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The elephant’s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named Discontinuity. That’s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don’t work the way they are supposed to — beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.

One reason it’s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.

For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can’t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can’t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don’t really pencil out — such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).

This will go on until it can’t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating “sub-prime” car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for “yield” (higher interest) on “safe” investments that ostensibly preserve their principal. The “collateral” amounts to the revenue streams of payments that are sure to stop because the payers are by definition not credit-worthy, meaning it was baked in the cake that they would quit making payments — especially when they go “under water” owing ever more money for junkers that have lost all value.

It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation. We took what used to be a fairly sound idea during a now-bygone phase of history, and perverted it to avoid making any difficult but necessary changes in a new phase of history.

Health care is now such a blatant, odious, and ruinous racket that it is a little hard to believe that it hasn’t ignited an outright revolution or, at least, a workplace massacre in some insurance company C-suite. It is a well-known fact that most Americans don’t even have $500 to pay for a car repair. How are they supposed to cope with a $5,000 deductible health insurance incident? Answer: they can’t. Their mental health is destroyed in the process of attempting to fix their physical health. Not uncommonly, they have to declare bankruptcy after a routine appendectomy or a visit to the emergency room to set a broken arm. Sometimes, they don’t even bother to go to the doctor, seeing clearly how this plays out. The pharmaceutical industry has, of course, been allowed to convert itself into a simple extortion racket. Got an unusual kind of cancer? We have something that might help. Oh, it costs $43,000 a month….

What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which must be the biggest public lie ever floated.

It’s interesting to see how a parallel fraud is playing out in higher ed. I submit the reason that college presidents are not pushing back against the Maoist coercions of the undergraduate social justice warriors is because the marvelous theater of the gender, race, and “privilege” melodrama is a potent distraction from the sad fact that college has turned into a grotesquely top-heavy and high-paying administrative racket offering boutique courses in fake fields (Dartmouth College: WGSS 65.06 Radical Sexuality: Of Color, Wildness, and Fabulosity… Harvard University: WOMGEN 1424:  American Fetish) in order to pander to their young customers (students) conditioned to tragic “oppression” sob stories. All in the service of paying huge salaries + perqs to the dynamic executives running these places.

Then there is banking, a.k.a. the financial system, certainly the greatest racket of rackets, since the fumes it’s running on — combinations of ZIRP, QE, and “forward guidance” (happy talk) — is all that there is to maintain the illusion that “money” remains a reliable gauge of value. Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.

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438 Responses to “The Elephant Cometh”

  1. Neon Vincent April 18, 2016 at 10:10 am #

    Cars, suburbia, health care, and higher education–welcome to the rackets that must keep going at all costs. I’m surprised our host didn’t take aim at another easy target, Tax Day, like John Oliver and FiveThirtyEight did. John Oliver suggested funding the IRS more. FiveThirtyEight recommended eliminating Tax Day as we know it. The first will make it easier to take money away from Americans. The latter will minimize the math involved. I bet I know which will be more popular.

    Also, tomorrow is the New York Primary. On the Democratic side, the choice is Clinton vs. Sanders. Both of them promise to do something about the rackets that our host mentioned, Sanders more so than Clinton. However, their “somethings” will not be sufficient to prepare us for the future our host predicts is coming and some of their fixes will actually make things worse. Geez, no wonder some people will be picking the elephant tomorrow, even if the pachyderm is named Trump!

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:56 am #

      Trump with a trunk!

  2. venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 10:24 am #

    What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on? Why, the Obama administration, which allowed the health insurance company lobbyists and their colleagues in Big Pharma to “craft” the Affordable Care Act — the name of which is must be the biggest public lie ever floated.

    (I’m not very tech-savy at all. Is there an HTML code this website accepts that can be used for quotes?)

    If and when Hillary gets the Democratic nod, my guess is low-key working-class hatred for the Unaffordable And We Don’t Care Act (tip of the hat to John Michael Greer for that one) will have a lot to do with either Donald Trump or (more likely) Paul Ryan winning the ticket to the Oval Office. I think it had a lot to do with the sweeping Republican victories in the previous two midterm elections. The only reason Obama was reelected is the Republicans ended up having no choice but to nominate the guy who was pretty much the architect of what became Obamacare, and who was also only slightly less detested than Hillary is now!

    Both parties are having their national conventions in late July this election cycle, almost back-to-back. I have to admit I am genuinely curious as to what the domestic political scene will look like on the Monday morning of August 1st. So you really think the next big economic {kablamo} will happen before then? I think the establishment definitely wants Hillary to be annointed queen of the USA, so they will do everything in their power to keep a lid on things until August 1st at the very earliest. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will be successful in this endeavor, though!

    • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 10:53 am #

      What kind of a polity allows this cruel and indecent grift to go on?

      The answer to this question is simple and obvious: It’s a society whose highest and greatest value is the freedom-to-extract.

      – Most people will pay anything, any amount at all, for the promise of healing when they are sick and injured, most especially when their children are sick and injured. Morbidity and mortality are a massive business opportunity and always have been.

      – Up to about the mid-1970s, wages tracked with productivity, but since then worker productivity (i.e. what people’s work is worth) has continued climbing while wages (i.e. what people get paid for their work) has been stagnant in real terms. The surplus has been extracted through suppression of labour bargaining power and endless financial chicanery.

      – The Pentagon budget is a gargantuan buffet where financial accountability goes to die. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan rapidly devolved into free-fraud zones where the only victors were (a) the enemy and (b) military contractors who grew fat on massive no-bid, cost-plus contracts.

      The freedom-to-extract is so surpassingly important in the American value system that it goes by the shorthand freedom and has handily replaced actual freedom in everyday discourse without anyone really noticing or caring. Just make a habit of mentally substituting “freedom-to-extract” anytime some TV talking head blabbers about “freedom” as the motive for the latest bombing campaign somewhere or other, and you’ll be astonished at how much more clearly you understand things in no time at all.

      • venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 10:58 am #

        Word, yo!

      • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 12:02 pm #

        I’ve been using the mental phrase, ‘Freedom to exploit‘ for quite a while myself. It produces the same rush of mental clarity.

        I think the clarity is real enough, but there is danger because:

        “We see things not as they are, instead we see things as we are.”

      • WannaBleave April 18, 2016 at 1:23 pm #

        “freedom to extract” <- pure brilliance! Funniest yet, is the party that yammers on about freedom the most (GOP) is the one that would most like to restrict it (No Family Planning, No Equal Rights, No, No, NO to everything!) – I'm no fan of the other side either but I do hope that whomever wins (Sanders or Trump?) will foment CHANGE at a fundamental level

        • Layne April 18, 2016 at 4:58 pm #

          I have followed JHK for years and this was one of his best, but also frightening because it is true. I was kind of surprised that he did not address last week’s threatening of an American destroyer and spy planes by Russian jets, or the Chinese placing fighters on their artificial islands…

      • Daphne DeMuir April 19, 2016 at 1:30 pm #

        so this year the rates for “affordable” care plans doubled in some cases and now that it’s back to being unaffordable care. I really think it’s inevitable that single payer is going to keep gaining traction. Too many people who were able to buy insurance, sometimes for the first time, have had to leave the system when their rates suddenly skyrocketed. I have a friend who found that her rates had doubled this year, so she had to leave her plan. The only one she could find costs $400 per month and has a $6000 deductible. This doesn’t even cover her husband. As someone said, it’s like making a car payment and never getting the car. This is unsustainable, especially since people who are once again uninsured are going right straight back to the emergency rooms for their basic health care. And I won’t listen to any jabber about who’s going to pay for it. To once again quote Tony Benn, “If you can find money to kill people you can find money to help people.”

        • Elrond Hubbard April 19, 2016 at 2:13 pm #

          There’s talk of fascism in the air. Fascism is one of the way things can go when the scams and excuses the 1% use to cover their strip-mining of the economy stop working — when people start paying attention to the real mechanisms, demanding real change, and won’t take no for an answer.

          The 1% may respond to that by accepting change as the price of not losing their position altogether, as they did under the New Deal. Or they may abandon pretense and resort to naked force, turning the methods they use in foreign exploited lands against their own population. This often involves enlisting rabid nativist, racist and reactionary groups to act as their enforcers — until they find that the nativists, racists and reactionaries are in the driver’s seat. That’s fascism.

          In America in 2016, the scams and excuses of the 1% are no longer working. They have tried to keep things going with obviously fraudulent half-measures like the ACA. They may or may not decide that their best interests would be served by accepting change as the price of not losing their position altogether. And the nativists, racists and reactionaries (h/t Janos!) see their opening, and they’re gunning for it. Strap in.

          • sharonsj April 20, 2016 at 5:51 pm #

            The problem with the elites using naked force in America is too many of us are armed. We are not South American indigenous people who fight the oil companies with sticks. I live in Pennsylvania where the first day of hunting season is practically a national holiday. It’s where the guy fixing my house said “A man can never have too many guns.”

          • Elrond Hubbard April 21, 2016 at 11:24 am #

            Americans who are relying on private ownership of firearms to guarantee their freedom are kidding themselves. When it comes down to delivering violence, government will always have the advantage. All the gun fondlers and open-carry nuts in the lower 48 didn’t prevent the fourth amendment from becoming a dead letter — more often than not, they’re the ones denouncing civil-rights activists who actually take on government overreach in the name of ‘security’.

            What really finishes off illegitimate powers in the end is when their enforcers refuse to turn their guns on the populace. A heavily-armed populace makes that less, not more, likely to happen.

  3. Greg Knepp April 18, 2016 at 10:42 am #

    Great stuff! Additionally, Charles Hugh Smith posted a marvelous article on dailyreckoning.com on April 14th titled ‘The Entire Status Quo is a Fraud’ that compliments today’s GFN article nicely. As of this morning Smith’s piece is still on the site’s front page. I recommend it.

  4. kimmasad01 April 18, 2016 at 10:49 am #

    Certainly true!! All of these rackets will fail and when they do (it can’t be long) they will fail spectacularly. What a show it will be. Don’t forget the very largest and oldest racket of them all: religion. All of of the fraud religions themselves will go down in a combined state of utter failure. Islam, Catholicism and all their offshoots in a heap of burning rubble where they belong. What have these institutions over done for mankind but foment murder, divisions, hatred and greed.

    • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 11:29 am #

      Religion gives hairless apes an excuse to hate and yet another excuse to feel superior. Until humans confront their nature, their limitations, and the greatest taboo known to man; the sanctity of human life above all else, our planet, our living system that we are A PART of, comes to an end. The question to be asking is what has mankind wrought, when the planet would be exponentially better without us.

      • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 11:39 am #

        Yep. Exponential growth has to stop somewhere, and stop it will, one way or another. The Judeo-Christian ethic “Go forth and multiply” is highly suitable for bacteria, but not for reasoning beings with the capacity to capture, and therefore control, their own environment. Human beings have the same right to inhabit the earth as other living things, but we have a unique responsibility to govern our appetites, for the good of the earth and our own ultimate good as well.

        • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:50 am #

          Not everyone agrees that we have a unique responsibility to govern our appetites. This disagreement is responsible for ‘the tragedy of the commons‘ and will result in our demise.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 12:36 pm #

            The so-called tragedy of the commons is a libertarian fig leaf for dereliction of the responsibility to manage common resources for the common good. There are plenty of examples of real-world communities that accomplish this successfully, but they do so by limiting the ability of individuals or narrow interests to sell out the future for their own temporary gain — in other words, it gets in the way of the freedom-to-exploit, so it gets denounced in the name of ‘freedom’ (understood as distinct from actual, you know, freedom).

          • basil April 18, 2016 at 12:44 pm #

            humanity appears to be an evolutionary mistake (if all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know-john kay). humans invented the concept of “rights” to excuse their destructive criminal nature.

          • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 1:01 pm #

            We tend to look back at the horrors of humanity and then ask ourselves “what on earth were they thinking?” Wrong question. With what were they thinking? Turns out, we are thinking with the same very thing yet we somehow believe we are thinking better. Time elapsed always means progress in the human construct of linear time. In time we will be asking that same question, yet again.

      • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:52 am #

        Our society has thrown ‘taboo’ away and with it the restraint that was its only reason for existence.

      • sprawlcapital April 18, 2016 at 1:18 pm #

        Frankiti wrote:

        Until humans confront their nature, their limitations, and the greatest taboo known to man; the sanctity of human life above all else, our planet, our living system that we are A PART of, comes to an end.
        ====================================
        Of the natural sciences, only biology has the ability to destroy its subject matter. Chemistry and physics cannot destroy time, space, energy, and the chemical elements, But the science of biology is different. We know of life only on this planet, and life on this planet–the subject matter of the science of biology–could be destroyed if biologists do not stop genetically engineering living things and then releasing those genetically engineered organisms into the environment.

        Genetic engineering could be considered to be nuclear war in slow motion, in its effects on life.

        By the way, I think you meant the first word in the above sentence to be “unless”, not “until”.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 1:57 pm #

        Yes, only the best should breed. Your call for eugenics is well timed. Oh you meant the opposite? That the best shouldn’t have kids and should be taxed so the lowest can have as many children as possible?

        Sorry bout that. I’m sure your Neo-Christian meek inheriting the earth will work out somehow.

        • Helix April 18, 2016 at 2:30 pm #

          The meek will indeed inherit the earth after the alpha males annihilate each other. The real question is, will it be worth inheriting by the time that happens.

        • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 12:25 pm #

          Meek does not mean weak. Those with “power under control” will inherent because the time will be “cut short” for those who are not meek to screw things up beyond recognition. Even so, we appreciate truth speakers, and look forward to the revelation of all things, as deniability fades away.

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:54 am #

      I wish fraud would get its due punishment but it is not going to happen. Fraud may even win the white house if the spinmeisters are to be believed.

    • Zoltar April 18, 2016 at 12:08 pm #

      Would that that were true, but it ain’t. When everything slides down the chute people will grab for their ridiculous, fraudulent religions like life vests. We have already experienced the modern perigee of religion in this country, and it will soon come roaring back.

      Post-collapse America will be a much more religious world – not less.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 1:52 pm #

      Some religions are less violent than others (like Buddhism). And no religion is more violent or kills more efficiently than Communist Atheism – the religion of no religion. The religion that man can create a utopia in this world and that anyone who gets in the way is an enemy who needs to be destroyed.

      • Ishabaka April 18, 2016 at 2:36 pm #

        Yeah – those Buddhist, pacifist Japanese – just can’t beat them for a history of non-violence.

        • elysianfield April 19, 2016 at 10:27 am #

          Ish,
          Uhhhm, Shintoism, not Buddhism, for the (wartime) majority of Japanese, I believe.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 7:39 pm #

            The Samurai adopted Zen Buddhism as their religion. They loved the mindfulness and the do or die mentality – good psycho-technology for warriors. To their credit, not all Zen Masters were thrilled about every aspect of this synthesis since it tended to mitigate the compassion aspect of Buddhism.

            The great scholar Conze hated it when Buddhist monks blessed Burmese tanks. On the other hand, Buddha never taught pacifism for the greater Sangha, but only for the monks. Indeed it would have been better if married priests had bless the tanks, but Burmese Buddhism is very monastic, with monks employed in areas where they probably shouldn’t be. Orwell talked about that – demonstrations, tripping Englishmen during “friendly” games of soccer, etc.

  5. Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 11:12 am #

    Incidentally, why do new posts no longer appear on the kunstler.com front page? It’s been a month. Knock knock!

    Support this blog on PatreonSupport this blog on Substack
    Support this blog via Patreon or Substack
    • patrickd April 18, 2016 at 1:16 pm #

      Clear your browser cache and cookies.

      • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 1:49 pm #

        Should have checked before sounding off… Fixed. 🙂

  6. Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 11:21 am #

    Excellent post. Of course people would rather prop up a system that abuses them in relative comfort than venture into the unknown. I suspect that is because the unknown is known… in the dark recesses. Cheney was wrong, and we all know it, the American way of life is negotiable. When 5% consumes over 25% or something along those lines, the odds are stacked against it long-term. I’m surprised Americans have not brought out the pitchforks when it comes to college debt. States no longer fund the universities because they are not getting the tax revenue that is now legally hidden off shore, and the expense is passed on to students and their families. In-state tuition is now averaging around $20K a year in most states. It’s unfathomable, the world’s best university system is now a racket for debt peddling. Obamacare was a vanity project from the inception. It didn’t matter that it would be a failure, it mattered that he could point to it and say, now everyone can be insured. It was, and is, all ego. We are the only developed/civilized country that allows big-pharma to peddle their addictions on TV. Try watching 60 minutes. CBS should be ashamed. Big-Pharma wants everyone on a prescription and a prescription to counteract side-effects of those prescriptions from childhood ’til death. It’s sickening. Bill Ford, the heir eponymous and failed CEO is in the news, selling his future of mobility where we are still dependent on cars of course, but more expensive electric ones that we will be forced to share. New start-ups tout groceries brought to your home (yes, this is a new concept for millennials) because we need less human and community interaction and not more. We need to stay in our homes (pods) on our screens, ordering things delivered to our doors. We don’t want communities, we want consumers addicted to pain killers and shopping highs. People need to come clean. In a system not worth saving, why not unleash the elephants?

    • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 11:30 am #

      Obamacare was a vanity project from the inception. It didn’t matter that it would be a failure, it mattered that he could point to it and say, now everyone can be insured. It was, and is, all ego.

      Obamacare is a response to a real problem, the endless upward spiral of health care costs, which people with real pull in the system (mainly corporate CEOs) understood couldn’t be allowed to go on. The trick was to do it without denying anyone their extraction opportunities. Thus there could be no public option, much less the option of extending Medicare to all Americans like every other civilized nation has done. Instead all there is is a taxpayer subsidy for crapified private coverage. Let the freedom-to-extract ring.

      • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 12:12 pm #

        The trick was selling it as “change”. It was a re-election bullet point… “universal healthcare” brought to you by the skin-deep change candidate. Don’t probe to closely, and your new bills won’t be coming in ’til after the election, conveniently.

      • venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 12:27 pm #

        I recently read somewhere that the Republic of Ireland (shame, ancestral homeland, shame) has an insurance-buying scheme somewhat similar to Obamacare for its national healthcare system.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:00 pm #

          They’re also committed to becoming a colony of Nigeria. And that policy can never be amended once established.

      • jloughrey April 19, 2016 at 1:05 am #

        The biggest problems with Obamacare are:

        1. Cost controls were not part of the reform. The cost of healthcare for most people has gone up faithfully 20% or more every year. Insurance companies are claiming they can’t keep up with their cost of adding more previously uninsured to the pool (read: they are still very healthy financially, thank you very much) but perhaps profits are not as wildly successful as they would like.

        2. THE FINE for not having health care. This is my biggest gripe. Those who can’t afford health insurance certainly can’t afford the fine that the government imposes for not having it, which rose to $1,100 this year. How does making a poor person $1,100 poorer give them better access to something they know they’ll never have? The government should NOT be in the business of forcing people to buy a product, especially one that will force them to become poorer as a result. I’m surprised the Supreme Court did not throw this requirement out.

        The cost for healthcare in the US is twice as high as any other nation, and with poorer outcomes. And still not everyone is insured. If that doesn’t constitute a racket, I don’t know what does.

        • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 12:34 pm #

          “I’m surprised the Supreme Court did not throw this requirement out.”

          Why?

        • Elrond Hubbard April 19, 2016 at 2:30 pm #

          Obamacare isn’t a left-wing policy, it’s a right-wing policy invented at the Heritage Foundation. (Try getting a Republican to admit that it’s their own policy. Go ahead, just try.) It’s a jerry-rigged mess designed to preserve the freedom-to-extract for doctors, hospitals, medical device and equipment manufacturers and the pharmaceutical industry while also gesturing in the direction of covering more people.

          The individual mandate (enforced by “the fine”) is there as a disincentive for people who might otherwise wait until they get sick to buy coverage, which would lead to a so-called death spiral — the free-rider problem. Unsurprisingly, there are lots of people who look at their options, assess the crapified plans that are being offered and what they would still be required to pay in the event of really needing coverage, and make the cold-eyed decision to risk the fine.

          Don’t accept a bad policy: demand a good one. Single payer is the way to go.

          • Q. Shtik April 19, 2016 at 4:35 pm #

            It’s a jerry-rigged mess designed to … – Elrond

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

            http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/132868/jury-rigged-or-jerry-rigged

            And then there is one of my brother-in-law’s favorite expressions: “n-word rigged.”

          • Elrond Hubbard April 19, 2016 at 9:15 pm #

            I saw that I had typed “jerry”, thought maybe I should change it to “jury”, then realized my point would be made either way and moved along.

            As for your brother-in-law’s expressions, please keep them to yourself in future. Thanks.

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:47 am #

      I think Cheney was referring to his American way of life as being non-negotiable, not yours. Our way of life is for sale to the highest bidder.

  7. beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 11:22 am #

    If you really want to be cynical, life is a racket. It’s not just the USA, it’s species-wide.

    I agree that some kind of meltdown will occur (I hope not in the way the word was popularly used in the 20th century), but not so soon as July. Not only are the Chinese challenging us, they’re throwing us a curse – we do live in interesting times.

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:44 am #

      Sometimes things melt slowly. Sometimes so slowly the meltdown isn’t really noticed.

      • venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 12:30 pm #

        I recently made a prediction to an online friend of mine that almost everyone in the USA not in the top 20% who actually has a job will be working for Walmart either directly or indirectly by 2021. She agreed with me. 🙂

    • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 12:30 pm #

      There’s one unifying element in all this weekly handwringing, however. Humanity is worth preserving, worth caring about, worth salvaging. Bring on the hybrids, the AI, the genetically manipulated man. The reality is that the current homo sapiens 1.0 is not worth projecting and preserving. We all must come to grips with this truth first.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:03 pm #

        Do we really have the wisdom for something like that right now? In any case, only the very few can afford it. It is the ultimate elitism.

        • basil April 19, 2016 at 7:48 am #

          humans do not have wisdom. we make gadgets. with every measure of what we call “progress” comes a measure of destruction. if we, as a species, could see that before buying into the latest technological “advancement”, we would be wise. we are not.

          • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 12:43 pm #

            Humans do not have the wisdom “to direct their own steps”. But their rebellion at being saved by an actual saviour, from those in active (overt) rebellion and the default position of following these other rulemakers (g-o-d-s) dooms them to the same judgement reserved for the Nimrods (rebels).

  8. PeteAtomic April 18, 2016 at 11:24 am #

    Thanks for writing in this particular article on some of the mechanics of how our economy is operating today. I have a difficult time trying to find this type of information on the general web. It seems like you are the only individual out there breaking this information down and demystifying it for the general population. There has to be others out there doing similar (right?).

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:42 am #

      No there are no others. Not many anyway, it is your patriotic duty to be mystified.

      Pay your taxes (they are due today) and sit back and watch the show. The information has to come out somewhere or we would not resemble a free nation. A farce that is still useful so why not allow the info to come out here. The information can’t become too widespread though because only truth in small doses can be ignored.

      • jloughrey April 19, 2016 at 1:12 am #

        We are only “free” to have our gadgets and eat at McDonald’s. There is no real freedom when there is no job security, no financial security, and systemic rackets can decimate everything you know and have in an instant. All it takes is one job loss or illness for someone to be wiped out. I don’t see the freedom in that at all.

    • michael April 18, 2016 at 3:07 pm #

      You can find out all this yourself by observation.

      I happend to be in America when the moorings came loose during the stock market bubble starting around 1995 (maybe a little earlier).
      The greed grew without bounds and in some circles any form of common decency seemed to vanish.

      We have Bill Clinton as well as the spirit of the times to thank for the abolition of the Glass-Stegall act. This was the beginning of the slipery slope. It is my belief that in this period the moral rot was concentrated in the elites but the common man was not yet unhinged.

      Then there was a period of sobriety after 2000 but soon followed by the housing bubble. Here everyone from the common borrower, appraiser, bank clerk, structurer, TV huckster (“flip that house”) all the way up the ladder of corporate governance in investment banking was involved in immoral and often criminal activity. The rot had spread through all levels of society.

      I truly think that it was this episode which has set America on a path of moral rot from which there will be no return. This is not to be meant as a critique of America only — it is no different in Europe, but it is idle to talk about Europe, since Europe has become a contemptible agglomeration of pipsqueak nations (with the exception of some former eastern European countries) which do not amount to anything.

      For western civilization really only America counts and the rest fall in behind — for better or worse.

      Now a heretofore unobserved quality is emerging in our foreign policy:
      capital stupidity in which we do our utmost to drive the Russians into the arms of the Chinese (of which they are naturally suspicious) while at the same time making our belligerent intentions as clear as possible.

      This means that in due time we will be faced with the formidable industrial power of China combined with the fairly ingenious weapons technology of the Russians.

      Most western European armies are not battlefield ready nor will they be in the forseeable future for the simple reason that nobody wants to make any sacrifice whatsoever.

      As a case in point we should recall the war against the formidable empire of Lybia in which the US had to first take out the Lybian air defences so that afterwards European air forces could bomb the country where they soon ran out of bombs.

      What do you think you can expect of such a military?
      We should reflect carefully on the size of the problem we are doing our utmost to create.

  9. Walter B April 18, 2016 at 11:28 am #

    Your grasp of the situation James is perfect as usual, thank you. As to what will happen when the elephant enters the room and the farce goes bust we can only speculate, but my vote is that nothing happens. Nothing generated by the people that is. They will do whatever it is they are told because that is what people do you know.

    Consider the Nazi Holocaust for it is the perfect example of what happens when a government goes berserk on its own population. What did the German people do? Why whatever it was that they were told to do. Not only the Jews but all of the other oppressed groups and individuals simply packed their bags, got onto the trucks and the trains, took off their clothes and quietly filed into the gas chambers. Some settled into the work till you die routine, again without complaint. I had a friend whose old neighbor was a camp guard back then. Every morning he marched 100 slaves out into the countryside by himself to tend crops in the fields, armed only with a bolt action Mauser loaded with 8 rounds. Never, he said, did a single person ever give him a hard time nor consider that the guard would have a hard time shooting more than 8 of them should they act up or try to run. No they simply worked themselves into starvation and death willingly.

    This is what people do, and the American Colonists would have done the same thing if there were no men of character to stand up and lead them against the oppression that they lived under. There are no leaders of character alive and well in America today and maybe not even elsewhere in the world. They are all sold out, all owned by far more powerful Masters than we can even imagine. There will be no Big Bang, only a Big Whine, and then silence.

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:36 am #

      I agree with you. But there is Bernie.

      • Petro April 18, 2016 at 11:51 am #

        I have become about as cynical as they come with regards to electoral politics, and gloomy about the future, but I like Bernie—his character, his history, and his ideas. I’d like to see him and his positions win him the nomination, and I feel a certain level of glee whenever the voters deliver a smack-down to Clinton.

        But there’s a part of me that hopes he doesn’t make it to the White House for his own sake, because he seems like a basically decent person who doesn’t deserve the sh*tstorm looming on the horizon.

        • venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 12:33 pm #

          Almost my exact words in a comment on last week’s post.

      • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 12:35 pm #

        Voters never learn. Too much belief that one elected politician can be a force for change. The reality is that neither president Trump nor Sanders will be able to bring about as much change as they presently boast. However, they are far more likely to force change upon the 2 party stranglehold on this country in the interim. Baby steps… hoping for a sea-change is a recipe for harsh disappointment.

    • venuspluto67 April 18, 2016 at 12:43 pm #

      Don’t forget about Sobibor!

    • SunnyJohn45 April 18, 2016 at 3:52 pm #

      Not to nitpick, but German Mauser rifles only held five rounds. There were revolts against the Nazis at a couple of camps but not many. Treblinka was probably the most successful but few of the escapees survived. I think there’s an abject fear of death among humans and they will cling to the hope that survival is possible. Maybe that’s what Americans are doing about their financial deaths. Or maybe the majority just don’t get it.

    • ffkling April 19, 2016 at 12:27 am #

      “This is what people do, and the American Colonists would have done the same thing if there were no men of character to stand up and lead them against the oppression that they lived under.”- exception being Native Americans. The number of Native Americans, for example, quickly shrank by roughly half right after the arrival of the Pilgrims. This alarming transformation was attributed to disease, warfare, enslavement (Indian slave trade), and a disruption of the social systems of the indigenous, all of which had devastating effects on the populations that inhabited the Americas. (source)
      Think about this for a moment. We have a population, somewhere in the range of ten million to a possible one hundred million, that shrank to 200.000 according to the US Census of 1890…
      This was, as many scholars believe, nothing short of an extermination, an American Holocaust.
      “That hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement” — the words of the great grand strategist John Quincy Adams, intellectual author of Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.
      The United States’ reluctance to acknowledge its original sin — the genocide of indigenous people — is of special importance today. It’s now routine — even among conservative commentators — to describe the United States as an empire, so long as everyone understands we are an inherently benevolent one. Because all our history contradicts that claim, history must be twisted and tortured to serve the purposes of the powerful.
      One vehicle for taming history is various patriotic holidays, with Thanksgiving at the heart of U.S. myth-building. From an early age, Americans hear a story about the hearty Pilgrims, whose search for freedom took them from England to Massachusetts. There, aided by the friendly Wampanoag Indians, they survived in a new and harsh environment, leading to a harvest feast in 1621 following the Pilgrims first winter.
      Some aspects of the conventional story are true enough. But it’s also true that by 1637 Massachusetts Gov. John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children, part of the long and bloody process of opening up additional land to the English invaders. The pattern would repeat itself across the continent until between 95 and 99 percent of American Indians had been exterminated and the tattered remains were sent to desolate concentration camps euphemistically known as, “Indian Reservations”, out of the view of polite society.
      Thanksgiving is the day that celebrates the beginning of a genocide that was, in fact, blessed by the men held up as heroic founding fathers.
      The first president, George Washington, in 1783 said he preferred buying Indians’ land rather than driving them off it because that was like driving “wild beasts” from the forest. He compared Indians to wolves, “both being beasts of prey, tho’ they differ in shape.”
      Thomas Jefferson –author of the Declaration of Independence, which refers to Indians as the “merciless Indian Savages” — was known to romanticize Indians and their culture, but that didn’t stop him in 1807 from writing to his secretary of war that in a coming conflict with certain tribes, “We shall destroy all of them.”

      • Walter B April 19, 2016 at 12:52 am #

        My ancestors were all in Germany while the decimation of the American Indians was being done and I am thankful for that because it is a really, really sad part of American history at least for me. However, as a big believer in Karma and the idea that crimes need not be paid for by those that commit them but they WILL be paid for by SOMEONE down the line, I cannot help but keep looking over my shoulder in anticipation of the payback for that one upon this nation and upon us.

      • michael April 19, 2016 at 2:17 pm #

        Here the US is not unique at all.
        Every empire or civilization creates a myth of its own benignity and virtue. The myth has nothing to do with reality.

        Actually this is a good sign. Think about what it would mean if the
        national or civilizational myth would celebrate the destruction and death which has been visited on others.

        • ffkling April 21, 2016 at 7:23 am #

          But there does seem to be a distinct double standard. The Germans to this very day are reminded on a continuous bases for crimes committed against the Jews- new Holocaust museums continue to be erected in Germany. Germany continues to pay Israel billions of Euros in reparations. Just a few months ago Germany gifted to Israel four of the world’s most advanced submarines. These German subs now provide Israel with, for the first time, submarine launched nuclear ballistic missile technology. Yet in the US not a single national monument exists in memory of the millions of Native North Americans exterminated.

          • michael April 21, 2016 at 1:13 pm #

            Double standards are now completely normal.
            My favorite one is UN Resolution a c 3-69-l’56 rev 1:

            “Combating glorification of nazism and neo-nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”

            Here is the voting record.

            Not a single European country including Germany could bring themselves to vote Yes (all abstained).

            This is a classic. Because if you want to boil down the rotten and mendacious state of our civilization into one single item, there is none better than this to do it.

    • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 12:49 pm #

      Cynicism is a spiritual disease.

      • Frankiti April 19, 2016 at 5:50 pm #

        Optimism is a hard-wired conceit. A coping mechanism orchestrated by the brain. Too much truth overwhelms.

  10. K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 11:29 am #

    This ‘discontinuity’ suggests a hard collapse but other scenarios are possible. If the media continues to spin reality into the twisted ‘don’t worry be happy’ perspective they do and misery is continued to be ignored then as people drop out of the middle class they simply become poor powerless and forgotten.

    Fewer cars get sold but some do. Car companies remain in business by laying off workers. This is a feedback loop that should go to collapse like a dog chasing it’s tail true; but if the number of people who don’t become poor is small enough a stable totalitarian regime of elites emerges instead of total collapse and a ‘discontinuity’.

    Today’s article assumes there is a point when lies can’t be told any more and truth emerges to crash the house of cards.

    This is wishful thinking.

    Unless someone invents a drug that makes everybody smarter and infuses the public water supply with copious amounts of it we are going down. Lies will continue to be told because they work so very well. Unless the ‘discontinuity’ of Bernie Sanders winning the election happens emergence of powerful and privileged elites will continue to happen and the middle class will silently disappear. As will their influence.

    ‘Discontinuity’ also implies a return to business as usual once the trauma of a discontinuity passes. That however will not be possible in a world where scant resources cannot be gathered together without huge infusions of cheap energy which no longer exist.

    A discontinuity will actually manifest in what is referred to as an ‘impulse‘ and the consequent impulse response will generate collapse and the end of the world as we know it.

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    • abbybwood April 18, 2016 at 4:10 pm #

      In the meantime we have Hillary Clinton doing a radio interview today at a Black radio station in NYC where she says she carries “hot sauce” in her purse.

      That purse of hers is getting pretty bulky.

      Early in the campaign she said she carries her Bible with her.

      I can only imagine she is also carrying around her “yoga” positions, her yoga mat, the transcripts of her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and maybe the “plea deal” given to her by her attorney David Kendall regarding the upcoming FBI “interview”.

      That $4000 purse of hers must be getting pretty dang hard to carry around.

      Poor Huma. She may have to bring in Carlos Danger to help her with all the baggage.

  11. malthuss April 18, 2016 at 11:36 am #

    “forward guidance”

    What is that?
    Be afraid, be very afraid.

    • Walter B April 18, 2016 at 11:50 am #

      Yes indeed! The general public will plead for their “rights” to be taken away for the promise of safety and they may grumble when their possessions are taken away or lost but they will for the most part not resist tyranny (without leadership that is) as long as the abuser promises to allow them to live. By the time that their deaths are upon them after total loss, they will even accept this as well as and end of suffering. Those who dominate and manipulate, THEY know all this and THEY are masters at the application of the process to maintain their control.

      • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 12:08 pm #

        Freedom has been traded for comfort every time the silent choice has been offered up. Cell phones being the clearest example. They know where you go, who you talk to, and even who you are around. They can and have been used as bugging devices.

        Privacy and freedom willingly traded away all so pictures of cats can be sent to other people at any time. We have our priorities but strange and twisted they are!

        • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:06 pm #

          So do you eschew cell phones?

          • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 4:05 pm #

            No, I have two. One for work and one as a personal life leash. However since I know how the deep state can harass and spy on people with them I leave them at home when I meet at midnight with my revolutionary comrades to plot the overthrow of the existing order.

        • michael April 18, 2016 at 3:52 pm #

          Stick your cell phone in a metal box (must close completely and tight)– no signal goes in, none comes out. Switch it off so it does not try to connect to the cell tower and deplete the battery. No signal to switch it on can get in.

          As an additional benefit you can’t be bothered either.

          • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 4:11 pm #

            Been there done that. Once you see Pandora’s box open her crack it scares yesterday’s lunch right out the end of your pipe.

            The natural inclination then is to throw that puppy in a can if you know anything at all about Faraday cages at all. The problem is once in the cookie tin the phone is really hard to use.

    • K-Dog April 18, 2016 at 12:12 pm #

      “Forward guidance”, is that the same as saying hospice care in a nice non-threatening way?

  12. swmnguy April 18, 2016 at 11:59 am #

    More and more I find my background was great preparation for what’s happening. While growing up, I thought the opposite.

    I was raised by impractical left-wing intellectuals. Not quite the same as being suckled by wolves in the forest, but close enough.

    My earliest public-sphere memories were Kent State, Watergate, the anti-war movement, etc. Between financial incompetence and health issues, my large family survived on welfare for a number of years. I worked farm jobs as a very young kid, and when those jobs paid over-the-table, the amount of my work as a 10-year-old was subtracted dollar-for-dollar from my parent’s welfare money.

    So I learned very early that the government represented the Elites, had no compunction about lying and killing, and would stop at nothing to maintain the advantages of the Elites. Absolutely nothing they said or did was to be trusted, and there would be a drawback that outweighed every purported benefit.

    It’s worked out amazingly well. I didn’t get a credit card until well into my 30s, 15 years ago. When I was ready to buy a house, I made sure I bought one that cost less per month than I’d been paying in rent, to make saving for repairs possible. I’ve never bought a new car. I realized how much my employers paid for the other half of my Social Security etc., and health insurance. I also realized there is no such thing in our system as “being paid what you’re worth,” because that leave no room for profit for your boss. I worked my way into a position where I could do without a boss, so I actually can get paid what I’m worth, and it takes a lot less work to support one’s self and one’s family than to support one’s boss, one’s boss’s assistant, their families, and then yourself and your own on what’s left over.

    I was raised for times when things don’t work, words don’t mean what they are defined to mean, every deal is a grift, and the entire system is a game of heads I win, tails you lose.

    There’s nothing new about this. It’s just that America has had a large middle class that had the luxury of ignoring this until recently. I never had such privileges. I will agree with everyone that this does indeed suck. I still remember, however, middle-class Americans moralistically lecturing me on how I deserved to suffer and be treated badly as a child because my father was an improvident alcoholic.

    So my sympathy is there for the taking, freely granted. My empathy, however, is a lot harder to claim.

  13. San Jose April 18, 2016 at 12:02 pm #

    My neighbor, who has health insurance, had her appendix out in January at Good Samaritan Hospital. She didn’t even spend the night, yet the grand total (before the insurance negotiated rate) for the day was $90,000.

    Meanwhile, Good Samaritan’s parent company, which is publicly traded, is losing stock value. Another friend, who is a therapist, ran Good Samaritan’s cancer support group–for the past 25 years. But in January, they had to cut back staff hours and my friend didn’t think she could do her job working just TWO HOURS a week. She quit.

    Jen in San Jose

  14. Bro Jobe April 18, 2016 at 12:04 pm #

    Not much Maoism on my campus, but we may be unique. The few victims-studies types get marginalized (there’s an academic word for you) by the grant-earning Sciences or popular majors in the Business School. I won’t go into how the liberal arts should change, in the interest of time.

    As for College Presidents? One joked with me that he soon learned “The Presidential Handshake”: palm out, for money.

    Thus they won’t buck any constituency that can bring in the bucks. It’s a racket, to be sure, like all the others JHK names here. Going to be tough to change, but it can be done as university governance is more tractable than, say, the US Constitution’s ways of adding amendments to fix the other broken institutions in our polity.

  15. stelmosfire April 18, 2016 at 12:23 pm #

    About the cars in this weeks log. my total:
    1996 GMC K1500 plow truck 105K miles, value maybe 2 grand
    1999 Tacoma 99K miles, value maybe 6 grand (Daily driver)
    2011 Hyundai ( Wifes ride) 9K miles, 91,000 more to go on the 100,000 mile warranty ( Daily Driver)
    1968 BMW R/60, Honda 1963 CA77, plus at least a few dozen cars and trucks. Please fell free to add to the list.

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    • stelmosfire April 18, 2016 at 12:25 pm #

      Should be Motorcycles instead of trucks :o) Cycles don’t take much room in the barn!

      • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:10 pm #

        Golf carts are the future. 25 mph tops. Can you deal with it?

  16. Georges1202 April 18, 2016 at 12:29 pm #

    My wife and I shovel $1135 a month down the rathole called ‘Affordable Care’ which features a $6,000 deductible and 50% after that. Clearly a government sanctioned extortion scheme that the Mob would be proud of.

    Thankfully she is Swiss and we are moving there very soon. We have simply had enough of this ridiculous bullshit and are voting with our feet.

    God only know what the endgame here will be like. The worst outcome is that it continues in this cynical way.

    • San Jose April 18, 2016 at 12:42 pm #

      Good strategy. My Finnish neighbors don’t have health insurance, but if they get really sick, they plan to fly back to Finland.

    • AKlein April 18, 2016 at 12:48 pm #

      Georges, it can’t continue in this cynical way! This is what JHK has been preaching for some time; the system (i.e. the collection of rackets that we call a system, is unsustainable. A bigger worry we all ought to have is what happens when the “system” starts to implode. Make no mistake, there are two groups here in the US; the many who are realizing that they are on a road to eventual ruin, and the fewer (though certainly much more than the 1%) who are very happy with the current situation. What do you think they will do when they see the end is near? Quietly adapt, or opt for some sort of cathartic distraction? What might such a cathartic distraction be? How about war?

      • Georges1202 April 18, 2016 at 12:55 pm #

        I am so very sick and tired of the vast majority that I talk to about what is happening in America Inc. who just sigh and shrug and say “Well, that’s the way it is…”

        Bullshit. Enough already. The plunder by the rich is a disaster and will lead to ruin as it historically does. Meanwhile McDonalds announces all-you-can-eat-fries and we smile brightly lining up just as we are told to do.

        How did this happen?

        • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 1:10 pm #

          Well, first and foremost, we have every walking inhabitant believe and fight to the death over the belief that a person has the right to amass the commodity of money without restrictions. It’s called capitalism, it’s called freedom, it’s called the murican way, it’s called the pursuit of liberty and happiness, but it’s all the pursuit od money, a commodity that can be amassed for personal use at the expense of civilization and the planet. Great isn’t it? Keep ‘murica rolling!

        • AKlein April 18, 2016 at 1:11 pm #

          Long ago, perhaps during the latter Roosevelt years and certainly right after WWII, we entered the Great Marketing Age. The general idea of this was to get everybody to “dream the dream.” And, for a while, it seemed to work. And for many, they dreamed and for some, the dream even seemed to morph into reality. Alas, it was still just a dream. Outcome? While many could have attained a decent, serviceable reality, they traded that for a few short years in dreamland. And now the nightmare ensues.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 1:44 pm #

            The origins of the great marketing age are in WWI and the propaganda methods that were used to prod the American people into supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into WWI. These methods were based on the early insights into crowd psychology provided by Sigmund Freud and others. This led to the founding of the discipline of public relations by Edward Bernays, whose methods were subsequently taken up by Madison Avenue. The consumer society we live in today is the result.

            Nowadays, it has been reported that Facebook can influence people’s moods by controlling what appears and doesn’t appear in their daily feeds. One wonders what uses that will be put to in the days and years to come?

          • Georges1202 April 18, 2016 at 2:10 pm #

            Here in the Bay Area surrounding San Francisco we have a public rail system known as BART. It is disintegrating before everyone’s eyes at the same time that this region is loudly touted as a marvel of ‘innovation’ and wealth creation. Why?

            Simply because the rich do not use public transportation. That is for the unwashed, consequently it will crumble to the ground when the well-heeled fly overhead in their helicopters.

            It is this sort of egregious bullshit that I look forward to leaving behind.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 3:34 pm #

            That’s what comes of allowing a separate class of society-wide decision-makers to be exempt from the consequences of their own decisions — of course they’ll serve themselves and leave everyone else out in the cold. If the U.S. ever extends Medicare to all its citizens, it should be a rock-bottom requirement that the level of coverage afforded to members of Congress is the minimum that can be afforded to anyone.

          • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 3:45 pm #

            Clap, clap. Am I the only one who is sick of incessant advertising – most of which is misleading? The last time I was in Europe (30 years ago admittedly) the advertising there was simple and straightforward while American advertising is scientifically based to induce spending – whether you need it or not. Sure, you can resist, and many people do resist. I am one of them. But it is the trustworthiness of the claims as much as the packaging that has changed. Even the internet has changed. Capitalism can be one of three things: (a) in its purest form it is unregulated and predatory but straightforward – economic Darwinism; (b) a regulated form which masquerades as (a) but favors capital over labor, large over small, sophisticated over simple, rich over poor; or (c) a regulated form which levels the playing field, requires participants to be honest and fair in their dealings, but retains the free market competition and price discovery and the mechanisms of supply and demand still function.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 4:28 pm #

            Dumbedup: The unfettered free market, where all the incentives function as envisioned by libertarians, is a utopian concept that can never actually be realized. Real-world capitalism has always depended on the state, and co-opted the state’s monopoly on legitimized violence to pursue its own ends: gunboat diplomacy to open up foreign markets, debt enforcement and debtor’s prisons, and of course bailouts and other measures to clean up the messes left behind by financial excesses.

            The religion of the market is so pervasive today that people will deny the most obvious, glaring, stupendous market failures going on right in front of their noses. It’s hard to do better than Jim’s example of the medical-system-as-swindle. A well-functioning market is supposed to provide price transparency, but what’s the going rate for treatment of a broken leg? Shouldn’t there be an index for that somewhere? If you do break your leg, and dare ask the nurse for an aspirin, what dollar amount will be in that line item on your bill? Who the hell knows? Does anyone dare to find out? No, because people have a well-grounded fear that the amount will be stupendous and unconscionable. Ideologues won’t admit that market incentives just don’t work in health care, and industry movers and shakers won’t allow the conversation to happen because they absolutely depend on the profligacy, waste, cruelty and perversity to continue.

            The market is a useful tool in many ways. In today’s world, though, it’s a kind of brain cancer that needs to be excised so we can get back to thinking clearly.

          • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 6:28 pm #

            Elrond, we too think alike. There is no utopia and a completely free market would run roughshod over most people anyway. So the two choices left are either regulate capitalism for fairness, justice and equality for everyone or skew it to favor those with the money. We have entered an era where influence peddling and corruption is considered a moral good. That no one can articulate what good it actually does is completely irrelevant. We have been sold the idea that it is a good thing and we bought it.

        • abbybwood April 18, 2016 at 4:36 pm #

          How did this happen?

          Speaking for the time I have been on Earth I would say the beginning of the end started happening November 22, 1963. I was 13 and I vividly remember sitting on the piano bench watching Lee Harvey Oswald murdered on national television and little John John’s salute at the funeral.

          Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, indicted and convicted and executed in just a few short days. The “patsy” had to die.

          Then the American people bought the bullshit Warren Commission report that JFK was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald then did their collective mourning and went about their daily lives. Shit happens, right?

          No questions asked.

          Then over decades, thanks to scores of serious researchers, we have found out that the “facts” do NOT support that Lee Harvey Oswald was some disgruntled anti-Communist lone gunman nutcase.

          It was a violent coup d’ etat.

          But will the American people rise up and demand that ALL the U.S. government files be released to reveal the “truth” of what actually happened and why?

          No. They haven’t and they won’t.

          Because the American people ARE sheeple and cowards.

          We will end up reaping what we have sown.

          • Q. Shtik April 18, 2016 at 5:49 pm #

            that Lee Harvey Oswald was some disgruntled [anti-Communist] lone gunman nutcase. – abbywood

            ===========

            pro-communist

          • Walter B April 19, 2016 at 12:59 am #

            However, it is always good to see a fellow human being that was not fooled by the scumbags that took us over on that dark day in November 1963. They beat us all down for the first, but not the last time. Every time I hear a fellow human speak wisely about this subject and their ability to see through the BS my heart soars! Thank you, bless you.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:13 pm #

      Switzerland is now 10% minority. It doesn’t seem to have the vitality to save itself, and in any case, isn’t big enough to stand alone. Once France and Germany go Muslim, Switzerland will naturally succumb.

      • beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 3:20 pm #

        I reluctantly agree with you – if the current societal trend continues.

      • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 6:49 pm #

        Personally, I don’t object to minorities – black, Muslim, Hindu, oriental or any other. What I object to is that this geo-political amalgamation is being forced on us by rapacious militarism and neo-colonialism. Most Muslims would much rather stay in their own country but we have allowed our leaders to make it impossible and to push the conflict so far that there is a deep lack of trust that is generational. It is another way to line the pockets of the militarist capitalists and keep the people distracted by news of sexual assaults by immigrants so we won’t have the time or inclination to look behind the curtain.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 8:18 pm #

          Naw, it’s the hijrah or migration – a way of spreading Islam that works in tandem with the jihad. Have you seen the “refugees”? Dressed in designer clothes and leaving half a dozen peaceful countries and passing thru half a dozen peaceful countries? C’mon.

          Of course some of them just want to improve their economic prospects. But that’s not being a “refugee” either.

          • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 8:49 pm #

            No! That’s only a small part of it. In the main, we have created this flood of immigrants to Europe by funding militant groups and calling them “rebels.” Constant civil war to maintain the flow of oil makes it impossible for most inhabitants to stay in their own country because either the government will kill them or ISIS/Al Qaeda, Al Shebaab or some other radical jihadist group will.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 1:57 pm #

            And Islam when Islam conquered half the known world (before Oil, Bush, America, or the EU) within a hundred years after Mohammad’s death, they were just defending themselves, right?

            The stuff you mention is real of course, but it’s secondary to existential aggressive nature of Islam. And again, I’m not implying America isn’t aggressive in its own way. But history didn’t start with America and life wasn’t roses before modern Capitalism. The Australian Hunter Gatherers considered people from other groups as game after all.

          • ffkling April 21, 2016 at 7:34 am #

            Over-population and climate change induced drought in the Middle East and Africa are the principal drivers of migration. I realize this blog is concentrated on the financial sector, but mankind’s destruction of the living planet is the real elephant in the room (guess the elephant analogy is still good for a few more years).

        • Dumbedup April 20, 2016 at 8:42 pm #

          Janos, I find it hard to understand how the nature of the Muslim civilization is different from every civilization that has ever existed including now and 1500 years ago. It is just that, for now, the west has prevailed.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 21, 2016 at 10:54 pm #

            It is different because Mohammad was different. Can you imagine Christ or Buddha saying “Kill one and terrify a thousand”?

            Of course some of the basic elements are the same, some similar to ours in their universalism and desire to convert everyone (or inability to mind their own business from another pov).

    • baird April 18, 2016 at 3:09 pm #

      I know this is a hardly news but I think each of us has “healthcare” stories, friends, etc which are beyond astonishing, Ocare is a god awful tragedy no matter who you are. Good friend of mine a recently retired doc went down hard on his bike (pedal type), badly busted up internal bleeding, etc. The life flight , not very far, was 30k then 10’s of thousands in uncovered costs and he had “great” coverage. If anything other than the most trivial medical stuff happens to most of us we are done. This is not health care this is a nightmare waiting for each of us.

      • ffkling April 21, 2016 at 7:36 am #

        You are suggesting a recently retired doctor is enrolled in, as you say, O’care? I think not.

        • ffkling April 21, 2016 at 7:39 am #

          The purpose of the Affordable Care Act is to provide catastrophic insurance coverage for those Americans who have no health insurance. Lower deductibles = higher premiums. So what is your “solution” for a plan that covers millions and is affordable?

          • pequiste April 22, 2016 at 12:12 am #

            Single payer medical services.

            Yes, by the government.

            Works in Canada, Europe, Japan…should work here and for much better cost for service. Cutting out insurance companies and making pharmaceuticals a utility type endeavour would stop the nonsense of a $500 daily dose cost.

            (Never gonna happen in the USSA under the current regimes of either partay.)

    • jloughrey April 19, 2016 at 1:19 am #

      If I had a way to get out like you do, I would. This ship is going down.

  17. AKlein April 18, 2016 at 12:33 pm #

    As my deceased mother used to say, “you can’t jump over your own shadow.” I could add, “… but you can certainly wear yourself out trying.” In addition to being steeped in the deception of all the fraudulent rackets that JHK lists, the country has worn itself out reaching for goals, deliberately made impossible for most to achieve. This comes under the rubric of smart marketing – keep ’em coming.

    • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 12:42 pm #

      It’s all marketing. All of it and everything. Heck, the hoi polloi are busy marketing themselves to corporations and other marketers under the euphemism of “social networking”. They can’t appease the will and its desires, and they can’t see themselves as the product. Debt paying interest bearing products to a man.

  18. I AM SULLY April 18, 2016 at 12:42 pm #

    I’ve thought about this topic as well – and it’s significance, “The Great Discontinuity”. Far more certain, palpable, and dangerous than any “robot apocalypse” or “nano-gray-goo”. http://iamsully.com/?p=14531

    • I AM SULLY April 18, 2016 at 12:42 pm #

      “its” not “it’s” … (sorry)

  19. pennohio April 18, 2016 at 12:46 pm #

    I guess I’m too old to really give a shit about what’s happening in the United States of America! I’ve seen too much for so long that, now, instead of ranting and raving about how stupid people are, I just laugh and realize that the American public, at large, prefers fantasy over reality.

    Great Prediction for 2016: Hilary Clinton will be the next President of the U.S. come November. Anyone doubting this is a fool! Hilary was bought and paid for years ago. It was decided, by the American people, back in 2008, that we would elect a Black President. In 2012, the people couldn’t say, “Hey, this didn’t work out.” because that would be “racist”. So, Obama was put in for a second term.

    Now the American public is saying, “Let’s give a woman a chance.” It’s Hilary’s turn. She’s put her whole life into this and will be the best President that money can buy. I have to laugh at how many people say she’s not trustworthy and power-hungry. Look around. Do you really, I mean, really, see anybody else running for President who isn’t in the same category as Hilary. Hilary will be re-elected in 2020 because the American people don’t want to admit that a woman isn’t capable of doing the job.

    I have to laugh at all the hullabaloo over the upcoming political conventions. The whole idea of a convention is to pick the candidate who will win the Presidency. The primaries are just like a poll to gauge what Americans think. The votes aren’t official like in a general election. If the Republicans think that Joe Schmo would become the President in a general election, they’ll pick Joe as their candidate. If the Democrats think that Jane Doe would be the next President, they’ll pick Jane.

    The whole fabric of American society is built on the rackets. It’s been that way for years, and I mean lots of years! Does anybody out there really believe that all this crap just started 10 or 15 years ago? Newsflash: it’s been in place for hundreds of years.

    Go back one hundred years: April 18, 1916. Who ran the United States of America? Woodrow Wilson? Congress? the Supreme Court? the American public? Not hardly. It was Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, J.P. Morgan, the investors and speculators ran it just like today. Ever wonder who are the “investors” and where the hell do they get all their money? The “speculators” are the “cool cats”. They sit around and make the prices of everything go up or down and, then, reap in the profits. If they make a mistake, they just go bankrupt and start over again!

    Insurance is one of the biggest rackets in town. I took out a life insurance policy back in 1965. I lost the gamble! I was betting that I would die before now; the insurance company was betting that I would live. Guess what? They won!!!

    Well, don’t you want to leave your loved ones something? Hell, no! My kids are worth more than I’ll ever be. Give them something to strive for.

    I want to be cremated. My mother died in 1999. As per her instructions, I picked out a casket for about $5000.00. Then, it was put in the ground and nobody can see it! I think the Pharoahs of Egypt had a good thing going with their pyramids.

    Healthcare? Ever wonder who the ads on TV are targeted to? I mean, like I’m going to go to my doctor and demand that he prescribe Pharzyga for me. Then, they spend more than half the commercial telling you of the bad side effrects of the medicine. I’m going to remember all that and I don’t even have the prescription yet? Hilarious! Whatever happened to the snake oil salesmen of yesteryear?

    Education? I have a Master’s Degree in Education. Ill never forget taking an American Literature class and the professor asking “Why did so-and-so write this story?” I felt like saying, “I don’t know. He’s been dead for a hundred years, I’ll go ask him.” I also was thinking that maybe the guy just liked telling a story. Needless to say, I didn’t do well in that class. That was fifty years ago, so for those who think that crap wasn’t being taught a long time ago, you’re wrong.

    One class I do remember a really good teacher in was American Government. Near the end of the semester, he asked us a rhetorical question. What if the United States paid people not to work? A person would be entitled to a decent way of life, but they had to stay out of the labor force. Only those who wanted a little more (or a lot more) and who really wanted to work would be permitted to get a job. This was 1965 and the class was somewhat aghast at that idea. Today, I think it might fly for some.

    I know a lot of people compare the United States to the Roman Empire. The other day, I was thinking (I do, occasionally), and, yes, the Roman Empire disappeared but the people didn’t! The Empire metamorphosized into Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. I know that the Empire was larger than that but I’m thinking of the countries that still speak a form of Latin.

    What will the United States become? Who knows. Back in 1916, people were probably asking the same question. The future didn’t look very prmising then, either.

    • AKlein April 18, 2016 at 1:00 pm #

      Yeah, but back in 1916 the A and H bomb hadn’t yet been developed. Even though just a couple of years later the “War to end all wars” occurred, it didn’t deliver on that promise, Welcome to 2016. Yes, things haven’t changed much, except for at least one thing; we are now quite able to end meaningful human existence.

    • DurangoKid April 18, 2016 at 1:04 pm #

      America started out as a colony and a colony it remains.

    • beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 3:26 pm #

      I agree with you, and my attitude is similar to yours. As Sabatini wrote, “Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.”

      I’m probably around your age,and I also plan on being cremated when I die.

  20. dweebus April 18, 2016 at 12:49 pm #

    JHK-

    “That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.”

    Meh..

    I agree with your analysis, but I think your timing may be a bit agressive. Oh, the elephant may poke his trunk in the door if there is a floor fight in Cleveland (almost certain) or in Philly (unlikely, but possible) and blow up one or both of the major politcal parties. As far as the elephant storming the barricades, I think it will be a while yet. 2030, plus or minus a decades perhaps. But by then, Horton will be really pissed off!

    As to cars, one of the really interesting things is from the supply side. Cash for clunkers really fucked up the low end used car market. Unintended consequences yet again. Cheap heaps to get you by for a year or two are virtually impossible to find. So this leads to bullshit predatory loans on newer cars. The loans go bad and the repo man shows up. I did not know the finaciers are bundling subprime loans on used cars into CDOs and selling them out the back door. Surely a recipe for disaster

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    • DurangoKid April 18, 2016 at 1:09 pm #

      It’s sometimes difficult to ascertain intent. Notice any similarity between cash for clunkers and Obamacare? It seems virtually impossible to put forth any program that doesn’t first benefit the 0.1%. What are taken for unintended consequences are really just externalities. It’s probably safe to assume programs like these operate exactly as they were intended to.

      • dweebus April 18, 2016 at 2:53 pm #

        You may be correct. Of course the ACA is failing. Failing by design. Once Obama prenegotiated away the public option, it became an extortion racket for funneling tax dollars to the insurance industry. As for cash for clunkers, it was a desperate attempt to prop up an auto industry in free fall after the 08 crash. No consideration seems to have been given to the consequences of removing older used cars from the market and destroying them. Maybe that was by design. I have a strong suspicion, whilst in panic mode, no one thought shit through. Very typical of our times.

  21. DurangoKid April 18, 2016 at 12:52 pm #

    One of the root causes of this discontinuity is an absurd blind faith in markets. It should be obvious by now that markets are supremely inefficient at getting commodities from the producers to their intended consumers. Worse still, the market seems to have failed spectacularly in its ability to even decide what the proper commodities should be. We get iPhones and salad shooters when what we really need is a WWII style mobilization to build out new energy systems and convert our built environment to favor walking instead of happy motoring. We need labor intensive low productivity jobs to put idle hands to useful work and fair wages. But the market in its demented wisdom has decided that labor is bad and swindles are good. Some would lay this mess at the feet of capitalism. They would say capitalism is bad. Capitalism hurt me. Of course they’re correct, but they’ve left a lot out of their analysis. We’re in a predicament where there is a miniscule but powerful class of owners and managers that can by lies and trickery convince enough of the rest of us that if we just keep faith in markets, things will sort themselves out. That kind of power is at the root of capitalism. Capitalism cannot exist without it. The crux of the matter is that until we confront that power, things will go on as they are until the wheels fall off, which if JHK is to be believed, is not far in the future. One might wonder if such a system is doomed to fail, why not just wait it out. My fear is that if the wheels come off, we may not get them back on again.

    • AKlein April 18, 2016 at 1:22 pm #

      Any economic system, any “ism”, will ultimately fail if the populace is not made up largely of people of good character. The reason for this is quite simple; any system can be perverted. That’s what happened to communism in the USSR and that’s what’s happened to Capitalism here. So, the natural question is, how does one foster good character in the populace? Short answer; good leaders who lead by example. Long answer: I will defer to other CFN readers to supply.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:19 pm #

        Obviously religion is necessary as odious as this is to many here. People will be far worse without it.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 2:26 pm #

          George Washington said, Only highly educated men, strangely formed, can be moral without religion. Most people need the idea of God, Meaning, and Justice – the latter in both its positive and negative aspects. The carrot and the stick rule us and in fact, all of nature. And aren’t we “part of nature”? Maybe it all depends on how we define nature.

          • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 4:39 pm #

            And Dostoevsky said, “If there is no God, no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and everything is lawful.”
            (The Brothers Karamazov)

            I also like what Pope Francis I and Bernie Sanders are saying about a moral economy. But there will never be a moral economy without a moral and just society. That society requires citizens who are not living with Borg implants (iPhones) and who actually pay attention and are willing to sacrifice some comfort. Freedom is not easy – it requires blood, sweat and tears.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 6:29 pm #

            Dumbedup: With all due respect to the great Mr. Dostoevsky, the conclusion doesn’t follow. If there truly is no God, no immortality of the soul, then it is up to us to find virtue, to make laws… because the alternative will inevitably be might-makes-right.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 18, 2016 at 8:22 pm #

            Allwrong: The Aborigines thought cannibalism was fine. And Black Africans and Muslims were always into slavery. Why are they wrong and us right, if it’s all just “creative”?

          • Lawfish April 19, 2016 at 10:17 am #

            Don’t confuse religion with belief in God. The latter does not require the former.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 19, 2016 at 1:47 pm #

            Janos: If you have me confused with a moral relativist, you need to pay closer attention.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 2:18 pm #

            You may not consider yourself a relativist, but you’re being illogical: your viewpoint leads to relativism. Where is your morality coming from? That’s the question. If humans are “alone”, why shouldn’t they follow their base instincts If they can get away with it? Or even create a social order based on them?

            Who are you to tell Black African Muslims they can’t mutilate their own women? Some kind of cultural imperialist, perhaps?

          • Elrond Hubbard April 19, 2016 at 2:45 pm #

            Janos: Reciprocity, better known as the golden rule, is the foundation of decent morality. With it, though, comes the responsibility to hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others. That doesn’t mean that we accede to anyone’s “base instincts”, but exactly the opposite: it means requiring that we — I, you, anyone — rise above our base instincts in order to meet the challenge of the golden rule. Therefore, I shouldn’t want some little girl’s genitals cut off any more than I would want my own cut off. If you can find a contradiction or hypocrisy in there, point it out.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 7:27 pm #

            You’re putting yourself above Black African Muslims and above Pakistani honor killers. Am I joking? Not in the least – culture is a defense now in Canada and Western Europe. And in some areas, England has ceded the law completely to the Muslims, at least for non-serious cases.

            This is where your philosophy of relativism leads to. If you don’t like it, change your premise. Accept Universals inherent in our nature put there by the Author of Nature – AND accept that the West has come closer to them more consistently than most cultures most of the time.

        • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 3:49 pm #

          Then, as I presume, humanity is not worth preserving. If the majority of people can’t be trusted to be moral, humane, and civilized without religion, then why worry about the majority of humanity’s future?

        • AKlein April 19, 2016 at 8:39 am #

          Janos, I believe you are absolutely correct in your assertion. Character cannot be circumscribed very well by laws or rules which are easily perverted by the clever and evil. The definition of character is “fuzzy” and highly dependent on context. Consequently, it requires the transcendental rather than the concrete to define its bounds. Whence religion, culture and myth.

        • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 1:43 pm #

          Religion is man-made idolatry. Until we reject the “commandments and doctrines of men” we will not find the other commandments and doctrines which are “the perfect law of liberty”.

      • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 4:15 pm #

        We think alike. (see my response to you above about capitalism) To subvert capitalism and turn it into a system which preys on the unwary and serves only a narrow group who have managed to cheat, lie and steal, but not be caught, or if caught, not punished, you have to do two things. Take control of the education system and take control of the media. (and by implication religion) If you can control the dialog you can get people to think and behave any way you want them to.

        We talk a lot about freedom in this country. But just because you are allowed to do something does not mean you are free. You are only free when you can express dissent without fear of retribution or further victimization. Freedom that is lost can be restored when the citizens have lost everything. Sometimes that means bloodshed.

        By controlling the message, we can be made to believe we have not lost everything. That postpones the reckoning and that is the message under which we have been living under since the early 60s – maybe before. This may sound outlandish, but I wonder whether the average Muslim perceives the truth more accurately than the average westerner.

        • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 1:51 pm #

          Freedom is the ability to eat grass and fly. Liberty is the ability to be left alone. Christian Liberty is the ability to be left alone with others of like mind.

          “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty.”

    • Dumbedup April 18, 2016 at 6:17 pm #

      That’s because everyone pays homage to Wall Street. Everyone. There was a time when you could accumulate wealth in other ways like real estate, business or just savings. So we have to trust the markets – or at least most people have to trust the markets.

  22. Lindy1933 April 18, 2016 at 1:19 pm #

    In most states the highest paid public employee is the state university football coach.

    • Georges1202 April 18, 2016 at 1:38 pm #

      Wonderful! Who can be surprised?

  23. pequiste April 18, 2016 at 1:20 pm #

    Here, for all the CFN to marvel and enjoy, is a fantastic intro for Jim’s missive:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlO3LR_Ld8c

    Plus dig the Ferde Groffe score, the sweet coffin nails, and the legendary “Calling Philip Morris!” bellhop.

    Where is Captain Braddock when we need him with so much racketeering going on? (He’s probably in Thailand or the D.R. on a vice filled police department retirement.)

    • beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 3:32 pm #

      Delightfully apropos. LSMFT – Lucky Strike means fine tobacco; I’d walk a mile for a Camel; Winstons taste good like a cigarette should.

      • abbybwood April 18, 2016 at 4:44 pm #

        Virginia Slims: “You’ve come a long way baby!”

      • Despatch from HQ INGSOC April 18, 2016 at 7:14 pm #

        Here at HQ INGSOC, LSMFT means something else.

  24. rOn cOn cOMa April 18, 2016 at 1:35 pm #

    I used to work for one of the media properties of Cox Enterprises. Cox also owns Manheim which bought into Go Financial and NextGear Capital. Go Financial and NextGear Capital provide subprime auto loans. Manheim is buying into subprime just like Wachovia purchased indymac and BOA purchased Countrywide.

    So I attended one of our “Ask the Publisher Anything” meetings. And I asked him what is going to happen to our company when Manheim goes south because of the subprime auto loans. I got a move along nothing to see here answer.

    Mainstreet companies can’t make it on mainstreet so they are trying to be like Wallstreet companies.

  25. FincaInTheMountains April 18, 2016 at 2:30 pm #

    New York Democratic primary, 2008

    After the votes were initially counted on election night, certain districts near New York City were found to be missing their vote tallies for Obama. The New York Times conducted a review of the unofficial results from the primary. They found that, among New York City’s 6,106 election districts participating, 80 districts did not record a single vote for Obama, including heavily black districts like Harlem, as well as districts next to others where Obama had very favorable results.

    City election officials reviewed the vote tallies and found several inaccuracies. For example, in Harlem where Clinton led Obama 141 to 0, the recounted vote was counted as 261 to 136, Clinton. In Brooklyn the primary night vote was 118 to 0, Clinton, whereas the recounted vote went 118 to 116, Clinton.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Democratic_primary,_2008

    Mazerfuka!

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    • abbybwood April 18, 2016 at 4:46 pm #

      I hope Sanders pulls out a New York miracle tomorrow night and cleans Mrs. Clinton’s clock!!!

  26. amb April 18, 2016 at 2:31 pm #

    Same as it ever was. Human behaviour with its concomitant failures, crises, destruction, etc. has not changed since the first society or tribe existed. The urge to survive and individual creativity have been the only elements that have kept us extent. No one knows how long these current shenanigans of the financial elite, governments, central banks, and corporations can continue on into the future. To try and make sense out of it or predict is a waste of time. They will until they won’t. When the systems fail there will be disruption and hardship. Then reformation and reorganization. And then we do it all over again. Sometimes the systems fail yet the transition to another form of existence turns out to not be that disruptive or problematic. The apparency is that technology has evolved to hither to unknown levels, financial engineering has brought us the strangest mechanisms, there are new and complicated individual and social maladies, and so on. All irrelevant. All symptoms. We don’t understand ourselves, our motivations, our aberrant behaviour, etc. Until that is confronted we are doomed to repeat.

  27. Ishabaka April 18, 2016 at 2:38 pm #

    Left out the latest big racket – the internet. Sucking down incomprehensible amounts of power in order to record (it is hoped), every action, word, and heartbeat of (soon) every human on earth, with the prime objective being to find out what kind of porn to sell them.

    • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 3:53 pm #

      … and hoodies that everyone has apparently been waiting to come back in stock (or so the “news” stories tell me).

  28. FincaInTheMountains April 18, 2016 at 2:47 pm #

    https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/13043213_10153560848161305_8535403990650060237_n.jpg?oh=7493e59bc7fbfffd2e6765dcdb7d87ab&oe=57791D0A

    Rally in support for Bernie Sanders could not be contained by the main field of Prospect Park worth 500 exhales to run around. And the entire park circumference is about 1800 exhales and the impression is that it is all filled with supporters of Bernie Sanders, who live in the surrounding houses.

    A headquarters of Hillary are 30-minute walk and all are confident that if you do not do something extraordinary, she will win the elections anyway. In the sense forge them in her favor. Some hot heads are proposing such actions, I will not write about, and all others require Bernie Sanders that he stopped talking shit how he respects Hillary Clinton and how he knew her for 25 years, but joined the request to investigate her crimes, including forgery of election results.

    And naturally that he brought to the attention of the Democratic Party, if they nominated her, all the Sanders supporters will vote for Trump as an independent candidate.

    No one believes that the Republicans will nominate him.

  29. beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 3:17 pm #

    @Frankiti:

    I enjoy your posts, but I disagree with you on the value of Homo sapiens 1.0. The sun’s luminosity will steadily increase as it ages, and in 400 million years will boil off Earth’s oceans and atmosphere, leaving a rocky she’ll of a planet. So we have a time limit for life on Earth in the millions of years, not billions.

    The evolution of life proceeded automatically, with no regard for the future. The only thing that mattered is how well a llfeform could handle
    the environment around it at the time. Obviously, Homo sapiens is very adept at adapting. If we die out and take the biosphere with us, the Earth won’t care because life is just a series of chemical reactions that can probably result in life forming again, even if it is totally different from the present.

    After all, we have a few hundred million years for life to spring up again even if we nuked

    • beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 3:18 pm #

      even if we nuked the world to hell.

    • Elrond Hubbard April 18, 2016 at 3:47 pm #

      At least half of the life on earth is single-celled life. More than that by abundance of species, and something like one half by sheer raw tonnage as well. Archaea and bacteria inhabit everything from Antarctic ice to volcanic vents to, purportedly, the “deep hot biosphere” halfway to the earth’s mantle. (Whether they’re busily cooking up more petrochemicals for our use here on the surface is, at best, a matter for debate.) They will certainly be the last life forms on our planet to give up the ghost, just as they were first.

      Over the long term, us macroscopic plants, animals and fungi are an interesting sideshow at best — unless we figure out how to govern ourselves for the long term.

      • beantownbill. April 18, 2016 at 5:52 pm #

        According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, entropy – disorder -must increase in a closed system. Yet evolution seems to favor increased complexity and structure. So what does this mean? Life doesn’t follow the 2nd law? The 2nd law must prevail and higher life forms ultimately die out – is Tainter right? Or is there a continual struggle between life and natural law? Or finally, does this not apply because the universe is not a closed system, and if not, what does THAT mean?

    • Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 4:21 pm #

      Humanity, as far as we know (although probability is against it), provide the only eyes for the universe to look upon itself. To see, feel, appreciate, and manipulate itself. I believe our mistake is believing that we are a finished product worthy for proliferation. The universe can do better. We are one in the first steps. We cannot bear the responsibility. No matter, the universe will conspire to awaken at some place and at some time again before the eventual heat death, rapid constriction and next bang… or so the story may go.

      You are absolutely correct. The Earth does not care. The universe does not care. Therein lies the beauty of it all; it’s totally free of judgment. Yet we care, at least the more evolved. Something in us asks that we care. The universe? In every moment we should appreciate our universe, the “miracle” the brief moment that the universe had eyes and ears, and preserve that moment. We don’t. The Japanese cherish the cherry blossom. They cultivate it. For that brief and fleeting spring moment. We don’t as a species live to cherish life, the fragility, the transience of it all. At least not for the right reasons. We are not listening, the universe has ears and they are mostly deaf.

      • monkey_flower April 18, 2016 at 10:18 pm #

        It is only a subset of Japanese that are fond of cherry trees. Just as many Japs are busy growing Rohdea plants. But you never heard of them. No wonder. Japan is a mystery. It is almost impossible to find references to forestry, agriculture or horticulture in Japan. It’s like they don’t care about communicating with the rest of the world. Indeed, all the reports I have read about Japan from the present time back to the 1800’s have all been written by white people who were visiting Japan. Very strange.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 2:04 pm #

          That’s true strength. Someone on another blog said of the French abroad: the don’t expect to be liked. They are strong in their own identity and accept that many wont care for them. But since they have their own people, culture, and nation – what’s the worry?

          People have to realize the fall of America will make us all vagabonds, despised by the rest of the world. It’s very special to have one’s own Nation. It’s amazing how we’re just throwing it away with open borders.

        • messianicdruid April 19, 2016 at 9:18 pm #

          Like cats; no memories.

  30. Hospice Man April 18, 2016 at 3:43 pm #

    To me there is no better proof for the vapidness of our political leadership than the idea that HRC was trying to claim credit for Obamacare (because she had tried a similar failure 16 years before). Now that people understand what a sham the ACA is, it’s enough to lose the Dems an election that has them facing off against opponents who have barely surpassed the level of having opposable thumbs. https://brooklynculturejammers.com/2016/01/20/why-aca-may-be-a-negative-in-2016/

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  31. goat1001 April 18, 2016 at 3:46 pm #

    Those rackets – health care, car loans, finance, student loans – they are all wretched indeed. There are plenty of other bad actors in the room – the MSM, the Military-Industrial-Complex, Factory Farms, etc. – but the biggest, baddest seems to be this animal: The 438 functioning nuclear reactors throughout the world.

    These are time bombs really, as it is unlikely many (or most) will not be “properly” decommissioned when the times get really tough. The power grid will go down, people will walk off of their jobs and the reactors will all melt down at once and flood the world with ionizing radiation. Four hundred thirty-eight Chernobyl’s going off at once. Ten-thousand years later, the affected areas (most or all of Earth) will be habitable again by….whomever.

    • michael April 18, 2016 at 4:09 pm #

      Not so.

      After 50 years the affected reagons become healthier than nonradiation zones.
      The condition is that you have access to antioxidants.
      Many animals around Chernobyl are healthier than the nonirradiated brethren elsewhere.

      A nuclear war or multimeltdown could be a boon to the biosphere.

      • Ken Hall April 18, 2016 at 7:20 pm #

        The articles I have read do not imply that affected areas near Chernobyl are healthier than areas not irradiated by the fallout from the Chernobyl meltdown. In fact they state that that the opposite is highly likely true ; but, insufficient data collection has hampered analysis of the animals, currently living near the cocooned reactors, for detrimental effects produced by the radiation. The real reason the animals have returned in large numbers is because the “humans” are no longer in residence. It is the adverse impact that modern day humans have on nearby animal populations that reduces the animal populations dramatically and removing the humans changes those dynamics in an obviously beneficial manner for the wildlife.

  32. wpa_ccc April 18, 2016 at 4:19 pm #

    “such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).” — JHK

    My car is now 17 years old. I haven’t made a car payment in over a decade.

    The idea that a car cannot last more than seven years is contradicted by the experience of many of my generation… and by the experience of Cuba under USA embargo.

    Find a good mechanic. Resist advertising. Don’t buy a new car if the old car still works. Conservatism.

    • malthuss April 18, 2016 at 7:31 pm #

      the experience of Cuba under USA embargo.
      Ergo, commies need capitalists to do more than survive.

  33. wpa_ccc April 18, 2016 at 4:30 pm #

    “That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.” –JHK

    Yet another JHK prediction that collapse is “just around the corner” …

    …this time with a predicted date of before the conventions in July.

    So we have about two months to prepare for the elephant, the greatly anticipated collapse of the monstrous and immoral house of cards that we call the financial sector. Good luck, everyone. This time it is for real and the number of deaths will be in the millions./s

  34. Despatch from HQ INGSOC April 18, 2016 at 4:41 pm #

    So James, you predict the wheels will be falling off by the end of summer, 2016?

    Interesting, here at HQ INGSOC we tend to agree with that timeline. Then there are the wild cards, too numerous to count. To name just a few: NKorea lobbing a crude nuclear tipped missile in our direction, Naval combat with China over the Spratley Islands, Saud family wiped away on the Arabian Peninsula and the country falling into chaos, unnamed ISIS depredations, Brussels like terror in our cities, bloody urban riots inspired by BLM thugs … and a lot of stuff out here we don’t even know exists yet.

    • elysianfield April 19, 2016 at 11:38 am #

      “Interesting, here at HQ INGSOC we tend to agree with that timeline. Then there are the wild cards, too numerous to count. To name just a few: NKorea lobbing a crude nuclear tipped missile in our direction, Naval combat with China over the Spratley Islands, Saud family wiped away on the Arabian Peninsula and the country falling into chaos, unnamed ISIS depredations, Brussels like terror in our cities, bloody urban riots inspired by BLM thugs … and a lot of stuff out here we don’t even know exists yet.”

      Elysianfield approves of this message….

      *Loss of the Dollar’s hegemony should appear on the list, also.

  35. Frankiti April 18, 2016 at 5:53 pm #

    “It’s easy to see how that ends in tears for all concerned parties, but we “buy into it” because there seems to be no other way to a) boost the so-called “consumer” economy and b) keep the matrix of car-dependant suburban sprawl in operation.”

    An argument by Bill Gates had me thinking recently of ‘The Matrix’ film. Bill Gates posits that overpopulation is a myth, and of course, his fallacy is supported by his faulty reasoning that since we can make enough food to feed us and heave enough land to house us, that there is no such thing as overpopulation. Of course he doesn’t take into account the quality of life we shall lead, the state of our oceans, the use and need of petroleum based farming from machinery and transport to fertilization. Instead he preaches, as Mr. K. calls ‘techno-narcissism”. Technology can make food available. Technology can make diseases curable. Again, he doesn’t ever think about us, and our replicants, enjoying a future of what Pirsig would consider “quality”. So long as the earth is kept inhabitable and people can eat and have shelter and their diseases cured, it’s a world worth supporting. In ‘The Matrix’ humanity was relegated to warehoused pods sustained by feeding tubes, and it did not matter, because their ‘real lives’ were virtual, net based. This is the future that Bill Gates finds acceptable, and most of the techno capitalists deciding humanity’s future.

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    • elysianfield April 19, 2016 at 11:50 am #

      ” Bill Gates posits that overpopulation is a myth, and of course, his fallacy is supported by his faulty reasoning that since we can make enough food to feed us and have enough land to house us, that there is no such thing as overpopulation.

      Someone once said…”Capitalism does not have a production problem, it has a distribution problem….”

      “You need food? You need shelter? Show me the money….”

      “No money, no honey. You want to play? You got to pay….”

      No jobs for the roiling masses,… this provides for the problem of distribution…and that leaves only charity and human compassion to eventually sustain a majority of the Earth’s population.

      *Charity and human compassion…how’s that working for the dispossessed?

  36. rapier April 18, 2016 at 6:34 pm #

    JHK and many others, including, sadly, fruitcake shills like Alex Jones, assumes “discontinuity” or something like it is at hand. Picking various facts out of the air and creating a narrative of collapse.

    Even the mainstream is filled with the decline of America meme. Meanwhile the neoliberal driven monetary reset proceeds smoothly wherein globally, debt in all sectors continues to grow smartly. The reset is in the form of Modern Monetary Theory wherein the store of value function of money is abandoned which means that the debt backing our money no longer needs to back it. I am as guilty as anyone who believes there is too much debt but if debt doesn’t really matter and debt defaults can simply be ignored then we are wrong.

    Then too neoconservatism which is now wedded to neoliberalism goes from victory to victory. Days away from a coup in Brazil without a drop of blood being shed. Soon enough Mr Trudeau will be put in the hot seat and ushered out. Brexit will not win and need I mention the US stock market is a hairs breath from all time highs. I’m sure you can come up with all sorts or reasons why the Presidential election would change things but don’t bet on it.

    I don’t doubt that systematic dislocation can occur. However consider it might be 10 20 or 30 years on.

    • Q. Shtik April 18, 2016 at 6:48 pm #

      Rapier, you are either wpa’s comrade or Krugman’s comrade, which is it? Come on, fess up.

      • rapier April 18, 2016 at 9:57 pm #

        What or who is wpa? As to Krugman I am a profound opponent of Economics. big ‘E’, as we know it and that includes the dominant Neo Classical consensus in all its flavors, supply side, libertarian, whatever, including Krugman of course.

        It must be said neoliberalism is not the same as Neo Classical although the later is ever more infused with the former and it is neoliberalism which is the worst thing extant.

        Where to start? How about here
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfbVPDNl7V4

    • michael April 19, 2016 at 3:45 pm #

      Debt defaults do matter. Currently we are slowing down the process of implosion to gain time to distribute the losses in not totally obvious ways to the citizenry at large also known as the hapless taxpayer.

      I picture the large system of financial contracts as a mixture of matter and antimatter just like particles and antiparticles are spontaneously created but — providentially — annihilate each other shortly thereafter.

      In finance however the annihilation does not take place continuously but rather there is a buildup over periods of time with a nuclear reset at longer intervals.

      A typical financial position is a follows: you make a promise (1e6 USD)
      and hedge it by receiving a promise from another party (-1e6+delta USD). The value of the combined position is the delta (orginally close to zero).

      The value is a difference of much larger offsetting positions (particle and antiparticle). At maturity the annihilation takes place under uncertain future conditions. Much of the risk management only concerns the degree to which the positions decrease to offset each other precisely (this can happen naturally through drift im market prices).

      However it is also possible that one party _defaults_. Then the offsetting position disappears and the promise _goes naked_. Now it is not delta which is at stake but 1e6 which may cause your default on positions which offset someone elses risk.

      Therefore a steady rate of default is actually a healthy thing since it prevents too great a buildup of offsetting contracts. Now we have stepped in to prevent any default by backing everything with the full faith and credit of government. In due course a ghastly mountain of financial contracts has built up entirely out of proportion to the size of the real economy which is almost a rounding error of the paper notional.

      It is like swimming in a pool of nitroglycerin. Once a particle blows up
      the detonation wave spreads as difference residuals become sums of absolute values — orders of magnitude larger.

      But this would not be the end of everything it just be the end of the current thing opening the way to new things and new ways of doing things are exactly what’s needed.

      • Q. Shtik April 19, 2016 at 5:00 pm #

        I don’t know what the frig you’re talking about Mike, but it makes you sound very erudite.

        • michael April 20, 2016 at 2:22 pm #

          There is no erudition in economics only delusion.
          Here is an example of what goes on:

          Some time back banks in Europe were willing to sell you a deal (promise to pay) as follows: you invested (gave the bank) 10K EUR and three years later would get back the 10K in addition to yearly interest of 8% (much more than any bond would pay) but interest was only paid until a certain major stock index would fall 50% from current value (an extremely unlikely move).

          You get your yearly cupon of 8% (number made up) if the index did not breach the lower bound by the end of the year. If it did you got nothing for that year or any following year.

          This looks like a bond and yields much more than a junk bond but interest payments are not certain though highly likely. Moreover you assess the creditworthyness of the bank much higher than that of the typical Junk bond issuer, so no worries about being paid back the principal of 10K at the end.

          The bank is a dim operation without much competence and goes to a much bigger, more sophisticated bank (say UBS) buying another more complicated promise (a derivative) which ensures that it will have the 10K to pay back and interest cupons of 800 a year should they come due.

          UBS finally engages in “productive activity” to create the value added needed to pay the interest should it come due.
          What UBS does is that it creates a probabilistic model of market prices and trades in the market according to a strategy implied by its stochastic model. The strategy is guaranteed to produce the needed cashflows to satisfy the above promise and has a computable up front cost at which it can be implemented.

          The mathematical proof assumes that UBS can trade all the time with no friction (trading costs) whch is not exactly true but more so on the assumption that market prices actauly behave a described in the model (only structural assumptions, no prediction).

          This works more or less most of the time. UBS charges the dim bank a fee in addition to the computable cost and the dim bank charges the final customer an even bigger fee.

          The dim bank is now in the following position:
          it has made a promise (particle) and it has received a promise (antiparticle) from UBS.

          These two promises are offsetting. The dim bank already has everything in place to make good on its promise and can keep the margin (resulting from the fees) _IF_ UBS makes good on its promise.

          The dim bank might make 50 bucks off that deal. This would be 0.5% of 10K. If all goes well the offsetting promises net (annihilate) each other and the “value added” remains

          However if UBS goes down (defaults) then the dim bank does not have the cashflows to make good on its promise and is out at least 10K plus interest payments shoud they come due.

          Suddenly +50 bucks has turned -(10K + some). The fifty bucks the dim bank counts on making is the sum of fees, and promises made and received with opposite signs and one of the summands has gone AWOL.

          In reality there is much (trillions) of business where you do not make 0.5%, indeed finance is not really a profitable business so that we do not talk about returns in % we talk about “basis points” (BP) where 1BP =1/100 percentage points, equivalently

          1BP = one part in 10000 (like making one buck off of 10K).

          It takes truly gargantuan notionals (also known as nominals, in our case the 10K) to extract nontrivial sums when you are living off of basis points (5-10 BP is often all there is).

          The idea is that the notional does not matter since it never comes due (is always offset by opposite promise). But unfortunately promises are not always kept and then the notional is due.

          You can see how it might be a problem if for some years you have been living on 5 BP on 1 Trillion (making 500 million a year) but suddenly many cannot make good on theri promises and now you are out 50 Billion.

      • rapier April 20, 2016 at 5:12 am #

        I am talking specifically about bank balance sheets. If losses are never recognized as losses, defaults written off, then the balance sheet balances to satisfy requirements and so stays around.

        I know most people don’t know that bank assets are the loans they have made. Nor do they know that they do not loan money they have sitting around but rather they create deposits out of thin air when making a loan. In the old days if too many loans went into default then their assets shrunk and then their balance sheets, assets/liabilities went below statutory requirements and so were closed.

        Well in the new age the bank balance sheet doesn’t matter. Only to the extent they can pretend that their assets, their loans, are good. Who is hurt exactly if they fib about this? Nobody, Well 700 years of double entry accounting but what the heck, times change.

        In the abstract the money created by loans is ‘backed’ by the asset that is the note held by the bank. In reality that really isn’t the case as long as everyone agrees it isn’t the case. So then, presto, unlimited money creation is possible.

        The fans of MTM have no clue that what they propose is that the banks own everything.

        • michael April 20, 2016 at 4:21 pm #

          There is however a problem if depositors show up and want their money — an idea that suggests itself as soon as the bank offers a negative rate of interest on demand deposits.

  37. Pucker April 18, 2016 at 7:22 pm #

    “Men of America, the problem is plain before you. Here is a race transplanted through the criminal foolishness of your fathers. Whether you like it or not the millions are here, and here they will remain. If you do not lift them up, they will pull you down. Education and work are the levers to uplift a people. Work alone will not do it unless inspired by the right ideals and guided by intelligence. Education must not simply teach work—it must teach Life. The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. ”

    “The Negro Problem”, Booker T. Washington

    • Pucker April 18, 2016 at 7:24 pm #

      Unfortunately, many negroes today rebuke the “Talented Tenth” for “acting White”.

    • S M Tenneshaw April 18, 2016 at 8:47 pm #

      “Man life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money”

      Master P

      • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 3:57 pm #

        Thank you Booker. I consider Puck to be Booker reincarnated.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 3:59 pm #

        Master Puck. He has grown since that Uncle Tom incarnation.

  38. Pucker April 18, 2016 at 7:25 pm #

    Black Lives Matter:

    “Do you think that if the leaders of thought among Negroes are not trained and educated thinkers, that they will have no leaders? On the contrary a hundred half-trained demagogues will still hold the places they so largely occupy now, and hundreds of vociferous busy-bodies will multiply. You have no choice; either you must help furnish this race from within its own ranks with thoughtful men of trained leadership, or you must suffer the evil consequences of a headless misguided rabble. ”

    “The Negro Problem”, Booker T. Washington

  39. Pucker April 18, 2016 at 7:26 pm #

    “Knowledge of life and its wider meaning, has been the point of the Negro’s deepest ignorance, and the sending out of teachers whose training has not been simply for bread winning, but also for human culture, has been of inestimable value in the training of these men. ”

    “The Negro Problem”, Booker T. Washington

    • AKlein April 19, 2016 at 2:52 pm #

      Seems to me that, unfortunately, it certainly is not just “The Negro Problem” anymore. “Knowledge of life and its wider meaning…” – what an interesting concept! How exactly does that figure into the Understanding of the Kardashians?

  40. malthuss April 18, 2016 at 7:30 pm #

    Your rulers consist of multi-generational families that go back hundreds of years.
    Yale University was started by Eli Yale who made his fortune in the opium business working with the East India Company of England. Another opium merchant (General William Russell) started the Skull and Bones secret society in 1832.
    The Bushes, John Kerry and many other “political leaders” are / were members (Bonesmen). None of this is any great secret. Anthony Sutton’s book “America’s Secret Establishment” gives you the names. I find it interesting that BLM are calling the shots at Yale.

    These “Eastern Establishment” families go back to the Royals and Blue Bloods of Europe and their fortunes were made in opium, banking, shipping, mining and war. In the early 1900’s opium was legal. You could buy it in drugstores. The people who control the real power remain hidden.
    Presidents, Governors, Congressman, Senators and other low life bottom feeders are only the front men and puppets for the real power. The real power stays hidden and lurks in the shadows while the sheeple watch sports, pack themselves into heavy metal concerts, become obsessed with who got laid in Hollywood and which one of their idols just “came out of the closet.”

    The wealthy members of the Bilderberg group will be meeting again in Washington this May to decide who will be the next American president and also to decide what country they will bomb back into the Stone Age. Ever notice that Bernie or any of the other “candidates” never mention who the real power mongers are.

    The Bohemian Grove are another bunch of elites who control the country and they meet every Summer in California. Once you realize that the real action takes place behind closed doors it gives you a whole new outlook in how the world s run. A hundred years ago one banking family controlled fifty percent of the world economy.
    From 1914 to 1945 there was this big super war that brought down global real estate values and murdered millions of people. The period between 1919 and 1939 was called peace. It wasn’t really “peace”….it was just a twenty year “time off” so everyone could reload and finish the job they started earlier. Ever wonder why during the depression there was NO MONEY but once the war resumed money was growing on trees. Every military contract was first approved by Wall Street bankers who owned stock in those companies who built the battleships and airplanes.
    War makes a lot of people very rich.

    So in about 100 years the powerful elite ruling classes have butchered nearly 700 million people. This slaughter was called “fighting for freedom….workers uniting…nation building….domino theory….spreading democracy….peoples uprising…culture revolution….ethnic cleansing….cold war….peace keeping…collateral damage….fighting terrorism….etc…etc…etc”. On and on it goes.

    A small booklet came out in the mid-70’s called THE OCCULT TECHNOLOGY OF POWER. The book might still be for sale on EBAY or AMAZON. It is a very good insight in how things work from “behind the curtain”. Jim Marrs also wrote a very good book called THEY RULE THROUGH SECRECY.

    A few dozen families totaling about two thousand people own the planet. I hear stories that they are all united in their plans of world control. I don’t believe it.

    They are so obsessed with GREED AND POWER that I don’t think they are the kind that will “share the pie”. I think that even at the top of the food chain they will still fight each other over that last slice of pie (or piece of chicken). That may be good for us. While these powerful families and religious groups battle each other we may slip through the cracks. Evil always destroys itself. We see that on a daily bases in the ghetto.
    ….

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  41. drewkeeling April 18, 2016 at 10:25 pm #

    Rackets like those described in this week’s blog entry are not unheard of in past American history. However, one does not have to agree with the exact descriptions provided, or even with the choice of items, to appreciate that we have in recent years been in a period of relative severity with regards to such business scams, public policy incompetencies, and socio-economic disasters. Past episodes led to a bloody civil war, to extensive urban slums, to widespread environmental destruction, and to a depression wherein a quarter of the workforce was unemployed for many years. Jim Kunstler is not particularly known for holding back on potential bad news, but referring to “discontinuity,” under current circumstances and given apparent future trends, sounds like understatement.

  42. BackRowHeckler April 18, 2016 at 11:28 pm #

    The party conventions this summer in Philly and Cleveland should be interesting, ‘specially the theater in the streets surrounding the conventions. The violence ‘so called’ in Chicago in 1968 really wasn’t all that violent; nobody resorted to the use of firearms, there were no fatalities, and only one injury occurred which required more than 5 days in hospital. 48 years on US civilization is frayed to the point there is no center to hold, so don’t expect police like Mayor Daley’s CPD on the streets with mace and clubs. More formidable weapons might be broken out this time around, on both sides of the line.

    brh

  43. pequiste April 19, 2016 at 12:25 am #

    And as an “outro” for JHK’s punget offering today may I proffer to the CFN an encore from the brilliant anti-heroes of American fusion (rock/jazz) music, Steely Dan.

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

    Don’t forget the greatest album cover to express precision truth about the rackets.

    Now I ask you who in heck is going to clean up after the elephant?

  44. AHtheHumanity April 19, 2016 at 3:11 am #

    Suspension of disbelief plays a large part in the American psyche. Probably due to the average 5 hours of t.v. and movies we watch every day (google it).

    The idea that something that is made well can hold its value forever and even increase in value because of its apparent rarity – discontinuity is writ all over that. Cuba has kept ancient cars rolling for 60 years* but now they may get a NEW one. Think of the time and money they will save! What will our car racket do to their small island? Islands do not continue as pristine Edens as much as the Cruise Ship marketers would have us believe. The Dominican Republic is a pool of discarded battery acid. Haiti is still tore up and infested with homeless. Jamaica no longer has public, undeveloped beach.

    Also, the ideas that human longevity is guaranteed by hospitals and big pharma is an illusion. This is tied up with the illusion that the best job you could have is being a doctor (healing people), so universities are the ultimate goal for High School graduates. Nevermind that 20% of Americans drop out of school at a rate of 8,000 a day. Where do they end up? 1% end up in prison; 2.2 million annually. The rest are on welfare trying to pay off used car loans and working in the lowest brackets of the service industries (meat packers, janitors, stocking shelves). The irony being the hardest laborers are the ones who need the most healthcare which they could never afford on their own.

    When it finally dawns on the people that things will never get better for them (99%), there has to be a surge of anger.

    *With an estimated 60,000 vintage cars still in Cuba, these old classics are a tribute to the nostalgia of the old days. Believe it or not, no new parts have been shipped to Cuba to service these auto’s since the ealry 60’s, and they currently run on the sole ingenuity of the Cuban people. Can you guess how they do this? Surprisingly, they either manufacture their own replacement parts, use common household items, or repurpose parts from older Soviet vehicles to keep these running. (http://insightcuba.com/blog/2012/11/13/the-classic-cars-of-cuba)

  45. Pucker April 19, 2016 at 7:19 am #

    According to his book “Up From Slavery”, Booker T. Washington says that post Emancipation many negroes thought that freedom meant doing whatever you want and not working. Basically, they had the cultural level of primitive cavemen. Probably lots of rapes and illegitimacy at the time.

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    • merf56 April 19, 2016 at 11:21 am #

      I have had about enough of your KKK racism. Shut the hell up.

      • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 2:07 pm #

        Booker wasn’t KKK, he was Black and superior to you. You don’t know nuthin bout nuthin.

          • Pucker April 19, 2016 at 4:48 pm #

            My reading of Booker T. Washington so far suggests that Emancipation of the Negro may have had the ironic effect of creating the civilized “Talented Tenth” who understands that Freedom means Responsibility, while creating a “Headless Misguided Rabble” black majority that equates Freedom with irresponsibility and lawless barbarism.

        • Q. Shtik April 19, 2016 at 4:49 pm #

          You don’t know nuthin bout nuthin. – Janos

          ===========

          If you’re going to employ Black vernacular the word is nuffin.

          • stelmosfire April 20, 2016 at 7:42 am #

            Ya’ll beet me tooit coona##!

      • Frankiti April 19, 2016 at 6:00 pm #

        There’s an entire klan of them. It’s the price you pay for an open forum. Blacks one week, Jews the next, Muslims another… but bring up the scariest creature of them all: the willfully ignorant tattooed left-turn race watching meth dabblin’ whiskey-tango, you know… the camo hat wearing overweight walmartians that drive pick’emups and shop for deals on 5.56? No, can’t tread on them.

        • Pucker April 19, 2016 at 9:44 pm #

          The Civil Rights Movement was about Booker T.’s “Talented Tenth”.

          The Black Lives Matter movement is about Booker T.’s “Headless Misguided Rabble”.

  46. Cold N. Holefield April 19, 2016 at 8:50 am #

    Another creative title this week and another play on words, or a play on phrases, I should say & just did. Since yesterday was the deadline for filing your taxes, the saying goes, The Tax Man Cometh. JHK substituted Elephant for Tax Man. The title to this blog post could also read, although it’s a bit longer and maybe a bit more unwieldy, Forget The Tax Man, The Elephant Cometh.

  47. Cold N. Holefield April 19, 2016 at 8:56 am #

    AHtheHumanity said: Probably due to the average 5 hours of t.v. and movies we watch every day (google it).

    How many hours do “we” spend googling (knock it off with your dirty mind) every day? Should we Google it to find out? I know one thing (just this one thing — nothing else) — it’s more and more every day to the point it will surpass TV Time. And don’t think “they” don’t know that and have it covered. Google controls your results. It’s a form of censorship. It’s a form of propaganda. Just as TV is. Google it — you’ll see.

    • AHtheHumanity April 22, 2016 at 10:43 pm #

      Google is a reference like a Dictionary. I use the dictionary quite a lot because I communicate quite a lot. T.V. is not a two way street. Google is a two way form of communication. You’re telling it what you want and if it doesn’t give you anything back, and that’s been known to happen, then you look somewhere else for reference.

      Your own life is a reference point. I watched quite a lot of t.v. in my youth and I binge watch now on the internet. The difference being I can gauge the quality of what I watch. Mostly, like a lot of t.v. viewing people, I’m looking for reality based entertainment…something I can learn from.

  48. ozone April 19, 2016 at 10:14 am #

    …Within this list you may find a few folks whose very bread and butter depends *exclusively* on the continuation of the rackets. Does that make them racketeers by association, or accessories thereto?

    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17Vn7hk7BuUZHy7q3kKYEyYczbxu-h415dZomchkSGcc/pubhtml

    Ps. There will be no prosecutions by the relevant “authorities” as the rackets have been sanctified by “law”. (…Said “law” being cannily manufactured by the folks on the list. ‘Round and ’round she goes; when it stops, look TF out!)

    • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 2:11 pm #

      Bulgarian volunteers hunt down Muslim refugees. The Police Chief is outraged at the competition, but the Prime Minister thanks them saying, Bulgaria belongs to Bulgarians. Does this not illustrate your point?

      Moreover, this is how a true Nation works, minus the policeman traitor. Police need to work with the People.

      http://www.dailystormer.com/meanwhile-in-bulgaria/

      • ozone April 21, 2016 at 7:00 pm #

        No.

  49. ozone April 19, 2016 at 10:22 am #

    Cogent commentary on the history and genetic provenance of The Elephant from yesterday (for the most part). Good to see some new commenters. Straight to where the termites have done the very worst damage by JHK.

  50. ozone April 19, 2016 at 11:26 am #

    “…Finance is the racket that will go down first and hardest, and when it does, all the other rackets currently running will go up in a vapor. That elephant will storm into the room before the political conventions, and when it does, it will usher in the recognition that nothing can go on as before.”

    We would certainly wish that it be the finance racket as first to go down the gullet of the porcelain god, but the props (and bald-faced mendacity) are being jammed under its crumbling edifice even as we post. Check this out:

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-18/days-after-wells-fargo-admits-defrauding-government-ny-fed-gives-it-reward

    I’m not so sure that the elephant will run amok until *after* the coronation. A number of extra-stout chains of informational ignorance and misdirection will be cast about it until that bit of business is done and dusted, along with organizing the security contingent (barrels pointed outward). However, the day is soon to come when the keeper/handler begins to ingest the very same concoction they’ve been drugging the pachyderm with, and then…

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  51. budizwiser April 19, 2016 at 12:34 pm #

    Our collective technological ability to centralize and control our population has out stripped any sociology-cultural abilities to deal with disparate values and needs.

    No better example: the current presidential election process.

    Just people are smart – doesn’t mean they are good.

    Earth goes the way of Venus in about 200 years….

    • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 11:57 am #

      Nostradamus book said ‘2000 years.’

  52. Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 3:53 pm #

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/19/she-got-caught-up-in-the-likes-teen-accused-of-livestreaming-friends-rape-for-attention/

    Don’t get caught up in the likes? Why not, if they are from other moral people? Everyone knows that Muslims have an intrinsic right to come into every country. Anyone who believes differently is a monster, an out-law who is fair game for anything anyone wants to mete out.

    Ok, then Muslims can come in but only so many per year. This is equivalent to a rape victim complaining that the perp needs to use more lubrication. Why should he? Why would he? If people let Muslims come in they are bending over and asking to be raped. People who surrender their rights cannot then complain about their treatment. Well they can, but they can’t really expect to be listened to. They can expect to be mocked and to be treated even worse. In other words, the Sadists want you to beg for mercy since denying it increases their enjoyment exponentially.

  53. Offgrid86 April 19, 2016 at 3:56 pm #

    I’m really confused. Why does anyone want to live in the USA? You have awful healthcare, very violent police, terrible job prospects, little holiday entitlements, no real freedom, incredibly corrupt and oppressive government, an evil military industrial complex, cities designed for cars not people, collapsing infrastructure, a population convinced they are the chosen people whilst being ignorant about almost everything. a poisoned and degraded landscape.
    What is it that makes anyone stay there?

    • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 4:04 pm #

      Where are you? How many of us “can” (are willing) you take? And is that the best you can do? Remember, you have to give until it hurts – a lot.

      Once America collapses, think Costa Rica and Canada wont? Think the Ticos wont blame the expats and take everything they have? Think the Indians wont take revenge on White Canadians? Think the Asians wont drive the remaining Whites from Vancover? Think the Muslims, Sikhs, Haitians, etc are going to tribe up too? Got tribe?

    • malthuss April 19, 2016 at 4:07 pm #

      Most of the citizens are not riche enough to move elsewhere.

      very violent police, uh, no, very violent blacks and browns.

      no real freedom, says you.

      cities designed for people with cars.

      a population convinced they are the chosen people [Jews?]

      terrible job prospects, WoW. YOU GOT ONE RIGHT. I will add, ‘due to Clinton and NAFTA.’

      • Frankiti April 19, 2016 at 7:47 pm #

        Is there anyone you don’t blame or hate? At least my enmity is confined to one group: ignorant white haters.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 8:03 pm #

          And why is your hatred confined to Whites? Why does that make it Ok? Doesn’t that make you a racist of a certain kind – as in a self hating anti-White White racist?

          Why not hate the ignorant of all colors? Or do you expect less from other races? Clinton’s soft fascism of lower expectations? You and most Liberals. So now we have to charge you with hypocrisy as well.

          • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 10:44 pm #

            Why does God make people like Frank?

        • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 11:55 am #

          I posted facts.
          The most violent groups in USa are —?
          And that the Jews have called themselves, ‘The Chosen.’
          Chaim Potok even has a book with that title.

          Simple facts you slur into ‘hate.’ Fool.

          • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:26 pm #

            http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race-and-violent-crime/

            Excerpted From: “New U.S. Department Of Justice Statistics on Race and Violent Crime” :

            “First, we find that during the 2012/2013 period, blacks committed an average of 560,600 violent crimes against whites, whereas whites committed only 99,403 such crimes against blacks. This means blacks were the attackers in 84.9 percent of the violent crimes involving blacks and whites. This figure is consistent with reports from 2008, the last year DOJ released similar statistics. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year Mr. Barack Hussein Obama was elected president.”

            “Interestingly, we find that violent interracial crime involving blacks and Hispanics occurs in almost exactly the same proportions as black/white crime: Blacks are the attackers 82.5 percent of the time, while Hispanics are attackers only 17.5 percent of the time.”

            “Some observers argue that what causes the overwhelming preponderance of black-on-white over white-on-black violence is “chance of encounter,” due to the fact that there are five times as many whites as blacks in the American population. However, there are only about 30 percent more Hispanics than blacks, yet black-on-Hispanic violence is almost as lopsided as black-on-white violence. This suggests blacks may be deliberately targeting both Whites and Hispanics.”

            ‘Let the FACTS force delusional White liberals and Blacks to face the reality that minorities, Blacks, are the overwhelming cause of murder, rape, (Mostly White women.) assault, abandoning their families, robbery, burglary, theft, racism, (Mostly against White people, Asians and Latinos.) gun violence, (Mostly against the Black community.) domestic brutality and violence, (Mostly against Black women.) — and many other criminal offenses. The real cause of this “Plague of violence upon our land.” is NOT minorities pathetic excuse of “White racism”.’

      • Janos Skorenzy April 19, 2016 at 7:59 pm #

        Very White skin is of mysterious origin. Generally, people get lighter to the north but the polar peoples aren’t that pale so it is by no means necessary apparently. I don’t know the answer. According to Carlton Coon, Whites aren’t really adapted to the cold that well. We don’t have compact bodies like the polar peoples nor do we get the “second wind” blood flow to our extremities that he talks about. This allows men to work for a time without gloves and to resist frostbite better. It has been found in some Norwegian Fishermen to a modest degree however.

        It’s always said that Muslims, being dark, will suffer in northern Europe from a lack of vitamin D, especially the women covered as they are. So how do the polar peoples manage it? Something in their diet? Perhaps Europe was especially dark and forested and this was a useful but not necessary mutation? Or perhaps it was something we got from the Neanderthals that proved useful?

        One interesting item Coon and other have talked about: Australian Aborigines wear little clothing and the interior being a desert plateau gets quite cold at night. And they don’t stay up tending the fire. It turns out they can sleep in temperatures that would keep other people tossing and shivering all night. A very useful adaption.

        White skin does handle cold better than Negro skin. It was observed that Blacks suffered more from frostbite during the Korean war. Their skin is thicker though and provides more protection against most things.

        Aborigines are not related to Negroes and hate them as much as they hate everyone else. A cross between a White and an Abo will look and be far more White than a cross between a White and a Negro.

        • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 11:47 am #

          Do Eskimos and Cherokees have blue eyes?
          Where are blues eyes ‘from?’

          How many 1000s of books have you read?

          • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 11:54 am #

            Aborigines are not related to Negroes

            Nonsense. DNA study shows where in Africa that the first
            Australian settlers came from.

            Like, wow, with their IQs of 50-60 points.

            Aborigines came out of Africa, study shows – Telegraph
            Australia’s Aborigines were formed from a single group of migrants who left Africa about 55,000 years ago, DNA evidence suggests. Once there the settlers …
            [Search domain http://www.telegraph.co.uk] telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550859/Aborigines-came-out-o…
            More results
            DNA confirms Aboriginal culture one of Earth’s oldest
            DNA confirms Aboriginal … ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS ARE descendents of the first people to leave Africa up … They contributed DNA to Aborigines along with …
            [Search domain http://www.australiangeographic.com.au] australiangeographic.com.au/news/2011/09/dna-confirms-aboriginal-cult…
            DNA study sheds light on aboriginal Australians’ heritage …
            When modern humans left Africa as far back … DNA study sheds light on aboriginal … that their DNA could predict the places they came from to within …
            [Search domain articles.latimes.com] articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/14/science/la-sci-india-australi…
            Aborigines: The First Out of Africa, the First in Asia and …
            … reveals that Aboriginal Australians left Africa much … Aborigines: The First Out of Africa, … modern humans came from a single out-of-Africa …

          • Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2016 at 2:42 pm #

            Well everyone is related if you want to put it like that. And we almost identical to chimps too. But in real relative terms that yield knowledge, the Abos are further from Blacks than they are from us. All the people that left Africa are closer to each other than they are to the Africans. But yes, apparently the hugged the coast of the Indian ocean as they wandered east. They never encountered cold weather and never had to develop any higher IQ.

            I heard that there is a group of Inuit that was found to have blue eyes. Some say they are the descendants of the Viking Colony in Greenland. I do believe Whites were here thousands of years ago, before our recorded history. The Spanish said the Inca nobles were almost as White as they were. And they said they had conquered a race of Whites, killed the men and took the women as wives.

          • Frankiti April 21, 2016 at 5:49 pm #

            Awwww! Look at the imbecilic racist fawn over the clever one. Be careful, familiarity also breeds contempt (y’know it’s not just race, ethnicity, color, sex, gender, nationality, etc)

    • Q. Shtik April 19, 2016 at 5:06 pm #

      What is it that makes anyone stay there? – O-Grid

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

      Because home is where the heart is. – proverb

    • Frankiti April 19, 2016 at 5:51 pm #

      got guns?

      • stelmosfire April 20, 2016 at 7:47 am #

        Check

    • michael April 20, 2016 at 3:21 pm #

      This is nonsense. I have lived both in the US and Europe for long periods. The quality of life in the US was far superior on a lower salary.

      In Europe I feel like we are viewed as a larger Nicaragua where you can sell second rate goods for higher prices.

      Freedom also lives on more strongly in the US. The European populations are more submissive, docile and receptive of government propaganda, which — unbelievable as it may sound — (at least where I am) is more virulent than in the US.

  54. dolph9 April 19, 2016 at 6:57 pm #

    Let me remind everyone that for all of America’s obvious problems, it still largely provides the following for the populace:
    1) food
    2) shelter
    3) some work or welfare
    4) some entertainments
    5) defense and enough propaganda to keep people signing up for the military

    You can name so many countries that can’t even get one of these right.

    So who needs healthcare or education? Because wur America! Wur number one!

    The Matrix is still functioning, it is going to be pushed as far as it possibly can be pushed.

  55. Cold N. Holefield April 19, 2016 at 8:20 pm #

    wpa said: Why does anyone want to live in the USA?

    I was about to leave when I saw it announced today that McDonald’s is bringing back Unlimited Fries (also known as All-You-Can-Eat Fries), so, I will be staying at least until that charitable deal ends, if it ever ends. I love fries and I have room to put on another forty or fifty pounds, so we’ve decided to defer our emigration plans for now.

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    • S M Tenneshaw April 20, 2016 at 9:04 am #

      And if you’re a senior citizen you can get senior coffee free at Wendy’s, or at least the one in Naperville IL. Their salads are nice as well; they come with croutons seasoned with sea salt.

      And just the other day I did a coupon scratch-off and scored a free 14-inch 2-topping pizza from John and Eddie’s. Who said opportunity is dead in the US of A?

  56. Pucker April 19, 2016 at 11:22 pm #

    “I have thus far referred mainly to the Negro race. But there is another side. The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much a problem as to what the white man will do with the Negro as what the Negro will do with the white man and his civilisation. In considering this side of the subject, I thank God that I have grown to the point where I can sympathise with a white man as much as I can sympathise with a black man. I have grown to the point where I can sympathise with a Southern white man as much as I can sympathise with a Northern white man.”

    “The Future of the American Negro”, Booker T. Washington

    • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:13 pm #

      You and Booker are both brilliant.
      Kudos.

  57. Pucker April 19, 2016 at 11:34 pm #

    “Columns of figures have been gleaned from the census reports within the last quarter of a century to show the great amount of crime committed by the Negro in excess of that committed by other races. No one will deny the fact that the proportion of crime by the present generation of Negroes is seriously large, but I believe that any other race with the Negro’s history and present environment would have shown about the same criminal record. Another consideration which we must always bear in mind in considering the Negro is that he had practically no home life in slavery; that is, the mother and father did not have the responsibility, and consequently the experience, of training their own children. The matter of child training was left to the master and mistress. Consequently, it has only been within the last thirty years that the Negro parents have had the actual responsibility and experience of training their own children. That they have made some mistakes in thus training them is not to be wondered at. Many families scattered over all parts of the United States have not yet been able to bring themselves together. When the Negro parents shall have had thirty or forty additional years in which to found homes and get experience in the training of their children, I believe that we will find that the amount of crime will be considerably less than it is now shown to be.”

    “The Future of the American Negro”, Booker T. Washington

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 20, 2016 at 12:24 pm #

      How’s that working out?

  58. Pucker April 20, 2016 at 12:02 am #

    “A very weak argument often used against pushing industrial training for the Negro is that the Southern white man favours it, and, therefore, it is not best for the Negro. Although I was born a slave, I am thankful that I am able so far to rid myself of prejudice as to be able to accept a good thing, whether it comes from a black man or a white man, a Southern man or a Northern man. Industrial education will not only help the Negro directly in the matter of industrial development, but also in bringing about more satisfactory relations between him and the Southern white man. For the sake of the Negro and the Southern white man there are many things in the relation of the two races that must soon be changed. We cannot depend wholly upon abuse or condemnation of the Southern white man to bring about these changes. Each race must be educated to see matters in a broad, high, generous, Christian spirit: we must bring the two races together, not estrange them. The Negro must live for all time by the side of the Southern white man. The man is unwise who does not cultivate in every manly way the friendship and good will of his next-door neighbour, whether he be black or white. I repeat that industrial training will help cement the friendship of the two races. The history of the world proves that trade, commerce, is the forerunner of peace and civilisation as between races and nations. The Jew, who was once in about the same position that the Negro is to-day, has now recognition, because he has entwined himself about America in a business and industrial sense. Say or think what we will, it is the tangible or visible element that is going to tell largely during the next twenty years in the solution of the race problem.”

    “The Future of the American Negro”, Booker T. Washingrown

  59. wpa_ccc April 20, 2016 at 1:19 am #

    Go, Bernie, go!

    Bernie was almost 50 points down before he won 104 more pledged delegates in NY tonight (the state where Hillary Clinton was elected to two terms in the U.S. Senate). Bernie won more delegates in New York tonight than any state that voted or caucused before tonight. Bernie has the momentum… wow! … 104 more pledged delegates!

    And what does that mean? Five important states vote one week from tonight, with more delegates at stake than Hillary Clinton led by coming into tonight. And if Bernie does well next Tuesday, he remains in a position to take the pledged delegate lead when almost 700 delegates are up for grabs on June 7.

    Bernie & Tulsi 2016!

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 20, 2016 at 12:29 pm #

      What are you smoking?

      Same stuff as the Titanic orchestra musicians?

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 20, 2016 at 12:32 pm #

        You kind of remind me of Baghdad Bob.

  60. FincaInTheMountains April 20, 2016 at 4:10 am #

    Hillary’s personal nuclear war

    Hillary announced Obama “reset” policy by presenting Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov with a red button with the word “overload”, allegedly as a result of “incorrect” translation of the word “reset”. And she was able to brilliantly demonstrate how this translation was not accidental, three times in the past seven years putting the world to the brink of a nuclear war.

    For the first time as Secretary of State she demanded American military force to support Japan’s territorial claims to the USSR. It was only the tsunami and the accident at the nuclear power plant “Fukushima” that made these words to remain just words.

    The second time she put world on the brink of nuclear war, catching President Obama on his word, when he said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would be a red line that separates the world from war. And of course, Assad almost immediately “used” the chemical weapons. However, in its technical characteristics these weapons were very unusual, not having anything to do with chemical weapons in the arsenal of the Syrian army, but, as you know, the Sheriff has very little interest in the problem of Indians.

    And to destroy the plans of the Sheriff, it took the joint efforts of US President Barack Obama, who refused to allow the bombing of Syria, despite having had all relevant powers, had requested a vote in Congress, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, who proposed under international supervision to destroy Assad chemical weapons and striking in its power anti-islamist march on Washington by million of American bikers on the day when the Congress scheduled a vote on the Syrian resolution.

    The third time she was able to bring the world to the brink of nuclear war this fall, giving an interview to PBS channel, where as a candidate for President of the USA that is “doomed to win” in the form of an ultimatum demanded establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria to shoot down Russian bombers. And a few days later, President Erdogan carried out the “order”, despite the fact that Madam Secretary no longer held any official posts.

    The war of Clinonites-Neocons against Obama led to the fact that the Democrats lost in the last election majority in Senate and Congress, but it also allowed Hillary Clinton to seriously discredit Obama and entwine several Anaconda rings around a choking body of the Democratic Party. Moreover, she has already opened her mouth and began to swallow the victim, but here comes Sanders and lifeless, as it would seem body of Democratic Party, began to kick, scream and stretch itself out of suffocating rings the real ISIS Commander-in-Chief.

    Of course, there still remain a few rings, and of course, that they are all tightly wrapped around the Democratic Party is in the State of New York, from which Senator Hillary Clinton was elected twice to the Senate, and the current mayor of the City of New York, Bill de Blasio was the head of her election campaign.

    In this situation it is difficult to expect that after the counting of votes the winner will be Bernie Sanders, despite the fact that the majority of New Yorkers fiercely hate Hillary Clinton.

    Although the US election campaign only came to its equator, America will never be the same.

    Waking up not only the people who are tired of the domination of one political mafia, but some elite clans, who do not want their last memory of life on Earth to be the red button in the hands of Hillary Clinton.

    http://regnum.ru/news/polit/2121899.html

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  61. Pucker April 20, 2016 at 6:37 am #

    On the Negro and the Problem of Immigration :

    “The place made vacant by the death of the old coloured man who was trained as a carpenter during slavery, and who since the war had been the leading contractor and builder in the Southern town, had to be filled. No young coloured carpenter capable of filling his place could be found. The result was that his place was filled by a white mechanic from the North, or from Europe, or from elsewhere. What is true of carpentry and house-building in this case is true, in a degree, in every skilled occupation; and it is becoming true of common labour. I do not mean to say that all of the skilled labour has been taken out of the Negro’s hands; but I do mean to say that in no part of the South is he so strong in the matter of skilled labour as he was twenty years ago, except possibly in the country districts and the smaller towns. In the more northern of the Southern cities, such as Richmond and Baltimore, the change is most apparent; and it is being felt in every Southern city. Wherever the Negro has lost ground industrially in the South, it is not because there is prejudice against him as a skilled labourer on the part of the native Southern white man; the Southern white man generally prefers to do business with the Negro mechanic rather than with a white one, because he is accustomed to do business with the Negro in this respect. There is almost no prejudice against the Negro in the South in matters of business, so far as the native whites are concerned; and here is the entering wedge for the solution of the race problem. But too often, where the white mechanic or factory operative from the North gets a hold, the trades-union soon follows, and the Negro is crowded to the wall.”

    “The Future of the American Negro”, Booker T. Washington

    • Pucker April 20, 2016 at 9:20 am #

      Because of robotics, automation and virtual immigration, there won’t be any jobs in the future. The negroes are fucked. Read “Rise of the Robots”.

      • capt spaulding April 20, 2016 at 11:33 am #

        Amen to that, Pucker. A very informative read.

      • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:15 pm #

        Is that book similar to Rifkins book? Or how similar?

  62. Cold N. Holefield April 20, 2016 at 7:16 am #

    Speaking of Rackets, look at the price of this piece-of-shit condo in San Francisco. This is emblematic of many urban areas, including, or especially, Manhattan.

    How do the wealthy intend to be waited on hand-and-foot if The Help can’t afford to live within a forty or fifty mile radius of their Masters and their Masters won’t even bother to pay to have them bused in?

    http://www.trulia.com/homes/California/San_Francisco/sold/1250134-681-Colby-St-San-Francisco-CA-94134

    • stelmosfire April 20, 2016 at 7:52 am #

      What is a lot size of 1? Garage under the house,not cool. Been to way more car fires than house fires. Detroit iron has a habit of spontaneous combustion.

      • Cold N. Holefield April 20, 2016 at 8:57 am #

        I’d like to see more about Detroit iron spontaneously combusting. Is it the same iron/steel that was used in the Twin World Trade Center Towers. That was also very special iron/steel — magical even, at least according to some fanatics.

        Of most interest to me is six bedrooms yet only seventeen hundred square feet. Each bedroom must be the size of a bed. Essentially, this is marketed to the help who are encouraged to live on top of one another like the imported hard-labor slaves in Dubai are required to do by circumstance.

        What kind of life is this? Why would people want to subject themselves to it? Are we rats, or are we humans? Some days, like today and probably tomorrow as well and the day after, is one of those days. James Cagney was right, perhaps: “You Dirty Rat……”

        Slaves of Dubai

        Vice, and other Progressive Bohemian news outlets like it, pretend that this is “them,” not us — meaning it only happens over there but not here, never here, in America. But that’s false and deceitful. It is happening in America with increasing frequency. I won’t hold my breath waiting for the sequel to the above Vice segment entitled Slaves of America.

  63. FincaInTheMountains April 20, 2016 at 7:49 am #

    Russia Wins $50 Billion Ruling in Decade-Old Fight With Yukos

    Russia succeeded in its battle to overturn a $50 billion arbitration ruling after a Dutch court ruled that the panel of judges who issued the record-setting award to the former owners of Yukos Oil Co. had no right to review the dispute.

    The ruling by a court in the Hague Wednesday was a sweeping victory for the country in its more than decade-old fight with the owners of what was once Russia’s biggest oil company. The court said that the arbitration panel misinterpreted a treaty that Russia signed, but never ratified, according to a copy of the judgment.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-20/dutch-court-overturns-50-billion-yukos-ruling-on-jurisdiction

  64. ozone April 20, 2016 at 8:50 am #

    There are “some” commenters here who need to look into a little something called impulse control, as does their fellow-traveler, J.J. Harper. Oh, wait, that’s right, J.J. can no longer look into anything, ’cause he had a spat with “the little woman”; popped off a few poorly-aimed rounds when the police arrived, then emulated his hero, Adolf, by sucking on a pistol barrel (to the eternal detriment of his clearly superior brain).

    Sure, I understand that all women are Minions of Da Debbil, but please, a bit of impulse control is in order if one is truly to be the captain of one’s fate and the very bestest of all the bestest peep-holes.

    • Cold N. Holefield April 20, 2016 at 9:01 am #

      Oh gee, okay. Sorry. Next time I won’t make the audacious claim that over-priced real estate is a racket and I won’t post any pictures of said over-priced real estate, but instead I’ll produce a link to a book about how the Rothschilds are the True World Rulers because that’s more in keeping with the sentiment of the comment section.

      • ozone April 20, 2016 at 9:17 am #

        ?
        What I posted was *not* a response to your post above. Ol’ J.J. (quite obviously) had nothing to do with real estate….. wellllll, maybe he was behind on his mortgage payment and that’s why he was fussin’ and fightin’ with the wife? 😉

        • Cold N. Holefield April 20, 2016 at 9:28 am #

          Oh, okay. I thought you meant me. Who is “Ol’ J.J.?” FYI, i don’t pay any attention to Pucker’s nonsense most of the time, so if it’s related to that, I admittedly haven’t been paying attention.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2016 at 2:23 pm #

          Why fake quotation marks around *not*? Is it *not* a viable word?

      • ozone April 20, 2016 at 9:44 am #

        Ah, more details from Macon, Georgia. A kerfuffle about a divorce decree…

        http://www.macon.com/news/local/crime/article72258387.html

        They’ve neglected the part about his Grand Whizzery of the KKK. Would that have anything to do with J.J.’s particular lack of impulse control? I think we’ve got ourselves a “case in point”. 😉

        • Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2016 at 2:33 pm #

          For every White like this, there is a dozen Blacks. Stop being such an anti-White Wanker. If you weren’t White it might be understandable, but you are. And self hatred is a very dysfunctional and unattractive quality. You are no better than he is.

        • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:24 pm #

          A disgrace to the race.

          http://www.amren.com/news/2015/07/new-doj-statistics-on-race-and-violent-crime/

          Excerpted From: “New U.S. Department Of Justice Statistics on Race and Violent Crime” :

          “First, we find that during the 2012/2013 period, blacks committed an average of 560,600 violent crimes against whites, whereas whites committed only 99,403 such crimes against blacks. This means blacks were the attackers in 84.9 percent of the violent crimes involving blacks and whites. This figure is consistent with reports from 2008, the last year DOJ released similar statistics. Perhaps not coincidentally, that was the year Mr. Barack Hussein Obama was elected president.”

          “Interestingly, we find that violent interracial crime involving blacks and Hispanics occurs in almost exactly the same proportions as black/white crime: Blacks are the attackers 82.5 percent of the time, while Hispanics are attackers only 17.5 percent of the time.”

          “Some observers argue that what causes the overwhelming preponderance of black-on-white over white-on-black violence is “chance of encounter,” due to the fact that there are five times as many whites as blacks in the American population. However, there are only about 30 percent more Hispanics than blacks, yet black-on-Hispanic violence is almost as lopsided as black-on-white violence. This suggests blacks may be deliberately targeting both Whites and Hispanics.”

          ‘Let the FACTS force delusional White liberals and Blacks to face the reality that minorities, Blacks, are the overwhelming cause of murder, rape, (Mostly White women.) assault, abandoning their families, robbery, burglary, theft, racism, (Mostly against White people, Asians and Latinos.) gun violence, (Mostly against the Black community.) domestic brutality and violence, (Mostly against Black women.) — and many other criminal offenses.

          The real cause of this “Plague of violence upon our land.” is NOT minorities pathetic excuse of “White racism”.’

        • ozone April 21, 2016 at 9:19 am #

          …Just as I said; impulse control. We’re witnessing the lack of it right here, right now.

  65. Cold N. Holefield April 20, 2016 at 9:35 am #

    However, I would like to know how Pucker’s mind works, and I think I may have figured it out, at least in this case. Elephants like peanuts, right? Wrong, they don’t eat peanuts in the wild, but here in America, we traditionally like to feed captive elephants, at least in the past Americans did, peanuts. Booker T. Washington hired George Washington Carver at The Tuskegee Institute in 1896 and Carver created all kinds of nifty & ingenious products from peanuts thus catapulting the status of peanuts in America, but not necessarily concomitantly elevating the status of Negroes. It’s something like that, I think. Also, I think Pucker may be autistic, or in the least he may have severe Aspergers.

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  66. BackRowHeckler April 20, 2016 at 11:13 am #

    Jerry Garcia’s ‘US Blues’ pretty much sums it up, saying in verse what James is in his latest blog. Everything is a racket, a grift, run by con men.

    My younger brother, a retired USCG Warrant Officer who later went to work for Exxon on several of their Supertankers (they had 6, one sunk in Alaska) moving crude from Bahrain to Houston, complains about the rackets, the cons, the grift afoot in the USA. I say to him, little brother, its true, buts its also true you’re in on the grift, and have been handsomely rewarded by it.

    That’s the thing, you have to be in on it, on the ground floor, preferably.

    brh

    • stelmosfire April 20, 2016 at 12:57 pm #

      Hey Marl### Nice Bikin’ weather. USA BLUES Gotta love the DEAD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPBLfzTPCDc I”m renovating an apartment of mine. Three bedrooms, 1400 sq. ft. all hardwood floors, 10 foot ceilings. 22 windows. New heat with cast iron baseboards, the best heat ever invented by the likes of man. Southern exposure. Garden on site w/fruit trees. Rent $900.00 ,problem is I am in MA. Land of the overstepping regulations. . My niece pays $4 Gs in Brooklyn for 700 sq. ft. 1 bedroom. on the 4th floor.

      • BackRowHeckler April 20, 2016 at 3:49 pm #

        Yeah Stelmose, I was out chugging around the village on my bike a little this afternoon, enjoying the weather. That was after cutting up some firewood from a maple that fell last winter. Where’s the apt, Westfield? Mass. aside, I’ve always loved that Pioneer Valley, your valley.

        Just a few days ago was talking with a women who lived in Queens, crowded in like rats, no place to park, car stolen every 6 months, house broken into regularly. What a way to live!

        brh

  67. FincaInTheMountains April 20, 2016 at 11:30 am #

    Just imagine the situation that Bernie Sanders won and socialism triumphed in the world, which naturally starts with the fact that unrestricted money-printing like during the Clinton’s Super Bowl will be outlawed.

    And the first thing Sanders offer to compensate the United States lenders by building on their territory environmentally friendly power plants operating exclusively on paper dollars.

    But socialist USA will have one terrible enemy, ready with nuclear arms to defend unrestrained, unregulated, cannibalistic capitalism, the main character of which will be a collector, burning children alive for a debt of $100, which accumulated over 4000 percent.

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/10/russias-debt-collectors-turn-violent-as-recession-leaves-115m-in-debt

  68. volodya April 20, 2016 at 12:16 pm #

    Some documents disappear and then re-appear on Bill and Hillary’s kitchen table? So what, sometimes docs go missing. I mean, Jesus H, do you think Hillary does the filing?

    And this Lewinski nonsense. Bill was asked questions he should never have had to answer.

    They say some people associated with the Clintons were moving money overseas. So what. It’s a globalized world isn’t it? And what has it got to do with the Clintons?

    People say that if you and I were consorting with shifty people, taking money from them, we sure as hell wouldn’t be running for president, our careers would crash and burn, our lives would be hell, the FBI would be investigating us…yeah, the FBI is investigating Hillary. Big deal, there’s nothing there, Bernie sez so.

    So Bill and Hillary took some money, so what. Yeah, it was a lot, but it was for sharing valuable insights from time spent as public officials. It was all legal and above board.

    Yeah, Goldman and Wall Street have this image as vampire squid but so what, they’re audited and regulated so they are not criminal enterprises, they are legal and legitimate businesses.

    People are judged by the company they keep? OK, so let’s concede there’s a double standard. So, yeah, if OUR associates were hinky, we’d be subject to suspicion. So? The Clintons fly higher than us. The world is different up there.

    The Clintons are NOT bought and paid for, Bill and Hillary are progressives, they are public servants. And no, we’re not lying to ourselves.

    • elysianfield April 20, 2016 at 9:06 pm #

      Whaa…What have you bastards done with Volodya?

  69. volodya April 20, 2016 at 1:04 pm #

    There’s a whole lot that doesn’t pencil out. There’s a lot of trading arrangements that don’t come close like that between the US and China and that between the US and Mexico.

    There’s guys that tout these blatantly unsustainable deals. Said one such supporter on a McLaughlin Group episode, globalization raised millions out of poverty and brought a flood of cheap goods to American shores. Replied the crusty Pat Buchanan, what about American workers?

    I suppose the consequent plunge into poverty for all those millions of Americans in fly-over country was the entirely justifiable price to be paid. Can’t make an omelette without scrambling some eggs no?

    But there’s so much more. The sequence of financial crack-ups were each incubated by the gutting of consumer demand through the move of American industry to China and Mexico and the simultaneous importation of millions of immigrants, both legal and illegal.

    As JHK calls it, “discontinuity”. The first such was the cliff-jump in the year 2000 tech bust, the second was the even worse bust in 2008-2009. In both cases the solution was for the Fed to paper things over. But you can only paper things over only so much. As Honest Abe said, you can’t fool all the people all the time.

    There’s a subset of punditry that isn’t prepared to write off the Trump phenomenon as just ignorant yahoo-ism but rather as an awakening of American working class to the fact of their having been fooled. It took a while but after all the personal bank account doesn’t lie.

    Too bad the vehicle of this expression is the blustering, semi-articulate Trump. Even so, better late than never. And, given past history, there’s worse outcomes possible than a President Trump and his possible disruptive effect on such institutions like the Fed and Treasury.

    Those worse outcomes being the status-quo, business-as-usual-ism of a President Hillary because we love to not learn from history and because Hillary is as bought and paid for as can be. And the buyers are all for status-quo-business-as-usual.

    But if history is a useful guide, and it often is, what it teaches us is that, unless there is a disruption of the trajectory we’re now on, maybe courtesy of the elephantine blundering about of a President Trump, the next bust will be worse.

  70. wpa_ccc April 20, 2016 at 1:19 pm #

    Message from Bernie Sanders to the Buck Studs of the USA:

    “When we started this campaign, I emailed my supporters and said, “This campaign is not about Bernie Sanders. It’s about a grassroots movement of Americans standing up and saying: ‘Enough is enough. This country and our government belong to all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.’

    I believe that now more than ever.

    We still have a path to the nomination, and our plan is to win the pledged delegates in this primary. Next week five states vote, and there are A LOT of delegates up for grabs. I am going to keep fighting for every vote, for every delegate, because each is a statement of support for the values we share.”

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  71. Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2016 at 2:28 pm #

    Hitler to Churchill via Von Ribbentrop when it was clear the war was lost: My spirit shall rise from the grave the world will know I was right.

    He cannot be stopped. The Truth has rights all its own. Happy Birthday, Spirit of Truth.

    • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:22 pm #

      YOU ARE TOO MUCH. HEIL HITLER

      AH was a taurus.

  72. malthuss April 20, 2016 at 3:17 pm #

    She is a ‘2 fer’–Black and female.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/us/women-currency-treasury-harriet-tubman.html

    • BackRowHeckler April 20, 2016 at 7:13 pm #

      Aunt Jemima on the $20.

      A 20 isn’t worth sh-t anymore, anyway, so what does it matter?

      Hey Jack Lew, go f-k yourself!

      brh

      • stelmosfire April 21, 2016 at 7:55 am #

        Your right! A twenty ain’t worth sh-t now a days. In the future I won’t feel so bad when I wipe my steenkin’ arse with one.

      • malthuss April 21, 2016 at 6:43 pm #

        Lews ethnicity is?

  73. FincaInTheMountains April 20, 2016 at 6:17 pm #

    So, Mr.Q, you still think that Russians can’t shoot a pool?

    https://cont.ws/uploads/pic/2016/4/9-2%20%281%29.jpg

  74. John Howard April 20, 2016 at 7:36 pm #

    James, nice “elephant that’s not even in room” description. As far as discontinuity goes, transgenderism and gay marriage are not just “potent distractions” but key ingredients of discontinuity.

    We can stop that distraction and restore a sense of continuity by banning male pregnancy and female impregnation, aka same sex reproduction, aka gay marriage, and preserving universal marriage and reproduction rights.

    It won’t solve all the budget problems, but it will help. Male pregnancy is a ridiculous thing to insist should be legal. It will bankrupt the medical system and it being legal demoralizes the whole country and provokes terrorists.

    • Q. Shtik April 20, 2016 at 8:43 pm #

      Male pregnancy is a ridiculous thing to insist should be legal. It will bankrupt the medical system and it being legal demoralizes the whole country and provokes terrorists. – John Howard

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

      Oh no!! It’s Groundhog Day all over again!

      • John Howard April 20, 2016 at 11:02 pm #

        JHK publishes a new column every Monday, repeating the same things, and the solution hasn’t changed, we still need to end gay marriage and ban male pregnancy before anything will improve.

        • BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 4:49 pm #

          Is this Asoka/WPA yankin our chain, bustin out balls and f-kkin up the works?

          brh

          • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:20 pm #

            If so, the guy’s good. He plays the part as straight-faced as Bob Newhart.

            Definitely a hamburger shy of a Happy Meal!

  75. Janos Skorenzy April 20, 2016 at 7:43 pm #

    Of the three Black giants, Booker, Garvey, and Dubois, the first two had valid ideas, namely segregation and back to Africa respectively. The third was a Communist trouble maker who wanted to foist Blacks on White no matter what the cost. Needless to say, our evil Elites have chosen Dubois exclusively over the last 75 or so years. Why? Because they want to middle class destroyed and the Republic overthrown. And the Black Race is a terrible weapon in their capable hands. And of course thy are just the Template, that is being repeated for Hispanics, Muslims, Hindus, East Asians, etc.

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    • Q. Shtik April 20, 2016 at 8:48 pm #

      Preach it, Janos !! 😉

    • malthuss April 20, 2016 at 11:18 pm #

      WHAT IF ALL BLACKS SUDDENLY LEFT AMERICA?

      WHICH IS 13.3% OF THE TOTAL US POPULATION:

      The prison population would go down by 37%.
      There would be 53% less gang members.
      Obesity percentage would drop 11%.
      Average IQ would go up 7.4 points, putting us 3rd in the world tied with Japan.

      Average SAT scores would go up almost 100 points.

      Average ACT scores would go up 5.5 points.

      AIDS & HIV would go down by 65%.

      Chlamydia cases would go down 54%.
      Gonorrhea would go down 69%.
      Syphilis would go down 58%.

      The average income for Americans would go up over $20,000 a year.
      Amount of people in poverty would drop 34%.
      Homelessness would go down 57%.
      Welfare recipients would go down by 42%.

      DEMOCRATS WOULD LOSE 76% OF THEIR VOTING BASE.

      And many criminal defense attorneys would have to find another line of work!

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:22 am #

        If we’re to do this, I think a period of mourning would be in order.

        On second thought, maybe just a moment of silence.

      • elysianfield April 21, 2016 at 11:10 am #

        Malthuss,

        “WHAT IF ALL BLACKS SUDDENLY LEFT AMERICA”

        I shudder at that prospect. One of those immigrating might, in the future, find a cure for cancer, or engineer peace in the Middle East, or find another 15 or 20 uses for peanuts….

        • Elrond Hubbard April 21, 2016 at 1:39 pm #

          Or pioneer blood transfusions. Or invent entirely new musical genres that take entire generations by storm. Or hell, even become director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. Imagine America, or even the world, without those contributions. You can’t, because they’d be unrecognizable.

          • elysianfield April 21, 2016 at 10:12 pm #

            Elrond,

            There is no question that blacks have contributed, in some fields significantly, to our nation and culture. I would never seriously denigrate the service of blacks in the military, as an example, nor people of color who excel in other fields.

            The post referenced was an attempt at humor referencing George Washington Carver. It was snarky, and made in jest. I can honestly say that I have nothing but respect for people of any race who make their best effort at citizenship, whatever their ability.

          • Elrond Hubbard April 22, 2016 at 12:23 pm #

            Pardon me for ranting. There’s so much open racism in this forum that I sometimes can’t help myself.

  76. elysianfield April 20, 2016 at 9:18 pm #

    Just announced on BBC America this PM…

    The new US $20.00 bill will picture…Harriet Tubman….(barely perceptible audio in the background…Joe and Eddy singing “Follow the Drinking Gourd”…)

    It was also announced that a decision has been made to place a woman on the US $10.00 bill…I would invite the readership to make suggestions….

    • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 12:26 am #

      In consideration of all of the rackets that have been discussed this week, the following “female” candidates for the new and improved $10 Federal Reserve Note will be placed in nomination:

      1. Christine Jorgenson.

      2. RuPaul.

      3. Chaz Bono.

      4. Caitlyn Jenner.

      Please make your selection now and make the Department of the Treasury aware of the people’s choice in this most essential historical revisionist act. It IS all about the money after all.

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:28 am #

      Melania Trump.

    • elysianfield April 21, 2016 at 10:52 am #

      After careful consideration, I would like to see Hillary Clinton on the $10.00 dollar bill.

      I could then grab a handful of those bills, stuff them into my wallet, and have a pleasurable evening sitting on her face….

  77. Pucker April 20, 2016 at 9:32 pm #

    “It is true that there was a large class of poor white people who laboured with the hands, but they did it because they were not able to secure Negroes to work for them; and these poor whites were constantly trying to imitate the slaveholding class in escaping labour, as they, too, regarded it as anything but elevating. But the Negro, in turn, looked down upon the poor whites with a certain contempt because they had to work. The Negro, it is to be borne in mind, worked under constant protest, because he felt that his labour was being unjustly requited; and he spent almost as much effort in planning how to escape work as in learning how to work. Labour with him was a badge of degradation. The white man was held up before him as the highest type of civilisation, but the Negro noted that this highest type of civilisation himself did little labour with the hand. Hence he argued that, the less work he did, the more nearly he would be like the white man. Then, in addition to these influences, the slave system discouraged labour-saving machinery. To use labour-saving machinery, intelligence was required; and intelligence and slavery were not on friendly terms. Hence the Negro always associated labour with toil, drudgery, something to be escaped. When the Negro first became free, his idea of education was that it was something that would soon put him in the same position as regards work that his recent master had occupied. Out of these conditions grew the habit of putting off till to-morrow and the day after the duty that should be done promptly to-day.”

    “The Future of the American Negro”, Booker T. Washington

  78. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 12:11 am #

    I’d like to thank the bloke who recommended last week the book “Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future” by Martin Ford.

    Great book! Definitely a “Must Read”.

    Ford basically says that automation, virtual immigration, and robotics mean that almost all jobs will soon disappear, including high-end, white collar professional jobs. We may soon be be reading ClusterFuck Nation blog posts generated by a software robot that can mimic JHK. We’re totally screwed. Trump won’t be able to “Make America Great Again”. And since self-worth is a product of work (as Booker T. Washington recognized), in the future “Black Lives Do Not Matter” to the extent that black people will be almost universally unemployed.

    I do not agree with Ford’s palliative prescription of a minimum “Guaranteed Income” as it will only further sloth, ignorance, broken families, illegitimacy, and government dependency.

    • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 12:40 am #

      I just cannot wait for the AI/robotix tsunami to finally hit the human beach. “Serf’s up!”

      This is where that 90% (or more) human population reduction program of the real NWOs demonic monsters comes in. (See the Georgia Guidestones for tips.)

      Prescient H.G. Wells wrote Men Like Gods back in 1923 and had a population of 200,000,000 in his Utopia.

      Thank you for your servitude (as Sticks always says) but it shall not be needed anymore. Useless eaters are, well, useless and unnecessary.

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:42 am #

      Not sure what it is, but I like the sound of ‘virtual immigration.’

      • Pucker April 21, 2016 at 8:35 am #

        “Virtual Immigration” refers generally to foreign workers replacing American workers albeit the foreign worker never lands on US soil. For example, Filippino telephone customer service people.

        • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 9:40 am #

          Yeah, that’ll work. Then they’ll want virtual unemployment when they get laid off. And virtual Social Security, etc.

          • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 9:54 am #

            But I’d be in favor of a ‘virtual draft’ and let them go fight our wars. Seems fair if they take our jobs.

          • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 11:00 am #

            VIrtual draft a good idea – but already obsolete.

            In the BIG plan, the “Matrix’s” controllers will be rolling out their robotix army within the next 10 years or so. Exclusively managed and operated some hyper-developed AI contraption. The management has well beyond petaflops computing power: it makes IBM’s “Watson” look like a game of “Pong” program.

            http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/petaflopbarrier/

            The robotix army, paid for by our taxes, will not mind nor care about your sexual orientation, religious preferences, or color. The “I,Robot ” fantasy fiction scenario, is not in play, only the cold efficiency of industrial-strength, autonomous-acting, contraptions that don’t bleed. Nothing fair here just high-tech ruthlessness fashion. Not NOMAD not ASIMO.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6o881n35GU&ebc=ANyPxKoJCq9tFFgF4iEhagLVX3CZ12_gEJhAw3SIbz9TkZ2dZ_7vR6Kyz31B1pxNnISsZUNieBUy3sQhp8uKIamhnNXdHpXBIA

            Why they haven’t engaged an Alpha test on the lovely folks over at ISIS is puzzling.

            You do know the bastards-in-charge have technology close to 22nd century level, today, at their disposal , right?

    • elysianfield April 21, 2016 at 10:58 am #

      “I do not agree with Ford’s palliative prescription of a minimum “Guaranteed Income” as it will only further sloth, ignorance, broken families, illegitimacy, and government dependency.”

      Puck,
      Your solution then?

      Employ them…OR…feed/house them…OR…fight/kill them. Give me some help here….

  79. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 12:40 am #

    Given the hard reality of computer automation and robotics to lay waste to all jobs (even high-end jobs), Trump’s “Vision” to “Make America Great Again” is not any more Real than the “Vision” of the negro slave that he would enter the “Promised Land” and live like the prosperous, indolent white plantation master upon Emancipation by Lincoln.

  80. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 1:04 am #

    JHK has a very extensive public record of writings and blog posts, probably sufficient for a computer software algorithm to mimic and replace JHK entirely.

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    • Cold N. Holefield April 21, 2016 at 7:07 am #

      Maybe it’s already been done. Look at the effect. There is no difference to “his” audience. A close approximation is good enough.

    • Cold N. Holefield April 21, 2016 at 7:12 am #

      The Algorithm Cometh.

      Or maybe it’s already here and we’re just slow to recognize it, or worse, we ourselves are also algorithms in a sea of algorithms swimming around in one giant algorithm that is also just one algorithm in a sea of algorithms. I think it’s called Fractals. Visualized, they’re actually quite beautiful.

      • Pucker April 21, 2016 at 8:32 am #

        Ford predicts that within 5 years 90% of magazine articles will be written by software algorithms.

        • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 9:32 am #

          Al -Gore -rhythms?

          Is this the former VP’s ultimate revenge on the USSA and the world for that matter?

          And this on top of the “global warming” jihad.

        • capt spaulding April 21, 2016 at 11:55 am #

          The only thing to do in this instance, is to create an algorithm to read those articles, thereby making the middle man (us) obsolete and unnecessary yet again.

          • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:12 pm #

            Too funny!!

  81. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 1:17 am #

    They could create a computer software algorithm that could exactly mimic the Black Lives Matter “Headless Misguided Rabble” (to use Booker T. Washinton’s description) that could rant about “Safe Spaces” and “Micro aggressions”. And all of the human college administrators would just nod their heads in agreement with the robot algorithm because they can’t think.

  82. Cold N. Holefield April 21, 2016 at 7:05 am #

    Putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty dollar bill is an incredibly insensitive, denigrating and racially-motivated act on the part of so-called Liberals. It’s a credit economy, not a cash economy. Cash is pretty much irrelevant these days to those who are “going places.” Bits and Bytes are what matter most. Don’t believe me? When was the last time Obama’s daughters broke out a twenty to pay for something? I bet the answer is, NEVER!!! In fact, I bet they have never seen or touched a twenty. And by virtue of that, they are most assuredly not Black except for the color of their skin, and in my book, the only book that matters, that doesn’t make them Black.

    Those who still engage in cash transactions are the ones who have been Left Behind — they’re the permanently disabled underclass. And that permanently disabled underclass, enabled by the Liberals mind you, is significantly comprised of highly impoverished Blacks. Harriet Tubman on the twenty, considering the aforementioned, is an extremely sadistic, cruel, cynical slap in the face to the contemporary slaves the “Liberals” have created. It’s tantamount to perpetual metaphorical psychical waterboarding — rubbing it in your victim’s face every day in perpetuity. What a bunch of sick fucking bastards.

    It’s not just this latest gesture. Don’t think the Eskimo Pie/Klondike Bar POTUS isn’t laughing his ass off forcing this impoverished class to pay premiums for what is essentially Medicaid that was heretofore a taxpayer-funded healthcare program despite its neglect and inadequacy as such. At least Nero murdered, albeit gruesomely, those he deplored, but not Obama & Co. He/They prefer endless torture and degradation — a very slow, but extremely painful, death lasting decades.

    • Florida Power April 21, 2016 at 8:28 am #

      I think cynicism would imply a conscious motive. In the case of Harriet Tubman on the 20 rather we see the culmination of years of PC hand-wringing and revisionist history. Jackson is whitey on steroids and must be written out. Expect next the white house presidential portraits to be edited.

      Regardless, the spectacle is hilarious and maybe even Larry Summers (Mr. Cashless Society himself) is laughing somewhere on Wall St. Meanwhile we learn that IBM is laying off workers in the West even as they hire in India and other low-wage countries. Instead of changing bill portraits “they” should change the flag — replace the stars and stripes with corporate logos. Now that would be cynical.

      • BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 8:48 am #

        Hey FP, you might be interested to know, here in CT, massive lay offs of state employees in an attempt to bridge a $1 billion deficit, the chickens finally have come home to roost. Capitol City, Hartford, is facing huge deficits too and have announced layoffs starting with 250 teachers. Public sector unions are apoplectic, made worse because the Governor who is doing the laying off is a lefty Democrat who got into office to begin with by pandering to these public sector unions. The real problem, contracts that granted state of CT retirees pensions as high as $240,000 per year cannot be addressed because its a contractual matter. There is no money left over to pay current employees.

        Oh, well, it had to come to an end sometime. And the time is now.

        brh

        • malthuss April 21, 2016 at 6:46 pm #

          You have posted many of the salaries of these ‘servants’ and maybe you could give us a nice list?

      • ozone April 21, 2016 at 9:00 am #

        FP,
        Your wish is the cynic’s command. Rub the lamp and…
        Behold!:

        http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-logo-flag-us-flag/

        And it’s only 30 bucks! 😀

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 9:28 am #

        Hey FP,

        I heard an idea with some merit. Politicians would have to wear embroidered patches with the corporate logos of their top ten “sponsors” like NASCAR drivers.

        • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 9:43 am #

          Tattoos, the type that JHK often rants about, would be a more appropriate and non-transitory modality for presenting ownership.

          That, ear tags, or perhaps even branding. Yes, branding in a public televised ceremony (Superbowl halftime?,) to let the entire fucking world know conclusively who belongs to who(m.)

          I can see Lloyd Blankfein, presiding over the affair. It would get great ratings for sure ( and Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow could do the play-by- play and color commentary.)

          • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 10:01 am #

            Sounds good to me peq!

            Maybe even pay per view with the proceeds going to Farm Aid or something worthwhile.

  83. BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 8:51 am #

    And to top it off Aetna Insurance Company is talking about leaving Hartford (after 150 years here) because of a hostile business climate in the state.

    brh

    • Cold N. Holefield April 21, 2016 at 9:08 am #

      Where’s it relocating? To Mexico, or is it China or Vietnam? Filing a claim, considering that, ought to be even more amusing than it already is.

      • BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 9:12 am #

        Louisville, Kentucky.

        • ozone April 21, 2016 at 9:26 am #

          A better tax rate, I’m guessing. The deal’s not sweet enough in CT, and it’s eating into executive “compensation”? (Not that I wish the insurance racket-for-exorbitant-profit a long and prosperous life.)

        • Cold N. Holefield April 21, 2016 at 9:39 am #

          Maybe the execs want to be closer to their horse farms and The Derby. Too bad Hunter S.Thompson (it’s important to never forget the very important “S.”) passed away. He could have reported on Kentucky as the go-to state for corporate refuge like he reported on the bizarre spectacle of The Derby so many years ago. Not much has changed, really, and yet so much has changed.

          The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved

          • BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 10:46 am #

            Hunter S Thompson was pretty decadent and depraved himself. That’s what I liked about him.

            brh

  84. volodya April 21, 2016 at 10:26 am #

    Elysianfield,

    sorry, I forgot to hit the “sarcasm on”, “sarcasm off” button.

  85. benr April 21, 2016 at 10:52 am #

    I once heard you could tell how far down the path of monetary devaluation and ruin a country was by how colorful and over the top it’s printed money was.
    For reference look at Mexico’s money and along comes the proposed changes the FED wants to impose upon the United States currency by 2020.
    Ruin and financial collapse appear to be around the corner slowly dragging us all under the waves.

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    • pequiste April 21, 2016 at 11:04 am #

      And with the replacement of Old Hickory on the $20 by Harriet Tubman, those Federal Reserve Notes get more colored full.

  86. FincaInTheMountains April 21, 2016 at 11:24 am #

    Making a bet in the 90s on the global strategy of high-precision non-nuclear strike, combined with nuclear disarmament, the US and the NATO committed an irreparable strategic miscalculation.

    As a result, over the past 25 years they have created an extremely expensive and bulky global military infrastructure that is sharpened for conducting colonial wars of a new generation, which the West is only capable of winning under the conditions of its total geopolitical dominance and qualitative technological superiority. For the wars with the enemy, at least approximately equal to their military capabilities, the new US army is totally unprepared.

    Meanwhile Moscow, which in the West has been completely written off, under Putin somehow suddenly came out from under the control of Washington and began a large-scale modernization of its strategic military capabilities. The West, carried away by the planting of “democracy” in the jungles and deserts of the “Third World”, missed the opportunity to adequately respond to the sudden challenge from the Kremlin.

    The great Western military machine has a tremendous inertia, and to deploy it to respond quickly to the suddenly resurrected “Russian threat” is simply impossible.

    The most significant is the situation in the field of strategic nuclear forces. More recently, the US military experts have boasted that Washington is about to achieve the possibility of inflicting on Russia a devastating preventive nuclear attack with impunity, and suddenly it turned out that Russia has not only regained parity with the US in the number of nuclear warheads, but also went far ahead in the quality of its strategic nuclear forces.

    Newest that is left in the US nuclear triad of strategic nuclear forces – a sea-based missile “Trident-II (D5)”, adopted into service in 1990. These are missiles on nuclear submarines of the “Ohio” class, the youngest of which has already turned 20 years, and account for more than 50 percent of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States. This missile has no means to overcome missile defense, it flies in classical ballistic curve, its combat blocks after the separation do not have the ability to maneuver, and the maximum range with full combat load is only 7800 km.

    Needless to say that Russian latest sea missile “Bulava”, carried by nuclear submarine of project “Borey”, in comparison with “Trident” looks like a limousine, compared with a tractor? Being half the weight, it flies at half thousand kilometers further, has shortened active flight segment, hypersonic warheads and many more that the American missiles can only dream about…

    • JimInFlorida April 21, 2016 at 1:55 pm #

      More important than any alleged qualitative parity, or even superiority, is the WILLINGNESS to use the power one has. That includes forward positioning of forces to compensate for any inferiority.

      ZOG-NATO (ZOG = Zionist Occupation Government) still has the advantage of a psychopathic elite that is willing to sacrifice its captive populations AND has placed its forces in advanced striking positions. Russia and China do not have forward operating bases all over the world, as does ZOG Amerika.

      The best way to secure world peace is to exterminate the billionaire benefactors of the ruling political class. We’re only talking about 1000 persons at the most. The billionaires, alone, have the power to stop any war in its tracks, if it meant saving their own hides. Putin should create the ultimate assassination team, whose mission is to shadow the ZOG billionaire class and discover any doomsday bunkers they may have. When ZOG-NATO precipitates a diplomatic or geopolitical crisis designed to force Russia into a dangerously vulnerable position, Putin could order the assassination team into action and take out the Top 1000 elites, i.e. billionaires, banksters, key political donors, and the like. Ideally, 1000 dead billionaires in a 3-hour time window. Without them, the entire ZOG matrix will collapse because the principle authority to compel action no longer exists. The ZOG Imperial War Machine cannot act on its own, any more than a tank can operate without a crew.

      Of course, the dark rules of war require a public confession about what a sovereign power intends to do before the deed is done. All Putin has to do is call a press conference and say, “If our Western partners want to create a geopolitical crisis that could lead to war, then I will be happy to invite the elites of NATO to a party that they cannot refuse to attend.”

      In other words, Putin must be able to GUARANTEE that ZOG’s Top 0.1% will PERSONALLY PAY WITH THEIR LIVES for any war they start, especially with Russia. When the world’s super rich live in constant TERROR for their lives, even to throwing their wealth in the streets, is when world peace will be within reach.

    • ozone April 21, 2016 at 6:15 pm #

      Finca,
      I dunno. I think it would be difficult for the Russkies to match this type of competence and precision, don’t you?

      https://www.rt.com/news/340474-humvees-failed-airdrop-hohenfels/

      (The guys observing thought it a fine piece of work, as you can tell. 😉 )

  87. Florida Power April 21, 2016 at 4:30 pm #

    BRH et. al above re CT state pensions, The Hartford elk heading South, etc etc etc:

    ZeroHedge ran another piece on the Central States Pension Fund fiasco which is now about to draw real blood, sweat, and tears. Fewer dollars = less spending, less tax revenue. A deflationary black hole. Our host may very well be correct that the financial event will precede the political.

    It is difficult to feel compassion for state employees pulling in mid-six-figure retirements courtesy of the taxpayers. Could we please at least disallow the use of the term “Public Servant?”

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 21, 2016 at 5:04 pm #

      FP,

      In the Army some of the DoD civil service civilian employees referred to themselves as ‘simple servants’. (We joked they ‘scheduled’ their sick leave rather than risk ‘losing’ it.)

      I’ll chew on ‘public servant’ and see if I can come up with an acceptable substitute. Wardens, jail guards, gangsters or gangbangers are my first thoughts.

      -Sticks

    • pequiste April 22, 2016 at 12:31 am #

      The best substitute for the nomenclature “public servants” is probably Mandarins.

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 22, 2016 at 2:55 pm #

        Sounds too imperial for the variety of bureaucrats here in the States. Mandarins are probably actually competent. -Sticks

  88. BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 5:22 pm #

    ‘3’ is the magic # for today.

    In West Haven, ‘3’ Black Males with a rifle rob the Post Office and get away with cash.

    They grabbed the cash and made a mad dash you might say.

    And in Hamden ‘3’ Black Males rob a bank and drive away in a Mercedes (probably stolen)

    Same ‘3’ Black Males? Well, one set had a rifle, and the other had pistols, so probably not.

    Two groups of ‘3’ Black Males, operating independently, but with the same goal: some quick cash, without actually working for it.

    brh

  89. BackRowHeckler April 21, 2016 at 5:26 pm #

    Penalty for the PO robbery: 25 years in jail and a $2 million fine.

    I would say this crime wasn’t well thought out.

    Along with state and local police, ATF and the Postal Inspection Service are out hunting for these Brothers.

    Tip for the Feds: look in New Haven.

    brh

    • beantownbill. April 21, 2016 at 5:53 pm #

      This gives a whole new meaning to the term, “going postal”.

  90. Frankiti April 21, 2016 at 6:15 pm #

    Goebbels Skorenzy has been an absolute success. He has either attracted new haters/racists, converted latent ones, and/or exposed closeted ones on a near weekly basis. His numbers have grown exponentially. He has the gullible joining him on the quixotic hunt for scapegoats. The ole human brain working its categorizing tricks again, can’t help it, can’t possibly think through it. Unable to accept that humans are fundamentally flawed in its entirety. Always missing the forest for the trees, always missing the big picture, the critical questions and, the substantial answers. No ability to see through or past… the burden of the stupid white man.

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    • Janos Skorenzy April 21, 2016 at 7:15 pm #

      The Klusterfuck Klavern is in session. Cowans to the exits!

      I notice you didn’t address my point, namely why do you only hate ignorant Whites and not all ignorant people? Perhaps the soft bigotry of lowered expectation, as Bill Clinton put it? Or do you prefer name calling to rational conversation? If so, you are a typical Liberal of the 21st Century.

      • Frankiti April 21, 2016 at 7:56 pm #

        Dummy, GW Bush said that.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 21, 2016 at 11:00 pm #

          Admit it: I landed a solid punch. And your unwillingness to engage is another one. Evidently I hurt you badly. I’m way ahead on points. Your show of bravado as you dance backwards is an awkward White version of Mohammad Ali’s graceful dance. You float like an elephant and sting like a gnat.

  91. Janos Skorenzy April 21, 2016 at 7:16 pm #

    Mohammad: “…Then I saw Hellfire and I have never seen anything more hideous than what I saw today; and I saw that most of its people were women.” They asked, “Why, Messenger of Allah?” He answered, “Because of their ingratitude.” Someone asked, “Are they ungrateful to Allah?” He said, “They are ungrateful to their husbands and ungrateful for good treatment. Even if you were to behave well to one of them for a whole lifetime and she were to see you do one thing (she did not like) she would say she had never seen anything good from you.”

    This is a good hadith with a clear provenance and is recorded by several of the major compilers – al Bukhari, Muslim, and an Nasa’i.

    Maybe I should convert? Thankfully our own tradition has this same wisdom, but it must be revived.

  92. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 7:57 pm #

    W.E.B. DuBois in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk”, recounts a story about teaching negroes for a year in a small rural school in Tennessee after graduating from Fisk in Nashville. He later returned to the village to follow up with his students. DuBois said that one male ended up in jail for robbery and an unmarried young girl had 3 illegitimate kids. He didn’t say what happened to the other students. While teaching, DuBois said that dropouts were common because the students didn’t see “book learning” as useful.

  93. wpa_ccc April 21, 2016 at 9:03 pm #

    REALITY CHECK (for the Buck Studs of America)
    THE DONKEY COMETH

    History Lesson:

    Obama only had 920 delegates at this point in the race and he lost NY to Hillary by 20 points.

    Bernie has 1105 delegates and he lost by 15%.

    Obama went on to beat Hillary and so can we…

    Bernie & Tulsi 2016

    • wpa_ccc April 21, 2016 at 9:07 pm #

      Or maybe Buck Stud was just another of Asoka’s sock puppets who has now disappeared.

      • Sticks-of-TNT April 22, 2016 at 2:45 pm #

        Dream on. He’ll be back.

  94. Pucker April 21, 2016 at 9:40 pm #

    After reading some of the writings of 19th century American negro intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, I get a sense that what may be driving all of the hand-wringing in the black community over the state of the negro may be the negro intellectual’s own frustration with the negro underclass’s spurning of the negro intellectual’s sincere efforts to improve the condition of black people in the US.?

  95. Pucker April 22, 2016 at 12:18 am #

    “It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream…”

    W.E.B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folk”

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  96. FincaInTheMountains April 22, 2016 at 3:51 am #

    The Reality Check

    The elites of the West, having created ISIS with Hillary’s hands, like Victor Frankenstein are too afraid of their own handiwork. Nothing is decided until July’s Convention. And President Obama is yet to endorse one of the candidates, and it won’t be Hillary.

  97. FincaInTheMountains April 22, 2016 at 4:04 am #

    From Leningrad Blockade Stories

    My grandmother always said during blockade and famine she and my mom survived only because of our cat Vaska. If not for this redheaded creature, they would have died of starvation, as many others.

    Every day Vaska went on the hunt and dragged in mice or even big fat rat. Grandma eviscerated the mice and cooked soup from them. A rat was turned into a good stew.

    The cat always sat there and waited for his share of food, and at night all three were lying under a blanket, and he warmed them with his warmth.

    He felt the bombing raids much earlier than was announced over the air, began to spin and meow; grandmother had enough time to pack: water, mother, cat, and run out of the house. When running to the shelter, the cat was dragged along so it wouldn’t be eaten.

    Hunger was terrible. Vaska was hungry, like everyone else, and skinny. All winter until spring grandmother collected the crumbs for the birds and in the spring went out with the cat on the hunt. Grandmother strewn crumbs and sat with Vaska in an ambush, his jump was always surprisingly accurate and fast. Vaska fasted together with us, and his strength was not enough to keep the bird. He grabbed the bird and ran out of the bushes and Grandma helped him. So, from spring to autumn family ate the birds.

    When they lifted the blockade and there was plenty of food, grandmother always gave the cat best piece. She stroked it tenderly, saying – you are our breadwinner.

  98. Pucker April 22, 2016 at 4:35 am #

    “The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river is the thought of the older South, —the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, 6 and called it a Negro, —a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, —some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build about them walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through. And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought, -the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity —vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!” To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought, —suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?”

    W.E.B. DuBois, “The Souls of Black Folk”.

  99. Pucker April 22, 2016 at 7:10 am #

    What impresses me about the writings of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois is how enamored they were of the high degree of civilization of the antebellum South built upon the sweat and blood of slave labor.

  100. FincaInTheMountains April 22, 2016 at 9:49 am #

    “The best way to secure world peace is to exterminate the billionaire benefactors of the ruling political class. ” — JimInFlorida

    Sorry, Jim, your “solution” sounds totally unworkable. The only thing that could keep peace is a guaranteed devastating retaliatory strike, something like Status 6

    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/between-the-loathsome-and-the-unspeakable/#comment-261860

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    • JimInFlorida May 18, 2016 at 1:30 pm #

      Here it is, May 18, and the odds of this being read by Finca is nil. But, I’ll leave it here because I must respond.

      Finca, you’re not getting it. The idea of Mutually Assured Destruction places The Masses in mortal danger while the billionaires stand a high chance of surviving such a catastrophe. CLEARLY, the billionaire class no longer has a vested interest in maintaining We The Sheep and no longer have any qualms about sacrificing us to gain their long term goals of a Global ZOG dictatorship.

      The Super Rich ***MUST*** be placed in mortal danger FIRST to deter WW3, or any other orchestrated crisis of similar scale. The Imperial War Machine of ZOG NATO cannot move without the approval of the Top 1%. The Super Rich ALONE have the authority and power to arrest events that will ultimately cause their extinction. THEREFORE, there must be a solid GUARANTEE that the billionaires WILL BE EXTERMINATED if they do not stop events that would lead to WW3. In the whole world, there’s about 1000 such cancerous creatures. They are the keystone. Destroy the keystone and the ZOG-NWO comes crashing down.

      The only alternative power that can do that is Russia and they have the greatest incentive to send out an assassination team to shadow all such billionaires. If Washington instigates a crisis that forces Russia into a position of mortal danger, about 20 dead billionaires in the U.S. and E.U. in a 3-hour time window will be sufficient to force a reversal of events! Another 100 dead billionaires will work miraculous powers to restore sanity in the world.

      New bumper sticker, “KILL THE BILLIONAIRES OR BILLIONS WILL DIE” In reality, it is just that simple.

  101. FincaInTheMountains April 22, 2016 at 10:50 am #

    The life of the Baltic economy in post-Soviet years was ensured only thanks to one and only one thing – trade relations with Russia and being a main transit hub of Russian goods to Western Europe over the Baltic. And Russia has long tolerated, encouraged, admonish, urged the Baltic elite, receiving in return just bitter spitting. Russian imperial approach seemed too weak to them. For fifteen years the Baltic “tigers” did everything to destroy their own interests. Finally, they are to be congratulated – they have achieved their goal.

    Gradually improving port facilities and developing its own transport infrastructure, Russia today has come to the point that more than 33% of the containers, 75% of gas exports, 67% of oil exports, 67% of export of coal and other bulk cargo could be provided using Russian port facilities, taking the balk of the business from the Baltic “Tigers”.

    In the next year and a half, you can expect for the final and progressive fall of turnover, followed by the Baltic economies kicking the bucket, and Baltic will return to what it used to be two centuries ago – dirt poor and useless periphery.

    And it will be looking equally futile from Brussels and Washington point of view. At the same time you can bet – American tanks and NATO fighters will evaporate as there is going to be no need to defend this hopeless place.

    Russia will not forgive and not forget the mockery against Russia and Russians allowed themselves by the rootless geopolitical mongrels.

  102. Q. Shtik April 22, 2016 at 12:13 pm #

    Prince was without question the greatest 5 foot 2 inch tall guitar player of all time.

    • malthuss April 22, 2016 at 3:36 pm #

      The 3/4 White guy described as Black.

      Obama ignored ALL the White musicians who died in last 7 years, yes?

  103. Despatch from HQ INGSOC April 22, 2016 at 1:22 pm #

    Memo to Airstrip 2

    Please be advised that any Comrades overhearing the new $20 bill referred to in conversation as ‘Tubs’, ‘Buckwheats’, ‘Picanannies’ or ‘Aunt Jemimas’ must immediately report same to Ministry of Minority Revenge, Retaliation and Reparations (MMRRR) at HQ INGSOC. Failure to do so is a serious breech of Goodthink and will be punished accordingly.

    Remember, we know who you are, and what you are thinking.

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 22, 2016 at 2:37 pm #

      “Ministry of Minority Revenge, Retaliation and Reparations (MMRRR)”

      Hilarious, ROF, etc.!

      -Sticks

      P.S. We hope you’re taking good care of nsa, feeding him well, letting him exercise in the prison yard daily, etc., IAW Geneva Conventions. Tell him he’s missed. wpa is keeping an eye on his investments. -TNT

      • Despatch from HQ INGSOC April 22, 2016 at 8:56 pm #

        NSA is currently being detained.

        His debriefing is proving most difficult.

        But we have our ways to make him talk.

        It is snakes that NSA fears most, and here at HQ INGSOC we are up to our knees in snakes.

  104. FincaInTheMountains April 22, 2016 at 2:36 pm #

    Russian Syrian adventure was designed to not only to demonstrate the combat capabilities of the Russian army – the demonstration absolutely necessary after the Norman ultimatum – but also to ensure the existence of Russian naval and air bases in the Eastern Mediterranean, which will not allow to turn the Mediterranean into a launching pad for the NATO anti-missiles.

    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-spectacle-so-far/#comment-245104

  105. capt spaulding April 22, 2016 at 2:55 pm #

    I see that Hillary has rescinded her support of the TPP. My guess is that she will follow the lead of Obama, who said that he would re-negotiate NAFTA, and of course after he was re elected, never touched it. I really hate to say it, but my best guess is that once Hillary is elected, she will do the same. Campaign promises anyone? Does anybody truly think that she will honor that statement? Does anybody actually believe the shit that she says? I think that she is one of the politicians who actually thinks that the old political bullshit will still float. The masses will just follow along like cattle, regardless of the reality of what’s going on.

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  106. capt spaulding April 22, 2016 at 3:01 pm #

    I really think (and hope), that things are coming to a head this time. However, I remember that people voted for Bush the second time too. You see where that got us. I used to believe in the innate wisdom of the people, however that proved to be completely wrong.

  107. Janos Skorenzy April 22, 2016 at 7:21 pm #

    http://www.dailystormer.com/andrew-jacksons-replacement-is-symbolic-of-our-own/

    Could it be anymore clear? And you thought they would stop with the Confederates, didn’t you Cuck? You’d like the play “Hamilton”: all the Founders are played by Blacks. Only the bad guys are White.

    • malthuss April 22, 2016 at 10:12 pm #

      And how many people have watched the play?

      • Janos Skorenzy April 23, 2016 at 12:42 am #

        It’s huge. It was featured on 60 minutes with Obama attending. And of course the Cucks think it is soo coool….

  108. Janos Skorenzy April 22, 2016 at 7:29 pm #

    Look at the many portraits of Jackson. Can we not say as Hamlet said of his father:

    “Look here, upon this picture, and on this.
    The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
    See what a grace was seated on this brow;
    A combination and a form indeed,
    Where every god did seem to set his seal
    To give the world assurance of a man;
    This was your husband. Look you now, what follows;
    Here is your husband; like a mildew’d ear
    Blasting his wholesome brother.”
    (III. iv. 53-66.)

    Compare his noble countenance with the glaring, flat nosed, mug of Tubman. Alas how the mighty have fallen. Ichabod – the glory is departed.

  109. wpa_ccc April 23, 2016 at 2:05 am #

    Tubman was not a blog activist. She was a real activist, with more courage than you will ever know.

    • Janos Skorenzy April 23, 2016 at 3:46 am #

      It’s going to be the Susie slugs all over again. People are going to be calling 20’s, Tubbies and blacking out her image.

      It’s gonna be bad! I’m sure she was a fine person in her own way. But this is a bit extreme – as is giving her more space in history texts than Washington and Jefferson. That’s just despicable and treasonous.

      • elysianfield April 23, 2016 at 11:01 am #

        “People are going to be calling 20’s, Tubbies and blacking out her image.”

        Janos,
        Worse yet, as the newly defaced 20’s circulate, it will outrage blacks who receive them, and provide a note of certitude to their sense of victimization and animus…might as well scrawl “nigger” across the face of the bill. I would predict that issuance of the twenty will be a total failure, and will be short lived.

        Few will want a bill so defaced, as passing it in the wrong venue could be a “trigger moment”.

        • Janos Skorenzy April 23, 2016 at 2:09 pm #

          She scowling and enraged anyway. So even if she isn’t blacked out her visage and identity will be incitements in themselves. Beyond that, each Tubby will be installed with a camera to identify any defilers. And Tubman herself will be a video jiving and insulting people any time she is activated by light.

          • BackRowHeckler April 23, 2016 at 7:08 pm #

            They took the ugliest most repulsive mug they could find; its a provocation, similar to the ‘Whiteness Study’ programs all the rage on campuses across the US this spring.

            Smashing centuries old monuments, tearing up universities, defacing our currency, undermining the armed forces, this is what Negro/Lefty rule is all about.

            The hyenas are not only loose, they are inside the gates.

            brh

  110. wpa_ccc April 23, 2016 at 9:01 am #

    For those still keeping score, Apple just won its fight against government invasion of privacy.

    Apple .. 9

    Govt. .. 1

    DOJ withdraws motion forcing Apple assistance in NYC iPhone case

    The U.S. government said it no longer needs Apple Inc.’s help to get into an iPhone used by a New York drug dealer, ending a second courtroom battle over whether the company can be forced to help unlock its devices.
    The Justice Department’s action follows its decision last month to drop efforts to compel Apple to help unlock an iPhone used by a gunman in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California.

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  111. Pucker April 23, 2016 at 9:21 am #

    According to W.E.B. DuBois’s book “The Soul of Black Folk”, the problem of criminality in the black community arose soon after Emancipation, and during the late 19th century there was a strong tendency in the black community to perceive black criminals (who were punished by law enforcement and the courts) as “martyrs”. So it would seem that the Michael Brown martyrdom phenomenon is nothing new.

  112. Pucker April 23, 2016 at 10:04 am #

    W.E.B. DuBois in “The Soul of Black Folk” characterizes the late 19th century black population of rural Georgia as a bell shaped distribution with the “Talented Tenth” who have the ability and drive to attain the high level of civilization of white culture; “a ninth” who constitute a “lewd and vicious” criminal class; and 80% in the middle.

    The plan (of W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington and others) was create teachers colleges to train the “Talented Tenth” who would then basically form a cadre of missionaries to bring civilization to the benighted negro. Unfortunately, the benighted majority might not have been so receptive to the young black missionaries.

  113. Pucker April 23, 2016 at 10:18 am #

    I get a sense that the historic relationship of the black “Talented Tenth” to the rest of the black majority since the 19th century has been a visceral frustration and disappointment at their inability to improve their cultural level.

  114. wpa_ccc April 23, 2016 at 2:07 pm #

    THE SOCIALIST DONKEY COMETH AND HIS NAME IS BERNIE

    There are five more primaries in less than one week and we of Bernie’s campaign are going fight for every single vote and every single delegate.

    Not just because we are going to do everything we can to win, but because every single vote, and every single delegate for Bernie Sanders is a declaration of support for the values we share.

    Together, we are the most powerful force for change in American politics today. Our political revolution has already forced a former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State to change her mind on matters as critical as international trade, the Keystone Pipeline, and the federal minimum wage. And with every vote and every victory, we grow stronger.

    • JimInFlorida April 23, 2016 at 3:18 pm #

      Until Bernie begins to lay the rhetorical whip across the back of the banksters, as FDR did, he will never close the deal and overcome the naked evil of Hillary Rodan Clintonista. The voters rejected such limp revolutionaries, like Ron Paul, and even preferred the disciplined evil of Billary Clinton over the feeble Bob Dole in 1996.

      The lies, malfeasance, and dead bodies that litter Hillary Rodan’s road to power is out in the open. All it takes is for Bernie to hold up the blood-stained burial sheets of her victims, hang them out for all to see, and shout to the streets, “Behold the innocent blood shed by Hillary’s ghouls! Hear the wailing of those whose lost jobs and property by the locusts who serve her! Rage against the tyranny that she has in store for you! I have pulled back the curtain for you. It is not forbidden to look upon the breath of pestilence; see Hillary as she is!”

      FDR reveled in the fact that the banksters and grifters of his time HATED HIM and he boasted of it in a speech when he said,

      “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

      They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

      Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. *They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.*

  115. wpa_ccc April 23, 2016 at 3:08 pm #

    “People are going to be calling 20’s, Tubbies and blacking out her image.” –Janos

    Which people, Janos? Racist people? Janos, are you going to black up the face of Tubman?

    Feeling a bit insecure are you? Not good enough to have mostly all white males on our money? You want 100% whites on the money?

    There will not be justice until 50% of the currency has women.

    One cent (penny): ABRAHAM LINCOLN

    Five cents (nickel): THOMAS JEFFERSON

    Ten cents (dime): FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT

    Twenty-five cents (quarter): GEORGE WASHINGTON

    Fifty cents (half-dollar): JOHN F. KENNEDY

    $1 coin (gold): SACAGAWEA

    $1 coin (old): SUSAN B. ANTHONY

    $1 coin (even older): DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

    $1 bill: GEORGE WASHINGTON (yes, again)

    $10 bill: ALEXANDER HAMILTON

    $20 bill: ANDREW JACKSON

    $50 bill: U.S. GRANT

    $100 bill: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

    $500 bill: WILLIAM MCKINLEY

    $1000 bill: GROVER CLEVELAND

    US $5000 bill: JAMES MADISON

    $10,000 bill: SALMON P. CHASE

    $100,000 bill: WOODROW WILSON

    Janos, it is rather juvenile to blacken (illegally deface) the currency because a strong and courageous and moral Black woman finally made it onto our money.

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    • Q. Shtik April 23, 2016 at 4:29 pm #

      $10,000 bill: SALMON P. CHASE

      =========

      We in the .01% use a spindled Chase to snort coke. It’s the diamond pinky ring of the elite.

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 23, 2016 at 11:02 pm #

      #1 Currency above $100 is no longer in general circulation.

      #2 It’s doubtful you would even be able to acquire a specimen of the larger (>$100) non-circulating denominations unless the law has a provision for currency “collectibles”.

      #3 The enemies of freedom are crusading to ban the use of cash by American citizens. Currently their focus is on eliminating $100 bills from circulation. Once that is accomplished, they will continue down the list until eventually, the use of cash of any denomination is prohibited. At that point, they will have achieved their goal of institutionalizing the monitoring and controlling of the financial transactions of every American shitizen.

      #4 By any reasonable measure, the stature of Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony fall short of the place of honor in American history and heritage held by our founding FATHERS and notable Presidents, several of whom were assassinated while in office, who presently are represented on our currency. Nevertheless, having previously recognized the contributions to our Republic of the two groups represented by these coins, Native Americans and women, there is no reason to withdraw them from circulation.

      #5 Your list omitted the $5 bill. Since President Abraham Lincoln appears on both the one cent (penny) coin AND the $5 bill, a reasonable solution to this controversy would be to award one of the two to an African American of stature and importance in American history and heritage and service to our Republic.

      #6 Rather than a decision on the selection of such a notable African-American being made by faceless bureaucrats at the U.S. Treasury, I propose a selection from a list of twenty nominees produced by a panel of ten prominent African-American citizens, each with two nominations.

      TO BE CONTINUED BELOW…

      • Q. Shtik April 24, 2016 at 12:50 am #

        I propose Leon Spinks and/or Buster Douglas.

        • Sticks-of-TNT April 24, 2016 at 4:52 am #

          Fine, they each get two nominees. ;>)

    • Janos Skorenzy April 24, 2016 at 3:23 pm #

      Well some White Supremacists (of whom I am not) might argue that they’re trying to blacken us out of existence. In any case, don’t accept these damaged bill. Demand clean Tubbies! or other bills in lieu of them.

      They could at least use the other picture of Tub where she isn’t glaring at us. Apparently she spent much of her time starting fights with White Men and getting beaten. One of her good points was that she was a strong proponent of the 2nd Amendment.

  116. FincaInTheMountains April 23, 2016 at 6:41 pm #

    Yesterday, President Obama on the day of commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire gave a speech that made the neo-Ottoman Turks in general and Erdogan in particular, to throw themselves to the ground and furiously chew on the carpet like Hitler in 1945 after receiving reports from the Russian front.

    In fact the only thing that separated the United States from declaring the President Erdogan regime as criminal, was the use of the term “Meds Yeghern ” (“Great Slaughter” in Armenian) instead of the term “Genocide”.

    Moreover, he said (quite correctly) that it was the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire that began a series of mass repressions in the 20th century, releasing the demon of genocide from the bottle or, if you will, opening a Pandora’s Box.

    At the same time he commemorated US Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. who really in the early 20th century protested against the Armenian genocide, but the most important thing whose son, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was the author of the Morgenthau plan, according to which Germany after World War II had to be broken into at least 3 parts, with all its industry and a significant portion of highly skilled population had to be taken outside of Germany, and all parts of Germany to be turned into an agrarian country.

    So it is possible that Angela Merkel, too, is chewing on the carpet.

    https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/22/statement-president-armenian-remembrance-day

  117. FincaInTheMountains April 23, 2016 at 6:54 pm #

    Obama during his visit to London managed to make a number of “mistakes” and protocol violations, as though as to offend British with their love of tradition as much as possible without doing anything wrong.

    Just an attempt to get into the car next to the Queen’s husband is worth something! And what she was supposed to do – get next to the driver?! And the way he played it out later in his welcoming speech! A penalty for getting out of EU? And then he put his arm around the old woman… But she said she would not meet with the US president, if he comes! Like she was expecting something like that!

    Apparently in Obama Kennedy’s Irish genes are dominating over all others.

    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/welcome-to-world-war-three/#comment-230418

  118. FincaInTheMountains April 23, 2016 at 7:21 pm #

    Of course politician that is using such tactic is at lot of risk, but Obama is not concerned, because he just now began a decisive struggle for his presidency, and he’s just got nothing to lose, because only now the Americans understand in what position he was all these 8 years under a pressure from Clintonites that he had to endure.

    Things reached the point that CNN, which the Clintons bend over under them just recently, have been forced to admit that his approval rating exceeded 51 percent!!!

    And a decisive role in this was that the massive forgery of the primaries results in New York became obvious even to supporters of Hillary.

    Moreover, they have become part of the public consciousness, regardless of what the media say about it. Namely, control of the media is the basis of the power of Hillary Clinton and the release of the “fourth power” from the tyranny of Clinton was one of the main priorities of the ending theme for the Obama presidency, which makes talk of a “lame duck” sign of mental retardation or lack of any interest in politics.

    From this perspective, the CNN rating in conjunction with the retrospective “On Changing our Politics” is a sign that this policy is relatively successful.

    But Clintonite control over the “freedom of speech” is so strong that even the US President can not expect that his most important statements, unlike playing fool in London, will be known to the American people.

    It became clear after 17 hours of interrogation of Hillary Clinton in the US Congress, where the chairman of the commission of the Congress to investigate Stevens death read emails of Hillary Clinton, from which it followed that “intelligence” on the basis of which the decision to intervene in Libya was made, originally were strewn with obscenities in Obama’s address.

    Nevertheless, all media after the hearings said that nothing was new was found during the course of interrogation, despite the fact that the videos of all the seventeen hours of interrogation is on the Congress website.

    The chairman of the commission Gaudi said that the obscenity in the letters was so terrible that high standards did not allow him to announce it in Congresses, but “leaks” discovered a very ugly racism of Cindy Blumenthal – closest adviser of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who called the US president nothing else but the black monkey.

    And it is these letters, sanitized by Hillary, were sent to US President Barack Obama and became the basis of that decision, which Obama is now considered his biggest mistake.

  119. Despatch from HQ INGSOC April 23, 2016 at 9:53 pm #

    Memo to Comrades in Airstrip 2

    Comrades, it has been brought to our attention in the City of Chicago 1035 citizens have been shot already in 2016, with nearly 200 dead. We do not understand how this could happen since the entire city is a GUN FREE ZONE! If you have to travel to Chicago Do Not Panic; agents from the Ministry of Safety, Security and Diversity stand ready to protect you. I do not need to remind you that protecting oneself from physical assault by someone of a darker race is evidence of Hatethink and will be punished severely, and it goes without saying possession of a firearm risks immediate summary execution where you stand!

    end memo

    • pequiste April 24, 2016 at 9:49 pm #

      For Christ’s sakes they have a less than 20% kill average.

      Can’t they – the bestial ones in Rahm’stown -at least make an attempt to hit center mass.

  120. Pucker April 24, 2016 at 12:16 am #

    The impression that I get from W.E.B. DuBois’s book, “The Soul of Black Folk” (written during the 19th century) is that black people in the US, as a whole, harbor a deep sense of grievance and vindictiveness coupled with a highly irrational emotional bent towards radicalism and Christian Utopianism. In other words, they’re susceptible to Communism, schizophrenia, and they’re basically crazy-as-fuck!

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    • Pucker April 24, 2016 at 1:32 am #

      Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple

    • Janos Skorenzy April 24, 2016 at 3:28 pm #

      Don’t forget their absolute obsession with our women. They want to breed us down to their level. They seem to feel that they have nothing worth preserving and they can’t stand that we do.

      You are putting your scholarship in service of the rAcE and the Wise have noticed and will requite you in due season. Pray that you are still worthy of this when the time comes.

  121. MisterDarling April 24, 2016 at 2:14 am #

    THE FUNNY THING about lies is that __Reality__ gives not a damn about them. I have been continually amused by those asserting that as long as central banks flooded the globe with enough notional “liquidity” to keep things “working”, “everything” was going to be “alright”. Mister Kunstler noticed this fundamental weirdness too:

    “If we didn’t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn’t continue.”-J H K.

    Well, guess what goofballs? “Alright” has a new look, and lies don’t do much to dress it up:

    http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/apr/22/yours-for-1-58429-deadweight-tonne-bulk-carrier-one-previous-owner

    Anybody want to buy a new container ship for one dollar? Welcome to the fire-sale! Elsewhere in Liquidation-ville:

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160422006085/en/Halliburton-Quarter-2016-Operational-Update

    As Halliburton’s CEO put things (bluntly):

    “Life has changed in the energy industry, especially in North America, and over the past several quarters we have taken the steps to adapt to that fact,” said Dave Lesar, Chairman and CEO. “Operators globally are under immense pressure, and many of our North America customers are fighting to maintain some value for their shareholders. Our goal is to work with those customers to get through these tough times.”

    As I and others have mentioned, this is what a deflationary death-spiral looks like. This is what happens when you kill aggregate demand. This is what’s happening in the real world. Don’t get cheesed at me, I’m just the messenger. You were notified.

    😉

    Cheers!

    • BackRowHeckler April 24, 2016 at 4:04 am #

      Halliburton just this week laid off 600 employees.

      brh

      • MisterDarling April 24, 2016 at 2:41 pm #

        Hello BRH,

        They’re laying off “a third of their global workforce” this year (so far). This comes on the heels of last year’s layoffs. Not happy to hear about people losing good paying jobs. On the other hand… we’re talking about *Halliburton*… Dick Cheney’s outfit. Couldn’t happen to a nicer corporation, could it?

        In the bigger picture, that this is happening to blatantly predatory multinational corporations like __Halliburton__ (which sidelines in starting wars to make money off of) and __Monsanto__ (which is only out to corner the global market on food, then overcharge everybody for it), shoots down the belief that global economic collapse is all part of some masterful plot cooked up by all-knowing oligarchs.

        Based on the evidence, it’s pretty clear that there are ‘oligarchs’ *but* that they don’t know W T F they are doing and haven’t for quite some time now. So, maybe that’s good news, considering…

        Cheers!

  122. MisterDarling April 24, 2016 at 2:22 am #

    IN OTHER NEWS: did you know that you can convert a washing machine into a reliable 1-Kw generator?

    http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/convert-washing-machine-into-water-turbine-generator/

    Hey, don’t knock it! An adequate amount of knowledge goes a long way.

    😉

    • FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 4:26 am #

      I don’t know, Mr.Darling about converting a washing machine into a generator, probably that’s a balooney, but for damn sure you could convert the washing machine into expedited moonshine maker – that’s been successfully implemented in Russia.

      You see, normal fermenting process takes days, even weeks, to complete. But in working washing machine it takes just few hours.

      http://s00.yaplakal.com/pics/pics_preview/0/5/6/3846650.jpg

      http://s00.yaplakal.com/pics/pics_original/2/3/2/3846232.jpg

      • MisterDarling April 24, 2016 at 2:26 pm #

        “probably that’s a baloney”-fitm.

        Check out the YouTube vid’ – skip through it if you’re pressed for time. The demonstrator repurposes the motor into a working small hydro generator assembly driven by an attached Pelton wheel/turbine, then tests the output – a steady kilowatt. It’s interesting.

        The converted device places less structural load & stress on the motor/generator. Parts can be replaced with more robust locally-sourced components as they wear down (copper, reforged aluminum and steel). You could keep something like this operating for decades.

        More interesting (I M O) is that we are surrounded by electric motor/alternator/generators in all sorts of overloaded, poorly implemented and wasteful configurations ready to be liberated, repurposed and put to productive use – or stashed for future generations. Once again, it all comes down to priorities.

        Cheers!

        • Janos Skorenzy April 24, 2016 at 3:35 pm #

          Soda Stream went out of business. But apparently there is a way to get carbon dioxide into a tank from melting dry ice. Check out youtube.

          Some of us need carbonated drinks in order to stay healthy. No doubt our lineage goes back to a time when the Earth was warmer and there was more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. No wonder we “find” ourselves denying global warming – we want it to happen so we can feel good again without going to ridiculous lengths like doing business with Israel or fucking around with dry ice. Both of these burn, one the body and one the soul…..

  123. FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 4:52 am #

    An interview with well-known journalist, Katie Pavlich, that people no longer trusts the media because the media refuses to cover what really matters. And as an example of such events she points to scandals surrounding Hillary Clinton, but is afraid to say that this is because all of the American media is being controlled by Hillary Clinton, or rather her supporting group.

    http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kristine-marsh/2016/04/18/katie-pavlich-explains-reasons-why-no-one-trusts-media-anymore

    And, of course, my favorite American housewife, Beth, who in plain English explains why you shouldn’t care about the silly transgender bathroom issue

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bznug53IPto

    In Russia, we call it: Having lost your head, you won’t miss your hair.

    • Sticks-of-TNT April 24, 2016 at 6:00 am #

      Beth may not be a polished speaker like Ted & Heidi Cruz, but she certainly understands what’s at stake.

      Transgender bathrooms? “Probably that’s a balooney!”

      -Sticks

      • Q. Shtik April 24, 2016 at 9:00 pm #

        “Probably that’s a balooney!”

        =========

        Funniest Finca phrase of this week…… “a balooney.”

  124. FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 5:15 am #

    American media is happy to cover a submarine launch of ballistic missile by N. Korea.

    But the news about Russia successfully testing a hypersonic (over 11,000 km/hr) combat block for a new strategic ballistic missile Sarmat that is coming to replace our old mutual friend Satan, are MIA. Satan missile was what President Eltsin had in mind warning President Clinton from Beijing in 1999.

    US military are closely monitoring developments of this kind by Russia, and military analysts note that the trajectory of Russia’s new hypersonic vehicle is unpredictable. It flies at a speed of more than 11 000 km / h. (For comparison. The maximum speed of the MiG-31 – 3,000 km / h) Moreover, this device is called aeroballistic, which means that it is flying over unpredictable trajectory, changing its direction with the rudders.

    That is, it may randomly maneuver that makes it virtually impossible to intercept by the elements of air defense and missile defense.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

  125. wpa_ccc April 24, 2016 at 11:56 am #

    THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE IS GAINING GROUND

    When the indictment comes down against Hillary the bottom will drop out of her campaign, but Bernie will be there to carry on.

    Bernie Sanders Is Seeing Gains In States That Have Yet To Vote

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-upcoming-primaries_us_571a7d4de4b0d0042da93713

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    • FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 6:40 pm #

      CNN and Co keeps exercising in arithmetic and counting future prospective votes – totally useless waste of time. One thing is for sure, it is not going to be decided by plain arithmetic.

    • BackRowHeckler April 25, 2016 at 12:11 am #

      News here is Sanders is ready to announce he is dropping out of the race.

  126. FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 12:39 pm #

    The “Time of Troubles” and the Secret of Shakespeare

    Billionaire Koch brothers, who were one of the main financiers of the Republican Party during the “Time of Troubles ” in the United States, decided to openly support Hillary Clinton.

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

    That means that both Hillary Clinton and the Koch brothers are in big shit, and they are forced to do from despair in front of everybody what they were doing before, in the era of their complete, as they thought, omnipotence, in the darkest corner, secretly.

    And the sight of this political intercourse could cause nothing but vomiting reflex.

    And opposing them, Barack Obama, who was hidden in the Time of Troubles, and afraid to show his oratory, political and diplomatic skills, has clearly gained the operating advantage, and behaves as if Hillary and Co are already defeated and the main problem of his remaining presidency is the consolidation of anti-Clinton forces in the West and the articulation of a consolidated position of the Western White Project.

    With great clarity that appeared during Obama’s visit to the UK, where he has fully demonstrated his talent.

    The main stage and the event of the trip was the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

    And yet the Western White Project (or the Anglo-Saxon world), headed by a black Irishman of the Kennedy clan, is now split into at least two fractions – fraction of the “Globe” and the fraction of Stratford-upon-Avon.

    The “Globe” is the Shakespeare Theatre were Obama went, and the leader of conservative part of English society, Prince Charles, went to pay tribute to Shakespeare at his grave in Stratford-upon-Avon, but would not meet with Obama.

    And in the center of that split are the differences in consolidated position of the Anglo-Saxon world in relationship with Putin’s Russia, the differences which were clearly and brilliantly showed by Prince Charles.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tacmtRsHI9o

  127. FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 4:29 pm #

    Still think I am full of it claiming the profound changes happening in the West? Read this:

    SHOCK CLAIM: Ukrainian fighter jet shot down Malaysia Airlines’ MH17

    A BBC documentary will air “shocking new allegations” about the downing of Malaysia Airlines plane MH17, including claims it was shot down by a fighter jet and not a ground-to-air missile.

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/663787/Ukrainian-fighter-jet-shot-Russian-crash-MH17-BBC-documentary

  128. Janos Skorenzy April 24, 2016 at 6:25 pm #

    http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/20/prince-gay-marriage-opinionr

    Prince haf repented of his life of degeneracy, but the media did all they could to keep this fact secret.

    • FincaInTheMountains April 24, 2016 at 6:35 pm #

      It was strange – I never knew who the guy was before that announcement on CNN.

  129. Janos Skorenzy April 24, 2016 at 6:34 pm #

    Science Guy and freak/fraud Bill Nye wants climate change deniers to be jailed.

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2016/04/15/does-bill-nye-really-want-to-put-climate-change-deniers-in-jail/

    Compare him with Christopher Hitchens who defended the rights of Holocaust deniers.

  130. tucsonspur April 24, 2016 at 7:13 pm #

    Will Harriet Tubman’s image be spiffed up like Aunt Jemima’s? Probably. We can’t have her looking like polk salad Annie or her momma, that wretched, spiteful, straight-razor totin’ woman.

    Again, Obama slaps down white America!

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    • tucsonspur April 24, 2016 at 7:46 pm #

      Payback time for Jackson, who wanted to extend slavery to the West.

      Praise her for her courage, as I have praised the Black Panthers for theirs.

      But the conflict between blacks and whites will continue, and I am white.

      Continual erosion and surrender ultimately means defeat.

  131. Q. Shtik April 24, 2016 at 9:28 pm #

    It took 3 – 4 days for Bowie fatigue to set in but only 2 – 3 days for Prince fatigue. I think it was all those shots of him in high heels that tipped the scales.

    • wpa_ccc April 24, 2016 at 10:29 pm #

      So are you the gender police now? What difference does it make what kind of shoes a performer uses? More and more people are gender flexible.

      Why are you so upset that people don’t accord to your prejudice that people are either male or female. We are all mixtures.

      Polygender people experience multiple gender identities, either simultaneously or varying between them. These can be male, female and/or any non-binary identities.

      People should listen to Trump on this issue. Trump is a live and let live guy. On the issue of legislating transgender bathrooms –and maybe only on this issue, if you ask me — Trump is completely right, and his rival Ted Cruz completely wrong.

      The billionaire said Thursday on the “Today” show on NBC that, “There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate. There has been so little trouble, and the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic punishment that they’re taking. So I would say that’s probably the best way.”

    • BackRowHeckler April 24, 2016 at 11:53 pm #

      Yeah, it turns out Prince needed those pain killers to begin with because the high heels were hurting his feet and ankles.

      Let this be a lesson to the US Army when it begins issuing new combat footwear — high heels and pumps — to new lady and tranny infantry troops in the field. Ash Carter might have to start handing out percs and reds along with this stylish government footwear.

      brh

  132. BackRowHeckler April 25, 2016 at 12:04 am #

    Hey WPA I’m still trying to figure out just how many of these freaks there actually are out here. Isn’t it something like 1/10 of 1% who dress up like a women, even fewer who actually go ahead and have their junk lopped off? This bathroom issue seems like a red herring to me and yet another way to rub normal people’s nose in the filth. I’ve known of 1 transvestite my whole life, used to see this weirdo around town, and the dude ended with his throat slit on an off ramp of I 84 in East Hartford. That was in the early 90s and the last we saw of any freaks around these parts.

    brh

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