JHK’s Three-Act Play
In
our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups
of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten
to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.
It’s
odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account (“Eight Days,” in the
Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine)
of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG
croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled,
reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it
all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.
It
was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all
those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared
recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the
first place. And it is our
inability to come to grips with that underlying catastrophe that prolongs the
resolution of the still-florid banking crisis — since the federal government is
doing everything possible to prop up the failed capital equation of terminal
suburbia, and to deny the obsolescence of that version of the American Dream
and all the mechanisms for delivering it.
The
suburban project was not a conspiracy by the likes of Robert Moses, Walt
Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and President Eisenhower to produce a living
arrangement with no future. It was
the emergent, self-organizing result of special circumstances in a particular
time and place: post World War Two America, with an immense supply of cheap
oil, cheap land, and the industrial capacity to churn out all the necessary
components for a car-dependent development pattern. Suburbia was spawned out of a couple of persistent themes in
American cultural history:
1.) that cities and city life were no good; 2.) and that the romance of settling the
wilderness could be reenacted, at great profit, in all that space beyond the
towns and cities. It would be silly to deny the appeal of this arrangement at
its inception. By the end of WW
II, city life in the popular imagination was reduced to one potently awful
image: Ralph Kramden’s apartment in “The Honeymooners” TV show.
There had to be something
better than that. Suburbia was engineered as the antidote to the Kramden’s
apartment:
country-living-for-everybody. The evacuation of the cities to the new outlands
proceeded as relentlessly as the landings at Normandy. It wasn’t until the program was well
underway that the self-destructive essence of it became obvious — that every
new housing subdivision killed the original rural character of the land, with
the result that suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a
cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country. With additional
layer-on-layer of, first, the shopping in the form of highway strips, then
malls, along with the office “parks,” these places elaborated themselves into a
kind of cancer-of-the-landscape, a chronic and expensive condition that
Americans had no choice but to live with, because of the monumental investments
they had already made in it. The
discontents it produced lent it to psychological depression and dark humor,
just as chronic illness does. But we
were stuck with it.
Meanwhile, all
the machinery of culture and politics made it impossible to construct anything
differently. The exquisitely fine-tuned planning-and-zoning codes generated by
the thousands of town boards mandated a suburban outcome everywhere — with
plenty of help from the DOT traffic engineers, the fire marshals, and the even
the mandarins of academia who trained all these professionals. As a natural consequence of all this,
the disinvestment in cities — especially the older cities of the industrial
heartland — continued remorselessly until it seemed as if the Second World War had
taken place in St. Louis and Cleveland.
This mode of behavior
persisted through the first, short-lived oil scarcity tremors of the 1970s. It
was so completely embedded in the popular imagination that it had become the
baseline American identity. The suburban project caught a second wind in the
1990s, when the last great non-OPEC oil fields of the North Sea, Alaska, and
Siberia nullified the grip of the Islamic cartel for while, and sent the price
of oil down to $11-a-barrel.
Ironically, it was during those years that the warnings of “peak oil”
first circulated beyond the geology offices, and it was clear to anyone who
reflected on the connections that the project of suburbia was doomed.
It was also
ironic, tragically so, that during this same period Wall Street began to seek
some new way to make real money beyond stock and bond markets, which didn’t
seem to produce wealth at all for more than a decade when inflation was
factored in. By a fortuitous
coincidence, the revolution in computers enabled Wall Street bankers to concoct
abstruse new species of tradable paper securities based on bundles of debt that
seemed to produce miraculous earnings. It had the added advantage of being
inscrutable to both investors and financial regulators. Due diligence became
impossible and moral hazard spread like ringworm in a dormitory. The bulk of
the securitized debt originated in home mortgages and the larger result was a
gigantic racket ramped up between Wall Street and the US government to conceal
all the structural weaknesses of a de-industrialized US economy behind a
hyperbolic commerce in the very thing that the American public cherished most: their houses, which, understandably, everybody
had come to call “homes.” Wall Street might as easily have commoditized mother
and apple pie – if you could sell each one for half a million dollars.
The
banking fiasco still underway is at once a proxy for the larger failure of the
American economy and the greatest fissure in it. Put as simply possible: we can’t service our debt, we can’t generate more debt, and the
notional “capital” we thought we possessed is dissolving into nothingness. The federal government and Wall Street
remain committed to supporting all the rackets associated with a suburban
sprawl economy that has entered its own zone of remorseless failure. It is failing as a capital investment
first, and is secondarily failing as a practical living arrangement. The two failures will continue in a
close race toward terminal entropy.
The dirty secret all
along was that by 2005 there was no economy left in the USA beyond the suburban
sprawl economy with its so-called “consumer” nexus — largely devoted to the outfitting
of suburbia. More mortgage debt
(and credit card and car loan debt) will go bad and the investment paper that
represents it will go bad and it will eventually destroy our current system for
accumulating, valuing, and deploying wealth. It will not destroy the function of capital — no matter how
many angry intellectuals inveigh against the straw man of capital-ism, as if it were merely a belief system – but it
will be a long long time before anything sturdy or credible in the way of
banking will be reconstructed out of the wreckage.
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Yes this is another perfect analysis. JHK your strength lies in taking the same theme and deconstructing it endlessly, because it is an endless deconstruction. Unwittingly I bought into cities are bad long before I had any experience in a city in order to know the belief I held. It was where crime happened, and for many years that was true. It wasn’t until hippies started moving in and renovating, starting businesses a la hippie capitalism that I noticed things changed in Philadelphia. All of a sudden there were good restaurants springing up on a shoestring. Alas success was so quick on South Street that greed took over as the $9000 buildings started going for 100K and up into the millions. Now that wonderful street has crashed almost to where it was in the 50’s when Philly had taken steps to condemn it, demolish it and put a beltway around the city there. Only hippies who had settled there, had a stake in the street, wanted to stay there, and so fought the good fight and won bringing city living into living trendy. And so painlessly I got out of the suburbs when I had no stake there.
But small town living as your novel suggests is a potentially horrible alternative. People in small towns have small minds, no culture, and are sheeple. Even though I can walk everywhere, the congenial cultural lifestyle I had in Philly is never going to be here in my neon red town.
Jim-you omitted Miracle on 34th Street (miracle being the suburban home wish) and Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream Home (where they can’t move out of town fast enough). The suburbanization movement was aided and abetted by Hollywood as the glorious California terrain was bulldozed to build tracts of homes for folks to purchased under the GI Bill. To quote Joni “you don’t know what you got til its gone.”
I also think with the proper editing you have a gret book of essays on this theme to publish, go on talk shows with and just generally publicize the future to masses of people. Please think about this. You just have a way of constantly looking at another facet (Honeymooners)that brings it home in a different way to that someone that has not yet been reached on the coming paradigm change.
And I am glad you brought up the straw manof capitalism. Ayn Rand said in 1960 when Goldwater fever was upon us that if he managed to win and if his ideas would infiltrate government, that they would fail because of internal philosophical contradictions and that capitalism would take the hit.
Not exactly her words, but definitely her intent. and to think her trusted acolyte Alan Greenspan would be the catalyst.
Americans may have been powerfully vested emotionally in the idealization of quasi-rural life, but even with quantities of cheap oil and cheap land available in the post WW2 era, we could not have managed the utter destruction of our cities and the buildout of suburbia along the lines it took, without government policy and without the unlimited taxing authority of the federal government, as well as the authority of local and state governments to misallocate tax receipts at the state and local level, and to zone city life out of existence.
The outward flow of the population would have been held in some check by natural constraints, which would be the inability to finance the mega highways and other necessary infrastructure. People could dream of houses and cars in the distant hinterlands all they wanted, but a far smaller fraction would have been able to afford them, and only an equally small fraction would have even wanted to leave their city neighborhoods. A certain number would have been driven beyong the city limits by the high prices of the cities, but there would never have been the wholesale rush to the suburbs had it not been rendered cheap by low-downpayment or no-downpayment home loans made available by the FHA and VA, and the willingness of GNMA, FNMA, and the other GSAs to buy loans that the lenders otherwise would never have touched. The FHA helped things along considerably by “red-lining” property in perfectly stable, desirable city neighborhoods, thus assuring their destruction.
To be sure, our authorities could never have done all this without the urging and applause of the population. Kunstler is correct in that this was the general thrust of the era, and there would have been suburban development and more car ownership no matter what.
But it took far-reaching policies backed by unlimited taxing authority to amplify popular sentiments and cultural biases into a sweeping wave that took out everything and everyone in front of it, to the point where by 1965 you really had no choice to move. We were watching St. Louis, the city my family settled in circa 1790 (before it was even an American town) be systemically destroyed. By 1970, the schools were being gutted, a process hastened by busing to achieve a specious social integration, which was the last nail in the coffin. The last resisters, the people who loved the cozy neighborhoods in which their families had dwelled for many generations, often clear back to the early 19th century, were at last forced out for fear of their lives. You got out while your house could still bring any money at all. The forced clearance of the slum area that encircled downtown and its replacement by the Pruitt- Igoe housing projects as well as other projects just like them, was the opening salvo of the Federal war on the cities, and it triggered a wave of disinvestment. The construction of these types of projects in almost every city destroyed our communities and cities in numerous ways. First, they destroyed the tightly knit networks of cooperation and association that poor people build over time in their neighborhoods and that help them maintain a certain level of civilization in the absence of the props that the rest of us can afford. Then, these presence of these projects in otherwise intact neighborhoods triggered flight out of them.
So, while the confluence of cultural trends- the idealization of country life in conjunction with modernist architecture and urban planning- was certainly unfavorable to urban life, it took government policy and billions and billions of tax payer dollars to translate these trends into reality.
And it was NOT done in innocence. It’s not as though we did not know better. Suburban sprawl was identified as an immense problem as early as 1950. And, worse, our government policy makers knew as the rest of the population did not, how finite our petroleum supplies were. Admiral Rickover as well as Hubbert predicted our current predicament, and other policy makers echoed them.
That’s right, we did what we knew better than to do just like we are now.
Jim,
Years ago, my reading of “Geography of Nowhere” influenced us to consider, and later move to Portland, Oregon.
Happily, we’ve found a lifestyle here that is less car-dependent, connected with local food production, and richly walkable.
But go out in the Portland suburbs and it’s a strip mall and McMansion landscape like most other big American cities.
So even here, the work to be done is enormous to extricate ourselves from the McMansion American Dream psychological rut.
My business of carpet cleaning has afforded me access to many a suburban McMansion in the Portland area.
Economic conditions during the past year have wiped away most of my younger customers, leaving the wealthier customers, and leisure retirees still able to afford to have their carpet cleaned.
A silver lining in all of this is I’ve noticed in our suburbs a huge uptick in hobbies such as home canning, and vegetable gardening.
Just to note another TV-antecedent. At one point, Lucy and Ricky did a series of shows in the idealized “Colonial” house in Connecticut. It was clearly a nod to the viewers who were also being told that leaving the dirty city for the leafy suburbs was the was to do.
As to small-town living versus big-city living? Abbeysbooks, I can’t agree. While perhaps not possessing theater or opera and sometimes small-minded, there are also trade-offs in larger urbanized settings. I don’t personally feel that we all need to have art galleries and haute cuisine within easy reach to make our lives whole…
One thing you miss out on all this talk on Suburbia: People were scared about what might happen with the end of World War II. After all, we’d just gone through twelve years of depression in various levels, followed by four years of rationing and enforced full employment through military service and military production. People were afraid of going back to the struggles of the thirties (Who would consume what the industries could make? And why would they?), and the constant building of Suburbia was the perfect antidote to the people’s fears.
Everything comes from that. Since the cities were crowded and sickly, the best thing for them was to recreate space in them…hence Pruitt-Igoe and all the other Projects (interesting fact: Pruitt-Igoe was supposed to be surrounded by factories, shopping and neighborhoods; by the time it was built all that surrounding stuff was either torn down, or abandoned). Parking in the city became a pain in the ass and expensive besides, from that we get strip malls, then the enclosed malls that became America’s de facto downtown, then Wal-Mart. Soon the factories got old, from that we get the Southern Strategy and eventually China. And during all this…constant spending, constant buying, constant consuming; all to keep the American contented with the idea that they lived in a consumer’s paradise.
What we have developing now (the death of consumer culture) was, in many ways, the disaster that Suburban Sprawl was intended to stave off. And it worked, in various ways, for fifty-plus years, even with its well-known problems and increasing costs. It’s just now that we’ve learned the costs are more than the benefits…and that it’s been this way for a while now.
One thing you miss out on all this talk on Suburbia: People were scared about what might happen with the end of World War II. After all, we’d just gone through twelve years of depression in various levels, followed by four years of rationing and enforced full employment through military service and military production. People were afraid of going back to the struggles of the thirties (Who would consume what the industries could make? And why would they?), and the constant building of Suburbia was the perfect antidote to the people’s fears.
Everything comes from that. Since the cities were crowded and sickly, the best thing for them was to recreate space in them…hence Pruitt-Igoe and all the other Projects (interesting fact: Pruitt-Igoe was supposed to be surrounded by factories, shopping and neighborhoods; by the time it was built all that surrounding stuff was either torn down, or abandoned). Parking in the city became a pain in the ass and expensive besides, from that we get strip malls, then the enclosed malls that became America’s de facto downtown, then Wal-Mart. Soon the factories got old, from that we get the Southern Strategy and eventually China. And during all this…constant spending, constant buying, constant consuming; all to keep the American contented with the idea that they lived in a consumer’s paradise.
What we have developing now (the death of consumer culture) was, in many ways, the disaster that Suburban Sprawl was intended to stave off. And it worked, in various ways, for fifty-plus years, even with its well-known problems and increasing costs. It’s just now that we’ve learned the costs are more than the benefits…and that it’s been this way for a while now.
It is true that the built environment is wasteful and expensive, but that is not what is doing us in as a people and as a population on this limited planet. Globally the rest of the world wants to be like us_ rich and with lives full of stuff. The world wants to be stylish, able to go anywhere at anytime, as well as feel physically safe and secure in the future. The cost of all this grasping for comfort and security is in the natural world. The oceans are fished out. The last great resource, the high arctic, will be harvested as the ice retreats. We really have no idea of carrying capacity.
We have no, zero, humility as a people. Humility is conflated with weakness. As a result we are unable to have a coherent and meaningful conversation about limits. Look at the hysteria generated around insurance reform. It is a perfect storm of media, limited attention, crisis and paralysis. It will be interesting.
Our garden has had its first frost and is being put to bed for the winter. We would be very very thin if we had to live off what it produces. It is the collapse of the natural systems of water, air, forest and fisheries that will do us in, regardless of how our cities and suburbs are designed.
Almost all of our leaders have bought into the system, despite obvious, persistent signals that something else is going on.
This discrepancy between their position and reality is why so many people question the legitimacy of authorities.
Other “leaders” like Bush and Cheney, by design or incompetence or both, undermined the legitimacy of leadership by their multiple disastrous actions.
Blogs and “opinion” have become so popular because people no longer trust what “leaders” have to say.
“People in small towns have small minds, no culture, and are sheeple.”
Excepting you?
It’s possible to overthink this issue. People wanted more space, nice stuff, cars and the whole catastrophe. Unfortunately, we had the means to cater to these desires cheaply and quickly.
I was in Nuremberg last summer and wondered aloud how a city that had been completely destroyed 60 some years ago would be in this country its most stunning jewel. Who exactly won World War II? Still, even in Europe, suburbanization is a powerful force. It won’t dstroy Europe like it’s killing us but it does show how ubiquitous these toxic dreams are.
The worst thing to consider is how unforgiving our suburban template is. Everything we’ll do will revolve around propping it up simply because the retrofit appears too expensive. Yes, we’ll see some “green shoots” in underutilitzed urban cores. But we’re stuck with this mess for the rest of our lives and probably our grandkids’ as well.
Jim, you wrote…
“Suburbia was engineered as the antidote to the Kramden’s apartment: country-living-for-everybody. The evacuation of the cities to the new outlands proceeded as relentlessly as the landings at Normandy.”
I’d add that a key post-war driver to building the suburbs was the Bomb. There was a widespread public belief, reinforced by the government, that the way to avoid being blown away in World War III was to move out of the cities.
Escaping urban Armageddon was a deep-seated psychological justification for building suburbs. It also helped when the time came for COngress to enable construction of the means to commute to & fro, via the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (the proper name of out national transport grid).
The US experience of World War II — bombing the crap out of European and Asian cities, culminating in nuking Japan — left much legacy on the home front.
My, what a gasbag you are. Small towns have small people, no culture, oh, horrors!!! How in hell do you arrive at this farcical conclusion? You must hold a doctorate, right? Your culture must be so superior, we must look up to you, right? Oh, we of little culture and low IQ’s. How terrible of us to be such mental drivel, such human detritus. I’d die to go to your weekly Mensa meetings, could you ask me, please, huh? Can you suggest ways for me to leave my countrified ways behind, to see your wisdom more clearly for what it is? I would be eternally grateful to you. So sorry I can’t breathe your rarefied oxygen, how dare I even suggest that?
Though ethnic vanilla despised ethnic strawberry, 1950s people were fundmentally ethical. People exercised committment to themselves, to their children, and to their country. Civil rights of the 70s cherished a slave class with no limit to cost. Empowerments of the 80s ended ethics, with no limit to cost. Massive importation of a massively reproductive second slave class into the 21st century is a bottomless wallet of accommodation. The mythos of America was shaved then skinned alive. Those who paid drowned in debt to survive one more year while supporting two other “families” who needed only to threaten.
Compare the volume of common vs. statutary law in 1959 versus 2009. Ethics is dead. 80% of a privileged minority are born out of wedlock. Productive adults are ground into a hamburger and Gifted children are flensed. Scholarship has been shriven into rights.
America is nation of virulent parasites by legislated confiscation gushing successive middens of morons to manage the next cycle. Capitalism amortizes debt through inflation, forever pushing reckoning into the next quarter. We have legislated a compassionate miracle! We pushed so hard tomorrow arrived last Tuesday – and it is not going away.
Parrot Boy,
I suppose I would also have to read Mein Kampf to really know that Hitler was a bad guy huh? BTW, since you are such a crusading anti-communist, have you read Das Kapital?, (has anybody, as far as that goes) If you didn’t you are not qualified to criticize communism, right?
It is easy to understand what you and Beck have in common however, the visual image you leave of yourself to everyone here is of a screaming, red faced little fat boy, devoid of thought, but full of invective. Oh! Who might that remind us of?
By the way using the phrase “typical white person” is not a demeaning characterization, so how would that justify Beck’s statement that Obama has a “deep seated hatred of white people”. Hell, the guy was raised by white people for Chrissakes! Parrot Boy…..you should be so lucky as to be called a “typical white person”.
As someone who spent my early years in both the city of St. Louis and across the river in East St. Louis I recall vividly the processes which brought about the near collapse of St. Louis and the complete collapse of East St. Louis. Although I am sure the interstate highway system and tax policy both played an important part in the equation what I personally witnessed was something different.
For perspective let me state that virtually every one of my various relatives all owned homes throughout both cities. My maternal grandparents owned a magnificent grand old home in East St. Louis near 10th and Pennsylvania next to what was known as the “sunken gardens” – a gorgeous assemblage of formal parterre gardens amidst fountains. And just a few blocks away my favorite playground known as Jones Park, one of the most beautiful Victorian walking parks in the country, featured exotic park pavilions, more formal gardens and meandering canals where Venetian gondolas could be rented by the hour. Everywhere, brick paved streets were filled with towering old sidewalk trees with a nearby high school that looked like a “palace of education”, unlike school buildings today that mostly resemble factories for making widgets. The homes where impressively built and designed to last for centuries. Today that world is almost entirely lost. Only a few isolated homes survive and these are nearly all in some level of advanced decay. The sunken gardens are now a trash-filled weed patch, the park is nearly entirely overgrown and the high school was torn down several years ago. Hardly a single sidewalk tree exists anywhere for blocks on end. The whole area looks like Dresden or Berlin, Germany right at the end of World War II. To this day I miss the pleasant walks with either my paternal or maternal grandparents to the corner grocery store, the rides on the street trolleys and those magical experiences every Saturday at one of the city’s grand old movie palaces.
But as I recall the key to the abandonment (and disinvestment) of our cities had less to do with highways or taxation, but rather premeditated policies put in place by our banking, insurance and real estate interests. Not a single one of my relatives ever wanted to leave either St. Louis or East St. Louis. But one by one they gave up their beautiful homes and the neighborhoods they had come to love and cherish primarily because no one could get a home loan for the most basic repairs, insurance policies were systematically cancelled and real estate agents were forever coming to their doors encouraging them to sell (block busting) warning of blacks moving into the neighborhood.
By 1968 all had left and moved out into the distant country or suburbs where easy credit and bank loans could be had. Without exception everyone regretted leaving and loosing that sense of neighborhood and community. My maternal grandmother lamented her fate to the very end.
After college I returned to St. Louis and spent the next thirty-plus years restoring my own historic home and creating extensive gardens, but even decades later I was constantly dealing with the difficulties in getting home improvement loans, reasonable insurance rates, etc., even having been shot once, stabbed twice and nearly beaten to death with a two by four in three separate home burglary attempts. Although I now live in the country in a small, quiet rural town to this day I miss the city and urban life, despite all of the trials and tribulations associated with it.
“Tell this to the multimillionaire rap artists.”
——————————-
Abbey,
I’d rather tell it to the average unemployed black person who, after prodigious effort, lands a first hurdle phone interview and lets slip axst instead of asked, wif instead of with, or dat instead of that.
The polite HR rep thanks the hapless interviewee, moves on to the next desperate soul on her list, and never even bothers to call back with a “Sorry, but we’ve selected another candidate who we believe more fully meets our needs.” Nothing; no explanation; just silence.
For you to have advised young blacks otherwise is a crying shame.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
What effect, if any, might the constant threat of nuclear annihilation have had on the desire to leave the cities? Even though a nuclear exchange would have obliterated America as it was, surely it would be preferable to not be at ground zero, even with the dangers of fallout and other horrors post-nuclear holocaust. Even today, scare-mongering about dirty bombs and other terrorist attacks inevitably focus on centres of concentrated population.
Just another facet out of dozens that make up the general fear of urban life that remains in the latter days of a colonial nation.
Although, you have to wonder if part of the problem of American cities is simply that they grew too quickly and in the wrong ways to have ever established themselves as healthy communities, aside from exceptions like New York and San Francisco, where money keeps them on perpetual life support.
I, too, have mixed feelings about small towns. I prefer small/medium cities, with populations from half a million to a million, ideally with two or three high-density areas (not just one), with neighbourhoods of assorted densities in and around them. I think if a city has well-defined neighbourhoods, it has much better cohesion. Maybe this has to do with being Canadian, or my nostalgia for an idealized version of historical European cities pre-industrialization.
“By the way using the phrase “typical white person” is not a demeaning characterization…”
What is typical of white people? “Typical”, suggests a boilerplate set of actions or reactions. It is an attempt to characterize an entire set or subset of people. In that it is racist. Of course I wouldn’t expect a TYPICAL FUCKTARD to typically get it.
Hey Jim,
You comment that this article missed the core, but you too are still a few levels too high.
Charles Eisenstein takes if a few levels deeper here: http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization
I think you would really enjoy Eisenstein’s essay. I worry about you sometimes because there’s really not much we can do, you know. Perhaps there’s some that Obama could be doing that he’s not, but as Audre Lord put it, “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” Obama is as trapped by the system as we are, and we can’t do anything today. You still drive your Tacoma, I still drive my Dakota, because we don’t have the money to completely rearrange our lives as thoroughly as the times truly require because it takes much more than money to do that. We won’t be able to create the new world until the old one falls. It takes the full cooperation of the whole community to rearrange everything about the way we live, but the majority of our community doesn’t yet think we are on the brink of collapse. This is OK, this isn’t cause for panic, people will come around when their personal worlds start falling apart, which it already is for millions of people. We will come together soon. Today it seems that there is cause for despair because we are so individuated and feel so helpless and powerless as individuals, but that’s just a outgrowth of the structure of our society after our growth economy has driven us apart by having us pay for everything that we used to do communally. As long as the “growth” based money system is standing we will stay separated and divided. Once it falls we will come together and allow reality to seep back in. It will be a beautiful time, albeit some strife initially, but with some positive work we can come back together create a more beautiful world.
We are currently in a national state of denial, and rightfully so. We can’t allow ourselves to stop doing what we’ve been doing because subconsciously we sense the abject poverty of our souls and we can’t let that enter into consciousness falling into an unbelievable despair. The Suburbs are a result of this. We fill the hole in our center with the appearance of wealth, success, beauty, and opulence to hide the inner poverty, failure, loneliness, and despair. The problems we face don’t start with physical or economic mistakes, but with our spiritual bankruptcy, with the bankruptcy of any meaningful purpose for our lives other than buying. You are advocating the death of more than just a sickly economy here, you are advocating taking away our very reason for living in America. This can’t and shouldn’t be done by any human, it must come from the death of the sickly system that created us in it’s image. Take heart, with the fall of the system that has so deeply impoverished all of us on a spiritual level will come a period of reintegration with our larger ecological selves, which will usher in a new era of beauty and true wealth beyond our wildest dreams.
re: “But small town living as your novel suggests is a potentially horrible alternative. People in small towns have small minds, no culture, and are sheeple.”
As zzzzzz pointed out (concisely) you’re not demonstrating lots of little self-awareness. Surely there are many small-town residents with small minds, but I suspect that the proportion of any human population afflicted with ignorance is roughly constant. In the city, with its generally higher income, ignorance can afford drive a volvo, buy healthy food (grown where? transported how?) from Local Natural Market (TM), and play cultural pretend, thereby masquerading as sophistication.
Perhaps more importantly, on what basis can you assert that small towns are a potentially horrible alternative (presumably to cities)? I assume that we’re on the same page about petroleum, and if you’ve been reading jhk for any length of time, you understand that most of us are going to have to get back to the farm (wherever the actual land is located). When very few of us can afford cars, constant cell-phone upgrades, new computers, mortgages, and grande-mocha-fucking-lattes, will it matter whether we have 5,000 immediate neighbors or 50,000? In 2025, after you’ve busted your ass picking pumpkins all day (or whatever chore you are lucky enough to find yourself doing), do be so kind as to let us all know how your evening studies of Wittgenstein are progressing.
Frederick,
Nice summary of a single persons experience of Post WWII social and economic decay.
General Aviation the canary in our coal mine?
http://www.suburbanempire.com
“What is typical of white people? “Typical”, suggests a boilerplate set of actions or reactions.”
—————————
More precisely, a group of similar perceptions and views, based on shared or similar culture and background. Would that be strange or deniable in some alternative universe?
Like I said Parrot Boy, you should be so lucky….
I grew up in southern CT when it was more town than suburb. By the 80’s, density had brought with it traffic and the attendant problems. Suddenly I was living with all the inconvenience of a large city and none of the amenities. Didn’t seem like a good deal. I moved.
http://maureenholland.wordpress.com/
Yes, millions of Whites have been driven form their homes and communities by Black Barbarism. Some have had to move twice and thrice to escape the same thing. And these people have not gotten a dime’s worth of sympathy from the mass media or the University Mandarins. Yes as Mr Kunstler says, an idyllic image was created of suburbia and that influenced some. But crowding and ethnic tension influenced others-even just the tensions among White groups. But when the Blacks were brought into the cities, the steam of evacuation become a flood. Are the Whites to blame for seeking their own safety, good schools for their kids, and a peaceful place to retire? Or is the blame to be put on the Federal Goverment who thinks it can “create communities” out of wildly different peoples with a history of strife? And of course, we mustn’t deny Blacks Agency-to do so would make them less than Human-as Liberal so often do. No their actions were often evil-sometimes consciously so.
Real Communities don’t call themselves such. They just are. And you can’t create them-they grow over time-or not. To think that you can, is simple Federal Hubris, the like of which has been killing us for decades. Is it to much to ask to be able to retire in the place you lived all your life? If you have a real community, that’s exactly what people want to do. Yet Whites have been denied this. If they had to bring the Blacks out of their lands in the South, they should have put them outside the cities like the French did for the Muslims-in huge housing projects. But it would have been better far to leave the Blacks and the Muslims were they were, for their sakes and for ours.
When Obama said, “typical White Person” he meant someone ignorant and racist. Most Whites understand this, but they block it out because he’s supposed to be Mr Wonderful. But you are so clueless that you don’t even get it. Your conditioning has reached a deeper stage. Try an experiment: use the words “typcial Black Person” with a group of Blacks and see how they respond. That is if you know any Blacks. Alot of you people that love them so have never really gotten to know any.
“More precisely, a group of similar perceptions and views, based on shared or similar culture and background. ”
Oh you mean like “catfish lovin’, watermelon eating negroes”?
Or “money grubbing” Jews? Or perhaps, “red neck, racist, Nascar attending, Southerners?
I could go on (making certain that I politically, correctly, insult every sub-set, so as to “equally offend” one and all) but I will not. When the word “typical” is aimed at a specific group it is never used in a positive mode. It always attempts to associate a negative action to the entire sub-set. In that it is racist, ageist or sexist. Obama’s example was racist as he used the term, “typical white person”.
Now shut the fuck up dale, because you are beginning to look even more stupid than usual and that is not an easy thing to do.
Parrot Boy,
Check out who is coming to your defense, nice…..
Total bullshit really, if the shoe were on the other foot and some R had used the term “typical black person” you would be beside yourself defending his honor….and you know it.
On the other hand, I would not do that, because I have little use for either party or their bullshit political tripe.
Now….go find something worthwhile to get all “red in the face” about, I’m sure it won’t take you long. You are just soooooo emotional, aren’t you?
I have an example of how this insidious suburban world view has contaminated government’s view of “development:” I have a farm in a very rural part of Virginia — our county has a population just shy of 13,000. The largest of the incorporated towns has a population of about 800. There are no traffic signals (clearly there is no need!)
Nearly all of the existing towns (with the exception of the county seat) developed around railroad terminals that were used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to move produce and tobacco to urban markets. The line in the largest town continues to operate, but the railroads have essentially vanished, the track even having been removed. Those towns continue to decline, lacking a clear purpose or business to sustain them.
Here is the folly: the county government created a suburban style “office park” in an attempt to attract businesses to the region. One forlorn building stands there among building sites for a half dozen more. I wonder what these people do for lunch; the nearest town is a 15-minute drive away. Northeast of this “office park” is the industrial corridor, where there are a handful of factories that employ most of the town’s residents. You would think they would encourage development in the towns, but no. Apparently this is the “successful” model to emulate.
Another town is pushing hard to have the state build a prison, which would bring jobs. The previous big employer was a textile mill, long since closed. So much for producing things of lasting value.
“On the other hand, I would not do that, because I have little use for either party or their bullshit political tripe.”
Hardly. You have no use for the truth, is what you have no use for. You got all “blue in the face” (or is it red?…I get all confused with the red state/ blue state bullshit) because Beck interpreted Obama’s statement to be racist. Then your silly little attempt to defend the word, “typical” in the sense that Obama used the term turns out to be indefensible (that is if one has more than two synapses firing at the same time which you, quite clearly, do not).
Then little dale-eee, whale-ee wants to run away when his “bullshit political tripe” folds like a cardboard suitcase. What-fuckin’-evah. (Puss.)
As a final comment to this spitfest. It should be revealing to everyone that our resident Nazi has made common cause with you, if that doesn’t tell you where the canard of “Obama as racist” is coming from, nothing will.
Had you read Mein Kampf, you would have been able to reach far deeper into Hitler’s psyche and rationalization for National Socialism, race and space issues for the German people sans the Jews.As far as “typical White people”, I struggle to dream what this really means. Obama got it caught in a ringer when he uttered this statement, and many others. The President is a racist, his wife is a racist. It’s very easy for them both to make these verbal boners, a sign they are absolutely sure of typical white people being a certain way, whatever that way is. Ironically, it is Obama who will set race relations back to the past, not a typical white male. He and the wife are seething and bitterly angry. Look for him to put his foot in his mouth many times during the rest of his term,hopefully his only term.
“Total bullshit really, if the shoe were on the other foot and some R had used the term “typical black person” you would be beside yourself defending his honor….”
Now here is some brilliant “dale logic.” You just said there is nothing wrong using the word “typical” regarding a set of people. So why would I have to defend the honor of some Fucktard that used this term if there is nothing wrong with the term? Sweet hay-sus you are a rather dull blade, young laddie.
You make a great point, Arctic Fox. So many of those suburban homes city-dwellers escaped to had bomb shelters built in the backyard as well, because the fear of a nuclear holocaust was so palpable.
And by-the-by I don’t know if Obama is a racist or not . I suspect he is not but that is a gut level feeling. However, I can see how someone may get the feeling, from some of the things he has said and written, that he may be.
Mr. Obama said he noted the trend. “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” the President said
———————–
While Obama’s presidency has been a disappointment to me thus far, this statement is something which should get more play, and why I mentioned last week that cable “news” is not news at all, but just political shouting.
Dale, I just wanted to say, thanks for being here. Thanks for your posts. Just wanted you to know, you ARE appreciated.
“As a final comment to this spitfest. It should be revealing to everyone that our resident Nazi has made common cause with you, if that doesn’t tell you where the canard of “Obama as racist” is coming from, nothing will.”
Hmmmm. Now it comes down to guilt by non association as the only time I ever responded to anything our “resident Nazi” said was to tell him to shut the fuck up.
Hey dale, I understand the child rapist that lives next door to you likes the type of lawn fertilizer you use. Uh, oh….that would make you a…ummm, I just decided I better not talk to you, you are a little peculiar. (FUCKING MORON.)
I don’t know if Obama is a racist or not . I suspect he is not but that is a gut level feeling.
———————–
If I were like many here, I would immediately jump on you for your apparent change in attitude….but then I would be discouraging you from thinking and be engaging in the same sort of reactive political process that is Glenn Beck’s reason for existence. At least you have distanced yourself from the pathetic little storm troopers here who want to gather you into their fold.
Congratulations for raising your head out of the muck of Fox News, hopefully it will not be short lived.
I grew up in post WWII suburbia (outside of Philadelphia PA)and our walkable community had corner grocery stores, cleaners, and pharmacies.
Many were in the two story buildings that allowed the owner to either live where he worked or realize extra income from the rent he collected. People still worked and shopped in the city and had either buses, streeet cars, or commuter rail to take them back and forth.
Schools were within walking distance and it was possible for a man with a high school education to get a job that allowed him to support a wife and family and have a hope for a retirement pension, social security, and the chance for his kids to attend college or receive advanced training is some trade.
In addition to all the financial flim-flammery that has happened in the past 40-50 years the deindustrialization of the United States and the increased outsourcing of good paying jobs to other countries (India, Phillipines, Malaysia for instance)where the people are just as smart and willing to work for 2/3 to 1/2 the pay of US workers has destroyed and is destroying the US.
This has led to a bankrupt elite leadership and a work force exhausted by having to work multiple jobs and go into increasing debt to maintain the lifestyle to which popular media has conditioned them.
Cities, suburbs, exurbs, and automobiles are morally neutral–it is the use to which they have been put that has made them such a cultural poison.
When our epitaph is written it may read: “They sat in a TV induced stupid daze as their tormentors stole everything from them while they paying them to do so.”
“and why I mentioned last week that cable “news” is not news at all, but just political shouting.”
Yeah like that non-ACORN story that all the major networks were finally forced to weigh in on for fear of looking even more corrupt than they already are. That was one of the more interesting “non-news” news events that I have ever read. Followed by the non-march on Washington on 9/12. All those non-people were really non-newsworthy. (I’m the fucking parrot? What a maroon.)
“In 2025, after you’ve busted your ass picking pumpkins all day …… do be so kind as to let us all know how your evening studies of Wittgenstein are progressing.”
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Les,
In 2025 Abbey, more likely than not, will be pushing daisies, not picking pumpkins but, be that as it may, your words above are a lovely expression of contempt via sarcasm.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
“If I were like many here, I would immediately jump on you for your apparent change in attitude…”
I have had no change in attitude. I never said I thought Obama was a racist. You are a moron.
Once again the Kunstler canard that capitalism is akin to the laws of physics rears its absurd, ugly and counterproductive head.
For an adult discussion about the myth of capitalism, I’ll take Chomsky over Kunstler any day of the week.
I assume Kunstler doesn’t like Chomsky because of his principled stance on Israel (which would, according to Kunstler’s warped logic, make Chomsky an antisemite).
All of which is to say, Kunstler’s bubble of consensus trance is no less debilitating and detrimental than the one he rails against.
Like it or not, it was the cosmopolitanism of the cities that was responsible for the cultural evolution beyond racial and religious fanaticism. Rural people – Russian peasant support of the Czars is a good example – are notoriously authoritarian in their communities whilst simultaneously being slaves to the ideologies of church and state.
The average rural christian small community in this country is composed of seriously psychologically ill fanatics, the ones who slavishly supported Bush and his wars. THAT is what I think the poster was referring to, not theater haute cuisisne.
Thanks…the sort of interaction I had with ZZZ is actually something I hate to do. It’s against my principles and something I usually prefer to remain detached from. Unfortunately, I have been exposed to far too much of that sort of “thinking” in my life and I find it despicable. I know how easy it is to make people like that look like the fools that they are, but I should not make it my job to do it.
My hope would be that we could create a society more interested in cooperation than competition, but I’m not optimistic about that happening anytime in my lifetime.
Uncle,
Your post is quite poetic and I love the middens of morons to manage alliteration.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
“I never said I thought Obama was a racist.”
—————-
That’s true, you’ve just waxed on and on about what a genius Glenn Beck is, who called Obama a racist who “had a deep seated hatred of white people” Then you defended Beck ad nauseum.
Apparently in your universe making such statements doesn’t stop Beck from being someone you listen to, admire and want to immulate. In mine….it does…and that’s one of the many differences between you and I.
“I know how easy it is to make people like that look like the fools that they are…”
No shit. You have been on the receiving end of looking foolish so many times you have a PHD in stoopid.
Abbeysbooks, I really admire how you remain lady-like even when faced with rude attacks here.
I do understand what you were trying to say about small towns. I am from Montana originally and there are people there who have never seen any black people outside of the TV, yet they spout all the latest racist rants. I despise that kind of ignorance and ugliness. I don’t care if they know about art or theater or anything else like that, but I do care when people are mean and racist and hateful, and I don’t like being around that. I’m sure that’s what you meant in your post.
I understand what you were saying, too, about preserving the original dialect while developing standard English for use in business situations, and helping students to understand the difference between the two situations. What you did was a good thing and helpful. I have heard very distinguished English professors give high praise to the African American dialect, by the way, calling it delightfully consistent in structure.
“immulate???”
Zikes, I don’t know if you think I should set Beck on fire or if I should marry him? Immulate? You really are a FUCKTARD.
Uncle Al said: “Though ethnic vanilla despised ethnic strawberry, 1950s people were fundamentally ethical.”
I grew up in the 50’s in a conservative land where the John Birch Society, the Ku Klu Klan, and the American Legion flourished. There was nothing ethical about their intolerant, racist behavior and the havoc they reaped upon the lives of those ethnic strawberries (who had just returned from European or Asian theaters of war defending “freedom”).
I grew up going to swimming holes with signs posted: No Negroes Allowed, and towns with signs on the city limit: “Nigger don’t let the sun set on you.”
It took years to escape from the harmful effects of the “ethics” of the 50’s.
Abbey doesn’t hate small towns, just small towns with White People in them. And she doesn’t hate poor, uneducated people-just poor, uneducated Whites. She’s wildly enthusiastic about poor Blacks. But she doesn’t live with them. Stange, huh?
I might be able shed some light. Abbey is perfectly policcally correct-that crazy, dangerous amalgalm of Marxism and debased Christianity. Political Correctness has become in many ways our own homegrown form of Communism. Now traditional Communism had irrational adoration of the poor. They had a rude awakening when White Workers both here and in Europe, had the good sense to kick their asses down the road, metaphorically speaking and sometimes literally as well. So now, Communism has decided to replace the stubborn Whites with Muslims in Europe and Blacks and Mexicans in the United States. This fits in perfectly with what the powers that be want and it’s happening. But Abbey isn’t going to let her ideology get in the way of her interests, so she lives with people she hates because that’s where she could get cheap land and peaceful neighbors. Her neighbors cling to their God and their guns. God bless them and give them the patience to deal with the PC Hater in their midst.
No…actually you think you WANT to marry Tom Sizemore.
dale,
Why no comment on following:
“Now here is some brilliant “dale logic.” You just said there is nothing wrong using the word “typical” regarding a set of people. So why would I have to defend the honor of some Fucktard that used this term if there is nothing wrong with the term?”
You really are a bit of a dullard. You say silly shit, get called out on it and then run away from your stupidity. Wait a minute…if I said the stupid things you do, I’d run away too. Never mind.
LOL. 🙂 Good one.
How do we get from the divisive, scary nation we have become, to one where most people are sane and cooperate?
I swear it’s like living in 1930’s Germany and feeling helpless to fight against the tide of rising facism. Part of me just wants to hunker down and hide and hope I survive.
Immulate? And you continue to post your wisdom here? Whatever.
ZZZZ,
You are gay aren’t you? I think you have made enough statements here to make that clear. Just come out and admit it, get out of the closet! It might help you to sort out your confused emotions.
Just today you’ve tied yourself into such a complete rhetorical knot you would logically have to check into a chiropactic hospital to get untied.
Seriously man…. be yourself…..whatever that is. It sure isn’t what you are masquerading as on this blog.
“That’s true, you’ve just waxed on and on about what a genius Glenn Beck is, who called Obama a racist who “had a deep seated hatred of white people” Then you defended Beck ad nauseum.”
Ummm. Lets try and stay on subject dale. You were congratulating me on having changed my mind. What is it that I changed my mind from and what did I change it to? You really have an attention deficit challenge don’t you?
“You are gay aren’t you?”
What would be wrong with that?
“Just today you’ve tied yourself into such a complete rhetorical knot you would logically have to check into a chiropactic hospital to get untied.”
Really? Well I challenge you to make your case. Explain just how I did that.
That a little harsh Z. I’m the one who told you how important the Acorn story was. You were telling Asia how stupid he was for making a big deal about it when I told you that Acorn had just lost the Census. Your tune changed 180 after that.
“Seriously man…. be yourself…..whatever that is. It sure isn’t what you are masquerading as on this blog.”
And I would be masquerading as…?
“I’m the one who told you how important the Acorn story was.”
You haven’t “told” me a single thing I didn’t know long before the thought entered your silly head. Now shut the fuck up because you are the KING of fucktards. That is all.
Great post, Laura. In San Francisco, the rich culture of the Fillmore District (which you described so well in its St. Louis version) was destroyed by “urban renewal.” Often, vast vacant wastelands were left for decades after these lovely old neighborhoods were bulldozed. The excuse for inaction was always that the planners “ran out of money.” But the people who lived there always thought that they were moved out so that others could eventually move in. And it happened.
Some of the changes in African American culture that other posters comment on endlessly were the result of this process. As the families moved from functional neighborhoods into projects, hope dwindled and a rougher scene emerged. Drugs replaced honest work as the remaining way to make a living. The manufacturing jobs were gone overseas. It was/is not genetic. It was the result of a long and brutal process in which ordinary people and their lives were given no value by the decision makers.
Jim,
This is a reasonable narrative, as far as it goes, but it leaves out an essential piece. We are just like any organism, consuming all resources we can, as long as we can. And the reason we can do this is because of our impressive military strength, itself an overgrown and significant element of the emergent property you’re referring to: suburban life in modern USA.
The defense industry still plays a critical role in keeping this whole thing running. The problem is, (almost) everyone still working in USA is employed in one of the essential elements (“suburbia++”, “defense”, finance, politics,) of the corrupt system, so you’ll have to pry it from their cold, dead hands to change anything.
dale,
You are kind of funny (in a pathetic way). You are so certain of your brilliance and “rightness” that when challenged, you so crumble in your house of cards philosophy that you run from the room. Stick to your guns laddie (though they be pop-guns). Eventually you will be able to engage in an intellectual argument…even though, invariably, you will always be on the incorrect, politically correct side.
And I would be masquerading as…?
————————–
Some kind of smart, tough guy macho man who really knows his way around the world of business, finance and politics. Oh…and can really ‘let people have it’ (wink, wink)
Nothing at all wrong with being gay, I have gay friends. What’s wrong is being gay and supressing it….and you are obviously one seriously repressed human being.
OK, I’m done now….go ahead and have the last word.
“want to immulate. In mine….it does…and that’s one of the many differences between you and I”
————————–
1. It’s emulate, not immulate.
2. If you’re in a quandry as to whether you and I vs you and me is approprite … if it comes at the end of a sentence the answer is almost always you and me. In terms of grammar I can’t explain why this is so but the ear in my brain tells me it is.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
Yeah!! Jaego told you how IMPORTANT that ACORN story was, remember??? He’s your buddy, man….
“I have gay friends…”
Yeah but are they special, special friends? I mean like share their Barbie kind of friends?
Be honest dale, do you think of them at the same time as you imagine Tom Sizemore and me being married? Hey, what did Tom and I wear to your imaginary wedding? Were we stunning? What kind of a cake did we have in your fantasy?
“1. It’s emulate, not immulate.”
No fucking shit, sherlock. I would assume (makes an ass out of you…not me) that little dale already took his whipped ass to the dictionary woodshed. Why not just can the schoolmarm shit, missy. Its boring.
Qshtik,
That’s great, you’re going to right long posts correcting everyone’s misspelling and grammer on a daily basis. You’re going to be about as popular as my ugly fouth grade teacher.
“I have a deep need.”
I wish I had not written that.
We are doing comments on a blog. There are other blogs, but I do not read them.
If you get mail from me, Steve Billinghurst, Jim, all it is is a 1948 railroad atlas and a San Diego Reader with a “Kunstler-influenced” (mentions New Urbanism)cover story. You should enjoy-don’t dunk it in water.
Other people using the same style I use, that of getting ideas down on paper with the word “because”, well, in short: they’re wrong. You cannot ascribe your pet causation to the dogshit you happen to get on your shoes. Who does that?
I have to dump this first:
QUOTE
It wasn’t until the program was well underway that the self-destructive essence of it became obvious — that every new housing subdivision killed the original rural character of the land, with the result that suburban life quickly became a cartoon of country living in a cartoon of a country house in a cartoon of the country.
UNQUOTE
My space bar is driving me crazy. It sticks. I’m not even funny at nine a.m. Hey, when I say crazy, I go crazy. I have impulses coming out of me now like the snakes coming out of the Gorgon Medusa’s head.
QUOTE
So many of those suburban homes city-dwellers escaped to had bomb shelters built in the backyard as well, because the fear of a nuclear holocaust was so palpable.
UNQUOTE
No, PeakOilLori. Kunstler doesn’t use a “because” today. He uses a “became”. Your because is lame. They built bomb shelters, period. I shudder to think that these people represent the reasoning process that will pull us out of this recession. We are commenting on a blog, like I said. Don’t ride the author’s coattails. He is not easing up on the fat, broke American. He is catching his breath.
Now to comment on my first quotation I have to put it side by side with this fuckin thing, from 1962:
QUOTE (SONG)
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.
UNQUOTE
The one said suburbia killed the rural character of the land, and the other, actual, contemporary critical lyrics, and it was well-underway (1962-1946=16 years), and it was similar because it was also, umm, UNAMERICAN. Yes, I am going to go with unamerican. If “Clusterfuck Nation”, as a phrase, does not sound unamerican to you, you are laboring under a delusion. My point is that Kunstler is a chameleon. Not every title is like this. Some are merely critical of housing. But Kunstler is a Commie, and Malvina was a Commie rat, and “all the same” is code for the PEOPLE being all the same. Read between the lines, you poor saps!
http://sbillinghurst.wordpress.com
(Shhh! This is telling you how to manufacture speed, brother.)
You know, and I hate that DEA. They colluded with Hollywood to make “Breaking Bad”, and flat-out advertised the usage of HF, but the story I lived did not quite go that way. We don’t dissolve bodies in the shit and accidentally pour it into a china bathtub and see the whole mess eating a hole in the floor. We attempt to obtain HI through (evidently) compromised sources and are delivered of a plastic jug with an iodine-stained label which gives off suspicious white fumes when you open it. But, it is mislabeled. HF is $10, HI is $300. I poured it into my expensive laboratory flask and it ate right through the flask and the heating mantle, ruining $200 worth of equipment. At least we saved the ten pounds of ephedrine.
The DEA is conducting too much surveillance, they pull dirty tricks, and there are Communists in the DOJ.
Today’s concept is EMERGENT PROPERTIES Kunstler’s, not mine, and that adds to COGNITIVE DISSONANCE and TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS, and these things are real learning, not just vocabulary. Kunstler actually has strict boundaries, dictated by you recommending the blog to others,such that any given post will be roughly thematic and you can count on anyone not comingback at you and saying, “Man, that blog you told me to read was wack. It was live streaming video of UFO abduction graphics fully cutting away to anal probes. Don’t you ever speak to me about the economy again.”
I have Steven Millhauser’s book, “Martin Dressler”. Listen to what it says: He teaches at Skidmore College and lives with his wife and two children in SARATOGA SPRINGS, New York. Obviously, if you throw a rock in that town you will hit a Communist intellectual, propaganda branch. QED.
“do you think of them at the same time as you imagine Tom Sizemore and me being married?”
—————————————
No, that is an image I prefer to leave to you. Enjoy.
find the joke yet? He will reply before reading this I’m sure.
Ayn Rand should know something about philosophical contradictions. As Murray Rothbard pointed out, she had a few of her own:
That said, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and her prediction came true, even if for the wrong reasons.
Back to your message.
The irony is delicious, if bittersweet for the rest of us.
“No, that is an image I prefer to leave to you.”
Really? Well you brought it up so it is your image. That thought/image emanated in your addled brain. I’m surmising it gave you some sort of pleasure. Whatever.
So……are you admitting you are gay? Are you also a virgin? It’s OK man…we understand. It explains a lot of things.
“I know how easy it is to make people like that look like the fools that they are, but I should not make it my job to do it.”–dale
Why stop now, you’re doing such a great job!
Anon0101, nice summary of the process. People often get what they want, but often don’t count on unintended consequences. Suburbs are what they wanted and now the consequences are just playing out. When the realities sink in some people will adapt and move on as they are best able. All this gnashing of teeth and plans to save Western Civilization are amusing and ill-fated. The answer will not come from the top down, but from individuals working locally — tribes and clans forming around common interests.
Forget tasteful architecture — that’s a luxury we can no longer afford. Tomorrow will be about survival. The new small towns of the future will arise of necessity partly from today’s small towns, but mostly from the existing “raw” materials of suburbia.
Forget fixing America or the world — fix yourself and your loved ones, then work on building community with like-minded neighbors.
To Abbeys Books
I,too, live just outside of Philadelphia.I did a fast internet search on a popular search engine to browse through real estate listings in the city. There are plenty of listings for housing and empty lots in the city, and many are well under 100K. They are not in the chi-chi areas of the city, but usually within the gritter parts. I believe that white yuppie families would be quite a minority in such areas. It is sad to say that, and I am not trying to start a war of words here. I just don’t think average suburbanite whites will come running back to such areas any time soon, and when they do they will probably not feel welcome.Nor will they like their new surroundings much. Sad, because the city has much to offer, really.
The great tragedy of suburbanization is that in the process of disinvestment that took place in Cleveland, St. Louis or Hamilton, Ontario, we left the suburbanites with nothing to move back to once the ever-expanding ring of suburbia began to fail and economic conditions forced people to move back to the same neighborhoods that their grandparents had fled from after World War Two. The modern conservative movement made matters worse by declaring government the source of all evil and convincing people that they’d be better off living under corporate colonialism.
Good point L_O_B. I’m no fan of the artsy-fartsy so-called cultured end of the spectrum any more than of the lumps at the other end. We’ll be in survival mode and need develop practical skills and to associate with others with the same.
As ever JHK, you have a true knack for the appropriate metaphor. In keeping with the spirit of your most recent, as Kramden might have put it, ” One day Uncle Sam [Alice], POW! Right in the kisser!”
You usually beat Dale either because you’re smarter or because he has to defend alot of garbage. But today he got the best of you-he got you to try to win his approval. Look back at the dialogue, it’ there. Trying to win the approval of the Left is a losing strategy the Right has tried for decades. They work as a block-Liberals, Socialists, and Communists. The smart ones know that Liberalism is always shifting-“move on.com” for example. It always moving towards Communism. But the Right is always rejecting its radical element trying to win the approval of some non existent parental figure-or the very communists they’re talking to. And thus they are always playing a losing, catch up game. Because Conservatism so called is pretty empty-it’s mostly about conservation of assets. The Republican Party is basically about this. Only the Radical Right has the core principles that can anchor a society and culture. Liberalism is empty too-but it’s always moving towards its core principle of Communism-and often consciously so. Communists understand the situation and so do we Fascists. It’s everyone in the middle who is confused or pretends to be. People like Ted Kennedy knew what he was doing as does Obama. You have to choose Z, or you’ll be ultimately routed by the likes of Dale or their superiors.
Dale, forget the misspelling and grammar, and deal with the lazy mind that can’t choose the right word. Learn the difference between write and right.
Obviously your brain slept through fourth grade, even if your teacher was ugly.
Puzzler says,
“Dale, forget the misspelling and grammar, and deal with the lazy mind that can’t choose the right word. Learn the difference between write and right.”
_________________________
You need to be a little less lazy and read a little more. You missed this:
“find the joke yet? He will reply before reading this I’m sure.”
———————————
You are just two eazy too pley with Puzzler, thanks for making my point.
See there Parrot Boy, you angered your only friends here, Jaego the Nazi and his redneck buddy. With those kind of friends……….
Oh, great. I see lil Stink Eye Open is back to his favorite hobby, trolling JHK’s blog.
Dale,
Stink Eye has other friends here besides Jagoff and Bambi, like, um, Dr. Dumb, for instance.
And a bunch of other not moronic, not stupid, non-f*cktard posters, too.
Are you talking about me?
I have some trolly things to say.
I almost never read your long winded hate filled diatribes but you did get something right in this one:
“Because Conservatism so called is pretty empty-it’s mostly about conservation of assets.”
Jaego knows…..all that talk about balanced budgets and small government is just economics,and that’s not where “the base” of the Republican Party is at, is it?
In making common cause with guys like Beck and Rush the Republicans are letting the fox into the hen house. Remember how Hitler came to power? The “conservatives” were going to use him…..look who got used.
Well Dale. I have better things to do than sift through every bit of garbage on this board. I don’t live on this board, as I actually have a life.
By the 70’s the white, working-class Kramdens had moved out to be replaced on television by the Evans (of “Good Times” fame), a struggling, African-American family who lived in an inner-city Chicago housing project. So many films and televisions shows from that period (from “Taxi Driver” and “Dirty Harry,” to “Starsky and Hutch” and “Barretta”) portray cities as decaying, crime-ridden, and impoverished. I give credit to MTM Productions for setting many (if not most) of their series in major cities (Mary Tyler Moore in Minneapolis, Bob Newhart’s first show in Chicago). The shows depicted urban life as desirable and showed city dwellers as likeable, middle-American, professional people. I will grant that these shows generally lacked realistically diverse characters in terms of race, ethnicity and socio-economic status (a la “Friends”), but at least they portrayed city life favorably when much of the popular culture did not.
I think this negative view of cities in popular culture trickled-down from the conscience-raising efforts of many activists, writers, artists and documentarians of the 60’s and 70’s. In their attempts to expose the grim realities of urban poverty, they unintentionally reinforced a more generalized bleak view of city life. Even Elvis sang about life “In the Ghetto.”
I used to live in Chicago and work in St. Charles, Illinois–some 30 miles from the city. My suburban co-workers were convinced I lived in a dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhood because I lacked the money to live elsewhere. In fact, the entire city and surrounding Cook County were, by their definition, dangerous and crime-ridden. To understand their attitudes, I started watching the local television news with the perspective of a collar-county suburbanite. I quickly saw why my co-workers feared the city; every night was the same litany of shootings, hit-and-run accidents, fires in dilapidated houses and apartments, government corruption–all taking place within the city or inner suburbs. Chicago’s outer suburbs have their share of crime, calamity and even poverty, but it’s all so dispersed. While in the relatively compact city a shooting and a house fire may take place within a few miles of one another, two similar events in the suburbs might be 50 miles apart. It’s easy to see that TV news directors with a limited number of reporters and remote crews are going to assign the stories that require the least amount of travel, so events in the city are given priority. This geographic bias in reporting, coupled with the fact that misfortune tends to strike disproportionately the urban poor (many of whom are people of color), gives a skewed perspective on the racial, ethnic and socio-economic profile of city dwellers. As a result, the people who neither live nor work in the city have a distorted view of the quality of life in city and the people who live there.
Yeah right……
Like, EXISTENTIALISM.
Before I look it up to confirm that it describes my thesis, I’ll just out with it. “Angels fear to tread where wise men go to the bathroom.”
No? “Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread”?
I change my mind. I’m from California. I’m crazy. I’m blond. I’m therefore an airhead.
I thought computers (ha ha) were for calculating math problems. Oh, no. They work fine for uploading 50,000,000,000,000 words per day from typists, mathematically challenged, still struggling with the English language, of no particular stripe.
If you ever see a Periodic Table, try not to notice the Americium, the Californium, or the Berkelium on there, since it means nothing and they’re typical.
“So……are you admitting you are gay? Are you also a virgin? It’s OK man…we understand.”
We? Would this be you along with your special Barbie friends? Why am I not surprised that you understand?
“They will not feel welcome”. Oh that’s rich. Philledelphia has one of the most dangerous Black Underclasses in the Nation. Going to live in those parts of Phillie would be suicidal. Is that what you mean by not feel welcome?
I can’t get rid of ‘reply to turkle’ so I’ll reply to this guy.
How can we let history be the judge any more with the Internet rewriting it every day? History’s history.
Yeah, I agree. Any old business? Any new business? Meeting’s adjourned.
Mr. Kunstler,
Excellent post, back to basics with a bang.
Oh yick…it just occurred to me. dale is not only asking if I’m gay but also wants to know if I’m a virgin. Is this a fucking preamble to a request for a date? Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Hooo, hooo…dale is fucking doing a different “kind” of trolling on this blog. dale, you old fucking cad, you. (You little scamp!)
no matter how many angry intellectuals inveigh against the straw man of capital-ism, as if it were merely a belief system –
Thats a quote of JHK.
I heard ’em say capitalism was the greatest trick of feudalism.
Bagism, fagism, …is that where FEUD comes from?
THAT WAS MY PIG!!
Just give me a straight answer, Pugil-ism, Puzzler,…-ism.
Are you a lesbian or straight?
Your comments have made me curious to learn more about capitalism. I am going to see the new movie: http://tinyurl.com/knluxh
CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY
JHK…..
The furs been flying here on yr blog for 8? hours
the Honeymooners pic is copywritten?
Did you see that yahoo or google named one ‘cool hip’ place for rich young people..a place that i had read of but once..in yr book
LOUNDIN COUNTY VIRGINIA
AND ‘ Portland suburbs ‘…any city burbs!
GOOD LUCK IF YOU EARN YR LIVING DEPENDENT ON RICH SURBURANITES!
The demise of General Aviation a canery in our coal mine of American Empire?
http://www.suburbanempire.com
ASOKA
yr post yesterday:
‘asoka | September 20, 2009 9:10 PM | Reply
As the green economy picks up speed more employment will be generated.
Are green shoots sprouting … YES! (even without Van Jones) and it is good news for our nation’
My question is:
how many jobs green or otherwise did V Jones create?
People who work for the govt dont create businesses…..THEY FEED AT THE GOVERNMENT TROUGH!
“You’re going to be about as popular as my ugly fouth grade teacher.”
—————————–
It should have been clear long ago that I’m not here to win a popularity contest.
An observation: What you, Zzz and others are upset about is that I have nothing to say about the content your pompous posts. I pooh-pooh them by simply bringing up the thing with which you are least concerned … spelling. The audacity, the chutzpah, the brass balls you all display in stating what are merely opinions as though they were profound truths for the ages is amazing. Abbey thinks her empathay for blacks justifies Ebonics as a second language, the “Messiah” is in daily conversation with God and confidently informs us in Bible-speak what God’s thoughts are, Zzz thinks “moron” and “fucktard” put an end to all further debate, Asoka copies and pastes Panglossian drivel, Dale? Who the hell cares what Dale thinks? ….. and everyone name drops the latest 10 volume series they have just read, or ordered.
CUT ME A FUCKIN’ BREAK!!
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
Jaego,
I really do not believe it was “black barbarism” that has created most of our problems within our urban centers. However, that said, I do understand much of your reasoning, how you have arrived at your varied conclusions and will go so far as to admit the black underclass has greatly exacerbated the process.
Within my own sphere of experience most of our urban problems have been the result of financial greed and a most undisciplined form of capitalism thrust upon us by powerful Wall Street business interests over the past six decades. As I see it, it has been essentially our rampant and undisciplined economic form of capitalism that has gotten us into the mess we are in and brought about our nation having some of the ugliest and most depressing urban centers in the industrialized “first world”.
Capitalism is like a wild stallion. It will do neither of us any good until it is effectively “broken”. In other words, trained. Only then can you properly ride it and have it work for your benefit. Remember, raw capitalism does not believe in or thrive on stability, community and all those wonderful qualities that characterize a stable and healthy world. By its very nature it demands chaos, for how else can you continually encourage people to abandon their homes and community and move on to the next development. Much, if not all, of our suburban growth has been based on this need to “force” people out of stable communities into ever new developments that benefit the banks, insurance companies and real estate interests. Government, pretty much owned by these three basic interests has encouraged this via enumerable policies. Think of it this way: There is no real “profit” or “growth potential” to business interests when communities remain healthy, stable and comfortable. Corporate interests and persons who make their living through financial speculation would affectively starve. They and their group live in their own private little parasitic worlds and care nothing for the larger picture or the true good of the nation. Like a cancer, it will grow until it consumes its host. What is good for them is all that matters. This is why it is so important that capitalism always have a “social” element and be disciplined by government intervention whereby the greater good of the community is what is served. Obviously this has not often worked as envisioned. Perhaps if we still taught ethics in our schools as they did when I was young we would never have witnessed the hideous folly that has befallen us via Wall Street (and its political surrogates) over the past decade, culminating in the current economic crises. The people who have gotten us into the present mess are supposedly some of our nation’s most intelligent and “educated” persons and that, alone, speaks volumes and leaves me deeply sullen with regards to the future of our country.
As for “black barbarism” no doubt the black underclass has played a tragic role in the devolution of our urban centers and the problems currently upon us. They are not so much the cause of the problem, but rather, just one of many tragic outgrowths of it. I am inclined to believe they have been played for suckers like most of the rest of America in this unfolding drama that we have called “suburbanization”.
Finally, our deteriorating manmade environments and the social, cultural and economic quagmire that have grown out of them were decades in the making. To focus on the details by blaming urban blacks is both wasteful and pointless as we really should be trying to gain perspective of the larger picture and work to find solutions that will allow us to transition into a more graceful, caring, respectful, sustainable and beautiful world.
LESBIAN or STRAIGHT
(since there are only two sexes, you do not get three choices)
hydrogen
……..\WATER and FORMING
(no, its hi dragon)
helium
…….\THE SUN
(no, its hell I um, am Steve. CAPITAL-ism)
………………………………….\is, umm,
James Kunstler still around? I don’t want to be silenced for being a troll.
Chemistry and physics are reality, the whole reality, and nothing but reality. Can you imagine what it was like trying to bring it up?
After SEVEN YEARS, we still do not have on record a single instance of science and technology paramours going head-to-head with Kunstler over the reality quotient of suburbia and technical dead-endedness versus “entropy” the literary term. Is their silence to betaken as acquiescence? Well how about they are sought out at the Union of Concerned Scientists proactively BEFORE ITS TOO LATE and caused to defend their institutes and their budgets?
You dont even get an apostrophe, this whitewash is so lame. Id love to stick it to smug scientists, so sure of the grass, the algae, the electric cars. Bring em in here and lay their bones bare. Theyll never agree they gave in to this blog, that peak oil is behind the economic collapse at this time.
I want to be gay! I want to be black! I want to smoke marijuana! Seriously. They don’t care what you think. Its good to be them.
JIM K
‘ The banking fiasco’ IS ONLY BEGINNING!
Okay, Sprocket, but…
Theyre doctors of PHILOSOPHY yer suckin yer THUMB in here
twas wise not to take them on.
If yur googling capitalism,u might be vell-advised to google POLITY & I liketed it. I liketed calling asshole policy capitalism for awhile and asshole-ness polity or ass-holity, the QUAL-ity or amount of being an asshole………besides being an asshole.
“I know how easy it is to make people like that look like the fools that they are, but I should not make it my job to do it.”–dale
Ah yes … the ‘ol fake remorse routine … like Joe Wilson’s apology.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
I’m going to try to add something fresh to the discussion, and break up the Zzzz/Asoka/Dale triptych that seems to span this public space from wall to wall.
From an ecological perspective, the suburbs represent an ecotone, or the overlapping area of two distinct ecosystems along their common border. And here’s where Jim’s sometimes monotonous railings against suburbia come up wanting:
Ecotones are the most productive part of any ecosystem.
The desire to live in the urban/rural interface is not only natural, it’s actually the smartest choice for biodiversity and energy flow. Access to both urban and rural resources is (theoretically) within arms’ reach.
Problem is, a whole lot of people had this natural draw to the ecotone, and as one wave of suburbanization replaced the prior, the former ecotone just got swallowed up in the urban maelstrom. That’s why older, inner suburbs get such a bad rap. They’re not urban, they’re not rural, hell, they’re not even suburban! They’re just kind of lost, and usually outdated.
Humans are animals, and no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from nature, there is still something inside us that feels it, that wants to be there. Reacquainting yourself with how nature functions makes this once in a lifetime OPPORTUNITY we call Peak Oil a whole lot easier to understand. And embrace.
‘the algae’
INDEED !!!! There was an article in The Times last week about SanDiego and all the biotech and Algae bio tech in their ‘ green alley’
” Zzz thinks “moron” and “fucktard” put an end to all further debate…”
Obviously not…FUCKTARD!
zzzzzz, thanks for helping my previous point out. The posters I listed were oddly absent from this particular page…
and yr the resident homophobe/ gaybasher?
YA KNOW WHAT CRIMINOLOGISTS SAY ABOUT THEM?
SB, I saw the same sort of thing in the small Mississippi town I was born in. They opened up all these factories (mostly owned by people from up North) but they placed them miles outside the town. When the first oil crisis occurred in the early 70′ people were freaking out back there. Of course, this was resolved by a 30 year long movement of these factories out of this area to foreign countries. The town I was born in now has about the same number of people it had when I was born there in ’49. The only real economcy it has is a regional college and an excellent hospital which services several counties. There is actually a higher college population than a town population. I have no idea what these people are going to do for a living. My nephew is still looking for a job and his brother is working part time.
As far as your statement about the proposed prison in your area, this doesn’t surprise me at all. I would image that my hometown would just love to have a big (or even small) prison locate there. How sad that prisons have become such a growth industry in our country.
Trippticket said: “break up the Zzzz/Asoka/Dale triptych that seems to span this public space from wall to wall.”
You put me in the middle of those two? I have not posted much today and I have not been at all in today’s exchange between zzzz/dale. But what can I do if you want to place me there?
Regarding the content of your ecotones post I agree that the suburbs provided a combination of both worlds. On one side of street (and I am speaking quite literally here) I had the housing division full of friends to play with. On the other side of the street I had corn fields and undeveloped wildness to explore. It was a nice eco-niche to inhabit.
‘India, Phillipines, Malaysia for instance where the people are just as smart and willing to work for 2/3 to 1/2 the pay of US workers’
Last time I checked it was 1/10 th the pay…And indias per capita is 500 to 1000$ a year.Or it was a few years ago.
also it depends what you mean by smart. IQ? formal education? Speak english?
Prisons v. textiles?
LOUDIN COUNTY…yahoo says its ‘ hip’
Washington D.C. Claims Top Spot For Wealthy Youngnews.yahoo.com — Washington, D.C. has become the favorite area for wealthy young ….
The Bush administration tortured many prisoners until they died and the Bush administration defined torture as involving organ failure, but they probably were not concerned about one of the most important organs, the brain. It appears CIA “enhanced interrogation” was actually counter productive if the goal was to gain reliable information.
“…scientific literature shows … Chronic stress and trauma – the likely result of the CIA’s methods, particularly for long-term prisoners, according to O’Mara – can damage the hippocampus, the part of the brain that integrates memory.
The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation – six days in at least one instance – being chained in painful positions, exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture.
Those methods cause the brain to release stress hormones that, if their release is repeated and prolonged, may result in compromised brain function and even tissue loss, O’Mara wrote.
He warned that this could lead to brain lobe disorders, making the prisoners vulnerable to confabulation – in this case, the pathological production of false memories based on suggestions from an interrogator. Those false memories mix with true information in the interrogation, making it difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is fabricated.
“The fact that the detrimental effects of these techniques on the brain are not visible to the naked eye makes them no less real,” he wrote.
The paper also asserted that forcibly exposing prisoners to what they are afraid of – the CIA got approval to use a suspect’s fear of insects against him – is actually a method used to cure phobias.”
The paper is Shane O’Mara’s article in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Some blame Trump / gentrification. and that includes working poor going from Residence hotels to the streets when the Trumps etc tore the old hotels down.
That being said i grew up partly in fillmore district in the 1970s….what i remeber was a multi racial slum…I was on Sutter st.
The big difference between 1950 and today is that Big Gov’t didn’t have all the social programs to “help” the poor, unemployed, underemployed, etc.
Today, if you can’t or don’t want to work, someone will pick up your tab. Back in 1950, you had to work.
Also, look at the photo, I don’t see two cars, three phones, two cell phones, a big screen TV, computers, microwave ovens, etc. Our standard of living has “improved” but we still owe for all the things we have.
You would have the same problem here. For one, you write too well. Your grammar is good and so is your syntax. therefore, they would not be able to understand your communications. You would be too complicated for them.
However if you are looking to dumb down, then come along.
I made an acquaintance when I stayed at the hostel in East saint Louis as the owner of the hostel was in the peace corps in India during the early 70’s. He married an Indian woman, and came home. He bought a run down shell in East St Louis and began his hostel. As time went on he bought more and more of them as he had studied architecture and loved the buildings. Pretty soon he owned the whole block.
The Soulard district is so great. Good food, liberal people, artists, musicians, etc.
And now he says his taxes on the buildings ae more than he paid for them. So guess what they are worth? He has made a fortune without working by preserving the beautiful. And people of all nations have stayed with them and enriched their life.
These are the kinds of people that are rare as white bears in the mid west when you live in a small neon red town.
ZZZZZ,
Congratulations, you now have the complete list of Fascist posters here on your side; Jaego the Nazi, Bhami the Redneck, and Asia the Retard. I’m sure they see you as someone with true potential. It must make you so proud to see your ideas admired.
You didn’t read what I said. I taught english, Standard American English, and I did not advocate their tossing their dialect in the closet and locking the door. Which you can see if you go back and read what you were responding to.
I taught when you use which. None of my students, none of them, would ever have spoken that way on the telephone for a job interview.
Besides you usually send a resume for a job. You just don’t call up and ax for a job interview.
It’s just knowing the difference. When you are writing fiction and you have a particular character, then you want the character to be able to speak as s/he would naturally speak. And you want to be able to read dialect also, as much of post modern fiction has a great deal of it. So does Lassie Come Home, as a matter of fact, only it’s upland Scottish dialect.
But now almost everyone has incorporated black dialect in their speech. Hey man! Whadda ya mean dude? And so forth.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You just like to find someone around here to pick fights with to discharge your aggression. Whattsa matter? Not gettin laid enuf?
“Why am I not surprised that you understand?”
——————————–
Of course I understand, I’m a liberal who dislikes both parties, I wish everyone the freedom to be themselves.
……but if I were Tom Sizemore, I’d get a restraining order.
“The Bush administration tortured many prisoners”
—————————–
I defy anyone to explain how Asoka segues from the referenced comment by Trippticket to a disquisition on Bush Administration torture.
Asoka, a suggestion: if you woke up all cranky about torture today why not just go to the comment box and say “Dear readers, I know this has nothing to do with Kunstler’s latest essay or with anything anyone else has posted but I’m feeling cranky about torture today and so that’s what I’ll be discussing below.”
You have a very annoying habit of abruptly changing subjects.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
I have to admit I was curious about that myself…
@Asia,
Re: algae.
Oliver Hemmers of UNLV appears on the front page of the Sun. He is the new director of environmental programs within the Harry Reid Center for Environmental Studies. He is a chemist, German, and his rant is that he is experimenting with algal biomass to move the country forward into energy independence. This is Feb 24, this year.
I say, “Damn! I have better things to do”, and yes, I am just as well in Las Vegas as I am in San Diego. My torso wants to split open in the summertime. The wattage of solar insolence is triple what you’ve ever experienced. But, this is February. I run on down there. If Metro arrests me I won’t have to work.
So I go there, paper in hand. I take my degree. I say, “This is you?” tapping the paper. he says yes. I beg five. I say, “Well, Jim Kunstler says this is NOT the way, our way of life is over, Las Vegas is at fault.” A bead of sweat rolls down his cheek. I go on. “I’m a chemist, too. I blog about methamphetamine. Here’s my degree, here’s a picture of my son (I’ve got a stake in this, you are a Kraut). How are you going to do this with what water for a big bioreactor in the desert when they can’t even mine gold since they have to truck in water?” He says that these are trays, just an inch deep. I ask whether they can be covered to prevent water loss. He smirks like, “Oh, buddy. We got all that covered.” I say, “Doc, how do you know what to reveal and what to protect, like with patents?” He says that’s the name of the game. It is a judgement call, right? I say I have no interest in protecting this crap any more. Your school itself harbors meth cooks and the pages of Org Syn are all razored out in the good parts. I tell him I want to check back in six months to see if it is all just talk or what. August 24 comes and goes, I send him an email, “Still waitin’.” But, it is weak. The idea has exploded like wildfire and they are all talking about it. The San Diego biotech has a $60 million contract, and now one of the oil companies, a big one on television, says ‘algae’, I don’t want to say which one for fear of getting it wrong. So, it is one. Now it is a lot more talk, but Kunstler is able to blast that like swatting flies on his Malthusian yachting voyage. Backin’ up to his Mcmansion put-put-put. Kunstler’ll say “green smoke up our collective ass.” There’s a disconnect.
“There’s more.”
“More what?”
“What you fancy. That’s the beauty of money. You can turn it into all sorts.” -Ripley’s Game
I resent the snide remarks about people who live in small towns. le dumb dumb red staters! I think the people are great, even the nazcar idiots. They got used to suburbia. It’s a habit. All habits take time to over come.
I dislike leftard liberals. The education system is geared toward dumbing down people and turning them into sheeple. It’s no surprise that the more “education” some has the more liberal they are. That’s called indoctrination.
The liberal mindset is expensive,and guess what? WE don’t have the money anymore to take care of everyone’s illegitimate kids and drug habits.
For example, I am all for making all drugs legal. However, if a person gets on drugs, the government will not use my money to get them off of it. The druggies can just go to the local 12 step program. If the druggy get drugged and pass out in their own vomit, they will stay that way. Liberal Free lunch is over.
“The average rural christian small community in this country is composed of…”
Did they scare you away from using the word “typical”?
“You didn’t read what I said.”
——————————
Oh, I read what you said alright … over and over … in disbelief.
You told a bunch of young black kids … what? 18-20 yrs old? (community college age?) to hang on tight to their black vernacular heritage as a second language. ‘Learn this Standard American English that I’m going to try to teach you and, by all means, be sure to use it when you are speaking to white folks, like in job interviews, or even if you suspect white folks might be within earshot.’
‘Then, when you’re in the privacy of your own home and you’re crafting Emmy award-winning rap lyrics for Jay Z – which, as you know, can be extremely lucrative – you can feel free to switch off that boring tight-ass white crap and pick up with the street wise black talk. It also works well for prize winning poets and it never cost Allen Iverson a nickel in contract negotiations either.’
Come on Abbey … one in a million young blacks are going to make a living writing or speaking black vernacular. The other 999,999, give or take, will need to impress a white employer. For their own good you should have been drilling white-speak into them till it was second nature … till they dreamed in it.
Please don’t lay some lame exception on me.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
There is no need to live in a big-city if you and your family does not have to. Especially at tense moments in history (such as the current one) we should wholeheartedly resist the primitive urge to huddle and crowd together like stunned rats in order to satisfy our irrational urge for mass-safety. It’s clear that the last place a sane person would want to be when and if TSHTF is in a big-city.
In the future, in terms of the mass-proliferation of high-speed internet, telecommuting, working and learning from home, and so on, we are likely to see even more spreading out (suburbanization) and thus even more urban depopulation. Similar to Russia, the USA is decidedly not a very urban-oriented nation — it is very decentralized and has an inherent deep-rooted anti-urban bias, and for historical as well as geographical reasons the people of Russia and the USA generally prefer small-town, medium-sized town, and/or rural living over the cramped, dirty, gray, impersonal, and generally ‘paved over’ milieu of modern cities. Remember that the USA was originally founded as an ‘agrarian republic,’ and that Russia was also overwhelmingly agrarian/rural during its entire history too. In terms of comparisons between the USA and Russia, it’s also very interesting to note that one of the ways which the Soviets forced independent Russian farmer-peasants (‘kulaks’ they called them) to submit to the Communist system was by forcibly urbanizing tens of millions of them (i.e., herding them in to cities) rapidly and taking over their ancestral lands for various ‘collective’ purposes, in effect turning them all in to highly dependent slavish urbanites who could no longer survive without The System…the hyperindustrial urban/internationalist-oriented Soviet bureaucracy based in Moscow called it ‘dekulakization.’ Could there be similar plans afoot in the modern USA?
If you really think about it, cities in general are huge parasites, i.e. they use up in many-many more resources than they actually produce. Where does all the food which cities consume come from? Where does the water of cities come from? And their fuel? And their building materials: either wood or metal? The answer to all: ALL of the necessities of life which keep cities functioning come from various rural and/or suburban areas…meanwhile the only things modern cities export in large amounts are mass quantities of sewage, air pollution, trash, and so on — not to mention trashy forms of ‘entertainment’ and lots of white-collar criminal rip-off artists. Factories aren’t even in many American cities nowadays (they’ve mostly moved to the suburbs) since so many are now very yuppiefied sand faux-santized, nor are any other truly productive facilities…you cannot grow or raise any food in cities obviously, all water is piped in from afar, and most of what goes on in America’s cities today is just worthless paper-shuffling, various forms of debauchery, white-collar scheming, and anti-cultural forms of ‘entertainment’ which is exported to the hinterlands. In suburbia though there are many factories AND also farms and pastureland and orchards and gardens, and decently-priced housing, and low-crime (usually), and so on. All trucked-in foodstuffs and water also pass through suburbia before they reach the cities…so if anything the big-cities are going to have their necessities cut-off first during a possible upheaval, since the supply-chains for cities pass through suburbia. It’s also better to raise children in less crowded areas where they can explore nature and stretch their legs so to speak, which they are of course unable to do in crowded dirty cities.
Most Americans just don’t like cities; they prefer open spaces, trees, grass, and greenery over endless concrete and gray steel. There will always be a bit of the ‘pioneer’ or ‘frontiersman’ in the personality of most Americans because that is the mythos upon which the USA was settled, founded, and slowly built over the last few centuries. If you want real city livin’, the overcrowded, gray, and dirty megalopoli of Europe and/or Asia await you. But again, we more provincial-minded Americans and Russians will always wonder: why live like crammed dirty rats stacked on top of one another if you do not have to?
I agree with Mr Kunstler that small towns are generally the best set-up in terms of maximizing human happiness and raising a family, or even smaller ruralish suburban ‘hamlets’ with good access to farmland, pastureland, orchards, forests, rivers, lakes, and of course a few decent roads.
Well well well. An MBA and you can’t explain why it’s you and me as opposed to you and I.
Here’s your lesson which I am sure you will hate:
Me is the accusative case which means that it is an object. (Did you ever do diagramming? They used to call it parsing.)
English is based on Latin, and so there is a subjective case and an objective case. At the end of a sentence is probably a good rule of thumb as you are not likely to get the subjective case at the end of a sentence. But English is an agglutinative language rather than an inflective one (French, etc) which is based on order rather than endings for comprehension. Yet the use of outdated forms for accusative and subjective seem not too tidy.
If there is a preposition such as to, then the objective case is indicated.
However, and this is pure LaBove linguistic analysis, there is something called overcorrection whereby someone wishes to indicate they are from a higher class than the person they are communicating with. So they over correct, always using the grammatically correct form rather than the vernacular. At a certain point in the cultural drift of changing syntax etc you get a mixed usage of the correct and the vernacular. This can go on for decades or a century or so. (We no longer speak like Chaucer and can hardly read him.) Ultimately one takes precedence over the other and becomes the accepted usage. This is Sausurean Linguistics upon which structuralism is based.
At this time me and I are used alternatively. We tend to say, It’s me! and not It is I. the I feeling like overcorrection. Snotty, condescending, which it is intended to feel like by the speaker.
The Brisih are masters at this. Your accent is crucial over there. They immediately peg you for your class, your school, your university, your part of the country, etc when you first open your mouth. I have noticed that the BBC now uses people who no longer speak the king’s English, but a flavor of accents (not dialects yet). I, myself, can understand them much better than American announcers.
Oh and for another time: then and than which I have used in sort of an overcorrective way today.
XXXXXBaby,
I ‘axst’.
(trying me some style)
The person referred to by the comment you pooh-pooh is a reality-impacted individual which is neither taught in English class nor appearing in the latest novel by Charles Dickens.
They do interview you over the telephone, in much the same way that the police interview you with handcuffs, or truncheons if in NYC. I have told them I do not do telephone interviews; they go right on ahead as if I’d said nothing.
Where do you think they get your phone number to call you to do a telephone interview? OFF YOUR RESUME!
If not for backsliding English teachers and librarians turning over our borrowing habits to the feds under the Patriot Act, we might have real rights. We would not all have to subscribe to “How Not to get Shot by the Police” (required reading). Your traitorous actions make you nothing but a roundheels. You Tory, you should walk to class with a mattress strapped to your back. You want to be Commissar.
Oh, I could have it wrong, but I don’t. I don’t. I ain’t …….lyin’. Human Resources does no work. Google does their work for them. They just Google your name and they can tell who’s got loyalty to the Party. Kunstler said this country lost its ballsacular navigation and they must have thought he meant it to do, it, to get something for nothing. Well, that’s nice work if you can get it.
I spent one evening with a group of people at Murray Rothbard’s apartment in NYC. He was a very direct person. I asked him a lot of Rand questions as I had read some of Von Mises and some of Rothbard and all of Rand, of course, as I was going to NBI lectures.
He did say talk about the “collective” derisively. He did say that a woman who was an heiress (some supermarket or other) got pregnant and at their advice,I won’t say whose) had gotten an illegal abortion (someone referred by the collective) and died. He had nothing but moral outrage for that.
He said he was agoraphobic and never left his apartment and that he was the youngest retired PhD in the country. He looked like a sedentary man and his wife was obese. He was incredibly generous with his time and supportive. He liked questions that made him think and he hated Rand’s group for their authoritarian ways.He also said (when I asked him) that he was living in a rent controlled apartment because it was necessary to use the state against itself. Take advantage of all it offered as a way of making it weaker. I agree. It was a lovely evening. I sent someone to meet with him who was fighting the govt because they were putting a pipeline to Alaska through his property. He said Murray was very cordial. But it is not possible that he could ever have remained cordial with Rand.
Qshtik, I apologize and I now see what I did wrong. I had replied to TripTicket, and then went on to post about torture. The software made it look like the torture post was in reply to TripTicket, when I wanted it to be a new post in reponse to something I read in JHK’s post today:
“The discontents it produced lent it to psychological depression and dark humor, just as chronic illness does. But we were stuck with it.”
Those who were picked up and tortured (even though they were later released because they were innocent) suffered psychological depression (many, understandably, tried to commit suicide in the USA torture camp in Cuba) and have chronic illness as a direct result of their mistreatment at the hands of the USA torturers. But they are stuck with it…
I lived right alonside of them on South Street where I owned some buildings. I did find it aggravating to get broken into and robbed all the time. One day I came home to find my little golden shepherd backed into the bathroom with an umbrella keeping her in!
And one time they broke in through the roof. I called the police who came right away because I told them a gun had been stolen. (That’s the cue word to use to get their attention.) The skylight was moved over and it was raining on my table. The ceiling was about 15 feet high. The detective looked up and said,”Oh they couldn’t have come in from the roof. It’s too high.”
But now that the skylight is off and shoved over, and the rain is coming in, how do you think that happened. Oh no, he said, It’s too high.
No one, I say no one, in my neon red town would have been that dumb.
Once you have been tortured you never get over it. At least that is what I have red from those who have been. The gulag memoirs are enlightening and instructive.
They explain why Jaycee Dugard didn’t try to get away yet dummies are still saying, “Why didn’t she try to escape when she had chances?”
Although when you read about the young girl in Austria waiting her chance and running, one wonders. and the other one whose father bred 7 children on her. She waited for her chance. Funny those cases?
From a Facebook log:
Friday, August 14, 2009 at 1:08am
This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly, Jackson EMC, regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the water utility.
After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – the Weather Channel.
I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on I-85, built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.
On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service.
After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.
And then I log on to the internet — which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration — and read on Fox News about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.
abbeysbooks,
Thank you! Thank you!
I really appreciated the English lesson. While I believe functional communication is the purpose of language, I really enjoyed reading about the underlying reasons and the dialects and the accents and the structure.
In my public suburban school (“government-run” public education, they would say today), I did take Latin and we did diagram sentences. I also took French, but it went out the window when I started learning Spanish. Seems I have a two-track mind, linguistically speaking.
Anyway, I really enjoyed your discourse… very brave of you after the comments you have received about high-brow culture.
What it says to me is that I know so very little about my own language. Therefore, I do not deign to make any comments in response to your comments about high brow culture — of which I likewise know very little.
I don’t know why you are here trying to enlighten us, but I am suitably impressed. Learning new things is so delightful! Especially about something that one thinks one already knows, like the language one speaks. Thanks, again!
Yeah well I do say it, that and other factors. I admit the other factors-you wont admit the Black Barbarism. I’m more open minded than you. As a PCPC (politically correct pre clear)The tactic of the scumbag slumlord/real estators couldn’t have worked unless there was already a legitimate fear of Blacks-based on prevous experience either first hand or not. You deny Blacks their humanity by denying them agency. They did great wrong. Admit it.
With manufacturing gone, the only “raw materials” we have to “work on” and thus provide “employment” are humans: thus the health-care “industry” and the prison (or “corrections”) “industry” and even the drug-treatment “industry.” Keeping oneself out of the “raw material” category is a worthwhile goal in this culture.
Yet you adore them more than ever. You see that’s the Christian side of the PC Religion-Masochism. Blacks can do no wrong-you just have suffer their abuse in silence or better yet, with a smile. They are the Sacred Cows of the Politically Correct Religion. You want to be a high priestess of this religon, but sister you have some heavy competition. The parents of Amy Biehl, White girl torn apart by a Black Mob in South Africa, befriended her killers, helped get them out of jail early, and then gave them work with the Amy Biehl Foundation. It boggles the mind. Can you not see the injustice not only to White Victims but to the Blacks themselves-to take away their humanity and make them some kind of subhuman idol?
Or to be more clear: the other factors opened the door to the actual conquest by the Black Barbarians. Long term Govermental malice is the first cause, the scumbag realtors a contributing cause, and the onslaught by the barbarians is the coup de grace. And another all pervasisve cause would be the failure of civil responsibility on the part of the people that allowed such a Goverment the chance to disposess its own people-an continues to do so.
the rackets associated with a suburban sprawl economy that has entered its own zone of remorseless failure.
END QUOTE
Why should you have remorse in failure?
I do not write as well as this, so I do not fathom how “relentless” got bumped in favor of “remorseless”.
I like “regretable”, especially from those form letters they send you after you send them a resume.
We are not harking often enough to Sigmund Freud, IMHO. We need more honest appraisal of our tendencies. What we got here, my friends, is an aversive lexicon, avoiding the overusage of an “impotent” failure.
Gee, I sound like a critic. I should wear a kravat. Asbeysbooks is wearing a shawl four out of five weekdays guaranteed. She reminds me of Dr. Evil telling his life story in …….Group.
If we are talking remorseless attacks, I got dibs on hammer.
Those Xs in my last post aren’t kisses. It’s supposed to look like where I cross … out B-I-T-C-H.
Abbeysbooks really has the best…….post of the day. I like her mind. She always posts a wealth of information. Her brain should be in a jar on a shelf in my garage.
XOXOXO …..OPS
The “strange fruit” is no stranger than life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. K need not raise the specter of the nation failing in a “paroxysm” of fire, I.C.B.M.s flung far and too late to recall.
I don’t trust “remorse” to put frail humans in check. That must be related to “Jewish guilt”. Or is it “once things are taken out of our hands and left to a higher,more remorseless power,…”‘
Remorse just isn’t good enough to lay on people with no death toll on their record-zuh! The rest of you should have remorse because the French, with a Revolution, are #1 in health care and you are 37th. I just want the elitist caught. I don’t care what he did. And, in these economic hard times the opportunity may present itself to bring some of them to ground. There’s 200,000,000 of us. Let’s thin their ranks “regardless”.
Anybody who differs with you is likely to be called most anything. Hell, Glenn Beck has attained the status of Attila the Hun already. That fucking moron president has already lied more in 9 months than any president in past history. But, people like you, Dale, conveniently forget this. Yes, we may be on your shit list, you shithead, but coming from you, hell, that’s a big compliment. I’ve visited other blogs where the ambient member is so fucking haughty and proud of his Mensa membership. Sorry we aren’t impressed with that, you twit. Memorizing some liberal bullshit won’t float my boat. Likely you feel we should just “give Obama some time”. He’s already set race relations back to the 60’s, is that enough time? Well, if there’s a God, we Fascists and Rednecks hope for many more setbacks for the Kingfish. The sumbitch doesn’t get it. Neither do you, sponge cake.
Perhaps he can call you up and tell you he’s a racist. How much more phoney introspection will it take you to realize this president flat out hates Whitey? Oh, sorry, typical white man I meant to say. The Gates affair is case in point. Yet, Obama thinks he can make these gaffs and we stupid country folk won’t realize it cuz’ we cain’t read no how. You suspect he’s a racist. Lots of conviction in your voice, we can all see that.
bahmi said: “Well, if there’s a God, we Fascists and Rednecks hope for many more setbacks for the Kingfish.”
Apparently God is Black.
And, as Obama pointed out to Letterman, before the election Obama was Black… and the country elected him.
I, for one, have no regrets. Even Glen Beck says Obama was the better choice to be president.
bambi,
You need to seek the help of a qualified mental health professional.
I haven’t finished Jim’s article and I felt I must comment on the use of the word “capital”. First off, capital is a commodity that can be valorized. Yes, read your Marx. That is, it is capable of transforming or being transformed by labor into a commodity for sale. Until a resource or commodity has been transformed by labor, it has no added value. Capital in the form of purchased labor, tooling, energy, resources is the means of that transformation. All value flows from that. So, is suburban tract housing a form of capital? No. If anything it is anti-capital. It continues to consume energy, labor, and material resources and returns nothing but phony baloney capital gains or a tax write-off until the inevitable bursting of the bubble. The suburbs do not in themselves produce real wealth. They only consume it. One one figures in the other losses of wasted land, fuel, time, materials, social degradation, suburban sprawl has been a collosal failure. There is one exception. The corporations that sold and financed all that crap have made out like bandits. Yes, their profligate ways have punched a hole in the capital markets, but Bernake and Obama have a big box of band-aids for them. Likely the cost of that will come out of your pensions and savings in the form of inflating them into oblivion. Have a ball. You’ve earned it.
You people, and yes I meant you people, canot get over the fact that a nigger is in the white house. Get over it.
He is more educated, more elegant, more informed, more everything than we have had in decades. No he isn’t perfect and I wish he were.
I think you’re underestimating the extent to which technology may reduce the need for capital, and undermine the whole rationale for the existing capitalist model. Indeed one of the central causes of corporate capitalism’s crisis tendencies is the vast surplus of investment capital with no productive outlet, and its exacerbation by the imploding cost of capital outlays needed to undertake production.
This has already occurred in the information and culture industries, with the desktop and network revolution lowering capital outlays for publishing, software and music by two orders of magnitude. The minimum cost of a hub in the old broadcast culture, typically, was hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the new network culture, it’s fallen to a few hundred or at most a few thousands. The old saying was that freedom of the press was great, if you could afford to buy a printing press. Toward the end of the 20th century, the minimum capital outlay for a conventional newspaper was several hundred thousand $$. The desktop/Internet revolution lowered the cost of a “printing press” to $1000 or so.
Douglass Rushkoff remarked that this had led to the tech industry destroying the California economy. The amount of capital required to fund a tech startup fell by 90% or more, leaving venture capitalists with lots of money and nowhere to spend it.
The very same process is about to be reenacted in the realm of physical production, via the revolution in distributed, open-source manufacturing in small shops using cheap CNC machinery. See, for example, the recent 100kGarages initiative of ShopBot and Ponoko.
As important as Peak Oil is by itself, it’s exacerbated by another phenomenon at least as important: the inability of old, centralized, capital-intensive industry to survive in the face of the exploding informal and household economy.
But still I am not sorry I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It was a safe and innocent time. and then the post war development came and took away the farm across from my apartment complex. They took away the huge hill for sledding, the quarry for swimming, the creek for crayfish, the wild flowers I could pick on the short cut home, and no worries about being snatched by a kidnapper. Inever thought I would have such nostalgia and it gets worse every day. I stalk old places on google maps and cry sometimes about the awful changes.
It is truly a terrible thing that has happened.
The 1930’s depression was a terrible thing too. When you live through something like that your mentality becomes one of scarcity. Saving every penny, picking up nails on the street, getting every last sqeeze out of the toothpaste tube, not buying anything unless you absolutely need it. Nothing for luxuries of any kind. And then the mentality stays even when the times start to improve. And that’s what they are afraid of starting for if it does it will continue for decades.
The inflation consumer mentality will not go soon. Inflation has permeated every aspect of life. Not only do things appear to cost more (because the dollar is so worthless) but grades are inflated, degrees are inflated (all those PhD’s who know nothing). High fashion says that workmanship on those fabulously expensive clothes is shitty. Wives are throwaways for new models, no pun intended. Everybody and everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. That’s all you are to them and they to you.
It’s why when I rescue doggies, all adoption fees go to my director even though they often cost me a lot of money to rescue, foster, and deliver. But I do not want any idea of profit to affect me when I rescue a dog or decide not to. I just don’t want that mingling of love and money.
“Corporate interests and persons who make their living through financial speculation would affectively starve.”
Hey Q, is this right?
SEB I’ve read all your correspondence with Abbey up through comment 154 and must confess … you’ve lost me. You’re way to nuanced for my small mind.
I gotta quexion for ya. I just want to get one thing straight. Do you feel I made a valid point about Abbey’s teaching of English to black kids? Namely, that advising them to retain black vernacular, as though it were a legitimate second language, was a bad idea?
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
I grew up in the ‘burbs, a small, rural town really that had some new houses, but not many, so it retained much of the small town character. If you think this was a peaceful, idyllic place you are only partly correct. There was rape,disrespect, drugs,inter-personal violence, crime, muggings, attacks,break-ins and puh-lenty of ethnic strife. Not that you would know it by the look of the place!! It looked like a Norman Rockwell postcard of a New England town in Autumn.
The ethnic hatreds has always struck me as odd. This was white European group against other white Euro groups! Odd, because it was a fairly homogenous place (100% white, mostly WASP or Irish) with some Poles, Italians, Portuguese and French, some Germans.I should say Americans whose grandparents or great grandparents were those ethnicities. One would think that the people, including the children in the schools who mimicked the hatreds of their parents, were living in some teeming,swarmy, 19th century urban immigrant ghetto hell,judging from the comments. Let’s not forget the schools.They were horrible, lots of violence and drugs and so bad some kids graduated only functionally literate.
My point is racial homogenity and a rural environment do not always make for a safer, better place to live for anyone of any race or background.
“It must make you so proud to see your ideas admired.”
No, dale, not really. I like it when they are reviled. Especially by a Fucktard such as yourself. That assures me that I’m on the right path.
“Of course I understand, I’m a liberal who dislikes both parties, I wish everyone the freedom to be themselves.”
Then why would you dislike both parties? They are being themselves. You really are an idiot dale. These inane statements just multiply as the day continues.
“I, for one, have no regrets. Even Glen Beck says Obama was the better choice to be president.”
Seems rather convenient that “we” only get two choices.
abbey-shakes sez:
“You people, and yes I meant you people, canot get over the fact that a nigger is in the white house. Get over it.
He is more educated, more elegant, more informed, more everything than we have had in decades.”
Wow the “n” word. Zo-kay though because shakie is a lib and making a point to all the racists. (Not.)
Educated, elegant and informed does not make one immune to bad ideas and worse solutions. Sorry shakes, the race card failed. (See Carter, Jimmah). Back to square one.
” Do you feel I made a valid point about Abbey’s teaching of English to black kids? Namely, that advising them to retain black vernacular…”
Sweet-dumb-dale you are a MORON. So black kids needed shakey to tell them to retain their vernacular? Has dale been blowing you lately or are you this stupid on your own?
Q: No, you didn’t ask me, but, YES, you were correct. Validating ignorance doesn’t help the ignorant.
PS – this is so unlike you…
“He is more educated, more elegant, more informed, more everything than we have had in decades.”
These qualities allow him to usurp authority not delegated to him by the Constitution. We need a President who follows the Law not the whims of the mob.
Let me try again.
If you are multilingual and say in France. You don’t pick up the phone and speak English, do you?
So if you are black, and have had some education (especially in one of my classes) you do not pick up the phone and speak black English to a prospective employer.
It’s just that simple. Just because you can doesn’t mean you will. Many multi linguists falling to the trap of continuing to speak whthe language they have just finished conversing in when the person they are speaking to doesn’t understand that language. But that’s something different from what you are talking about.
Although I do not think you are posting in good faith here when it concerns me. Go back to pool.
zzzzz you are replying to the wrong person. It’s squish dic you want here.
And BTW although I don’t agree with just about everything that comes off your fingertips, I do think you are the most original writer here.
@Q,
Yes, in my sober mind I do, because I am a racist. I am as racist as Bruce Willis. Some
thug said he wanted Bruce to scream in pain, and Bruce said, “Play some rap music.”
But, there’s a caveat: I am not at all sane. I am waiting for that to make a difference to
someone, but so far no luck. maybe I “aged out” of stark, raving lunacy, maybe the sexual
repression in our society has made everyone who is not shank-sharpening Charlie-Manson
veinous mahar (“Have a Nagila (monster))’museum of yardbird reflexes’ (“Still Life With
Woodpecker”)kind of a guy too wrapped up in their own neuroses to notice, or, perhaps I died
on my feet at some point and am still falling to the floor like “An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge”. I am a playing-card, not smooth seamless and natural moving in time, but a
flickering reflection on next universe’s dirty screen, like oil pollution becoming a rainbow
on the water. I could be stuck in a frame of the film, the last Steve Billinghurst in the
deck, alias Miff-I am miffed I can’t fuck my time off any longer and I killed it all,. It
was easy being young. I drew short straw; future’s up.
No, I don’t mind Ebonics. They named it after me. I’m SEB. It’s really Sebonics.
What do I care what is taught outside physical science courses? It’s all basketweaving. My
school, UCSD, eventually tired of calling Psych underwater basketweaving, and now you can
get THE class of Underwater Basketweaving on your transcript. You sit down there in SCUBA
gear.
QUOTE
By a fortuitous coincidence, the revolution in COMPUTERS enabled Wall Street bankers to
concoct abstruse new species of tradable paper securities based on bundles of debt that
seemed to produce miraculous earnings. It had the added advantage of being inscrutable.
UNQUOTE
Notice ‘computers’ (emphasis added). What did they do? They enabled. Enabling is not
always a bad thing. Co-dependencies suck, but WHEELS “enabled” my PLANE to land, okay?
Eventually (whip out your Bible), the “babble” of different languages will be BANISHED. We
need black dialect redounded into the language just now.
Q, Dale or somebody axst you what would be “affective” and if it was wrong. Since the word
is “effective” and it can’t be right, that fixes it to easily-answered in the affirmative.
I can’t go on record verbally gutting poor dear Abby without remorse, but she invariably
toots her horn and lives in an ivory tower. I am stalling and I won’t remember, but there
is a relevant prejudice in one of her arguments.
She’s a jewel and so are you. It is late here, it has to be late there.
I logged back in and I swear I stepped on a wooden block and it gouged the bottom of my foot. I am in quite a bit of pain. Ha ha, I’m joking. I threw a cinder block through a car window and caused another crash at the same intersection and I’m feeling guilty.
It’s as clear as new-mown hay. You gotta know how to read. Let’s swing. Who’s up for a Crisco party. It’s emblematic of today’s problems. It’s just the flux of current events, not the current events themselves. They are mere window-dressing for a pogrom. Smoke weed. Kristalnacht. Yellow Journalism. Close as you’ll ever get to the Pacific Ocean. You got cities like that? You guys got worked. I want pins in my face, Q.
MessianicDruid said: “Seems rather convenient that “we” only get two choices.”
I’m sorry, perhaps you are not from the USA or don’t know about its process. There are actually more than a dozen presidential candidates. They engage in debates and have conventions. The parties choose their candidate.
Here is a list of the major USA parties, i.e., those with candidates who qualified for a minimum 270 electoral votes
Constitution Party
Green Party
Libertarian Party
Independent Party
Then there are other candidates from minor parties.
Boston Tea Party
New American Independent Party
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Prohibition Party
Reform Party
Socialist Party USA
Socialist Workers Party
Independents Party
If you do some research on the party platforms, you can probably find someone to vote for who comes close to your political views.
Oh, and I almost forgot, there is also a Democratic and Republican party.
Bodyworld exhibit….I hear its falun gung bodies
Bodyparts sold…from homeless chinese killed for organs that are re sold
Todays LA Times page1….3000? children stolen in china and sold to adopted families…3000$ each
the chinese market what they can
“I do not think you are posting in good faith here when it concerns me.”
————————-
No, you do not think I am posting in good faith here when I disagree with you.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
if we got 3 choices the power elites would have to put yet more $$$ into buying or trying to buy off party 3!
and today i read in the dreaded LA Times about ‘green funding’….in a collapsing economy maybe the red chinese will use their gold to fund the green to keep the greed factor going.
when they arent stealing children to sell.
I think he meant Z/D/ qtip
Wow, Scabby Abbey said, regarding Obama: “He is more educated, more elegant, more informed, more everything than we have had in decades.”
First off, I hated — let me repeat, hated — Bush, he made me want to vomit with every appearance. But be that as it may, Obama’s refusal to use his inherent executive powers to bust trusts and go after the big bankers who defrauded tens –nay hundreds — of millions of people has made me sick. And I voted for the guy.
To say all criticism of Obama is racist (though some of it undoubtedly is) is pure apologetic bullshit. Am I racist because I think we should get out of Afghanistan and Iraq or prosecute corporate crooks? Give me a fuckin’ break.
This is the Great Unwinding, as JHK has pointed out numerous times on this site, and if we want to get out of it in an orderly manner we’ll say “fuck you” to the corporate powers that be that want to loot this once-great system before it collapses. And if Obama can’t tell them “fuck you,” I say fuck Obama. And if he were white, I would be even more prone to say that.
Which brings me to another point: If we had some old, lame white guy in office who failed to bust trusts and implement radical reforms during this trying time, the public would know they were being fucked over, and, hence, they might react. But Obama is too smooth. Surely a hip minority president would never sell out to corporations and big banks, would he?
Qshtick, Abby, Druid,…
I am going to use Druid because I was thirsty but I drank a glass of horse sweat by mistake and it burns and I am not here to function (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”).
I’m not certain Abby really has a blind spot or either she glosses over more than somewhat (Damon Runyon) a band-daid approach. At this juncture I can’t produce it.
But Druid’s a servicable villain (King Lear by way of “Revolution Number Nine”)for something I want to do, and that is pinion people who memorize. What is the best way to state a POV such that in a few words we know you are a Jehovah’s witness or a child molester or a pinko?
Where’d you get “usurp”? Where’d you get “mob”? Isn’t there another word for mob that you choose not to use for fear that dialectical materialism of the means to production will be nationalized by the workers?
Si si pueda. We are bolunteers, Homes, joo know mang?
By the way, the G-20 protests next week in Pittsburgh will be interesting. If protesters show up en masse, I’ll have some faith that progressive change is possible. If not, we are flat-out fucked by the big corporate schlong.
KC
‘capital-intensive industry to survive in the face of the exploding informal and household economy’
DO YOU MEAN EXPLODING IN THE 3RD WORLD?
I am not asking kids to retain their vernacular, I asked adults in college to cherish it. And to be proficient in Standard American English (different from British).
TOO?
dont burst the bubble!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
from kennedy to clinton to who knows who they smile as they kill!
‘It was a safe and innocent time. and then ‘
NAME 1 THING THAT WASNT BETTER 30 OR 40 OR MORE YEARS AGO!
so much for ‘progress’!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
does that explain 50? million people moving here illegally over only 30 years?
‘I’ve got a stake in this, you are a Kraut’
HUH????
who has got a stake in what?
OK….but Peakeverything notes the govt is broke!
ultra lib gavin newsome says ‘soda is the new tobacco’ and wants it taxed
THATS HOW BROKE THE GOVT IS
48 STATES ARE BROKE AND SOME ARE BARTERING WITH EACH OTHER
‘CUT ME A FUCKIN’ BREAK’
cut us one..you just made a spelling mistake
is it at the greenpeace site that they tell of the catastrophe that the building of the prius engine is causing alberta canada?
in a class i told a student a green car is one thats painted green and someone else started to talk about ‘ the building of the prius’
reply2
indeed the rise of the prisons for profits industry proves this
as well as ‘ship young folk off to the military’
check an old song by randy newman;
MASTERMAN AND BABY J !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Abbey says to Zzz: “I do think you are the most original writer here.”
————————–
How Jennie Rico-esque … seeking allies via a compliment. A frequent tactic of the fair sex. Last week PeakOilLori declared I, of all people, had a delightful sense of humor and paid out a series of similar compliments to others in quick succession. We are wise to subtle motivations.
Secondly, it’s a baldfaced lie and everybody here, including Zzz, knows it. Zzz has a limited repertoire of tricks that he repeats over and over. They all come down to the gratuitous insult in one form or another and are so threadbare as to be utterly ineffective.
But don’t take my word. Let’s go straight to the horses mouth … are you the most original writer here, Zzz?
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
WHY DID DALE CALL ZZZ GAY AS AN INSULT?
this from someone whos called folks here racist?
think bout that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I saw the LA Times yesterday. It had “Chinese Babies” in it. Notice chine SEB abies (hou SEB oat, ba SEB all) all over the place are the signs, signs galore. Pretty soon the world will be as a myriad soap bubbles reflecting my face. You don’t like ‘all over the place’?” Use “galore”.
I only have nine fingers. It’s Fung Shway. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,…yep.
M
S
NBC
Thinly disguised, that has ‘SB’in it. I gauge my telepathy with it, that and torture. Mental torture. This is nothing. They call me the Birdman. It’s either me or Sylvia Browne. We’re psychic. I breathe through my mouth.
The Chinese official had “no right” to take the baby. Excuse me, government functionaries never have rights in the same way citizens do. When they took my baby Robert deNiro and Martin Scorcese showed up to give out an Oscar, and a Family Court Commissioner and his wife were BLOWN AWAY with a shotgun. The crime’s “unsolved”. Not hardly. If deNiro took issue with the DEA for questioning him about a case and accosting him at his rented house near Hollywood while making a movie, and I wrote to him in the 1990s telling him what a rotten game they run here, then you can COUNT “Ground Zero” as NOT GROUND ZERO. In other words things get done and there’s some stand-up guys.
My Family Court Commissioner’s named Martin Wegman of Pasadena. Believe me, the miscarriage of justice in this country run by Judicial has racked up in spades in blood for losing a magistrate here and there (“Brian Benedict” Read what the judge ruled ppt a shooting of the ex-wife). “They’re coming after us with weapons now”, says Wegman. I’m not going to see my daughter, then, see?
Kunstler barely scratches the surface. This “country” doesn’t do anything. It’s an allover failure of the will to succeed. People died for our rights, and after a few years, the bastards TOOK THEM AWAY AGAIN, and a whole new round of dying is to follow. That’s where you’ll watch it from. The best man we lost in the past year is George Carlin. Nah, June 22, 2008. Year-and-a-quarter.
whats a nigger?
hes…
10% black
40% arab
50% white from a slave owning bloodline
the power elites thru the media marketed him as ‘black’
ANY MANY DONT CARE ABOUT HIS SKIN COLOR BUT HES GIVING AWAY THE FARM TO WALL ST…WHO FINANCED HIS ELECTION.
AND WITH RADIO AND THE WEB ….
the corporate media cant freeze it out
what…..you gloss over the most racist cover piece to date?
the newsweek cover!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
newsweek 9.14.09
page 60
1st paragraph
po bronson
‘ITS HORRIFYING TO IMAGINE KIDS PROUD TO BE WHITE’
next time you want to see the work of the racist new nazis look to Newsweek and the southern poverty law center!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We
huh…didnt you blast rico…now mostly gone from here
for talking in ‘ groupspeak’
We We We We v We We We We We We
‘ jennie cant even peepee alone’
or something like that?
The parents of Amy Biehl, White girl torn apart by a Black Mob in South Africa, befriended her killers, helped get them out of jail early
WHAT THE F IS THIS ABOUT???????????????????????
PLEEZE PRAY TELL!
THIS IS THE ONLY FUNNY THING DALES EVER POSTED HERE FAR AS IM CONCERNED
I almost never read your long winded hate filled diatribes
long winded hate filled …..thats you dale
yr humor was un intended but its humor none the less
hail dale the gay basher
“It’s as clear as new-mown hay. You gotta know how to read. Let’s swing. Who’s up for a Crisco party. It’s emblematic of today’s problems. It’s just the flux of current events, not the current events themselves. They are mere window-dressing for a pogrom. Smoke weed. Kristalnacht. Yellow Journalism. Close as you’ll ever get to the Pacific Ocean. You got cities like that? You guys got worked. I want pins in my face, Q.”
———————————–
Whew! Guess I should have known better than to ask.
P.S. Rico/Zzz delendus est.
see
solari.com
fitts worked high up in the govt
on national radio she said just that
” the country” doesn’t do anything
its just Obama payin back wall st..the rule of law is over
SEB is crazy…like a fox
so if zzz or JS calls you a 70 ish grump with a thesaurus[?] then yd be happy?
This recent quote from progressive author Chris Hedges says it all: “Unless we on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do — stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.”
In other words, get your asses out there so-called progressives. When the shit goes down, the Glen Becks of the world will be like “hey we were saying something,” even though that something was corporate cheerleading.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/20090921_globalization_goes_bankrupt/
Another good quote, from Larry Holmes (not the boxer): “The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president. It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it.
“Obama is in trouble,” Holmes went on. “The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster.
So, progessives, stop mocking the town hallers and become one of them (though with a different message of course).
“Where’d you get “usurp”? Where’d you get “mob”?”
I read them some where, and believe others have also and will understand them to mean what
I intend. They are very applicable words, not lures. Mutually acceptable definitions are imperative to concise communication.
I showed him a picture of my kid. He’s five. It’s one of those things and it goes with having kids. Now you’re not 75. You’re 150. Years. A stake in this biosphere’s viability. The ongoing reality.
Leave this world a better place than you found it, but leave. There’s too many of you.
You’re rootin’ tootin’. I’m hopping mad. It’s genocide. You want non-racists to do that? We tried to ask ’em nicely not to have kids. Now it’s too late, podnah.
Well we admit that he’s an elegant man who can give a rousing speech. As for his mind-he sure can read a mean teleprompter. In addition to all these good qualities, he also recieved financial aid at Occidental College-the type given to foreign students. This was recently released by order of the Court via the Freedom of Information Act. The College was covering for him just like you cover for him just like all Liberals cover for him-because he’s Black. And there is no evidence that he ever applied for US Citizenship. The next four years are going to be very, very interesting.
To call us racists after you all but admit that you hate rural Whites is a little much. Have you no shame you Pious Fraud?
He’s lying-Communists lie about everything. He read all of my posts-he loves them. I give his miserable life meaning.
I didn’t want to steal your Thunder. We are the Sons of Thunder, James and John (I’ve just read too much SEB) Btw, since we have now been drafted into Glen Beck’s Army, and are supposed to be his “tatooed followers”, what kind of tatoo are you going to get? I can’t decide between jagged black lines and flowers. Or perhaps that cover of Jimi Hendrix as Vishnu-the Unviversal Form. As Oppenheimer said upon seeing the mushroom cloud, from the Gita, “I come as Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”
Just wanted to say I appreciate your sense of humor. Every time I see your posts, I think back to a very different time, more than 1/2 a lifetime ago, when I knew a sort of inefficient, yet effective professor name Leuckart. We spent many hours with CA, Beilstein, et al. I was really into the awesome beauty of the tetrahedron.
Then there was this organic hippie chick, solid, but with an acidic personality. She looked like her sister, Acoh, but with a Phat ass. OH, these girls were rather simple, but, get them in the right mood and they really knew how to party! Make you the …one, so to speak … kind of a Phun AcMe, stripped of the unNecessary interloper and concatenated, nay, fused into a single being. But, you know you can’t stay, there’s always more to be done. With or without Me, for Mami (de Laval nozzle is apt) converging on the final state was thrilling, a blast! She’d get all worked up, then wash off … yes, this is getting base, so I’ll stop.
I haven’t seem them since the mid ’70s … left that life long ago. Too many unsavory characters, too many risks. Now that I reminisce, I realize this blog evokes that feeling of a dangerous milieu.
Someone told me you’ve posted some of my stuff. Where are my royalties?
Do you know about Jenkum-the African drug of ultimate despair? Shit in a bottle. Piss into bottle. Put a balloon on top of bottle. Put in sun for a couple of hours until balloon fills up with fermenting fumes. Carefully clasp the bottom of balloon, lift to mouth and huff. It is so egalitarian. Anyone can do it. Everyone has shit and piss. Anyone can find a bottle. The balloon may be a little more difficult, but I’m sure something can be worked out. It is truly a democratic, egalitarian, communist drug! And best of all, izz from Africa. We can all be Africans! And it’s natural too.
This horror has been spotted in a couple of Black American communities. We can only hope in vain that it wont spread. The huge influx of Africans into America guarantees it. Don’t believe me? Google dudes. Itz there.
Just wanted to say I appreciate your sense of humor. Every time I see your posts, I think back to a very different time, more than 1/2 a lifetime ago, when I knew a sort of inefficient, yet effective professor name Leuckart. We spent many hours with CA, Beilstein, et al. I was really into the awesome beauty of the tetrahedron.
Then there was this organic hippie chick, solid, but with an acidic personality. She looked like her sister, Acoh, but with a Phat ass. OH, these girls were rather simple, but, get them in the right mood and they really knew how to party! Make you the …one, so to speak … kind of a Phun AcMe, stripped of the unNecessary interloper and concatenated, nay, fused into a single being. But, you know you can’t stay, there’s always more to be done. With or without Me, for Mami (de Laval nozzle is apt) converging on the final state was thrilling, a blast! She’d get all worked up, then wash off … yes, this is getting base, so I’ll stop.
I haven’t seem them since the mid ’70s … left that life long ago. Too many unsavory characters, too many risks. Now that I reminisce, I realize this blog evokes that feeling of a dangerous milieu.
A good piece, but I’m afraid James, the problem really is with ‘capital-ism’ itself: there has been a crisis in the ability of capitalists to accumulate the surplus since the late 1960’s. This was compounded by the “oil shock” of 1973 and the 1980’s solutions – sending the factories and the jobs to low-wage third-world countries; and lending the money to the Western working class to keep them consuming (compensatory borrowing), both of which have hit the rocks. No one can afford to borrow any more and the banks are too scared to lend as people can’t pay back what they owe now. Add to this an unfolding environmental crisis of Biblical proportions, various resource crises (oil, minerals, food, water) and a political crisis of representation in which the far right have taken control of the old center right – in New Zealand we have the pro-business National Party, Labour, the “Greens” – who now absurdly support free-market solutions to global warming, and the Maori Party who were suckered into supporting the pollution market in exchange for some notional support for “poor people” in the discussion surrounding the climate change bill, which of course vanished in the final document. We won’t mention ACT (The Association of Consumers and Taxpayers), an Ayn Rand-ian 1%-of-the-vote collection of libertarians and neo-fascists.
In the US you have “a single ruling party, with two right wings” to paraphrase Gore Vidal.
Change will come when people find themselves unable to carry on life in the old way, which will probably correspond with the growing inability of the tiny financial and political elite being unable to run things in the old way. Accumulated capital will be meaningless when there is no food on the shelves, no food-ships in the harbors and no cheap oil to fuel your car to collect all this stuff.
Abbey, how well I remember when the Soulard district began to get trendy, in the years before I left St. Louis. I have a few old classmates running restaurants and bars there,and an old friend who inherited a 10-flat built by his family in the 1880s. The area was at that time a neighborhood inhabited mostly by extremely poor and uneducated white people, with many social problems, notably drug abuse (glue and meth) and a lot of domestic violence as well as other crime. I was living in my old haunt, the west end (with its high rate of violent crime), and didn’t like Soulard much, mostly because of its proximity to unsightly old industry and the steep, hilly,cobblestone-paved streets that never got salted or cleared of snow… and also because of the extremely unfriendly looks the remaining poor whites would give us when we visited restaurants in the area.
St. Louis and cities like it, I believe, are ripe for a renaissance as we enter JHK’s “long emergency”, but it is going to take a long time, because they can’t get over their auto-and-defense industrial past, and they are unspeakably corrupt. St. Louis was almost totally mob-controlled by the 60s, thanks to former mayor Tucker and the mayor who really finished the place off, Cervantes. St. Louis has a lot going for it in the way of built beauty, much more than any other small Midwestern city, and it is STILL a very pretty place in spite of the blight, crime, and poverty. But all of these cities, including Chicago, will have to “rethread their heads” if they want to succeed and rebuild their economies on a new template, which will take a few decades.
As a former resident of Center City Philadelphia and a frequent visitor to Philadelphia and the surrounding area, I’m interested to see it being discussed at length in this forum.
Despite all the economic, governmental and civic obstacles that face it, the city of Philadelphia seems to be doing pretty well lately. It has lost much of its industrial base and population in recent years, but it hasn’t experienced a total meltdown, either. It still has a strong oil and chemical industry, a very strong hospital industry that is in very little danger of decamping to the suburbs, and many strong small business communities.
Thankfully, it hasn’t fallen for the Potemkin Village model of urban economic development that has hindered so many struggling industrial cities, including Camden and Baltimore. This model is basically one of putting some trendy tourist traps on the waterfront (or otherwise just downtown), while the rest of the city is allowed to violently decay. Philadelphia officials have certainly established some dubious economic development programs, but overall they’ve taken a more balanced approach than officials in Baltimore and an entirely more balanced approach than officials in Camden.
Part of Philadelphia’s success can be attributed to its having a critical mass of decent neighborhoods and useful, functional businesses. I’ve heard plausible claims that Baltimore is reaching such a critical mass and that things there have improved in the past decade, but I’ve also heard stories of pervasive violence and disorder in Baltimore worse than anything I’ve heard from or personally observed in Philadelphia. If Baltimore is making real progress towards civil society, I wouldn’t say that it’s definitive. On the other hand, Camden is definitively stuck in a Third World managerial style, with Third World results.
Philadelphia has retained its critical mass of civil society in large part because of its size. By Pennsylvania standards, it is an enormous municipality, the largest by population and one of the largest by area. It is also the only PA municipality that is also a county. The safer parts of Philadelphia have not been allowed to secede (nor, to my knowledge, has there been any serious secession movement), so they do much to support the city as a whole, including the run-down, violent neighborhoods. Camden suffers from the opposite municipal structure: the worst neighborhoods in the state within a radius of nearly thirty miles are incorporated in a single demoralized municipality that receives negligible support from its county and feels compelled to grovel to the state government for basic services (including patrols by the State Police).
Philadelphia is often described as a “city of neighborhoods,” a phrase that is trite but apt. Many parts of the city have a very strong neighborhood identity and stronger neighborhood institutions than citywide institutions. Semi-official tallies of the number of neighborhoods in Philadelphia usually count about 108. Of these, I’d say offhand that between one and two dozen are truly violent. These neighborhoods are West Philly, Mantua, a few other neighborhoods in the West and South, and the “Badlands,” stretching from around Strawberry Mansion in the Northwest to around Kensington in the Northeast. Again offhand, I’d say that fewer than a dozen other neighborhoods are marginally violent, including Parkside, Frankford and Germantown. I feel confident saying that the remainder of the city, possibly covering the majority of its land area and housing a majority of its residents, is basically safe.
Blaming Philadelphia’s problems on its black underclass may in some cases be reasonable insofar as much violence and other deviant behavior occurs among blacks in black neighborhoods, but it misses the salient points.
First, the serious trouble is contained within very well-defined neighborhoods that the police and other social services recognize for what they are. The challenge in these places in marshaling enough cops and fellow-travelers to clean up Dodge; Chief Ramsey is forcing the PPD to pacify some of the worst neighborhoods, sometimes in fits and starts, but there remain serious institutional obstacles within the PPD and tremendous neighborhood problems.
Second, Philadelphia’s black population is by no means entirely segregated in the bad parts of town. There are some de facto segregated neighborhoods, but also some mixed-race neighborhoods with low rates of violence (the latter is true in many suburbs, too). It should also go without saying that there are many normative people in the bad neighborhoods who aren’t readily noticed in the midst of sensationalized crime.
True, the most violent neighborhoods in Philadelphia are black neighborhoods, but the cause isn’t that blacks have a predilection to violence; it’s that these neighborhoods have been allowed to revert to the lowest common denominator of human evil. Sometimes, all it takes to prevent violence is a police presence: I’ve personally seen plenty of thugs in Philadelphia who don’t respect the police but who fear them enough to be peaceable whenever they think that cops might be nearby. This basic fear of the law can serve as a tipping point towards public order.
As I mentioned, the violent parts of Philadelphia are fairly small and well-defined. Much of the rest of the city is in great shape, with a strong civic fabric, race relations that in my experience are as good as they get anywhere, and excellent public manners in most regards (these three, especially the last two, are closely related). Although the city as a whole continues to lose population, some of the better neighborhoods, including Center City, are gaining residents.
I argue that this is in spite of a largely dysfunctional city government. The police department, although improving, is mismanaged, corrupt and ill-disciplined. Saturation patrols are often conducted in safe areas while dangerous areas are left to fester. The 39th District in the Northwest is a byword for lax policing driven by conflicts of interest, and the residents of the district suffer for it. Most of the city’s public schools are disastrous. Customer service levels in city government are generally poor. The Parking Authority is a byzantine maze and a corrupt money pit. SEPTA, the main transit system, generally provides inadequate service. Its regional rail system is a bottlenecked relic of the 1960s with an inscrutable fare schedule, and the subway and trolley systems haven’t been renovated since about 1909. For all these problems, Philadelphians pay one of the highest local income tax rates in the state.
It’s been amusing this week, watching the total confusion of Jaego the Nazi and his coterie of stormtroopers as they try to understand our poor confused progeny ZZZZ. They just can’t figure it out?? After all, ZZZZ says all the right things; he harps about ACORN ad nauseum, does verbal prostrations to Glenn Beck nightly, why does he refuse to acknowledge his philosophical comrades?
Let me explain in to you Jaego. You and I, and most people here understand that ACORN isn’t on RW radio and Fox News every night because it’s “news”. Rush makes about as much in a week, as ACORN received in Federal subsidies in a year, so why would a big shot like him waste so much time talking about a third rate little organization like ACORN? It’s out there because, when it is repeated often enough, it becomes a way of saying “lazy no-good blacks”
Like you Jaego, I understand history, while ZZZ was examining every frame of “Saving Private Ryan” we were reading about the rise of the Nazi’s albeit, for different reasons. We both understand that the Right is powered by grievance, and grievance requires enemies,…. and scapegoats. Hitler would never have been appointed dog catcher of Munich without using the Jews as his “offering”. They were his offering to every twisted loser in Germany. By blaming the Jews his followers would have their “sins” absolved. They were still losers, to be sure, but after Hitler they became losers for a reason….because of the Jews.
Jaego, you and I both understand that ACORN is a RW dog whistle, used to power us that grievance and fury of the losers in America. As government has increasingly abandoned their cause in favor of tending to the wealthy, they are (and will) increasingly look for other outlets to explain their fate.
Unfortunately Jaego, ZZZZ is not one of you. For all of his chest thumping, he is politically, a babe in the woods. He actually believes that ACORN is important because of the money! Isn’t that funny! He watches the likes of Beck and doesn’t understand that Beck is an obvious Fascist who can’t admit it because Fox would have to remove him from the air if he did, and that would effectively kill his golden goose. So, he continues to talk between the lines as much as possible while saying just enough keep the rabble out there sufficiently stirred up. He talks about the frosting, while the dark cake underneath is left to his followers to visualize.
Now, I’m not saying ZZZZ won’t gravitate eventually to your level of emotionalism and irrationality, but he’s not their yet, and there is always that chance that something good will happen in his life which will extinguish, or at least hold in check, his budding sense of grievance.
“Mutually acceptable definitions are imperative to concise communication.”
Hey Mess: This, while true, is quite curious coming from you. Does this mean you’ll stop ascribing human attributes to your supernatural fantasies? (14-Sep-09 2:23pm).
JS: “Shit in a bottle.” ???
I’m having trouble hitting it. Can you hold the bottle for me?
It is interesting “Condi lies alot ” called slavery America’s original sin. That one probably has as many claims to authenticity as the antichrist. I agree with another blogger who say you keep this interesting and I study your writing as to how you do it. I believe alot of it is the wonder of the disaster, The Hindenburg effect if you will how did we possiblty screw up this bad. In the end it’s like child abuse or mountain climbing. Why did he do it? Becasue he could. I personally think it is more different and sinister than that and there are books that agree with me. Disaster capitalism. As a society progresses it becomes so refined and mechanized that it has to devolve to make business successful anynore, a sort of entropy capitalism. The more disorder, the more opportunity for large profits becasue well there are bullets flying, whose counting. That’s why we will always have cash. They need the criminals. They want the criminals as surely as they want Al Queida or the Soviet Union or the Communist SaNDINISTAs. I think fundamentally all any of us can do anymore is entertain. It’s down the tubes from here so let’s have a laugh or two.
dumber-than-dale sez:
“…as they try to understand our poor confused progeny ZZZZ.”
Ah, so I’m your progeny and you call me confused? Kay.
“We both understand that the Right is powered by grievance…”
So you and Jaego have come to an understanding? Cool. However, when the “left” was actively criticizing all things Bush was it not due to leftist “grievances”?
“He actually believes that ACORN is important because of the money!”
Nawwww. The money comes in a distant fourth, preceded by Voter Registration Fraud, Racketeering, and before they were given the keys to the kingdom( but have since been shown the door) Census Taking.
“Now, I’m not saying ZZZZ won’t gravitate eventually to your level of emotionalism and irrationality…”
Not necessary. You are providing the entertainment value along those lines. Thanks for that. Its fun watching you consistently wet yourself.
Jagoff,
From what I remember of my American History classes, the black people in America are descendants of slaves who were brought here against their will and forced to work for no pay. Families were forcibly torn apart, and disobedient slaves were killed or received severe corporal punishment.
Then after the Civil War, they were discriminated against through Jim Crow laws and segregation. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act that black people were no longer officially 2nd class citizens, though housing discrimination and other types of discrimination continue to this day.
Oh, and let’s not forget the 1000’s of lynchings that occurred in the South right up until the 1950’s and beyond.
And yet somehow you’ve determined that black people are the ultimate villains destroying America.
So I’d encourage you to head over to the American History section of your local library or book store. You might actually learn something and perhaps gain some sorely needed compassion for other people that are difference from you. But I won’t hold my breathe on that.
I told him similar last week and Js replied ‘ you can do better than that’!
JIM K…..Radio this am says theres huge amounts of natural gas untapped in USA! enuff to ‘ get us thru’
and
10 that may fail……………………………….or be bought by the communists…from yahoo news:
.1.Hertz
2. Textron
3. Sprint Nextel
4. Macy’s
5. Mylan
6. Goodyear
7. CBS
8. Advanced Micro Devices
9. Las Vegas Sands
10. Interpublic Group
Anyone who continues to post on a blog from which they have been banned three times is obviously NOT a moron and definitely NOT a f*cktard.
OEO/zsazsa/zzzzzz/aszasz, or whatever your user name is this week, I hope you stick around and continue to show us all how NOT to be a stupid troll.
Thanks for everything.
Phillys well! Great…but the state of Penn is broke? yes?
and JS…did you know tawna brawley was last heard from in Philly? shes muslim now…goes by miriam mohamed!
praise be they havent named a street there MUMIA ST…..like they have in paris
In france they kiss cop killers on main st!
‘Nawwww. The money comes in a distant fourth, preceded by Voter Registration Fraud, Racketeering, and before they were given the keys to the kingdom( but have since been shown the door) Census Taking’
YOU NAILED IT…plus the medias cover up via neglect…except the radio!
thats as big a story as the story!
….SO MUCH FOR YR HATE FILLED DIATRIBES
“Thanks for everything.”
You are welcome, turkey-lurky! Have a splendid day.
HUH?
See, for example, the recent 100kGarages initiative of ShopBot and Ponoko
Some info from ACORN’s site:
“ACORN is the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in about 75 cities across the country.”
Hmmm. 400,000 members, 75 cities. Insignificant. (According to dumber-than-dale)
“A recent study shows that our issue campaign victories have delivered approximately $15 billion in direct monetary benefits to our membership and constituency over the past 10 years.”
Fifteen billion dollars? Come on guys, thats not all that much money. Not since a “trillion” entered the daily lexicon. Chump-fuckin’ -change.
200,000,000
WHERE YOU BEEN? THAT WAS 20 YEARS AGO
TRY 310 MILLION
what did he say exactly???
Oliver Hemmers
Director OSEP & Associate Research Professor in Chemistry
Dr. Oliver Hemmers received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1993 from the Technical University in Berlin, Germany with specialization in x-ray atomic and molecular spectroscopy. Recent research focuses on developments of biofuels and new materials for hydrogen fuel storage. He currently manages a multi-year, multi-million dollar biodiesel project funded by the US DOE. Over the past 10 years he has been a principal investigator or co-PI on several research projects at UNLV totaling over $6M.
Dr. Hemmers has given about 200 presentations at national and international meetings, published approximately 90 research articles, written one book, and holds one patent. He is a member of the American Physical Society and a reviewer for the American Institute of Physics and the Institute of Physics.
Dr. Hemmers is the acting Director of the Office of Strategic Energy Programs, established under his guidance in October 2006, and Associate Research Professor in the Department of Chemistry.
Very well said.
We will look back on this year’s stimulus package someday and shake our heads – for it is being fed down to us through that same “machinery of culture and politics” that of course will make it “impossible to construct anything differently” with those funds.
If you expand this article into a book, I will certainly line up to purchase it.
By the way, I recall being personally repulsed as a child in the 1960’s by the dark, drab ugliness of the Kramden apartment.
Haven’t read other commenters, too angry at the rare lack of Kunstler insight. You neglect America’s original sin–racism. Suburbs let White folk be with their own kind–Brown v Bd of Ed made this an imperative. I grew up in Brooklyn at the time–middle class not mingling with “coloreds.”
Europe had no White flight–until Algerians and Turks and Jamaicans moved in. We had a head start, but their cities have also spread out–they taught us racism, and are being taught our reaction to same.
Nothing happens in the world that isn’t affected by hatred of some fellow man. It’s competitive nature’s birth partner–our teams–my mom–is better than yours. We kept up with the White Jones’ by moving out of the cities–leaving behind our 3/5 brothers and sisters.
“Suppose another straw breaks?”
————————
It is the camel’s back that breaks, not the straw. You need to get your cliche metaphors straight or they just don’t work.
Orrr … maybe there’s some phrase about breaking straws that I’m unaware of?
P.S. Effective immediately, I’m discontinuing my delendus shit list. Zzz is no longer worth the effort and Jennie Rico hasn’t showed (or is it “shown,” help me out here Abbey) her heinous face in quite some time.
Jaego, Damon,
Jaego Scorzne is definitely an interesting name. It has indeterminate origins. I got caught up in a panic when someone googled it on my blog, since I regularly complain about enforcers for the syndicate. I have a habit of naming names. Now I am not so bold. I ran next door and attempted to pound my fist on the bedroom window of the neighbor, gently but I was too agitated, and the fist plunged through the window. I have thirteen inches of stitches.
I had Jeago on my blog and it isn’t “your stuff”, Herman Munster. It’s what happens when you drag a cursor over your own stuff to highlight, select, copy, paste. I’ll never do that again, but your name exists on my site now. Pay me for my time and I’ll expunge it as I have for so many others. I don’t like them and they don’t stand for free love. They close their curtains when they undress.
In actual fact I arose this morning filled with regret, like the song, “Best of My Love”, by the Eagles: “I wake up and worry what’s gonna happen today (1975)”. I said way too many things. The name ‘SEB’ I know is a luxury, so I made the most of it. You can get jewed out of your alias so easily online; coming in as a guest and lamely explaining you’re SEB.
I reread that. It came out with ‘glimly’ in it . I googled glimly. Google said if I was looking for ‘glumly’. I almost clicked. My eye glances down. “One who claims to be offended by words he uses constantly and uses the attention they gain to get his own way.” Hello. That’s right. Well, well. Urban Dictionary. Jaego Scorzne, the syllables are great. Say, “Adolf Hitler’s got nothing on me.” I am glimly claimin’ SEB. It’s a ruckus.
So, I get the fuck up, and I am literally hung over from typing. I’m a word processor. I circle the computer, afraid to sitdown. My wife leaves me alone with it. I need intervention. I go to the bus stop with Nicholas; he’s towing his backpack. he has to bus to the “Language Academy.” The other L-A pupil has a black father and a white mother. The mother’s theme has been to stay positive.
POSITIVE
a) You ask me the question, I give you the truth.
b) You ask, I say I do not have to answer that.
I haven’t met the individual who can get me to compromise myself enough to hand out (b), and I don’t lie. I’m not positive. I tell her this. I tell her my wife receives $200 a week and that has kept her off any payroll for 15 years. The woman says it is a blessing. I tell her it’s a curse. I look at her daughter. That kid is almost not there. I know people who say if a black and white have a baby, it might come out with black-and-white harlequin patches on it. Akkiva threatened his sister that he’d kill it. We all waited for it to be born. Her boyfriend was black. Surprise, surprise! It came out all white, kind of Irish. Akkiva’s friend Dan Haney said he got in there ahead of champ. It were wise.
INTERNET ADDICTION
(a) It’s free.
(b) It’s not anything bad. It’s the written word, fast as light.
Damon gives a rough code breakdown of cooking drugs. He uses the name Acoh, for “acetic”, actual: acetic acid, CH3CH(OH)=O.
minus H equals
CH3
|
CH=O
|
O
|
“acetate”, OAc; pronouncing “Oh”, and “Ah” fast makes a “W”, with an a and with a c makes “Whack”, HOAc, acetic acid. I swear I haven’t been so unprepared on tests that I have looked at these symbols and started pronouncing them to myself, have I?. You say “Ho-whack” to yourself enough times when you are supposed to be blazing through an exam and you’ll quit school. It’s a shame. I have remorse. I just embarrassed myself. I wasted my time at school.
Here I’m doing this. The woman told me she had to go and turned and walked away, tossing her water up against a fence. I was glad she hadn’t thrown it in my face. I told her I was a racist. wtf? I thought-“Hey”. Well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. It seems less important to me now to muster the gall to yell “Nigger!” at every nigger I see. I am going to have to have my manhood based on other terms. Those damn snow tires don’t bust out in song whenever you slap the chains on ’em, is all I know.
“P.S. Effective immediately, I’m discontinuing my delendus shit list.”
Well everybody cares so much. Thank you for informing one and all. (What an endless douche-bag.)
“The dirty secret all along was that by 2005 there was no economy left in the USA beyond the suburban sprawl economy…”
What about the software and pharmaceutical industries? I don’t know how much of the GDP they consist of compared to sprawl building, but they’ve got to constitute a discernable slice of the pie, right? Or have they reached their respective breaking points since ’05 as well?
Goldrodor,
The US is still in the top 10 exporting nations in the world. I think it may still be #1 or just behind China. We just import a lot more goods now than we export, so the balance of trade is negative. When JHK says there is “no economy” beyond suburban sprawl, well, I guess he’s either using hyperbole or he doesn’t know better.
AMR,
Thanks for the excellent and balanced summary of what’s happening in Philly and environs.
I grew up in Collingswood, NJ, 5-10 miles away, and went to St Joe’s on Cityline Ave. One of my son’s went to Philadelphia Univ (at the time known as College of Textiles and Sciences). He liked Philly enough to stay … 10 years now. He lives near 47th and Chester which he refers to as West Philly … on your list of violent areas. The area pop. is roughly 50/50 black/white. He has no knife or gunshot wounds. I asked him if he ever heard of anybody being shot in his neighborhood … he thought for awhile and said, “not really.”
Something you didn’t emphasize is the large number of excellent Universities. Also, the fact that Philly has become a poor man’s NY in respect to “artsy” types who’ve relocated from the Big Apple to lower-cost and less-hyper Philly. Museums out the wahzoo too … and all the Pro Sports.
As to the South St. area discussed by Abbey and others, it still has a honky-tonk atmosphere like the Seaside Park, NJ boardwalk but without the boards and the ocean.
I’ve always liked Philly.
Asia, what he said exactly was given in a newspaper interview of that same day. I wasn’t going to interview him for the second time. I merely prepared the words mentally to question the conventional wisdom on this energy question. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. What if he’d already lied that day? You tell me how to give them a second chance to come clean. All I know is that, while difficult to put my finger on in this blog, Kunstler has repeatedly explained that technology does not substitute for energy. He says the huge societal blind spot extends to the otherwise intelligent, like Professor Hemmers. You can’t be so naiive as to expect that Hemmers said anything. Kunstler has something on Las Vegas itself, the town where Hemmers’ office is …….located. Why not just hit him on that for starters? Make him feel noticed. And notice how Harry Reid clusterfucks this whole thing. Do you expect any other chemistry to be accomplished at UNLV with the “Reid Center” in the limelight and Reid still humping his political agenda through the Senate? What could he gain from it? He’s got a position. Somebody like me is a gnat. Hemmers is 300 lbs,BTW. I mean, there is only so much schnitzel in the world, and he had a smidge more than his allotment.
Do not be fooled by things like “applied molecular and atomic spectroscopy”. First thing, they’ll make it an acronym, like NAMBLA. Then, people turn up in the Department you just never see, and instruments turn up in industry they never teach. The reason is that once somebody hits Niels Bohr status, a word from them kills the alternative theory, and money is pumped into Niels like a crime wave because you let $100,000,000 leave the country, so he travels. Medicine keeps him alive, how far past 65?
n. He was also part of the team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Niels Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century.[
Notice that word “influential”. Do you want that? Let me fuck with this: AND HE WAS ALSO PART OF THE TEAM OF PHYSICISTS WORKING ON THE MANHATTAN PROJECT!!! Bull everloving shit. 10-7-85 to 11-18-62 says he was 58 in 1943. They could barely get the atom bomb made with him around, security risk, kibitzing. He was 1920. “The Copenhagen Theory” meant Niels Bohr. This is Danish! They make ecstasy! Jews live ALL OVER. A criminal from Israel traffics in the drugs because whatever country he’s run out of, the Jewish syndicate is a phone call away in the country he runs to. There’s so much ecstasy they deforested Vietnam and Laos, and are now doing Cambodia.
The atomic and molecular spectroscopy is not spectroscopy at all. It is not just a spectroscope, a scope, an instrument. It is an esoteric mathematical treatment such that the theory explains the spectrographic lines you see in stars, and it starts slow and innocent, but instead of leading to electric power plants, it leads to a self-organizing, self-aggrandizing, runaway money sponge called quantum mechanics. Bohr was created to knock Einstein off his perch. That’s all they care about, not you, not the “real world”. That’s what they called it. Abandon all hope of real solutions all ye who enter academia. They jealously guard their right to entertain only themselves and serve nothing. When the top 10,000 scientists have nothing to offer, they’ll just say, “Well, it was you who fucked up. You trusted us.”
The Hemmers guy equivalent at UCSD was Hans Osterreicher. The approachable chemist was Gerhard Schrauzer. He was a 13-year old German in Germany when all the trains stopped on the tracks, and he got an X-ray machine. He is not a Nazi since he was only 13 when the war ended. He has nerve gases for all occasions. The stumper of a problem of how to get a chemical to sterilize all the niggers has been worked on wrt AIDS prophylaxis, but it’s going to be gene-specific. Notice there are always cover stories and always Copenhagens to carry out the dirty work, clean little towns like Irvine and Los Alamos.
Whenever a scientist works on evil mojo the evil gets to him and deranges him mentally. Watch any movie of it. In the groid sterilization project the Mormon genius must have thought he was the brains, but the business partner thought he was the brains,so, since genius is nest to insanty, the doctor tried to have the CEO killed. Now, I have a PDF called “Hitman” and I’d like to send that to you, Asia, so, say the word, but, although a chunk of the guy’s jaw went flying, he survived. This is in Irvine. My memory’s fogged. Dr. Mormon went home and put a bullet through his head, so the research had a setback. 92209
Another cinematic representation of the flight to suburbia was the movie Marty with Ernest Borgnine. Marty lived with his mother and other annoying family members and friends in the Bronx. Watch the movie and you can almost feel the stifling compression of their small city apartment and what must have been for many city-dwelling, inter-generational family members the desire to just get the hell out of there. Even today cities are no panacea. Marty finally meets his woman and takes off with her to the suburbs. The nuclear family, that is, the single-generational family, was just as much an ideal as suburbia itself.
And don’t forget that during the wave of post-war suburbanization there was an equally strong critique against it and it Grey Flannel Suit breadwinners. Proto-Kunstler elitism was alive and well then, too.
I got a replyto oujust above this, on hemmers. i can’t believe were’ doing the se the secondfunkyday..i gottodo something else,..buy a keyboard
Its important due to the major futuristic energy glut coming our way from biomass, and that’s methanol, and the desirable conversion schemes with their CO2 balance is worked out in a book called,”Energy Victory”. But,it is Kunstler, Orlov and Roubini who are the only breath of fresh air in the world. I hate being intimidated by scientists with their brains and the courts with its police. Until my dying day I’ll deny I’m a witch.
At least this prediction is now time-stamped.
I got a replyto oujust above this, on hemmers. i can’t believe were’ doing the se the secondfunkyday..i gottodo something else,..buy a keyboard
Its important due to the major futuristic energy glut coming our way from biomass, and that’s methanol, and the desirable conversion schemes with their CO2 balance is worked out in a book called,”Energy Victory”. But,it is Kunstler, Orlov and Roubini who are the only breath of fresh air in the world. I hate being intimidated by scientists with their brains and the courts with its police. Until my dying day I’ll deny I’m a witch.
At least this prediction is now time-stamped.
This line interests me: “It will not destroy the function of capital — no matter how many angry intellectuals inveigh against the straw man of capital-ism,…” I tend to think the function of capital is changing – it is shifting away from having a role in everything, at least if you define capital as money. Said differently, the constituency of capital is shifting to include more and more people as capital, community as capital, systems as capital, collaborative process as capital, new world views and values as capital (such as the Earth Charter) and remembering other modes of knowing as capital. What this means is, really, it isn’t capitalism any more (and we’re not in Kansas…). And, too, I disagree that capitalism is a straw man in the argument or effort to understand what is happening. To the significant extent that capitalism has supplied the abstraction (capital) to which we have exclusively focused while forgetting what is real, capitalism is the the red, round, bulbous nose on the face of our divorce from reality. Hence the allusions to awakening from a ‘dream’. So, yea, the function of capital will continue to exist, but maybe we can find a better word when capitalism is dead and buried.
I got a reply to you just above this, on Hemmers. I can’t believe were’ doing the se the secondfunkyday..i gotto do something else,..buy a keyboard
Its important due to the major futuristic energy glut coming our way from biomass, and that’s methanol, and the desirable conversion schemes with their CO2 balance is worked out in a book called,”Energy Victory”. But,it is Kunstler, Orlov and Roubini who are the only breath of fresh air in the world. I hate being intimidated by scientists with their brains and the courts with its police. Until my dying day I’ll deny I’m a witch.
At least this prediction is now time-stamped.
But, the comments section and sign in function (and my keyboard) have some glitches, but the screaming of all cap-s makes it look like our minds have glitches. i suggest we both lookup the html tags for style and italicize from now on.
My 200 million figure was so as to alienate one sector of the populace from another, implying as a joke (but really meaning it) that 200 million could strangle 115 million, or, in the way of the French, as they are a funny race.
I only care about science, as do many others, and we regularly slow down muzzle velocity on high-powered rifles to study the ballistics. We just don’t shear off heads. We don’t even do that. Bullets are not at all what we call fast. Crime labs are not labs. The Rad Lab’s a lab.
Okay …… everybody got that? (Q scans the room) There’ll be a quiz tomorrow.
I never much cared for either Ralph Kramden or Jackie Gleason…rather unsavory people.
“i suggest we both lookup the html tags for style and italicize from now on.”
SEB,
Below would be my handle italicized if you simply remove the spaces in everything that precedes Q and everything following K.
QSHTIK
I also leave no space between > and Q and none between K and
Ooops, those html tags apparently can’t be shown even if you try to game the system by using spaces.
OK, let me try it by putting everything in a vertical column:
Q
S
H
T
I
K
The bastard still won’t show all the characters. There are two missing characters in my prior post, a
I give up.
what about all the [rumored?] DEAD MICROBIOLOGISTS
and the baxter tainted flu vaccine???
My understanding of ACORN is they helped 5 Million illegals get low income mortgages!
Kinda like WESTSIDE STORY….where they sing about ‘ everything free in america’
and those who have to state 5 or 8x how unimp. Acorn is..like shakespeare…’ my dear thou protest a little too much’
Jim & other peak oilers should read the latest TomDispatch (Tom Englehardt’s blog) with its post by Michael Clare. He confirms your fears & spins out the results.
You and I can’t communicate, now, except on a very
limited way {too many assumptions to overcome}. It’s probably best to wait until you are curious instead of me.
Beck can’t admit he’s a fascist and you can’t admit you are an asshole. Never heard such stupidity from you, you have reached a new level inhabited by only you. Nobody can tell you anything negative about Obama, I’ll wager. Nobody. Why? You have an answer for his lack of promised transparency? What about the Eric Holder CIA shaft job while your man Obama pretends he is against crucifying the agency? Transparent? You need to apply for Robert Gibbs’ job, you have the power of denial down to a T. Obama is sinking like a stone and you and Charlie Gibson won’t touch the story. You simply lack integrity, your labeling of everybody as a Nazi or Fascist seems to act like a stomach tonic to your acidic behavior. You have never been able to call a spade a spade. You are afflicted with ambivalence, unlike Beck who says what is on his mind. Nature abhors a vacuum, yet there is one between your ears. Still trying to get approval from adults, aren’t you?
OK, let me try it by putting everything in a vertical column:
i
>
Q
S
H
T
I
K
/
i
>
Perfect. Now shove ’em up your silly ass.
Mr. Kunstler is so correct. The entire firestorm that melted down the economy came out of subdivision development with low interest rates, affordable mortgages allowing homeowners to use the structure as an ATM machine so as to increase their debt levels while accumulating stuff, vacations, and more.
That has ended. Now, those homes are becoming empty. New home construction has virtually stopped. ARM mortgages are coming due, and commercial real estate is finding itself in foreclosure.
The only way to teach Wall Street a big-time lesson would be to sell off your entire equities and bond portfolio. I am suggesting that this be done on October 23, 2009. Sell it all! Let them know that the manipulation of the market MUST end. Tell Geithner and Obama that the game is up and the working American will no longer play. Whatever you have left, move it into cash and money funds. Find a local or regional bank and stick your stock sell-off cash there. The market will drop 1000 to 2000 points in a day or two. The game is up Wall Street. later, you can buy low, yet Wall Street will never know when this sell off will happen again.
Make Youtube videos of this plan and let it go viral.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
Brilliant plan….if your intent is to crash world markets and drive us into a world wide depression lasting years. Bravo, Jerry. A big hizzah to the ole Jer. (Not.)
“sell off your entire equities and bond portfolio. I am suggesting that this be done on October 23, 2009.”
————————-
Jerry, when I read your idea I said to myself, “who is this clown?” This is a joke right? You obviously have no clue how the market works. First of all, how much clout do you have? Who’s going to follow your lead? Maybe your poor aged mother who has Alzheimers and you have power of attorney? And maybe your unemployed fool of a brother-in-law who owns 37 shares of some “dog shit” penny stock (Michael Douglas, Wall Street). Yeah right, I’ll be watching for the market to go into a tailspin on Oct 23rd.
Anyway, I checked out what you actually do for a living. Others reading this blog are encouraged to view your site.
http://jerrytheclown.com/
P.S. Don’t quit your day job.
Hey listen Punk, you need to get some humility. You are the product of a completely corrupt educational system that has lied to you about everything. Ok, a good place to start is with Thomas Jefferson and the Jefferson Memorial. Inscribed on the Memorial is a quote from Jefferson, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (the Negroes) shall be free.” The problem is that this isn’t the complete quote. The real quote is, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (the Negroes) shall be fee; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live under the same goverment.” The bastards changed a semicolon into a period and aborted the full quote-thus changing the whole meaning. They lied in stone about one of our Founding Fathers. Jefferson said in another place, “Once freed, (the Negro) is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.” These guys were terrified of miscegenation and wanted to protect America’s future by deporting all Blacks.
To this end, they formed the American Colonization Society. Some of the names, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Gen. Winfiled Scott, John Marshall and Roger Taney. Ever hear of any of these?
During the Lincoln-Douglas debate, Lincoln said, “I an not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
So there you have it. Don’t feel bad, you have been betrayed by this society which lies about everything. But at the same time don’t remain in ignorance. YOU go down to the bookstore-the library would be better, and YOU study the issue. I already have as have Dale and Abbey btw. As I said earlier, the extreme Left and Right both know their facts-it’s everyone in the middle who is confused. The difference is in our Values and our Vision. They want to destroy the White Race as a way of destroying Western Civilization. For some weird reason, possibly part of their Theology, White Racial Awareness is totally evil, but other races are encouraged to feel good about themselves. Or it might just be a tactic-get rid of the most powerful, the Whites, and then get to work on the Asians, Arabs, Slavs, and finally one imagines, even the Blacks. Who knows, probably not even them. They are so focused in hate that they don’t even think about the long term. Maybe their superiors do though.
In contrast, White Nationalists want to preserve the White Man and His Civilization-the greatest ever created as far as we know. Also known as Western Civilization. Once you study up, you’ll have to make a choice about what you value. To stay in the middle would be a cop out-acting as if you still didn’t know the facts.
OK podner-we’re kopasemitic.
Don’t try this at home I should have said. And I realized that’s the rub-the bottle top is way too small. One will have to get ones hands dirty. But since you’ve already started, shove the bottle up your ass.
Yeah, well Tom knocked up Sally, the earth isn’t flat and the sun does not revolve around the earth.
JS said: “These guys were terrified of miscegenation and wanted to protect America’s future by deporting all Blacks.”
And they were wrong to be terrified because Love knows no racial boundaries. Miscegenation is destiny, it is inevitable, and it is desirable, as the 200+ years of history since “those guys” has demonstrated.
When the races are mixed and there are no more people who believe themselves to be “pure” … then we will have no more genocides and no more “ethnic cleansing”.
The sooner the better.
Love will triumph.
Ask the leaders of twenty of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations to hold an upcoming G20 Summit in Africa, to focus the world’s attention on how Africa can and must be part of any successful economic recovery.
The nation that hosts a G20 summit helps set the agenda, and bringing the G20 to Africa would focus the world on this market of 1 billion people like never before. And, with world leaders headed to Pittsburgh for a summit September 24-25, now is the perfect time to ask them to look to Africa for one of their next meetings.
http://www.one.org/international/g20toafrica/index.html?rc=g20toafricataf
Yeah, the whole Mumia thing illustrates the complete madnesss of the Left. The Officer’s Wife wrote a great book about her decades long fight for her husbands honor against these creeps. Called “Murdered by Mumia”.
I’m glad Tawana is doing something good with her life other than smearing herself with feces and then blaming White Cops. Most Blacks still believe her or pretend to because they hate Whites. The would do the same thing for OJ. The real mystery is why a man of your intelligence thinks that we can ever live in peace with these people. Rodney King’s question, “Can’t we all just get along?” The answer is No according to the Founding Fathers. White Nationalism is as American as Apple Pie. All the Presidents up to JFK were White Nationalists-at least privately. All history written after WW2 was tending towards revisionism. Everything after 1960 or so was a blatant lie. The Revolution in America was from the Top Down starting with the Federal Reserve Act, the New Deal, etc. Education reform via John Dewey and the NEA was working in parallel. A vast inerlocking network was gradually created-the Leftist Professors already in place, produced indoctrinated graduates ready to fill places in goverment and industry and implement the new culture of Globalism and Anti-Nationalism/Anti-White Racism. The long march through the institutions called for by Adorno and Gramsci was thus effected with nary a hitch. A brilliant and monumental achievment of Subversion on unprecedented scale. Patriots have been fighting a desperate battle behind their own lines. It took decades for us to realize even what had happened. But before we can launch a counter offensive they plan to have us down to minority status-using our own misunderstood traditions of freedom to do it. Where do Blacks fit in? They have been the battering ram. On their own, they are too disorganized to present any real threat, but organized by unseen hands, and they have proven to be a most potent weapon against the White Man and His Civilization.
JS said: “…have proven to be a most potent weapon against the White Man and His Civilization.”
Yes, “White Civilization” reached a peak in the 20th century. And the fruit of that “civilization” was state-organized genocides: Stalin’s Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Bosnia in the 1990s.
The world might be better with less “white civiization” … the world was cheated of the potential contributions of millions who died horrific deaths.
“The Obama administration will announce a new policy Wednesday making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping, according to two senior Justice Department officials.”
So, Obama wants to make it more difficult for government to commit crimes and then hide the evidence by classifying it as a “state secret”
New boss. Not like the old boss.
About zzzz I am not referring to content but to zzzzz’s style. Just a way with words when the usual are not being repeated over and over. Theonly one who makes me laugh here.
Still don’t agree with anything usually that zzzz says, which I did say in the first comment about this.
sqshdk you have a disturbing way of responding to something out of context and then spinning it. I guess you learned your lesson well from Karl Rove. Comes out of propaganda 101. So only clever with not so smart people.
I’m not covering for him. I think also that he has given away the store. I think he doesn’t see what’s coming at him. It’s a shame. He had it in the palm of his hand and let it slip. But it’s the same pattern of his grandfather and father.
Orwell wrote a story about the same thing. Only the one they helped was a nazi who turned on them and killed them.
I forget the Chinese saying but the one who owes you his life will hate you.
Be very careful whom you save. And trust me, I know.
Oh please.All my graduate studies were paid for by grants, NASA, etc. I never had to pay any of it.
zzzzz, great work. You’re comments are always interesting.
…and I love the beat downs!
zzzzz, great work. Your comments are always interesting.
…and I love the beat downs!
Very nice. It’s all a sophisticated game of cops and robbers, eh?
shown IMHO instead of showed but it is definitely in flux. Don’t know which one will win out. Any guesses?
Marcuse goes on about capitalism being likepac man, eating everything and making it part of the problem. MMoore says the same about his movies. They fund them and distribute them because they make money even though they are questioning the fundamentals of capitalism and corporate power.
Houellebecq spends many pages on how captitalism has taken over interpersonal relations,in particular sex.
What have you got against comments that are detailed and intelligent.
O I get it, you are mentally challenged. Sorry.
And Jerry is going to buy puts and make a fortune.
Bahmi,
Mensa isn’t that smart, either. By and far most of the active members in my local chapter live in UrbanSprawlLand. I can only go to a few social events because they are out of reach of mass transit. The local chapter has been good enough the past few years to have their large gathering at a hotel that is on a bus line. They are now considering getting rid of that. Worse, the national headquarters moved from eminently accessible Brooklyn to Arlington, Texas. Arlington has two “park-and-ride” lots at the edge for the Fort Worth buses. That’s it for mass transit for a city of 300,000 people. Smart, hunh? They just spent well over a megabuck (half their annual budget) on a lawsuit it lost so I wonder how much longer I, a 20-year member, will stay if they do goofy things like that anyway.
Lenin, part Jewish and Mongolian, Trotsky, Jew, Stalin, a Georgian Monster-killed tens of millions of White Christians. They were Western Civilization-not the Communists. Yet you try to blame the death of these people on Western Civilization. Have some decency.
There you have it-Asoka makes my point for me. They intend to genocide us thru forced mixing. And they call this love. A funny kind of love which is non different than hate in its results. Maybe Blacks don’t have anything to lose thru such an ammalgamation, but we clearly do. And in fact, Blacks who really love themselves, such as the Nation of Islam, are against miscegenation. They consider Whites inferior. More power to them. We can cooperate with people like that to mutual advantage. But to the Asokas of the World-nothing.
The Asokas want to undo evolution and drag the world back to some undifferentiated state. Evolution on the contrary, is always differentiating, producing new strains and ultimately new species. Whites are on their way to becoming an new species-we mustn’t let ourselves be dragged back into the common herd as Communism would have us do. They want to stop us-they hate us for our Beauty, Intelligence, and Accomplishment. The Blacks hate us the most because they have accomplished the least. So in their infinite egotism and malice, they criticize our History and mistakes. They have no history and they are a mistake.
On my way to our 170-acre ranch, I drive through McGregor, Texas, pop. about 4,000. Prominent on the door of a building with a Texas flag and a Don’t tread on me flag is a weekly commentary of obnoxious right-wing nonsense. The latest is a picture of Obama, with the caption “Somewhere in Kenya or Indonesia, a village is missing it’s (sic) idiot.” This is one of the nicer things said. The comments are always racist, small-minded, angry, and treasonous. Whoever is responsible for these commentaries really needs to be tied to a post and whipped soundly. But this is small-town America. I prefer the isolation of our ranch (inherited) and the company of our two goats and five chickens (all pets). We are dependent on two vehicles for getting back and forth, but we have old, efficient vehicles and hope we can keep up our commuting. We also have a home in Austin. We can hold out longer than most. We both live on fixed incomes, but we live pretty well. I worry about our children and grandchildren. I’m not worried about the goats and chickens.
The truth about voter registration and ACORN
ACORN, as many groups do, paid individuals to man voter registration booths in some of the cities in which they have offices. The registrars got paid by the number of new registration forms brought in. When the forms were returned ACORN noticed some were filled out by false names…Daffy Duck….whatever. By law, ACORN is required to submit every filled out registration form they receive regardless of the names used. It should be obvious to everyone why that legal requirement exists.
ACORN submitted the forms, as required by law, but separated out some of the more obvious false registrations for the purpose of notification of the county offices involved. These false registrations were picked up by RW radio and inexplicably used to try and accuse ACORN of falsely registering voters. As if Daffy Duck was going to show up to vote!
ACORN employees about 700 people nationwide, most I’m sure are paid very low wages. Most of their work involves helping low income people find housing or secure mortgages, people who otherwise don’t understand the borrowing process and have no experience with lending organizations. Most people here have no idea how inaccessible the mortgage market can seem, and how easily abused low income people can be by irresponsible lending officers
As I said before, I’ve never met an ACORN employee or seen an ACORN office. I really couldn’t care less if they survive or not, I’m sure if they fail another organization will rise in their place to continue any good work they may have done.
What is also obvious is that in terms of threats to our society, a group of poorly funded community organizers is a strange place to focus ones rage on, how could that happen? How could it be that with the 100’s of billions of dollars in graft and pork being misused each year out of public funds that this one little organization, with it’s measly 2-3 million a year in public funding (now revoked) is receiving so much attention? Hummm……I wonder?
” The comments are always racist, small-minded, angry, and treasonous. Whoever is responsible for these commentaries really needs to be tied to a post and whipped soundly. ”
The particular example you cite possibly represents small-mindedness and anger. However, it does not qualify as racist or treasonous. You wishing to whip the poster “soundly” represents anger and small mindedness. In that you tie in negative attributes. However, if the poster is of a different race or religion than you and you were prosecuted for actually whipping them you could also be tried for perpetrating a hate crime. That means you would be guilty of racism as well.
Gadzooks, you sound like you might be a small minded, angry person with possible racist tendencies.
Had “evolution” been allowed to continue as you suggest it should, then you wouldn’t be here.
If GB and the US hadn’t interfered to prevent “survival of the fittest” from becoming the predominant political value in Europe during the 1940’s, you and your Slavic brothers would no doubt have died as slaves of the Nazi Reich.
“Hummm……I wonder?”
You wonder? Well possibly because you won’t let it go. ACORN is corrupt. ACORN registered over one million voters but did so using fraudulent means. That can change elections. That is a threat to our republic. Below are instances of ACORN’s corrupt means. NOW, dale, Shut the Fee-Yuk Up. You are as stupid as ACORN is corrupt.
“Although the organization prides itself for its registration efforts, it also has a long history of scandal. In the state of Missouri in 1986, 12 ACORN members were convicted of voter fraud. But that case was not an isolated incident in the state. In December 2004, in St. Louis, six volunteers pleaded guilty of dozens of election law violations for filling out registration cards with names of dead people and other bogus information. Authorities launched an earlier investigation after noticing that among the new voters was longtime St. Louis alderman Albert “Red” Villa, who died in 1990. The volunteers worked for “Operation Big Vote” — a branch of ACORN — in St. Louis.
On February 10, 2005, Nonaresa Montgomery, a paid worker who ran Operation Big Vote during the run-up to the 2001 mayoral primary, was found guilty of vote fraud. Montgomery hired about 30 workers to do fraudulent voter-registration canvassing. Instead of knocking on doors, the volunteers sat at a St. Louis fast food restaurant and wrote out names and information from an outdated voter list. About 1,500 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in.
In October 2006, St. Louis election officials discovered at least 1,492 “potentially fraudulent” voter registration cards. They were all turned in by ACORN volunteers.
In November 2006, 20,000 to 35,000 questionable voter registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials in Missouri. Most all of these were from St. Louis and Kansas City areas, where ACORN purportedly sought to help empower the “disenfranchised” minorities living there. But the ACORN workers weren’t just told to register new voters. The workers admitted on camera that they were coached to tell registrants to vote for Democrat Claire McCaskill.
In 2007, in Kansas City, Missouri, four ACORN employees were indicted for fraud. In April of this year eight ACORN employees in St. Louis city and county pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting bogus voter registrations.
And, that was just Missouri.
This year there have been several accusations of fraud against ACORN. Over a dozen states are investigating the organization already. Here is a complete list of the ongoing investigations:
North Carolina — State Board of Elections officials have found at least 100 voter registration forms with the same names over and over again. The forms were turned in by ACORN. Officials sent about 30 applications to the state Board of Elections for possible fraud investigation.
Ohio — The New York Post reported that a Cleveland man said he was given cash and cigarettes by aggressive ACORN activists in exchange for registering an astonishing 72 times. The complaints have sparked an investigation by election officials into the organization, whose political wing has supported Barack Obama. Witnesses have already been subpoenaed to testify against the organization.
Nevada — Authorities raided the headquarters of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now on Tuesday October 7, 2008, after a month-long investigation. The fraudulent voter registrations included the Dallas Cowboys starting line-up.
Indiana — More than 2,000 voter registration forms filed in northern Indiana’s Lake County filled out by ACORN employees turned out to be bogus. Officials also stopped processing a stack of about 5,000 applications delivered just before the October 6 registration deadline after the first 2,100 turned out to be phony.
Connecticut — Officials are looking into a complaint alleging ACORN submitted fraudulent voter registration cards in Bridgeport. In one instance, an official said a card was filled out for a 7-year-old girl, whose age was listed as 27. 8,000 cards were submitted in Bridgeport.
Missouri — The Kansas City election board is reporting 100 duplicate applications and 280 with fake information. Acorn officials agreed that at least 4% of their registrations were bogus. Governor Matt Blunt condemned the attempts by ACORN to commit voter fraud.
Pennsylvania — Officials are investigating suspicious or incomplete registration forms submitted by ACORN. 252,595 voter registrations were submitted in Philadelphia. Remarkably, 57,435 were rejected — most of them submitted by ACORN.
Wisconsin — In Milwaukee ACORN improperly used felons as registration workers. Additionally, its workers are among 49 cases of bad registrations sent to authorities for possible charges, as first reported by the Journal Sentinel.
Florida — The Pinellas County Elections supervisor says his office has received around 35 voter registrations that appear to be bogus. There is also a question of 30,000 felons who are registered illegally to vote. Their connections with ACORN are not yet clear.
Texas — Of the 30,000 registration cards ACORN turned in, Harris County tax assessor Paul Bettencourt says just more than 20,000 are valid. And just look at some of the places ACORN was finding those voters. A church just next door is the address for around 150 people. More than 250 people claim a homeless outreach center as their home address. Some listed a county mental health facility as their home and one person even wrote down the Harris County jail at the sheriff’s office.
Michigan — ACORN in Detroit is being investigated after several municipal clerks reported fraudulent and duplicate voter registration applications coming through. The clerk interviewed said the fraud appears to be widespread.
New Mexico – The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in by ACORN”
I’m pretty sure you haven’t been involved in voter registration efforts. I have, and it isn’t what you think it is.
Without any fraud involved, I would guess that at least 20% of the forms I received from field reps were problematic. Repeat registrations (people forget) wrong addresses (students who use their parents home as their place of residence, for example) misspelled names, registering under married and maiden names, wrong zip codes…..the list goes on and on. Any of those could be grounds for disqualification of a voter at a precinct.
Most people doing the registering are either volunteers or low paid workers, in the later case there is little incentive to be accurate and often there are monetary incentives to turn in large numbers of forms. Voter registration is a very haphazard process and there is a lot of politics around preventing it from becoming too controlled due to past efforts to use that control process as a way to prevent different classes of people from registrating. That’s the simple truth…..errors (much more frequent than “fraud”, I’m sure) are a big part of the system.
In ACORN’s case they seem to have made definite efforts to get large numbers of registrants without much quality control. For that, they deserve to have their VR efforts stopped. That ACORN is systematically involved in any effort to change elections is absurdly hyperbolic. I mean really….do you actually believe this pathetic little organization could have that much of an impact?
If you want to change elections, look to the FL Republican Party and SCOTUS. When it happens, that’s how it happens, Dem or Repub. It ain’t the little guy who is screwing with elections, never was, never will be.
Well, Snoozzze off, you know nothing about me, but you label me anyway. Tells far more about you than about me. The signs I speak of are printed in large letters and are the size of a large door. And they appear in a new iteration, week after week. What they have said about Michelle Obama and our president and his children would easily qualify for the tag racist. You would have to have seen the dozens and dozens of these repulsive signs. It’s true that they make me angry, and there is nothing I can do about it. The public whipping idea is about the only way I can express my loathing of the kind of thinking that this person or persons intrudes on the consciousness of local folks. I always drive through fast. On my way, by the way, to Crawford, which I also drive through fast. Not that I disobey any laws. One does not drive through these little towns unlawfully fast, as that gives the local police the opportunity they have been waiting for.
BTW—–consider the following quote from you,(no doubt lifted off a RW website somewhere):
“The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in by ACORN””
I can tell you from experience that if you change just one word “fraudulent” to “incorrect”, that statement would be true for EVERY voter registration effort in this country, of any meaningful size, in that last 10 years. In fact, for most efforts, that would be a radical underestimation.
It’s easy to skew the meaning with just one word, yes?
If there is anything dumber than being a racist, it’s being a stooge of racists.
Well, Snoozzze off, you know nothing about me, but you label me anyway. Tells far more about you than about me. The signs I speak of are printed in large letters and are the size of a large door. And they appear in a new iteration, week after week. What they have said about Michelle Obama and our president and his children would easily qualify for the tag racist. You would have to have seen the dozens and dozens of these repulsive signs. It’s true that they make me angry, and there is nothing I can do about it. The public whipping idea is about the only way I can express my loathing of the kind of thinking that this person or persons intrudes on the consciousness of local folks. I always drive through fast. On my way, by the way, to Crawford, which I also drive through fast. Not that I disobey any laws. One does not drive through these little towns unlawfully fast, as that gives the local police the opportunity they have been waiting for.
BTW—–consider the following quote from you,(no doubt lifted off a RW website somewhere):
“The Bernalillo County clerk has notified prosecutors that some 1,100 fraudulent voter registration cards were turned in by ACORN””
I can tell you from experience that if you change just one word “fraudulent” to “incorrect”, that statement would be true for EVERY voter registration effort in this country, of any meaningful size, in that last 10 years. In fact, for most efforts, that would be a radical underestimation.
It’s easy to skew the meaning with just one word, yes?
If there is anything dumber than being a racist, it’s being a stooge of racists.
” The signs I speak of are printed in large letters and are the size of a large door. And they appear in a new iteration, week after week.”
Well maybe you should cite them because the one you chose did not qualify as being racist or treasonous.
Well, Snoozzze off, you know nothing about me, but you label me anyway. Tells far more about you than about me. The signs I speak of are printed in large letters and are the size of a large door. And they appear in a new iteration, week after week. What they have said about Michelle Obama and our president and his children would easily qualify for the tag racist. You would have to have seen the dozens and dozens of these repulsive signs. It’s true that they make me angry, and there is nothing I can do about it. The public whipping idea is about the only way I can express my loathing of the kind of thinking that this person or persons intrudes on the consciousness of local folks. I always drive through fast. On my way, by the way, to Crawford, which I also drive through fast. Not that I disobey any laws. One does not drive through these little towns unlawfully fast, as that gives the local police the opportunity they have been waiting for.
“I’m pretty sure you haven’t been involved in voter registration efforts. I have, and it isn’t what you think it is.”
The truth comes out. Fucking dumber-than-dale works for ACORN. Well wonders never cease.
Bwa ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ho, he hehehehehehehehehehehe. Stop, dale, you’re killing me he hehehehehehehehe.
Thanks for the chuckle, d-t-d.
Well, Snoozzze off, you know nothing about me, but you label me anyway. Tells far more about you than about me. The signs I speak of are printed in large letters and are the size of a large door. And they appear in a new iteration, week after week. What they have said about Michelle Obama and our president and his children would easily qualify for the tag racist. You would have to have seen the dozens and dozens of these repulsive signs. It’s true that they make me angry, and there is nothing I can do about it. The public whipping idea is about the only way I can express my loathing of the kind of thinking that this person or persons intrudes on the consciousness of local folks. I always drive through fast. On my way, by the way, to Crawford, which I also drive through fast. Not that I disobey any laws. One does not drive through these little towns unlawfully fast, as that gives the local police the opportunity they have been waiting for.
“If there is anything dumber than being a racist, it’s being a stooge of racists.”
Ohoooo, Dumber-than-dale plays the “racist” card. Hey d-t-d, talk about taking one out of a tired playbook. Of course I’d ask you to back up your charge but you are incapable of backing up your toilet paper by folding the sheets in half. What a maroon
Lastly, as I mentioned, when you receive Registration forms you legally MUST turn them in. So, turning in inaccurate registration forms is not unlawful, not turning them in is.
If someone comes into your office with 1,000 forms all filled out to Donald Duck, you would lawfully have to turn them into the County Registrar.
I’m sure the local prosecutor in Bernalillo (or wherever) gave a large yawn when he was so “notified” by local political operatives.
Twisting language to suggest that it’s unlawful, or melicious, to turn such forms in is just one of the ways the RW spin machine uses to try and obscure the facts.
“Lastly, as I mentioned, when you receive Registration forms you legally MUST turn them in. So, turning in inaccurate registration forms is not unlawful, not turning them in is.”
There is no end of your effort to explain away the corruption that is ACORN. It is pathetic. Now you want to place their actions in the hands of some nefarious group that is out to get them.
You are the kid with a hammer standing next to the broken piggy bank, “I didn’t do it. It was the uh….racists.”
“Sure you didn’t, little dumber-than-dale”, your mommy reassures.
And we wonder why we end up with semi-adult dumber-than-dales? Go fucking figure.
“I’m sure the local prosecutor in Bernalillo (or wherever) gave a large yawn when he was so “notified” by local political operatives.”
dumber-than dale is “sure”? And this is based on…what, air,
the ether that substitutes for your brain?
“Lastly, as I mentioned, when you receive Registration forms you legally MUST turn them in. So, turning in inaccurate registration forms is not unlawful, not turning them in is.”
Thanks for repeating that paragraph for me, it nice to see you helping to get the truth out. A law that is easily verified by any who doubt it.
“Thanks for repeating that paragraph…”
You’re welcome. Here is another repeat:
“You are the kid with a hammer standing next to the broken piggy bank, “I didn’t do it. It was the uh….racists.”
wee-wee choir
we require
True, there are overt signs of racism in America against the idiot Obama and his family. This is unfortunate, indeed. As the Obummer himself says, voting against him because he’s black is racist, but voting for him just because he’s black is also racist. One of his very, very rare observations that makes much sense, as he’s riled up race relations in this country considerably. His support of Van Jones is very racist. Despite knowing what sort of knee jerk wackjob Jones was and is, he still chose the fool. Like, he dares Whitey to oppose his sacred choices ‘cuz he’s the man, he got elected, he did.
Obama is headed for the OK Corral, though. Even his young airhead supporters are getting antsy ‘cuz Obama is not delivering what he promised to his supporters, young and stupid as many of them are. His tirade against the United States today at the UN is case in point. Basically, Bobster, he said your contributions to the unified cause here in the States is all for naught. Sure, you may be a veteran, but Obama says you contributed only to the ugly American image abroad. You may have a successful business, employing many folks with a good salary and benefits, but Obama says you suck ‘cuz you one of the goddam capitalist freaks. Y’all vote for him,Bobster? Your president, so much more intelligent and suave than the Crawford guy with the ranch says you eat shit, you filthy capitalistic American. Still nice to know you drive through Crawford fast, but not illegal, of course. Durn cops would be plum delighted to arrest you for breaking the law, just be gigglin’ when they put the cuffs on you. Well, your guy won, he says so hisself. He’s the Kingfish, don’t you ever forget that. Gonna lead us to the promised land where everybody in the world is flattered by Obama tellin’ ’em we suck.
and yr rants are:
‘[to be avoided]….hate filled diatribes’
…was that the wording ?
If acorn doesnt matter whys the posts goin on now for a week or 2
re:
‘this market of 1 billion people like never before’
ASOKA…you do get it
the africans want to be left alone or have things on there therms
They dont want china buying their assets and competing with them there by building hotels and stores.
Read ‘ investment biker’ and ‘ adventure capitalist’
both are written by soros former partner and one was a best seller
MARKETS ARE OPENED BY THE BIG FISH TO SWALLOW THE SMALL’…and eat them alive
They dont want their plants and animals genes patented
i think there was a case in new guinea?
they took the guys rare blood or genes and patented them and he sued.
theres another book
‘ the ownership of all life’
thats why rockefeller/ buffet/gates went to china etc.
maroon =
moron
SEB + ? = ?
DOO BEE SAYS…behave yrself here or peeps will write mean things about you
you cite possibly represents small-mindedness and anger.
POSSIBLY?????????????????
you were expecting otherwise???????????????????
Just hit submit once
it usually works even if it seems like it doesnt seem to be working
an nice to hear you got thru Crawford
whats texas like now? unusually dry?
sorry
i meant ‘DONT’ but typed do
and meant TERMS not therms
“I’m sure the local prosecutor in Bernalillo (or wherever) gave a large yawn when he was so “notified” by local political operatives.”
———————–
And this is based on…what?
————————
You need to stop jerking off to Tom Sizemore and let a little blood get to your brain, McStooge.
Since turning in filled out registration forms is required, and fraud is proven in court, not decided by a Republican operative, and since you didn’t even suggest any charges were filed, the only reasonable conclusion to come to is that it was not even taken seriously.
Of course, if you have an update to this story with proof that charges were filed and people were convicted, I’d be happy to apologize.
Why do I think that the chances of that are, let’s see….slim to none? Because in the world of Little Green Footballs or wherever you got this bullshit, the accusation is all that matters.
What a gullible fucking child you are.
Just figured it out, Jaego is writing from prison. Explains all the racism, his having been beaten up by black thugs, posts about Jenkum, etc. It’s all the stuff that has been covered in MSNBC’s “Locked Up.” Jaego is writing prison-speak with every post. Glad he’s in there and not out here, that’s all I can say.
The truth about voter fraud here: http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/case_studies_by_issue/
The truth is, while probably millions of people are double registered (usually for innocent reasons) studies show that incidents of multiple voting are statistically very rare and have never been shown to be an issue in the outcome of elections. As I mentioned earlier, elections, when they are stolen, are done so at a much higher level. Fraudulent reporting of results, voter machine fraud, intentionally misleading ballots etc. Does double voting happen? Sure…..but no where near enough to have any effect on the outcome of elections. When one factors in that this is probably done by supports of both sides it is reasonable to conclude that they are most likely self canceling.
So…..for one last time……why all the hoohah about ACORN and voter registration? Because it gave the RW of the Republican Party the opportunity to run up the idea that “black activists” were trying to “steal the election”, a charge totally unsupported by the facts but guaranteed to rile up the knuckle dragging R-wingers who need very little excuse to get all riled up.
I don’t give a shit about ACORN, but I do care about a major party consistently using race as an issue. If this whole canard about ACORN isn’t racism, then nothing is.
I want to clear up some old business. Bolded below is an opening that Zzz can drive an 18-wheeler of insult through; I just hope when he does it’s something fresh and new for a change and worth a chuckle:
In case anyone gives a shit, I predicted in August that the bear market would resume on Sept 8th. Well, obviously, it hasen’t. The logic for the prediction being impeccable, at least in my mind, should have been evidence enough that precisely the opposite would happen … based on contrarianism, which everyone on Wall St professes faith in.
I also named two ETF bond funds and prices at which I thought they would be good buys. Their symbols are TBT and TMV. The prices of these funds will rise when long term interest rates rise. It is a certainty on a par with death and taxes that this will happen some time in the future but when is the big unknown.
I stand by my recommendation of TBT @ $45.75 (it’s $46.12 as we speak) but I’m pulling my recommendation on TMV for the following reasons: it is relatively illiquid (i.e. has a low avg daily trading volume) and, as a result, often has a wide gap between bid and ask. This generally does not work in favor of the “little guy” either when buying or selling. Secondly, being a triple levered fund it is even more volatile than the double levered TBT fund and I am, for the most part, a risk averse person.
I’m telling you all this in the event some reader out there might base an investment decision on something I said just because I claim to have spent a lifetime as a student of the markets … which often doesn’t mean shit.
Sorry folks. My last comment was repeated several because I could get no feedback from JHK’s site to confirm my comment had been recorded. The upshot was it was recorded, I think, three times. Interesting, though, it gave some jerk the opportunity to spew ill-mannered and ill-tempered nonsense in reply. Congratulations, or something, JHK. Apparently you will let anybody say anything as a comment. And why the vendetta toward ACORN? I am in favor of anyone and everyone’s being registered to vote. If the registration is false, then no vote will ensue. But ACORN performs a very valuable service. Too bad you right-wing-nuts are so worked up about it. Why don’t YOU get out and register voters?
Jail would explain a lot but do they let cons sit around all day blogging on a laptop? I thought it was supposed to be Crime and Punishment. Crime, 3 hots and a cot, plus blogging sounds not too bad to me.
Bobster, don’t feel like the lone ranger about this friggin CFN software … I am so pissed I can’t see straight. I spent time today crafting a reply to someone, sent it off into cyberspace and it never came back. When that happens I get discouraged and refuse to try to reconstruct it. There’s only so much fucking time in life. JHK take note.
“What a gullible fucking child you are.”
Right dale. Looks like the IRS is gullible too. You are fucking dumber than a box of water. And a liar to boot. You keep defending the corruption that is rife within ACORN and then say you don’t give a fuck about ACORN.
Its really about racism if one has an issue with ACORN, you state. Any criticism regarding ACORN or Obama or his policies are racist. How the fuck does that work? I mean if an African-American isn’t crazy about troop reductions in Afghanistan does that make them racist. Or if a Chinese-American doctor has some issues with Obama’s revision of health-care is he too a racist?
ACORN as an organization is corrupt. ACORN was started by two white brothers. You want to make it about race that is your fantasy. Here is the latest regarding ACORN and the recent IRS action:
“IRS severs ties with ACORN over scandal
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP)
WASHINGTON — The IRS says it is severing ties with ACORN, the community activist group involved in a scandal after employees were caught on video giving advice to a couple posing as a prostitute and pimp.
The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday it would no longer include ACORN in its volunteer tax assistance program. The program offered free tax advice to about 3 million low- and moderate-income tax filers this spring.
The IRS said ACORN, which is short for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, provided help on about 25,000 returns.
The House and Senate voted earlier this month to sever federal funding to ACORN. And the Census Bureau severed its ties with the group for the 2010 national head-count.”
Bobster sez:
“But ACORN performs a very valuable service. Too bad you right-wing-nuts are so worked up about it. ”
Bobby,
See previous post. ACORN performs the very, very valuable service of being a shaming, scamming bunch of fucktards. I mean it is as clear as the drool on dumber-than-dale’s fucking shirt.
Hey here is an interesting piece on Dale Rathke the brother of the WHITE founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke. It talks about how he embezzled close to a million dollars from the organization. Lets see, WHITE GUY embezzles a cool mil from a charitable organization and its about RACISM and not CORRUPTION (because dumber-than-dale sez so). Sure.
“The New York Times reported on July 9, 2008, that Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN’s founder Wade Rathke, was found to have embezzled $948,607.50 from the group and affiliated charitable organizations back in 1999 and 2000.[1] ACORN executives decided to handle it as an internal matter, and did not inform most of the board members or law enforcement, and instead signed an enforceable restitution agreement with the Rathke family to repay the amount of the embezzlement. Wade Rathke told the Times, “the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a ‘weapon’ into the hands of enemies of Acorn, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to ACORN’s often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers.” A whistleblower revealed the embezzlement in 2008. On June 2, 2008, Dale Rathke was dismissed, and Wade stepped down as ACORN’s chief organizer, but he remains chief organizer for Acorn International L.L.C.[1]”
Shut the FUCK up dumber-than-dale. You are looking more and more like a raving, FUCKTARD. (If that is possible)
Have you read N. N. Taleb’s books? “Fooled by Randomness”, and “The Black Swan” are both indicated for this ailment.
JS said: “Lenin, part Jewish and Mongolian, Trotsky, Jew, Stalin, a Georgian Monster-killed tens of millions of White Christians.”
Are you a White Christian?
“Have you read N. N. Taleb’s books?”
—————————–
I’m aware of the existence and the general thrust of those books, I’ve listened to Taleb on TV a number of times but, no, I have not read the books. Maybe I’ll drop a hint to one of my kids about the Black Swan for my B-Day coming up in Nov.
zzzz it was explained to you carefully about voter registration. It is correct and doesn’t deserve name calling and stupid comments from you so stop it.
and now I expect to get a barrage of insults from zzzz.
Barrage away!
This is just crap from you bahmi.
Whatever you can say about Obama an idiot he s not. Not financially astute is OK. But he does not come from that milieu. and his life since has not introduced him to those people. Yes I am sure he has met them socially but he does not pal around with them. His crowd in Chicago was interested in other things than stocks, bonds, currency trading, puts, calls and commodity options.
He is over his head politically with the DC crowd.
For your purchase a recycled copy:
http://tinyurl.com/ng9wf at half.com an ebay subsidiary.
Here’s the secret for comments. Keep 2 browsers open so you can go back and forth. when you submit, the choice fades out. then if you want to comment to comment to someone else you can’t.
Here’s how you can. when it fades, just hit refresh or reload under view in your browser. You will find the comment you just submitted now has the submit choice black again. Just delete it and you are ready for the next comment. Or delete it and refresh, it makes no difference. If you are anxious about losing your comment you can go to the other browser and check ifit got submitted and shows up. This way you don’t have to keep hitting submit.
Shitty software is the problem with no feedback as to how to do this. But it does make you think creatively.
JS said: “Lenin, part Jewish and Mongolian”
You conveniently left out that Lenin was also part German, part Swedish.
And according to biographies of Lenin, such as Christopher Read’s, LENIN (2005, Abingdon: Routledge) and Christopher Hill’s LENIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1971, Penguin Books:London), Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.
Suffice it to say nice Jewish families were not in the habit of baptizing their children into the Russian Orthodox Church. Lenin was not Jewish, any more than he was German or Swedish or White Christian.
Fruit of White Christian “civilization”: state-sponsored genocide in the 20th century. “Ethnic cleansing.” Millions murdered.
JS said: “Lenin, part Jewish and Mongolian”
You conveniently left out that Lenin was also part German, part Swedish.
And according to biographies of Lenin, such as Christopher Read’s, LENIN (2005, Abingdon: Routledge) and Christopher Hill’s LENIN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION (1971, Penguin Books:London), Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.
Suffice it to say nice Jewish families were not in the habit of baptizing their children into the Russian Orthodox Church. Lenin was not Jewish, any more than he was German or Swedish or White Christian.
Fruit of White Christian “civilization”: state-sponsored genocide in the 20th century. “Ethnic cleansing.” Millions murdered.
This week’s commentaries are a demonstration of incoherence.
“Coherence … depends on self-knowledge. And the first rule of life is to “know thyself.” This applies to nations as well as individuals. And here is where we have gone wrong: America is not an ideology, yet some of us have attempted to make it into one. America is land and people, history and society. To make it into an ideology is to make politics into religion. And once politics becomes a religion, domestic disagreements become irreconcilable.”
Another way of describing the Leaven of Herod.
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/0612.html
JS said: “Stalin, a Georgian Monster”
Stalin, at age sixteen, received a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary.
I believe that would make Stalin a White Christian trained monster.
Uh huh. OK, now tell us something we don’t already know, and something you haven’t said 2000 times already.
Lately JIMIs been a one trick pony!
But i love him none the less…….just wonder what happened to the kunstler clubs!
All this idle chatter about the ethnic makeup of long-dead revolutionaries and ACORN — when we have the G-20 protests set to start tomorrow in P-Burgh?
Come on. I thought JHK’s Clusterfuckers were made of better fiber than that.
This isn’t the Fox News blog.
Good points, bro. I knew all that-I was painting fast and with a broad brush before I went to work. But no brush could be as broad as your condemnation of Whites and White Civilization. Technical Point: White Nationalists make a distinction between Whites and the larger Race of whom they are a member-Caucasians. Whites are the people of Western Europe-Caucasians include peple from Morrocco to India. These other subraces are not threatened with extinction-just Whites. As a Georgian-Stalin was on the fuzzy fringe of what would be considered White. Armenians as well. Anyway, yeah he was a seminary student-but he rejected that and became a dialectical materialist mass murderer. We can’t blame the Church for people who leave and then kill Christians can we? You’re just mad because we’ve had a Civilization (many!) and Blacks haven’t. (zero!) Your purported civilizations were Muslim with Arabs or Moors at the top and light skinned Negroes as middle men. Just like we have in many American Cities today.
You are so resentful that you become illogical. You are so desperate to make us hate ourselves that you become pathetic. Keep going-you will help wake people up. And make no mistake, the conditioning is wearing off and Whites are waking up. It’s not going to be a cake walk anymore-you commies are going to have to fight for every inch from here on in.
yes ..i wanna hear
as the newpapers talk about AIG stock tripling ? since July
the only thing i can figure is collapse isnt orderly and when you throw a trillion $ at it…gets harder to factor
and as far as jailbirds with cell phones and laptops
around the time of the maddoff arrest a guy in canada was arrested for stealing half a billion
they let him keep his cellp in jail and that enabled him to steal millions more!
and lori..if yr reading…i dunno if JS is in jail
however reading norman mailers comments on racist rape in jail…well if he is in jail or if any one goes to jail id assume its a real eye opener
DO YOU KNOW WHAT WHITE KITTY IS??
i didnt think so
‘ My last comment was repeated several because I could get no feedback from JHK’s site to confirm my comment had been recorded’
did you keep hitting submit?
the site often gives no indication it accepted comment but usually does despite what it seems to do or not do
The list of books I’d like to read before I die grows longer daily. Now Damon has reminded me about The Black Swan so, of course, I have to add that. Example, awhile ago David Foster Wallace committed suicide. I had never heard of him but I read his obit which declared him to be one of the greatest writers of all time. So now I have a note to myself to read his major works. Then you, Abbey, had to start touting Toynbee and Lovecraft so they are on my list. But the mother-load is my collection of the Hundred Greatest Books that I purchased from the Franklin Library in Phila. The deal was a book each month at $32 each if I recall correctly. These are finely bound leather with gold edges and all sorts of other features. My plan was to receive a book, take a month to read it, receive another book, and so on. Well, here I am 35 years or so beyond the 8 yrs 4 mos that it took to acquire all 100 and I’ve read maybe 70. I will finish all those if it kills me.
Anyway, I clicked on your link and got an ERROR message so I googled half.com, clicked around and found the best price for Black Swan was $7.99. What I’ll do is try the library first and if that fails ask my kids to get it for me from Half.com. They are savvy about such things and I’m not.
Thanks for the tip.
P.S. I too vote for “shown.”
cuisisne
what an apt end to yr post
point of fact…at least according to TOM HARTMAN
most peeps in the USa opposed both of these wars…and of 500? newspapers 2..yes he claims 2 opposed the wars………………
well….the G-20
did jimmy k focus on the the G-20 in his posts the last 2 mdays?
Pat buchanan[?} went to the battle in seattle
wheres jimmy K????
Sounds strangely familiar. The Jews founded and ran the NAACP for decades. All out of their selfless desire to help their Black Brother-yeah right. More like their desire to use Blacks as a battering ram to bring down America. They hung in for decades-the Blacks finally had to kick them out. They were having too much fun-destroying White America.
not with george soros and his ‘open society’ propositions on ballot[s]
Abbey thinks her empathay
cute cute….iS THAT EMPATHY…like with a brit accent?
empathy vs sympathy
i dont have any to spare now…..MD heal thyself
JIM K
no one here has noted the news in todays news
AIG stock soaring
and banks will be nicer to those writing rubber checks….1930s here we come
Very few people care-after all, they’re just Whites and they’re just Men. Whites laugh hysterically when comics bring up the subject. And women don’t care-it’s just men after all. Feminists don’t even care about Women being raped-unless it’s a White Man who did it. The rate of Muslim Rape in part of Sweden is as high as New York City. But the silence from the Feminists is deafening. They don’t want to interfere with the destruction of a White Country. The dispossesion of Whites and the destrucition of Western Civilization trumps all. Feminists are Marxists after all-women’s rights are stricly secondary to the extent they care at all.
Another interesting thing about Lenin is that he didn’t walk until he was 4 years old. Imagine how powerless he felt for 4 years. Totally dependent upon a parental figure.
Don’t believe me? Try it to see how you feel.
NOW
JDL
ACLU
whats new
started by who?
o boy
sure not a goy
i dunno the connection from the immigration act of 65 to the house of david
TELL ME?????????????????????????????
meanwhile back at acorn:
The lawsuit seeks an injunction preventing the further distribution of the videos.
The recordings represented “clear violations of Maryland law that were intended to inflict maximum damage to the reputation of ACORN
WORLD TO ACORN:
NEVER BE CONCERNED ABOUT YR REPUTTTATION
its merely what others think of you…be concerned with yr character,,,thats what you are!
David Foster Wallace is my idol. I loved loved loved Infinite Jest and reading it is an addiction. I did nothing else for almost a week. I waited until I was starving to eat something and only slept when I just couldn’t read another word. It is magnificent.
And if you read his McCain 2000 he takes you right in the inside of his mind. Right ow I am reading Supposedly a Fun Thing I did Once (close anyway) about his journalistic assignment to take a cruise. It’s incredible. The director of my Pet Rescue group takes them all the time and can’t understand why I hate them. My girlfriend and I took one to Bermuda long ago, got off the ship, looked across at the travel agency and said Let’s fly home so we turned our return tickets in and got plane tickets back.
‘ They don’t want to interfere with the destruction of a White Country’
what will they replace it with?
DO YOU KNOW WHAT WHITE KITTY IS?
i didnt..till i read the LA Times about the recent and huge prison riot!
Well do go see District 9 as it is easily the most intelligent hi fi film of all time. And it is pure Lovecraft.
Produced and directed by Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame. Lovecraft and Tolkien are the two foremost fantasy horror writers of the 20th cetury. Lovecraft regarded Poe as his master and then wet beyond him, although the public recognition hasn’t gotten there yet (English classes etc) but academic recognition has.
But do see this movie. It is scary wonderful.
I saw District 9 a month or two ago and mentioned it in one of my posts as being apropos to all the discussion here on racism. I liked it and my wife loved it. A movie I liked even better was Children of Men. I don’t know what it is about dystopia that I find so fascinating but I do.
In D-9 you start by being creeped out by the prawns and by the end you’re rooting for them. I’m afraid the message would not affect Jaego one iota.
Asia, you seem to be familiar with JMNYC. He comes out of the woodwork every week or two, makes a couple of smartass type comments then disappears. Is he, by any chance, one of Zzz’s or Rico’s alter egos?
The more minorities, the divided America is. The more divided, the weaker the Founding People, the Whites. The weaker the Whites, the stronger the Jews-who are the “Friends” of all minorities. The Jews didn’t have to do this-they had full rights and full access and were doing very well. They wanted it all. Not to do this would be “being a loser” or “not being all you can be” in the Jewish book-as if a ballet dancer fails in he or she doesn’t take over the troupe.
JS,
Are you a White Christian?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7CtSBcqni0&feature=player_embedded
A little musical interlude with Bono and friends.
My wife and I took a Caribbean cruise once. It was like an eating contest held in (on?) a floating hotel. The stopover places were a turnoff to me … as I watched everyone go from one jewelry store to another while I sat in the shade reading the WSJ.
JS said: “The more minorities, the divided America is. The more divided, the weaker the Founding People, the Whites.”
Really? Is China weak? China certainly has a large number of minorities, yet China is strong. Diversity provides strength. Try eating nothing but white bread as 100% of your diet. The pure white bread diet will make you weak.
But if you use the principle of miscegenation and mix seven grains into the bread, and then add lettuce, tomato, bacon, mayonnaise, etc., then you have a mixed race sandwich, and that culinary diversity will make you stronger. Have a brown soft drink to go with it, or white milk, or chocolate milk. The more diversity the stronger.
Monoculture (white everything) leads to pestilence, pathology, and death.
CHINESE MINORITIES
The major minority ethnic groups are:
Zhuang (16.1 million)
Manchu (10.6 million)
Hui (9.8 million)
Miao (8.9 million)
Uyghur (8.3 million)
Tujia (8 million)
Yi (7.7 million)
Mongol (5.8 million)
Tibetan (5.4 million)
Buyei (2.9 million)
Dong (2.9 million)
Yao (2.6 million)
Korean (1.9 million)
Bai (1.8 million)
Hani (1.4 million)
Kazakh (1.2 million)
Li (1.2 million)
Dai (1.1 million)
Q: I think you meant mother lode.
re. Taleb: don’t forget “Fooled By Randomness”, which preceded Black Swan.
Another suggestion is Andrew J. Bacevich, a true conservative. His latest is “The Limits of Power” — I think you’d like it.
You people have no fucking sense of humor. I’m giving you a second chance. Go back and read the reply I made to Jerry and then click on the link.
Well this is just wonderful Damon … two more books to add to my list. I’ll have to live to a hundred.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/business/energy-environment/24oil.html?_r=1&hp
Looks like lotsa oil, more and more all the time . . . . only problem is low prices.
Children of Men is truly wonderful. The book is really far better than the movie. sometimes it works that way and sometimes it doesn’t. Clive Owen is a marvel though. But check the book out.
Oh I developed Evelyn Wood’s mini-lesson for her speed reading classes. If you just put your index finger on the page and slide it along the line you will immediately double your speed. That’s if you want to read faster. Sometimes I do and sometimes I just want to wallow.
I sell used books on the internet and am drowning in books at this point. They don’t sell fast enough to give me any more room around here. I have hundreds and hundreds in my own pile that I want to read and time is getting shorter and shorter.
Although from time to time I can thin them out and sell them. Lovecraft and Houellebecq and Wallace made a lot of them irrelevant. When a watershed writer comes along, many of the previous writers seem dated. The really good ones hold up but time is the judge.
Houellebecq turned me on to Lovecraft as he wrote a book on him and included two of his best tales. Lovecraft is dangerous for your mind though. I started on this journey when my niece had another psychotic break late last winter (2 of them) and her experiences were so frightful and bizarre I wanted to understand. Lovecraft had an unbelievable destructive life (not any of which was his fault) which included awful childhood experiences. And he was so very considerate of everyone who corresponded with him and so supportive of new writers of weird tales. Since you have seen District 9 you have an excellent idea of where Lovecraft’s work is at.It is like a template of one of his tales.
I am very preoccupied with Jaycee Dugard (as you have noticed) because all the well wishers that are wishing her a happy life from now on have no idea what they are saying. The tragedy will be if she believes them and keeps trying the impossible. Art seems to me to be the only way forward for her.
“I think you meant mother lode.
——————————-
Guess I’ve got nobody to blame but myself. Now I’ve got everybody and his brother correcting me.
AL FRANKEN GETS SERIOUS ABOUT CIVIL RIGHTS
“Franken, who opened by acknowledging that unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, he’s not a lawyer, but according to his research “most Americans aren’t lawyers” either, said he’d also done research on the Patriot Act and in particular, the “roving wiretap” provision that allows the FBI to get a warrant to wiretap a an unnamed target and his or her various and changing cell phones, computers and other communication devices.
Noting that he received a copy of the Constitution when he was sworn in as a senator, he proceeded to read it to Kris, emphasizing this part: “no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
“That’s pretty explicit language,” noted Franken, asking Kris how the “roving wiretap” provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn’t require the government to name its target.
Kris looked flustered and mumbled that “this is surreal,” apparently referring to having to respond to Franken’s question. “I would defer to the other branch of government,” he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: “I know what that is.”
Kris explained that the courts have held that the law’s requirements that the person be described, though not named, is sufficient to meet the demands of the Constitution. That did not appear to completely satisfy Franken’s concerns.”
Then you are gonna love DFW’s account of his Carribean cruise. It is like watching someone peel an onion, paper thin slice by paper thin slice. All the things one sees and thinks but doesn’t say because no one appreciates hearing them as they are too dark, he says.
Reading him I understand exactly why he committed suicide and I so wish he hadn’t. But I am thinking he never read Lovecraft who came to the same horrible conclusions DFW did. That idea of just being a particle of dust in the universe, all alone and lonely. Lovecraft wished he could have believed in religion and lived within that charmed circle of belief.
Observer said: “Looks like lotsa oil, more and more all the time…”
This cannot be happening because JHK has told us we have already reached peak oil production in 2005.
Besides, as Nudge would tell us if she was here, EROEI means, in the words of Nudge, “we are screwed!” (in spite of facts indicating otherwise)
“Dong (2.9 million)”
————————
Correct me if I’m wrong Asoka but wasn’t it the admixture of the Dong that prevented the yellow race from having the shortest dicks on the planet?
The majority Han population is so huge that all of these come out to no more than five percent. As I said, homogeneity is strength. The Uighurs are the largest and most alien group, being both Muslim and of mixed race. Correspondingly, they are looked down on the most by the Han. And they riot the most-or don’t you watch the news? Another group rioted last year on the South Coast-don’t know which one. And the Tibetans are miserable of course. Maybe the other groups have made a good adjustment, I don’t know. But given the level of Han isolationism, I wouldn’t bank on it.
Q, what are you drinking this morning?
You are supposed to be unconcerned about content and focus on grammar and spelling, n’est-ce pa?
JS,
Are you a White Christian?
Ah yes, the Black Child of Man-no wonder you liked it. Surely some religon major is doing a disertation on this someplace. I can’t be the only one to see Political Correctness as a Religion and Abbey as a devout practitioner.
The Black Child of Man is obviously Obama. He has both Divine (Black) blood but also corrupt (White) blood. Indeed Whiteness is Original Sin in this pseudo Christianity. By partaking of both natures, Obama seeks to save the fallen. All he asks in return is that his White followers serve his Real Children the Blacks and try to destroy everything that Whites have done-especially their very existence. Thus miscegenation is a sacrament in this Religion.
I liked the visuals in Children of Men. It showed an England that had finally had enough and was deporting the Muslims. The Muslims were fighting back and getting creamed. Just beautiful.
Also the feral leftist gang was an accurate portrayal of Marxist and Peta steet warriors.
Franken is known to be a policy wonk. He is correct on this one. When I took Gene Zimmerman’s legal seminar he spent a lot of time on warrants as that is where people get themselves in trouble.
Here’s what he says to do when they come after U.
Do not open the door. If you do then yu have given them permission to come in even if their warrant is filled out incorrectly and there is no probable cause. OK so far?
Tell them through the door to put it on the doorstep and go across the street to the other side. Why? Because your property starts at the middle of the street. If you open your door and they are in the middle of the street, you have given permission for them to come in. Ha!
Open the door, pick it up and read it. Make sure you understand what is being searched for and exactly where they are allowed to look. Make sure the judge has signed it. If it is correct you may let them in. If not, put it back on the doorstep, close the door and tell them to please (always be respectful)fill it out correctly.
If it is OK and you let them in then stand by the fucking door. Do not follow them. Do not go anywhere in your home. They are allowed to look anywhere you go. Don’t go to the bathroom. Got that? This is from the bok of the best criminal lawyer in the Springfield area.
If they go somewhere where that is not on the warrant, stand by the door and say I object really loud. If you can video or tape do that. Keep yelling objections and tell them that place is not on the warrant. Even if it seems harmless keep objecting. This is making the entire search invalid. So if they find that stash in your bedroom and it is not on the warrant and they have gone there, too bad for them.
All of us need to know these rules. Do not say anything. Anything you say can and will be distorted and used against you.
People get fucked because they do some of these things wrong. Consider Martha Stewart. Two FBI agents came and played good cop bad cop with her. Her very very expensive lawyer told her to talk with them. She did and the rest is history. So from this learn to distrust any lawyer, no matter how much you are paying them and find out for yourself what to do. There are more and more sites on this subject.If you are in a pickle consult them. Tell your friends to read this comment. Print it out and give it to them.
And remember stand by the door they came in.
P.S. If you have a back door and the door is open but the screen is locked, that doesn’t count. They can come in the screen door. Do not open the door even if you hav a locked screen door and make sure all your doors are closed and locked.
OK that’s all folks.
The thing about ACORN is they register voters.
They don’t register Democratic voters or Republican voters or Independent voters. They register all voters.
And they safeguard the right to vote.
ACORN WINS COURT CASE AND $450,000
“KANSAS CITY (AP) — The Missouri Department of Social Services settled a lawsuit…
As part of the settlement, the department will provide monthly reports on its efforts to comply with the law with attorneys for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and will pay ACORN $450,000 in legal costs. The group filed the lawsuit in 2008, claiming the department was violating the National Voter Registration Act and leaving thousands of low-income or disabled Missourians unable to vote.”
Hate to disappoint you Jaego but I am not politically correct. Not anymore. I lean more toward your POV than most anyone here.
I regard the muslims as religious fanatics, and as suffering from mass psychosis. Catholicism went through it in the Middle Ages. They are trying to catch up. They are truly dangerous and their fatwas are simply not to be tolerated anywhere. As long as they do the kinds of things they do they must not receive shelter or understanding from any civilized nation or peoples. They sho7uld be pariahs in the world.
Have I made myself clear, Jaego? If not what part of my condemnation don’t you understand?
And you better believe they are crooked in MO. I will tell you sometime what is going on in that department with me. Right now I am posting anonymously on a local site and being very subversive to the town govt. Supporting those who criticize it and moving them to go to meetings and just observe, and find others to run for town govt. And you can do this wherever you are. What’s his name here in Texas can do it. Just go in there and say the truth. Diplomatically. Keep nudging and nudging.
Jaego,
Cat got your tongue?
JS said: “Indeed Whiteness is Original Sin in this pseudo Christianity.”
Jaego, are you a White Christian, or do you just like to talk about Christianity, while being a Nietzchean atheist at heart?
abbeybooks said: “I regard the muslims as religious fanatics”
I regard Muslims as harmless and devotional (99% of them anyway) and condemn those for when jihad means outward violent struggle, instead of jihad’s true meaning, which is an inner spiritual struggle.
I especially like the Sufis and the stories of Mullah Nasrudin, the poetry of Rumi, etc.
Islam has made many wonderful contributions to civilization and it is a shame how politicians are painting all Muslims as intolerant radicals, and are convincing those without firsthand knowledge that it is so.
That would be like a Mullah condemning all White Christians for the actions of Timothy McVeigh or condemning all White Christians for tha actions of those Christians who murder doctors at women’s health clinics or condemning all White Christians for tha actions of those Christians who torture and murder innocent prisoners at CIA black sites.
Sorry abbeysbooks, this message was meant for Jaego.
Jaego,
Cat got your tongue?
JS said: “Indeed Whiteness is Original Sin in this pseudo Christianity.”
Jaego, are you a White Christian, or do you just like to talk about Christianity, while being a Nietzchean atheist at heart?
I think sufism is exceptional. I do not confuse it with Islam in any of its forms. If you want to argue about this then read Idries Shah and Pir Inayat Khan before starting anything with me. And don’t forget the Tales of Nazrudin.
abbeysbooks said: “I think sufism is exceptional. I do not confuse it with Islam in any of its forms. If you want to argue about this then read Idries Shah and Pir Inayat Khan before starting anything with me. And don’t forget the Tales of Nazrudin.”
OK, I did just that. I read Idries Shah (THE SUFIS, 1971 edition, and Idries Shah seems to think the Sufis are related to Islam (and from my personal experience dancing with dervishes and doing zikrs with Sufis, I certainly agree with Shah).
page 34: “The recognition of the climate established by Islam as a suitable one for projecting Sufi wisdom is easy to trace.”
page 36: “In the religious sphere, the Koran maintains the unity of religions and the identical origin of each…”
Just like Sufism does. You can’t separate Sufism from Islam. And you are wrong to condemn all Muslims for the acts of a few extremists.
O’REILLY AND FRANK MIX IT UP OVER ACORN
“O’Reilly:
Nobody cares about the Maryland wiretap law. I want to know in spirit if you admire them.
Frank:
I’m sorry, what an outrageous statement. What an outrageous statement for you to make: nobody cares about the Maryland wiretap law. I do care about the law. I’m an elected official.”
Abs: This is all legally correct, I’m sure, but in real life it won’t make much difference. If they want to come in, they’re coming in. If someone gets shot in the process, the authorities are usually absolved of criminal wrongdoing. This gross corruption of justice has been embraced by a TV-addled populace fed a constant stream of fear, anger, hatred & bigotry in their infotainment.
This tacit approval will continue as long as it’s “them”, until the pool of them encompasses just about everyone. I’ve seen this movie before.
You need to go to Marseille, France and then tell me 99% are all peachy keen. In Europe, the common observation is that Muslims fail to integrate into the societies there. Don’t want to, want Sharia law, etc. Trouble brewing in Nashville, Tn and other areas with Muslims. However, the press is laying off them, probably in deference to the head Muslim in our country, Hussein Obama. You make the call.
“md, heal thyself…” A little leaven will leaven the whole loaf. I supported RP in the last cycle, still believing that political measures will fix spiritual problems; ain’t gonna happen. We are all getting a taste of it now. The only thing that will kill the Leaven of Herod {any leaven} is heat, the loaf must be baked. Our God is a consuming fire.
Franken will be told that there is no longer anyone who is able to appeal to the Constitution. We are under commercial law. Any appeals to the Consitution in a commercial court {they are all commercial courts} go unanswered. They take silent notice that you are a fourteenth amendment “citizen”.
Do not answer any questions. Do not make any statements. Ask questions. The warrant is not addressed to the flesh and blood human being. It is addressed to the STRAW-MAN CORPORATION created by the birth certificate. Look it up.
http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=398806
Its really about racism if one has an issue with ACORN, you state. Any criticism regarding ACORN or Obama or his policies are racist. How the fuck does that work?
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As I stated before it isn’t whether or not ACORN has done something wrong, and if they have they should receive justice for that. What is so concerning is the extreme efforts being made to implicate ACORN in wrong doing and the misleading and excessive coverage of that effort by certain elements in the media.
The bruhah over voter registration is an excellent example. Not only are the charges frequently misleading or manufactured (as I labored to point out) but the net effect of any actual wrongdoing by multiple or false registration is widely know to be insignificant. So, WHY all the coverage??
The same is true, for different reasons, in the prostitution sting. While the employees of ACORN were guilty of extreme stupidity and deserve to be fired, what effect do the incidents have on you and I? The obvious answer is none. It was a hit job to be sure, and ACORN should have been expecting such behavior given the orchestrated efforts against them since the election.
As I mentioned before, I have first hand knowledge that virtually every serious voter registration effort in this country has faced exactly the same kind of false registration problems as ACORN (if not to the same degree) and, so far as I know, there has been no reporting of that. If you doubt this, talk to anyone who has worked for such an effort in a campaign headquarters. EVERY MEANINGFUL VOTER REGISTRATION EFFORT, RECEIVES HUNDREDS IF NOT THOUSANDS OF FALSE REGISTRATIONS. It’s reported by the RW media as if ACORN is the only one experiencing this issue, and nothing could be further from the truth. They were singled out for two co-joined reasons; they are associated loosely with Obama and they are perceived as a “black organization”. If both of those circumstances were not true, you would not have heard about them during the election, or likely since.
The extreme coverage given to ACORN by the likes of Fox News is a pretty pure example of trying to create a “boogie man” for whites to react against with fear and disgust. See Willie Horton for an earlier example of this same sort of racial politics.
It’s mean, it’s wrong, and it damages this country.
the root of all evil is suburbia? i’ve such fond memories of growing up in a little plywood box on a postage stamp lot on a senseless cul-de-sac. so many playmates around, good, bad & ugly, we were the ragged edge of middle class, drunks and young professionals, motorcycles and high mileage diesel mercedes, aclu bleeding hearts cheek by jowl with loud racists.
fifteen minutes to new haven? some kids’ dads commuted to new york. i was too young to know my parents were simply biding time, coiling to pounce on a big place in the country, a beautiful place with no-one around.
for a number of years i worked for a pair of superstar bankers; whatever else you can say about them (eg, atrocious table manners,) they were not incompetent. they always had an eye for getting the money back. the mantra ‘charge for risk’ was especially meaningful because they worked like hell to assess it ahead of time.
all those strip malls of the sixties and seventies, a child could have told you they were doomed. sears roebuck was a friggin plague, we only went there because there was nowhere else to go.
don’t first shoot all the bankers, there as much a mix of wheat & chaff as the rest of us. aim for the incompetent crowds, the ones with $400,000 sportscars. similarly, don’t dismiss every residential ex-cornfield street named after a developer’s wife, only the ones in which nobody’s ever played a decent game of kick-the-can.
You got me, like you I am a tormented soul. I do believe in God, was raised a Christian, love it, but have doubts about its complete ability to sustain a culture in this scientific and multicultural world. So there are two Jaegos at the very least. I hate atheists who disparage all religion, but I cannot help but think that evolution is important and one of the ways God deals with the universe. After all, natural law is His Law as well. And evolution need not be completley Darwinian, indeed much evidence shows that mutations have greatly speeded the process. If the mutations had been purely random, we’d still be in Dino ville.
All Western Denominations have betrayed the White Race. They rave about taking care of the “stranger” that is in the Old Testament. This meant another Jew, one that you didn’t know. And how does one stranger become millions of aliens? It’s insane. No, they serve the NWO. By its very nature Christianity is Global. Fine. But Christ said go out and teach all men. He didn’t say bring them in and overrun your own country. And many of these interpreters are really agnostics or atheists anyway. The Church has allowed a nest of vipers to grow within its very breast. I don’t expect them to become racially aware, I would expect them to stay out of it and just serve all men. So the mainstream denominations teach Whites to hate themselves and the Black Churches often teach Blacks to hate Whites. Yup, sounds like America.
The only chance for Christianity to stop harming the West is perhaps the Orthodox Way of National Churches. The doctrine is still Universal, but there is an explicit loyalty to the Nation. This might not be enough now that the aliens are within our gates however. This wasn’t a problem before the twentieth century because the wide spread immigrations from the third world hadn’t started. Once they did, it became clear that Western Christianity had no defence and nothing to offer but lip service about the right of nations to have borders. They say yes to borders but no to defending them against illegals. Complete nonsense.
bahmi said: “You need to go to Marseille, France…”
You need to go to the nearest mosque and pray for your soul.
Allahu Akbar!
Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion, 1.5 billion and counting.
Learn to love your neighbors.
Wow! Someone in the media finally decideds to point out the obvious, if they had done this a couple of days ago, it would have saved me a lot of writing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/23/AR2009092303679.html
JS said: “This might not be enough now that the aliens are within our gates however.”
Here is a simple solution. Put Jesus’ teachings into practice and love the aliens. (“Love your enemies, love your neighbor as yourself”)
Blanket amnesty. Aliens become legally employable and therefore, taxpayers. The Nation is stronger.
You are not the closest to my viewpoint of anyone here. You are in fact a brilliant crazy person. To be specific, you are a Negrophilliac-you suffer from an intense overestimation of the character and capacities of Negroes. You worship them-thus my post.
Like John Paul Sartre, you are very smart, you know it, and it corrupts you. You don’t think you even have to look at what’s going on. You already know. And once you get an idea in your head that you like, nothing can get it out. Just pure obstinancy. The Sufi thing is a perfect example. No scholar holds your view that Sufis and Muslims are separate. None. Only a few new agey people who want to Sufi Dance with a clear conscience. You have forgotten that you have to sit down before the facts like a little child. No, not for you. You like Sufism-You don’t like Islam and presto, no relation. There are a few antinomilnalist brotherhoods who bend shariah. There were a few great Masters like Ibn Arabi or Rumi who were loving and universal, and there have been some Masters in the West who weren’t very strict like Pir Vilayat. That’s it. A couple of swallows don’t make a summer.
Your training in Marxism taught you to obfuscate to fool others. Now you believe your own obfuscations. To disemble-now you disemble to yourself. And of course, your feminine sentimentality doesn’t help-always for the underdog whether they deserve it or not.
I’m not being ironic about your IQ. I’m sure its very high. And you are very well read and educated. But it doesn’t matter if you can’t use it properly. In fact, smart people can go farther wrong than others because they live in their minds. As I said a few weeks ago, Jean Paul Sartre was the last to realize the true nature of the Soviet Union. I trust you when you are talking about purely physical things like farming, or money-things that don’t hit you emotionally. But as soon as things near and dear to your heart come up, your Marxism and Sentimentality take over and rationality becomes a servant of emotion or the Revolution.
“What is so concerning is the extreme efforts being made to implicate ACORN in wrong doing and the misleading and excessive coverage of that effort by certain elements in the media.”
Hogwash. What WAS concerning is that “certain elements” had to keep banging on a drum until it was so apparent to even the dimmest in our midst (dumber-than-dale) that ACORN is rotten to its very core. Very, very slowly, the main stream media decided that they could no longer NOT cover the story. THAT IS CONCERNING.
Yesterday, Barney-fucking-Frank even threw in the towel. He will not support the further funding of ACORN. Now that this corrupt organization has been exposed its on the the next one. Where will that lead? Throw a fucking dart. Corruption in government by BOTH FUCKING PARTIES is rampant. You want to make corruption about race it is because you are a
MORON. Corruption is color blind. I take that back. Corruption is GREEN.
Great article, dumber-than-dale, now consider the author of said article
“Born in Los Angeles, Harold Meyerson was educated in the Los Angeles public schools and at Columbia University. The son of long time leaders in California of the Socialist Party of America, he was active in the 1970s in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. He currently shares his time between Washington, D.C. and California.
Here is what Meyerson had to say about the Republican party:
“In a year when the Democrats have an African American presidential nominee, the Republicans now more than ever are the white folks’ party, the party that delays the advent of our multicultural future, the party of the American past. Republican conventions have long been bastions of de facto Caucasian exclusivity, but coming right after the diversity of Denver, this year’s GOP convention is almost shockingly — un-Americanly — white. Long term, this whiteness is a huge problem.”
Very open minded, this Meyerson. No agenda at work here. (God you are stupid, dumber-than-dale.)
The “straw man of capital-ism as if it were merely a belief system”???
Yes it’s become much much more than that. It’s now an historical social and political force. Yet, historically, many of those that have maintained a sufficiently viable opposition and critique of capital, have also had within their grasp the means and the will to live without it. After all, what is capital if not a set of social relationship designating the ownership of land and materials? Does it not seek to legitimize the quantified exclusion of the poor and destitute as a generalized threat to the rest of those that are merely in debt? How can such relationships exist without “a belief system” and what would happen if the belief in those relations were not perceived as inevitable, necessary, or desirable? Couldn’t more spontaneous social relations be the missing crucial components to the survival of free individuals, families, and communities beset by this crisis?
“That’s if you want to read faster. Sometimes I do and sometimes I just want to wallow.”
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Now there … you’ve hit on the very problem. I would like to get through these books and on to the next but what I really want to do is savor every word and well turned phrase. I want to look up words I don’t know. I want to marvel at the perfect adjective used to the exclusion of all others that might have been used. To use your term, I want to “wallow.”
Perhaps I can wallow faster using my index finger. I’ll give it a try.
The “straw man of capital-ism as if it were merely a belief system”?
Yes it’s become much much more than that. It’s now an historical social and political force. Yet, historically, many of those that have maintained a sufficiently viable opposition and critique of capital, have also had within their grasp the means and the will to live without it. After all, what is capital if not a set of social relationships designating the ownership of land and materials? Does it not seek to legitimize the quantified exclusion of the poor and destitute as a generalized threat to the rest of those that are merely in debt? How can such relationships exist without “a belief system” and what would happen if those relationships were no longer perceived as inevitable, necessary, and desirable? What if people stopped believing in a system that’s clearly leading them down the path to their own destruction? Couldn’t more spontaneous social relations and initiatives be the missing crucial component to the survival of free individuals, families and communities beset by this crisis?
You posted:
Born in Los Angeles, Harold Meyerson was educated in the Los Angeles public schools and at Columbia University. The son of long time leaders in California of the Socialist Party of America, he was active in the 1970s in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. He currently shares his time between Washington, D.C. and California.
Hummmm…..which part of this is the burning indictment you are presuming to make.
1.) That his father was a socialist
2.) That he was educated in public schools
3.) that he spends time in Washington
4.) that he, (or his father, I can’t tell from the poor writing) were “active” in DSOC (whatever the fuck that is, I grew up in CA in the 70’s and never heard of it, do YOU have any idea??)
Once again you use the tactics of propogandizing, accusing someone of something which is neither against the law or germaine to the topic at hand, and calling that your evidence of some presumed impropriety.
You keep stating that “the media” (other than Fox I presume) is not covering ACORN or the Teabagger March in Washington. If you actually watched any other media than Fox you would know that is not true. I watch many other media outlets (but not Fox) and I saw plenty of coverage of both.
You then state:
Corruption is color blind. I take that back. Corruption is GREEN.
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Exactly, and is it really you assumption that poor people and the organizations that represent them are the ones who provide all the money and are most responsible for, and deserve all the coverage about corruption and graft in Washington? What percentage of the lobbyists in Washington do you think are hired to represent poor people??? Please….even to you, the irony of that should be obvious.
Sui Generis…..dim one…..Sui Generis….who benefits?
The “straw man of capital-ism as if it were merely a belief system”???
Yes it’s become much much more than that. It’s now an historical social and political force. Yet, historically, many of those that have maintained a sufficiently viable opposition and critique of capital, have also had within their grasp the means and the will to live without it. After all, what is capital if not a set of social relationships designating the ownership of land and materials? Does it not seek to legitimize the quantified exclusion of the poor and destitute as a generalized threat to the rest of those that are merely in debt? How can such relationships exist without “a belief system” and what would happen if those relationships were no longer perceived as inevitable, necessary, and desirable? What if people stopped believing in a system that’s clearly leading them down the path to their own destruction? Couldn’t more spontaneous social relations and initiatives be the missing crucial component to the survival of free individuals, families and communities beset by this crisis?
“i’ve such fond memories of growing up in a little plywood box on a postage stamp lot”
————————
FINALLY … someone talks some sense. Your post is filled with truths. BTW, for two years I lived in Branford (15 mins from N.H.) and worked in Hamden.
Dale, thanks for the Meyerson article. Another sign that the war against ACORN, like the war against genuine health-care reform, is planned and organized by the oligarchs, who continue to seek every possible way to squeeze the last drop of juice out of those who can least afford it–and who continue to find ingenious ways to enlist them in promoting their own economic demise.
first…to Asoka..
99% of any subgroup may be wonderful ITS THE OTHER 1% WE WORRY ABOUT!
2…nashville voted down its anti multi lingual law and predictably the LA times put a piece in about how wonderful that was with a picture of a protest of maybe 20 WHITE people…no blacks championing multi cultural ism and its many languages
3…..I was wondering…maybe abbey and anyone reading this can tell me
why does the media take some of the worst of the human race and paint them as heroes on victims?
i mean…among many…..
OJ
JOHNNIE COCKROACH
TOOKIE WILLIAMS
MIKE JACKSON
MIKE VICK
MIKE TYSON
TAWANA BRAWLEY
AL SHARPTON
MUMIA
RODNEY KING
JOANNE CHESMIRE [visited in cuba by maxine w]
MAXINE whos now in hot WATERS
is it the rap industry? makin billions?
how and why??????
i dunno?
anything is possible!
JR is gone..i sense you miss him!!!
Yes, you are probably right in most cases, but that is not a good reason not to do it correctly. When you are in court a judge has boundaries around her/him. Usually they regard those boundaries as a simple nuisance. But your job as a plaintif or defendant is to keep drawing fences around those boundaries and legally constricting what the judge can do. You do this by objecting. Continuously.
If you begin correctly with the warrant you make it easier for your lawyer if you take that route. If you are doig it yourself- highly recommended if you are serious-then you must keep objecting in court also. Always remember your first concern in court is to prepare for an appeal. As you force the judge to behave, it will get easier. But you must know the rules of the game to do this.
Get a copy of Wenke’s Making and Meeting Objections vol I and vol. II
is this working today?
“Q, what are you drinking this morning?
You are supposed to be unconcerned about content and focus on grammar and spelling, n’est-ce pa?”
—————————-
Here I come up with one of my best spoofs and get accused of concern for the content. Nobody gets it; no reaction; zippo; zilch. Was it too Beavis and Butthead? I had tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks as I typed it … literally.
BTW, What does “n’est-ce pa?” mean? I never took French. I had three years of Spanish but only remember how to count to ten. Actually, for some reason, I also remember the word for “railroad” … ferrocarril.
“I watch many other media outlets (but not Fox) and I saw plenty of coverage of both.”
Hey MORON,
I watch and view all of them. You omit Fox. You are small minded in doing so. On a regular basis I sift through the WSJ, NYT, Wash Post, Christian Sci. Monitor, Chicago Sun Times and even the Village Fucking Voice. My radio listening habits include NPR, Beck and small doses of Limbaugh. TV watching, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, NBC,CBS, Fox, PBS. I regularly view Charlie Rose, Tavis Smalley, 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly. (Hannity is a light weight idiot and I rarely watch him, ditto Keith Olberman)
When you were busy claiming ACORN was no big deal, the main media outlets were busy not covering it. Fox and the WSJ and a few other outlets pursued the story and kept after it until the rest could no longer ignore it. When initially queried about ACORN Charlie Gibson said he wasn’t familiar with the story. On and on the denial amongst the main stream continued until it became laughable that they had not yet weighed in on the story. Eventually, they HAD to cover it.
Your silly denial of the corruption in ACORN is stupendous. First you said it was a non story. Then when some federal dollars were assigned to the organization you said the amount wasn’t really all that much. Then it was the racists pursuing the story. It didn’t seem to matter to you that the organization was started by a WHITE guy, Wade Rathke, who’s brother, Dale, absconded with almost a million dollars. (By the way the money was repaid by Drummond Pike, founder of the Tides Foundation. You do the homework on the Tides Foundation. Quite oddly the Tides foundation is kissing cousins with ACORN and SEIU)
Regarding the author Harold Meyerson you cited, you ask: “Once again you use the tactics of propogandizing, accusing someone of something…” I didn’t propagandize any thing. I listed some facts and included a quote of his. If you could not surmise that he is quite liberal from these facts and that he might have a bias in defending the indefensible actions of ACORN, I got a bridge you may want to purchase.
“Q, what are you drinking this morning?
You are supposed to be unconcerned about content and focus on grammar and spelling, n’est-ce pa?”
—————————-
Here I come up with one of my best spoofs and get accused of concern about content. Nobody gets it; no reaction; zilch. Was it too Beavis and Butthead? I actually had tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks as I typed it.
BTW, What does “n’est-ce pa?” mean? I never took French. I had three years of Spanish but only remember how to count to ten. Actually, for some reason, I also remember the word for “railroad” … ferrocarril.
“Here I come up with one of my best spoofs and get accused of concern about content. Nobody gets it; no reaction…”
Ah, I think it is because no one gives a flying fuck.
Yes, you are probably right in most cases, but that is not a good reason not to do it correctly. When you are in court a judge has boundaries around her/him. Usually they regard those boundaries as a simple nuisance. But your job as a plaintif or defendant is to keep drawing fences around those boundaries and legally constricting what the judge can do. You do this by objecting. Continuously.
If you begin correctly with the warrant you make it easier for your lawyer if you take that route. If you are doig it yourself- highly recommended if you are serious-then you must keep objecting in court also. Always remember your first concern in court is to prepare for an appeal. As you force the judge to behave, it will get easier. But you must know the rules of the game to do this.
Get a copy of Wenke’s Making and Meeting Objections vol I and vol. II
“JR is gone..i sense you miss him!!!”
—————————-
Like a case of hemorrhoids.
BTW, you mentioned Joanne Chesimard in your prior post. The incident happened on the Jersey Tpke a few miles from my house. It was in May 1973, three weeks before I got married. My wife (to be) was on a bus headed to work in NY and there was a big traffic tie-up. Her bus was pulled over and searched by the St Pol looking for Chesimard. It still pisses me off that that bitch was able to escape prison.
I agree with you except your lumping Obama in there. He is not a muslim. His mother exposed him to many different religions so he was never brainwashed by any of them.
“I… have doubts about its complete ability to sustain a culture in this scientific and multicultural world.”
The Kingdom of God is a form of government. We were not taught {and do not practice} God’s Laws because men {nicolaitans} don’t believe them. When His judgements & statutes are taught and obeyed the people {all people} will learn righteousness and mercy. But the catch is this: you do not want people who are operating at a carnal level running things {look around}. The only way it works is to have a Christ-like leaders {kings and priests}. Until the first resurrection, the Kingdom is limited to families and small groups. None of us have more than an “earnest” of the Holy Spirit {we are leavened} and this is insufficient to the task. Man’s innovations have polluted the way until it is “evil-spoken-of” and caused many to turn away.
When Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker, I knew that our generation was in serious trouble.
bambi,
Don’t you have anything better to do than whine about Obama and Muslims on JHK’s blog?
You just want someone or something to blame for your sad, pathetic life.
Obama is not a Muslim. He has gone to a Christian Church the entire time he was in Chicago. Remember the flap with Obama’s MINISTER? You got a freaking screw (or two) loose.
From the NY Times on the G-20 protests (This is some seriously scary shit):
“Protesters trying to march toward the convention center where the gathering is being held encountered roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police threw tear gas canisters that released billowing clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light after firing a sound cannon that emitted shrill beeps, causing demonstrators to cover their ears and back up.
City officials said they believe it is the first time this device has been used publicly.”
We are fucked.
“I watch and view all of them ……. On a regular basis I sift through the WSJ, NYT, Wash Post, Christian Sci. Monitor, Chicago Sun Times and even the Village Fucking Voice. My radio listening habits include NPR, Beck and small doses of Limbaugh. TV watching, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, NBC,CBS, Fox, PBS. I regularly view Charlie Rose, Tavis Smalley, 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly. (Hannity is a light weight idiot and I rarely watch him, ditto Keith Olberman)”
————————-
Well aren’t you well informed? You’re just a regular Chris Matthews.
You need to GET A LIFE !!. Go fishing, jog in the park, or maybe watch some football.
But if you’d rather walk out on the pier every day, toss in your tiny pebble thinking the sea level will rise, who’s to stop you. You’re a cog in the wheel of self-important armchair activism.
There’s one small ACORN in your underpants but the other one never descended.
I thought I posted this earlier, but apparently not. The following is from a story from today’s NY times regarding the G-20 protests. It reveals some scary shit. Apparently, the rights to peacefully assemble under the Constitution are dead.
“Protesters trying to march toward the convention center where the gathering is being held encountered roaming squads of police officers carrying plastic shields and batons. The police threw tear gas canisters that released billowing clouds of white smoke and stun grenades that exploded with sharp flashes of light after firing a sound cannon that emitted shrill beeps, causing demonstrators to cover their ears and back up.
City officials said they believe it is the first time this device has been used publicly.”
The Pee-burg police chief later said that it was a successful demonstration of the untested sonic device that will encourage governments everywhere.
Good essay by Mr. Kunstler and good responses, adding detail. One more bit of detail, in my opinion, is the separation of city and county governments. Cities and towns have a vested interest in fighting commercial sprawl. They have established businesses that cannot survive the competition from suburban malls and big box stores. How many small town centers has WalMart starved to death? With those deaths go the towns’ tax bases, and so the downward spiral. Counties, at least in the West, are often run by (usually) three good ‘ol boys who are farmer-friendly. And those farmers have been waiting generations for a speculator to offer suburban prices for their land.
Of course, county commissioners aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about the towns where they do their banking, business and churchgoing. Many of their votes come from the flat-wallet farmers. It’s easy to get two out of three commissioners to buy into the notion that a bunch of construction and store clerk jobs will offset the destruction of their own town’s culture. After all, they aren’t responsible for the town, only for the sparsely populated land surrounding it.
Forty years ago the federal government tried to induce cities and counties to form “councils of government”, tying grant monies to these cooperative city-county administrative entities. What we got were cooperative planning and management of some functions, like water and road systems, but we also got town councils, planning and zoning commissions packed with real estate salesmen, developers, home builders, architects, engineers and others who had a vested interest in sprawl. By then, local shopkeepers, who might have said “no” to leapfrogging suburban development were politically irrelevant.
Just another instance of our Jeffersonian political system being unable to adapt to urbanization.
Holy shit. This is scary. These guys are truly stormtroopers at the G-20. Seriously, they resemble stormtroopers more than they do actual police. If anything, just give the first 1:30 a view.
Where were the tea baggers? I though they cared about “liberdy.” Oh wait, they only care about helping corporations.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tNk6h2_khA&feature=related
Typical babble! Your abuse of the English language is only surpassed by the incredible lack of research to support such a ridiculous line of misleading points.
This diatribe is filled with pure emotional nonsense. Who are you to dictate from your pedestal made of bullshit to people as to the lifestyle they prefer whether suburban, urban or rural? You consistently fail to recognize the qualities of suburban lifestyle that make it so appealing in real terms that can be substantiated by facts based on research. And oh yes my dear dear Jim it is not evil corporate conspiracies that placed people in some sort of trance like state where they have for decades opted for a house in suburbia. Such a premise is rubbish!
Whom are we to rely on as alternative? People like you who abuse the language with marginal writing skills to socially engineer our culture and living choices? I for one do not want to to be warehoused in some multistory cubed space relying on a postage stamp public park filled with the last passer poodle’s bowel movement.
Have you considered that people may genuinely enjoy suburban lifestyle? That it supports the pursuit of recreational hobbies? Gardening, antiquing, etc.? That bonds between people as neighbors are formed, block parties occur, children birthdays are mutually celebrated?
Apparently not. You, in your loathing, hateful paranoia choose to miscast through placement of emphasis on fractional narrow views that are meaningless to the point of being laughable. Fortunately, for the most part you contained in this little “blogsphere” at the fringe of the wider universe. Do us all a favor and point your little spaceship to edge and keep on going!
Typical babble! Your abuse of the English language is only surpassed by the incredible lack of research to support such a ridiculous line of misleading points.
This diatribe is filled with pure emotional nonsense. Who are you to dictate from your pedestal made of bullshit to people as to the lifestyle they prefer whether suburban, urban or rural? You consistently fail to recognize the qualities of suburban lifestyle that make it so appealing in real terms that can be substantiated by facts based on research. And oh yes my dear dear Jim it is not evil corporate conspiracies that placed people in some sort of trance like state where they have for decades opted for a house in suburbia. Such a premise is rubbish!
Whom are we to rely on as alternative? People like you who abuse the language with marginal writing skills to socially engineer our culture and living choices? I for one do not want to to be warehoused in some multistory cubed space relying on a postage stamp public park filled with the last passer poodle’s bowel movement.
Have you considered that people may genuinely enjoy suburban lifestyle? That it supports the pursuit of recreational hobbies? Gardening, antiquing, etc.? That bonds between people as neighbors are formed, block parties occur, children birthdays are mutually celebrated?
Apparently not. You, in your loathing, hateful paranoia choose to miscast through placement of emphasis on fractional narrow views that are meaningless to the point of being laughable. Fortunately, for the most part you are contained in this little “blogsphere” at the fringe of the wider universe. Do us all a favor and point your little spaceship to edge and keep on going!
Typical babble! Your abuse of the English language is only surpassed by the incredible lack of research to support such a ridiculous line of misleading points.
This diatribe is filled with pure emotional nonsense. Who are you to dictate from your pedestal made of bullshit to people as to the lifestyle they prefer whether suburban, urban or rural? You consistently fail to recognize the qualities of suburban lifestyle that make it so appealing in real terms that can be substantiated by facts based on research. And oh yes my dear dear Jim it is not evil corporate conspiracies that placed people in some sort of trance like state where they have for decades opted for a house in suburbia. Such a premise is rubbish!
Whom are we to rely on as alternative? People like you who abuse the language with marginal writing skills to socially engineer our culture and living choices? I for one do not want to to be warehoused in some multistory cubed space relying on a postage stamp public park filled with the last passer poodle’s bowel movement.
Have you considered that people may genuinely enjoy suburban lifestyle? That it supports the pursuit of recreational hobbies? Gardening, antiquing, etc.? That bonds between people as neighbors are formed, block parties occur, children birthdays are mutually celebrated?
Apparently not. You, in your loathing, hateful paranoia choose to miscast through placement of emphasis on fractional narrow views that are meaningless to the point of being laughable. Fortunately, for the most part you are contained in this little “blogsphere” at the fringe of the wider universe. Do us all a favor and point your little spaceship to edge and keep on going!
“There’s one small ACORN in your underpants but the other one never descended.”
Yiiiikes!!! You claim to know what’s in my underpants and I need to get a life? Care to add up you postings since your brilliant arrival and weigh them against mine and see who is the bigger “armchair activist”? I thought not.
That’s not fair-did these folks come to the Tea Party demonstrations? Of course not-they are Left Wingers and the Tea Party Right Wingers. Now I’ve gone to these kind of things and I do agree with alot of the beliefs about how the Goverment has been hijacked by the Corporations. And the Tea Party folks would agree as well. But the difference is in Vision and thus in the cure. We distinguish between Capitalism and Free Enterprise. You folks tend not to. Thus you want to give the goverment and even bigger role in our affairs-Socialism in a word. How would that stop corruption? The original American Sytem was built with many limitations, checks, and balances because it knows how corruptible human beings are.
Also the G-20 protestors will never say anything about illegal immigration. As Socialists or Communists, they don’t believe in National Sovereignty so they will do nothing to protect America. Needless to say, the Tea Party differs. So whatever the parralels, the two movements spring from different roots and go on to produce different fruits.
Tea Bagger is an insult with sexual innuendoes-made up by the vile Jeanine Garafaelo.
Refrain from using it or be tarred with the same brush as her.
You didn’t answer the important question in the post you just responded to. If we are as you state, up to our neck is greed and corruption, who is responsible? ACORN’s agenda is ‘increasing the minimum wage, and assisting low income people with their housing needs’. Are they responsible for corporate and government corruption? Do they have the resources to cause such widespread corruption?
For the record, I can respect libertarianism, it’s intellectually honest, and many of the people I’ve met who support it are sincere. I don’t think it’s possible in a world as interconnected and complex as the one we are living in now, and I also think the train has left the station on such sweeping “solutions”, but it is a respectable counterpoint to something like democratic socialism.
What passes for “conservatism” these days does not deserve respect, it’s a reflection of the most corrupt and disingenuous elements in our society. Modern “liberalism” isn’t much better, less venal, but nearly as beholden to the same special interests that have so completely corrupted conservatism. I remember true conservatism, guys like Bill Buckley, I didn’t like him much, but I think he was honest.
I have watched Fox News, when I visit by father-in-law, that’s what is on most of the day. By choice, I would never watch Fox News because I don’t trust them. They are flatly and openly dishonest. Anything that is really news, and not just political propaganda, is done better by others. The purest real “news” I’ve seen in a long time is “World Focus” on PBS. They typically carry analysis from around the world.
Do yourself a favor, drop the mock anger and screaming insults, it’s not only bullshit, it doesn’t work. Tune out the media emotion merchants like Beck, they’re there to trick you. They are well aware of the old saying “He who can make you angry, controls you.”
“Holy shit. This is scary.”
————————–
Calm down Cows … take a deep breath. The sun will rise tomorrow. I guarantee it.
“Do yourself a favor, drop the mock anger and screaming insults, it’s not only bullshit, it doesn’t work.”
———————————
This is sooo true, and sooo well said. I wish I had said it.
“This is sooo true, and sooo well said. I wish I had said it.”
No shit because what you DO actually have to say is vapid nonsense.
Yes, Libertarianism proceeds logically from its principles-unlike most Conservatism. Unfortunately, those are not first principles for Man does not live by bread alone. No Society can hang together by everyone trying to get over on everyone else. On the other hand, the profit motive is powerful and the great engine of creativity and an excellent means of allowing for consumer choice. The answer is the Third Way-a Republic which guides the market for the good of all. In this regard, the East Asians have always been far ahead of us. They never had the illusion that Big Corporations and the Goverment could be kept apart. But rather than have the Corporations covertly control Goverment, they had Goverment watch over and guide the Corporations-for the benefit of the Nation. Likewise, some Socialism is inevitable. Rather than let the Leftists grab hold of these principles for the purpose of Revolution, the wise State readily admits them and garners income from its Industries, thus relieving the people of onerous taxation. Needless to say, such a Socialism is National not part of some hideous Globalist Conspiracy whether old Marxist or the so called New World Order. Just a few of the principles of rational Fascism-completely compatible with the Constitution.
As Dale says, there’s no going back to the 1700s, nor would we want to. London of that day had tens of thousands of girl prostitutes-children of people thrown off their land by the new Industrial Elite. It got worse in the next century. But there is no reason to give up our Nation to the likes of Dale and Co either.
For the record, though I sympathize with the G-20 protesters, I am not a communist or an anarchist. I belive in a planned, locally focused, small-scale form of capitalism that doesn’t concentrate wealth in the hands of the few.
In other words, I believe in a traditional America. Surprisingly, I don’t find many of the “tea partier” types supporting my worldview. All I hear from them is stuff like: “Wal-Mart has a good business model, don’t punish success.”
In the end, though, the Big Corporation and Big Government are no different.
Embrace my worldview tea partiers. Let’s get back to our roots.
“Are they responsible for corporate and government corruption?”
What the fuck does that have to do with the price of bread?
They are responsible for the corrupt behavior within their organization. It has been exposed and now needs to be investigated.
If you have some information regarding corporate and government corruption I suggest you get in touch with the appropriate governing agency and report it. This is what was done regarding ACORN and if the agency truly has some good works to offer the world they will pay for their transgressions, mend their ways and provide some needed services. Period. End of sentence
Ah, lil ole Stink Eye is obsessed with ACORN. I would never have guessed that.
zzzzzzzz/OEO/zsazsa/aszasz reads all dem papers and watches the teevee so he can bring us his expert knowledge here on kunstler.com. Aren’t we a lucky bunch to have such a brilliant, balanced, well-adjusted, knowledgeable person among us? She is definitely not a moron or a f*cktard for that matter.
theres a song by Kate Bush:
‘A SOUND THAT WOULD KILL SOMEONE’
get my drift here?
thanks for reporting on the G20…i hear kadafi was camping at Trumps!
‘You need to GET A LIFE !!’
Do we sense some projecting goin on?
Do you remember the details? i dont….and no i didnt read them in the Wash Post but in Readers Digest!!!!!!!!!!!!
Escaped to cuba and M Waters went to visit her..or something like that!
Peak Oil, Global Warming, Financial Crisis, Iran’s trying to get nukes, overpopulation, Pakistan and Afghanistan falling apart, government is $16 trillion in debt, economy bleeding jobs, among other things, and we’re supposed to be worried about….ACORN. LMAO. Pardon me if this scandal isn’t making me get out of the Lazy-boy to go teabagging.
‘ the main media outlets were busy not covering it’
Indeed, I saw something buried away on the editorial page of the LATimes….but only after the coverage on theweb and AM radio made the story impossible to ignore
Man, this thing is FARKED today. Where is my posts? Enjoy your enlightening conversations with Stink Eye, Bambi, Jagoff, and the rest of the winners. Dale, I don’t know why you come here. You’d do better to organize your sock drawer or any other number of household tasks than try to argue with Parrot Boy. I’m out.
Yesterday on CNBC, Erin Burnett did an excellent interview with an old dude named Julian Robertson. His knowledge and his manner of speaking induce instant respect. You listen carefully because you know you will be hearing something of value.
What Mr. Robertson said was that at some point, long term interest rates would rise significantly, maybe even massively. To profit from this eventuality his firm is buying “long term puts on long term bonds.”
A couple of days ago I said the same thing about the certainty that long term rates would rise but who knows when? I said a way to play this was to buy the double levered ETF on 20 yr bonds that goes by the symbol TBT.
Why am I repeating all of this?
Because Cramer came on in the evening and ranted about the dangers of double and triple levered funds. I have heard him before on this subject and I’ve read many articles backing up that view. Cramer is pushing to have these vehicles outlawed.
I feel an obligation, therefore, to tell you about this warning concerning leveraged ETFs and, in fact, I’m going to try henceforth to avoid market prognostications and tips altogether. I don’t want the responsibility for any potential bad outcomes.
For myself, I will be trying to find out how one goes about buying “long term puts on long term bonds” rather than involving myself with the potentially dangerous TBT.
Asoka shows up at the ANTI Growth site and praises Growth! what a fools errand!
‘Islam is the world’s fastest growing religion, 1.5 billion and counting’
YES DUE TO POVERTY, LACK OF EDUCATION, OPPRESSION OF WOMEN, AND BEING WELFARE QUEENS IN EUROPE.
Due to these factors muslim women continue to have 4 to 15 children each.
Islam grows like a cancer!
“‘You need to GET A LIFE !!’
Do we sense some projecting goin on?”
——————————-
Asia, if you can show any pervasive tendency on my part to pontificate endlessly on any political issue, right or left, (a la Zzz on ACORN) or to hold myself out as the ultimate authority on any subject (to the point where other opinions deserve zero respect, a la Zzz), or to gratuitously, endlessly and boringly insult other commenters* as if it were a legitimate debating tactic (a la Zzz), please point it out so I can go about mending my ways.
*Except for spelling and grammar 😉
hahahah
Unless, as some had accused him it was always about self promotion and schemes to make $$$
JR was not my hero…..Ginsburg was a much better writer
In any case people get old and act differnetly as they do age
‘Your silly denial of the corruption in ACORN is stupendous. First you said it was a non story. Then when some federal dollars were assigned to the organization you said the amount wasn’t really all that much. Then it was the racists pursuing the story’
you know him too well…as does anyone even half way reading this 5 day long flame fest
“long term puts on long term bonds” rather than involving myself with the potentially dangerous TBT.
————————-
Call your broker, probably just a matter of you being cleared to trade options, not difficult.
That being said, I’m not sure puts are less risky than TBT. Options are best used as a hedge. TBT is not that volatile anyway, since it is based on bond fluctuation, which is usually small on a daily basis, especially compared to the other leveraged ETF’s like SRS, FAZ, FAS.
Keep in mind, even if you are “sure” what a market will do eventually in any particular area, you can go broke twice waiting for it to happen.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh…..
Settling into the space I will occupy for the remainder of the G-D TRANSITION(!), and “you-betchum-you-Red-f-ing-Rider”, I’ll be exceptionally careful about who I chose to “save”.
Those who have no thought for co-operative effort will be left in the limbo/purgatory of their greed and foolish race-hatred. You think we’re not prepared for you assholes? We are HYPER-aware of you and your suicidal agenda.
Beware, we’ll just wait until you’ve exhausted your load of mouth, ammunition, and strength and bury you and your ideologies alive.
You want somethin’ else to fear, do ya? Now you’ve got it, you bullshit Confederate Crackers for Jesus (tm D.M.G)…
What is a Muslim? Sitting in a church pew (bench to you)for 20 years listening to a so-called minister preaching hatred for Whitey and being anti-semitic overtly, being exposed to a guy like Farrakhan who is clearly a Muslim, you don’t think our President is even remotely like a Muslim? What are you hiding, Turkle? Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, isn’t a duck?? Obama sucked up to the Middle East Muslims, bowed to the Saudi hotshot. His hosts mentioned all the great things about Muslims like child brides, tolerance to wife beating, instant divorce, OK for concubines, yeah, Turkle, Obama chooses his friends wisely and wonderfully. Of course, you won’t admit this, will you? No, you and folks who constantly say, “aw, let’s give him some more time”…. what is it you don’t understand, Turkle?
Open up, we can help you understand the realities behind the guy you obviously envy and admire.
from an old post:
puppet.
Jaego Scorzne replied to comment from PeakOilLori | September 15, 2009 10:41 PM | Reply
My sympathies to you-if you are for real that is. The problem with anecdotal (personal experience) evidence is that is intrinsically very limited and skewed. The fact is that Blacks rape women at five times the rate White Men do. That people don’t know that is a tribute to the controlled media. White Men rape more than Asian Men. Why the differences? Because the races are different. And it’s not just cultural: Blacks have more testosterone than Whites and Whites more than Asians. Now of course the respective cultures reflect these differences. So sure, it’s cultural-because it’s genetic first.
HOW ABOUT READING:
‘THE DARK SIDE OF MAN’
it may warm yr heart to read him take on the feminazis
HOWEVER HE SAYS POOR MEN RAPE
it is an economic low status ‘desperate’ way to get sex.
Wow Jaego such poison that spews out of you. amazing.
Sufism is composed of many different sects also. As Shah says, when a master and his disciples remain at some sort of ashram for a long time, they tend to become rigid. No more flexibility which is anti sufi teaching. There are probably as many sufi sects as there are sects in other religions.
As for blacks, I look at them as individuals. I cannot lump them. If that is black loving then so be it. I see them the same as whites.
I think you are projecting with me. You are also well read but very strange.
But what would transcend capitalism? That is the big question. We have socialism (totalitarianism) on the left and fascism (totalitarianism) on the right and we are living in a window between the two. It will not last forever.
Don’t you think it might be the dumbing down of all Americans. The media is made up of them. Also I think Chomsky’s book on media explains why.
Those names sell media.
It is not so is it? Meaning yes.
I know what you mean.
“Holy shit. This is scary. These guys are truly stormtroopers at the G-20. Seriously, they resemble stormtroopers more than they do actual police. If anything, just give the first 1:30 a view.”
Ah, checked it out. A bunch of ninnies that were told to disperse did not. A couple actually got a wisp of tear gas. My lord this is time-standing-still shit here. (Not.)
These demonstrations today are sending a message around the world. That the US hates its own citizens and is willing to crush them too. But we have known this since the viet nam war so no surprise here. The new part is the technological sophistication of countering protesters.
Just wait until the video cameras with facial ID are everywhere. No wonder China is testing it out for us. If you are Chinese you have a certain color skin (number of shades) dark eyes, dark hair so tech surveillance that can identify you under these conditions is very good indeed.
The noose is tightening.
“JR was not my hero…..Ginsburg was a much better writer”
———————–
IMO Rubin was a person desparately in need of the limelight. As the limelight dimmed what would be more natural than a Jewish boy working on Wall St where he might turn a flair for self promotion into some sort of clientel. I don’t think it worked out too well though.
As to your writing remark, I think you may be mixing up Abbie Hoffman with Allen Ginsberg. Hoffman was one of Rubin’s cohorts in the Chicago Seven and wrote “Steal This Book,” famous for its title, not its artistry. Ginsberg gained fame as a writer/poet but was not one of the Chi 7.
When political activism sputtered out in the US, Hoffman’s reason for existence sputtered with it and he killed himself. Zzz should keep this in mind since it seems to be his reason for existence too.
As to getting older and acting differently with age … Rubin got hit by a car while crossing a street on foot and died in his mid-fifties.
That ultra-sonic sound device worked wonders on the G-20 protesters in P-Burg. Just imagine if they would have had it around during the days of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. They could have taken them uppity folks down easily.
Jim Crow would still rule today! Jaego would love it.
Go police state, go! Go stormtroopers!
So, all of us just give Obama a free pass, right? Let’s just get along, right? What does that make you, turkle? It addresses the fact you go along with this moron four square. If that’s sad and pathetic, so be it. Had Germans been able to oppose Hitler successfully, there would have been no war. Sadly, they didn’t take him out early. It’s why we want to jump Obama early, turkle. He’s incited race friction since he started campaigning, he’s a malignant individual.
Enjoy your sweet dreams, turkle. But, they are only dreams as you have the dreaded Media Disease, don’t call ’em as you see ’em.
With a nod to Mencken {& pookie}:
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful democrat to reconcile himself to the idea that after all, Obama will not help him.
Also for my list of ‘those awarded hero/victim status by the media’
Mike tyson
eldridge cleaver
rev Wright
rev Ike
Donald DeFreeze ……sla’s cinque
and leftissts terrorists made college profs
Bernadine
bill
angela davis
“These demonstrations today are sending a message around the world.”
—————————-
In my usual fashion, I have no strong concern for what is going on, or not going on, with the protesters in Pittsburgh, nor any skin in the game. I do have a vague gut feel, however, based on an admittedly invalid statistical sample.
Some half dozen or so of my son Tom’s circle of liberal friends went off to P-Burg several days ago. They IM’d back to Tom to dream up and send some snappy words they could put on signs to march with against the vile capitalists. (Tom is known for his way with the written word.) He did so and showed me a few examples. They weren’t bad. They spun a pithy angry take on the subject matter of the NY Times Op-Ed pages. But I know Tom. He’s an artsy type who could write a tome on pop-music genres that would out-weigh War and Peace. It scares me that I have to explain, for example, what a corporation’s quarterly dividend is all about.
I’ve met some of his friends and suspect their grasp of the issues about which they’re protesting is about as “deep as a plum pudding” (Spencer Tracy, in Stanley and Livingstone). What these dudes are up to, I think, – not that there’s anything wrong with it – is an early-fall lark away from their grim daily routines in Philly in hopes of “getting lucky” with some like-minded member of the opposite sex with a tastefully tattooed loner body.
Dammit, I screwed up my punch line. Those last two words should read loaner body
The title of this weeks column is ORIGINAL SIN.
zzzzzzz is ecstatic about the anti-ACORN witch hunt and apparently thinks federal dollar recipients who have committed fraud and mismanaged taxpayer dollars should be de-funded.
There are 600 war corporations (receiving BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in contracts) seriously mismanaging our money to fund prostitution, child sex slavery rings, rape of women soldiers, death by electrocution of American soldiers, murder of innocent civilians, and just general rampant FRAUD (like the Department of Defense paying for $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers).
The war corporations’ FRAUD and IMMORAL BEHAVIOR is on a scale that makes ACORN look saintly by comparison.
zzzzzz, should all the war corporations be de-funded also?
Or is this just a witch hunt against ACORN because ACORN registers poor black and brown voters?
OBAMA WILL WIN 2012 THANKS TO REPUBLICANS
“According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll published on Wednesday, a plurality of respondents said that if health care reform fails, the Republicans will be at fault. Those who disapproved of the way that Republicans are handling the health care debate outnumbered those who approved of their behavior by a margin of more than 3 to 1.”
GOD BLESS THE ANGRY TEA PARTY FOLKS!
YES WE CAN!
The ORIGINAL SIN was to send USA troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, just as Bin Laden hoped Bush would do.
Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996:
“Osama Bin Laden told me when I interviewed him in November 1996, “I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success.””
Nine years later the USA is losing the war… and Obama should cut and run, as fast as possible, to withdraw ALL troops from all bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead Obama kept all the Bush guys who don’t know how to fight or win a war… nine years… against an inferior fighting force… and the USA is losing.
Bring the troops home, ALL of them, and focus the human and financial resources saved on solving domestic issues.
“There are 600 war corporations”
———————————
Asoka is back and the gloves are off … no more mamby pamby bullshit downloads that go in one ear and out the other. Asoka’s here to grind his pet ax.
Of course, Asoka’s words require the critical eye of someone who actually knows something about which Asoka speaks. Someone who does not wear goody-two-shoes. Someone who does not need to whirl with dervishes to drive away the demons of suicide. Someone with 26 years in the business. In short, someone like me.
Let’s break it down a sentence, phrase, or even a word at a time lest Asoka deceive you:
There are 600 war* corporations
No, there are far far more than 600 corporations directly or indirectly supplying the government with, what is more accurately referred to, as its defense* related requirements … everything from tanks to toilet paper.
*Asoka has absorbed the wisdom of anti-military lifers who know the importance of labels … namely, never say Defense … always say War
(receiving BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in contracts)
Alas it’s true, and a damn shame that defending one’s country is expensive … as is just getting by from week to week for Joe Sixpack.
seriously mismanaging our money
The management competency of major defense contractors is equal to or greater than that of any other corporations in the US. Saying the opposite is so easy and who is going to make you prove it?
to fund prostitution, child sex slavery rings, rape of women soldiers, death by electrocution of American soldiers, murder of innocent civilians,
To suggest that this is a conscious goal of the honorable people working in the defense industry is a slander of the highest order and something only Asoka, Abbey and a few other paranoid crackpots believe.
and just general rampant FRAUD (like the Department of Defense paying for $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers).
I will give Asoka credit for lowering back those toilet seat and hammer numbers closer to the levels actually reported in the press decades ago in their, then, cause celebre. The numbers grew over time to mythological proportions till those toilet seats were said to have cost the taxpayer as much as $2,000.
The blame for routine items that, in theory, could have been bought at Home Depot for, lets say, $50 and $25 respectively belongs with the government, not the suppliers … that very same government that Asoka has all but sainted in every area of involvement except military. One example should suffice: the Bailouts, which Asoka gleefully tells us is proceeding swimmingly. Contractors would love to have been relieved of absurd “mil spec” requirements on materials that did not require them. In more recent years great strides have been made to allow use of non-mil spec parts where appropriate. And then there is the high cost of “government compliance.” The average citizen would be astonished at the degree to which the government oversees contracts both technically and financially. Such oversight places heavy requirements on the contractor which doesn’t come cheap. The Defense Contract Audit Agency was my #1 external customer during the last 10 years of my career.
The war corporations’ FRAUD and IMMORAL BEHAVIOR
Defense contractors are required to live up to high levels of ethical training and compliance. ACORN fraud is to Defense Contractor fraud as Madoff is to shoplifting.
ASOKA, YOU ARE SO FULL OF SHIT and you should go back to that fictitious work project.
Jefferson was particularly pessimistic about Negro intellectual proficiency. “Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous…..They astonish you with strokes of the most sublime oratory….But never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration….”
And modern research for the last hundred years has found just the same things-surely a tribute to Jefferson’s acuity of observation. People nowdadys can’t understand the same things even with long scientific studies.
I can’t help but wonder if it would improve the quality of the discussion here, if everyone had to meet in person and carry a sword. It made people remarkably polite at one time. The good old days of civilized debate between people like William F. Buckley and John Kenneth Galbraith have faded away, never to return. Ah, the joys of the internet where everyone can be the equivalent of a crank telephone caller with no fear of reprisal.
CaptSpaulding said: “it would improve the quality of the discussion here, if everyone had to meet in person and carry a sword.”
Ah, yes, conversation carried on under threat of death.
Remarkably civilized!
Qshtik, you have essentially confirmed my point about contractor fraud, while conveniently ignoring my point about de-funding ACORN and the war contractors.
You say defending the country costs a lot, but what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is not defending the country. Traveling thousands of miles to bomb, invade, and occupy countries that never represented a threat is not defense, it is pre-emptive, unilateral, war making. But, after 26 years of working with “defense” contractors, I guess you have drunk the kool aid.
You should have investigated a bit before taking that first job.
What are gyroscopes used for? Missile guidance systems.
What are the missiles blowing up wedding parties and killing civilians doing? Making the country less safe by creating more terrorists. (As Rumsfeld candidly admitted)
You completely ignored the point of my post. If ACORN is de-funded for fraudulent mismanagement of federal funds, then there are at least 600 war contractors who should also be de-funded.
Despite no less an authority than the Bible, warning “There will always be wars and rumors of wars,” Asoka, as Secretary of Defense, would execute a cost-free strategy of simply asking the world the famous rhetorical question: “Can’t we all just get along?” My God, how naive can a grown man be?
I want to thank Asoka for finally conceding that his characterization of Defense Contractors was unjustified and for recognizing that they are probably better managed, more ethically run, and more intolerant of fraudulent activity than the typical US corporation. Further, I am pleased Asoka was gracious enough to admit that operations of defense contractors are completely irrelevant to the debate concerning the funding of Acorn.
Thanks Asoka !!
I know how hard this must have been, given your genetic pre-disposition toward pacifism … and how, no matter what horrors some future terrorists might perpetrate on our soil you will believe in your heart that we deserved it.
And now that we’re on a more civil footing I want to apologize to you for all those times I called you an asshole and said you were full of shit and other similar unkind remarks. They have no place in civil debate. My sincere apologies.
Q
“a guy like Farrakhan who is clearly a Muslim”
Weeellll, no not clearly. Farrakhan is Nation of Islam (NoI), which is NOT Islam. NoI believe in a prophet after Mohammed named Elijah Muhammad. Muslims believe Mohammed to be the last Prophet.
And there are no pews in a Mosque.
If you want to see a real, unromanticized ‘world made by hand’, come to the less developed areas of rural China. I don’t think there are many people who would care to live in that way, unsufferably hot in summer and miserable all winter. No heating, air-conditioning, refrigeration, TV, internet or phone. Most of the products people use in their daily lives are locally made and are scarce and primitive. You really come to appreciate the miracle of modern industry in a situation where even the most simple of things are not available, like soap, detergent, a new pair of shoes or trousers, a 7-11 at 2:am, an anti-biotic for the infection taking root in your gums. In villages, most people use a public latrine, and they bathe by standing in a large pan while pouring cold water over their head. Forget about fresh or even canned fruits and vegetables in the winter, and a lot of the foods we take for granted are never available. Industry, mechanization, technology and related progress have enriched people’s lives tremendously. These things have allowed people to escape the cruelties of unrelenting harsh climate, have relieved us of unrewarding, backbreaking toil, have afforded us new freedoms to explore and given us many forms of intellectual enrichment and stimulation. The best aspects of modernity are not possible without markets and the profit incentive, systems of delivery, abundant energy, and a modern economic structure etc. People of prior times certainly did not have the answers to happiness, fulfillment or peace, and we certainly do not today. Communism didn’t work, social democracy is not working in Europe or Japan, and capitalism has failed. JHK artistically and humorously describes the flaws of our present, but for me his argument breaks down in suggesting that we need to retreat to some point in the past.
What’s wrong with Kmart? (besides the obvious)
http://www.suburbanempire.com
Q and Asoka read
http://www.suburbanempire.com/content/wackinhut-pride-nation
If you think private contractors are a good deal for the taxpayer, then Qshtik, take a good gander at the Butt crack shots you are paying for. (and now paying to prevent)
Qshtik replied to comment from asoka:
“there are far far more than 600 corporations directly or indirectly supplying…defense* related requirements”
Agree
“(receiving BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars in contracts)”
Disagree; try hundreds of billions of $
“a damn shame that defending one’s country is expensive”
That is a mouthful; roughly $1 Trillion this year and last for the US DoD
“seriously mismanaging our money”
Having seen it with my own eyes, I agree with Asoka
“The management competency of major defense contractors is equal to or greater than that of any other corporations in the US.”
If competency is measured by corporate profits; I agree. If competency is measured by cost effectiveness of defense products; I disagree. If defense contractors are so competent why does the US spend twice as much for defense as the sum total of the entire rest of the Earth’s complement of countries?
“The blame for routine items that, in theory, could have been bought at Home Depot for, lets say, $50 and $25 respectively belongs with the government, not the suppliers …” that very same government that Asoka has all but sainted in every area of involvement except military. One example should suffice: the Bailouts, which Asoka gleefully tells us is proceeding swimmingly. Contractors would love to have been relieved of absurd “mil spec” requirements on materials that did not require them. In more recent years great strides have been made to allow use of non-mil spec parts where appropriate. And then there is the high cost of “government compliance.” The average citizen would be astonished at the degree to which the government oversees contracts both technically and financially. Such oversight places heavy requirements on the contractor which doesn’t come cheap. The Defense Contract Audit Agency was my #1 external customer during the last 10 years of my career.”
Talk about horseshit; where to start? 1. Blame the government for outrageously costly equipment and services. The government is required by Congress to use procurement devices commonly decried as wasteful and whom do you suppose convinces the Congress to impose those procurement processes? You win if you said corporate management via their lobbyists in D.C. any other answer is absolute horseshit. Milspecs are an ingenious invention which enables “certified” corporations to bid on lucrative contracts and exclude “the others”. I agree the average US citizen would be astounded at the LACK of competent oversight of government contracts. The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) (notoriously under funded) was/is responsible for actually monitoring the production items under contract DCAA supposedly performed audits to follow the money; neither DCMA or DCAA had/have input into the letting of contracts. Your contention that you worked for DCAA as a subcontractor substantiates my contention that these organizations were undermanned.
“Defense contractors are required to live up to high levels of ethical training and compliance. ACORN fraud is to Defense Contractor fraud as Madoff is to shoplifting.”
I worked for a defense contractor for about two years until I could stand it no longer and quit. Defense contractors ethical; in the main, bullshit. Have you ever been to any of the contract supplied ethics courses forced upon government and contractor personnel? I have.
In actuality Defense Contractor Fraud is to ACORN Fraud as Madoff is to shoplifting.
I worked 29+ years in a combination of active duty military (USAF) 10 years, DoD civilian (USAF 10 years, USA 7 years, USN 0.5 years) defense contractor (2 years) from CA to NY and stations in between.
“defense contractor (2 years) from CA to NY and stations in between.”
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You must have lived quite a miserable life, what with 29 straight years in one way or another connected to Defense. To have such contempt for the work of an entire lifetime must be awful. It is something I council my kids about all the time … don’t work at something you hate.
Those last two years (see quote at top) say a lot about you. In just two years you hopped from one contractor to another and from coast to coast and in between. Who was dissatisfied with whom, you or your employer?
I could as easily take your comment and deconstruct it beginning as you did with the words “Talk about horseshit; where to start?” but a debate would rage on endlessly. Nevertheless, I can’t stop myself from mentioning at least one of your gems: “The government is required by Congress to use procurement devices….” You speak of Congress as though it is something separate and apart from the government. It is the government. And that is where the problem lies. It is not the Contractor but the Government who is inherently inept.
Instead of observing in silence the rampant waste and fraud you allege, you should have reported it (as was your duty) instead of letting it fester for 29 years.
BTW, I did not work for DCAA as a subcontractor; I worked for a Defense Contractor and interfaced with DCAA continuously. They audited us and I responded to their requests for information. One of my proudest moments came in a routine meeting where the local head of DCAA said in front of a dozen people including my boss: “When Q gives us info we check it, as we are required, but we know we are wasting our time … it is never wrong.”
I recommend you change your handle from SNAFU to SNIAFU: Situation Normal, I’m All Fucked Up.
Indeed
The times had a page 1 story last week…..tens of 1000s of infants stolen from rural china and sold to ‘ do gooders’ in the US and europe!
showed village pix of a world handmade