puts into play the question of whether its borders are tenable. It reduces its tax base, out of which it funds defense expenditures. Unchallenged dominion over land and territory is the basis for nationhood. Once you say “open borders” the basis for nation-hood goes away, the mechanism for collective and personal security and well-being goes away too.

    One way to determine who belongs to what polity is to run the flag up the flag-pole and see who salutes. If people decline to salute, then whoever sees themselves as top-dog might want to make plans.

    As to your last point, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell people that they owe a duty of self sacrifice to a nation if that nation is working against the interests of the person who is supposed to do the sacrificing.

  79. Dumbedup August 1, 2018 at 2:39 pm #

    Professor Stephen Cohen of Princeton (formerly) absolutely destroyed Max Boot on CNN’s Anderson Cooper. (Don’t criminalize diplomacy) But, I think he is wrong on Russian and Trump campaign collusion. It is becoming clear that something was going. Whether it rises to the level of a crime like conspiracy remains to be seen.

    Of course, if Sessions orders Rosenstein to fire Mueller (and he does it), and Trump grants a blanket pardon to everyone including himself, we will probably never know for certain.

    • 100th Avatar August 1, 2018 at 3:30 pm #

      Max Boot, the neocon trying to have his cake and eat it too (Wolfowitz Doctrine but hate on Trump) all with journalistic affectations including a crumpled fedora with a “press” card.

      Another breathless poser.

      Embarrassing

  80. janet August 1, 2018 at 3:43 pm #

    Records show us that temps are increasing. They don’t tell us how or why or what to do or if we should even do anything at all. –exscotticus, who must live under a rock

    Scientists have been advising how, why, and what needs to be done for decades now. The fossil fuel industry has mounted disinformation campaigns to make people either believe AGW is a hoax, or that “nothing can be done” … both of which are false. Solutions include:

    Confronting the Realities of Climate Change

    https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming#.W2IMaS2ZMWo

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    • Exscotticus August 1, 2018 at 4:55 pm #

      janet-bot, nowhere in this or any other proscription is the suggestion that we must first curtail world population. In fact, quite the opposite. We’re told we have to prepare for more growth by packing into cities, giving up meat, giving up wine, eating insects, and so on.

      As you come from a bot planet, I’m sure these things don’t mean anything to you. But a choice between steak and wine, and additional billions, ain’t no choice at all. Goodbye billions!

  81. Pucker August 1, 2018 at 8:44 pm #

    Satter in his book implies that Putin and the FSB used the 1999 apartment bombings as a False Flag akin to 9-11 to consolidate power and to garner popular support to level Grozny.

    In his book, Darkness at Dawn, Satter charged that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) was responsible for the bombings of Russian apartment buildings in 1999 that claimed nearly 300 lives and provided the justification for a second Chechen War. He argued that this was part of a conspiracy to bring Putin to power as Boris Yeltsin was fading.

  82. janet August 1, 2018 at 8:47 pm #

    Trump’s economic ignorance is going to crash our economy and not just from his starting a trade war and alienating our allies. Trump’s economic signs are not good. Under Trump’s regime home sales have declined in four of the past five months as housing prices have grown — but under Trump paychecks have remained stagnant.

    Because of Trump many people can’t afford to buy homes, and those who can are taking on a lot of debt to get into them. That is what happened right before the Great Recession in 2008. Trump is leading us to another housing crash. Billionaires don’t care about you and neither does Trump. Buckle your seatbelts.

  83. janet August 1, 2018 at 8:52 pm #

    nowhere in this or any other proscription is the suggestion that we must first curtail world population. –exscotticus

    With each post you illustrate your ignorance of AGW solutions that have been proposed by scientists. A 2009 study of the relationship between population growth and global warming determined that the “carbon legacy” of just one child can produce 20 times more greenhouse gas than a person will save by driving a high-mileage car, recycling, using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs, etc.

    Each child born in the United States will add about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent. The study concludes, “Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.”

    One of the study’s authors, Paul Murtaugh, warned that: “In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime. Those are important issues and it’s essential that they should be considered. But an added challenge facing us is continuing population growth and increasing global consumption of resources. . . . Future growth amplifies the consequences of people’s reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance.”

    The size of the carbon legacy is closely tied to consumption patterns. Under current conditions, a child born in the United States will be responsible for almost seven times the carbon emissions of a child born in China and 168 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

    https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/pdfs/OSUCarbonStudy.pdf

    • Exscotticus August 1, 2018 at 11:49 pm #

      janet-bot, I know it’s hard for you, with your limited AI bot capacities, but try to stop long-quoting sources verbatim. Post a link, a few choice quotes that you think prove your point, and your analysis.

      Here’s a conclusive proscriptive quote from the very source you linked…

      scaling back first-world consumption patterns, and long-term population reduction to ecologically sustainable levels will solve the global warming crisis

      So the first thing mentioned is NOT population control, but a reduction in “first-world” standard of living. And that is where all the focus is. The US is asked to reduce its carbon footprint, but no one is telling breeder cultures to stop breeding.

      China—the one nation that actually tries to curtail its population—is criticized for these “human rights violations”. For decades, all Chinese asylum-seekers to the US had to say was “I want a baby and my government won’t let me.” Bam!—they’re in. Free everything. Asians make up 60% of the planet and they’re called a “minority”.

      You will search in vain for any mention of population control in the Paris Climate Change Summit. What you will find are lines like: Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.

      Good luck promoting population control while acceding to all that.

      Meanwhile, you—janet-bot—have criticized Trump’s attempts to hold breeder cultures responsible for their actions by not letting them overflow the US and subvert its culture. While scientists mention US population growth, they fail to mention where this growth is coming from. Hint: it’s not people of European descent. Third-word nations are overflowing, and liberals like yourself are encouraging open borders to reward them for their egregious lifestyle choices. This includes having children when you can’t even afford to feed yourself, and then sending these children on a perilous journey to reach “the land of free shit paid for by suckers”.

      • malthuss August 2, 2018 at 10:53 am #

        China—the one nation that actually tries to curtail its population—is criticized for these “human rights violations”. For decades, all Chinese asylum-seekers to the US had to say was “I want a baby and my government won’t let me.” Bam!—they’re in. Free everything.

        Asians make up 60% of the planet and they’re called a “minority”.

        –That last sentence is like wow.
        UCLA
        U C LOTSA ASIANS.

  84. 100th Avatar August 1, 2018 at 10:05 pm #

    “No more annoying string quartets, tedious dental implants, boring brass…”

    String quartets?

    Heck, no more Yves Montands:

    “Fallen leaves can be picked up by the shovelful
    You see, I haven’t forgotten…
    Fallen leaves can be picked up by the shovelful
    as can memories and regrets”

    c’est la vie

    c’est la mort

  85. KesaAnna August 1, 2018 at 11:02 pm #

    ” “i am quite certain that 99 out of 100 innocent people plead guilty anyway. ”

    Kesa,
    Perhaps in the “Former Soviet Union” this was the case.

    Your statement would indicate that , by extension, most people in prison would be innocent. This is usually not the case. ”

    Very curious,

    It might seem to the unfamiliar and to the uninformed that the one would follow from the other.

    But the familiar , and the informed , like an ex-police officer for example, would know that is not the case.

    most people who plead guilty do not go to prison.

    indeed , in most cases , the very idea of pleading guilty ( even when you are not ) is to avoid an even nastier outcome , like prison for example.

    Not that you avoid a nasty outcome , just that you avoid a nastier outcome.

    like , for example , you avoid prison but you get , ” convicted felon ” stapled to every job application you ever fill out .

    Worse , you have to spend the rest of your life explaining to prospective employers or others what YOU did WRONG.

    Never mind that isn’t true. You have to make up a story ( that makes you look bad ) and pretend to be contrite and remorseful.

    Because if you explain what really happened , first , most people won’t believe you. Secondly , even if they do believe you , they still won’t appreciate your candor or honesty , but rather the reverse.

    One of the many things that Russians and Americans have in common is that typically they don’t like being told that their country sucks , especially and precisely when it is true.

    In hindsight , imprisonment might actually have been the better outcome ; there would have been less dishonesty and general bullshit to deal with.

    ( By the way , that , in simple terms , was why I preferred the GDR to the USA . Both regimes were as evil as fuck.
    But there was less bullshit in the GDR.
    Less people pretending to love you and respect you while they beat you over the head with a stick. Fewer people pretending it wasn’t a police state.

    Life , at least to me , seemed less stressful and bitter when I only had to lie 50% of the time , not nine -tenths of the time. )

    Now as far as nastier outcomes like prison ;

    Your jails and prisons are so populous that even where murderers , rapists , and bank robbers are concerned , a long stay in prison is not even then a foregone conclusion.

    There are many reasons why the system would let a rapist walk , but undo liberality is usually not one of them.

    for example , while the TV never seems to mention it by the way , the Devil himself could not invent a better breeding ground for plague than an over-crowded prison.

    But will barbered wire and cinder block keep a disease locked up ?

    Ha , Ha , Ha —

    NO !

    They CANNOT lock up everyone , they HAVE TO let people out.

    But do they point out to people that you need to prioritize your wants , and even your needs ?

    No, see , there is this magic wand called ” justice ” and it can churn out endless free lunches as per desire.

    That , in plain English , is what they pitch.

    That is what they pitch — in reality the charge gets knocked down and a rapist walks in 6 months because even the state has to pay bills , and there is a limit to even how much cash the state can generate to pay those bills.

    But they don’t talk about that.

    ” Perhaps in the “Former Soviet Union” this was the case. ”

    Well , you have me there.

    That is , I have no fucking clue why so many people who believe that is actually true would be hanging out in a blog entitled , ” Clusterfuck Nation “.

    It’s like when I ask people , ” what is so great about the U.S. ? ” and then they give me a list of things …..

    …… things which might have been true fifty , or one hundred years ago.

    ” because we have Burger King . ” at least makes some kind of sense.

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    • elysianfield August 3, 2018 at 12:54 am #

      Kesa,
      It is possible that I am totally wrong regarding the Criminal Justice system in the “Former Soviet Union” I will admit that all I know regarding their system I learned by reading Solzhenitsyn’s three volume Gulag series, “A day in the life of…” and the “5th Circle”. For all I know, the information Solzhenitsyn presented was the romantic musings of a Soviet Article 58 owner.

      There are many failures evident in our system in the US…doesn’t seem to be improving. I do not deny what you argue…just an issue with the degree present.

  86. janet August 1, 2018 at 11:19 pm #

    boring brass…

    Before you can have brass bushings you first have to have brass. And that is where Africa comes in. In ancient Egypt, metal was smelted from the time of the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BC). In Sub-Saharan Africa, native metals were first worked in parts of Niger and Mauritania. Copper was also smelted in Africa.

    Metal use was almost universal in Africa. The ‘Three Age System’ of stone-use, followed first by bronze, and then by iron, does not apply to the history of metals in Africa. Almost everywhere, iron, copper, bronze, and brass were introduced at virtually the same time.

    Benin became famous in the West for its ‘bronzes’. In fact Benin bronzes are made of brass. White Europeans took the Benin brasses developed by pre-colonial Africa. The Benin Bronzes were seized by British forces during the Benin Expedition of 1897, and were given to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Seized means stolen… theft being the basis of much of white European “contributions” to “western civilization.”

    • pequiste August 2, 2018 at 12:22 am #

      Next, you are going to tell us that the Sung Dynasty Chinese, Khmer Empire, Meso-American Mayans and even Gian Lorenzo Bernini appropriated everything they knew about sculpture and bronze and architecture and design also from some stolen African heritage.

      • K-Dog August 2, 2018 at 12:39 am #

        Everything is a remix.

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

          Right, as if Blacks have invented just as much as Whites?

  87. janet August 1, 2018 at 11:26 pm #

    “You cannot go wrong by expecting the worst from Donald Trump.

    Within 24 hours, he called on the attorney general to halt the investigation into his campaign’s links to Russia, slammed the criminal prosecution of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort as a “hoax,” and lied with great confidence at his Florida rally about his own popularity. Add his wacky claim that people need to present identification to buy groceries, and you get Trump at his worst.

    Coming from any other President, Trump’s brand of crazy talk — much of it personal, ugly, and deranged — would be enough to prompt calls for the White House doctor, who would, at the very least, prescribe some rest. But with Trump, statements that sound like he’s trying to obstruct justice and distort reality no longer stir widespread outrage because he has taught the world to stop trying to make sense of what he says.

    Eighteen months into his administration, Trump has bombarded us with so much awful noise that our minds have been trained to disregard much of it.” –Michael D’Antonio

  88. janet August 2, 2018 at 12:37 am #

    Nobody has ever claimed that “collusion” is the technical legal term for what Trump and his minions are suspected of doing. It’s simply a description of their behavior. The legal term is “criminal conspiracy.” I would guess that Trump’s team has now ensured that the media will use that latter term from now on, which may not be the outcome they were looking for.

    If, as former assistant U.S. attorney Daniel Goldman suspects, the Trump team is now privy to everything Gates has told Mueller, it would certainly explain the sense of barely contained panic we’ve seen these past few days. Remember, Gates remained part of the Trump team well into 2017.

    • BackRowHeckler August 2, 2018 at 11:34 am #

      for Gods sake little jane are you still searching for ‘colluders’? Will the search never end?

      In 1611 explorer Henry Hudson was marooned in Back Bay in central Canada, with 8 loyal seamen, by mutineers; nobody knows what ever became of them. The search goes on even after 400 years for a trace of them, any trace.

      brh

  89. Pucker August 2, 2018 at 9:46 am #

    The Russians seem to view “The Clinton Gang” as an entrenched group of criminal oligarchs as in Russia.

    “Soon the leading Moscow banks became the core of financial political groups, each of which was tied to one or another leading political figure. As their power and wealth increased, the banks began to behave like states within a state, acquiring media outlets and establishing their own security services capable of spying on economic and political rivals as well as tapping the phones of thousands of ordinary citizens. With the resources of a former superpower at stake, the struggle for power between the financial political groups became the principal determinant of the policies of the Russian government. The second process that contributed to the creation of Russia’s criminal business oligarchy was privatization. Privatization both predated and survived the period of hyperinflation. The privatization that took place first is euphemistically described as “unofficial” privatization and consisted in the uncontrolled and illegal seizure of the economic infrastructure of the country. “Official” privatization took place in two stages: voucher privatization, from October 1992 to July 1994; and money privatization, which began in August 1994 and continued to the end of the decade. Unofficial privatization began during the perestroika period as soon as government organizations were given permission to engage in commercial activity. Government officials, secretly and without any legal basis, began to take over their agencies and reorganize them as private enterprises. In place of ministries, they organized “concerns”; in place of the state distribution system, they created commodity exchanges; and in place of the state banks with their regional branches, they organized commercial banks. The new commercial enterprises used the same suppliers, the same buildings, and the same personnel. Only the name of the organization changed. But the assets of the organization became the property of its new “owners.” 3 Wild privatization was followed by voucher privatization, which began in October 1992. Each Russian was entitled to a voucher with a face value of 10,000 rubles (the monthly salary of an auto worker), which was redeemable for a share of Russian industry. The vouchers were of little use to most Russians, who were rarely paid dividends on them and had no say in management even when they invested their voucher in their own factory. They were very useful, however, to those who could accumulate them in great numbers. This led criminal and commercial structures to buy them up as quickly as possible. In some cases, agents bought vouchers on the street from indigents and alcoholics, often for a bottle of vodka. In other cases, these groups organized voucher funds that advertised on television, promising high dividends, and then either did not pay the dividends or simply disappeared. In this way, criminal and commercial structures accumulated huge blocks of vouchers that they used to buy up the most desirable factories, often at giveaway prices. 4 In the last days of voucher privatization, the federal property fund put more than a hundred of Russia’s most valuable enterprises on sale at once, causing a sharp fall in the value of shares, which were then bought up by the voucher funds. 5 When voucher privatization was succeeded by money privatization in the latter part of 1994, the population was already divided into a handful of groups that could participate in it and the vast majority of the population, which could not. The pressure to put property into private hands as quickly as possible, however, did not relent, and it led to the selling off of many of the country’s remaining industrial enterprises, including the most desirable, at absurdly reduced prices.”

    David Satter
    Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 10:01 am #

      How the fuck do you think Clinton came up with his balanced budget?

  90. FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 9:59 am #

    Barack Obama Releases List of Dem Midterm Endorsements – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is NOT on that list

    https://www.mediaite.com/online/barack-obama-releases-list-of-dem-midterm-endorsements-see-if-you-can-spot-ocasio-cortez/

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  91. K-Dog August 2, 2018 at 11:54 am #

    In protest to think tank histories chomping up bits of this digital scroll, I bring you some better shit!

    Something better for your brain salad than ever more and more Russian dressing. Surly some comments here are stains on our digital lawn but I found this text inside my link I bring your here more interesting then digressing into the think tank sponsored territory of distracting morass which surrounds me.


    And that brings us back to the serial pooper. This person is probably not living in the woods and pooping along the street because they enjoy it or even because they can’t find work. It’s probably the result of other problems in their lives: drugs, alcohol, maybe both. In theory, the police could do something about the poop problem. The person responsible could be given a $1,000 fine if caught. But what they really need, most likely, is to run out of options to pursue their habit while living in the woods. What they really need is to run out of options to getting sober. And at the moment that doesn’t seem to be something that’s in the cards.

    Probably? Nothing is known about the serial pooper or the pooper would not be serial. He/she would be a known pooper!

    I’ll throw in CO2 poisoning. Increasing levels in the atmosphere are leading to serial madness about which absolutely nothing can be done.

    The pooper could be Bigfoot. Our pooper could even be Russian or a member of a Moslem sleeper cell under deep homeless cover, waiting for activation into murderous mayhem. For now he merely bides time brazenly pooping on lawns and driveways, but all the while obsessed with thoughts of raping white women.

    My point, rather than accept their own ignorance people will make shit up, and that’s something for you to chew on.

  92. janet August 2, 2018 at 11:57 am #

    “for Gods sake little jane are you still searching for ‘colluders’?” —brh

    The conspirators have been located, named, and many have been indicted. Some have already entered guilty pleas. A Russian is in prison awaiting trial in a US courtroom. Trump’s campaign manager is on trial right now for violations of US federal statutes (felonies).

  93. FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 12:02 pm #

    Manafort: indicted for financial crimes over a decade ago in the Ukraine prior to his brief service in Trump’s campaign. Supposed crimes occured during his work with the Podesta Group (lobbying firm of the brother of HRC’s campaign manager John Podesta which abruptly closed down during the Mueller probe). == NRWer

    This gets better and better, weirder and weirder!

    You know who may be the first defense witness called by Manafort lawyers?

    No other than Rod Rosenstein – yes, the guy who actually now runs the Justice Department!

    How many of you know that Paul Manafort was exonerated by federal investigators who investigated his financial and tax affairs eight years ago?

    I doubt that more than a couple of people, if any, raised their hands.

    How can the press explain away its collective failure to prominently report this quite pertinent fact for NINE MONTHS?

    ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Here’s Manafort’s defense: I was investigated for all this by the government eight years ago, and I was exonerated. And I’m going to put on the stand as my first witness the young lawyer who exonerated me.

    You know who that young lawyer is? Rod Rosenstein.

    http://www.bizzyblog.com/2018/07/31/appalling-media-negligence-manafort-was-exonerated-8-years-ago-federal-prosecutors-led-by-rosenstein-declined-to-charge-him/

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 12:13 pm #

      Again, from the Orthodox point of view everything is clear – when Manafort was part of the glorious squad of the Flying Monkeys (working for Podesta) he would be invincible from the reaching hands of American Justice, but as soon as he repented his sins and joined the righteous side of D. Trump-MacLeod, he’s guilty as sin.

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 12:18 pm #

      Someone said double jeopardy?

  94. RobH August 2, 2018 at 12:07 pm #

    I read this in the UK Guardian

    I think it makes an interesting comment relating to some Trump core voters, as a parallel the UK Brexit vote

    The fundamental point of the article being ‘society is multicultural’ and so the working class is multicultural, and so there is no such things as ‘the white working class’

    It’s one of those phrases that gains common acceptance, but unless you are alert (or of color) can go under the radar

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/01/white-working-class-stereotypes

  95. wm5135 August 2, 2018 at 12:26 pm #

    Three hundred and twenty six million human beings can afford to spend five hundred and seventy four billion dollars a year to insure their cut of the(racket) global production. The cut is so good that despite the obvious decline in the percentage of wages that are discretionary, well documented, there is exists within the same 326 mil. human beings essentially no desire to address the racket.

    The racket produces enough that an individual is able to amass holdings equal to $150 billion dollars.

    The racket is the Naked City that never sleeps. Every second of our awareness humans endeavor to make available and consume more energy than the local star can create.

    That there are those who seriously argue that some alignment of the sails, despite a change in the wind and current, to a new compass point will only bring destruction has lost all humor.

    Provide for the outcome of the racket you support?, no we cannot afford that. Let us hire some contractors and build some prisons. Then let us rob great numbers of human beings of their hope and dignity and punish them for their poverty. Let us hire lawyers and build courts and increase the size of the police force.

    See you told me we could not afford the milk of human kindness, yet we can afford the gall of the waterboard. and of course you are RIGHT!

    …….the hardness of their hearts. Let me assure everyone, Mr. Trump is not the problem.

    it is something like this ” we ain’t gonna fix nothin until THEY quit f…..g.”
    that ought to do it

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    • elysianfield August 3, 2018 at 1:05 am #

      “Provide for the outcome of the racket you support?, no we cannot afford that. Let us hire some contractors and build some prisons. Then let us rob great numbers of human beings of their hope and dignity and punish them for their poverty. Let us hire lawyers and build courts and increase the size of the police force.”

      Wm.
      Punish them for their poverty? Yeah, you have a point. All those FBI crime statistics are just window dressing.

      C’mon man…you ever been a victim of a crime?

  96. janet August 2, 2018 at 1:24 pm #

    “Someone said double jeopardy?” –finca

    LOL! In law double jeopardy bars second prosecutions after either acquittal or conviction, and prohibits multiple punishments for the same offense.

    As you have admitted, finca, Manafort was never tried or punished eight years ago. Hence, double jeopardy is impossible.

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 1:55 pm #

      Question of semantics, which is, after the months discussion in Congress of definitions of the word “is” and “sexual relationship”, proven to be a pretty flexible science.

      • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 2:01 pm #

        Putin: I did not have sexual relationship with that man!

        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/01/17/JS118065166_POOL-EPA_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqZRlmL2VnvBTYeWb-cXG3RfaGyjX9M_C1GjbPR1CLAEI.jpg

      • janet August 2, 2018 at 4:10 pm #

        “Question of semantics” –finca

        Tell it to the judge. In a court of law your “semantics” won’t work.

        Manafort is facing 305 years in prison for 2016 Trump campaign crimes. Manafort was the Trump’s campaign manager when he committed the crimes.

        Trump is an illegitimate president. Putin’s GRU changed 70,000 votes in three states, which allowed an electoral college victory.

        Trump’s illegal conspiracy with Putin is the only reason Trump is president. Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes. Trump’s criminal conspiracy with Russia defrauded the USA.

  97. K-Dog August 2, 2018 at 1:38 pm #

    Stuck in traffic. I-90 over Lake Washington closed while the Blue Angels strafe Seattle looking for the pooper. Preparing for Seafair is a cover.

  98. K-Dog August 2, 2018 at 1:40 pm #

    A seriously free air show.

  99. Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 1:47 pm #

    This is my fourth Bike Trip post comprising days July 19 and 20.

    Thurs July 19, 2018

    In the planning stage of my big bike trip I had been in touch with a Major Hendrickson, one of whose titles was/is Wing Executive Officer. I told him of my desire to see my old base and he promised to give me a grand tour. After much back and forth it turned out that today, July 19, was the day it would happen. He would pick me up at 10AM from my motel lobby. Due to a last minute meeting with his Commander he was 45 mins late but I killed this time speaking with an old gentleman who was sitting on a bench in front of the motel waiting for a cab to the nearby airport to pick up a rental car.

    He had a scraggly head of white hair and a more scraggly white beard. I would have guessed his age at 75-80. He reminded me of a civil war era photo character. He was here from Fairbanks, Alaska and was only 61. He was a carpenter but was hoping to retire soon since all the years of hard labor was taking a toll on his hands and this was particularly bothersome to him since he was also a serious “classical pianist”…Say WHAT!!? He also mentioned his passion for backpacking the great outdoors, lifting weights, and more. He described the unsettling vibe he felt instantly upon arrival in Duluth from the center of Alaska. He felt an intense busyness like everyone was on speed or cocaine. I interjected that if he thought Duluth felt busy he should multiply that by 10 to get a concept of NJ where I live. Mark was his name and he was here to check out Ely, MN as a potential place to relocate to be closer to his 91 year old mother who was in Memphis, TN…Say WHAT!!? He noticed my astonishment and said you probably think Memphis isn’t that close but when you live in Alaska that distance (Ely to Memphis) is nothing.

    Simultaneously, my new found buddy Steve from the check in counter yesterday was preparing to climb on his BMW to head back home to Fargo, ND. I took some pictures of him, his bike and all his regalia. All Steve’s family, siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins were, or had been, farmers in the Fargo area. Steve broke the mold…he was, as he called it, an addiction counselor.

    Just then the Major arrived, a strapping guy about 6’2” in full camo.

    Troy (the Major’s first name), a life long resident of Duluth, of Swedish and Finnish descent, with a classic northern Minnesota accent, pulled up in a 1995 Ford Aerostar in dire need of a new alternator. He also owns an F150 (doesn’t everybody?) but uses the old Aerostar, inherited from his father, to save a buck.

    He asked if there was anything special I wanted to see at the old base and I said “yes, the SAGE building.” These letters stood for Semi-Automatic Ground Environment. It was a 4-story windowless cube of concrete with 4 foot thick walls supposedly able to withstand an atomic blast. Inside were arrays of scopes and other electronics stared at in 8-hour shifts, 24/7/365, by mainly 1st and 2nd lieutenants monitoring the northern hemisphere for possible incoming missiles or aircraft approaching from over the North Pole. Secondly, across the road from SAGE was a 2-story frame building known as the Accounting and Finance Office that I had worked in. The Major was totally familiar with this iconic cube of cement and it was our first stop.

    The building had been sold to a company for some civilian purpose and various alterations had been made: some windows and an elevator that ran up the outside of one corner of the cube as well as a business-like entryway and signage. I took some pictures then turned my attention to the former Finance bldg less than a hundred yards away which now housed a civilian business. How sad it looked after lo these many years, painted some God-awful two-tone earth shades. I took pics to show the family.

    We continued all around the former air base and nothing was recognizable. Old buildings had either been torn down or re-purposed and new buildings built. Among the new, as I looked off to my right, were row after row of nice, but barracks-like, structures which comprised a Federal low-security (white-collar) prison. A mere 8′ high chain link fence enclosed it. The men walked about without supervision between and among the buildings. Troy told me he had had conversations with these prisoners and they were, to a man, a very bright bunch but not bright enough to avoid getting caught in their (mostly) financial fraud schemes.

    Another new structure was the Cirrus Aircraft Factory. In 2016 this Corp. became Chinese owned.

    I don’t think the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters) that I once lived in before moving off-base into a small rental home with a couple of other Lts, still existed. Everything was utterly changed. The ANG (Air National Guard) Fighter Wing had a much larger presence than I recall from the early ’60s.

    On our ride about the base the Major stopped at a guard post and spoke to 2 enlisted men heavily festooned with all sorts of gadgets, communications devices and whatnot. Troy asked “Are the aircraft back yet?” They said “No, but they’re due in a few minutes.” The guards executed the snappiest salute I’ve ever seen and we pulled away. Troy said to me “You are in for a real treat.” The 148 FW was ending today a 90 day deployment of 12 fighter jets (he didn’t say to where or for what purpose) and they were returning in 2 separate groups of 6. We drove to the end of the runway they would be landing on, heading into the wind, and got out of the car. To our right on a large grass lawn a number of civilians – the family and friends of the returning pilots – stood waiting. In the distance a barely visible delta formation of 6 jets appeared and within seconds passed over us with an incredible roar. One by one they peeled off to the left and made a great counter-clockwise circle and landed a minute or so apart heading right where I stood. They taxied to assigned parking spots in front of the assembled loved ones. WHAT A SHOW!! and just by happenstance on the day of my visit.

    These aircraft had been airborne 20 straight hours flying non stop from some overseas location. Each plane had several fuel tanks visible on their undersides and if that was insufficient they had aerial refueling capability. The pilots were provided methamphetamines to keep them awake.

    I mentioned to the Major that in Sept 1963 President Kennedy landed at this AFB and paraded on foot along a fence and that I was a bare 5′ from him. Two months later he was assassinated in Dallas. Yes, Troy was quite aware of this history although it took place long before his birth.

    He then said “here is something YOU may not be aware of.” President Trump landed here at this airfield in Air Force One last month (June). By plan, there was little or no media coverage of the event (presumably) for security reasons. Troy showed me a bunch of pics he had saved on his cell phone.

    We next headed to downtown Duluth, 10 mins away, and he showed me everything of interest. To encourage tourism a long walkway had been built close to the tip of Lake Superior. We were in an area called Canal Park where many hotels cater to tourists. The high room rates, particularly on summer weekends, attest to Duluth having become “a destination” that it certainly was NOT in the early ’60s.

    On the way back to my motel we passed thru a really nice residential area and then by the University of Minnesota – Duluth (UMD). In my day here we referred to it derogatorily as UmmDee. We also called Duluth DULL-uth. Troy expressed a degree of disgust that Duluth had accumulated a population of homeless people for the simple reason that it had provided soup kitchens and was playing ‘Good Samaritan’ while other cities didn’t.

    Back under the canopy at the front of my motel we spoke for a few more mins. He is highly interested in the stock market and he has a collection of several motorcycles that he has restored. He envies me for being able to set out as a retiree on a long bike trip. I expressed my great thanks for the time he took with me and we shook hands heartily several times.

    After a short rest I drove over to Superior, WI (9 miles) to an old fashion motorcycle shop: sprockets and other parts lying around on an oily floor, a mechanic with gnarled hands, grease under his nails, a mustache that drooped an inch below his upper lip and lots of gaps from missing teeth that will never be filled with implants. I got an oil change for which I was 700 miles overdue according to the manual and had them check everything important for the trip home…tire pressure, brake lights, directional signals and whatever. Coming and going I had to cross two high bridges over water with a stiff cold wind blowing me around…scary! Once back in my room I played catch up on my travel log.

    I was scheduled to be bounced out of my room the next day (July 20) because they were booked solid at much higher rates than the $99 negotiated weekday rate that I was enjoying. They told me to check frequently for a cancellation and, indeed, someone did cancel. I said “great,” can you extend my stay one more day at my same $99 rate? Well, no, the weekend rate was now $161 and the desk guy didn’t have the authority to offer a lower rate on weekends when they really make their bread and butter. I groaned and got on the free lobby computer madly searching for anything available at $100 or less…there was nothing. Likewise I searched Airbnb and didn’t find ANY room available until July 31, regardless of price. The desk said I should check with the Gen’l Mgr about a lower rate when she came in the next morning. I had been chatting this woman up during the day with the whole tale of my great adventure and was hoping to get lucky… you know, about the room rate I mean. Before the GM was due at work I was at the front desk checking room status. They still had the one cancellation available to fill but the rate (dictated by EconoLodge home office) was now $220. Holy Shit! My situation was getting worse by the hour…I might wind up sleeping under the stars! Damn that Law of Supply and Demand! The desk guy again said talk to the GM when she gets in. Only she has the authority to over-ride home office dictated rates. (Where is Trump and his Art of the Deal when I need him?) Well, I am so proud of myself. I must have charmed her. She extended my stay for one more day at $99.

    So much for my notes about July 19…what a windbag I am.

    Fri July 20, 2018

    OK, I have one day left to check off 2 “bucket list” items before heading back to Jersey beginning Sat July 21. Namely, to take a ride up the North Shore of Lake Superior, something I had not done during my 3 years here in the Air Farce. (yes, that’s what we called it, the Air “Farce.”). So I set up the GPS to head for the town of Two Harbors, MN, (pop. 3562), some 25 miles northeast thru a cold wind coming off the lake. Once there I reset the GPS for a specific street address in downtown Duluth that my research had told me might be my old watering hole called the Kazbar (now known as R.T. Quinlan’s Saloon). Indeed it was and I spoke to the owner and told him I had just ridden a bike from NJ just to come to his bar and check this item off my list. He may have thought I was loony but I think he was impressed.

    On a level lower than the bar itself was what was once a dance floor and in the middle of it was a pool table. There were 3 mid-afternoon barflies hanging out and I was tempted to challenge one of them to a game of 8-ball in hopes of making good on my screen handle, Q. Shtik but my bike was parked at a maximum 15 minute meter so I had to leave rather abruptly. Out on the street I noticed what the Major had told me about yesterday, that there were many homeless people and the area had become decidedly seedy. Again, with the indispensable GPS guidance I found my way back to the motel and updated my travel log. Tomorrow I begin my trek home to NJ.

    • Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 3:05 pm #

      Too bad Yogi couldn’t have ridden on the back of the bike. What a conversation starter! You could have said to Bikers riding with their women, “Yup, I have my dog with me and you have yours.” Not to over-generalize: I’ve seen a couple of attractive middle aged women over the decades. But let’s face it – most dogs age better. Men look bad too, but who cares? These are true thoughts, accurate generalizations, the proper use of inductive logic.

      If you’re ever caught for financial shenanigans, maybe you could ask to be sent to this prison. How cool would that be? Your end in your beginning….

      How is your Bill, Peter? What did he think of this adventure?

      • Q. Shtik August 2, 2018 at 4:23 pm #

        How is your Bill, Peter? What did he think of this adventure? – Janos

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

        I am pleased that you’re keeping up with my tale and not using your scroll wheel.

        As to my b-i-l (not Bill), Peter, I have had no communication with him for a month and two days. He has gotten himself into a serious jam (both legal and otherwise) and I have loaned him some serious money and now he’s pissed that I am snooping too deeply into his private affairs. (Well, when I lay out money I tend to do ‘due diligence.’) This all goes back to July 4, 2014 when his wife died, or even to his own date of birth if one really thinks about it.

        As matters unfold and issues are resolved…or aren’t…the tale of Peter may be worthy of another 21 typed pages.

        His trial has been rescheduled twice and is now set for Sept 11th.

        • Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 5:23 pm #

          Both of y’all may end up in the Duluth Hoosgow (sp?). Maybe as cell mates. That would be a fit punishment in and of itself perhaps.

  100. malthuss August 2, 2018 at 1:54 pm #

    TSarah Jeong.

    Born in Korea, raised in a Carolina [in a shelter? Carolina likes to move yellows in].

    he New York times hired a new writer to their editorial board named
    And she is really anti White

    Video about the left wanting to force integrate New Hampshire,

    Idaho, etc – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtI4w… Video about nation of immigrants slogan and where it started:

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

    #NewYorkTimes

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    • malthuss August 2, 2018 at 1:54 pm #

      woops–Sarah Jeong

  101. janet August 2, 2018 at 1:56 pm #

    Finca, the crimes (collusion, conspiracy, criminal hacking, theft, fraud against the United States, foreign campaign contributions, etc.) are all felongy crimes that relate to the 2016 election campaign… not eight years ago.

    The term “collusion” is referring to a conspiracy to break federal election laws. Title 52 US Code Section 30121 says that it is a crime to solicit or accept a thing of value from a foreign national in order to influence a federal election. There is well documented evidence of Russian military intelligence officers (some of whom are named in the indictment) through hacked emails that the Trump campaign team either solicited or accepted.

    Trump’s team arranged a meeting with the Russians, in the Trump Tower, for the explicit purpose of influencing the federal election of 2016 and agreed to the Russian offer to receive “dirt” on the HRC campaign. That is the crime. Whether or not actually received, the setting up of the meeting and agreeing to receive is a crime, a conspiracy, a felony in violation of United States Code Title 52, Section 30121.

    Cohen will testify that President Trump knew about the June 9, 2016 meeting with the Russians. There is public evidence of enthusiasm at the highest levels of the Trump campaign to accept information from the Russians derogatory to Hillary Clinton and her campaign. Mueller has uncovered lots of evidence of Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the campaign and Trump’s collusion with the Russians, which is criminal conspiracy.

    Lying to federal investigators is also a federal offense. Violating federal election law, working in partnership with Russians to break the American law, which is conspiracy, and then lying to investigators about it are all crimes. Most of the indictments by Mueller are about one of those three categories of crimes. We will be seeing more indictments in the future.

    Giuliani is right that collusion is not a crime. Collusion is four crimes. What is commonly referred to as collusion is a complex series of violations of American federal election law, of truthfulness to federal investigators, and the commonly known crime of conspiracy (18 USC 371) which is working with one or more persons to break federal law: simple conspiracy.

    Trump is a traitor to the United States who has committed many felony offenses. Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 2:09 pm #

      The army considers Hillary not just a criminal, but a traitor who did not allow the US special forces to intervene in the events in Benghazi and in the army everyone is listening to an interview of an American special forces officer who was in Benghazi and saw an attack on the American mission.

      And he says that they knew that in Benghazi the US ambassador and his guards were being killed and they were ready to be there within a few minutes, but they were forbidden to interfere by their superiors. And they violated this order and intervened and rescued several people, but units in Tripoli and Croatia who could arrive in Benghazi within an hour did not violate this order and the wounded soldiers were taken out by the private Libyan aircraft which was not afraid to land in the airport of Benghazi, despite the fact that armed to the teeth US Marine Corps were “afraid” to fly.

      • janet August 2, 2018 at 4:16 pm #

        House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy confessed that Congress’ investigations into the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi were a political move against Hillary Clinton.

        “There have been seven investigations led mostly by Republicans in the Congress,” Clinton said. “And they were nonpartisan, and they reached conclusions that, first of all, I and nobody did anything wrong, but there were changes we could make. This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out of the deaths of four Americans.”

        Clinton was cleared. Trump’s criminal conspiracy is ongoing. His campaign manager is on trial this week (in August 2018). Trump’s family members are also involved with the criminal conspiracy with the Russian GRU and Trump Tower meetings with Russian intelligence/spies.

  102. FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 4:44 pm #

    Mueller is loosing his first trial? Rick Gates refuses to flip.

    Manafort case judge warns Mueller team they ‘can’t prove conspiracy’ without star witness.

    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/08/02/manafort-case-judge-warns-mueller-team-cant-prove-conspiracy-without-star-witness.html

    Oopsie-poopsie…

  103. Janos Skorenzy August 2, 2018 at 5:19 pm #

    New New York Times hire, Sarah Jeong is gold for White Liberation. Countless Whites will be awakened by her virulent hatred – and subscriptions will plummet. As has business at Starbucks.

    Q, this means you….

    JS

    From today’s Amren.com

    The New York Times’ newest editorial board member Sarah Jeong is not a fan of “dumbass f**king white people” sharing their opinions on the internet and she wants the whole world to know it.

    The Times announced on Wednesday they were hiring Sarah Jeong to join their editorial board:

    Sarah Jeong is joining The New York Times editorial board. … [Jeong] will join us in September as our lead writer on technology. … Born in South Korea, Sarah grew up in North Carolina and California. She’s both a journalist and a lawyer.

    Here’s their announcements:

    {snip}

    Jeong’s Twitter history reveals she doesn’t like “dumbass f**king white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

    {snip}

    Jeong also wonders if white people’s light skin is a sign they’re “only fit to live underground like groveling goblins” and produced these helpful graphs shoiwng that the whiter someone is the more “awful” they are and the more they produce a “weird dog smell when it rains.”

    {snip}

    She says she gets a sick “joy” out of “being cruel to old white men.”

    {snip}

    She thinks white people should be “canceled” and likes entertaining the notion they’ll go extinct.

    {snip}

    She thinks white people can’t take credit for creating anything:

    {snip}

    She thinks white men need to be targeted for more scorn:

    {snip}

    [Editor’s Note: The snips indicate screen captures of tweets from Jeong. The original story contains many others that are not summarized. Also, the New York Times has released the statement below on Miss Jeong.]

    Note on Editor’s note: basically saying that they her tweets did not reflect the philosophy of the Times and such statements by her would not be acceptable To the Times or printed by them. So why did they hire her? Can you imagine them making such an alchemical distinction for a White Nationalist or White racist? JS

  104. FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 5:27 pm #

    FincaAnon ID 4a87CD No 12845732

    >> 1723807

    Operation “Bagration” going according to the plan!

    Trust the Plan!!

    Think new M-uller fuckups.
    Proofs are paramount.

    Thank you, ClusterFuckers.

    F.

  105. janet August 2, 2018 at 5:59 pm #

    Mueller is loosing his first trial? Rick Gates refuses to flip. Oopsie-poopsie… –finca

    More fake news from “Russian” fincasoka… Gates already flipped and will testify.

    Prosecutors say they intend to call former Paul Manafort partner Rick Gates to testify against ex-Trump campaign chief

    A lawyer on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team says prosecutors have “every intention” to call Rick Gates to testify against Paul Manafort.

    “We have absolutely put him on the witness list,” prosecutor Greg Andres said, before the jury entered the courtroom Thursday morning. “We have every intention to call him as a witness.”

    –Kevin Breuninger, CNBC

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    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 6:12 pm #

      Fake noose….

      Big freakout coming our way… Board the windows, check supplies, gas up the car!

    • JohnAZ August 2, 2018 at 8:38 pm #

      Janet, you keep coming up with a step by step report on all the bad things that the Trump administration does. You seem to delight in every little negative nuance that might remotely be tied to the Trumpers. It is humorous to watch every little nuance fall by the wayside as the months roll by. The entire plan to remove Trump is a house of cards and hopefully the Manafort debacle will remove the last vestiges of credibility of the Mueller witch hunt. BTW, still waiting for even one example of collusion, whatever that is, between DJT and Russia.

      • janet August 3, 2018 at 12:12 am #

        “The entire plan to remove Trump is a house of cards…” –JohnAZ

        JohnAZ, when Cohen testifies that Trump was in on the collusion with Russia, including the meeting in the Trump Tower, and Trump is facing charges of obstruction of justice, lying to federal investigators, criminal conspiracy, etc. it won’t be the Democrats or any “plan” that removes Trump. He will remove himself, just like Nixon did. Trump will resign.

  106. FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 6:27 pm #

    We have every intention to call him as a witness

    All that remains is to convince Count Pototsky!

    F.

  107. Pucker August 2, 2018 at 7:16 pm #

    I suspect that Putin may have cut a deal with the Oligarchs?: They can keep their wealth and assets as long as they serve the Russian State. This ethos is not Capitalism. Is it Fascism? In any case, it’s contrary to serving the interests of particular financial groups that are essentially global. The financial groups seem to hate Nationalists.

    The Russians seem to view “The Clinton Gang” as an entrenched group of criminal oligarchs as in Russia. There may be a relationship between the massive privatization of government functions that has been ongoing in the US and a rising tide of criminality in the US government?

    “Soon the leading Moscow banks became the core of financial political groups, each of which was tied to one or another leading political figure. As their power and wealth increased, the banks began to behave like states within a state, acquiring media outlets and establishing their own security services capable of spying on economic and political rivals as well as tapping the phones of thousands of ordinary citizens. With the resources of a former superpower at stake, the struggle for power between the financial political groups became the principal determinant of the policies of the Russian government. The second process that contributed to the creation of Russia’s criminal business oligarchy was privatization. Privatization both predated and survived the period of hyperinflation. The privatization that took place first is euphemistically described as “unofficial” privatization and consisted in the uncontrolled and illegal seizure of the economic infrastructure of the country. “Official” privatization took place in two stages: voucher privatization, from October 1992 to July 1994; and money privatization, which began in August 1994 and continued to the end of the decade. Unofficial privatization began during the perestroika period as soon as government organizations were given permission to engage in commercial activity. Government officials, secretly and without any legal basis, began to take over their agencies and reorganize them as private enterprises. In place of ministries, they organized “concerns”; in place of the state distribution system, they created commodity exchanges; and in place of the state banks with their regional branches, they organized commercial banks. The new commercial enterprises used the same suppliers, the same buildings, and the same personnel. Only the name of the organization changed. But the assets of the organization became the property of its new “owners.” 3 Wild privatization was followed by voucher privatization, which began in October 1992. Each Russian was entitled to a voucher with a face value of 10,000 rubles (the monthly salary of an auto worker), which was redeemable for a share of Russian industry. The vouchers were of little use to most Russians, who were rarely paid dividends on them and had no say in management even when they invested their voucher in their own factory. They were very useful, however, to those who could accumulate them in great numbers. This led criminal and commercial structures to buy them up as quickly as possible. In some cases, agents bought vouchers on the street from indigents and alcoholics, often for a bottle of vodka. In other cases, these groups organized voucher funds that advertised on television, promising high dividends, and then either did not pay the dividends or simply disappeared. In this way, criminal and commercial structures accumulated huge blocks of vouchers that they used to buy up the most desirable factories, often at giveaway prices. 4 In the last days of voucher privatization, the federal property fund put more than a hundred of Russia’s most valuable enterprises on sale at once, causing a sharp fall in the value of shares, which were then bought up by the voucher funds. 5 When voucher privatization was succeeded by money privatization in the latter part of 1994, the population was already divided into a handful of groups that could participate in it and the vast majority of the population, which could not. The pressure to put property into private hands as quickly as possible, however, did not relent, and it led to the selling off of many of the country’s remaining industrial enterprises, including the most desirable, at absurdly reduced prices.”

    David Satter
    Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 7:29 pm #

      The biggest confusion of the 20th century and a huge disservice that historians dealt to humanity is mixing up two absolutely different concepts – fascism and national socialism (nazism).

      Both Putin and Trump are fascists in academical sense of the word.

      The essence of the current civil war in US is the struggle between the fascism (Trump) and national socialism (Clinton).

      For example, I thought before that Janos is a fascist, but he turned up to be a nazi.

      Volodya is another example of National Socialist in our community.

    • FincaInTheMountains August 2, 2018 at 9:26 pm #

      I give you one example explaining my position:

      At one time Guy Julius Caesar gave Roman citizenship to Gallo-Romans of Languedoc.

      It was this act of Caesar that turned the somewhat fascist Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, which later became the Christian Empire, and the Orthodox Church teaches that the appearance of the Roman Empire was one of the providential preparations to the Incarnation of the mission of Christ.

      The Roman Empire was undoubtedly the higher form of organization of the human society than Roman Republic ever was, being the source of statehood, laws, education, science, culture, business and living infrastructure for the multiple peoples inhabiting its boundaries, at the same time recognizing the uniqueness of each people inhabiting it, preserving their language and culture.

    • bibliomaniac August 3, 2018 at 9:06 am #

      Pucker–Sounds like a fascinating book. I must read it. Reminds me of Robert Kuttner’s book, “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?” in which he contends that the whole globe has been set up by global capitalism for the likes of Trump. If we look around–we see it everywhere. A return to the dark days of the 1930’s, market crashes, starvation, and a tiny financial elite–but this time the planet is involved, and it may be the loser.

    • bibliomaniac August 3, 2018 at 9:25 am #

      Pucker–“For at least a decade now, those who defend Putin either have something to gain from it or they are dangerously ignorant.”

      Garry Gasparov
      Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped

  108. JohnAZ August 2, 2018 at 9:35 pm #

    I have a question for the more knowledgeable internet/social media types.

    Just read an article on the Russian meddling in the 2016 and 2018 elections, being sworn to by members of the DOJ, mainly Wray.

    I do not get it. Why don’t the PTB entertain us with what form that meddling takes. How is Russia attempting to destroy American values and Democracy? There was one and only one statement that Russian trolling was affecting social media like Facebook. What is the content of anything they are doing? Some candidates have said that their data bases have been hacked, but Russia has not been proven just suspected. Russian meddling, like the DNC incident, has been alluded to but proof has not been presented. Seth Rich is still n the picture. Again, I refuse to just take the FBI’s word for anything anymore. Their reputation is flawed to the max.

    Is Russia pick and choosing who they want to deal with here? Or attempting to? Anybody who puts confidential info on computer Clouds is foolish anyway. Nothing is sacred, everything is hackable.

    IT has sold a bill of goods to the world. Instead of info security, there are no more secret places to put confidential info.

    It is about time that people start to realize the full impact of cyberspace, ignorance is IT ‘s chief ally.

    • chipshot August 3, 2018 at 7:48 am #

      JohnAZ,

      I’m not a knowledgeable internet/social media type (never been on Facebook), but as a progressive disgusted by Trump, the Russian meddling story drives me crazy.

      Even IF there’s any truth to it–which I doubt–it doesn’t deserve nearly the amount of coverage it’s gotten, mainly from CNN, MSNBC, and the NYT.

      It makes total sense this idea was planted by Clinton/DNC, to distract from her and Bill’s ties to Russia and distract from why she lost in 2016.
      And possibly to distract from her collusion w DNC and MSM to cheat Bernie in the primary. BTW, why isn’t that a story w an investigation??
      There’s far more evidence pointing to that than the Russia thing.

      I, too, refuse to take the FBI’s word on anything. Same for the CIA and DOJ. They’re all part of the oligarchy/plutocracy that must be overthrown.

  109. FincaInTheMountains August 3, 2018 at 7:25 am #

    Donald Trump Jr. Says Democrats Are More Like Nazis Than Republicans Are

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-jr-compares-democrats-nazis_us_5b622361e4b0fd5c73d5f319

    “I’ve been hearing the left talking about these things ? fascism, Nazism on the right — and when you look at the actual history of how these things evolved, and you actually look at that platform versus the platform of the modern left, you say, ‘Wait a minute, those two are very heavily aligned and, frankly, contrary to the right,’” Trump told the conservative cable news channel.

    While promoting D’Souza’s film, Trump also suggested that people shouldn’t trust what they learned in a history class because “academia has been so wrongly influenced by the left.”

    “You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s and what was actually put out there, and you look at it compared to, like, the DNC platform of today, and you’re saying, ‘Man, those things are awfully similar,’ to the point where it’s actually scary,” Trump added. “To me, that was one of the most striking things I took from the movie because it’s the exact opposite that you’ve been told.”

    • FincaInTheMountains August 3, 2018 at 8:23 am #

      Still, the only thing that can save America today is the establishment of the Commission to counter attempts to falsify history to the detriment of America’s interests.

      Of course, if this commission is headed by the right person with a scientific worldview, a workable philosophy of history and a living, imaginative speech close to people in the current situation (a la Vladimir Putin).

      I modestly will keep silent about who exactly should lead this commission. Modesty is one of my many virtues.

  110. FincaInTheMountains August 3, 2018 at 8:22 am #

    Americans regard Russians very well. Americans regard Russian system of government very badly.

    Americans know that Russians are educated.

    And they ask themselves: why in a thousand years of the existence of the Russian state you did not create a government that you are happy with? Why can not you adjust this area of your life? It’s easier than writing great books, creating brilliant mathematical models, flying into space. It’s just a technological problem. Arrange a system of power that you will be happy with and that will help you live.

    Hence the American messianism. They say: if you do not succeed, take our model!

    We have our own problems, but our system works. We never changed the Constitution. The same rules for choosing the president remain. There is a built-in fool-proofing. Take this system.

    I am a categorical opponent of the transfer of the American model to the Russian soil. But it is difficult to explain it to Americans. They do not understand why we do not create something better then they? What’s stopping us?

    I’m sure that if Martians – Heroes of the novel by Herbert Wells “The War of the Worlds” – arrive to Earth, then among the earthlings there will be people who will be engaged in the supply of food for the Martians.

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