JHK’s Three-Act Play
On a hot Saturday in mid-July in my corner of the country, when everyone else is cavorting on Million Dollar Beach at Lake George, or plying the aisles of the home Depot, or riding their motorcycles in faux-outlaw hordes, I like to slip away to the neglected places where nobody goes. I seek out the places of industrial ruin – there are many around here in the upper Hudson Valley, and they are mostly right along the river itself, because there are many spots where the water tumbles and falls in a way that human beings could capture that power and direct it to useful work.
I always bring my French easel, a wooden contraption ingeniously designed to fold up into a box, to which I have bolted on backpack straps. To me, these ruins of America’s industrial past are as compelling as the ruins of ancient Rome were to Thomas Cole and his painter-contemporaries, who took refuge in history at the exact moment that their own new nation began racing into its industrial future.
I’ve been haunting this particular site in Hudson Falls, New York, all summer so far. Originally called Bakers Falls, it evolved over a hundred-odd years into an extremely complex set of dams, spillways, intakes, revetments, channels, gangways, and hydroelectric bric-a-brac all worked into the crumbly shale that forms the original cliff. From a vantage on the west side of the river, you can clearly read the layered history of industry as though it was a section of sedimentary rock from the Mesozoic.
One thing above all amazes me about these American industrial ruins: they’re not really very old. My grandfather was already reading law and drinking beer when some of this stuff was brand-new (or not even here yet!). Unlike Rome’s long, dawdling descent from greatness, America’s industrial fall seems to have happened in the space of a handclap. I suppose it was in the nature of the fossil fuel fiesta that these activities could only last as long as the basic energy resource was so cheap you hardly needed to figure it into the cost of doing business. Which is not to say that the human element didn’t change, too, since obviously it did – as America went from a cheap labor nation of immigrants eager to join in the security of factory regimentation, to adversarial relations between unionized workers and business owners, and finally to game over, as off-shoring and out-sourcing savaged American manufacturing.
These factories at what was first called Bakers Falls began in 1858 as an iron machine works, intended to produce the frames for water wheels. Soon they quit that in favor of making replacement parts for the growing paper-making industry that made use of the pulpwood from the Adirondack Mountains. Activities related to this went on clear through the 1960s, about a century in all, until things fell apart in the upper Hudson Valley and business mysteriously went elsewhere.
I’m sure it was a mystery to many of the people around here who got a living from these factories, who felt strong, willing, and able to trade their labor for a decent paycheck. How could the world not need them anymore? American political leadership explained it rather poorly to them. This was a new economy, they said. From now on making a living in America would be all about being clever at cooking up “innovations” that the rest of the people in the world could use in order to churn things out for us at twenty cents an hour. America’s young people, they said, should go to college, even if it meant taking on a lifetime of loan obligations. Or enroll at the local community college to learn “computer technology,” the coming thing.
What really happened to places like Hudson Falls is now painfully visible on-the-ground, in the streets, and in the shopfront windows, which are either vacant or occupied by the most marginal businesses – martial arts studios (training for what? Gang war? Insurrection? Afghanistan?), second-hand shops, and the ubiquitous pizza joints for a cheese-hungry populace. The once dignified business blocks at the small center of town – itself perched on a bluff with a panoramic view west – are vacant and falling into gross disrepair. The owner class of citizen, still inveighed against in progressive radio circles, are so gone that their ghosts seem to have packed up and left, too. But then so is every other class of people above the nether-class – that is, people engaged in something other than subsidized idleness and crime, people who’s only obligation in life is waking up in the morning. (No wonder the nation is obsessed with zombies these days.) I passed a wedding late in the afternoon on my way out of town. The bride had a tattoo the size of bumper-sticker on her décolletage. The groomsmen were dressed in black baby shorts and backwards hats. You want to weep for their offspring.
I only saw them on the way out. All the rest of the long day, I was blessedly alone under a fierce sun on the far side of the river, in close observation of the visual details of history and the quality of the day. It is hard to imagine the determination and ingenuity (not to mention strength and sweat) it took to pile up all these buildings right next to this raging river, or to fling a concrete dam across it. I don’t see how we could do that now, since we seem collectively incapable of accomplishing anything anymore – except some phony new political disposition of foot-dragging, evasion of responsibility, or refusal to confront reality.
The reality I spend these days rambling the river with is the reality of a nation riding a great wave of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming vampire nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all be wishing desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow and the kindly touch of a loving hand and the dim memory of what it was like to care about anything or anyone.
Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss… and decided that we liked what we saw in there.
______________________
A sequel to my 2008 novel of post-oil America, World Made By Hand, will be published in September 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
This blog is sponsored this week by Vaulted, an online mobile web app for investing in allocated and deliverable physical gold. To learn more visit:Kunstler.com/vaulted
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Paintings from the 2023 Season
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#1
Sick of Disney merchandise? Get some Destruction merchandise; Creative Destruction that is. Shittybank shirts, Plunge Protection Team official jersey, Standards R Poor apparel.
We take Vise, MasterPlan and American Excess cards.
http://www.creativedestruction.us/
Beautiful images.
It seems like we are experiencing PTSD induced emotional numbness.
We are overwhelmed by the degree of change required of us, due to the long slow grinding down we have been living with for the last 50 years.
We no longer have the will to try, because all our efforts have resulted in nothing but failure and pain.
Stockholm syndrome.
Jim, we liked what we saw in the abyss indeed because we were programmed by evolution to like it. You are so right about the blip-like nature of the rise and fall of consumer-civilization. It could not have been any other way. In ecology, the sharper we rise, the faster we fall. The r-strategists come, dominate and go, the K-strategists settle in for the long haul. Our sudden rise is demonstration of the fact how we changed our nature from K-strategists mammals to r-strategist consumer bugs.
http://hurricanekatrinakaif.com
Nubbin of the problem: no leadership. The primary responsibility of leaders is to create relevance beyond that which is innate (need for food, need for water, need for shelter). We are now seeing what happens when those who have the wherewithal to be leaders shirk their responsibility. My mother used to say that “democracy” was invented by the aristocracy so they could enjoy the benefits of being aristocratic but without the responsibilities. How correct she was, indeed.
Ah, yes, the good old days, when 700,000 eager American workers a year were killed in the mines, factories, railroads, etc.
Then they got all organized for better pay and working conditions, and the owner class decided to go elsewhere, where labor could still be beaten and disappeared into submission, and the environment could still be destroyed without cost.
Damn Americans! All uppity and such.
I work in a large Boston hospital. Almost all the nurse, of every age, are sporting ‘Tats’ and ‘tramp stamps’. Nose rings are picking up also.
Do you think we will ever see the factories waterways working again? Makes sense to me.
nurses
The system is too big for us to stop now.
So we are collectively hoping for destruction to mercifully put an end to this miserable “culture.”
Thus our fascination with apocalypse.
Or at least, thus the fascination by the purveyors of media and finance. Perhaps those groups, relatively monoethnic, hate themselves.
Civilization – (Gulf blowout) + diversity = soy-based bad luck
Social advocacy is too big to fail! The rest of the planet will collapse around it.
@ TEDC: “We are overwhelmed by the degree of change required of us”
This is not surprising, is it? I’m 56, and I think it’s safe to say that, in my lifetime, we’ve seen more change than in any other 50 year period in history. And much of it has been radical change. While I don’t want to excuse the lazyness and idiocracy of our culture, I think that there may be only so much change that can be endured within a period of time before people start to crack.
I think the Amish, and isolated, so called ‘Poor’ indigenous people will have the last laugh.
Let all this nonsense just ‘pass on by’.
We can only hope we don’t screw this place up so bad even they can’t make it.
I read Sci-Fi as a kid. It made me hope that we could, some day, become ‘More’.
No looking very likely these days.
Jim, I am from the central NY area, and one irony is the observation that the air conditioning industry that was developed by carrier of Syracuse area, allowed the destruction of the northern climate industrial base. Prior to that it was too unbearable to live in the south for the majority of people. Now much industry has shifted to Mexico and then further afield. Such is the geo-politics of the carbon age. As the cheap carbon is exhasuted the great shift in culture that you write of will occur, however, it will be preceeded by devastating conflict as the thirst of war machines and the commanders and operators do all they can to squeeze every last drop they covet.
Have you ever noticed the decorative brick work on those old buildings? What induced the owner to incur the extra expense of that when a plain building would have been as functional. Pride? optimism? appreciation of beauty? They are calling cards of a different time. Moe.
Christ Howard,
Find a lover, get a new hobby, and go out and do some real sweat-producing work.
When I hear your rants about the lost working ability of Americans I know you never really knew working class people. You live in a fearful fantasy land, afraid of everybody from displaced factory workers (they were thankfully gone 30 years ago) to Islamist terrorists.
The real danger in this country are educated effete fools like yourself that fear the future and idolize the supposedly good-old-days of mindless factory work. Willing to trade Constitutional rights for the fictional security of imperial invasion.
Write something funnier, entertain us better, or do the world a favor and kill yourself.
This enlightening post offers insight into Mr. Kunstler’s paintings which show the inherent beauty of the melting artifacts of our industrial rocket ride. As a fellow upstate New Yorker I see these abandoned mills and small industrial buildings in places once sensible, now rendered incongruous by the ruinous sprawl that links us by asphalt rather than our humanity. I wonder if the superficial overlay of sprawl will collapse while there’s still some collective memory of how to grow food, make things, and entertain one another beyond digital displays. Part of the sad answer comes every time the power goes out and people are frozen in their tracks, slack-jawed at the prospect of throwing a switch and having nothing happen.
An excellent post, Jim. It is easy, however, to romanticize about the halcyon days of American productivity while forgetting the hardship of factory life. If consumer-culture is but a handclap in the longer tale of civilization, then the days of good-paying and (relatively)safe factory jobs with benefits are comparable to an eye-blink. The truth is that capital, restless, ambiguous capital, will always (indeed, must) subvert such expenses in the presence of alternatives, such as cheap labour or lax labour and environmental laws elsewhere. While the coming energy crisis will cause a contraction of both consumption and production, one wonders whether the disaffected ‘nether class’ of post-industrial climes will have the collective will to regain those hard-won benefits, or if we will see a renewed factory and resource underclass. Hmmm..For those who care about such things, start supporting local people who preserve cultural knowledge in food, production and lifeways. They may be the only beacon against the coming dark.
http://michaelvidoni.blogspot.com/
I was up to Lake George the week before the 4th of July and was surprised how empty it was. That area of NY is not as depressed as Binghamton and Buffalo.
I am on week 53 of my subsidized idleness wishing I could get back to earning a living. It doesn’t look promising.
We may not make many things in this country, but we do design things. The new iPhone for example. Not the greatest example but one that came to mind. We also make movies. No real value add, but it keeps our minds off of the coming calamity.
And The LeBron James show was deliciously insane.
Aimlow Jow was here
http://www.aimlow.com
Jim – You get all mushy an ‘nat when you spend quiet time in the bush…
I would argue that we’ve seen more recent and rapid decreptitude because the U.S. came along at a time when technology (and I’m talking old school stuff like iron and woolen mills and such) was changing very rapidly. Much of our built environment was used and they tossed aside simply because something better did indeed come along, not because we are by nature profligate wasters. Much of the crap built in the UK and Europe in the past century isn’t faring all that much better — but they just have better bones….
If more people had hobbies like painting our energy requirements could actually be sustainable. I guess inevitably they will to enjoy activities that require no energy derived from fossil fuels. Its a shame most children would rather play video game sports than real sports which are free
Cheap labor is the building block of cheap things. You very rarely hear anything now but how cheap, or how expensive things are. If you try to get local produce, or a handmade chair or bag you are labelled a crank. Where did the need originate for large quantites of cheap nasty consumable shite made in sweatshop conditions? Surely that’s the key to a lot of problems
Mankind really has not really coped since ‘the death of god’. No more meaning, no respect, who gives a damn? New paradigm required and fast
Most of us — present company excepted — do like what we see in the abyss and don’t want to give it up, even when it is killing us.
It is shocking to see people in their early 60s dying before they even get to collect their hard-earned Social Security/Medicare benefits. We live in a toxic society, with millions of deadly delicious treats to tempt us like pizza does.
I found a really good interview with futurist Gerald Celente that pretty well sums up what the immediate future holds for us all: http://tinyurl.com/25vnfwg I thought your audience might enjoy it as he pounds home all the points with gusto. Even has a plug for an upgraded passenger and freight rail system! Check it out, it’s brief, hard-hitting, and to the point. Oh yes, and entertaining in a dark way.
Moe –
They were able to do that decorative stuff ’cause it was dirt cheap, but also because, when people built buildings, they actually had pride in them. The building was meant to be a brick and mortar representation of their hopes, aspirations and success — and, I think, they imagined the building was last and last. Today, the assumption is that everything has a very limited lifespan; so why bother?
@ TEDC: “I think the Amish, and isolated, so called ‘Poor’ indigenous people will have the last laugh.”
Exactly. I often travel through the Black Belt region of Alabama, and while many of us have been off on this Happy Motoring adventure, the residents there kept doing what they always do: a big garden, a couple of hogs, a modest house, a simple lifestyle. We’ll be re-joining them soon enough, and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
I suggest you dig a little deeper, Jim. Change is here and it’s all good.
Small is The Word. Community gardening, crafting -of clothes, of blankets; solar, wind, wood energy.
No more grieving of factory sweat shops and back-breaking deathly labour in the mines. Once higher education became available to all, no one romanticized the working class anymore.
Money is becoming less important, skillsets and community living are prominent.
I see the momentum where I live, it is slow, but it’s there. For those of us who are awake anyway.
Love the pics and painting.
Great last sentence. Every American wants to go get the latest tattoo and idolize their favorite sports star and pray that things will go back to “normal”. A new Gyro shop opened up next to where I work in a small town. You woulda thought Jesus came to town to carry us all to paradise. Now half the town is in the Gyro shop waiting for their salad that they should have got 20 minutes ago with their Gyro. Or waiting on them to get more “meat” as they ran out of it…..
We had an inland hurricane, with trees down on every power line.
The power was out for varying times for people- anywhere from 3 days to weeks, depending on where you lived.
How did we respond?
The young people got together and had cookouts, cooking up what was in their refrigerators and sharing it with each other. Their computers no longer worked and their cellphones didn’t either, after a while. They had parties instead.
The Burger King manager took his food to the women’s center.
The police hassled the kids who were outside interacting with each other, but left people in cars alone.
I agree 100% with your disgust of all things dark, goth and vampiric. There is nothing erotic about having your life blood sucked out of you. Its troubling to see little girls weeping for that kind of love -i.e. the fascination with the “Twilight” movies. Makes sense though – the culture obviously has been programmed to be accept being sucked dry in every sense of the word – and we call that progress.
Indeed we will wish for little lambs and sunny fields. Thats why I went to that field NOW while I could.
Enjoyed also seeing your painting in progress. Art is a fine refuge in the age of anxiety.
Kunstler, you should really check out this site
http://www.jornmark.se/
It has some really great fotoessays about desolated places.
check out THE END OF GARY, USA.
Just imagine how strange one of today’s bags of cool ranch Doritos would have looked to someone going into the general store in Hudson Falls in say 1910 …
The rest of the changes to our diet since then, the way food is made or imported and sold, would blow the minds of 1910 Hudson Falls citizens.
Mr. K, I point this out only to spoil Qshtik’s fun, but we seem to have a problem with today’s thoughtful essay:
“Who’s” is “who is” — you need “whose.” But then as Q says, who gives a shit.
@ marcus
roflmfao!
Well said!
Jim,
I caneasily imagine a future where a small factory again harnesses the power of the river using old 55 gallon drums as a makeshift water wheel. The spinning of the drums will activate a small electric generator to power a neon sign that reads, “Trinkets Here,” smuggled in from far away places like Miami or the more expensive products from Los Angeles or Seattle.
The times they are a changing, but not in the ways we were all expecting.
Fondly,
Zev
http://www.abrahampaiss.com
Jimbo if we all dressed like you we`d be sporting mustaches and bow ties and feeling all mighty and enlightened over the nose ringed and the tattooed,
once sustainable tribal communities that lived off the land. That is till the mustached and bow tied came along to build those factories you romanticize.
What is it with you and tattoos and body piercing?
Did you lose some girl in high school because she didn`t get turned on by your bow tie?
One would have thought that Kuntsler was describing some entropic wasteland down Dixie way, but, no, it was good ole upper New York that inspired his almost poetic musings. Maybe there’s more to learn from those climes than NASCAR ovals. Anyway, I thought last week’s tea party message was almost perfect in its plan for a brave new world. Cracker that I am, I can support it all the way – down with the warfare state as well as the welfare state! Only a third movement can lead us to anywhere near that kind of political scene and it will only happen when it’s forced. The two political behemoths that have us in a stranglehold won’t let go until forced. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to see ahead a hundred years?
One expects decrepitude in some of the
old industrial backwaters of America
since we’ve had some time to get used
to our current postmodern, high-tech
world. However, here in Palo Alto,
the seat of Stanford University and
lots of plutocrats, one would expect
just the opposite.
Yet the downtown area of Palo Alto is
a shadow of its former self. Can you
imagine a downtown of one of America’s
elite universities having no music store,
no sheet-music store, and it has gone
from NINE independent booksellers down
to ONE? It’s all snooty, overpriced
wine restaurants and a lot of store
fronts that have been vacant for periods
ranging from one to three years. The
landlord mentality has made family run
businesses all but an impossibility.
Few people realize that the greed that
characterized the “financialization” of
America in the 1990s up to today is
embodied in that landlord mentality.
Every dollar that landlords extract
from the pockets of renters and store
front lessees is a dollar that cannot
be used to buy goods and services in
the community. And nowhere in America
is this mentality in greater abundance
than California.
The financial sector, which made up only
five percent of GDP in the 1950s while
manufacturing made up nearly sixty percent,
is now around one-quarter of the entire
US economy. It’s the same “something for
nothing” mentality that Jim cited in his
excellent essay “Las Vegas: Utopia of
Clowns”.
California in general, and Palo Alto in
particular, are probably, next to Las
Vegas (and Manhattan) probably THE places
in the United States that exemplify this
mentality. We’ve not only offshored most
of our manufacturing capacity but we’re
destroying the disposable income of the
middle class that still remains through
realtor cartels that have no concern
about the continuity and vitality of
downtown areas in America.
Of course, plutocracies the world over,
including America, have always had robber
barons but they used to have a scintilla
of civic consciousness. Henry Ford priced
his vehicles so that Ford employees and
other middle class people could afford
one without being pushed to the financial
brink. Now, it seems as though these very
same magnates could care less whether their
wares are affordable or whether downtown
areas are 30% boarded-up businesses.
There’s a fine but very important distinction
between Ayn Rand’s “enlightened self interest”
(a term I’ve never particularly loved) and
gross sociopathy. There’s no doubt in my
mind that the business mentality (and the
now-exalted MBA degree) and especially the
landlord mentality represent gross sociopathy
and kleptomania. They have deep pockets and
don’t care if downtowns have 25% business
turnover in a year, no family run businesses,
empty buildings for two or three years, or
that the businesses that CAN afford the
rent must charge prices that put their
products out of the reach of most of the
townspeople.
Your towns and mine are usually owned by
four, five, or six realty cartels that
don’t give a crap about the feeling of
community in your town, the price
accessibility of products in town, or
the continuity of businesses.
The greed in America is hardly confined
to Wall Street. Indeed, I think the
damage that’s been done by the landlord
mentalities across this country are
easily as damaging at the street level
as anything going on at Wall and Broad.
E.
“ Faux Outlaw Hordes”, now that really is a hoot. The nine to five bankers, accountants, insurance agents and bill collectors–the real vampire characters of America– pump iron on their lunch hour in order to play a more convincing role on the weekend. Make room for the Sons of Silence in the long line of cultural lament.
Good eye Kunstler, you’re an astute observer of the American condition.
Those who have realized that upheaveal is upon us have begun to implement necessary changes. It is getting late for those who are still distracted by the mainstream idiocy.
Strengthen your body, calm your mind and make peace with nature. There is no other path.
http://wanderingsagewisdom.blogspot.com
Good Monday Jim,
I love reading you. You have great insight. I am finally compelled to comment.
A. – We are not all idiots in Atlanta and the South. You make rather racist statements regularly and slammed some other group as well the other day. I will see if I can go back and find the reference.
B. – Martial Arts? – How about for training for Self Awareness and Physical Fitness.
Your cynicism and elitism is starting to cloud your intelligent commentary.
If my paintings were that bad, I would seriously think about finding something else to do. Really Jim, it looks like someone is drinking absinithe or going cuckoo. While you worry about crumbling bridges, I am observing construction of new ones that would blow the “old-time” engineers’ minds. As Marcus suggests, suicide is an option. You’re going to be dead for a long time so cheer up.
and you even need to put down pizza????……stick to oil and banking please…..that is why I read you….
not for you to tell me what to eat…..
you really are judgemental….to quote you…
“The groomsmen were dressed in black baby shorts and backwards hats. You want to weep for their offspring.”
whatever happened to you can’t judge a book by its cover….they could by physicists for all you know…..
this monday post of yours has degraded over the months from facts to just rants…
I miss your facts and intelligence and could pass on the elitism and racism….
Kids playing electronic video games, which they must buy hit a chord with me. It seems that every aspect of what we used to do that was free has now been “new and improved” to make it into a commodity which we are trained we must purchase.
I write a lot about how physical maladies like high blood pressure and obesity used to be handled for free with a modest amount of exercise and a sensible diet of real, whole foods. Now, we’re sold an instant remedy in pill form for everything from restless-leg syndrome to indigestion(caused by eating too many cheez doodles and fast food before bed). And all the pills have side-effects, which call for another pill.
Most people have forgotten how to get back to the place where we did without all these modern conveniences and were a lot healthier.
The Amish and Mennonites, in many way, have the right idea. As do the Back-to-the-Land hippies.
Thanks for the stimulating comment “Babylon”!
“If my paintings were that bad, I would seriously think about finding something else to do.”
Perhaps Mook would elaborate a bit on what constitutes a “good painting”?
And while you’re at it, tell us about the last piece of hand made art you purchased, and the qualities it contained?(The Velvet Elvis, card game depictions don’t count.)
Mook obviously has no clue how difficult fine art is, how many failed efforts it takes just to get a few good ones.
Thanks for posting your paintings JHK.
“Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss… and decided that we liked what we saw in there.”
It took 2 weeks of writing to find it, but there it is.
Here’s to more human days to come!
We’re having dinner at Mean Dovey Cooledge’s cabin Sunday night in north Georgia. Anybody here have any conversation topics they’d like to toss out? Sort of Monty Python style? (Nah, I don’t like this conversation; what else have you got on the menu?)
Full report forthcoming…
Tak sa mycket Magnus. The photo essays on this site are excellent. I especially liked East St. Louis essay
Jim,
May I add Schenectady NY, Sayre PA, Binghamton NY and Endicott NY to your list. There are many others of course. Add Elmira NY also. Endicott the original home of IBM and the E.J. Shoe Company. Elmira, Corning Glass, Schenectady, GE. Binghamton, a fur trapping center in the 1800’s, and home of machine shops, on the Susquehanna.
In the last two weeks, I read a story in the Financial Times about Illinois Tool Works and Caterpillar. Both Illinois companies. They’ve created specialized ‘cells’ that they locate near their customers—globally, and don’t need large units in the U.S. anymore. The CEO of ITW said in the Financial Times that his company simply didn’t need a large workforce in America. He also said that Obama’s claim that he would bring manufacturing back to the U.S. was impossible to implement. Even solar panels and wind energy systems are supplied by China now.
Paul Craig Roberts, who was Treasury Secy under Reagan has even written that America’s future is in low paid service jobs. That wage arbitrage would continue to drive exportable labor overseas. What remains? Non-exportable labor, and we can count on one hand what those job categories are, until China or India figures out how to export medical care (via large medical ships that visit US harbors?) and law (done on the Internet?).
Our Congress and White House realize Americans are going to slide down the wall, and they aren’t about to help with unemployment or medical benefits. They see the work force collapsing, except for finance–which is now 46% of US GDP. Manufacturing used to be 46% of GDP. Now, it’s in single digits. So how will the U.S. fund its military, DHS, CIA, NSA? Taxing minimum wage service workers to death? Or via the global profits from our financial industry? I don’t know. I don’t know.
One poster here commented that not all Southerners were idiots. I agree. It took and still takes a lot of creativity and networking to make a lot of money in the South, away from the financial and entrepreneurial centers, but areas of the South are doing just that. Where I live, the highest paid jobs are in law: $150,000 plus a $5,000 hiring bonus. And my city manager makes $200,000 a year. Not bad ‘for the South.’
Don’t forget, decades ago, those pirates along the NC coast tied lanterns to the necks of horses and ran the up and down the coast to get ships to think they were able to come in to dock, but they ran aground and were looted. The South’s moonshine runners were a success and we have NASCAR to prove it, along with it’s financial success. Today, the banks and Wall Street have emulated those NC coastal pirates in stealing trillions from Americans. We have a to learn from the entrepreneurial South I’d say.
Best to all.
Mr. Kuntsler, your paintings are beautiful. My deepest regret is that all of the lovely scenery you so elegantly depict is slowly turning into a vast, concrete wasteland. I saw the beginnings of this when I was a senior in high school in 1960. Unabashedly, rivers were dumped with rust-colored, oily gunk into once thriving river streams. Entire fields and farm land were paved over to make room for suburban, cookie-cutter, track homes, clear-cutting of trees and everything. Our annual family vacations in our dad’s Edsel (!) revealed piles upon piles of garbage thrown out of car windows (hamburger wrappers, coke bottles, you name it). Btw, that Edsel was the biggest piece of crap ever produced. The car shimmied over 60 miles per hour, the steering was awkward and hard to manuever, plus it rattled! Even at that young age, I wondered why such a great country was so rapidly and completely destroying itself. Then along came the violence of the Civil Rights Movement, which I was totally for during the Freedom Summer of l961. I even helped register voters in Mississippi in ’64, and worked ardently to defeat Goldwater that year. That whole scene evaporated for me with the Watts riot. Our generation grew up with non-violence, and the black community was out there literally cracking white people’s heads open with baseball bats and the like, destroying business properties held by both whites and blacks! That, for me, was the end of an era, from which we have yet (and may never) recover. I see black (and white) thugs littered with tatoos all over their bodies, with mean, hateful expressions on their faces. It makes me wonder, what became of brotherhood? When did we lose our self respect? When did it become “fashionable” to wear your filthy jeans so far down around your ass crack that you effectively moon anyone behind you? When did cruising down the street with your sub-woofers rattling your neighbors’ windows become cool? When did good study habits mean “acting white”?
re: JHK’s painting. Im pretty sure that is the underpainting….laying a foundation, in other words.
asian cucumber salad? zucchini and angel hair pasta? yellow tomato bisque? jalapeno and goat cheese poppers? rest assured, it will be as much straight from the garden as possible.
good news, Tripp. They are building the appalachian organic food “corridor” – a network of NoGa farmers markets open 3 days a week!
Loved this article in Washington Post – the case against air conditioning.
“In the heat wave, the case against air conditioning”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/09/AR2010070902341_pf.html
JHK once again got the zeitgeist down perfectly.
America’s choice of monster always captures the national fear of a particular era. We used to fear radioactive lizards and Martians as surrogates for the Reds and the Bomb (50s), satanic cults as surrogates for the Counterculture (70s), and slashers as surrogates for urban criminals stalking suburbia (80s).
Now we have zombies. This is the first monster that is not what academics would call “The Other.”
They are just us. And as Nietzsche said, “If you stare into an abyss long enough, the abyss stares into you.”
We’ve been staring too long.
Write something funnier, entertain us better, or do the world a favor and kill yourself.
marcus why do you take your time to read jhk’s page if you Hate it that much.
My mother used to say that “democracy” was invented by the aristocracy so they could enjoy the benefits of being aristocratic but without the responsibilities. How correct she was, indeed.
sounds like a very intelligent woman.
i’ve often thought that myself. even tho i am not all that intelligent.
The greed in America is hardly confined
to Wall Street. Indeed, I think the
damage that’s been done by the landlord
mentalities across this country are
easily as damaging at the street level
as anything going on at Wall and Broad.
I Couldn’t agree more.
only ones’ making $$ are the realtors, and the landlords.
I’d love to have a small restaurant, can’t afford to. I would see any of the $$$. The rents are rediculously high.
but still i see so many vacant buildings for years now here in west coast california.
also people are buying the foreclosed homes cheap CHEAP and renting to Gangs, etc. they do not care about the neighborhood.
it is sickening. should be illegal. we have a serious Gang problem here.
Eleuthero, thinking beyond the ‘landlord mentality’, (and I agree with your ideas generally) these landlords bought these buildings as investments and have huge mortgages. It’s the banks and commercial lenders that force landlords of mortgaged buildings to charge such high rents. People who own their buildings outright and decide to raise their rents to whatever the market will bare, are the ones you describe so well.
Please don’t forget that old buildings can have high maintenance costs that aren’t part of a brand new building’s expenses.
In my own southern hamlet, it is astonishing to see the empty store fronts in the once thriving downtown streets. The large expanses of glass, once displaying the latest in ladies frocks are now papered-over with old newspaper. There are a few, scattered restaurants, mostly catering to those who can afford the $35-$60 entrees. The remaining eateries are much cheaper, but frequently held up by gangstas. In the last year, we had three murders of merchants: one barbershop owner, one restaurant patron, and one drive=by. The cops, with their budgets cut to the bone, can’t possibly keep up with this senseless violence. As a result, merchants are packing up and leaving in droves. Oh, and those expensive, highly decorative cornices of the grand old brick buildings? Yes, those were designed to give people who entered into these establishments a sense of relavance and importance. Their simplistic beaty is so similar to the Walmarts and Costcos today. Last week at Sam’s Club I nearly had to dive into a row of shopping carts to avoid getting hit by an SUV. (Yes, it was a lady driver, and yes, she was yakking on her ubiquitous cell phone). It seems that Americans are all walking with their collective heads up their asses.
Years ago, my grandmother enunciated her dislike and fear of the current culture. Her history of concentration camps, war, famine, and social upheaval, perhaps, contributed to that worldview. As a teenager, I laughed and enjoyed the birth of McDonalds as well as a glorious trip through war-torn, bullet-scarred Europe.
My point, it appears that a large portion of commentators in these walls have similarly adopted in their advancing age a fear of and a contempt for the changes the world has undergone. Yes, there are problems, most from the effects of over-population (which is why TPTB would like a “population shrinkage).
The biggest other point I would like to make for the thermodynamically and scientifically challenged is that the earth is an OPEN system and the amount of energy input from the sun coupled with alternative sources (not excluding nuclear) is sufficient and plentiful for whatever conversions we care to implement. If these conversions involve localized gardening fine, but let’s not forget about industrial conversion of CO2 to methanol and petrochemicals. An optimistic perspective is possible.
J
Jim, I’m often amazed at the fact that you are truly one of the few literary types (no offense meant) that has a handle on the coming darkness. Your reference to fantasies of little lambs and shiny meadows captures it well. When the ubiquitous gang warfare starts (and I do mean ubiquitous), and cannabalism becomes NORMAL ROUTINE and the main game is to avoid being someone else’s food, people will truly long for the “GOOD OLD DAYS,” regardless of how bad they really were.
Cheap oil has allowed us to have a mass rose colored fantasy about life; now that its ending, what will be seen everywhere will nullify all the bullshit about tea parties, progressive this/progressive that, dems, repubs, etc ad nauseum. There will be no middle ground for a long time. There will be nothing but chaos and darkness. After the coming collapse, it will take many many years before we’re even able to organize into small 1890’s type towns. Read a novel called World Made by Hand……..between now and then will be very very dark indeed.
Those who plan on not being food better get ready quickly and stop worrying about tea parties, elections, politics and other superfluous bullshi. Learn to shoot, accurately, to save ammo.
Years ago, my grandmother enunciated her dislike and fear of the current culture. Her history of concentration camps, war, famine, and social upheaval, perhaps, contributed to that worldview. As a teenager, I laughed and enjoyed the birth of McDonalds as well as a glorious trip through war-torn, bullet-scarred Europe.
My point, it appears that a large portion of commentators in these walls have similarly adopted in their advancing age a fear of and a contempt for the changes the world has undergone. Yes, there are problems, most from the effects of over-population (which is why TPTB would like a “population shrinkage).
The biggest other point I would like to make for the thermodynamically and scientifically challenged is that the earth is an OPEN system and the amount of energy input from the sun coupled with alternative sources (not excluding nuclear) is sufficient and plentiful for whatever conversions we care to implement. If these conversions involve localized gardening fine, but let’s not forget about industrial conversion of CO2 to methanol and petrochemicals. An optimistic perspective is possible.
J
“I passed a wedding late in the afternoon on my way out of town. The bride had a tattoo the size of bumper-sticker on her décolletage. The groomsmen were dressed in black baby shorts and backwards hats. You want to weep for their offspring.”
So, what?
Jim, that post really was a great essay. You are always at your best when you write about things you know.
I pretty much “get it.” I’m not so sure that our apparent apathy is not more a result of the relentless and endless blather spouted from every media concern that factors dollars above all else than from any kind of “mindful surrender.”
A case in point, Rush Limbaugh, not minutes ago, waxing on and on about all these nasty people “shaking down” BP as a reaction to the gulf oil spill.
Talk about “alice and a tea party” – now, according to Rush Limbaugh, anyone seeking recompense in the form of corporate reimbursement is somehow morally and socially bankrupt.
Oh, yeah, I forgot, we are………
Just for the record, I don’t believe JHK or most people on this blog “long for the good old days”. I’m old enough to remember that our country has been on a downward, slippery path for a while now. As a youth of the 50’s and 60’s, I’ve seen good and bad througout my life. What’s discouraging is “Marcus” telling how US how disparaging factory work was. Well, let me tell you something, SFB dunderhead! Factory work, despite its toil and sweat, created a solid, working, strong working class, enabling U.S. factory jobs to remain here instead of China. You rant and rave about how JFK believes in a “yesterday” when you can’t even figure out what TODAY is, let alone what tomorrow will bring. Jack _SS! Try thinking first before you blog, SFB!
Oh please, go look at your Andy Warhol paintings. If that’s art you can have it. I’ll take realism over….., by the way, what the hell is so fine about art? My kid does tattoes that look better than most of the slop out there. See you at the next Salvador Dali exhibit. Now that’s some good stuff!
Asoka, this is with respect to last week’s discusson on the use of nukes and WASPs being more evil than other groups etc.
This is a value judgment on my part and don’t take it personally but to me your line of reasoning stinks of hate filled racism. Maybe you think you’re entitled because of the suffering that black people have been put through. I’m not black so I can’t walk in your shoes (I’m not WASP either). Remember the Indian elder: you are feeding the wrong wolf.
Moreover your assertions don’t stand up to critical scrutiny. Ever heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Nukes haven’t been used since because of fear that their use would invite massive retaliation by similarly armed powers.
Also, the clock has not stopped ticking last I checked. Knock on wood but the last chapter has not yet been written. You don’t know if at some point in the future non WASP nuclear proliferators will put a nuke in the hands of a rogue state or non state actor and you don’t know if that nuke will be used. In the past MAD worked. Maybe not in the future.
Various groups in earlier days would lay seige to cities then gut the men, women and children with swords and spears. Maybe you think this is better or more morally enlightened use of lethal force?
You are of course entitled to your opinion.
Oops, my mistake. I truly apologize. I do remember looking at the ones that have been on the site for years but failed to go back and look at them before my critique. Sorry.
The “powers that be” must love tattoos, as they clearly, and publicly, define the haves and have-nots. The Nazis couldn’t have done it better…
But I think SO much of this is due to our culture’s insatiable appetite for mass media. Children are glued to it from infancy, whether on their massive flat screens or their toys or their phones or whatever.
It’s interesting to note that we are really the first generations in the history of the world to deal with this non-stop barrage of images and sound. Is it any wonder that we have no innate ability to self-regulate or mute them? Natural selection has no answer. Our species is addicted to media and no 12-step program in the world will get us to back away.
We are all junkies, and like addicts, we constantly need a bigger, stronger, more potent “hit.” Hence you arrive at a time when Glenn Beck is immensely popular — and the former Sunday political shows are seen as hopelessly out of touch. People NEED their Beck now. They NEED Rush. And pretty soon? Even that won’t be enough…
Aside from the obvious fact that Jim’s “happy motoring” derived from the reality of cheap oil, it was the advertising which made our culture believe it was all true — and to WANT IT SO DESPERATELY!
Pilt
There’s nothing new under the sun as cultures rise and fall under the weight of excess.
In our case the squandering of limited fossil fuels along with greed and a dash of poorly implemented global “free” trade that works for no one but the top 2%, that will bring us down.
What we are witnessing is the corruption of a system of checks and balances. The attack on the fourth estate, at this point morphed into the lap-dog of corporations, and ultimately the selling off of the public realm with real value against a monetarist system with no other value, but debt. That will add to our dissolution.
The more we fight nature, the faster we’ll destroy our precious habitat. We’re the only critter that doesn’t have a clue what we’re doing on this earth and is destroying that which gives sustenance to our very existence. Our self-awareness works both ways and sadly we can envision our own demise, as the system may be too far-gone to stop the process.
As a painter I appreciate the title of this week’s blog, a reference to Gauguin. But lately I’ve been checking out one of my all-time favorites, Goya. Truly a painter’s painter with a wonderfully plastic approach toward his medium.
The “Disaster Series” was always my favorite. The images and captions say it all and caught my eye when I was a student. There’s a dark irony and almost humor to the captions. One’s first response would be to to turn away from these images of cruelty that come out when the veneer of civilization come crashing down.
Although a non-objective painter, I’ve often thought that the idea of “painting for painting sake” was a luxury that comes out of a time when the zeitgeist of plenty is secure. There comes a time, when perhaps the depiction of the human condition becomes a greater and more meaningful imperative.
There is a bit of the 19th century naturalist in Jim’s work and thinking. Almost a return to that which resonates as more real than the illusions of modern life embracing nature as it overtakes what was man-made.
The areas JHK visit are at the fringes of a society that cannot hold its center any longer. Like canaries in a coal mine (how apropos) these factories were the fabric of small town life and the key to the success of the middle class. They now litter our landscapes and I agree that they seem like ruins approaching a kind of decadent art form–a memory of how we once lived. When you consider the implications it can only leave you feeling the tragic loss of what once was. It is like looking at ghosts.
obama -ism’s:
‘THE USA IS A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS’
‘BEING AN AMERICAN IS NOT A MATTER OF BIRTH OR BLOODLINES’
The first [ lie/canard ] sets us up for the agent evidenced in the second!
I ask you citizens of the usa..if you read the 2nd quote [ it is verbatim ] WHAT IS BEING AN AMERICAN DEPENDENT ON?
Just a note, about “the good old days.”
One of the reasons the “good old days” seemed good was because they were better than what came before. Unfortunately, that will no longer be the case for many of us, and ever worse prospects for our children..
Now, the good old days only exist for people who swindle and bribe as part of their daily machinations. A host of activities that has come to be known as “big business.”
Part of the rotten truth, a comfortable society often becomes complacent. With the help of a corporate-bought media, the control and dumb-ing-down is complete.
Its not exactly every man for himself, but it is every rich guy for himself. And that doesn’t leave much off the table on the floor anymore.
‘China or India figures out how to export medical care (via large medical ships that visit US harbors?) and law (done on the Internet?’
Can i burden you with a little story?
I live in WestLA area….I have 2 neighbors [ not friends] who both work for a firm in elsegundo that imports indian doctors.
it went from wasps to jews to asians as the us MDs!
i am told the indian doctors smell [ 1 or 2 days on plane] and the firm gets them to pass the med board and evrybody passes the test!!!
i can get name of firm if you want
It’s all a scam to separate us from our money.
So, in addition to Zen17’s sage advice, I would suggest:
Starve the Beast(s).
“Black baby shorts and backwards hats”, I shudder to think of it, what on earth have we become? – A bunch of fat lazy dependants who think that education is for suckers and looking cool is everything. Crap, America doesn’t deserve America.
These are good signs, and offer hope that our better nature will take over when we need to work together. I always enjoy those moments when the juice stops and we get real after thi initial stun factor wears off. I wonder if everyone would still be getting along after four months with no showers and competition for calories ramping up.
America became a caricature of herself when she started believing her own press. Then after that she was just like any other old person or thing : Life passed them by and they became irrelevant and even dangerous to the world and their children as they try in vain to knock one last one out of the park or have one last hurrah. The search for good times has ended with the Gulf Oil Spill. The Dick Cheney solution to energy, drill without regard to anything just get the black goo to the market. One last hurrah aye Dick. You’ll find the big field that will save the world, instead you may have released the angel from the bottomless pit. Thanx alot Dick.
I keep waiting for the angry homeless hordes to set fire to the millions of unsold houses built during the housing boom as an act of economic terrorism against the banks who will not even rent them out to people who have no homes.
Marcus,
JHK’s work really does go over your head, doesn’t it? Your post is completely devoid of understanding of what JHK is saying.
We really are in a lot of trouble when people like you take time to comment on stuff that they don’t understand or that is so far out of what your culture has ingrained in you, giving you no chance of understanding it.
The Mook,
Do you really imagine that JHK’s painting is the finished product? Even if it weren’t, what on earth is the point of railing against someone simply because you, personally, can’t appreciate his paintings?
Can anyone describe what “baby shorts” look like?
Are they mid-calf?
One of America’s greatest contributions to human civilization has been the idea that any individual, no matter what their creed, color or economic circumstance, has the right to rise to the best of his/her abilities. Many of our nation’s greatest leaders, like Abraham Lincoln, Booker T. Washington and Harry Truman, overcame poverty, hardship and brutal racism to become great leaders in their own right. Unlike the Old World, where your bloodline counted for everything, our history demonstrates the value of merit over priviledge, no matter how pathetic of a nation we’ve become.
And let’s not forget what Jackie Gleason used to say about the good old days: we remember them better than they were actually lived.
San Jose Mom,
In this YouTube video almost everyone is wearing baby shorts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPI5F2bO2CU
The discussion last week was truly informative. If you want to launch a platform that
will both appeal to a wide range of americans and at the same time bring hard-hitting
truths in a platable format. Here are the issues you MUST pound on.
Israel: More and more people in the alternative and even tentatively, the MSM are recognizing,
“It’s the Zionists Stupid!”
Israel is NOT our friend. It is a criminal, Zionist owned enterprise and has been since day one.
More and more Torah-based Jews, both religious and secular, within Israel and elsewhere, are
waking up to the true fact that Zionism is doing more irreperable harm to Judaism than anything
the Nazis could’ve ever done. All the Nazis could really do was wipe out a people. Zionists are
wiping out a people’s claim to represent a part of humanity’s dialogue and legacy. Jews world-wide
are revulsing in horror as unspeakable evil being purpetrated “in their name”. This of course, is bogus
Look at the recent incident in Jerusalem where a centuries old JEWISH graveyard is being dug up
and paved over for a Christian Pilgrim hotel. The IDF beat up and locked away dozens of Orthodox
Jewish men among thousands protesting this desecration. Zionist Leaders ultimately care about one thing only,
Profits and land. Judaism has become an excuse. Little difference from the leaders of the Neo-con
movement. Interestingly enough, both Neo-cons and Zionists have a sweetheart relationship, not that
Democrats are extempted.
“Islamic Maniacs” and secular arabic “terrorists” had no beef with the West or the United States
in particular until we threw our weight behind Israel during the Seven Day War in the late 1960s.
This was AFTER the atrocious massacre of the men serving on the USS Liberty. The truth on that is
slowly outing. Other documented atrocities done by our “friend” include the stealing of state secrets,
the smuggling of uranium by Jonathan Pollard and other such doings. Israel was recently caught
with it’s pants down by a document that revealed it attempted to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa
during the 1970s, when apartheid was in full swing.
Israel receives the Lion’s Share of foreign aid. Officially, the number is $3 billion a year,
unofficially, it is much much higher. According to the Symington Amendment, no nation that possesses
nuclear weapons and refuses inspections by International bodies is allowed to receive ANY aid whatsoever
by the United States. Perhaps this conundrum can be best explained by the fact over 300 members of
Congress have pledged their allegiance to Israel. Most likely because Israel takes a portion of that
Aid monies and lines CongressCritters’ pockets with it.
We are spilling our Blood and Treasure, our young men and women, “over there” for the debased and insane
motives of Zionist/Neo-cons of both the “jewish” and “christian” stripe. I know what gods they worship
and it’s not the God of Abraham. No, it’s Mammon and his companions, Moloch and Baal. A good example
of the sheer callousness of Zionists is when Benjamin Netayahu stated “9/11 was very good for us”.
I don’t know the truth of 9/11, it certainly is not the two Official storylines. I certainly do not
see much but some very interesting circumstancial evidence that Israel may have had a hand in it.
Still, that statement of Benjamin Netayahu gives one pause, the flippant, unthinking COLDNESS of it
makes one take a closer look. Only an unfeeling psychopath could be so blase.
In conclusion, it is in the United States’ best interests to cut off relationships with Israel and remove from office
all Zionists with dual Israeli/US citizenship or with family/military/political connections in Israel and deport them there.
Our extensive military deployment:
Summed up very easily. Close all the oversea bases, bring ALL our boys and girls home!
We are not the World’s Police and neither should our military folks be defending private and
spook enterprises. I do not want our military defending energy/material resources and I
especially do not want them defending the opium crop in Afghanistan for enterprises
which do NOT benefit the American People!
Our Debt and the Federal Reserve:
Default on the Debt, wipe it all off the books and Audit the Federal Reserve, which is neither
Federal, nor a reserve. It is a Private Central Bank owned by a few very rich families. We are
charged interest for every dollar we print. Supposedly because the Fed has reserves. That the Fed refuses
Audits is VERY telling.
Our Food:
We HAVE to transistion from the current Megafarm mess to organic permaculture, forest gardens and extensive
city farms. A massive training program needs to be undertaken. Arid areas that require extensive irrigation
need to either be abandoned and turned into a buffalo/longhorn “commons” or converted to small-scale
agriculture along the lines of the Southwest or the middle eastern ancient conservative, sustainable
methods.
Our Transportation:
the existing railroad networks need to strengthened and used. waterways must be kept in order.
Our road networks are a travesty. Much of it will simply rot away or be taken cared of locally
according to their own needs.
Our means of exchange:
Barter needs to be encouraged. A metal based note system needs to implimented. The Time Bank
concept shows lots of promises. Most of our taxes are not re-funneled back into our communities,
instead used to pay off debt that benefits no-one but a select few.
Education:
Our current system is a rote-based one. It does not encourage creativity or critical thinking whatsoever.
Children are systematically broken down and remolded into good little cogs for the “Machine”. Most
People simply need to know the basics, reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetics. The rest should be for
creative exploring and critical thinking as well as socializing and networking. Children are a
wonder, they learn to walk, speak and so much else simply by imitating everyone around them before
they are three years of age. Why should we assume they cannot pick up the other things by the same
manner? Mistakes should be applauded, not condemned, as a sign that the child is learning and applying
their brain.
Justice system:
Quite a few members currently “hosted” in our system are non-violent drug offenders. Legalize
drugs and prostitution, regulate and tax them. Hemp has the side-benefit of being a literal “miracle”
plant, it is where “Home-spun” comes from. Our police forces are using the dregs of society to
be an “enforcement gang” to protect the needs and whims of the PTBs. They are no longer even
pretending to be “Officers of the peace”.
Medical system:
The current one is hopelessly corrupt and has improved in only one area “Emergency Medicine”.
Alternative medicine, nutrition, herbs and PREVENTION are key here. Doctors accidently kill quarter million patients
every year. Indeed, when israeli doctors and nurse went on strike in the 70’s, the death rate plummeted
to half. Our environment has also become very toxic over the last 100 years, this must be reversed.
Health Insurance is a scam, as evidence that 75% of the people who go bankrupt from medical bills
initially had Health Insurance.
Alternative/Clean energy:
This was needed 30 years ago, but well, we need to get crackin’ on it. While I personally believe
that Petroleum is a deep crust/mantle material consisting of hydrocarbons passing up through the crust
and interacting with calcium deposits and microbes to become natural gas and oil, the time scale of
replenishment is in the thousands, if not millions of years. In that sense, I agree with the Peak Oil
crowd. Petroleum products are “finite”. And drilling 7 miles or more beneath the surface is dangerous,
risky and as the GOM gusher shows, extremely costly, thanks Halliburton, Goldman-Sachs and BP! Coal on the other hand, genuinely appears to be strictly
Biotic in orgin, so when that’s gone, it’s gone for the next 30 million years and you have to wait
another quarter of a billion years to get any significent deposits like we’ve been exhausting for
the last few centuries.
Our Borders:
Every other country in the world enforces their borders and regulates immigration, that we
are regarded as racists for doing so is insanity. Fine and jail everyone who hires illegal labor.
Big corporations, housewives with the honduran nanny and make it HURT! A decade of jail for
each illegal, $100,000 to a million fine for each illegal. Watch how fast the illegal population is driven out
and the average wage goes up to $10 bucks an hour, or “expensive” products go cheap.
Welfare:
This is a topic that like illegal immigration, homosexual rights (which I support, let them know the joys
of divorce!) abortion (Also support until the time comes we can figure out a solution equitable for all)
and gun rights. That is used to inflame the bases of both wings of the National party for votes. Barbara Ehrenreich
in “Nickeled and Dimed” recorded a pilot “welfare to work program” in Minnesota that provided full support for 192 women to transition
from welfare to work. These women had full medical,dental, child-care, housing and college. The follow up
several years later recorded that over 90% of these women were still off welfare and making between
$30,000 to $100,000 a year. A program with a success rate like that shoud’ve been applied state wide, hell,
nation-wide, but it was scrapped! This was in the roaring nineties, with money to spare. Apparently
this was too much to swallow for both the Repukes and Dumbos.
Foriegn Policy, Taxes:
What foriegn policy?!?! We have millions out of work and homeless in this country! We cannot
afford to take care of anyone else right now! Taxes need to be slashed and tariffs need to SOAR!
Luxury taxes need to become prevelant. Tax the hell out of the Rich, they contribute NOTHING
to our economy but misery, consumption and the antics of Plunge Protection Teams. The USA needs
to not only go into debt bankruptcy, it needs to forgive all debts it owns. Stop letting people be kicked
out of their homes. Retrench and rebuild industries on american soil.
Religious and other extremitisms:
We must combat this with truth. When White supremicists blare loudly that blacks are inferior,
point out that the (legal!) immigrant group with the highest education and entrepenualship rates
are from a certain continent with a lot of dark-skinned members….(hint, it’s NOT Asia or South America). When
Black supremicists blare about “Whitey”, introduce them to the “Tragedy of the Commons” and the book,
“They were white and they were slaves”. hundreds of thousands of peasants in England, Wales, Scotland
and Ireland were rounded up and sold into slavery in the Americas. That is ONLY what is documented.
Ireland alone, lost 2 million people in a decade stretch in the 1600s, long before the Potato Famine.
Most were children and adolescents simply “spirited” away or outright sold by their own desperate parents.
“Indentured Servitude” terminology is a joke. The vast majority were worked to death, or had their terms
extended for the slightest infraction. Only two colonial states, Maryland and Pennsylvania, enforced the
laws requiring that indentured servants be given money and land after their terms were up. Even that
was a joke, since so many simply DIED long before that ever happened, whether they were White, Black
or Native American. Slavery was and remained an equal opportunity system. one/third of the slaves
in the South at the break-out of the civil war could easily pass for white. After the war, they were
displaced and mostly absorbed into the white populations. Easily 30 to 50 percent of modern “whites”
in this country most likely have black ancestry. For “blacks” it’s even higher, at 70 to 80 percent.
Christians need to seize back their bible. The zionist supported Darbyism and Scofield bible perversion/hoax
side-notes lead up to the present day insanity in the middle-east with the support of modern fundies and evangelicals.
The vast majority of jews at the turn of the last century did not support Zionism. Guess what happened to them?
Whether a fortious stroke of luck or something much darker, Zionism took the world stage of Jewry.
Jews need to renouce Zionism and get back to their Torah roots. Muslims need to acknowledge that like
The Torah and the Bible, the Qu’ran of today is not the same as yesteryear.
All the races, religious believers, political stripes and ethnicities need to WAKE UP and recognize our shared
humanity. We are being used as pawns in the insane games of psychopathic people in power who regard us
as cattle. They create and adopt whatever “beliefs” they believe are expedient for their own
deranged goals. I would require that every normal thinking human secure a copy of “Political Ponerology”
This was written by several scientists who lived both under the insane Nazis and insane Communists.
It explicitly details and explains how the true 6 percent psychopathic deviants corrupt and destroy
entire civilisations and societies from within. The hideousness of Pol Pot, the scourge of Stalin,
even the incipitant insanity of the West, it is all explained in that book.
*addendum, should your platform truly become significent, watch out for spies and agents provacteurs. Don’t forget the lessons of the 60’s and 70’s, when peaceful organizations were infiltrated and played off against each other. Check _everyone’s_ credentials.
other superfluous bullshi
=============
I realize, of course, that your left index finger simply failed to depress the t key hard enough BUT, on quick glance, the result looks like a new word that might be defined as “the uncooked testicles of a male bovine.”
Clarification:
“..in this country most likely have black ancestry. For “blacks” it’s even higher, at 70 to 80 percent.”
I meant the reverse, white ancestry for blacks in this country likely is between 70 to 80 percent, if not higher.
sorry, yet another clarification:
“I do not want our military defending [privately owned]energy/material resources..”
I’ve been bike commuting to my factory job for three weeks now, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it, even the bad weather. I live in Michigan, and we had weather in the 90’s this past week. I was talking with my supervisor during lunch break, and he said, “I don’t know how you ride your bike all the way in here, work in this heat for eight hours, and then ride home”. I told him that it’s surprising what you can do when you have to do it.
Granted, I could buy another car if I wanted to, but I’ve already invested about seven hundred dollars in rain gear and improvements to my bike. There is no way I’m going to think about buying a car until I’ve broken even in savings on gas and car insurance. The truth is, I don’t need a car, andonce you get used to the physical exertion and learn the best routes to take, it’s a relaxing way to get around. I find it hard to describe, but it’s almost like you’re in the enviornment rather than just passing through it. Rather than fighting through traffic, you avoid it, and it spares you a lot of stress.
I’m not trying to preach here, either. I don’t have any kids or long distance travel needs. I’m just sharing some observations.
Kunstler, you wouldn’t stoop to give the time of day to one of the blue-collar people that supported the old way of life you seem to cherish. You spend half the time expressing contempt for the masses and the other half lamenting the fact the U.S. no longer relies on those same people to create an economy based in reality. Circular logic.
One of the things that make me laugh (cry) is that comment from y’ello (and others like him) that many of his ideas bear merit. Unfortunately, things like legalizing prostitution usually entails demeaning women as mere sex objects who can be acquired for monetary value. There is more to a woman than her body (SURPRISE)! As for blacks, you cannot take a group of people, enslaved for hundreds of years in this country, and suddenly proclaim them to be “free”. This is Treebeardsuncle, Vlad, et.al’s argument. From lynching, torture, black-balling, block-busting, rape, and murder, a culture of people deprived of their inherent humanity cannot possibly “assimilate” into a white society that neigher wants them nor accepts them. My point is, regardless of your point of view, we’ve all got to join this effort together to survive the lONG Emergency. And no, I’m not saying blacks are superior, and I’m not saying whites are superior. We all have to get our collective minds out of this hate-mongering and start with some solutions. Come on people, smile on your brother, try to love one another right now!
For every uphill, there is a downhill. For every climb on the roller coaster track to the top, there is always a fast, and furious downward shot.
We have climbed the roller coaster track to the top nearly a decade ago, and now, with a weak president in place, we are descending. In just 10 years we have had 9-11, two wars, Katrina, tsunamis, earthquakes, a devastating economic collapse, continued governmental mediocrity feeding the global financial poisonous spider, draughts in the fields, and now, BP’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico.
We are declining. The worst is yet to come.
http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com
and don’t take it personally but to me your line of reasoning stinks of hate filled racism.
===============
This reminds me of the form spats with my wife have developed over the years — we can say any rotten thing to our spouse that we want so long as we end by saying “no offense,” to which the reply is “none taken.”
Jim,
Take heart. When you see places where industry no longer is, others see potential micro hydroelectric sites and maybe later in the collapse waterwheels again. Nature is still there in abundance. Tattoos are not such a big deal either. There are still human beings underneath them probably wanting something worthwhile to do with their lives. They just are not motivated enough yet or are leaderless. Hunger is a great motivator and industrial demise will provide plenty of that. Leaders both bad and Good arise in times of crisis. Be ready to identify the right ones.
I understand there is a LOT of baggage and a lot more to these two ideas than I laid down.
On prostitution: It exists, it will probably always
exist. Legalizing it and regulating it gives prostitutes a voice and a measure of safety. Prostitution is hardly limited to women and girls, young men and teen-age boys easily make up a third of (typical) prostitutes in the USA alone. To say nothing of the pedophile prostitute structure which is rampant and goes all the way to the top (See the Franklin Scandal, Dave Mcgowan’s Pedophacracy).It’s not just women being “Objectified” by any stretch of the imagination.
Legalize prostitution, provide a safe frame-work, perhaps a work-place democracy and mandatory “squirreled money” for retirement and we can then crack down on the sick pedophiles.
On Black Slavery and then freedom. Let me paraphrase James Kunstler’s idiom. “Reparations?
360,000+ Union Dead”.
Blacks in this country were becoming more upwardly mobile, secured in their families (90% marraige rate among adult blacks, more than among whites!) until the late ’60s into the present day.
And I totally agree with you on your characterization of these conditions and their causes and symptoms. What blacks need to do is junk the “gatekeepers” like Al sharpton, Louis Fharrakhan and many others and _demand_ their rights directly, in concert with the other races.
We are all americans and in spite of many of the attempts by the PTBs to pervert it, the newer generations coming up are both embracing their tolerance agendas, BUT they are resisting their State-Group think agendas. They lose both ways.
I hate to admit it, Eye, but you’re soo right. Years ago I feared the Cold War, Vietnam, race riots, nuclear armagedon, erosition of civil liberties, decline in education, a diminishing middle class, eco-disaster, over-population/immigration, meaningless, senseless wars based on lies and propaganda. Alas, all those things are coming true. Perhaps as Janis Ian once said, “We only get what we deserve.” How incredibly sad.
“Faux Outlaw Hordes”
NAILED IT! Harley Hoggers cruising for coffee. The Poppa Tuttle mustaches and “if you can read this shirt, the bitch fell off the back” tee shirts are a nice touch for the braver ones. Rowdy, they aren’t.
Cash, you are free to challenge my arguments … and that is fine with me.
But when you characterize the conversation like this:
I feel no desire to continue conversing with you.
Hey Jim,
Funny you should mention video games, have you ever heard of Frontlines: Fuel of War? They mention the Long Emergency in the introduction. http://www.kaosstudios.com/screenshots.html#B
Go to video, introduction cinematic
In this YouTube video almost everyone is wearing baby shorts:
=============
and is overweight.
Good comment, Wagelaborer.
In addition to the human costs there were also environmental costs as capitalist profit-seeking factories dumped industrial waste into our waterways.
In Jim’s beloved Hudson River, for example, from 1947 to 1977, GE dumped as many as 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson.
http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/hhudson.asp
Thank God for Pete Seeger and his campaign to clean it up.
So factory work was hard?
Imagine…
And McJobs of every de-human shape and description are some kind of improvement?
The whole pathetic assorted messed diaper loads and other assorted corporate wet dreams wherein the advertisers’ digest nudged the holy bible off the mantleshelf (and gets more airtime on a Sunday now, anyhow…) has produced a rather large group of citizens (term used loosely) who don’t even KNOW anymore, what they’ve lost.
Normal, practical industry – not perfect by any means, no holier than Nascar or Shopping Channel – at least enabled sustainable commerce for much, much longer than the last Wall Street run-up, and allowed a lot of people enough dignity to live useful lives (as opposed to a future of paying back a 50-G college education on a Starbucks job).
I dunno….maybe it’s just a thing you feel in your gut – the financial flyboys would never leave well enough alone….too much new blue gooey goodies, tantalizingly (and so easily) drop-kicked the lifeblood of blues collars over the horizon in exchange for mannered manna (more money than they’d imagined possible) and somehow, this was all so Sensible………………
So is propaganda, until you’re on the wrong side of the screen, bub.
just let me laugh when it’s funny,
and when it’s sad, let me cry.
Peakinterest wrote: “I’ve been bike commuting to my factory job for three weeks now, and I have to say I’m really enjoying it, even the bad weather.”
Fantastic! I got my bike at the beginning of July, rode it 3 miles the first night, got sore (hadn’t ridden in 20 years), waited a day, then started riding the bicycle to work. Since then I’ve driven to work only once, and have been riding otherwise, even in this hot weather. (Guess what? If your car hasn’t got AC anyway, you’re cooler bicycling than you are in the car.)
It is many times more relaxing to travel at a slower, human-scaled pace, stop and smell the flowers (or enjoy the shade of a tree by the riverside), and be there in your environment rather than whizzing past it in a metal box, cut off from all senses but sight. A favorite thing to do is stop and pick wildflowers along the way, then put them in a vase on my desk.
Next up I’m getting some rear carriers so the bicycle can replace the car for grocery-shopping trips. Like most Americans, 90%+ of my driving has been to places less than 5 miles away. All of that can be replaced with bicycle use.
I agree with Jim on the tattoo issue. This is not a merely cosmetic issue but an unmistakable sign that people have lost the appreciation for what defines civilization. There is nothing remotely attractive about primitive cultures. Noble savage fantasies are just that. Primitive cultures are primarily unspeakably violent and ignorant. In my opinion it is a sure sign that big trouble lies ahead for the people that embraced this gutter culture. Take your children out of public schools and cancel cable TV. Anything it takes to isolate them from the septic tide of American popular culture. They will thank you when they are 30.
Y’ello, you’re right. Prostitution, victimization, etc. have always existed. I don’t disagree with your premise of legalization. My main objective is to protect women, children, the less fortunate (sometime mildly retarded/disabled) who enter into this “profession”. No serious judgements on my part, only compassion. I’ve known some smart hookers throughout my research and they’ve got plenty of street smarts. My concern is the PERVERTS who want violence from these people, not sexual gratification. Whatever. Heck, with Prohibition drinking just went underground…and MORE popular! I say, legalize these things the same way (if not more so) than tobacco, alcohol, and weed. (NO HARD DRUGS, please…I remember the
“It’s all good, man, …” l960s! Mert
Don’t hate on martial arts studios, we don’t train in them for any of the reasons you suggested. We love what we do, It’s about sport, self-defence, socializing, and excercize. And later on in this long emergency I will have the confidence and proper technique to beat some pickers into the ground, for stealing from my garden. But strip mall mcdojos (karate and taekwondo schools) are marginal business, usually run by frauds and other shady characters.
I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said Ma’am. I want the sick fuckers jailed and castrated or (if they’re female, rare, but does occur) subject to a hysterectomy. Pedophiles deserve nothing less but the death penalty if they offend or an isolated island with no chance of escape if they do not. A pedophile who openly admits it and does not offend because he understands that it is evil and wrong should be taken to an isolated island
with others like him and given all the CGI/Anime child pornography he/she wants.
We should not condemn him/her for admitting to their proclivities and wishing for anything to stop it. It cannot be cured and those conscious ones who do not wish to do evil to children MUST be isolated and given “release”. They should be given training to garden and build homes on these isolated islands, as well as medical care and supplies. We normals need to study them and isolate the gene/environment/whatever that provokes this Human abnormality.
Much the same can be applied to the Anti-Social-Disorders (Narcissism/Psychopaths/Sociopaths). The ones who admit what they are and come forward will be isolated, treated humanely and studied to prevent their occurrence in the general population.
Both of these deviancies MUST be eliminated if humans are ever to progress forward.
S&M doesn’t bother me if it is between two or more consenting adults and a third disinterested party concerned with safety watches from CC video. For some people, that floats their boats. So what I say, as long as children and mentally disabled people are not involved.
A few tens of generations of this should help eliminate these deviants from the world wide human population. Child-fucking is rare in the natural world, so is Anti-Social-Disorder. We humans would do very well to emulate THAT particular trait. Many other deviancies, such as S&M, Bestiality and others would fade away.
Homosexuality/Bisexuality/Intersexuality are quite normal and widespread. The books “Biological Exhuberance” and “Evolution’s Rainbow”
demonstrate that quite clearly enough. Abortion or selective gene therapy could help us eliminate a whole range of ills.
Problem with the last sentence of course is “Who decides?”
On American Blacks; there is no evidence whatsoever that as a “group” (if you can characterise any human collection as an isolated “group”, even with pedos and psychos) that american blacks are inferior. Instead, it is clear from history that black people in the americas were consistently destroyed at every turn. Every attempt to rise above subservience has been co-opted in one form or another, look to Jamaica or Haiti, hell, look to the Sub-Saharan African continent. Only a very precious few countries, such as Botswana and Ghana have managed to escape the depredations of the Anglo-Saxon/Zionist based IMF and World Bank during the 1970s. These racist assholes really HATE black-skinned people for some reason. Not that South America is doing that much better.
Oftentimes politicians will use an emotional topic like the labor unions to tug on our heart strings to make us feel as though they are sympathetic to our needs. We’ve been pummled for the last 40 years with the notion that we can’t compete with the rest of the world because of the damn labor unions. All this argument has been is a long, steady convienient excuse to remove consumer services, consumer protections, product safety standards, labor laws, etc. or simply put: stop tending the middle class.
Companies have been quietly moving overseas since the very early 70s, maybe earlier? Yes? Then somewhere along the line they even began receiving tax incentives to leave. Yes?
The politician wants you to blame it on your “lazy” unionized neighbor who makes too much.
so that he can allow his friends to continue “trading dollars”. It’s been a long slow exchange – We’ve been slowly trading our middle class way of life for more cheap crap from overseas. And they have been getting our shiney new factories, subdivsions and bullet trains instead.
Before you know it, Africa will be the next new manufacturing mecca.
First article I have been compelled to comment on. Don’t know if that is good or bad, but couldn’t find enough enthusiasm before. Great observations, though awfully two dimensional. Do the math for yourself, the odds were fifty/fifty that you would be alive to see the end of the world. Wouldn’t have missed it! Ever wonder where all the missing stones went from those ancient ruins? The survivors scavenged them to build their little dreams, just as we will tear down the places you so eloquently described.
But, back to the third dimension. Read Victor Hugo’s account of the wonderful life in Les Miserables’ or The Hunchback of Notre Dame and I’m sure you will understand the ‘new’ generations lack of enthusiasm for the idyllic life. We that work with our hands AND minds have no desire to return to normal or the green, gteen grass of home. We want out of the ratrace and will most probably not greet all of the little refugees with their ‘bug out bags’ with open arms.
So, as I’m sure some plutocrat must have announced, in some fashion, before sending countless men and women to their violent end in the Coliseum…”Let the games begin”!
The fall of so-called civilization comes so slowly whilst the weeks and months go by so quickly. Nice to read a JHK post that didn’t harp on the coming Obamageddon. But instead traipsed around the appreciation of local history. We have been waiting for the other shoe to fall for decades, in any number of societies, industries, governments, peoples. Racism is not an unknown quantity. Stereotypes didn’t grow out of a vacuum. If you aren’t observant enough to see how different everyone is who have come from hundreds or thousands of years of once isolated cultures to your own culture then you are wearing blinders. Of course people from Africa are different than people from India or Greece or Bulgaria or Native Americans or European Whites or American Whites. Are you an idiot? “All people are the same” is a bunch of crap promulgated by the so-called elite sector of society. They are evil because they love money/power more than anything really worth loving. Humans all have two legs and arms but that’s where the difference stops/ends. Try walking down the street in the border cities of Mexico south of the U.S. as a white person. You’ll never see me there. I would never visit Egypt or Mexico or South America. Not because I don’t like the people but because I don’t want to be shot in the crossfire. Most people (not all of them) need to Get Real about how the world works. And in a funny ironic sense you should “get local” with your concerns. Your town/city is home – your home. Make the best of it, enjoy the simple things, realize that a good friend means so much more than “did you vote for a “fill in the blank”. Politics are a joke, don’t buy into the the idea that you make a difference with the morons in Washington D.C. Keep your focus on people you know, friends, family and appreciating your local environs.
Well dang, sounds like ol yeller here’s got it all worked out … although Tree and Vlad might want to have a word or two withim about Blacks not bein inferior an such.
I never walk down my own street as a white person. As a citizen of Aztlan I know enough to live in fear of the other. I carry my ball peener, and wear a sombrero. I am known around here as Senor Maxwell.
Seriously, last time I visited friends in Guaymas (admittedly not a border town) I walked and rode the bus everywhere, although my hosts were appalled. The worst that happened there is the worst that usually happens here: strangers approached me.
Recently I had a michelada with a buddy who considers himself Mexican and American. He told me he is avoiding the home country for a while. “Too fucking crazy” is what he said. He is going to Canada, where he already has a good job lined up.
Canexico. We are just that broad region in between.
I just returned from grocery shopping myself. I have a rack on the back that supports a pair of saddlebags. I could get some for the front forks as well, but I don’t think I will. Having limited cargo space forces me to make a detailed list and stick to it, resulting in less useless junk coming home with me.
Bigger things can be held onto the rack with a pair of bungee cords. I bought a 6 man tent and an inflatable air mattress last week and got it home along with my groceries with no problems.
I’m going to get a set of carbide studded tires put on in late October, and if all goes well through the winter, I may treat myself to a roadbike next spring.
Most of my trips are under 10 miles round trip, but usually I go to visit friends on the weekends, and that is about 25 miles round trip. It can suck battling the wind here in Michigan, but since I’ve been on the bike daily, my legs have gotten wicked strong.
Happy trails.
Qshtik-
Hardly, but anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can understand where we need to start.
As for the Racists, I would like to ask them, “If whites are so superior, why is it that “Jews” (I use the quotes because whatever these controlling creatures are, they are NOT “Frum” [i.e followers of the God of Abraham and Moses.]) Control the media (six major conglomerates all owned by “Jews”), control banking (80% of Federal Reserve leadership seats hold “Jews”)and are slowly taking over Congressional seats(Do I need to talk about Lieberman et al?), two Supreme Court positions held by “Jews”(And a potential Third), Federal appointments, etc.
Imagine things this way. Jews represent 3% of the USA population. Native Americans about 5%. Blacks about 15%, hispanics about 15-20%. If the United States is so white-oriented, why is it that asians, blacks and hispanics are mostly still struggling, but “Jews” seem to be doing just fine in many very crucial areas of our Constitutional Republic?!? How in the Hell is a supposedly protestant/catholic white christian dominated Nation allowing so many “Jews” to hold so many positions?
The answer is…it doesn’t happen without deception, black-mail and other perfidy.
The rabbit hole is deep, you want to ask about the Catholics on the Supreme Court? Good luck!
As for the idea that somehow White Protestant/Mormon Christianity is immune to all this evil. That is a laugh, +70% of an anonymous poll of various denominations had the clergy admit that they were “tempted” or out-right raped children, scammed parishioners, or other evils.
“Vlad” and “Treebeard” can hold on to their illusions. I know that Evil is present in ALL races, ethnicities, creeds, religions etc. It is a largely genetic-based abnormality that MUST be eliminated.
latchkeykid-
The days of the Unions are hopefully over. Now comes the advent of work-place democracies.
James Crow-
Certain areas, agreed, but not for what you think.
ubs-
What the Hell are you babbling about? “primitive” and “uncivilised” “Noble Savages”?!?!
You are posting on a site that understands that humans will soon be coming very close to Nature and “Nature’s God”. Remember, it was the “Superstitious”
“Primitive” “Noble Savages” in the Americas, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere that took pity on desperate white colonials.
The coming Age will be a Glorious one. Whether in a few decades or a few centuries, all Evil will be swept away and the ancient Druidic/Paleochristian/Vedic/Mystery School, etc. line of thought will prevail….
The Age of the Shaman will be born anew.
I think that manufacturing declined because energy got too cheap. The best way to revive manufacturing NOW is to tell the WTO to fuck off and impose some tarrifs. In my mind it foxes several problems:
– New tax revenue for the govt, allowing them to reduce wage/PAYE tax
– More expensive goods make people think twice about buying the latest gadgets
– Gets manufacturing within the U.S. going again.
I also think that some things are outrageously expensive because of cheap energy, and here’s an example from Australia.
A cyclone in a small Australian town ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Larry#Banana_Shortage ) in March 2006 resulted in bananas reaching about $16.00/kilo for the rest of the year. 80% of the bananas are grown in this small town: near-zero transport costs mean that anyone else who dares to grow bananas will be out-priced. The cyclone is gone now, and we’re back to the same banana monopoly, propped up by cheap energy.
Nick.
Continuing my last comment … local manufacturing will revive (on its own) when it becomes too expensive to ferry stuff in and out of China. But the judicious use of tariffs will get the western world ahead of the curve.
Although there was a significant comment/complaint of high freight costs in and out of China … from Toshiba – of all people (specifically speaking about laptops!!!). Although that was before the GFC depressed fuel costs.
They wailed: “We’ve just spent the last five years putting all of our manufacturing in China!”. Drongos.
anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear can understand where we need to start.
=================
OK, if I got this straight, we send the really incorrigible ones to an island called District 9 and the rest we breed the badness out of over many generations. That sounds workable. I’m down wit dat.;o)
Clarification-
“Homosexuality/Bisexuality/Intersexuality are quite normal and widespread. The books “Biological Exhuberance” and “Evolution’s Rainbow”
demonstrate that quite clearly enough. Abortion or selective gene therapy could help us eliminate a whole range of ills.
Problem with the last sentence of course is “Who decides?”
Homo/Bi/Intersexuality was honored and respected by MANY pre-Abrahamic/Crypto-Evil cultures. From Native American “Two-Spirits” to Fa’afafine, Hijra and so many other Third Gender concepts. Even after the Abrahamic time, Third gender and variable sexuality (especially among masculine men) was not considered abnormal until fairly recently.
Qshtik-
Hehehe, I’m JUST a little stricter than that. The really incorrigible ones get fried, the ones with a barely functioning conscious or heck, a self-preservationist mind get to live. As for breeding out the traits, absolutely!
Yet another clarification….
“Imagine things this way. Jews represent 3% of the USA population. Native Americans about 5%. Blacks about 15%, hispanics about 15-20%. If the United States is so white-oriented, why is it that [native americans] asians, blacks and hispanics are mostly still struggling, but “Jews” seem to be doing just fine in many very crucial areas of our Constitutional Republic?!? How in the Hell is a supposedly protestant/catholic white christian dominated Nation allowing so many “Jews” to hold so many positions?”
I will not tolerate bigotry towards jews. Whatever the evil creatures that lead jews today are, I see no real difference among christians, muslims or any other psychopathic rabble-rouser.
However, to get a true idea of the extent of Evil in the world today, think about Circumcision, both male and female. I mean REALLY think about it. Research it! Perhaps then the “Reality” of “Evil” in this world will slowly sink into your mind.
I’ll link a hint.
http://fr.video.yahoo.com/watch/352478/2210721
Yet another clarification….
“Imagine things this way. Jews represent 3% of the USA population. Native Americans about 5%. Blacks about 15%, hispanics about 15-20%. If the United States is so white-oriented, why is it that [native americans] asians, blacks and hispanics are mostly still struggling, but “Jews” seem to be doing just fine in many very crucial areas of our Constitutional Republic?!? How in the Hell is a supposedly protestant/catholic white christian dominated Nation allowing so many “Jews” to hold so many positions?”
I will not tolerate bigotry towards jews. Whatever the evil creatures that lead jews today are, I see no real difference among christians, muslims or any other psychopathic rabble-rouser.
However, to get a true idea of the extent of Evil in the world today, think about Circumcision, both male and female. I mean REALLY think about it. Research it! Perhaps then the “Reality” of “Evil” in this world will slowly sink into your mind.
I’ll link a hint.
http://fr.video.yahoo.com/watch/352478/2210721
What could the purpose be for I wonder? Hmmm?
Apologies for the double-post
I catch your drift Catman but the
landlords know very well that they
are paying exorbitant prices for
the real estate they bought from
those nasty lenders. They’re every
bit as guilty as the lenders because
BOTH are counting on “something for
nothing” through endless 10% appreciation
and “while-u-wait” passive income
from lessees with little structural
improvements being applied to buildings.
A lot of those maintenance costs you
cite could be ameliorated by making
one-time investments in, for example,
upgraded plumbing, better venting for
restaurant exhaust, and so on. Yet
in downtown Palo Alto the fact is that
the RENTERS are expected to pay for
earthquake retrofits, for example, and
NOT the landlords or the bankers.
I hold to my original thesis: The landlord
mentality is bleeding money from both
lessees and consumers and NOT plowing
any of it back into the real economy.
When housing and store fronts became a
COMMODITY instead of a place to live or
a livelihood, that was the beginning of
the end of this country.
E.
http://www.eutimes.net/2010/06/king-tuts-dna-is-western-european/
Striking new evidence that the early Egyptians were as White as Snow. Yes a few later pharoahs were Black, but Egypt was already in steep decline, so so what?
Anyone here ever read Fat, So? magazine? A magazine for fat women and the men who “love” them.
Osho – Oh, So!
The Jew paranoia is ridiculous. Sure, there are apparently a lot of successful Jews out there in various positions, but it’s not like they’re all 100 percent Jewish. It’s about descent.
It’s like saying because a bunch of poltical and Hollywood folks have a wee bit of English blood in them (many undoubtedly do — why not?) that there’s an English conspiracy to take over the world.
But no one pays attention to those fractions of English, Irish, German, Italian, and whatever bloodlines. But as soon as we find out someone is like 1/32 Jewish, people are like: “Oh my God! They’re a Jew and part of the Jewish conspiracy!
If you could prove to me that all those Jews in Hollywood, in the banking system, etc. were all 100 percent Jewish, I might take the conspiracy talk serious.
Hell, every white person I meet seems to be part Cherokee, but I don’t think there’s a Cherokee conspiracy or anything. I don’t even consider such people American Indians; I see them as someone who happens to have a small fraction of American Indian blood in their heritage.
Why not look at Jews the same way?
Cowswithguns, we are all part Cherokee because they took the whole Cherokee nation and put us on this reservation. They took away our ways of life, the tomahawk and the bow and knife, they took away our native tongue, and taught their English to our young. And all the beads we made by hand are nowadays made in Japan.
Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe, so proud to live,
so proud to die. They took the whole Indian nation, locked us on this reservation. And though I wear a shirt and tie, I’m still part Redman deep inside.
And I am proud to be part Jewish, specifically part “mulatto-Jew”, from ancestors who were fathered by Jewish slave owners.
I embrace all my heritage, white, black, Cherokee, Jew, and celebrate the diversity within me.
Though, ultimately, we are all just human beings on a very short journey of 70+ years on this planet. Our death will be here shortly.
So, while we are alive, “Why can’t we all just get along?” as Rodney King said.
Buffy St. Marie in the house! Pride, right on. I, personally, am not a proponent of racial pride. My attitude is: Hell, I have to be born something.
But that’s just me.
Er…I do, I’m part Seppardic myself on my dad’s side. I follow the Benjamin Disraeli model, stay the HELL away from the nutty rabbis.
When did I say real, bona-fide Torah observing jews? You seriously need to research Zionism and Talmudism and their long, sordid history. It’s a rabbit hole that will scramble your mind. Start with “Sabbatean” and Irgun and see where you go from there.
I don’t worry about religious people, whether jewish, christian or muslim, etc. I _do_ look closely to political movements that attempt spread or solidify “religious” teachings.
Have you ever found a copy of the Talmud in the book store? I mean an english or any other language beside Hebrew copy. You ain’t gonna find it. Now why is that so? The Torah, the Holy Bible, the Qu’ran are all readily available. The non-canon christian gospels and writings are quite available. So are the Hadiths in English. Yet aside from the Torah/Septuagint, you will NEVER find a Talmud or Zohar translated into English at any store. Really, why is that?
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/talmudtruth.html
Anyone who bills THEMSELVES as “wise”
in their name usually does what your
post did WWW … posit that a new
utopia is already underway and, of
course, only YOU see its ascendancy.
Sigh. I love Jim’s detractors whose
primary mode of discourse is that the
rest of us do NOT “see” but they DO
“see”. Evidence is beneath them.
Trust me … while Jim is by no means
an all-seeing oracle, I’m pretty sure
that in his meanderings if there was a
nascent return to nature breaking out
all over rural or suburban America, he
would see it.
Your post is just a kinder, gentler version
of Marcus’ who said that Jim had no idea
what a working man was and that he should
just die. In both cases, the posters just
pontificate without one whit of evidence
beyond their self-anointed near godlike
powers of altered perception.
As Bill Maher said on TV about religion,
the human race has to GROW UP OR DIE!!!
By the way … Marcus … if you think
a return of “boring” factories is the
devil’s handiwork, how’s it workin’ out
for ya to have GREEDY FINANCIERS running
a fake economy???
Thankfully, most of the posters on this
board are actually far above the average
for blogs because the two sides of the
debate usually attempt to deal in historical
or ontological evidence, even in these
singeing hot debates about race and
ethnicity.
I really wonder what universe these
New Age “goddesses” descend from or
are they just refugees from George
Nouri’s show who can’t get enough
air time?
E.
The Zohar. Translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon (and Dr. Paul P. Levertoff) … With an introduction by Dr. J. Abelson. Reprinted. 1968. London : Soncino Press, 1978.
http://amzn.to/aeY9MC
Steinsaltz, Adin. 1989.
The Talmud : the Steinsaltz edition.
New York: Random House.
http://amzn.to/aTDxWP
It’s unreal watching these financial
channels like Bloomberg and Fox Biz
trot out these pollyannas one after
another with an occasional jeremiah
just to claim “fair and balanced”.
The ECRI Weekly Leading Index fell
to a minus eight percent growth rate
and the Baltic Dry Index … perhaps
THE indicator of indicators … is
at the same level as May, 2009. It’s
in total freefall.
I guess the sponsors of these biz
programs are virtually commanded NOT
to deal with facts so they get these
starched shirts to talk authoritatively.
The poor saps who are the reporters must
get about an inch of leeway.
E.
“Write something funnier, entertain us better, or do the world a favor and kill yourself.”
Hey Marcus,
You may not agree with him, but at least Mr. Kunstler articulates a coherent position, and puts it out there for the rest of us to ponder. Most of the comments on this site are thoughtful and well considered. Your comment, on the other hand, is boorish and trite. Either contribute something of value, or just go away.
I feel no desire to continue conversing with you.
– Asoka
As you wish. Others on this forum have told me that arguing/conversing with you is a waste of time.
Yeah, I know the drill (been married for decades). Except Asoka is severely offended and won’t talk to me anymore. C’est la vie.
When housing and store fronts became a
COMMODITY instead of a place to live or
a livelihood, that was the beginning of
the end of this country. – Eleuthero
Totally agree. People believe what they want to believe. Everyone “knows” that buying a house is the best investment you can make or at least they did until this latest bust. In ten years this will all be forgotten and we’ll be in another cycle of speculation.
One of the differences I see between the political/economic cultures of the English-speaking and German-speaking countries is the balance between rights and responsibilities. In the English tradition, it seems the rights outweigh the responsibilities in various social contracts between various parties. I bet that even the mention of “responsibilities” sounds quaint to some folks. People, companies and especially corporations vigorously pursue their rights, but few live up to their responsibilities. Let’s be honest, humans are motivated more by our self-interest than by our responsibilities, and so there needs to be an institution which motivates people to fulfill their responsibilities. In the German-speaking world (the “Prussian” model) this role is performed by governments, legal and cultural traditions. Until last year, Germany was the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods (now China is). How is it that American manufacturing has been dying a hideous death in the last 50 years, but German manufacturing has been thriving? Not the cost of labor, I assure you, German labor is among the most expensive in the world. I believe it’s because of the culture of responsibility, both personal and collective, in the German tradition.
American manufacturing is a good example: companies used their “rights” to use clean land, water and air for short-term profits, then abandon the land leaving behind ruined water and air, abandon communities and individuals and move to new places and repeat the cycle. Why not, they are only responsible to their shareholders (which is not even true, but this is another topic). ANd when the profits were higher in far-away lands, they have the right to go there. SInce their responsibilities are not enforced, why not? And now that corporations can vote, we’ll see more of it. As a result, the American manufacturing scene looks like a tornado went thru it. I never see that in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. It’s very rare to see decrepit or abandoned buildings in cities, towns or villages there. THere’s vibrant commerce even in small towns, where most businesses are small-locally owned enterprises, not far-flung outposts of McDonalds and Kohls and CVS and Walmart and other such royal charters.
Business and businessmen there feel and act responsible to their workers (often their family, freunds and neighbors), community, land, etc.
Any irresponsible acts (poisoning of community’s land, water and air, exploiting then abandoning their employees) would not be tolerated. Here an irresponsible businessman can move to the next company, next state and the slate is wiped clean. Not in many places in Europe — his reputation will precede him anywhere he goes.
How could it be that GM, once controlling over 60% of the auto market, is bankrupt? While Benz, Audi, VW, Porche, BMW, etc. are thriving (yes, their sales declined lately, but they are basically healthy). One German company GM took over (OPEL) they drove into the ground.
THe common thread I see here is complete abrogation of responsibility by individuals, business and the government here in America.
Sorry for the long post.
Legalize
drugs and prostitution, regulate and tax them. – y’ello
Have to be careful with taxing them. Up here govts impose huge taxes on cigarettes. But in this neck of the woods about 40% of all the smokes sold are contraband and therefore untaxed. A lot are manufactured on Indian reservations and sold out of the backs of cars in plastic bags really cheap or in convenience stores.
What I’m saying is if you tax such things like drugs and prostitution too much you raise the price of the goods too much and its an encouragement for a black market.
Regulate for sure. Prostitution is a nasty business. The hookers you see around here look really messed up. The cops crack down on street prostitution but do nothing about brothels unless there’s a complaint. But the brothels are gang run, the inmates are nothing more than sex slaves from China/Phillipines etc. Really shitty stuff, extremely dangerous (violence, disease) for the girls and a public health hazard. I don’t know why we turn a blind eye, maybe up here we think we’re all modern and enlightened, but I think there’s horrible suffering going on in those places and I don’t think we should just let it be.
Askoka,what’s this BS about Cherokee”nation”?
Do you know the difference between a Nation and a tribe?
The Jew paranoia is ridiculous. Sure, there are apparently a lot of successful Jews out there in various positions, but it’s not like they’re all 100 percent Jewish. It’s about descent. – Cowswithguns
Agreed. My last boss was Jewish. His family came from Poland. The guy was blond and looked and acted like a big, rough Polack. Obviously a lot of inter-marriage/fornication going on. But in his mind he was Jewish not Polish. I think you are who you think you are.
Kunstler slams tattoos and your son is a tattoo artist; the vitriol seems to add up a bit more. As some have mentioned, the painting image you found so repulsive is just a start. Not a grisaille under painting, just a mapping out of the darks. As far as realism vs. abstract it’s all the same to me. Good realism demands abstract underpinnings and most realism breaks down and fails on this account. Conversely, most abstract art fully divorced from nature descends into generic convention devoid of the bountiful idiosyncratic inflections provided by nature. De Kooning protested against the non-objective categorization of his work by the critics as he consistently turned to nature for seminal shape inspiration. So Do Kooning might isolate the peeling paint on a tiny door hinge and monumentalize it in paint. Reality enlarged and expanded. Bad realism, on the other hand, fails when it attempts to do too much, whether it be a failure to sacrifice minutiae or a visual puncture from the acute intentions of narrative input. So Greenberg was right: painting is about paint. But so is the Russian realist who condenses and refines until poetry is achieved.
And what’s so fine about art, you ask? Well, I’m sitting here today–”It’s A Beautiful Morning“ — fondly thinking back to Paul Revere and The Raiders, to the days of my youth when the grass seemed greener and the rains more frequent–thanks Asoka!
Mark me down in the column that thinks things will improve when the mallrat cheetos culture gives way to something more closely resembling ancient tribalism.
Anyone who thinks that pre-agrarian societies endured short, brutish, and unfulfilling lives is simply out of touch with the facts.
Hobbes included.
Take your children out of public schools and cancel cable TV. Anything it takes to isolate them from the septic tide of American popular culture. They will thank you when they are 30.
– ubs
I knew one guy from Vietnam that immigrated here to make a better living. He went back to Vietnam, as you say, to isolate his kids from American culture.
I know another guy from India that also immigrated here. He has 2 daughters. His friends and relatives in India were strongly against his moving the family here for the same reason: exposing his daughters to the culture here.
You see little girls dressed like skanks. You see girls who go to private schools and wear the private school kilts. Those skirts are so short you don’t know why they bother. You wonder what their mothers are thinking, they must be nuts. I think we’ve lost our collective minds.
Tell me what’s so great about modern life. Even if you ignore the fact that the last 200 years have not been particularly pleasant for the vast majority of humans on Earth, and instead focus on the splendor of the United States alone, I’m still not convinced that it’s been a real boon.
And that’s only natural. We live in a culture of excessive energy. And excessive energy gets converted into mischief mostly. Without loads of excess energy we wouldn’t have a vast internet porn network, alcoholism, smack junkies, cancer, type II diabetes, 40,000 lost souls every year in car accidents (I really miss my grandmother who was killed by a drunk driver back in ’88), lost ecosystems to golf courses and strip mines, half a trillion a year in war budget, really freaking annoying car stereo systems and 22″ chrome rims with low pro tires (got to love the car show that is Macon, GA), and toxic garbage that somehow passes as food.
I’m as “poor” as I’ve ever been, and as healthy and happy too. All that other junk is gone. I grow a ton of my own food, quit any drugs and most of the alcohol that once plagued my life, and bike to the public library to chat with you fine folks. My bills are de minimis, I work with soil and plants, and I get to watch my children grow up every day.
It’s a rather fine existence compared to the career ladder climbing I was doing during peak economy. And apparently I’m not alone here. A standing ovation is due for you other guys – Diogen, Mean Dovey, y’ello, PeakInterest, among many others – who are engaged in REAL life instead of passing your responsibilities on to others in the form of daycare, farming, water supplying/treating, energy production…
Once more a gem of a piece Jim…
Twould seem we’re overlooking this*…
Law 32 – Play to people’s fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
(from the 48 laws of power)
*Bilderberg/Caryle group fantasists please take note…lol
Admittedly, all that passing the buck creates a lovely little economy, but it also destroys the biosphere that supports us by its excessive complexity. It won’t be long before more people understand that. And that will be a very good day for them.
Sublime writing. Thank you.
Thank you for that video, Y’ello.
I have always felt that if people could see a circumcision, they wouldn’t submit their babies to such barbarity.
But looking at the comments, some hard-hearted people don’t seem to care!
Two things – the first circumcision I saw was even worse, because the doctor called the hospital and said he was on his way, so get the baby ready. Meaning that the baby was naked, cold and restrained for 1/2 hour, until he finally showed up. Then, after it was over, I tried to take the baby to its mother, but they wouldn’t let me. They said that it would get cold!!!!
The other thing, I always refused to participate in circumcisions. As my friend said “I’m a conscientious objector.”
But, once, a doctor talked me into it by saying that he anesthetized the penis first.
OK. So I participated.
“Anesthetizing” the penis involves sticking a needle into the tip about 7 times.
Guess what? That hurts too.
I have to say that anyone who would knowingly submit their newborn to such a barbaric procedure is a horrible human being, and shouldn’t be a parent.
Whenever people bring up the horrors of female circumcision in Africa, I bring up male circumcision here. You should see them backtrack!! No,no, male is OK, female is horribly wrong.
Hypocrites.
I want to start a side conversation for anyone interested. It begins with my developing hypothesis about mineral density in the western diet. About 80% of our mineral density has disappeared in the US over the last 50 years, and with it, in my proposition, IQ points, reason, health, and social grace. I propose that the reason “organics” are so important is not as much because of the lack of chemical inputs – plants after all are the masters of biological transmutation – but because of the increase in mineral density due to properly nurtured soil life, particularly the symbiotic fungi that mine subsoil minerals. Humans require 90 minerals (surprise, surprise, all but the unstable radioactive ones on the periodic chart) but apply only Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium to agricultural soils to replace harvested fertility. This grows plants, yes, but the meanest skeletal versions of them. It’s not really food, it’s just bulk.
I think this is responsible for ALL of the problems faced by modern society.
Goes right along with the agricultural paradigm. Convert virgin ecosystems into humans via agriculture, absorb the latent minerals in the new acreage with a tiny selection of economically important crops, run them through our guts, and shit them out into the nearest receiving waters. End of mineral availability. And the estuaries are dying under the weight of those minerals to boot.
It’s a lose-lose scenario for all involved. There’s a reason why citizens of California and northern Iowa/Minnesota/Wisconsin are on average healthier and happier than everyone else. They’re getting the last of the fine mineral array that US soils have to offer. The rest of the country’s ag lands are just serving up oil and natural gas for dinner really. Or NPK derivatives thereof.
Research shows that ex-cons who received organic (more mineral-dense) meals while incarcerated have a significantly lower recidivism rate. Let’s start there. Anyone?
“I have always felt that if people could see a circumcision, they wouldn’t submit their babies to such barbarity.”
We didn’t circumcise Oliver. We just don’t get down with genital mutilation, however culturally acceptable…
I heard that circumcised males catch STDs a lot less often because there’s one less place for nasty bugs to fester. I’m not a doctor or nurse.
Is this true or false?
Maybe it is barbaric. I’m circumcised, have no memory of it and don’t know any different. Again I’m no medical professional but aren’t circumcising a newborn boy by a doctor in a clinic with a sterilized scalpel in antiseptic surroundings and circumcising a school age girl with an unsterilized knife with no anaesthetic in an unclean hut two different things? Isn’t cutting away a boy’s foreskin a radically different thing than cutting away a girl’s private parts?
However, what do you mean by pedophile?
When kids hit adolescent, they become sexual human beings, or more sexual.
Old societies dealt with this by marrying them off. Even some states (Georgia, Tripp?) still allow marriage at age 14 or so.
Now we pretend that they are innocent little beings corrupted by the evil society they live in.
Pre-adolescent preying, however, is not right. You want research on what causes it. Isn’t it already proved that children who have been molested are more likely to grow up to be molesters? Think Michael Jackson.
I don’t think that it is congenital.
Homosexuality, however, is certainly inborn.
And since they don’t usually reproduce, we should celebrate and appreciate “non-breeders”.
Good for you, Tripp.
Cash, at one time in America, most males were uncircumcised.
Then the push began. First, they said it would stop masturbation. Then they said it was cleaner.
As most men were circumcised, they used the “I want my boy to look like me” line, as seriously ridiculous as that is!
Now they use the “Stop STDs” line.
My objections go WAY beyond the sterile environment vs unsterile environment.
Yes, I suppose that there are fewer infections in mutilated newborn boys in the US than there are in mutilated adolescent girls in Africa.
That isn’t enough for me. I object to the pain and suffering, not the hygienic standards.
Plus, I’ve seen infections, as well as botched circumcisions.
I invite you to watch that video, and see if you think that since you don’t remember what happened to you, it’s OK.
You may be interested in what Karl Marx had to say about this problem, Tripp-
“But by the 1860s, based on his reading of such thinkers as Liebig, Johnston, and Carey, and in response to the soil fertility crisis, Marx began to focus directly on the soil nutrient cycle and its relation to the exploitative character of capitalist agriculture. Thus, in the first volume of Capital he wrote:
Capitalist production … disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the fertility of the soil…. All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility…. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker.”
I took this from the following article, which discusses your concerns, and talks about what our predecessors thought about it-
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n3_v50/ai_21031831/pg_4/?tag=content;col1
Another quote from that article that you will certainly appreciate!-
This argument was developed systematically in Marx’s analysis of capitalist ground rent in the third volume of Capital, where Marx also observed that, “In London … they can do nothing better with the excrement produced by 4.5 million people than pollute the Thames with it, at monstrous expense.”
Tripp,
I’m sure I could learn a lot from you about soils and gardening. I’ve often wondered why so many kids these days have attention deficit disorder and whether it’s related to diet. ADHD is a pandemic in my neighborhood.
One thing that has improved since, say the 50’s and 60’s, is cuisine (by this I mean home cooking). Back then Americans didn’t use olive oil, and they tended to boil vegetables. My mom used to serve Jello “salads”–yikes.
Never said circumcision was OK.
But to reiterate, I would hesitate to equate circumcision of a boy with circumcision of a girl first because the body parts are so different.
Secondly a circumcision in a modern clinic is not the same as one done in a filthy hovel.
I have no memory of it, no memory of pain, no sense of loss, no feeling about it at all. To an African girl who was circumcised much later in life I suspect the issue is much different.
Let’s agree both are cruel or at the least misguided. But I think one is more so than the other.
Cash, don’t take it personally! LOL!
I will continue talking to you. I like you as a person. I’m just not going to argue with you anymore.
This forum is not the best venue for sustained argument involving logic, peer-reviewed published research data, and historical evidence.
We can still entertain each other. That seems to be the zeitgeist of the era anyway.
And this one is for Asoka-
Such considerations on capitalist agriculture and the recycling of organic wastes led Marx to a concept of ecological sustainability – a notion that he thought of very limited practical relevance to capitalist society, but vital for a society of associated producers. The “conscious and rational treatment of the land as permanent communal property,” he wrote, is “the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of human generations.”
Diogen, personal property is different from “private” property, as in factories, mines, megafarms and such.
This country does NOT respect personal property.
Part of my front lawn was taken by the city to widen the road in front of my house. I am opposed to road widening on principle. That’s why I’m on this blog.
I especially was angry about my own personal property being taken. Too bad. That meant nothing to the city.
Also, the police frequently prey upon those who have the very least, the homeless. Like all Americans, they love their possessions, even if they do all fit into a shopping cart.
Too bad. The police confiscate and throw away their meager treasures.
Our city, like many cities, took Federal money to rebuild our high school out of town, abandoning the centrally located high school. This was a CONDITION of the federal funds. Now the kids have to be bused, and the new high school is like a prison, with dog tags and permanent police presence.
Anyway, a homeless couple moved into a shed on the old high school football field. She is a former salutatorian, and loves books. She had a bunch of books in that shed. The police came and took them all, breaking her heart.
Too bad for her. Her personal property meant nothing to the agents of the city.
Funzel said: “Askoka,what’s this BS about Cherokee”nation”? Do you know the difference between a Nation and a tribe?”
Hey funzel, don’t you think there is enough hatin’ on blacks and jews? Do we need to start on the Cherokee now?
For your information the Cherokee nation has a constitution, they vote, etc. Why does it bug you that they be called what they are?
Check it out? http://freedmen.cherokee.org/
OK, we’ll agree that all circumcision is bad, but if you’re going to mutilate your child, it’s best to do it with sterile instruments.
This belief that babies don’t feel pain, which is how circumcision is justified by some, used to be quite widespread.
I mentioned that I used to work in a NICU in San Francisco.
We didn’t do open heart there, that was done at SFSU.
We did have a baby that had abdominal surgery, though, and the surgeon came in one day and debrided his wound without anesthesia. The baby was screaming in pain, but the surgeon said “Babies don’t feel pain”.
Then my co-worker told me that at SFSU, they did open heart surgery on babies without anesthesia. The theory was that since most surgical complications come from anesthesia, they would solve that problem by not using it, since babies don’t feel pain, and won’t remember it anyway, if they do.
This bothered me tremendously. Finally, I called the child abuse hotline and reported them.
The woman taking my call argued with me. She said that she didn’t believe me. I said, “Isn’t that your job? To investigate allegations?” She indicated that, no, that wasn’t her job.
Later I read a Parade magazine report that half of the hospitals in the US were then using anesthesia, because research had shown that babies DO feel pain, and that babies who had surgery with anesthesia do better than ones without.
As any normal human being would say, Duh!
Wage, thanks for illustrating the difference between personal property and private property.
Now governments (city, state, local, whatever) have the right to take your personal property to make room for private property, as people in Connecticut found out when their personal property was taken to make room for private development. The Supreme Court ratified it in Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)
y’ello-
the tattoo fad is directly related to the idealization of primitive cultures in popular culture, especially hollywood movies. The very term “culture” is used to blur the distinction between civilization and primitive societies. In reality, there are important differences between the two, and one is very much preferable over the other. A fact that the iDiot generation will have to painfully rediscover of the next couple of years. If you care about your children, make sure to teach them not to dance with wolves. That way they won’t become the last of the Mohicans.
I have fond memories of meat loaf and jello salads. Yum.
Maybe 1950s/60s cuisine wasn’t great but I liked it all the same. In the 1950s and 1960s we didn’t eat out. Mom stayed home, didn’t go out to work and so had time to cook.
Nowadays it seems like the grocery store has a produce dept just for appearances sake. People do fly-bys with their carts so they can say they’ve been there. They look at roasts like they’re of extraterrestrial origin (a grocery store clerk told me she’d never cooked a chicken). Then they stock up on prepackaged, precooked, frozen stuff. That’s for when they aren’t getting pizza, takeout Chinese and other similar healthy, low cal, low cholestoral grub.
I’m not criticizing. OK maybe I am. But back then things were different. Only dad went out to work. Mom and dad stayed married. Nowadays mom and dad each have had three different “partners” by the time a kid is grown. Cooking and cleaning are menial and demeaning so no one does it. Fighting, mess and chaos reign.
A regimen of shopping, cooking, cleaning requires domestic peace, order and organization, parents acting like adults, cracking the whip and keeping things in line, not fighting, mess and chaos. An average adult used to have 2.8 kids. Now an average kid has 2.8 parents. Somewhere.
This business about babies not feeling pain is just plain nuts. I think maybe these doctors are educated stupid. Science based medicine doesn’t require abandoning common sense. If you stick a baby with a needle he/she cries. Golly, you don’t need an advanced degree to tell you he/she’s in pain. If a dog is kicked he howls. Same thing.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, in arguments I’ve had, that common sense doesn’t apply. Common sense ALWAYS applies. It just means accepting the simple evidence of your own eyes and not getting overly convoluted. Some things just don’t need multi-year, double blind studies with advanced statistical analysis.
Thank you Rabbi Kunstler, for a quietly sober and thoughtful essay on the ‘great turning’ we are are amidst. You paint a very compelling, eloquent picture of a world found, and lost. Thank you. dbt
I don’t take it personally. If you don’t want to argue that’s fine by me. You are the master of your keyboard.
Cash,
Once in a while I’ll cook a tuna noodle cassarole for the sake of nostalgia. When my kids were younger, I would make the annual St. Patrick’s day green jello salad!
My neighbor (with her $200K kitchen remodel) mostly cooks Kraft macaroni and cheese for her lifestyle accessory (only child). My next door neighbor defrosts for dinner. She goes out and buy’s these expensive frozen meals from a place called “Dream Dinners.” Better than pre-packaged frozen lasagna, I guess. She works full-time, so it would be hard for her to cook every night.
Tell me about it.
Common sense is seeing evidence with your own eyes and not getting over-convoluted.
It’s like watching buildings explode into billowing clouds of concrete dust, throwing small bits of human bones hundreds of yards onto other skyscrapers, and then being told “It’s gravity”.
But it’s easier to go along with what they tell you.
Although I care about babies and their pain, I used to paralyze them without even thinking about it.
Then, when I moved to ER and we don’t paralyze anyone without versed and morphine, I finally thought back to the babies and realized that they must have been terrified!
JackieBlue2U, you mention wanting to start a restaurant, but high rents are a problem. I’ve heard that the hot thing now is food trucks. You get a truck (or trailer) with enough kitchen equipment and roll up to a likely location, open the windows and sell lunch for a few hours. Take a few hours off, and then setup for dinner a few hours.
This has been a popular thing for a long time at the MIT campus, and I’ve heard it is common in California (taco trailers). We finally have one here in Lansing Michigan, but they just use the parking lot of a vacant store and don’t move the trailer.
And someone was telling me that the popular chefs are starting to do this too, for the same reason (high rents). Today’s technology is a big help, you can Tweet your location to let customers know where you are setting up that day. Search for a place called CurryUpNow, somewhere around SF, for an example.
Maybe the biggest hassle would be government, trying to tell you where you can park?
I used to bitch and moan about stress. Listening to you I’m thinking my life was a breeze. There is not enough money or liquor in the world that could make me look at what you’ve seen or deal with what you’ve dealt with. You must have some mental fortitude, either that or you must drink yourself senseless every night. I mean, Jesus H Christ, surgery without anaesthetic?
My wife had some surgical complications and we had to go to emergency and had to wait a while. While we were there I saw the parade of cases going in. It was a downtown hospital near drug central and it looked like a war zone. I do not know how the nurses there cope.
Cash said:
Finally, we agree …
No need to get overly convoluted. http://www.world-crisis.com/images/uploads/hiroshima_2.jpg
I’ve always thought of getting tattoos as a form of attention seeking behavior. I spent some time in the Navy in my late teens through my early twenties. Some of the people I served with trotted off to the tattoo parlor every time they got their meager paycheck to have more work done. By the time I got out, they were sporting “sleeves”. I never understood it myself, and I was afraid to get one because I figured I would probably hate it in a few years. I chose to be a borderline alcoholic instead.
Tattoos, in my opinion, serve the same purpose as designer clothing and flashy cars. They scream “Look at me!” Such things are perfect for insecure young people taking the first tentative steps on the journey to self-discovery.
Unfortunately, some people continue that attention seeking behavior late into life, because they never “discover” themselves. They attain a level of material success that allows them to live on autopilot, never questioning themselves or the world around them because everything is going well.
My mother asked me once how it is that I am so happy when I am essentially destitute. I told her that you don’t learn anything about yourself when things are going well, but you learn a great deal about yourself when are going poorly. Penury forces you to look inside yourself, and it forces you to recognize the concept of value. It also forces you to adapt and overcome rather than just throwing money at your problems.
peakinterest said: “My mother asked me once how it is that I am so happy when I am essentially destitute.”
My mother did much the same thing. After noticing how happy I am she said: “You will never have anything because you always give it away.”
She was right that I will never have anything, but that has had no influence on my being happy.
I suspect voluntary poverty may have even been a benefit in that respect.
For those interested in global warming new NASA data shows first half of 2010 hottest on record:
http://climateprogress.org/2010/07/10/nasa-hottest-year-solar-minimum/
Congress Acts to Protect Biodiversity
No, really, not speeches or votes, they engaged in real action, taking seeds to a DOOMDAY seed vault in Norway to conserve and preserve humanity’s chance for a future.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/13/doomsday-seed-vault-senat_n_644513.html
Asoka said to Cash – I like you as a person.
===============
As you may have noticed, I’m into words, their meanings and their pronunciation. For no particular reason I’ve even written a few compendia of words which reside in files on my computer.
One, that I mentioned in a recent post, is a compendium of commonly mispronounced words. Another, (that I haven’t mentioned before) was a compendium of basketball cliches. This came about when I was all wrapped up in “March Madness” one season when my alma mater had Jameer Nelson and Delonte West bringing the ball upcourt. (Both are currently doing well as professionals.) Dick Vitale, the mere sound of whose voice would send me scrambling for the remote’s mute button, was a cornucopia of cliches such as “step up,” “down town,” “athleticism” (which he pronounced ath uh let i cism) and the praiseworthy attribute of being “unselfish” which meant that the player so described would willingly pass the ball to a teammate if he, himself, did not have an open shot.
Given that preamble … today I am going to start “Q’s Compendium of Meaningless and Annoying Phrases.” The first entry will refer to “liking someone as a person.” Next to the phrase I will explain why it is meaningless and therefore annoying … such as liking someone “regardless of what they do or believe.” Examples will be noted such as “although Asoka believes Obama should be tried for war crimes he still likes him as a person” and a fictional entry: “although Jeffery Dahmer tortured, killed, had sex with the corpses of, and ate, his numerous victims, Asoka said he still liked Jeffery as a person.”
I have no second entry in mind yet but once I start really paying attention here at CFN the entries should come fast and furious.
OK, it might have been a DOOMSDAY seed vault.
But members of Congress are engaging in action that may save your grandchildren from starvation.
Seeds are important.
At risk of pissing everyone off; I repeat the essence of my posts from last week in response to the insensate comments that continue to populate this blog.
It appears to me that respondents to the CFN blog exhibit dichotomous logic when discussing the likely effects of peak oil and then suggesting cure after cure which completely ignore the major offending cause, too GD many so called homo sapiens. I say so called because additional major causes are greed coupled with willful ignorance of scientific/mathematical models which have existed for at least 200+ years predicting the points of no return we have likely passed or are fixing to shortly.
Poster after poster predicts that living small, electric vehicles, electric planes, wind turbines, solar cells, water turbines, nuclear power generation, coal power generation, horticulture, grass fed beef, free range chickens, permaculture, bicycle riding, minding our own business, saving ourselves, tossing the others under the bus, green houses, small houses, voluntary serialization, racist/non racist inclinations, buses, trade, NAFTA pro/con, unions pro/con etc., etc. will enable the Earth to support the exponentially exploding human population. BULLSHIT! The Earth is fixing to massively reduce the numbers of humans with or without the aid of the “knowing man”. Numerous well known researchers have attempted to raise awareness among the masses that there are or would be too damn many of us to allow the Earth to support each as she/he desires; soon! Pre-hydrocarbon era human population hovered about 1*10^9 vice the 7*10^9 of today. On this blog there appears to be a majority agreement that peak oil is real and that within 30-60 years the amount of oil being pumped from the Earth will be be very nearly the same amount that was at the turn of the 20th century. As Michael Pollan has been wont to say “we are eating oil”.
Hydrocarbon enhanced agriculture produces 4 to 6 times the yield per acre as non-pesticide and non-nitrate enhanced soil. When oil and natural gas are significantly depleted, to the point we are at pre-hydrocarbon food growing capacities, with a hell of a lot of the dirt that was fertile despoiled and paved over, prey tell how the hell 6*10^9+ extra humans are going to be fed. My expectation is that the remaining fertile dirt will be hard pressed to feed even 1*10^8- humans world wide. As this collapse unfolds the desperate will eat every last cultivated and wild animal and fish left on the Earth and then likely turn to mass cannibalism. Does that not sound like a happy future for today’s young-uns? For those who think that my recommendation to spay and neuter the human population and drastically reduce populations RAPIDLY is unwise, un-doable, impracticable, inhumane, or any other “un-” you care to conjure up; consider not bearing sons and daughters to bearing sons and daughters who end up eating or being eaten by other sons and daughters when there is naught else left to eat. Sound like a fun time for them to you? Why would any caring/loving person bring forth offspring with such a deplorable potential future for them?
From the US Census Bureau:
World Vital Events Per Time Unit: 2010
Time Births deaths increase
unit
Year 132,397,530 56,167,829 76,229,701
Month 11,033,128 4,680,652 6,352,475
Day 362,733 153,884 208,848
Hour 15,114 6,412 8,702
Minute 252 107 145
Second 4.2 1.8 2.4
Take note that the worldwide births are nearly 2.4 times the deaths yielding a phenomenal increase of more than 76 million humans per year this year. Only by decreasing human BIRTHS to virtually ZERO is there any possible chance to save homo sapiens from extinction. To this end my concept is a chemical neutering agent specifically for men. Sterilizing every swinging dick on the planet but allowing semen banks to store frozen sperm would ensure the capability to institute fertilization of human females in the future.
Why target only the men? Well as I hear it women have but a fixed and rather limited number of potentially viable eggs but those fucking men produce sperm by the gazillions. And speaking of fucking men I have also heard tell that there are homo sapien societies wherein men hold all of the aces and women have two choices when it comes to sex, they can acquiesce or be beaten into submission and/or possibly killed; I say let’s give women a few aces.
The sterilization of men needs be universal and capable of being implemented with or without agreement by the men. To this end the major powers of the Earth must be brought together to recognize the severity of the approaching catastrophic avalanche of human protoplasm and be convinced to do something drastic about it, now!
As the population ages death rates would likely reach 100 to 200 maybe even 300*10^6 per year. Even if it averaged 100 million per year we are looking at 50 to 60 years to get to the target population and I think we might have to allow some births during the down slope as 50 to 60 year old first time mothers might have a little problem with the process and thus the time to stasis lengthens.
Unfortunately there is also the BIG economic problem with an undoubtedly unpopular solution. There is some $83+ trillion, that roughly .1% of the Earth’s population control, out there looking for good investment opportunities preferably guaranteed by governments, in reality the other 99.9%. Do I have a deal for them, they get to possibly save humankind; all they have to do is give up all of their ill gotten gains and pay off all the world governments debts. All other banking cons and pyramid schemes must go away as well, with hair cuts all around. Stasis is the name of the game with a total population target between 1 and 2 billion. No more billionaires or even millionaires. The likelihood of the deep pocket controllers of the Earth’s governments allowing this scenario to occur; vanishingly small.
We (as a species) may be shit out of luck; what with global warming, peak oil, an impending agricultural crash, greedy bastards……. and way too many humans all waiting in the wings. The place to bend over and kiss our asses goodbye might be right around the next corner.
Nibbling about the edges with niggling individual behavior changes, on the part of the enlightened few, will never significantly alter the current trajectory of human kind. If minuscule efforts to possibly ensuring the existence of homo sapiens on Earth in 100, 1000, 10000 or 100000 years is all you think it will take; then keep on keeping on and watch it all slip away. Without large scale comprehension of the population bomb’s deleterious potential (name a problem facing us and it is ultimately because there are far too many of us) humanity is SOL.
Write your congressman/woman, write your president, convince your friends and relatives. If your experiences are as mine have been, half don’t want to talk about the problems, 40% nod while their eyes dart around the room looking for an escape port. Of the remaining 10%, 9.9% listen nod and continue on with their existing life style. A .1% conversion rate is not going to cut it. As Pogo so frequently said “we have met the enemy and he is us”.
SNAFU
I never met Jeffrey Dahmer but Roy Ratcliff, who baptized Jeffrey in prison, seemed to like Jeff as a person.
SNAFU said:
SNAFU, it is not possible for any of us to reduce the world’s population (except by cutting our own tubes; did you get a vasectomy?)
You are ranting about overpopulation (which you cannot solve, and probably did nothing about at age 20), while judging harshly anyone who offers any kind of practical solution to an immediate problem that can be solved.
Does not compute.
Jim and other peakers:
Cheap energy and its demise (including human labors, easily reached fossil fuels, or other sources that appear inexpensive but have avoided paying for externalities like environmental damage) is only one variable sending us to untenable pastures. Re-frame the issue, as the Hunger Folks have: there is plenty of food, starvation is a political invention.
Post New Deal “Capitalism” and its political twin, Corporatocracy (the corporate control of our political system), which has subverted both the distribution of capital to the most effective and efficient projects and caused the enormous drain of wealth (money, jobs, purchasing power, etc.) from the populous, up and out to a new aristocracy, is the underlying cause of the current financial crisis.
It makes no difference whether the jobs were in manufacturing or elsewhere. IBM is making a fortune shipping Information Technology jobs over seas. Medical Tourism is on the rise.
None but the most menial geo-local jobs are safe, and they cannot sustain an middle class economic base. Those with money still only eat three meals, snacks and some much in beverages a day. They need only build at their wimp, garden, buy art, entertainment, boats, planes and vacations as needed.
Meanwhile, the “artificially low price of energy” brings meat from New Zealand, tomatoes from Israel, hardware, including heavy, cheap inferior dry wall from China,(which Jim, we have plenty of manufacturing capacity right in the Hudson Vally, or at least we did just 15 years ago. Is the U.S. Gypsum plant still there?)
It’s the rules of the game, stupid!!! There is no under priced energy! The price of energy is set, we just don’t make the New Robber Barons pay the price.
The problem is obvious. The only way to stop the slide is direct economic action. The work has to be done by those who have not yet lost their jobs, but soon will. Cut up your credit and debit cards: use cash. Avoid the Big Greed box stores, Big Greed national banks, Big Greed chain restaurants, Big Greed junk food, use less Big Greed Energy: gas, oil, natural gas, electric, don’t invest in Wall Street’s Big Greed mutual funds, individual stocks, pension plans. You get the idea: if it is part of the Corporatocracy don’t feed it or feed it less.
Start taking some positive steps to end Big Greed and its control of the rules of the game, stop whining and spread the word.
http://www.UseCashMovement.com
Thanks, Chaz.
Here is another alternative: do not use cash and embrace a barter economy where possible.
Here is an article (with many links) about how the barter economy is now working effectively:
http://www.boiseweekly.com/boise/you-barter-believe-it/Content?oid=1152533
Hey, I like Doritos.
@ yeast people: consider adoption.
Snafu wrote: “The sterilization of men needs be universal and capable of being implemented with or without agreement by the men.”
It is already happening, albeit slowly, and certainly not in time to stave off catastrophe.
Apparently male fertility in North America (specifically) is dropping substantially. Consensus is that the causes are environmental. Whichever way you slice it, we’re screwing ourselves into the goround.
Now yr sounding like Michio Kushi, a very wise man!
minerals are very important.
see ‘ the magnesium miracle ‘.
-Asoka
http://www.revisionisthistory.org/wire1.html
“The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith knows that the book Judaism’s Strange Gods is winning converts to our Cause from around the globe, including formerly “frum” Jewish persons who find personal liberation in being set free of the evil Talmudic micro-management that oppresses every moment and detail of their lives.”
“With regard to your first point: I suppose to a goy or even to a Jewish person who is not Talmudically-literate, the ADL report, The Talmud in Anti-Semitic Polemics, would be compelling. Actually it is a joke. Yes, I will answer it at length, when I have the time. For the present, allow me to provide you with a bare bones research lead into the ADL’s intellectual dishonesty: the ADL report “exposing” my book, Judaism’s Strange Gods, omits the Steinsaltz Talmud translated by Orthodox Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, from the ADL’s bibliography and footnotes. The ADL “expose” only cites the older Soncino edition and the new ArtScroll version, which is in progress. Both of these versions are redacted and bowdlerized editions of the Babylonian Talmud. The Steinsaltz edition is a reasonably accurate and uncensored Babylonian Talmud (perhaps that is why Random House stopped publishing it). The Steinsaltz edition confirms the fact that Jesus Christ is mentioned in Talmud passages in which He is derided and degraded, contrary to the ADL’s absurd obscurantism in this regard. The ADL is so dishonest, they are preying on the gullibility of the goyim and the ignorance of secular Jewish persons to gain credit for their fraud. That is how brazen they are in their intellectual dishonesty.”
“For true Jews there is only one divinely-inspired book, The Bible[Torah] — not the Talmud! The Bible liberates, the Talmud enslaves.”
Notice that the Steinstaltz edition is no longer published.
I am referring to Zionism and Talmudism as examples of insanity in the world today, the same applies with just about any other “ism” since ALL have been corrupted and perverted by Evil beings.
Here are four very good articles to read.
http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/2010/06/social-engineers.html
http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/2010/07/and-one-day-owner-came-home-and-was.html
http://intotheashes.imva.info/?p=388
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2008/01/02/02073.html
And I HIGHLY recommend securing a copy of “Political Ponerology”
http://www.ponerology.com/
Good documentary.
http://documentaryheaven.com/i-psychopath/
Excerpt: This is Sam Vankin (The Psychopath) Talking to the Documentarian after he has been baiting and verbally abusing him.
“After subjecting Walker to a series of degrading insults (a regular occurrence during filming), and with Walker still visibly in shock, Vaknin coolly, and with disturbingly sadistic insight, described the process to him:
“Your body was flooded instantly with adrenalin and its relatives like norepinephrine … Now when these moments pervade the bloodstream, your brain reacts. It shuts down certain centers and activates others. This is called the stress reaction, or stress syndrome, actually. Then when the abuse recedes, the adrenalin levels begin to drop. As they drop, the entire system goes into mayhem.
So what bullies usually do, they start and stop, start and stop. That achieves the maximal stress syndrome, and this is the great secret of bullying. Never overdo it. Small doses. The victim will do the rest. – Although you are shaking much less [now] … I must do something about that.”
This will give you a much better understanding of the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.
‘seemed to like Jeff as a person’
Qtip..you there?
This is a request to trippticket. Your posts are the most enjoyable and helpful on this site. I am fascinated by your descriptions of how you and your family live in Georgia.
Would you consider writing a blog to share more details about growing crops, alternative energy, etc? Those of us in the sustainable urban agriculture movement in the Pacfic Northwest could learn a lot from you.
Alternatively, do you ever email reports to friends and acquaintances about your activities? If so, I’d like to be on your distribution list. What is the etiquette about sharing one’s email address on this site?
Thanks,
SunsetSu
Lady Tattoo
The three ring
Is not for her.
The nose ring
defines her circus.
And her body ink
So clearly shows
That she’s on the brink
Of a grave new world
Ready to sink.
Ah,good old bartering,a meal or two for a good days work.Sounds like dream come true for the idle rich.
Tripp, thanks for the invitation to converse.
It is very difficult to isolate variables and say that x causes y. You are asking about the relation of organic diet to mineral density and it is very difficult to determine exactly whether organic diet increases mineral density, though your supposition is logical and make sense.
A study was done on the contents in yolk and albumen of the trace minerals Se, Zn, Mn, Co, Cu, Mo, V, Cr, Ni, Tl, As and Cd (measured by using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, or ICP-MS) in eggs from hens from three husbandry systems.
Conventional hens were given a commercial feed with added minerals, organic hens were given a feed based on organic feedstuffs also with added minerals, and courtyard hens were fed on cereals, legumes, grass and swill.
Dietary Se, Zn, Mn, Co and Cu concentrations were lower in courtyard compared to conventional and organic diets;
Cr concentration was highest in courtyard compared to organic diet.
Trace element contents in yolks were higher than those in albumen.
The highest content of Se in yolks was in organic, followed by conventional eggs.
Zn contents were highest in courtyard yolk, followed by conventional, which in turn was higher than organic.
Mn yolk contents were lowest in courtyard eggs;
Cr contents were highest in courtyard eggs.
The differences in albumen were in Zn and Cr values, which were highest in courtyard eggs.
So, as you can see it is very difficult to draw conclusions.
My practice is to not eat eggs and, instead, eat a variety of organic foods, especially vegetables with lots of colors (green, red, yellow, orange).
And remember that, if it comes to you through a window at a drive-up, fast-food place, it is not food.
TYPO CORRECTION (so Q can sleep tonight):
your supposition is logical and makes sense.
Planted 350 variously colored gladiolus June 21. In zone 6a outside of Boston. Coming up swell, about 14 inches tall, should bloom in August.
You can plant way past recommended planting season, things’ll just bloom smaller.
Also planted 110 leftover fragrant Acidanthera bulbs (Peacock Orchids). Stuff’s wonderful to watch grow, and I sell ’em for $1 each (glads too).
I love flowers and plants. Much more logical to worship them, you can see the goodness a tree provides. What are we all doing chasing plastic lives?
Peace to you all.
Qtip..you there?
==============
Yes, I’m here. Why do you ask?
I hate to have to admit this, and I loathe the violations of human rights that would have to take place in order to implement your population reduction program…..
……but you are most likely dead right in your assessment of our population predicament.
What a shame. Such a wholesale violation of basic human rights would not be necessary to reduce the planet’s population to sustainable levels, were it not for the human rights violations practiced by every patriarchal society since the beginning of human history, which is to box women into such a position that they only thing they can do is breed, whether they want to or not.
It’s bad enough that most traditional cultures institutionalize rape and child molestation of young females in the form of forced marriages at ridiculously early ages, but what’s worse, this is done in order to assure that males can father as many babies as possible for which they bear no real responsibility, and make contraception illegal and impossible.
But that’s where we’re at, isn’t it. Violations of rights breed more violations of rights. Abuse necessitates more abuse. The use of force in enforcing the norms of a culture necessitates the further use of force in reversing its bad results.
It’s tragic. It’s really no use to imagine “what could have been” but you really wonder how much different a place the world might have been if we had exalted individual rights for the past five thousand years, and coupled them with commensurate personal responsibility.
Great post this week, JHK. Last week was excellent, a practical roadmap to a future.
Another commenter said it better than I when he said last week, “You set the nail with one blow of the hammer.”
Now this week you took a nostalgic look back at the past. (complete with artwork…which resonates a little with me)
You leave unstated something I thing we’ve got to confront…..A Nation must know where it has been to have any hope of moving into a Future.
=================================================
The South is full of old industrial monuments like the ones you found on the Hudson. They are just harder to identify. Maybe it is the hotter and more humid climate, or perhaps you have to peel back the kudzu first before you can tell what you have. Or it may be that most of them were blown to pieces as a consequence of that recent unpleasantness between North and South.
And every little crossroads in the South used to have a cotton gin, a couple of stores, and a couple of churches. All were small (microscopic) by today’s standards, but they held families and communities together for generations. Now they are mostly gone….even the old foundations…like a way of life that never even existed.
“Song, song of the South
Sweet potato pie and hush yo’ mouth
Gone, gone with the wind,
There ain’t nobody looking back again….”
Plenty of courses in Hyderabad and Bangalore to learn computer technology, I checked. I don’t know if they take foreign students. If your going to get hopelessly in debt, might as well make some exotic memories in the process.
Another plus is that when finished you can work anywhere an Indian can. Maybe even here and as a citizen you would not even need a visa to be legal.
Planted 350 variously colored gladiolus … [they’re] … Coming up swell …
==============
I haven’t seen the bolded word above used in ages. I’ll guess you’re 75 or older.
It reminds me of an old routine where an english tutor advises a student to rid her speech of all slang saying “There are two words you must never use, one is swell and the other is lousy.” The student replies: “Really? What are they?”
It’s funnier when delivered by professional actors.
Hate to tell ya, Asoka, but Eminent Domain is no new thing. It has been practiced, first by our authorities, to build (unnecessary) highways and military installations, then by our authorities on behalf of politically connected businesses and developers.
I might as well have been howling at the moon back in 1982 when I protested the seizure of homes and businesses by a real estate developer in St. Louis-whose development failed, by the way.
Unfortunately, the constitution allows the taking of property for “public purposes”- a core violation of individual rights that should not be permitted in a civilized society. No one bothered to challenge this before Kelo.
To permit seizure of people’s property for the “public good” however that might be defined at the moment by whoever holds the reins of power, violates the entire spirit of our constitution.
This is one more legal abuse that needs to go the way of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the inferior legal status of women.
SNAFU,
I’ve given up on my metaphor of the CFN threads as the bar scene in Star Wars…where alien cultures meet and try to understand each other.
Too many prickly personalities on here. We’d all be blown to bits in a hail of light sabers and photon torpedo pistols in a matter of seconds.
It’s crazy, and maybe worthy of a Doctoral Thesis, how people seem to project their own personalities onto others on CFN. In my mind, and absent evidence to the contrary, everyone who posts is an intelligent, affable, middle aged male with a receding hairline and a goatee.
You MUST?? have those characteristics??
Then if I discover a poster is a different race, I immediately shift all those characteristics above onto a good looking guy (like me?) with a different amount of melanin in their skin.
If I discover a poster is female then I mentally remove the goatee, add pretty blond hair and posit a spirit who looks somewhat like my wife.
Go figure!
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that we might (violently?) disagree about a bunch of stuff but I think we’d understand each other.
I’d be on board with your population proposal if you can figure out a way to pull it off, for example.
And your pessimism about the future strikes me as far more honest than that of a HUGE group of posters…..who think that collapse will be orderly…and neat….and end up with well behaved kids who reject contemporary society, turn off the TEEVEE and sing songs like in the “old days.”
I am afraid they are wrong in terrible ways most of us cannot even begin to imagine.
I’ve been a doomer. I’ve been a slider, and I’ve made my preparations for both as best I can.
I can do no more for myself and my family than I have already done.
Now I’ve got my back up against the North Georgia mountains and I’ve turned as best I can into an internet fighter….fighting for a slightly better Future, and for the Grandkid, who you may have heard me mention.
Regards,
C
Our moment as a culture was really so short! I, too, have been mesmerized for years by the wreckage we leave behind us.
I grew up in a Rustbelt city where industry had just begun to flee. Some surprisingly nice buildings were in the process of being abandoned, including the huge, ornate headquarters of the regional railroad, but no one was putting together that most industrial prosperity was truly going away. It would have seemed unthinkable.
Anyway, I had a summer temp job in a downtown law firm who often had business with the corporate remains of this now-bankrupt railroad. One day I had to run an errand there, and after I passed under the huge vaulted entry to the empty terminal, I was alone except for the cobwebs and the lone elevator operator. Up we rode to the 10th floor, and when I got out, everyone in the headquarters suite was out to lunch.
I dropped off my paperwork and started walking around the empty floors. The offices were built in a square around a courtyard/air shaft(pre-air conditioning, of course) that was filled with trash. All were empty. Stranger still, none had been “modernized”. The floors were oiled wood planks, the desks the bare-bones models Andrew Carnegie’s clerks might have used, the file cabinets that hefty, no-nonsense olive green of the early 20th century.
The entire place–floors and floors of it, which I saw because I couldn’t resist continuing to peek–looked as though the last freight clerk had put down his pencil in 1918, parked his last Bill of Lading in the carriage of the old Underwood, gone out for an Armistice Day celebration, and never come back.
A 20s movie could have been shot there without no changes at all. The enormous railroad (a local household name and secure employer for generations) had just … ended.
As you can see, I’ve never forgotten that routine office errand. If only I’d grasped that it was just the beginning! But none of us were quite that smart then.
could have been shot there without no changes at all.
==============
Options:
. with no changes
. without any changes
>I’ve been a doomer. I’ve been a slider
What’s a slider?
>If I discover a poster is female then I
>mentally remove the goatee
Oh no, now I may have a nightmare about females with goatees – good going P, thanks a lot.
A nice bit of nostalgia for the old South… any thoughts about the fate of the South if Global Climate Change (a.k.a. Global Warming) gains momentum? Any way to turn Kudzu into human food? I’ve read that goats like to eat it, perhpas this is one way 🙂
On a lighter note:
http://www.ajc.com/business/pecan-farm-to-double-541110.html
This link goes to an article in the Atlanta paper last month about a man who built a one acre solar (PV) array at his pecan farm.
The site will produce 310,000 Kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
That is enough power to run 20-30 normal suburban houses.
It is the electrical equivalent of EIGHT THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED GALLONS OF GASOLINE, produced every year for the projected 50 year life of the panels. All without consuming a single ounce of coal, oil, natural gas, or nuclear fuel
This one facility doubles, REPEAT DOUBLES, Georgia Power Company’s entire output of photovoltaic (PV) power.
Why are people not jumping up and down, taking to the streets, and demanding these things be put up all over the US?
=================================================
On a side note, nobody seemed to notice last week when I posted that JHK’s beloved passenger trains are no more fuel efficient per passenger mile than a 35 MPG Chevy with two people in it.
I’ve confirmed it from a couple of sources, folks. Passenger trains burn (waste?) just as much fuel as passenger cars with multiple occupants.
TRAINS ARE NOT A SOLUTION!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxl-_3MzJkA&feature=related
Diogen,
I’ve seen the term slider used on here before…kinda thought it was common terminology.
You know….the long slow PO and/or environmental collapse…a slide into a “bad” future.
As opposed to the doomers…who plan to shoot all their weapons, eat their canned turnips, and celebrate a short, quick, exciting environmental collapse.
I think both groups are wear DEEPLY TINTED rose colored glasses.
to answer your other questions…
Global warming will make the South hotter, but HELL, it’s already hot.
Kudzu…and many non-food plants, will grow faster in a hot CO2 rich environment..and that is a possible biomass partial solution…
Hot temperatures don’t concern me as much as climate shifts that reduce regional rainfall…there’s anecdotal evidence of that already.
Speaking of kudzu….this is important and I just thought about it… then I’ve gotta quit for the night.
=================================================
I’m working with a registered forester and a couple of loggers to get some pine forest in middle/east Georgia thinned.
And Georgia Power had put together a program to buy “trash trees” for biomass electrical generation. My loggers said it was amazing how fast the program went together and they were hauling 100’s of 20 ton loads to a plant in N. Georgia.
Then the program mysteriously ended….something about tax credits and write offs from the Feds being withdrawn.
Naturally…the program ended just as I put my trees on the market….so the loggers will have to cut the trash and just let it rot on the ground…. at least it is soil enrichment for future growth.
Go figure!
Life is good, anyway!!
I talked to the factory generation about the days that Jim described,and yes hard work,but they felt proud to be building something. Anyway in my rustbelt city of western NYS, a small article came out in our newspaper that the city water pipes and the county water pipes ( 2 separate operations run by both parties political pals) are losing millions of gallons of water because of the aging lines, and the sewer treatment plant reports in 5 to 10 years major overhauls are needed,but instead we worry about John Travolta moving to our region. Ahhh, the good olde days:)
Can we have a seprate area to discuss ideas about prep,tools, gardens, water, heat,etc?
Paula said:
Paula, evocative scene you painted in words.
I was just becoming of age in 1967. It was the summer of love, anti-war protests, and hippies having Be-ins in the park.
The hippies talked of an alternative to the materialistic militaristic consumer society. The hippies said make love, not war. They said tune in, turn on, and drop out. They saw the corruption of mainstream society and what it would lead to way back in the 1960’s.
And the hippies were ridiculed, ostracized, and beaten in the streets. Nixon was elected president, committed his crimes, and was impeached.
Then the hippies took up the back to the land movement, self-sufficiency, organic food co-op movement, which eventually was co-opted by the mainstream as Whole Foods and Trader Joes and Central Market chain stores.
In the 80’s the protesters knew what was in store: the outsourcing of jobs, destruction of labor unions, a trickle down economics, deregulation, institutionalized corruption and greed. Reagan was elected president and spent the country into debt with his combination defense spending and tax cuts.
In the 90’s when when the capitalists started with the WTO, and GATT and NAFTA, and “free trade” those who protested were in the streets being beaten and jailed. Clinton was elected, “welfare reformed”, more war waged, and NAFTA became reality. At least Clinton left a balanced budget before leaving.
Then Bush was appointed when the Supreme Court ordered the votes in Florida not be counted, knowing Gore had won the election. We saw the destruction of the middle class, with a giant transfer of wealth to the rich through corporate tax cuts, off-shore tax havens, a loss of civil liberties and a loss of 600,000 jobs a month, and the TARP bailouts which were approved by Bush, Obama, and McCain.
With Obama the bank heists have continued, we have a “jobless recovery”, increased war expenditures, more boots on the southern border than ever before, corporations with person-hood, and a national government that is paralyzed and is engaging in endless bipartisan kabuki theater.
So, to sum up, I wouldn’t say “But none of us were quite that smart then” because there were plenty of people from the 1960’s on that tried to protest and got beaten, tried to develop alternatives in a counterculture and were ridiculed, tried to stop endless expenditure for war, tried to stop the destruction of unions and the middle class, tried to stop the destruction of the environment and electoral fraud.
But they were unsuccessful, and the country now belongs to the corporations, not the citizens.
And the oligarchy has managed to shift our focus to “illegal immigrants” and “liberals” as the cause of our problems.
I have family in Atlanta and I would say the drought Georgia suffered in 2008-2009 was not “anecdotal” …
Lake Lanier was very close to it’s record low of 1,050.81 feet. It got all the way down to 1,051.35 feet just 1/2 a foot away from the record.
And I don’t think Georgia has escaped the possibility of another drought. Right now, in July 2010, there is an expanding and worsening drought over Western Mississippi, Louisiana and Southern Arkansas.
Laura, I agree.
On the bright side … it is now completely legal for two human beings to love and marry one another in the state of Massachusetts, where GLAD and its cooperating law firms have won a great victory — a real first. Never before has a court ruled that the federal DOMA is unconstitutional.
few here are willing to confront [ someone else dubbed him]:
‘Mr cut and paste’!
government!
went to a talk tonite by a mr pearse? who was arrested in santa monica for building an electric car in a garage.
i went to samo library to find no paper towels..instead a sign:
in the interest of sustainablity we in city wont offer them in restrooms!
govt gone amok
someone said they were going to scroll past another person and not read or respond.
But that someone broke their word and has been secretly reading and publicly whining all day long.
I don’t doubt that earth is getting mighty crowded, but I think it might be rather difficult predicting how a mass die off might take place.
As far as I know, India and China are leading the world in population, with America finishing way back in the pack. I can certainly see Asia experiencing a lot of the deleterious effects you brought up, but I’m not so sure something like that would happen in the Americas.
All of this is speculation on my part, but I wonder how you might see things breaking down on a per continent basis, because the world’s billions aren’t exactly evenly distributed around the planet.
Where Have We been? Where Are We Going?
I was here in “83… I am Earl, from Alabama.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19830819&id=0nk0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=mKUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3935,4396407
We hope to ride with you on your next bike tour. How much would it cost? I am in! http://www.kunstler.com/Bike%20Ride%202010.html
And the thanks be to JAH.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIpcCzNiN5s
SNAFU, I answered you last week, I guess too late for you to see.
“There is an easier way between your vision of oppressive Big Brother sterilizing all men, and Laura’s oh,well-too-late-now.
I totally agree with you that the way to reduce population is to reduce births, not the evil kill the old that we are being pushed to accept.
But I don’t believe that the kind of repressive, overbearing solution that you give is appropriate.
Number one, let’s just worry about the US. That’s where we live, we are the most destructive to the planet, and other countries can deal with their own crisis.
For instance, China has been on this for decades, leading to screams of “oppression” from the right and the religious here, who prefer to have babies born and starve to death.
This is America. We should deal with the problem with money.
Most responsible people sterilize themselves anyway.
I say we pay women $6,000 and men $5,000 to be sterilized. And let the service itself be free. Not a tax credit, a cash bonus.
I wrote about it in my blog.
http://wagelaborer.blogspot.com/2010/04/community-of-citizens-or-collection-of.html
By the way, one of the women I talked about was then sterilized, but the mother of the other told me last week that she is pregnant with her tenth child!
In the meantime, we had a 2 month old baby beaten to death a couple of weeks ago.
I was watching the news, and they said that he had left behind 4 brothers and 2 sisters!!!!
Really? These people need to be sterilized!!
And I believe that a cash bonus would be enough incentive to do it.
I talk about my idea all the time at work, and most everyone agrees with me, even the ones who start out advocating the Big Brother solutions of licensing, or forced sterilization.
I hated NICU, but I like ER.
My co-workers are mostly great, we have a good time, and people’s stupidity mostly amuses me.
It may be wrong, but that’s how we are.
But thanks for the concern.
The Locusts have no King, yet they attack in formation. And great labyrinths are created by ants who just take a grain of dirt and place it where it feels right. Conspiracy is often nothing more than such “flocking” behavior. But that it is unconscious does not make it any less real or less deadly. The ants who build, farm, go to war, and milk their herds of aphids don’t know what they’re doing, but they sure know how to do it.
Con spire – they breath together.
And at the highest levels, conspiracy obviously is conscious – as per the Bilderbergers, CFR, Bnai Brith etc.
“The Jew and Goy are like wolf and lamb; if you want the Wolf to dwell with the Lamb, please provide a fresh lamb every day.” – Israel Shamir, Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity
What do you think of the Orthodox Anti-Zionists, the Neturei Karta? I mean if they follow the Talmud, they’re still our enemies. Are they not just trying to enlist the hapless right wing goyim to fight their internecine battles? Truly nothing is thicker than a goy’s head.
Oh, Asoka, why do you fall for ruling class trickery?
The key to biodiversity is not a “doomsday vault” to which WE do not have the key!
The key is for individuals and communities around the world to continue saving and breeding seeds which have worked well for them in their own specific localities.
A vault in which seeds are saved, and Monsanto holds the key?
How could that be good?
http://www.grist.org/article/jolly-gene-giant/
Yellow to you. I agree. I’ve read some Ponerology and it’s terrifying. It makes me despair about being human. These monsters actually recognize each other early on and learn to cooperate against real humans. The stories of Vampire Societies are not so far off after all. But what do you propose doing about it? Any widespread, mandatory sterilization campaign would just stengthen the hand of the psychos who are already in control.
I’m certainly in favor of voluntary sterilization and that subnormal individuals should be urged in this direction. And further, as Margaret Sanger knew, an undully large percentage of Blacks fall into this category. Some say they are more different from us than the Bonobos are from the Chimps. A different species perhaps – certainly a different subspecies.
Bravo Diogen, you have put your finger on the crux of it. But don’t hold your breath waiting for anyone here to get it. Everyone in America loves rights – as if they have any meaning apart from responsibility and duties. And such responsibility makes for a good society – surely no one believes that there can be one without good people? That just what people tend to believe; that some system like libertarianism can make morality unnecessary.
But it can never be. There is no getting around morality. Responsible people don’t place an undue burden on Goverment. And they create companies that make good products which they stand behind. A good private sector keeps the Goverment in check and a good public sector keeps the private sector in check – and performs the functions that only it can do. Surely no sane person wants to go back to private armies, privately held toll roads, and walled villages? But that is just where we are headed because of our confusion about the mutual dependence between the Public and Private Spheres.
Asoka,
You’re right; since the late 1960s, many people have been warning us about the decline and fall of the American empire: Dr. King, Ralph Nader, Noam Chomsky, Dennis Hayes, Malcolm X, Sen. George McGovern; novelists Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy & Barbara Kingsolver,
playwright Arthur Miller, the American Indian Movement activists, singer/song-writers Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joan Baez and Utah Phillips; historians, journalists and social critics Howard Zinn, Benjamin Barber, Wendall Berry, Kevin Phillips, David Korten, Jim Hightower, Bill Moyers, Molly Ivins, Jared Diamond, John Perkins…
I participated in most of the political events you described, starting with anti Viet-Nam war demonstrations. My hippie friends and I got gassed and beaten by the cops in Minneapolis during the protests of 1970 and 1972.
I’ve been politically active my entire life, but I no longer believe it’s possible to change the federal government. We’ve lost the Supreme Court to right-wing nutcases and corporations control the White House and Congress.
Our last chance to turn things around was in 1974, after the Oil Embargo. Our last real president, the hapless Jimmy Carter, tried to convince us to turn down the heat and put on sweaters.
People didn’t want to make any sacrifices, so we were easily suckered by Reagan, the corporations’ fatuous mouthpiece. Things have been doing to hell since 1981. Now it’s too late to fix anything on a national level. As Candide said, “we must cultivate our gardens.”
Vlad-
I agree that anti-Zionism without a critical re-evaluation of the Talmud isn’t going to get you anywhere. Zionism lives,breathes and preaches the Talmud. It is the sort of logic you’d get from Coyote or Raven if they were demented and humorless or say, Ahriman.
Surprisingly enough (or not, again I’d recommend looking at the legal immigrant group with the highest rates of education and entrepreneurialship), native Africans are _least_ likely to be born psychopathic. That might be due to their lack of Neanderthal genetics. However, they are _most_ likely to be ponerized under the right circumstances. Look to where the majority of dictatorships and tyrannies have thrived in the modern Era. That’s “former” colonies in the South. Anywhere people try to live a traditional lifestyle off the land and still retain strong cultural bonds…now why would that be? Read the book, it’s an eye opener. So is this article
http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/2010/06/social-engineers.html
Excerpt:
“Why do these people have hard lives? These people have hard lives because there is NOTHING wrong with them. The truth is that social engineers have engineered a system that forces people like this into lives of extra difficulty precisely because these indigenous people know how to work hard, they know how to live off the land, and they know how to run their families. Therefore they are naturally strong, the mortal enemies of social engineers, who abuse trusting people to weaken and fray society in order to gain power, and who specifically target the strongest groups first.
On and on. Around the world. Over and over again the story repeats. The people live on the land, they work hard and have big families. They have enough to eat. They have clean water. They settle their conflicts with their neighbors. Someone shows up “to help:” to bring democracy, to bring economic growth, to bring religion. Things get worse. The people suffer and may have to leave their land, or stay and be poor. This goes on for so long that no one remembers anymore what it used to be like. History gets forgotten or rewritten. It becomes a racial thing. You know, those people have hard lives because they’re brown.
That’s the social engineers at work. They set people up and then they throw them right under the bus for walking into the trap. And it was important to set up the brown people first, and to practice on them for a long time, so that the white people would never see their turn coming.”
The last sentence of course isn’t entirely true. European Secular and Church societies promulgated the Inquisition, The Witch-Burnings and finally and most horribly in the British Isles, the Tragedy of the Commons, culminating in millions being sent off into slavery in the New World. Western societies _are_ going to once again, suffer the effects of this insane system.
At this point, there is not a whole lot we can do, except spread awareness, i.e. get the word out.
If the Authors of this book, who lived through the most grotesque periods under Nazism, Fascism and Communism hold hope that humanity will have a brighter future, I cannot say abandon such hope.
Demand that all people who hold positions of power (or aspire to) be subjected to an MRI, this is the quickest method and the brain doesn’t lie.
It will take generations once the ball gets rolling. This knowledge _is_ depressing, but at the same time, it fills one with joy. We normal humans make up the vast majority (over 90%). Our desires for kinship, community, creativity and a good, decent challenging, fun-filled life are NOT the abnormality in any way, shape or form.
Think of it this way, we normals of all religions, races, creeds etc. are being squeezed like turnips for the last drop of blood. We are going weak and crazy, we the hosts as it were. The parasitical elite psychopathologicals do not have any real comprehension of what is going on within us emotionally, since they do not have a reference point themselves. They’ve gotten too big for their britches and are now fighting amongst themselves for the last spoils like starving, rabid wolves. Every day, more and more, the “Masks” are falling off and a lot of normal people are taking mental notice. We don’t have all the pieces, but we _do_ have a general idea.
If you think about how quickly and fast things have been and are coming down the pike, you get a sense these creatures had a “time-frame” and things are not quite going their way. Could all this be related to the rapidly escalating changes in our local cosmic neighborhood? If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve noticed a huge increase in the number of meteorites hitting the planet. Earthquakes and volcanic activity have been rising to levels exceeding the 1980s. We;ve had two tunguska sized-asteroids recently hit our upper atmosphere, one above Indonesia and the other over the Pacific. Such an event is only “supposed” to happen once every couple of hundred years. A 10 meter wide meteorite just recently smashed into a mountainside in Mexico.
The GOM gusher is hardly the only one, many others, off Australia, Viet Nam, among others are spilling, though not quite as intensely.
With regards to our climate, we now know that “The Day After Tommorrow” scenario is not far fetched Sci-Fi at all, in fact, it’s happened fairly regularly throughout the last 2-3 million years of this current Ice Age. Recent work by an Irish team utilized a new microscopic slicer for analyzing a lakebed with sediments stretching back 12,000 years ago. When the Younger Dryas hit, it hit Full Bore. It wasn’t centuries or decades or a couple of years. That lake shows that Ireland went from a temperate ecosystem similar to it’s modern counterpart, to a cold arctic condition similar to Iceland within _WEEKS_! It stayed that way for over a century. Real climate scientists (not the despicably corrupt CRU group) are extremely nervous about this. I imagine they are crapping their pants over the enormous amount of methane being released right now, not just in the GOM but elsewhere in our ocean beds, they’ve been heating up very rapidly due to volcanic activity. Global warming is pretty bad, but it is _nothing_ compared to the havoc a mini-Glacial or (shudders) a full bore Glacial would do. Things right now are following _exactly_ the pattern set for previous glaciations. “Global Warming”, a much more intense cosmic neighborhood, huge releases of methane, followed by a sudden sharp drop in Global Temperatures.
Now, if you were an elite and had this knowledge, would you tell the masses? Would you make sure that it was censured or derided or packaged up into compartments with a lot of baloney and slowly released as infotainment? You can’t stop the truth, but you CAN spin it.
WageLaborer- Agreed! And I think it ties in with what I was speaking about above.
Truly nothing is thicker than a goy’s head.
================
They have an expression:
Goyishe Kopf
Re: http://twelfthbough.blogspot.com/2010/06/social-engineers.html
I read the first couple paragraphs and then decided to ask myself a simple question: HTF do a bunch of “social engineers” manage to change entire societies? You would have to have a lot more people buying into your thesis than just the handful of SE’s in the office in order to make it work.
Take a look at this comment string and almost any other comment string out there, and you’ll notice that two people can hardly agree on anything, never mind trying to rally hordes of people around one idea.
I think it’s far too easy to believe there is some form of mass-organized malfeasance on the part of an elite few (this seems to be a common lament expressed on this comment string), and less easy to realize that we live in an extremely complex web of social, economic, political and ecological systems that bring societies to the places they arrive.
For example. I was greatly troubled by the way the twin towers collapsed on 9/11. I tried to develop a thesis on why they, as well as WTC 7 collapsed the way they did, i.e. as a result of an internal US conspiracy versus the seemingly obvious causes and those propagated by the authorities.
My theory was that explosives were planted in all the buildings as a pre-emptive way of bringing the buildings down in the event of another terrorists attack. This would ensure that the collapse of any of them would not precipitate a domino effect in downtown Manhattan, which would be feasible if the foundations were to be blown out asymmetrically. Given the events of 1993, this would not be an unreasonable fear.
But I came to the realization that in order to achieve my hypothesis, many MANY people would have needed to be involved. The likelihood of no one coming forward since then is very slim.
So, for all the allegations of special social engineering organizations and covens of elites gathering around round tables rubbing their hands (a la Mr. Burns, The Simpsons) concocting the fate of the world, I believe applying Occam’s razor is the best approach.
Warning! Off topic rant follows.
I’m ticked off yet again by San Jose Police Department. I know they have difficult jobs, but they are out of control. In today’s Mercury News there is a story of how I man went to a convenience story to buy a lottery ticket and as he left he was tackled by 4-5 officers and kicked in the face. Oops, mistaken identity. The guy had to get eight stitches in his eyelid.
Also in today’s paper…an officer saw a driver near SJSU turning right when there was a sign forbidding it. A chase ensued. The perp ended up critically hurting a girl and 5-6 others.
Last fall the SJPD pounded/tased an Asian student at SJSU. They claim he was resisting arrest, but actually he wanted them to bring him his glasses so he could see. His understanding of English was limited, and he needed to see the officers lips to better understand what they wanted. He went to the ER, then straight to class the following morning so he wouldn’t miss a math exam. Bless his heart.
Are our police turning into thugs? I’ve told my kids, “Be very polite, but never, ever talk to the police.”
Funzel said:
Pop Quiz for Funzel
Question:
Do tribes issue passports to travel … or do nations issue passports?
Ah, it can be detected by brain scan? An excellent defence if true. Perhaps a new expleteve will be born, “get ponerized”. It may well have a genetic component – Whites produce far more low level criminal types than East Asians do – but far fewer than the Negro Race. Africans are being exploited no doubt – now by the Chinese. But is that any reason to bring them here? Once here, they can take advantage of the ruthless persecution of Whites – affirmative action, set asides, set percentages in college admissions, weirdly helpfull Whites, etc. All the crime statistics that show Blacks the most dangerous will apply to Black Immigrants within one generation. The brain is different and they have more testosterone. Blacks can do alright in a structured, traditional society whether Muslim, Christian, or Animist. Modern America destoys them very quickly as they are the most childlike of the races. If they came here and we could compete on an even playing field – that would be one thing. But that’s not the case. And we don’t need more people anyway. Read the Bell Curve for an introduction to these matters.
The Irish study is fascinating. But it’s too late. People will be walking around in shorts as the ice age descends. They were imprinted via mass media and idealism. The reinforcement is both internal and external. Whites are probably the most vulnerable of all people to this kind of thing. As Burroughs said, the word is a virus. And Whites are sick unto death – completely willing to deny their senses and their commonsense in defence of a mental construct.
Enviro, I agree entirely with your anti-grand-conspiracy stance, particularly, in my view, conspiracies said to span centuries or even millenia.
I found Vlad’s comment above about locusts and ants interesting since it explained extraordinary behavior and outcomes without requiring individuals to consciously conspire but then Vlad tipped his true hand by saying “at the highest levels, conspiracy obviously is conscious – as per the Bilderbergers, CFR, Bnai Brith etc.”
You are one of the greatest Talmudists on this site. The get and the vig are good.
Last week you edited your viewpoint about the nature of homosexuality. Was this some self reflexive way of admitting I had a point? I hate to force the conventions of discourse into your soliloquy but this is a public venue after all. If you want masturbation, go read the good gray lady.
Jim, I’m pretty sure you don’t read all these comments, provided as a courtesy so that we can blow our stacks along with you, but if you or someone knows . . .
Will your new book be offered as a Kindle edition? If so, remember I am willing to pay $9.99 for it and no more.
Bicycle Tourist,
The Long Emergency and World Made By Hand are both available in Kindle Edition. I imagine any future books will also be available in Kindle.
Sounds like the RCMP is giving your cops seminars on how to behave like assholes. Not long ago some guy from Poland was stuck in a section of the Vancouver airport for many hours and he was getting agitated. The RCMP were called. Without so much as a how do you do they tasered the poor schmuck until he was dead. Then they lied like hell about what they did.
Spent over 20 years working in a wire factory and paper mill as an electrician. Hot dirty work but felt a sense of community. Company picnic, turkey at Thansgiving, small bonus for good work.
Now all gone. Work for faceless national company doing service work in a casino. Interact via email and text. Way larger pay but sucked up with larger housing and living cost. what to do now?
As a Canadian. it is disconcerting to know that our RCMP is developing a reputation outside of Canada as sullied as the rest of the world’s police forces: not a badge of honour.
The G20 summit in Toronto bestowed our local constabulatory with magnified powers allowing them to perform agregious acts in the name of keeping the peace. The consummation is a significantly more militarized poice force and environment.
Going back to my previous argument, here is a perfect example of consequences arising from the complexity of systems, not an intentional outcome.
Or was it?????
Not related to Peak Oil nor the decline in manufacturing in the Hudson Valley and not that anyone gives a shit .. but ..
I am going to change the name of the new compendium I discussed yesterday to “Q’s Compendium of Meaningless Phrases and Other Annoying Rhetoric.” Limiting it to phrases is just too, well, limiting.
And so, the second and third entries in this compendium (the first being “I like Jeffery Dahmer as a person”) will be “Listen” when used to begin a sentence and “I mean” which apparently is intended as an emphasizer. During any given football game commentary note that John Madden will say “I mean” hundreds of times.
These words jumped out at me moments ago as I listened to a CNBC journalist (nicknamed Mandy) ask a government official (last name, Jarrett) a question. Jarrett’s response began, “Listen …” Then Mandy asked a second question and the response began, “Listen …” Is it just me or is this kind of an in-your-face way of responding as in “Listen, you ignorant slut?” Sprinkled throughout were the words “I mean.” (My thought was “LISTEN Jarrett, you don’t need to tell us that that is what you mean … we already know that since CNBC obviously brought you on TV to expound on what you mean.”)
Note also, these words are used almost exclusively in speech, not in writing. Read back through all CFN comments. No one ever begins with “Listen” (except in the “Listen to the birdies sing” sense)… and “I mean” is an extreme rarity.
Whew, just in time before hitting submit, I recalled another nonsensical word used to begin sentences. Entry #4 will be the word “Wait.” It is used by 10-15 year olds to start all spoken sentences. They seem to think they need this word to get a thought in edgewise when the barest pause in a conversation presents itself.
And what happened to the property taken in New London By eminant domain? Still sits empty growing weeds after 10 years. Pfizer is leaving and the state is left to pay the city for lost taxes
A very sad read. I’ve felt this way since April of 1972, when TV from the Moon was interrupted by an early season baseball game. I love baseball, but – wow, it still amazes me.
I find it interesting that reliance on technological wonders has gone hand in hand with a near complete corruption of the spirit of fundamental science, which has become a sort of proxy religion in place of the dead God. Well it turns out, people have no interest in knowing, they prefer to believe. Everyone is scared shitless of reality. Nothing to be done about it.
-drl
I recommend you read ‘Dark Age Ahead’ by Jane Jacobs. She has a insightful look at our current approach to science.
Qshtik said:
Wait, you are going to change the name?
Listen, this will be upsetting to many people.
But I still like you as a person, you know what I mean?
You are one of the greatest Talmudists on this site.
For a quick chuckle, I was going to say “thank you” but that would have been disingenuous. If I AM a great Talmudist its purely by chance. I’ve never read it. Have you?
The get and the vig are good.
From Dictionary.com:
vig (slang) – short for vigorish, a small fee charged to a buyer or seller by a third-party
It’s true, a vig as a middleman’s charge, such as a finder’s fee, seems entirely appropriate to me.
Last week you edited your viewpoint about the nature of homosexuality. Was this some self reflexive way of admitting I had a point?
No. If anything just the opposite. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that I believe sexual orientation is in-born and that instances of someone being lured into a different sexual “preference” – must be extremely rare. You seem to believe it’s quite common.
I hate to force the conventions of discourse into your soliloquy but this is a public venue after all.
There’s a beef in here somewhere but, honest to God Vlad, I just don’t get it. What soliloquy? Am I somehow restricting you from saying what’s on your mind?
If you want masturbation, go read the good gray lady.
I am ever vigilent of the leftward lean of the NY Times.
Enviro,
If ordinary citizens behaved like the RCMP or SJPD they’d be put in jail for felony assault. But of course the officers involved in San Jose’s trouble will get administrative leave with pay. The PD won’t even give out the names of the officers involved. Some of SJ’s residents might want to know the names of these guys so that in the future they can interact with extreme caution and submission.
Qshtik said: “I am ever vigilent of the leftward lean of the NY Times.?
I will now correct the errors in your sentence.
The word is vigilant, not vigilent.
You don’t use double punctuation at the end of the sentence. A period would suffice.
The NY Times is not leftist … as a Green Party member I know.
The NYT supported Bush on going to war, with nary a peep of protest, accepting uncritically that Iraq had nuclear weapons.
Some leftists!
I will now correct Asoka’s errors:
CORRECTION:
I will now correct the errors in your sentence.
The word is vigilant, not vigilent.
The NY Times is not leftist … as a Green Party member I know.
The NYT supported Bush on going to war, with nary a peep of protest, accepting uncritically that Iraq had nuclear weapons.
Some leftists!
cant find the post this is from….
‘Our Congress and White House realize Americans are going to slide down the wall, and they aren’t about to help with unemployment or medical benefits. They see the work force collapsing, except for finance–which is now 46% of US GDP. Manufacturing used to be 46% of GDP. Now, it’s in single digits. So how will the U.S. fund its military, DHS, CIA, NSA? Taxing minimum wage service workers to death? Or via the global profits from our financial industry? I don’t know. I don’t know.
One poster here commented that not all Southerners were idiots. I agree. It took and still takes a lot of creativity and networking to make a lot of money in the South, away from the financial and entrepreneurial centers, but areas of the South are doing just that. Where I live, the highest paid jobs are in law: $150,000 plus a $5,000 hiring bonus. And my city manager makes $200,000 a year. Not bad ‘for the South.’
in santa monica the meter men reportedly make 100k a year!
nice while it lasts, not sure how much longer anything will last.
and ‘which is now 46% of US GDP’ scary!!!! paper$
TT,
what about the ‘die off’ you predicted? when/ why?
and:
and northern Iowa/Minnesota/Wisconsin are on average healthier and happier than everyone else. They’re getting the last of the fine mineral array that US soils have to offer. The rest of the country’s ag lands are just serving up oil and natural gas for dinner really.
its speculated why hunza are long lived is not the food but the minerals in the wawa
The word is vigilant, not vigilent.
Thank you. I’m especially bad with words ending in ant or ent. There doesn’t seem to be any general rule to go by … unless maybe you know of one.
The NY Times is not leftist
One can always tell just how far left a person leans when they try to tell you the NY Times is rightist.
P.S. You missed the missing ‘ in “its purely by chance.”
Jim – that first picture you posted – the one with the broken down factory next to the river – made this fly fisherman salivate. Looks like there may be a lot of great trout lies around that old building [presuming there are trout in that stretch of the Hudson.] I know I am way off your point, but hey, aren’t we all going to have to learn to fish again anyway?
HI Asoka, Per your comment “SNAFU, it is not possible for any of us to reduce the world’s population (except by cutting our own tubes; did you get a vasectomy?)”
A vasectomy I did not get; however, as I pointed out in previous posts I have no biological children, both of my wives had had had tubal ligation’s when I married them. I helped raise 3 step daughters during my first marriage and 2 step daughters in my second.
My proposal is to attempt to convince the congress and the president as I too realize the futility of individual actions.
I have spent the past 8 years resurrecting an old dairy farm in northern, NY as a last refuge for my daughters. Why did I pick the north? Mostly because I like the cold and most folks don’t so I have theorized that most folks will head south WTSHTF. Since I will be 68 on Hiroshima day chances are I’ll be long gone when they have need of the place; but it will be ready.
SNAFU
“My proposal is to attempt to convince the congress and the president as I too realize the futility of individual actions.”
Laudable. Good luck! Thanks for your reply.
Asoka
Howdy Peak, Your comment “I wonder how you might see things breaking down on a per continent basis, because the world’s billions aren’t exactly evenly distributed around the planet.”
Dr. Hubert’s oil production curve predicts that by 2050 world production will be at about the same level it was right after WW II about 35% of what it is today, which is likely the bumpy plateau of the peak. In the early 70’s OPEC induced about a 10% reduction followed by a 20% reduction in the late 70’s early 80’s. I remember gas prices in Dallas Fort Worth at $0.16/gallon in 1970, $0.70/gallon in 1973 in Sacramento and $1.60/gallon in Plattsburgh in 1981. What thinks ye a 65% decrease in world oil production will do to price and availability?
Agreed that China and India are the big kahunas but we are number three. I have found organic agriculture site after site that promotes the concept that organic farming can produce as much if not more food than hydrocarbon farming and make a larger profit while doing so. My question is; if this is so why is less than 1% of the cultivated land in the US organic? If the profits are higher would not one expect that the greedy corporate interests would convert all of their activities to organic? One site was promoting something called the Neely-Kinyon Research Farm where they were yielding 130 bushels/acre organically on 17 acres. I just happened to have watched “King Corn” a few nights ago and the two young men who planted an acre on corn in Iowa harvested 180 bushels off their acre and the old boy who owned the farm allowed that it was pretty good but he had seen over 200/acre on 1000s of acres.
My guess is that as the availability of oil and natural gas goes through the floor the availability of food is going to follow; everywhere! Russia might be the last best place to live. Twice the land area of the US with less than half the population. If they stopped supplying Europe with natural gas and oil they could probably hold out for a long time. Since they and we have a corner on the worlds nuke supplies unless we are stupid enough to attack them and the two of us wipe out the planet in 3 or 4 days nobody else is going to threaten them. Plus it is cold there; my kind of place.
SNAFU
-Vlad,
The MRI evidence is true and damning.
http://tamagawariver.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaTfdKYbudk
Spindle Neurons in Psychopathologicals are very restricted compared to Normals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_neuron#Evolutionary_significance
I cannot agree with the concept that “races” or “ethnicities” are unequal to each other. Individuals, sure!
Black africa is _slowly_ revealing it’s secrets, as it tells of a magnificent history of a myriad of unimaginably ancient civilisations. The Congo has recently revealed in fly-overs and satellite photos of an ancient agricultural civilisation that lasted for thousands of years until around 1000 A.D. We are discovering a sophistication of the vast empire of Meroë; a hybrid egyptian/caucasian/subsaharan/black culture that is only equaled by the Druidic/Celtic culture of Northern Europe. White Europeans and Arabs arrived in Africa during one of it’s “Dark Ages”.
Now let’s get one thing straight. Civilisation is NOT about advancing materially or technologically.
That is the way of Ahriman and Psychopathologicals. TRUE civilisation is controlled by normal human beings who have figured out how to solve the basic problems of survival so that all can concentrate on the “inner” world within. This is the synthesis that humans are seeking always.
Anyways, back to Meroë. The archeologists working there are amazed on how all the earliest egyptian influences were co-opted and made subservient to the subsaharan black empire. Much of the concepts found in later Egypt seem to have been borrowed from Meroë and possibly other, more ancient black civilisations long dead under jungle, sands or grass.
One thing that Egypt and all other Mediterranean civilisations never really adopted was the _irony of the “Gods”_. In Meroë, ALL the gods, whether in hieroglyphics or statues, are laughing, smirking or sardonic. This is a trait shared so prevalently with Druidic and world-wide Shamanic traditions, it makes you wonder…. Did these people have contact with each other or did they derive it from a human racial memory?
“Civilisation” in Black Africa is _ancient_, possibly tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years old. Recently, South Africa and Lesotho have been examined by a few amateurs and found to have ancient traces of housing, stonehenges, etc. some +150,000 years old!!
Fly-overs and even a reparation of a “stonehenge” in Lesotho (note, all but two stones were still in place, the amateurs simply _replaced_ the two fallen stones in a manner consistent with the others) showed they were erected to a night-time sky that was 200,000 years old.
There _are_ differences between the “races” aside from complexion, the complexities and potential evolutionary paths are staggering. At the same time, they are not much more than the potential differences in any other species.
However, I would recommend a full reading of this article.
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertals-live-genome-sequencing-2010.html
Compared to resident African populations and the obvious hybrid sapiens/neandertal Cro-magnon populations in Europe; pure neandertals were quite unimaginative. Negroid and Khoisan artistry is known up to +70,000 years ago. The hybrid Cro-magnon, some 40,000 years ago. Around the world, Australia and hints in China and the Americas also show artistry as early as 40,000 years ago on caves and impliments. However, neandertals seem to have done _very_ well with regards to “practical” culture. They were making birch glue up to 100,000 years ago. Do you know how _complex_ and an “art” making birch glue is?!?! The majority of attempts, even by modern day researchers very skilled in this are failures.
-Qshtik
yes, conspiracies can be lead by a “queen” with mindless, idiot workers not paying attention. Take another look at how christianity is disparagated because of it’s mindless sheeple being lead to the slaughter. Why should that be different for _any_ other possibility?
But…but…but….
I mean…really? It’s the same game in a different dressing. The folks who were busy renovating the towers in the late nineties, early 2000 were not asking about the paint sprayed on the walls, or the material injected into the boreholes. Why would they? Find the proper avenue and the sheep will follow.
You might want to read these as well
http://www.reopen911.info/11-septembre/des-signaux-sismiques-revelent-l-utilisation-d-explosifs-au-wtc-le-11-9-selon-le-geophysicien-andre-rousseau/
english translation:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/209899-A-New-Study-of-the-Seismic-Signals-on-September-11-2001-in-New-York
http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/thermite/explosive_residues.html
take your time.
“There _are_ differences between the “races” aside from complexion, the complexities and potential evolutionary paths are staggering. At the same time, they are not much more than the potential differences in any other species.”
In other words, it’s not much more than the difference you see between caspian/arabian horses, european forest horses, or siberian yakut ponies.
Or between pumas living in alaska, florida or patagonia.
Hi Wage, to your comments “SNAFU, I answered you last week, I guess too late for you to see.”
Yup saw them. Understand the reticence on part of most humans to engage in mass elimination of other folks even for the good of all. On the other hand I am suggesting that folks not be born; if you are not born your chances of being killed and eaten are greatly reduced.
It strikes me as strange that most folks have no compunction when it comes to eliminating any other animal on the planet that even remotely interferes with the so called rights of humans; but, the animal causing the planet to meltdown, hell let that one propagate at will unless you piss off the righteous then we will smite your asses. I know from whence I speak as I got sucked into helping kill people by the boxcar loads in Viet Nam.
SNAFU
Howdy Progressor, Thumbs up to you.
SNAFU
-Qshtik
yes, conspiracies can be lead by a “queen” with mindless, idiot workers not paying attention
=============
Y’ello, if the two paragraphs below my name in your comment are supposed to be related to something I wrote I am completely baffled as to what the connection could be.
Apologies Qshtik, if you do not feel the same way as Environfriggimentalist, I apologize.
Envirofriginmental,
This is the best single sentence I’ve ever seen to puncture the conspiracy theorists:
=================================================
Take a look at this comment string and almost any other comment string out there, and you’ll notice that two people can hardly agree on anything, never mind trying to rally hordes of people around one idea.
=================================================
Yet, it’s still impossible to talk with these people, their theory becomes a substitute for religion.
ExxonMobil announced today in a business press release that they have “developed” a strain of algae that will produce 2000 gallons of crude oil equivalent from a single acre of water surface exposed to sunlight.
And the theorists will say the CFR or the Bilderburgers furnished the algae.
Now, I’m heading out to the GOM early in the morning. My family will stay at a resort about 120 miles from the oil “spill.” You hear about boots on the ground; I’ve got to put toes in the sand and see for myself what is going on down there.
I’ve swum, snorkeled, or SCUBA dived in Gulf waters almost every year for the past 50.
I tend to take news of the “spill” personally.
Now, if some of y’all want to have some fun this weekend, head over to the Fox News website. Find a discussion thread about the “spill,” or gas mileage, or whatever on that subject.
Post something like, “Oil is cheap because we steal it from our children!”
Wait for the responses from the “conservatives.”
Say God Bless America a lot!
And try to change some minds!
Good luck!
re: jello salads and the 1950s:
Today 47% of food dollars are spent away from home. so we are going down fast!
gmo’s
increased pesticides
topsoil going
progressorconserve said:
Progressorconserve, you might want to check out Dr. Adey who was the coral guy at the Smithsonian. (see link below) He started growing algae to clean water, so his algae growing technology is always cast as being about clean water, which confuses the picture.
Here’s the clear version: he’s fixed biodiesel. How? You know the thick, hairy stuff that grows on stones in rivers? That’s an algal turf. They grow in seawater too.
Most of the complexity of harvesting algae is separating single cell critters from the water that surrounds them; with turfs you harvest with a snowplough type blade.
It gets better. Turfs are multi-species, and include multicellular critters – they’re a complete ecosystem. Bonuses are two: firstly, you can grow them open tank and anything that drifts in becomes part of the mix. This means no evil pesticides or “monsanto-style” genetic engineering of algae for pesticide resistance.
Second the lipid content of the turfs goes up with time as you get more and more little predators and such like which are just made of lovely, crunchy oils. You just wait until enough oil has built up for your purposes.
Did I mention this is all happening in a two foot deep seawater tank, kind of like a rice paddy, but in some desert or other? Completely doable.
They’ve got something like a hundred acres under cultivation now, but, again, someone on CFN **cough Nudge cough** will ask: *how fast can it scale?* – as fast as you can flatten and flood desert areas.
http://www.algalturfscrubber.com/
SNAFU said:
Good question. I would say the bigger greedy corporate interest is the oil industry which has convinced farmers that they need petroleum-based products (fertilizers and pesticides) or their crops will go to hell, all the while promoting big agri-business monoculture farming which is more susceptible without fertilizers and pesticides.
But you basically nailed it on the benefits of organic farming. Ivette Perfecto of the University of Michigan in the USA and her colleagues found that, in developed countries, organic systems on average produce 92% of the yield produced by conventional agriculture. In developing countries, however, organic systems produce 80% more than conventional farms.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12245-organic-farming-could-feed-the-world.html
Basically, global food yields could go up 80% if we went organic. Seems moderately solid.
http://www.mosesorganic.org/attachments/research/07orgfeedworld.pdf
What in the world are you babbling about?
You and your ilk of both wings of the same national party are complete fools and sheep-fied, cattle-fied and lap-dogged idiots.
for example: in Babara Enrenreich’s “Nickeled and Dimed”; a pilot welfare to work program in Minnesota in the mid to late 90s(1997); with 190+ single women had a 90% success rate. When a follow-up was done several years afterwards; 90%…read that again, 90 FUCKIN’ percent of these women were totally OFF welfare and making between $30,000 to $100,000 a year. To quote from Barbara Enrenreich…
“And sometimes there seems to be almost deliberate deception. In June 2000, the press rushed to hail a study supposedly showing that Minnesota’s welfare-to-work p[rogram had sharply reduced poverty and was, as Time Magazine put it, a “winner”. Overlooked in these reports was the fact that the program in question was a pilot project that offered far more generous child care and other subsidies than Minnesota’s actual[mainline]welfare program. Perhaps the error can be forgiven-the pilot project, which ended in 1997, had the same name, Minnesota Family Investment Program, as Minnesota’s much larger, ongoing welfare reform program.”
These pilot programs are a testing ground to see if the most downtrodden, degraded and humiliated of us stupid, poisoned, screwed sheeple still show some gumption for rising above our station when given a hand UP, not hand OUT. Apparently, as recently as 1997, some 13 years ago, over 90% of the worst cases proved they were up to the challenge.
So….why was this never blared HONESTLY in the media? Liberal or Conservative?
Typical stupid sheeple, thinking they’ve got the damned shadows on the wall figured out when all they need to do is TURN.THE.FUCK.AROUND!
y’ello said:
I have often argued on CFN culture wars that Western “civilization” derived from Eastern and African (specifically north Africa/Egypt).
What you have written supports the idea that Africa was indeed the mother.
While it is good to appreciate ancient Africa, right now Africa is in trouble after so many years of White imperialist colonization and exploitation. Here is an idea that is helping: ONE ACRE FUND.
http://oneacrefund.org/
12,000 farms in Africa. One year training program, kind of like health visitors but for farming. For a year they come to your farm, visit, and teach you things. Cost per farm $100 or so, taken as a loan by the farmers. Average results … wait for it …
Doubled agricultural productivity. Halved infant mortality.
Bunch of .com guys who got interested in Africa, apparently. Heavily data-driven, but there’s no special tech. Apparently most of the farming boost comes from teaching people to plant seeds properly.
Vlad and Asoka should have fun with this one: A digital reflection of white flight to the suburbs — Did whites flee the ‘digital ghetto’ of Myspace? It seems the digital world has the potential to not only unite but to divide.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25474/
That’s an interesting idea. But the only viable option, it seems, would be to pump water from the Pacific — which would be a huge energy-intensive project that would probably be tied up in the political system.
Please, no more sucking water from the Colorado, etc. to implement such an idea.
Our freshwater systems are already taxed enough.
I’m guessing that the general level of
economic-based anxiety and anger in the
general population is making the fuzz
that much more unbearable. In the Bay
Area, many cities are so broke that 50%
of cops are being laid off. Example:
Vallejo and Suisun City merged their
police forces after a 50% layoff.
Combine this with the general sense that
the GENERAL populace might be acting at
less than their best for the same economic
reasons and you have a LETHAL combo. Angry
cops vs. pissed off people on the edge of
survival. That can’t be very good.
By the way, speaking of economic problems …
despite all the happy talk about Q2 earnings
(which, of course, are in the rearview mirror)
the Baltic Dry Index just dropped for a 33rd
consecutive day to levels last seen in April,
2009. For those who don’t know, the BDI is
a comprehensive index of maritime shipping
activity and is THE greatest of all indicators
of REAL economic activity.
So, reality is that we’re entering a new round
of housing problems (ARM resets are now in high
gear again and so are foreclosures) right as
economic activity is sinking to levels when
the Dow was below 7000. Watch those Biz
channels on TV at your peril. I’ve never
seen more disinformation in my life.
E.
Interesting. A nation of a few thousand within a nation of 300 million. The fact that there are 550 federally recognized American Indian tribes in the US — most containing very small numbers — with more on the way could result in a very slippery slope.
I like the idea of indigenous cultures retaining some semblence of tradition, homeland, etc. But this seems to me a very dangerous thing.
I hope I’m not monopolizing this space. Anyway, I just thought I’d respond to your comment: (to paraphrase) native African blacks are the least likely to be psychopathic.
That is probably true according to the evidience provided. But think about the other factors — the lack of money to hire a big, professional force of detectives — thus crimes that are connected may not appear to be; also, social mores of a Third World culture (where speaking up to police about your loved one can get you killed; where murder is fairly commonplace).
Basically, what I’m saying is take away the billions spent on America’s police forces yearly, throw in some Third World conditions and — before you know it — guys like Ted Bundy wouldn’t even exist.
Not only would Bundy never have been discovered, but no one would have realized that any of his murders were connected.
Don’t ignore social conditions in your analysis.
Thanks for the input, but I don’t see things getting that bad in North America. I live in Michigan, and everywhere I go, there is a ton of land sitting idle. I suspect it is that way all over the place. Granted, expensive oil may force us to do things differently, but they will be done nevertheless.
I’ve seen people who never had an interest in gardening take it up and do pretty well with it over the last couple years, simply as a means of saving on their grocery bills. As people continue to get squeezed out of the economy or forced into lower paying jobs, I expect that trend will continue. I would be doing the same thing, except I live in an apartment complex, and it’s simply not practical for me.
All things considered, it’s a tricky business predicting how things are going to fall out, so I just try to focus on general preparedness and learning how to do practical, useful things. Best of luck with the dairy, and once again, thanks for the input.
That you “Cowswithguns” for understanding that I seized on Zionism and Talmudism with Neo-Conism and Fundie-Christianism to a lesser extent as _examples_ of psychopathological derangement writ large.
You and many others may be shocked when I say this; I’m NOT that worried about “serial killers” or serial rapists. These are examples of FAILED psychopathologicals. The VAST majority of psychopathologicals are FAR more insidious than this. They are your boss, your spouse, your lover, your policeman, your assembly man, your senator, your local judge, your military leaders, your president….
Think about it….Get “Political Ponerology”
http://www.ponerology.com/
You’ll understand that I do not promulgate bigoted views, I am trying to WARN normal people what MUST be done in all circumstances with regards to the Evil Creatures who spring up on all races, creeds, enthnicities, whatever.
Geesh,
reminds me of that (white) Wall Street fellow who quit and decided to take up the farming lifestyle…
By buying up hundreds of chicken hatchlings and burying them underground so they could “grow-up” to be chickens.
I know it’s not that bad in Africa, but that ANY-ONE needs to be taught how to raise chickens or grow tomatoes or corn…..(shakes head) too much was lost in the first place.
i feel like there’s probably someone saying something intelligent in the comments here, but there’s just too much ‘crazy’ to sort thru.
Right, this time suck is pointless, most of the time.
I know what you mean about biz channels. Bullshit artists talking bullshit. We’ve been listening to unvarnished bullshit for more than a generation. North American workers were supposed to be moving up the “value chain” as their jobs were being offshored. Some fairytale that was.
I spent years in the real estate development business. That industry is run by retards. Same debacles decade after decade and they never learn.
Yeah, sad. But the important thing is it works. And I forgot to mention because each new African farm is successful, the $100 loan is paid back.
Snaf,
There’s obviously something missing in your interpretation of my posts. I’d be the one responsible for the permaculture/horticulture ideas that somehow get lumped with nuclear, solar panels, and all that myriad other stuff you listed.
Most of those ideas would fall under techno-grandiosity. Permaculture is a low-tech system that utilizes some fossil fuel and current technologies to establish human/wild ecosystems that can be maintained by human power in perpetuity. Part of the permaculture system is a voluntary reduction of population, and we’re under no misconception that population can stay where it is. On more than one occasion I’ve predicted that maybe 1 in 10 will make it through the crash. That would be closer to pre-industrial levels.
And when I talk about horticulture as a preferred paradigm, I don’t mean that we should all plant apples and breed plants, not at all. I’m talking about a completely different way of life. There’s an enormous mental shift that comes with a different cultural paradigm, and this one is very useful for the mission at hand.
My writings here are generally restricted to a discussion of ways to downsize, downtech, eat and medicate better, and avoid getting…um…culled in the pending population crash.
Please don’t lump me in with the techno-triumphalists.
The main difference in horticulture and agriculture is scale. We talk about scaling here a lot, but that’s because it’s a big deal. In practical terms horticulture is a system based on the majority of the population being involved in gardening, and foraging to varying degrees. In agriculture one of the prime movers is the push to have fewer and fewer people involved in food production, with more and more acres under each farmers control. What about that spells quality?
For every acre of cropland you see there are 4 others being exploited to support it. In a horticulture system fertility is produced and recycled onsite. Horticulturists tend to be pantheistic, seeing god in everything, and therefore they tend to respect everything far more than agrarians who were ordained by their skygods to have dominion over the earth and its resources do.
This is just the beginning. Don’t confuse my writings about horticulture as an attempt to get everyone to work on new peach varieties…
Tripp, thanks for making clear the distinction between horticulture and agriculture. Horticulture traditionally is connected to Great Mother eras that celebrated Earth religions.
Does your emphasis on horticulture imply a renewed appreciation for all things feminine?
Do you consciously create Goddess gardens using companion planting?
Do you turn garden spaces into sacred spaces using land blessings?
Do you create your own insect repellents and natural fertilizers.
Do you use crystal and moon gardening methods?
There is enough vacant land in the City of Chicago to support a third of the city’s current population.
It’s hard to grasp how much vacant land there is, and much of it was never developed at all. Most of it is on the vast south side of the city, which has twice the land area but half the population of the north side. Some of it is off the table because it is a protected wetland.
And a substantial portion is “brown lot” land that is probably pretty toxic from industrial pollution.
But most of it is easily salvageable and could support huge numbers of people. That which is “brown lot” could support “raised bed” type gardens, or perhaps greenhouses for growing “tropical” type stuff that will become scarce and expensive in coming years.
Has any one here tried growing coco beans (for chocolate) in a greehouse? How did you do with it? I’m thinking of this as a future business.
Excuse me, “greenhouse”, for nitpickers. Damn keys are sticking.
A small detour from this discussion:Lockerbie Bomber
The cross-purposes of Global Corporatism
One would have thought the two great allies the United States and Great Britain would have been walking in lock-step when it comes to fighting the endless war against terror, but when BP has it’s say, everyone folds and what is left is making money to the nth degree.
This could not have been more evident in the latest news coming from Libya this week. It seems that a cancer specialist in Briton, Professor Sikora had made a case that the Lockerbie Terrorist, Abdel Baset al Megrahi would die of Cancer in three months. It was determined the the humanitarian thing to do would be to release this man to his family in Libya to live out the rest of his short days.
He is the only man to be convicted of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. 207 people were killed including many from my Alma Mater, Syracuse University.
Even if his condition was that dire, which we find this week that it is not, why should this particular prisoner be released? Have you ever heard of a terrorist or mass murderer being released from prison because of health reasons? It sounded really odd at the time, but to add insult to injury, they now say he’s got another 10 years to live. Go figure.
Now we find out the BP had requested his release as they were about to make a deal with Libya for off-shore drilling and there were conditions to be met. Some say this is “Realpolitik” a philosphy that Mr. Kissinger is so fond of pushing. After all when it comes to powe, money and expansion all else is irrelevant. You gotta love that Nixon White House–they also introduced Milton Friedman to the world, specifically to Chile, by the way. And you know what happened there.
But I digress. There has to be a chink in the armor between the different factions in the Republican Party at this point. The monetarists and globalists are totally amoral. There are simply no principles culturally, spiritually or nationally in their ethos, or lack thereof. Sooner or later the religious right adherents are going to figure this out.
When you hear of the BP-British govt. decision you have to wonder where the nation state fits into this global paradigm–and you also have to wonder how much our government knew about this.
So now, I will harp on the idea that we have become a colony of Trans-nationals. The private contractor Wackenhut is working at the site of BP Gulf of Mexico headquarters, our military is helping to keep reporters from taking pictures and or interviewing clean-up crews, and new fines are being exacted upon those journalists who don’t keep their distance. We are not getting medical reports concerning illnesses in relation to exposure to Corexit and methane. So the free speech thing is a quaint notion and you have to wonder about all those security companies and surveillance folk that are making money hand-over-fist on the endless war on terror.
Eleuthero,
Additionally, Oakland laid off 80 cops yesterday due to budget cuts. Not good.
“Say God Bless America a lot! And try to change some minds! Good luck!”
God blesses America by turning {changing minds} about her sins {law -less ness 1 John 3:4}. so, you are being redundant.
The so-called conservatives are a lot easier to change their mind than the so-called progressives.
They already know that God’s Rules the World {they just don’t understand – how}, but the so-called progressives think it’s all up to us.
When you show the so-called conservatives what God is doing, they get it. The so-called progressives deny it and attack {or ignore] you, or focus on some trivial point that is tangent to the subject to “wrangle” over until the important stuff is forgotten. Think cacophony – jibber, jabber, til nothing matters.
About the “Lockerbie Terrorist, Abdel Baset al Megrahi,” the travesty of this guy being released for BP-induced “humanitarian reasons” would never have come up if the right thing had been done in the first place – try him, and if found guilty, give him 15 mins to read from the “good book” of his choice while smoking his last cigarette, then take him out back and hang him. How heinous does a crime have to be for God’s sake?
207 people were killed by Abdel Baset al Megrahi.
207,000 people were killed by Paul Tibbets and Charles W. Sweeney. They walked as free men.
How heinous does a crime have to be for God’s sake?
And don’t tell me indiscriminately killing men, women, and children in a war zone is not a crime against humanity.
progressorconserve | July 15, 2010 1:09 PM | Reply Think cacophony – jibber, jabber, til nothing matters.
Similar to something I blogged back in May:
Truth–just a matter of opinion
One of my observations on our corporatist version of freedom of speech is that you have a right to your opinion, but not the right to know the truth. (Colbert’s version of truthiness). We are living in a tower of babel with all kinds of crazy ideas going around, but nobody is talking facts. Unfortunately even if you do give them facts they won’t accept them.
I would not make a blanket statement on progressives who believe in the commons, meaning Public sector. Some believe in organized religion and some don’t, but ethics and values can be agreed upon amongst members of a society regardless of a belief in a supreme being.
I don’t know that one can change anyone’s mind about their politics, but the religious right should see how their basic tenents are undermined by the globalists who are on both sides of the aisle, IMF, WTO, Chamber of Commerce, think tanks and academia.
‘for God’s sake’
for goodness sake lets not have atheists abusing GODs name!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Howdy Tripp, Sorry if I offended you. My contention is that there are far to many humans for the Earth to support once the hydrocarbon era is kaput and the global warming benefits of all that burning kick in with a vengeance. Sans a rational methodology to downsize the human population rapidly, via the absence of new human births for a sustained period followed by population control, there is likely to be mass cannibalism WTSHTF and then what? Growing your own food is laudable. When I was a youngun we had gardens, I have one now, and my mother and her mother spent hot hours canning beans, peas, apples, pickles, etc. The food we canned was a nice addition to the grocery store; but surviving from one growing season to the next on what we grew would have left us mighty lean.
SNAFU
“Some believe in organized religion and some don’t, but ethics and values can be agreed upon amongst members of a society regardless of a belief in a supreme being.”
If everyone in a certain group agrees about “ethics and values” they then turn this into either a government or a religion. And they worship and pray to it to protect them and provide for them, just as any other member of another government or religion does.
I almost use these two terms {government/religion} interchangably. The only difference; governments claim sovereignity over a piece of ground and onwership of all on it.
Once again, so many comments with so much “truthiness” behind them. Most all of we CFNers are making speculations in the dark without facts, which is necessary, yet a difficult dilemna considering the veracity of recognized authorities seems increasingly compliant to power and susceptible to corruption.
Also the historical fact that The Powerful have seldom, if ever, been exactly forthright about what is REALLY driving their decisions over those they rule, so hard facts regarding that level of society are hard to comeb by even in the best of times.
All of it begs the question of the RESULTS we mostly all agree on, overarching everything.
Humanity is very VERY likely going through either a keyhole event or complete extinction, due to the the combination of Overpopulation, Peak Oil and the environmental damage wrought from the first two. The difference between the two being the long-term extremity brought on by our current environmental catastrophe once it REALLY gets moving, which I suspect may not be for a century or more.
And whether it is an explicit conspiracy by the Bilderbergers, Jews, Free Masons, Zorastrians, Corporo-Fascists or just a bunch of rich assholes acting in an uncoordinated but sociopathic manner, the RESULT is that which I think most people commenting on CFN can agree upon.
The Titanic is going down, more and more people are noticing that Malthus was not disproved, but only postponed, and either we voluntairly make changes to the structure of modern life or Gaia will do it for us in a most unpleasant way.
What fewer of us, but still a sizeable minority of CFNers, agree on, is that the Elite Powers That Be have noticed this, as well, and are transitioning us from the New Normal to the Old Normal pre Age of Cheap Energy state while making sure none of us notices too quick or makes a fuss about the new “old” future that waits for us.
This would be true whoever the hell and whatever the hell is actually running things, from the wackiest Alien Space Lizard Conspiracy Theories to the equally wacky idea that everything one sees on the Corporate M$M regarding machinations of power are 100% true with no omissions.
sorry, forgot to provide link:
http://www.hisholychurch.org/news/articles/world.php
the absence of new human births for a sustained period
================
If you have not already seen it, rent the movie “Children of Men.”
Qshtik says he is an atheist.
He is just using “for God’s sake” as an expression.
Although God evidently wanted those people killed, otherwise an almighty loving God would have stopped it.
You don’t have to wait for the biggies to move their money. Move yours now: http://moveyourmoney.info
basic tenents are undermined
===============
it’s tenets
I’m thinking of starting YET ANOTHER compendium. I would title it: “Word Corrections About Which I Am Apparently Wasting My Breath Because They Just Fuckin Refuse To Sink In Anyway.”
The first two entries would be:
tenet for tenent (and tenant)
jibe for jive
FINANCIAL REFORM PASSED CONGRESS AND WILL BE SIGNED BY “YES WE CAN!” OBAMA NEXT WEEK
Here are a few things it does:
*** creates a consumer financial protection entity
*** brings serious reform to derivatives trading
*** gives regulators the authority to break up major banks that are deemed a threat to the system
*** authorizes a broad audit of the Federal Reserve
*** largely bars banks from trading taxpayer money for their own profit
*** bans many of the deceptive mortgage lending practices that fueled the housing bubble
Qshtik said: “I’m thinking of starting YET ANOTHER compendium. I would title it: “Word Corrections About Which I Am Apparently Wasting My Breath Because They Just Fuckin Refuse To Sink In Anyway.”
Wait, here is another idea.
Listen, treat your OCD.
I mean, leave the rest of us alone.
If you treat your OCD, I will still like you as a person.
You don’t have to wait for the biggies to move their money.
=============
A week ago today I emailed the two politicians (Egolf and Keller) who sponsored HB66 in New Mexico as follows:
Gentlemen,
I participate in a particular blog where it was pointed out that you two gentlemen were sponsoring a bill in New Mexico that would effectively pull certain state funds out of big banks – Bank of America, in particular – and the money would be put into more local institutions (community banks, etc). This bill (HB 66) passed 65 to 0 in Feb 2010. Can you tell me what, if anything, has happened since then? Do you believe it is likely that the funds in question will actually be removed from B of A by 12/31/10?
As expected, I’ve received no response.
It’s worse than you think.
The original persecution, er, prosecution of Megrahi was a travesty, done to get Iran’s support for the first US attack on Iraq.
http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/09/pilger-megrahi-justice
Releasing him when they did was no miscarriage of justice. The Scottish court of appeals had already said that his trial was not fair.
The manufactured hoopla about Libya, Iran, BP, Lebron James, etc., is just to keep your mind occupied, while your pockets are picked and your home (Earth) is trashed.
“A week ago today I emailed the two politicians…”
Qshtik, have you not yet learned that electrons do not travel quite as fast once they enter government offices?
A week ago today and you thought you would have a response by now?
Maybe it is the heat in New Mexico slowing things down. Do New Jersey politicians respond any more quickly?
Did I give the impression that I believe in mass extermination? Cause I don’t.
I don’t even believe in forced sterilization.
On this one thing, I’m all about the power of money!
Pay people to be sterilized, and our birth rate will drop, the ones that are born will be wanted, and hopefully nurtured, so we won’t need as land or oil to feed them, water for their lawns and pools(joke!),schools to learn ’em, police to keep them in line, etc.
“A week ago today I emailed the two politicians…”
Qshtik, your not receiving a reply might also be because the New Mexico Legislature only meets for 30 days in even-numbered years, from January to February.
Ex computer guys go to farmers in Africa and teach them how to plant seeds?
Yeah, right.
I’m with David Korten on “helping” impoverished countries.
They do better without our dams, our massive irrigation projects, our airports, golf courses and export flower farms, our GMO seeds, etc.
The US has been “helping” third world people for 50 years now, and more people than ever are starving.
Yeah, its all so fffing hysterical.
The industrialized nations are colossal interdependent aberrations of civilizations currently guided by a self-consumed, self interested elite.
They view their time line with respect to “peak anything” from a considerably different vantage point. As Ive mentioned for the last several weeks, America’s problem is the 30% or 40% of the population is in it for themselves and see no danger on the horizon.
The other ruling 1% are satisfied that events are still a “not in my lifetime” story line.
“Truthiness be damned” – the conversation was explored over ten years ago in a Newsweek story about “red state reality” versus “bluestate reality” – as if there are two sets of facts…..
wars against communism
wars against terrorism
too big to fail
corporations have human rights
people are shaking down BP
What are next absurdities to be launched upon the brain washed masses?
Can anyone next absurdities to become part of the
So, Wagelaborer, your solution for drought, famine, and genocide in Africa is: “Step back, nothing happening here”
Since I last read your essays, James, I have picked up and read in full “The Nine Nations of North America.” I first saw this book when it came out around 30 years ago and I kept putting it off. Now, I found out Joel Garreau wrote it; I had read “Edge City” only a few years after release. The man has a good feel for political geography. But then, he cites The Almanac of American Politics as a source. This book I faithfully read every presidential year; I have since 1984. I’ve been to a lot of those places he’s described and I note his insight for the feel of a place. I also find it amusing at the predictions he missed. It seems so much like “The Occupational Outlook Handbook.”
Things aren’t so great in The Foundry. New England got hit first. All those industries I read about in my fifth-grade social studies books (textiles, shoes, machinery) were already in decline by then. When the economy started tanking in 1970, the jobs went with it. I saw newspapers with lots of ads for jobs I could easily do now all through the 1960s. Those are all gone now. The USA, with rare exception (the boom of the late 1990s, the only REAL one, otherwise the economy was either crashing, stagnant, or “in recovery”) has had chronically high unemployment since.
New England has plenty of down-and-out industrial towns where shells remain of once-viable workplaces where people could walk to work (Berlin, NH; Fitchburg, MA; Woonsokcet, RI; Meriden, CT, even the city near where I grew up–Lynn). The population, yea, many of their governments seem to be in a perpetual depression, notwithstanding Federal help (as with Lowell) or living off an unsustainable high tech industry (as with my home town, Somerville) and its attendant run-up of housing costs.
Dear readers, if you live in a poor city or the poor part of town, you may survive America’s downsizing better than most. You can walk to neighbors, help, and services. Food distribution will be the major problem. At least those depressed Ohio towns have farms surrounding them. Heaven help those old coal towns in northeast Pennsylvania! Keep pushing for a rail network; a slow train is still better than none at all.
AN INFORMAL POLL
Asoka said “The NY Times is not leftist.”
CFN readers, in your view is the NY Times editorially slanted to the political left of center, right of center, or is it evenly balanced?
I’m surprised that you would think that European or American interventions in Africa would be benign or helpful.
Africa has land, forests, minerals and oil.
The US has no interest in helping the people of Africa control their resources. The idea is to exploit the resources, and control the people.
Duh.
The New York Times editorial board is pro-ruling class.
They may lean slightly more towards the “throw the peasants a bone so they don’t revolt” side of ruling class thought, but that in no way makes them left of center.
I’m not sure at all the old definitions of liberal/ conservative really apply all that well anymore. There is a lot of Republican conservatives who want to start endless wars with somebody else’s money and somebody else’s kids, I don’t think that’s conservative, they think it is.
A lot of Republicans think Obama is a leftist, but he’s given the ruling classes everything they want, just like W Bush, Reagan, Clinton. If you talk about gay rights and abortion, then Obama is a leftist, if you talk about bank bailouts, and continuing the wars, and non regulation of oil companies, he’s an elitist, just like every President since Reagan and 95% of congress. That’s the way I’d describe the New York Times, they’re elite snobs, with a left wing social bent.
“While skeptics brush off global warming as a distant catastrophe, a new Stanford study suggests that heat waves and extremely high temperatures could become commonplace in the United States by 2039.”
more at http://www.stanforddaily.com/2010/07/15/study-suggests-rise-in-heat-waves-by-2039/
Closer to home, we’re harvesting potatoes every day now from our home and community-garten plots. On average, each potato plant produces 7-8 new potatoes, sometimes many more. Think about this — you plant 1 potato, and 2-3 months later you get 7 back. What would you think of an investment where you put in $1, and 3 months later you get back $7? Same with beans, peas, tomatoes, squash, etc. Any of you not gardening are squandering an investment opportunity never to be matched!!!
JD Moore said “At least those depressed Ohio towns have farms surrounding them”
Yeah, and we have the Amish who still know how to farm without fossil inputs. Although now only about 10% of them farm, regrettably. High cost of land makes it impossible for young Amish to buy farms… Sometimes it’s comical, my Amish cabinetmaker uses his horses to pull a sickle-bar mower with a Diesel engine on it… When I pointed out the paradox, he said “Mach dir keine Sorgen” (he speaks High German in addition to the Penn. Dutch which is like Old German), which means “don’t worry”, he keeps his old mechanical equipment well oiled and stored in the barn for when it’s needed.
I’m tellin you folks, if you want to come thru that keyhole, Cleveland Ohio is the place. We have a lake-full of fresh water, farms 20 minutes away from the city, small farm-towns scattered around, even a Nat’l park (no kidding, Google the Cayahoga Valley Nat’l Park). My cabinetmaker made new kit. cabinets for us using Ohio timber (some from his own trees) for LESS $$$ that a quote from Home Depot for lower quality cabinets. Too bad I had to pay him in $$$, wish we had a local currency. Ever heard of “Chiemgauer”? It’s gaining momentum in Germany (in Bayern really, as any Bavarian will likely point out 🙂
but that in no way makes them left of center.
================
OK, if left is out that leaves “right” and “balanced.” Which, in your humble opinion, is it?
Howdy Qshtik, Watched it a few months back.
SNAFU
Re INFORMAL POLL – the NY Times – left, right or balanced
I googled “NY Times editorial slant.” Following are excerpts from the numerous articles that appeared:
1) Former New York Times Editor Describes Media Bias 30 September 2009
When I was at the Times – my term there ended four years ago – everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?”
If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.
2) The New York Times’ Anti-Israel Bias – By Ed Koch
The British Broadcasting Corporation and The New York Times consistently carry news stories and editorials that are slanted against Israel and sympathetic to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.
3) Case Study in New York Times Bias, Coakley/Brown Edition – Matt Welch | January 19, 2010
On the lower two-thirds of page A22 today, The New York Times runs side-by-side Liz Robbins-authored articles of the same length, space, design, and sidebar-box analysis (the latter by Katharine Q. Seelye). On the left, the story is about Martha Coakley. On the right, Scott Brown. The exercise practically screams out for a bias-detection exercise, and oh my word does The Times deliver the goods.
4) The Times Today
The Times enjoys the reputation of being a generally reliable source of news. The editorial position of the Times is often regarded as liberal in its interpretation of social issues and events. However, it does have a mix of editorial columnists, ranging in approximate political position from Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and Bob Herbert on the left to William Safire and David Brooks, formerly of the Weekly Standard magazine, on the right.
Many conservatives believe that the Times news coverage, as well as its editorial board, has a liberal slant. Many books have been written about the reliability of the New York Times and its impact on the political community. Comparisons have been made between the Times and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, both of which are also published in New York have a much more conservative slant, at least on their editorial pages.
5) From Wikipedia: The New York Times – Liberal or conservative overall
The Times has been variously described as having a liberal bias or described as being a liberal newspaper,[72][73] or of having a conservative bias on certain issues by some writers[clarification needed].
According to a 2007 survey by Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% believe The Times has a liberal slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant.[74] In December 2004 a University of California, Los Angeles study gave The Times a score of 73.7 on a 100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal.[75] The validity of the study has been questioned by various organizations, including the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.[76
Qshtik, your not receiving a reply might also be because the New Mexico Legislature only meets for 30 days in even-numbered years, from January to February.
============
You’re pulling my leg, right? When you pull someone’s leg the proper thing to do is end the post with a winking smiley face.;o)
My guess about them not responding was that I signed my email with name, hometown and state. I figured they saw NJ and said “NJ? Fuck NJ!”
I have written to many people who I thought might never answer but I’ve had an excellent response rate, and very prompt as well. I once wrote to William Safire about an On Language article in the NYT Magazine. Although my letter was not published he DID respond to me personally by email. I’ve written to authors of books and received responses. I also emailed two professors re their audio lectures. In each case I was pointing out some verbal foible. Both responded within one day.
I once wrote to Dwight Stones, the former track high jumper, right in the middle of the Summer Olympics which he was covering, and he responded within an hour or so. I wanted to know certain rules about the high jump because I thought I had conceived a way jumpers might be able to soar over 8, 9 or 10 feet. He explained why the idea wouldn’t work.
I’ve written 3 or 4 times to Rick Mishkin, a former board member of the NY Federal Resesrve who appears periodically on CNBC. He frequently uses the words “probably” and “problem” which he pronounces as “prolly” and “prahlem.” I tried to be nice in suggesting that this pronunciation did not reflect well on one who held such a lofty position and that he might want to work on enunciating the missing bb’s. Mishkin did NOT reply to any of my emails and continues to this day to say “prolly” and “prahlem” which makes my skin crawl.
In one of the later emails I told him I was dismayed that he had obviously ignored my good advice and to drive the point home I said “suppose you took your wife out to a fine restaurant and during the meal she looked at you oddly, made a subtile pointing motion toward your face, and quietly mouthed the words “you have a glop of mashed potatoes on your chin” – would you not pick up your napkin and wipe it off?”
made a subtile pointing motion
============
Make that subtle
thansk for being so democratic and letting us vote on JHk dime!
re: wagelb: The New York Times editorial board is pro-ruling class.HOW COULD THEY BE ANTI OLD $?
i.e= corporate, and very left! did they describe chandra levis accused killer as an ‘ immigrant ‘ [ as opposed to a career criminal illegal]..
o but obama says we are all immigrants..that tired canard……………..
‘The Titanic is going down’ YES BUT, didnt the prez get in on the theme of HOPE?
The GOP/Libertarian political party are fond of equalizing the political parties–” there’s no difference between Bush and Obama”– when they are the minority party. When they are in the drivers seat they ruthlessly distinguish themselves from “the liberals”. Strategically, this serves to demoralize the utopian progressives and undermine the base. I have seen this act time and time again and it always produces results because politicians inevitably disappoint.
But only a fool believes judicial appointments and nominees are equal and that is where a president wields real power. And on that score, President Obama has yet to disappoint this voter.
Ok. Finally got caught up with the reading.
Well, the zombies are not coming, the S will not HTF, there will be no Mad Max future. The first thing to do is to turn off the tv and to stop getting one’s idea of reality from television and the movies. So, do you folks contemplate building any kind of social organization or are you just going to dig little holes in the ground in your perma-patch jungle like Trip or collect guns and hide out in your bunkers?
Geoff
Sacramento, California
PS
Folks might find this interesting. Am reading about how to spot pyschopaths:
http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2009/07/12/spotting-the-covert-psychopath-%E2%80%9Cin-the-wild%E2%80%9D/
PPS
Gogreenordi, I hate your guts. It has been nice not seeing you.
It’s not “either/or”, TBU. The S
**is** hitting the fan right now
but we know that the ability of
politicians to create stopgaps
which actually elongate adversities
is diabolical.
However, I most certainly **do** agree
with you that the “survivalists” are
kidding themselves if they think they
can predict the nature of a high-entropy
social and economic breakdown.
Personally, at 58, I plan to live as
ordinary a life as possible until there
is viable evidence as to the NATURE of
the coming various meltdowns.
Many survivalists are very, very naive
about human nature. For example, the
few people who grow “victory gardens”
are going to get their veggies STOLEN
by the less agriculturally gifted.
The rich will need private armies which
will not make their lives especially
enviable.
It’s hubris of the highest order, at this
point, to imagine that one has a plan for
muddling through a severe Depression …
other than getting away from cultural
groups who’ve been horribly murderous
and thieving even during the BEST of
times.
E.
Perhaps the future in the USA is a new rendition of Feudalism. You get a lavish, ruling class overseeing a population of Neo-serfs. With impunity, I might add.
Tree said “Gogreenordi, I hate your guts. It has been nice not seeing you.”
Heh heh heh, am I a thorn in your side? Good, perhaps it will remind you to not post psychopathic hateful half-baked notions denying the humanity of other people, you hate monger.
Have a nice day 🙂
Bigview, don’t forget that the neo-serfs are armed to the teeth with the weapons of war, which gives them an edge over the pitch-fork wielding peasants of the last feudal age…
>For example, the few people who
>grow “victory gardens” are going
> to get their veggies STOLEN
>by the less agriculturally gifted.
E, perhaps so. However, in the meantime we live in accord with our values, eat and share the healthy organic non-hybrid fruits and veggies, enjoy the activity of doing pleasant physical work outside, often sharing it with friends and neighbors. We improve and share our knowledge of growing food, we keep our food-dollars from going to the Frankenfood corporations. My wife and I save enuff money each year by growing our own food to take a trip back to Europe (essentially free). We save fossil fuel by not mowing the lawn (there’s no lawn in the backyard, just garden beds), and we dont poison mother Earth by putting lawn chemicals into it.
This was a short list of the pleasures of gardening.
By sharing our gardening skills with our neighbors, we’re making sure they could grow their own when the hard times come, and then the entire hood will be motivated to join forces in keeping the carrot thieves away.
It’s all good, Bro. You should try it before you knock it down!!! Watching life in its full splendor in the garten is much more satisfying that watching an imitation of it on TV, let me tell ya!
Eleuthero,
I have a few supplies in case of trouble….but I realize it’s only a stopgap that won’t last but a few weeks. Fifty pounds each of beans and rice, 100 gallons of water, lots of Costco batteries,
3 tanks of propane, and a shotgun. Not that I’d use the shotgun for anything but warning shots — dang, I don’t even know how to assemble the thing. It’s hidden in the attic and my kids don’t even know about it.
When the ’89 earthquake hit I was totally unprepared. I was at a computer company in North San Jose. I waited hours until the traffic settled down because I was wearing high heels and I only had a gallon of gas in my car–didn’t want to end up walking miles in the dark. (The service stations were all closed down because of no electricity.) I had nothing in the house to eat.
As I’ve mentioned before, my vegetable gardening efforts are a joke because of my Barbie-sized back yard.
Obviously, my preparation is more geared toward a natural disaster rather than a really long term problem, but it’s better than nothing.
Q,
Does the name Judith Miller ring any bells?
The NYT prints lies, authored by liars, and thus their “editorial slant” is [to me] exceedingly irrelevant.
I would tend to agree that it represents “monied interests”, so, it’s kind of a vanity press, wouldn’t you say? (I highly doubt it’s “making a good profit” anymore, regardless of what the liars in the accounting dept. might say publicly. ;o)
Ps. Right, left, center, balanced, unbalanced?
How about, accurately reporting “a pack of lies”? (Always was partial to that expression.)
E said:
>For example, the few people who
>grow “victory gardens” are going
> to get their veggies STOLEN
>by the less agriculturally gifted.
Dio, listen to E. All those “less agriculturally gifted” will suddenly begin eating vegetables. They will come back every eight hours to get more zucchini. Be afraid, very afraid.
207,000 people were killed by Paul Tibbets and Charles W. Sweeney. They walked as free men.
===============
Now here is a perfect example why Asoka wins the Most Annoying Commenter Award month after month. When I suggested the convicted killer of 207 innocent people should have been quickly executed Asoka responds with the above remark. If you will recall, the Award Committee listed 3 reasons for Asoka’s repeated wins. Reason #2 was: sneaking in his own pet issues that are unrelated to the issues of a commenter to whom he is purportedly replying.
Asoka never addresses the point of my post – that Abdel Baset al Megrahi deserved execution. PROMPT EXECUTION. No, Asoka is intent on highjacking the conversation and diverting it to HIS pet issue. I will venture that Asoka is capable of segueing from ANY comment to the A-bombings in Japan 65 years ago. Tripp could be giving us a horticulture tip and Asoka will turn it into a diatribe on WASPs dropping A-bombs.
And please people – do NOT tell me I have some nerve talking about changing subjects just because I sometimes ignore a commenter’s issue and attack the spelling and grammar. I have already admitted more than once to an obsessive compulsive disorder.;o)
Q said: “I have already admitted more than once to an obsessive compulsive disorder.”
And more than once I have recommended you get treatment instead of annoying us with your pettiness.
Q said: “Asoka never addresses the point of my post – that Abdel Baset al Megrahi deserved execution. PROMPT EXECUTION.”
Q, in case you haven’t gotten the message yet, I am against violence whether it be deliberative or retributive. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
I am against blowing up airliners. I am against the death penalty for those who blow up airliners. And I am against the indiscriminate WASP mass murder of 207,000 men, women, and children.
Someone gets it. Actually, as I have stated before, most CFNers “get it” even though everyone seems to come at it from their “pet issue” perspective, including me.
The Left vs. Right game that passes for our infantilized joke of a National Dialogue becomes more strained and tiresome as time goes on. More and more difficult to keep Big Show going on for the Rubes when the curtains are tattered and the theater seats are fraying.
More amusing is the fact that the Right, by virtue of it’s consolidating the two wealthiest, most powerful (previously opposed) factions of America under the Modern Republican (really RW Authoritarian) Party: Wealthy Yankeee Corporatists and the Southern Aristocratic Elites (neither really restricted by archaic geography anymore), is increasingly having to stretch to portray the Left as frightening, all-conquering juggernaut.
No coincidence that this is how the Nazis portrayed their victims, as frightening, all-conquering juggernaut – because nothing ever really changes much, except technology and energy budget. And it is no coincidence either that neither audience of these RW Authoritarian Liars had much of what it took to see through these transparent, laughable lies, even as reality demonstrated their increasing falsehood daily.
I am once again reminded of the dutiful band playing for the Second-Class (and therefore doomed) passengers of the Titanic. As the actual Left continues to wane in terms of actual political representation along with the actual Right (neoconservatives and neoliberals, but few conservatives or liberals), the Aristocracy is going to have to resort to even more absurd measures to keep The Big Show propped up.
But in the end, they just need to keep us confused and divided until the last of the chains are in place and the last of the barred doors locked tight.
THEN anybody who opens their mouths will enjoy some “enhanced interrogation”.
It’s all speculation and metaphor. Who can guess the exact shape the future will take, other than at least 6 billion net human beings will almost certainly be leaving our unsustainable creation, and nothing that produces that kind of outcome will be remotely pleasant.
Know who I pity? Anyone who is so unfortunate as to live to see the year 2100.
My mistake – my previous comment was a reply to ozone
How much land can a man take care of with just his own power? I heard it was only about one acre. If so, how do weigh in on plouging with horses or oxen?
Even if we could get rid of the “ponies” there would still be the regular cases of criminality and undevelopment. Are you familiar with the work of Laurence Kohlberg on the stages of moral growth? Not all selfish people are sociopaths – many are just normal, undeveloped folks. And many people are very developed in one stage of morality but haven’t even broached the higher ones. Many Mafia Men are good fathers for example. And many Zionists care deeply for their fellow Jews. A psychopath only pretends to care about anybody else – so it’s a different phenomena all entirely.
I think there can be degree of ponerology – in other words, an index. My sister enjoys lying for the pleasure of it, but she seems to really care about her children and our mother. She has a degee of sociopathy, but could not be considered a full blown case.
It would be great if you could comment on everything going on with the tarsands in Alberta and a fairly new report about natural gas declines in the province that are essential to the heat separation from the oil and sand. Corporate Ethics has launched an ad campaign to boycott Alberta in Seattle, Portland a few other US cities. With people afraid of offshore, a lot of people see the tarsands as a Godsend, but it’s far from that as you know!!!
Go to the Uniform Crime Report, fellas. It details crime according to ethnicity. Blacks kill at rate of 5 to 6 times as much as Whites. Rape is even higher I believe.
Burton, Speke, Livingstone et al did not find advanced civilizatons in Africa. Rather they found savages who were very interested in eating them. Albert Schweitzer found similar conditions in the Congo – primeval ignorance. His mission actually saved a Tribe who were being eaten out of existence by a new tribe in the area – the Fang.
The ruins mentioned may not have been built by Blacks, but rather lost races of White Men. Meroe may have been blonde and red haired like the Aristocrats of Ancient Egypt.
Hancock1863 | July 16, 2010 2:48 PM | Reply
I couldn’t agree with you more. The way I put it is: Soon the velvet gloves will come off.
You seem to fail to notice that most of human history, right to this very day, is very “Mad Max”-ish, if not outrightly so.
Ironically, the relationships portrayed in Mad Max are in direct contravention to what human history teaches us about human behavior and interactions of human power.
a) Lord Humongous wouldn’t be working aganst those in the Gasoline Castle, or whatever you want to call it. He’d be working FOR them, so as to keep “the little people” in line and keep the tribute (probably food) flowing. Humongous, of course, would get a “piece of the action” and all the gasoline his Blackwater Thugs needed to “patrol” and “maintain order”.
(Because it’s not “Mad Max” so long as there is ORDER to the brutality and thuggery, right?)
b) The people inside the Gasoline Castle wouldn’t be the nicey-nice “keepers of civilization”, they would be The Bush Family, interested only in keeping their power, comfort and position – utterly ruthless and sociopathic.
If it makes you feel better, tree, picture them as Elders of Zion.
c) The more likely scenario would be Humongous and his Blackwater/Xe Brutes turning on their Aristocratic Masters to take it all.
But then, it wouldn’t have been much of a movie with few “Good Guys” and such a starkly realistic potrayal of human power relationships as shown by human history, would it?
Movies are meant to be FANTASY, escapism, and fun. Few want to be reminded of reality when they plop down their hard-earned cash on cinema fantasy.
Finally, as to whether or not humanity will experience something akin to “Mad Max” within the next two centuries (who can guess the exact timeline), my reply to you, Treebeard, is this,
“If you know of a better or different way for Earth/Gaia to get rid of 6 billion or more net human beings through overshoot and dieoff, I’d like to hear it.”
This has been an enjoyable interlude. Though some may think it frivolous and nonsensical, know that I share your sentiments.
Now let’s return to our usual conversations and quarrels.
Your worldview is much like Doris Lessing’s – especially her novels Shikasta and the Sirius Experiments. Europeans are a race not favored by the Godlike Canopus even if clever. I grant you that there is far more to life than building and technology. Perhaps Blacks were once more than they are now, but have degenerated along with the rest of humanity.
Right now I’m uner the influence of the Neo-Traditionalists like Rene Guenon and Fritjof Schuon. They are very erudite men but they just do not believe in evolution – which they consider scientism. Rather they believe in the four ages of which this is the last and worst. As Schuon says, this cycle of humanity is now coming to an end. There will be no universal reversal or worldly salvation, but rather only a saving remnant. Only without us for the most part, can the world be made new. Like the higher brain in tghe body, man is an expensive luxury in the ecosystem. We will thrive again in a the new cycle someday. Hopefully we will do better next time, hopefuly we will come back improved.
What do you think of 2012?
There’s a Zambian economist named Dambisa Moyo that says the same thing, that aid to Africa has been a disaster.
Here’s a blurb from her:
What kind of societies are we building? How dare we stand around and think it’s OK for us in government not to take responsibility for public services such as education, health care, infrastructure and security which the governments are charged to provide to the people? In most African countries, those goods and services are provided by the international community thereby severing the link between its citizens and the elected officials.”
Moyo said far too many African leaders have taken a backseat and allowed other people, including celebrities such as Bono and Bob Geldof, to usurp the PR image of Africa.
Here’s the whole magilla:
http://www.sharenews.com/local-news/2010/02/17/foreign-aid-hurting-not-helping-africa-economist
A long time ago I saw a program on foreign aid. The thrust of it is that, in impoverished places, change is better done incrementally. They used the example of a farmer with a donkey that was pulling a cart full of produce to market. They said that the cart could carry three times the amount if it was installed with a rudimentary suspension system. Small things like that can save a lot of labour, improve productivity and people’s standard of living a lot.
Just the other day I saw a program where Chinese manufacturers were simple making pedal driven water pumps for use in Africa. They cost about $100. They showed an African farmer who saved for several months, bought a pump and was using it to irrigate his plot of land. He said that he was now going to put more land under cultivation because of this pump. His old method was to irrigate with buckets of water carried by hand from a well. Now with his new pump, he pedals, his wife waters the plants using a hose attached to the pump. Massive time saver, massively more efficient than busting your ass carrying hundreds of buckets of water by hand.
They brought up a problem though. If it becomes known that the farmer has a few extra bucks to buy things like a pump he’ll be beseiged by family and neighbours wanting him to give the cash to them. He’ll have to say buzz off essentially which probably won’t go down all that well.
sorry should read:
Just the other day I saw a program where Chinese manufacturers were making simple pedal driven water pumps for use in Africa.
Ok, E I see things a little differently.
I don’t think the T will HTF even without such political stop-gaps. I believe the whole idea of sudden catastrophe occuring is a delusion that people here share with Christian fundamentalists who believe in Armagedon. It is a phastasm of the mind and an expression of a psychological sickness.
It’s not “either/or”, TBU. The S
**is** hitting the fan right now
but we know that the ability of
politicians to create stopgaps
which actually elongate adversities
is diabolical.
That was not what I was saying either. I thought the so-called surivalists who are really just common paranoid wingnut anti-social recluses with mean-spirited personalities and an obsession with weapons are just acting out in accordance with their own psychological aberrations. I don’t see a high-entropy social and economic breakdown occuring. I see a continuation of the fleecing by the many to enrich the few which is typical of agricultural, industrial, and technocratic civilizations.
However, I most certainly **do** agree
with you that the “survivalists” are
kidding themselves if they think they
can predict the nature of a high-entropy
social and economic breakdown.
Now the following I do agree with:
Many survivalists are very, very naive
about human nature. For example, the
few people who grow “victory gardens”
are going to get their veggies STOLEN
by the less agriculturally gifted.
The rich will need private armies which
will not make their lives especially
enviable.
These folks who are the garden-growers tend to be weak isolated hippies with little wealth — meaning little in the way of resources — and little in the way of a social network either. They also lack legal and institutional support. They will be easy pickings for most any predators around.
This last part I agree with most. There is no successful black society in the world. They are genetically destined to be pyschopathic criminal dysfunctional incompetent morons by and large and are to be avoided. Nearly all those living south of the Rio Grande also form societies of semi-moronic peasants ruled by corrupt exploitative criminals. They too are to be avoided and should not be allowed into this country. Blacks, Central and South American indians — meaning Mexicans, Guatamalans etc — and Islamics should all be sent back to their own failed societies. Most of them are incapable of living well where they are and should not be allowed to infect white civilization. Note, there was a time when Islamics had higher civilizations than Europe but that time has long since passed.
It’s hubris of the highest order, at this
point, to imagine that one has a plan for
muddling through a severe Depression …
other than getting away from cultural
groups who’ve been horribly murderous
and thieving even during the BEST of
times.
Well, as usual, unlike the New York Times, I’m coming from a left point of view.
I don’t see foreign aid as being an attempt to “help” other countries at all.
I see it as a way to entrap other countries into debt, which is used to hire US corporations to build infrastructure which is not helpful to anyone in those countries except the rich, and then the poor are forced to pay the debts.
John Perkins was a part of this for years, and he explains it well-
http://www.wanttoknow.info/johnperkinseconomichitman
Hancock1863 | July 15, 2010 3:29 PM | Reply
“Once again, so many comments with so much “truthiness” behind them. Most all of we CFNers are making speculations in the dark without facts, which is necessary, yet a difficult dilemna considering the veracity of recognized authorities seems increasingly compliant to power and susceptible to corruption.”
Absolutely true, no-one in their right mind here claims to have all the answers.
“Also the historical fact that The Powerful have seldom, if ever, been exactly forthright about what is REALLY driving their decisions over those they rule, so hard facts regarding that level of society are hard to comeb by even in the best of times.”
Again, absolutely true, do not listen to what they SAY, look to what they actually DO.
“All of it begs the question of the RESULTS we mostly all agree on, overarching everything.
Humanity is very VERY likely going through either a keyhole event or complete extinction, due to the the combination of Overpopulation, Peak Oil and the environmental damage wrought from the first two. The difference between the two being the long-term extremity brought on by our current environmental catastrophe once it REALLY gets moving, which I suspect may not be for a century or more.”
I suspect it will be a lot closer, within the next decade and pretty much finished within a century.
“And whether it is an explicit conspiracy by the Bilderbergers, Jews, Free Masons, Zorastrians, Corporo-Fascists or just a bunch of rich assholes acting in an uncoordinated but sociopathic manner, the RESULT is that which I think most people commenting on CFN can agree upon.”
Absolutely
“The Titanic is going down, more and more people are noticing that Malthus was not disproved, but only postponed, and either we voluntairly make changes to the structure of modern life or Gaia will do it for us in a most unpleasant way.”
We could’ve had a decent, dignified planet even with the present day population had the whole world gone down the path of sustainablity and population densification back in the ’70s. This was _very_ well known to the PTBs.
Instead, they chose to continue the same path of destruction and greed. I mean, seriously, how much MORE wealth did they need? They were already wealthy enough to support their children for a hundred generations. Potentially forever if it was wisely managed.
These are not stupid people in terms of the basic nitty-gritty. That we had and to a vanishingly small extent, still have a window to unroll a global revolution in smart, sustainable living that can even roll a small profit for generations to come for everyone…but it was and is being wasted. What does that tell us? Look to what is done, not what is said.
“What fewer of us, but still a sizeable minority of CFNers, agree on, is that the Elite Powers That Be have noticed this, as well, and are transitioning us from the New Normal to the Old Normal pre Age of Cheap Energy state while making sure none of us notices too quick or makes a fuss about the new “old” future that waits for us.”
They’ve known this since the 1950s at the very least with regards to Admiral Rickover’s warning.
That it was not heeded indicates your premise is spot on, or these guys know something we the masses don’t.
“This would be true whoever the hell and whatever the hell is actually running things, from the wackiest Alien Space Lizard Conspiracy Theories to the equally wacky idea that everything one sees on the Corporate M$M regarding machinations of power are 100% true with no omissions.”
Agreed stick with the facts and derive plausible hypothesis from these facts. So far, the facts indicate something really,really nasty coming down the pipeline (yes pun intended) for the vast majority of us.
And, by the way, I think that it’s our turn now to be IMF’d.
The rich ran up a bill and they want us to pay for it.
So Obama, the black face put up to fool us, will preside over that which Cheney, the sneering face which aggravated us so, was unable to do.
Shortly, the “bi-partisan” committee will announce that America can no longer afford Americans, or at least, a lot of us, like the poor, the old and the disabled.
We must go, to make sure that the rich continue to profit.
That is what is happening, although we are being dazzled by distractions – immigrants, and terrorists, and gays and guns, etc.
Have you ever read Dimtry Orlov? He talks about what happened after the USSR dissolved, and its riches were turned over to the Russian mafia and it’s American counterparts (including Obama buddies Larry Summers and Robert Rubin). (Well, that’s not how Orlov puts it, that’s my left version).
We are told by our propaganda organs that “life expectancy dropped” in the former Soviet Union.
Damn right. In one year, from 78 to 59. (Or whatever it was).
What does that mean?
It means that 700,000 people more than expected died each year for the entire 90s!
Orlov puts it into the perspective of the survivors. He says that people are always dying and people are always being born, so you don’t really notice that more are dying than being born. It just happens.
Without the statistics, you might not even realize that your population is dropping.
I am in favor of the population dropping, but not like that.
Thanks for that comment, as we wait for the next shoe to drop.
“More amusing is the fact that the Right, by virtue of it’s consolidating the two wealthiest, most powerful (previously opposed) factions of America under the Modern Republican (really RW Authoritarian) Party: Wealthy Yankeee Corporatists and the Southern Aristocratic Elites (neither really restricted by archaic geography anymore), is increasingly having to stretch to portray the Left as frightening, all-conquering juggernaut.” -Hancock1863
I would have to include “The Poor” with “The Left” as being the main enemy these ass-wipes are railing against with increasing frequency via their toadies (albeit a veiled “railing”). Guess what? TPTB are MAKING a lot more of “The Poor” every day… oops. Is that a smart move? Shouldn’t they be tossing more crumbs?
I believe that you’ve probably hit on the next black swan to fly into view. The rubes may just be awakening with the GOM going down the shitter. IF they happen to grasp how little they really mean to the Lords of the Universe, chaos will reign.
Yep, controlled thuggery, anyone? Ha! The fascists are gonna have to sign their suicide pact with history EARLY this time; it’s pretty likely they’ll be vaguely aware of what they’re getting into (and going out of).
July 15th, 2010 7:10 PM
Goldman Shares Up; SEC Announces Settlement
By Brett Philbin / Dow Jones
NEW YORK — Shares of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) surged after the close of trading as the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it would settle a fraud lawsuit against the investment bank.
Earlier Thursday, in the regular trading session, shares of the investment bank rose after the SEC said it had a “significant” announcement, without disclosing that it would be the settlement.
I thought the so-called surivalists who are really just common paranoid wingnut anti-social recluses with mean-spirited personalities and an obsession with weapons are just acting out in accordance with their own psychological aberrations.
Hey, just a goddamn minute there TreeBeard. I hope you realize you’re describing to a T one of our very own greybeards at this blog and we don’t take kindly to some young upstart that muscles his way in and starts disparaging our elite, no matter how true your words might ring. The person of whom I speak, of course, is Vlad Krantz who has told us any number of times about his intentions of heading north to Idaho or Montana to escape the brown hordes, laying in weapons and ammo, learning to farm a modest sized plot and setting up a stationary bike to charge up batteries so he can live off-grid.
There is no successful black society in the world. They are genetically destined to be pyschopathic criminal dysfunctional incompetent morons by and large and are to be avoided. Nearly all those living south of the Rio Grande also form societies of semi-moronic peasants ruled by corrupt exploitative criminals. They too are to be avoided and should not be allowed into this country. Blacks, Central and South American indians — meaning Mexicans, Guatamalans etc — and Islamics should all be sent back to their own failed societies. Most of them are incapable of living well where they are and should not be allowed to infect white civilization.
And there you go again TreeBeard. I hope you realize there’s a smart fellow that claims to be Black (although, to be honest, I have my doubts) who has been participating at this blog for many years and I am certain he will be mightily offended by your words. He goes by the name Asoka. SHAME on you!
TeeHeeHee, snicker, guffaw.
“We are told by our propaganda organs that “life expectancy dropped” in the former Soviet Union.
Damn right. In one year, from 78 to 59. (Or whatever it was).”
Thanks for this. Only 4 more years to endure, rather than 23. Heck, I can do 4 years standing on my head, watching NASCAR and eating cheez doodles. No need to get all sweaty gardening, or sharpening my aim.
Whew.
>come back every eight hours to get more zucchini
If they are polite, we’ll invite them to have dinner with us and get them started on their own gardening (i.e. teach them to fish vs. giving them a fish).
If they’re not polite, I can hit the bulls eye from 50 feet with either the 9mm or the .357, although I hope I will never have to.
‘ On more than one occasion I’ve predicted that maybe 1 in 10 will make it through the crash. That would be closer to pre-industrial levels.’
When? 2010? 2015?
Hi.
Am thinking that regardless of the PO and GW phemonena some significant changes need to be made to our society especially the following:
I. The reduction of the entitlement of the administrative, executive, and trading class, particularly the hedge fund and leveraged buyout firms. The setting of a maximum total annual compensation of around $500,000, the level of brain surgeons, may be reasonable.
II. The elimination of corporate personhood and the limitations on the idea of fiduciary responsibility, maximimizing shareholder profits.
III. Allowing the participation of multiple parties through proportional representation, and thus breaking the lock of the corporate republicans and democrats.
IV. Stopping immigration from Mexico etc.
V. An End to Free Trade: Nafta, GATT etc
VI. An End to neo-colonialism: BOFA, IMF etc
VII. Banning leafblowers (because I don’t like the noise)
That is a good start.
PS
Would legalize marijuana too
Am not certain American society as a whole should be dispensed with as it is quite comfortable. The entitled kleptocrats (CEOS, university administrators) should be reigned in though.
this blog for many years
years?
ill check when posts were first allowed.
april 2009
see cover article this weeks LA Times.
the head of bell californias police gets almost half million $ a year.
his staff of police..40 or so.
his city..40,000? mostly born outside USA.
Hi, Diogen. I consider what you’re doing
LIVING A PRINCIPLED LIFE, not survivalism.
Your doing this before Mad Max which I
don’t anticipate for another decade.
I, too, life a principled life. Aside from
my to-and-from-work driving (4000 mi. per
year), I drive only 2000 mi. per year. I’ve
grown many crops just as a hobby (summer and
winter squash, potatoes, tomatoes). I don’t
eat “Frankenfoods” because I consider that
poison created out of the hubris of the
biotech industry.
Believe me … I’m not knocking your efforts.
I’m DUPLICATING them. However, I am, above
all a realist and if social disorder accompanies
a total economic rout, I fully expect people
to do nothing short of SHOOTING me if they
want my larder.
However, until then, I love gardening and I
love being in the natural world since I
consider the social world right now to be
more sociopathic than at any time in my
life.
As the Aussies say … “Good on ya, mate”!!
E.
Your preps seem sensible to me, SJ Mom.
Actually, I’ve never seen the Mormon idea
of a year’s food storage as being anything
but the epitome of pragmatism. Who the
hell knows what’s going to happen even
way, way before “Mad Max”. An earthquake?
A nuclear event? A major electrical grid
failure?
By the way, that SHOTGUN seems bit dubious
to me because in most chaotic situations
there are four things that can happen with
a shotgun and three aren’t good for you:
1) A sneaky crook wrestles it from you,
2) You can’t get to the shotgun before
some marauders get to you, 3) You shoot
an innocent person mistaken for a baddie,
and 4) You get to the gun in time and you
shoot the baddie(s).
I’m absolutely in agreement with the food
storage idea just as a pragmatic emergency
preparedness tactic (in WHATEVER kind of
emergency). The gun? I think the “safety”
they provide is overrated. However, I
realize, to paraphrase Sophie Tucker, that
it might “soothe your nerves”.
She said that in relation to MONEY. She
said: “Actually I hate money but it does
soothe my nerves”.
Cheers,
E.
Well, you may note in my reply to
SJ Mom, who appears to be a very
nice woman, was decidedly PRO food
storage (and not just for “Mad Max”
… what if the grid goes out for
a week?) but decidedly ANTI this
idea that shotguns or other armaments
provide “safety”.
I said above that four things can happen
with that shotgun and three are bad for
the owner: 1) The criminal wrestles it
from you or gets to it before you do
and shoots you with your own gun,
2) You are ambushed and can’t even get
near the gun, or 3) Your nerves are
“hair trigger” and you actually shoot
an approaching person who isn’t a menace
at all.
It’s actually rare that you get ample
enough warning of approaching marauders
or pillagers because it’s in their very
nature to NOT announce their coming or
arrival. I’ve never found the “gun as
protection” idea to be more than an
anarcho-libertarian myth.
E.
How dare you put Uncle on the spot like this? What did he ever do to you except try to educate you? If he says nothing, it will look like he agrees with you. If he protests, it will just look like he’s patronizing me. You are pure EVIL.
Put it this way: like all analytical types, TBU thinks just about everyone else is silly or crazy. The great explorer Burton said that this was the common attitude in the East: everyone else was either a fool or a rogue. This is certainly my attitude and I believe it too. This is your attitude as well. So since we’re all similar in this, we should be courteous and not openly call each other crazy or deluded. William Blake knew too: The only man I ever knew,
Who did not make me almost spew,
Was Fuseli, and he was both Turk
and Jew,
So my dear Christian Friends,
How do you do?
Consider such courtesy the rules of the road. Like Charles Bukowski, I experience an empty elevator as a thing of beauty. Most people are a waste of chemicals and a corruption of space. Nontheless we have a duty to bear with them if we can.
The opposite of all this is embodied in a line from Gray’s Elegy, “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” A high ideal, no?
The very idea that it’s an easy thing to help another person or society is hubris. Helping is very different than hooking. In certain part of Africa, the native tailors have been put out of business by constant massive clothing donations.
The Haitian Goverment wisely and quietly asked for food donations to level off. Why create a multi-generational camp population? Making sick White people feel good about themselves just isn’t a valid reason.
I take it, Vlad, that you have a
Hobbesian view of the human race
as currently constituted. I do,
too. Indeed, and alas, history
has featured far, far more Hobbesian
epochs than enlightened ones.
I deal with the public for a living
… which I shall give up in one more
year. Whether it be administrators,
who function like Communist apparatchiks
(they’re “correct” about things they
know nothing about or, if you disagree,
your career is in QUIET JEOPARDY) or
students, the world of the last few
years has gotten immensely dumber
and needlessly complicated.
The latter because Peter Principle
managers, none of whom have written even
a ten line computer program in their
lives, fancy that the cybernetic jokes
they inflict on customers and employees
alike to “go paperless” makes them
tres chic and hyper moderne.
Idiocy combined with high technology is
lethal.
E.
I read the Perkins review. Very interesting stuff. I wonder though how much Perkins talks in his book about home grown corruption in countries getting this “aid”.
No doubt this business of giving “aid” is corrupt to the core. But I have this aversion to thinking of countries with populations in the tens or hundreds of millions that have been civilized for many centuries and with long traditions of intellectual and artistic brilliance as helpless victims. My bias is rather to see them as willing accomplices in their own misfortune.
I used to work with a chap from the Philipines (I was his boss). Over lunch we used to chat about many things. One thing he could not fathom was why we think nepotism (favouritism towards family and friends regardless of merit) is a bad thing. Why shouldn’t govt officials take care of their families and friends? It’s the first priority and it’s the moral and correct thing to do. He was pretty insistent about this (he was a good employee but he let his chin wag a bit too much). I suspect (though I don’t know) that this attitude wrt to nepotism is pretty widespread in his home country.
I used to work with another chap from Czech Republic. He told me stories about, how in the post communist era, former communist party officials and the secret police took control of formerly govt owned businesses via devious means, drained them of all their cash (for instance by not paying workers and suppliers), sending the loot to overseas bank accounts and letting the businesses crash.
In my long wretched life I’ve seen and heard things like the above and it always struck me that the nastiness was always avoidable. True to form the former communist bosses and their hitmen showed their contempt for their compadres and ripped them off. Why could they not have been above board? Same thing with that fellow from the Philipines. Why could he not see the huge damage that comes from govt officials behaving this way?
I hadn’t heard that clothing donations were killing off African tailors but I’m not surprised. Same with the Haitian thing.
I read a while back about aid workers in the backwoods somewhere in central America. They were trying to help villagers who were basically subsistence farmers. The farmers had every problem in the book: malnutrition, parasitic diseases, high infant mortality, you name it. The aid workers said to them that they had some resources and asked the villagers what they wanted first ie a sewage disposal system, a water purification system, water pumps, an irrigation system, medical help etc. Know what the villagers said they wanted most of all? A concrete dance floor.
I read of another instance in South America where people were using sewage to fertilize vegetable gardens. Problem was that, according to medical aid workers, the sewage was transmitting nasty stuff like polio. So the medical workers told the people that the sewage was transmitting this shitty disease and that shitty disease. They weren’t listened to. The gardeners insisted that they got good juicy veggies and that was that.
I think people have to be left to their own devices. We have a former politician up here that’s always pushing for money to help AIDS victims in Africa. Then you hear about leaders in Africa that subvert the effort, they refuse to believe that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus and they push useless folk remedies. I heard of one AIDS conference in Africa (this was a while back) attended by African medical students and workers where the audience booed one speaker who said that you must wear condoms.
When you hear stuff like this you say, fine, do what you want, it’s your country, you’re all adults. People believe what they want to believe.
Has anyone ever taken your advice no matter how good it is? I don’t know about you but nobody listens to me. And know what? When people tell me what I to do I resent it. I’ll bet you do too. And I’ll bet people in Africa and other places do too.
A long time ago I realized that you cannot tell anybody anything. And nobody can tell me anything. I don’t listen. I want to be left alone, I don’t want people sticking their nose in my business. I think most people are like that. I wonder if aid workers keep that human tendency in mind.
As for these sick white people I would say to them that they have enough fish frying under their own noses to keep them occupied ie a society and economy that’s imploding. They should mind their own business and fix their own problems and leave other people to theirs.
How dare you put Uncle on the spot like this? … You are pure EVIL.
==================
Oh for Christ sakes Vlad, LIGHTEN UP! TreeBeard wrote something eqivalent to an invitation with a bow on it begging to be Q-spoofed and I drove right through the opening with my 18-wheeler.
And besides … look at the wonderful opportunity I gave you to sport your erudition:
. The great explorer Burton
. William Blake knew too
. Fuseli, and he was both Turk and Jew
. Like Charles Bukowski…
. a line from Gray’s Elegy
And speaking of “sport,” these were the very names of my Little League team infield:
Bill Blake at first
Chuck Bukowski at second
Shorty Burton at shortstop
Timmy Gray at third and
Eddie Fuseli, catcher
What are the odds of THAT?
Has anyone ever taken your advice no matter how good it is?
===============
No one ever says to me, “thanks Q for advising me about the word jibe. I just always assumed the word was jive. But I believe they DO listen and it slowly sinks in.
Know what Wage? I think the rich are rich because we the sheeple are idiots. How many of us bought into the Ponzi economy?
Did we seriously think that we could fund our retirements buying and selling each other’s houses and stocks?
Did we seriously think that we didn’t need to save? Do we even know what saving is? Do we even know that saving is putting aside some cash from your paycheque in the bank for future use? Do we even know that “savings” is the number you see on a bank statement, that it’s a legal claim you have on the bank, enforceable in court and FDIC insurable?
How many of us don’t even know our take home pay?
The “rich” are enough to make a cockroach gag. I mean what kind of a business model is it to offshore our businesses and expect our newly unemployed masses to buy the products made by slave labour in China that can’t afford those products either?
This is a dog of a business model that don’t hunt, it don’t even bark. What kind of cretins on Wall Street or in universities would entertain such howling nonsense? Oh wait, I remember, the newly unemployed were supposed to move up the “value chain”. Some fairy tale that was.
eqivalent
==========
insert u between q and i.
Another thing Wage:
I look at me and the so-called “men” around me. The mess we’re in is entirely our fault. Why? Because we have the balls of mice, you know, really tiny mice. Microscopic balls. In the space of one short generation we turned from the men our fathers and grandfathers were, the men that got us through the Depression, put Nazi-ism in the grave, went to work day after day, year after year, decade after decade in hard, dirty jobs without complaining and took care of us all and we became these contemptible, fat, feminized, weepy, useless, sorry assed ninnies. You always hear about sexual harassment or women in the worklace. You know why it happens? The harassers are not afraid of the woman’s father/brother/boyfriend/husband. You know why? Because the father/brother/boyfriend/husband are contemptible, fat, feminized, weepy, useless, sorry assed ninnies. No point a woman telling them. They can’t/won’t do anything. It’s against the law you see. A confrontation and a punch in the mouth used to be a fast, sure form of justice and the cops used to be able to judge when someone had it coming. No more. Now I hear in these parts that young women say that young men won’t make a move and I hear young men say that young women are disdainful. Disdainful? No shit sherlock. Like the Godfather shrieked at Johnny Fontane in his office: “YOU CAN ACT LIKE A MAN!”
We could’ve acted and averted the mess we’re in and we didn’t.
In Canada we turned from a respected, respectable, feared country into this limp and ludicrous “Rest of Canada”. Canuck readers will know what I mean. We’re doomed.
Something else: I HATE the term “self esteem”. It makes me VOMIT. But I’m going to use it. It used to be that a man’s chief source of self esteem or sense of self worth was supporting a wife and family. No more. These days, if this attitude is not strictly illegal, it’s at least reprehensible. But I wonder, when this rug was yanked out from under men, in large part by other men, that it didn’t lead to a greater and greater withdrawal from a sense of obligation and responsibility. You can’t have half of society saying screw it, not my problem / I have no power / what can I do. I’m not making excuses. Excuses never cut any ice with me. But now we’re in the mess we’re in.
Anyway Wage, sorry about the temper tantrum. That’s a guy’s view of guys. How do you see it?
years? … ill check when posts were first allowed.
==============
I believe it was Asoka himself, or maybe other oldtimers like OEO or Rico, who said it had been years. I’ve only been here a year so I couldn’t say for sure. In any case, those who merely read participate too.
Well, judging by the torrent of abuse you take, I would say that you, at least, are making a difference. People may not like it but in your case I think you’re right, they listen.
I remember you saying in a post that in your opinion you have an obsessive/compulsive disorder. In the bean counting business how common do you think it is? I’ve seen quite a variety of other personality quirks/disorders/psychoses in bean counters. I’ve seen really bad mood disorders, people that fly into uncontrollable rages, some guys that I would say have asperger’s syndrome, some guys that cannot carry on a conversation. Many things.
But I’m not sure that the obsessive/compulsive trait is always harmful. I remember reading Solzhenitsyn’s account of life in a Russian prison camp. He said that your survival depended on small things ie properly drying out your socks at night, getting an extra spoonful of soup. In other words you had to be obsessive/compulsive.
I think that in the old days that’s how life was like. You had to be really careful of small things and people that had this personality trait did better and survived longer than others. Look at us. In our work lives we were always thinking: I have to do this, then this, then this… Plus accuracy, if not the be all and end all, was top two in importance. The other was time management, hitting your deadlines. Like a boss told me, every accountant is just one fuck up from the unemployment line. Obsession with time, obsession with precision was the key to survival.
…the word was jive.
============
Insert quote marks (“) after the word jive.
Has anybody heard any talk of Hillary for 2012?
obsessive/compulsive disorder. In the bean counting business how common do you think it is?
===============
I love this entire post of yours. It opens up so many opportunities for me to talk about ME.;o)
The whole OCD thing is a self-diagnosis upon reflecting back on my near 70 years. I can’t say that I was particularly aware of it until after I retired. My nitpicker’s eye turned me into a passably good auditor. Sometimes too good. My boss was furious when I published certain “findings.” He said, “you know what you’ve done here? You’ve just pissed on the company’s entire system of ……”
As to OTHER obsessive bean-counters, I will match my last boss with any functioning being on the face of the earth. Actually, in his case, it was more ADHD than OCD that made him such a character … and that drove me near to committing murder or suicide. I have written extensively about this person as a way to purge demons but I may only have posted a snippet here and there on this blog. I like to save these tales for times when someone’s comment presents the perfect opening. (Note: I had a letter to the editor published in the NY Times on the subject of ADHD. I also had a piece published in the Stanley Bing blog [he publishes selectively] on the subject of Letters of Resignation prompted by my nemesis boss.)
You spoke about accuracy and “hitting your deadlines.” In my case deadlines were never a problem. I always had assignments done way quicker than my boss could review them. I think it drove him crazy. It was always ME prodding HIM to “review the fucking report already” and get it out the door.
One quick anecdote … I went down to HR for some reason and spoke to an older woman who worked there and she said “Tom R. is your boss isn’t he?” I nodded yes and she wordlessly pointed her index finger at her temple and twirled it in a clockwise motion.
I have spent the past three weeks driving across the U.S. stopping in Elk Horn, Wisconsin… Sterling, Colorado…. Omaha… Cortez, Colorado…. Las Vegas… Grand Junction…West Des Monies.. and Elkhart, Indiana.. so far…. the situation in Elkhart has been the most dismal so far.. the service in restaurants in Excellent, a sign that jobs are hard to come by and restaurants can be picky about who they hire at a rate of$2.13 per hour.
Las Vegas has just become another place to stand in line. (and standing in a line that shouldn’t exist to eat really awful “food” is not my idea of fun) As always if you want to experience Las Vegas as it was in the 50’s this can still happen in the little tiny casinos on the Boulder Hwy… where the service is always perfect.
Grand Junction hasn’t figured out that there is a recession at all. They are building strip malls and big box stores like no tomorrow.
Sterling, Co is in desperate need of some new hotels… the few decent ones they have are booked on the strangest nights, but no one has built a motel in Sterling since Carter was in office.
Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and Nebraska are working their cops like hell ticketing every possible moving violation.
And the TV stations in Denver have become so oober obsessed with professional sports that their stations lead the 5pm news with sport… (with a break for a “news second”) then it is right back to the Broncos, Rockies, Nuggets, and Avalanche. What the TV stations in Iowa do for the price of corn, the Colorado media do for the “sports” corporations.
5,700 miles (with a thousand to go) I can tell you that this country is utterly clueless about what is happening to them…. ( and behaving like they are all but awful certain that Jesus will rapture them before it happens)
I must admit, I bought the shot gun in time of personal panic — the 10/2008 stock crash. When I told my husband (a year later) he rolled his eyes and told me that I was nuts. So for almost two years it has remained hidden in the attic, in the original box (with a lock on it — even though it’s not assembled).
If mass chaos breaks for whatever reason, I imagine my neighborhood will band together to help each other — I’m sure my beans and rice won’t last long. We have a neighborhood watch group and lots of goodwill all around.
I’d rather have the Mayan calendar.
Hi, Q. I appreciate your responding to my rather rude posting there. I know what you said was written in the sense of sarcasm (as indicated by TeeHeeHee, snicker, guffaw.)Thus a serious reply is not called for.
Geoff
Hi, V. I appreciate your defending me in the face of Q’s reply there. However. I know what he said was written in the sense of sarcasm (as indicated by TeeHeeHee, snicker, guffaw.)Thus a serious reply was and is not called for.
Geoff
The reason the third world folks are having so much trouble with over-population and resource depletion is due to European colonization and corporate exploitation. If the foreign powers pulled out, those places would revert to the stone to iron age cultural states they were in before the Europeans arrived. Most of their populations would pass away and they would consume far less resources.
Geoff
i wish..i wish he’d only read not attempt to ‘ cheer us up ala polly anna’ !!!!
and they found the bad guys, cept they werent the bad guys:
Utah officials said Friday they have identified at least two state workers who apparently accessed confidential documents to create a list of 1,300 purported illegal immigrants that was mailed to law enforcement officials and the news media.
Gov. Gary Herbert said the employees work for the Department of Workforce Services, which administers food stamp programs and other public benefits.
The employees have been placed on administrative leave, and the state attorney general will determine whether to file criminal charges.
“Newspapers started receiving the list of names and personal information this week, and its publicity created widespread fear in the Hispanic community. The anonymous mailing
gee.. the gay left groups that out politicians and celebs should give those 2 a GLADD AWARD
If you think the end is near maybe flee sanjose!
if you have a room 20×20 you probably could store years worth of food there…grains and beans etc
‘I hadn’t heard that clothing donations were killing off African tailors but I’m not surprised. Same with the Haitian thing’
much as i dislike jim rogers as a person [ ya reading asshok] you might wanna spend 10$ on his 2 travel books.he talks about charities [ ha]
even he now..on radio ..is talking us depression and peak oil.
Those two workers should be given a medal for starting to stem the tide of the invasion. What? Do the Norenos and Sertanos and assorted tatooed homicidal moronic gang trash not put fear into the Hispanic community? Anyone hiring illegal aliens should be fined at least $100,000 per instance per individual hired. NAFTA, GAT, etc should be repealed, the World Bank and IMF disbanded, the corn lobby eviscerated, agricultural subsidies cut, and then the tide of human brown scum from the south return to their cess pools of origin.
Geoff
Sacramento, California
‘Central and South American indians — meaning Mexicans, Guatamalans etc — and Islamics should all be sent back to their own failed societies. Most of them are incapable of living well where they are and should not be allowed to infect white civilization.’
Well its already happened and now the middle class is the target. black , white or other!
half a million anchor babies a year and the prez says ‘ we are all immigrants’ etc.
ashok..do you agree with the prez..we are all immigrants?
‘ over-population ….due to modern farming, anti biotics, food aid etc. less infant mortality and more infants.
i can see it in LA when i see a US born 14 year old mexican gal with her baby and he r mom. all 3 generations speaking spanish and mexico identified.3 generations in 30 years.
I’m with you on all points except one, and that is legally limiting executive compensation.
Remember, TBU, that the 7-digit bonuses these people collect wouldn’t be possible if their enterprises hadn’t been backed by a government ready to step in and rescue them whenever their bets went terrifically bad. People who have to clean up their own messes do a better job of cleaning house, and we served notice to our financial kingpins in the S&L bailout of the 80s, and especially the LTC bailout of the late 90s, that we would never fail to rescue them from the consequences of their own malfeasance. If we had not done those two bailouts, we would have avoided the insanity of the noughties and the destruction of our financial system now.
The right to limit compensation legally would start with the executive class, but it would quickly begin to impact people at much lower levels, including independent entrepreneurs who create real value but whose rewards would be determined not by their success or failure, but by the arbitrary standards of a bunch of bureaucrats.
The people who would get the worst of it, however, would be ordinary middle and lower income earners, who would be completely at the mercy of credential-conscious bureaucrats who, for example, cannot see why a rail operator gets paid better than an art teacher at a private academy or why a fine carpenter makes more money than an office manager. The incentive to perform dangerous, difficult, uncomfortable jobs that demand real responsibility would disappear, while we would have a larger surfeit of over-credentialed but under-educated people standing in line to be white-collar flunkies. As it is, our current bias in favor of credentials has deprived our society of workers in areas essential to our health and safety, such as electricians, plumbers, and the like, while burdening our youth with $150K of college debt to qualify for the relatively small number of white-collar beginner level and mid-level jobs that pay well enough to service their college debt.
We have too many market distortions caused by ham-fisted government intervention as it is. Even Kunstler finally figured out that the government needs to get out of the housing market, and I wonder when he’ll figure out that it needs to get out of the transportation business, too.
The last thing we need is a bunch of officials arbitrating on the worth of one job vs another.
Ok. I just meant capping, setting maximi to executive and administrative compensation either, just in the form of a maximum salary and compensation in analogy with a minimum wage. Agree the gov should get out of the housing and transportation markets to a large degree.
Sold about 60 of the gladiolus @$1 each, 43 of them to a community planting project for kids, gotta get their hands in the soil, it’ll be their salvation yet.
Everyone get in the garden, run your hands thru black composted soil, grow your own. Tune in (to permaculture/growing), turn on (to horticulture) & drop out (of the enervating, soul-killing grotesquity that is the American ‘way-of-life’).
Europeans complain we Live to Work, not Work to Live. Boy are they right.
It’s probable that escapees of the CorporGov Matrix will need to rig up non-Internet networks to communicate, when the Masters decide to throw the WebKill Switch (the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ / ‘Net Neutrality’).
Any engineers here who can offer any guidance?
Peace to my brothers & sisters.
Has anyone ever taken your advice no matter how good it is?
===============
No one ever says to me, “thanks Q for advising me about the word jibe. I just always assumed the word was jive.” But I believe they DO listen and it slowly sinks in.
Ummmmmm, Thanks, Q, for trying, but I already knew that shit, ;o). (Sailing, y’know.) So, thanks! …And NOTHING sinks in sloooowly with me’self; it either scores or misses. I might not be quite as brain-dead or hidebound as you might believe.
Yes, I do look at what you’re positing, but generally, I ignore most “folks'” staunch opinions in favor of my nastier and FAR more hard-knock-ian one. (Invariably turns out more accurate that way.) I’m just not sure your particular life experience has given you much of a look into what the “boots on the ground” people really think, or how they arrive at the reactionary conclusions that they most assuredly do.
I appreciate your efforts at getting a bit more standardized semantical expression going (all ’round), but your political “leanings” make you ripe for culling. You probably don’t think so (just what you were speaking of), but there it “went”. (As opposed to: “is”.)
Kudo’s and congrat’s anyhoo! :o)
Ps. Ya gotta do what makes you happy.
Pss. I probably AM as hidebound/brain-dead as anyone would think me! lol
Pps. See that?!?
Aw, hell, Q; just read Dmitri Orlov’s latest. It will properly enrage you, as I doubt you’ve much recent practice being poor.
…And, great-googely-moogely, that last sentence should make us BOTH a bit apoplectic! ;o)
(We got’s to have us some fun while we may, eh?)
With all due respect, TBU, I feel that any salary regulations are a pretty slippery slope, and that we have no right to interfere.
What we DO have the right to demand is that public money be reserved for public purposes, and not be diverted to supporting these institutions. A “rescue” of the financial system could have been implemented without violating our rights and rewarding the malfeasance and criminality that our government fostered by the devices of the Federal Reserve and the implicit guarantees of bailouts extended to these institutions.
For example, in 2008, we could have done the following: First, set up 5 Emergency Temporary banks to function as lenders so that goods could be shipped, factory orders filled, and the economy otherwise function. At the same time, insure all “demand money”- checking and savings accounts, AND money market accounts up to any amount of money, for this M1 money includes money to meet payrolls and pay utility bills for businesses as well as individuals. The point of all this is to protect the “no-touch” “conservative” money of the public, both individuals and businesses- the money that cannot be put at risk.
Then, let the rest- the mortgages, the bonds, the liens, the secured and unsecured notes unwind as they would. Collect on what debts could be collected on and let the rest go, as it’s going to anyway, because there is simply too much debt relative to the money to be made for the next 50 years for there to be any hope it will be repayed.
What we did instead was put our entire system at even greater risk by endangering the treasury to support the institutions who did the most to produce this debacle. We’ve rewarded the malefactors, while if we had arranged to protect the “safe” money in demand accounts and make arrangements to provide commercial credit essential for day-to-day commerce, while letting the pile of bad debt collapse, our Bonus Boys would now be penniless, with no hope of recovery, and in no position to inflict the consequences of their malfeasance on the country as a whole, and no ability to continue to strip-mine the population. Not only have we extended the pain, kicked the debt can down the road, but we’ve added to the bad debt and our financial firms are now even more leveraged than they were in 08.
We don’t need to put legal limits on their rewards. If they can function as investment firms with no connection to the banking system, and still do well enough to pay themselves 10 digit salaries, so be it. But of course there is no way that would ever happen- the only way they could make the kind of money that makes those salaries possible is with the love and support, at the expense of the citizens, of our governmental authorities.
And the only way to prevent THAT is to strip our authorities of the power and authority to interfere in our economy. That would mean NO government intervention in our economy. No housing assistance of any sort , no intervention in transportation just to build a system we cannot sustain, no wars to secure the right of our businesses to operate in slave-labor havens, no trade policies, no NAFTA, no trade agreements. No help for failing banks- let dishonest bankers be dealt with the way they were before the Federal Reserve, which way I believe involved a lamp post and a length of rope. THAT will keep’m honest.
“With all due respect, TBU”
Laura, this is the person who refers to other human beings as “human brown scum from the south return to their cess pools of origin.”
This person TBU is one of the most evil bigots I’ve seen anywhere in the blogosphere. Not to mention his pitiful attempts at being thoughtful…
Treebeard, I’m having fun thinking up the insults I’m going to unleash on you in this space. I’m warning you, your fragile sense of self is about to be shattered! Now be a good boy and apologize to the brown people who are just trying to survive. I don’t think they should be here either, but please try to remember that they are human beings, not “scum”.
Have a nice day 🙂
In degenerate societies like our’s, many men become more effeminate, while a smaller perecentage become more brutal. Both tendencies are encouraged on high, but are also the result of our world view. And even the effiminate are often vicious albeit usually cowardly. Chivalry? How could men have it, when they are officially despised – not even allowed to defend their homes or person. And then women expect men to open doors for them? It doesn’t work that way. How can a man give what he doesn’t have? If he hasn’t been allowed honor, how can he extend it to others?
Of course some women don’t want chivalry – they want equality. That’s why homosexualtiy has cultic significance – it affirms that everyone is the same; gender is just choice. Some men reject all of this in favor of barbarism – quite understandably too. Because this kind of culture doesn’t work. High levels of homosexuality, the acceptance of it, women rejecting marriage and children, and of course, abortion are always signs of social breakdown. Always.
The deeper aspect of Abortion is of course, human sacrafice. Sacrafice to what? To the Goddess. To woman’s CONVENIENCE. Face it Cash: any culture that allows “doctors” to pierce the skulls of new born babies and suck out their brains is evil and doesn’t deserve to survive. And it wont. It will be conquered by simpler and cleaner barbarians. It’s an incredible tragedy because we really did have a higher culture than the Hispanics or the Muslims. But all cultures need religion – we thought we were too good for God so now we have been brought low.
The Left has become the new center. The Neo-Liberalism of Obama is no different than the Neo-Conservatism of Bush.
If you go far enough East you get to the West. Similarly, if you keep going Left you get to the Right.
The whole point of Communism was to overthrow the Aristocratic Ruling Class and replace it with a ruling class based on economics. This they have done via Communism in Asia and Capitalism in the West. Rockefeller and Khushchev embraced as lovers when they met. Trotsky and Baron Rothschild used to play chess together.
You have bought a giant lie. As for your truth – it’s impossible to begin with. Hierarchy is intevitable because humans are not born equal. And they pass on their wealth to their children. And you will do the same when the time comes in spite of your idealism. So why try to foist on others what you cannot follow either?
I’m high on the anti-social index, which is not the same of psychopathy. Hans Eyesenck has found a strong relationship between irascibility and creativity.
I hate the bureacrat, the company men with their cash register eyes and limp dead fish handshakes. Or the other kind with their firm hearty handshakes and eyes that look right through you; eyes devoid of humanity. These men herd the sheeple to their doom. The shepherds are too busy kissing Black Ass or buggering boys to care.
As Plato said, Democracy means totalitarianism. The people are lost without their princes and prophets to give counsel. Our particular form is plutocracy. We honor our war heroes and then try to deny them medical coverage for injuries recieved.
I will destroy you, eviscerate you, kill you, make you suffer. I will throw your pieces to the four winds and then wash my sword in the sea. Just kidding.
Was Eddie Fuseli both Turk and Jew. If so, I’d like to meet him. He might be a Sabbatean Jew…
What are the chances? Infinitesmal. The chances were no chances at all. You should take this as a message delivered to you via me from a higher intelliegence. Don’t disount the message because the messenger is flawed. What is the message? The message is the message. For a message presupposes an author. Know the He Is. Will you not now believe?
“If you go far enough East you get to the West. Similarly, if you keep going Left you get to the Right.”
And as the white half of the circle transitions into the black, and the black into the white, a small opposite remains within the dominant aspect of each half.
Kind of like a small brain within a large skull. (Irascible!)
Our particular form is plutocracy.
Whose isn’t? I cannot imagine a society or government that is not plutocratic. It seems that wealth and power go together as naturally as breathing and living. Likewise, smarts and wealth are joined at the hip. How could it be otherwise? And so, everywhere and always, the smart, the financially well-off and the politically powerful are one and the same. If I am naive, if I am wrong, please point out where on earth the smart ones are the poor and the powerless.
With people as currently constituted
(greedy, narcissistic, stupid), democracy
surely is totalitarianism. That’s why
I notice that “militant stupidity” has
become a staple of social intercourse.
It’s like “yeah, I’m loud, I’m tattooed,
I’m ill-mannered and uncultured … WHAT
OF IT”.
I don’t think we’re too far from something
like Mao’s Cultural Revolution where if
you look smart (e.g., you wear glasses)
you should be censured, marginalized, or
even damaged.
These are the same members of the populace
who are stupid enough to think that THEY
will profit from a Tony Robbins course or
get rich on distressed real estate.
A friend of mine once said that if people
realized that they were 99.9% closer to
eating out of garbage cans than to being
Warren Buffet, America would change over
night. Regrettably, I talk to a lot of
young people who fancy that they’re
“undiscovered artists” or “T-shirt
entrepreneurs” waiting to be discovered.
America, right now, is like a real life
“Waiting for Godot” and, like the play,
Godot is never going to arrive.
E.
Speaking of militant stupidity, some people would subvert the “natural order” they so passionately espouse in reactionary fits to a perceived macro social order. It doesn’t get much more infantile that not opening a door for the opposite gender because “ it just doesn’t work that way”.
On the other hand, repressed chivalry is hardly infantile; it’s the abbreviated impulse of a censoring and calculating mind–my hand reached to open the door for the woman carrying a bag of groceries, but ultimately yielded to a sense of societal retribution. I am left to wonder how many more abbreviated impulses are ruling the day in the land of the xenophobic paranoid. So smart, but unable to turn off the brain in the midnight hour. And if living like a “real man” is tough to do in a constrained society how bout mustering up some of the irascible creativity to penetrate the vast cavities of decadence and decay instead of the withering limp-handed retreat no longer willing or capable of opening doors.
When I put on the glasses to read between some of the lines I see nothing but fear, bile, and the closing of doors, so sorry to startle.
“A friend of mine once said that if people
realized that they were 99.9% closer to
eating out of garbage cans than to being
Warren Buffet, America would change over
night. Regrettably, I talk to a lot of
young people who fancy that they’re
“undiscovered artists” or “T-shirt
entrepreneurs” waiting to be discovered.
America, right now, is like a real life
“Waiting for Godot” and, like the play,
Godot is never going to arrive.” -E.
Ouch! Great way to encapsulate our present state of delusion (sad to say). Ah, Warren Buffet: Railroad Tycoon; sounds ominous…
It’s ironic that the get-rich-quick
infomercial, which scarcely existed
in the mid-1990s but now dominates
the “off” hours of most local and cable
stations, is still at fever pitch in
2010.
One would think that two stock market
crashes, massive job losses, and
declining real wages would sober America
up. Nope.
Some would say that the “greed gland”
is strictly a byproduct of the stock
mania of the 1990s but I say that this
has been building since the 1960s when
we stopped being a nation that could
defer sensory gratification.
The wholesale makeover of a nation’s
people does not occur in ten or fifteen
years. It takes a lot of repeated,
Orwellian irrationality passed off as
truth over decades to get people to
believe, economically speaking, that
pigs can fly.
Look at the delusions that are now
conceived of as “truth”: 1) Computers
make societies more “efficient” (tell
that to anyone stuck in automated
answering system menu hell or who is
spending two hours a day on email),
2) Housing is an “investment” (as
opposed to a NECESSITY), 3) Casino
gambling is “good” for municipalities
and states (tell that to Nevadans who
now have the nation’s highest unemployment
rate, vaulting over Michigan), 4) You
don’t need to make stuff to have a viable
economy, 5) Cable TV is good because it
gives more choices … which is always
good (yeah, it let’s you channel surf
for hours before putting the remote
down instead of five minutes) … you
catch my drift.
More “choice”, more avenues of gratification,
more instant wealth … and yet we find
ourselves a broken society of dispirited
people. We were happier when we found
our gratification in PEOPLE and when
people were our allies instead of “things”
we avoid by doing all our commerce on the
Internet or avoiding local commerce by
driving to a Big Box store instead of
strolling a downtown.
What in hell have we become??
E.
Gogreenordi, I don’t like TBU’s or Vlad’s racism anymore than you do.
But I also don’t feel that name-calling and blatant rudeness does anything to raise the level of civility on this site, which is pretty low. I avoid the discussions on race because they provoke so much venom and hate, and I don’t feel like adding to it.
“ashok..do you agree with the prez..we are all immigrants?”
How long does a lifeform need to occupy {or thrive in} an environment before it is considered a non-immigrant instead of an “invasive species”?
When did the “native americans” become natives?
Good on you Marcus!
I’m from Brisbane Australia.
In our town we have recently built an “Ecosciences Precinct” in the “Boggo Road Urban Village” , the new-speak to an expansive development to replace and utilise what was once the “Boggo Road Gaol”.
What remains of the Boggo Road Gaol is a wonderful old building, built in the late Victorian age, and age when planning, design and construction mattered and included a deep sense of obvious pride. It was of a time too when people who showed a disrespect to the sanctity of others lives, where thankfully and efficiently, hanged. A no-nonsense and pragmatic period of late classic western domination.
The irony is that, (and thankfully) they’ve retained the old prison buildings, as a museum, is that (even?) a gaol 100 years ago was a wonderful and proud expression, so starkly contrasted with this awful and disgusting urban village!
A tin lined and plastic pipe veneered , new aged, air-conditioned, balls-up of modern architecture.
Please visit the monstrosity and weep…
http://boggoroadurbanvillage.com/content/standard.asp?
A product of the tramp stamped, tits and ass age. This failed new building a structural elegy to an age of woe, the crass cellophane wrapped ad-agency glitzed cheap thrill!
The bang in a packet genre!
This appalling junk ‘eco-sciences’ excuse should be an international symbol to the pendulum of modernity – swung way too far!
Please visit the monstrosity and weep…
=============
The image at your link reminded me of the old adage that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee.”
A few thoughts on chivalry and simple kindness…
I just finished reading “Overshoot” by William R. Catton, Jr. On pg. 223 he writes, “For scores of centuries, unevenly and with many setbacks, human beings had been learning to pull in their elbows and be civil–i.e., to relate to each other not as colliding objects or competing animals but as compassionate humans. But the ongoing irruption of population and techology were compounding pressure until eventually this progress had to be undone. Competitive relations were to become again increasingly prevalent.”
We live in an increasingly graceless age. I do my best to be nice when I drive, letting folks into my lane, stopping and letting pedestrians in parking lots pass in front of me. It amounts to nothing, but it makes me feel more at ease with the world.
I’d express it differently – our Cultural Revolution has been going on since the 60’s. Not as intense as China’s was, but the results may be more long lasting because of the time.
Of course America’s always had a good does of anti-intellectualism. Anytime I have workmen in my house, they accuse me of having alot of books. It’s the tone of the voice that gives it away.
“Natural Order”? If you don’t believe in it, why expect us to open doors? Surely you don’t expect women to show chivalry to men? Someone did a study and was outraged to find out that men stop and help attractive women more than unattractive. But women don’t stop for men at all so the outrage is nonsense.
Let’s go deeper Comrade: everything is false under Capitalism, isn’t it? So just reverse everything and make it right! All the cops are criminals and all the criminals, saints. All men are women and all women are men. High is low and low is high. Black is White and White is Black. Immigrants are the real Americans and Americans are illegal.
And if things don’t cross over properly, just give them a little push! Mix all the races together and call it diversity. Whites who wont mix? The new niggers, whith White Men being the lowest. And the amazing thing is that you actually are offended when White Men object to this. Your Maoism and Mau Mauism are crap and there will never be peace in this Land until the Natural Order of Merit is reestablished.
I still hold doors for women occasionally – or for anyone who needs it. But truly the impulse is weakened knowing how many of our women have adopted this world view which sees White Men as the lowest of the low. It tickles their fancy, very funny comercials etc and of course their vanity – “I can do anything better than him”. But deep down, alot of them really, really believe it – and that is deadly for relationships and bodes ill for the survival of our Race and Civilization. And as a Nihilist, all of this pleases you very much. Next project: how to get rid of the skeleton so humans can become like Trilobites or even jellyfish.
For what I can see, the wealthy and powerful think they are entitled to anything and everything; for example: prison labor, sweat shop labor, slave labor, working kids twelve hours a day, busting unions, declaring bankruptcy and stealing people’s pensions, and then starting over in Mexico. What about the TARP bailouts? They think they’re entitled to public money to save swindlers.
Their usual excuse for these outrages is ‘market forces’. It’s a global economy, there’s nothing we can do. I’ve noticed these Captains of Industry don’t put themselves in competition with the cheapest possible labor.
You think these people are smarter and better than everybody else, I think they’re shit.
>It amounts to nothing, but it makes me feel
>more at ease with the world.
I think it does amounts to something. Or at least I choose to believe that it does. Whenever I do such things (i.e. practicing random acts of politeness) I imagine the recipient doing it to several people, and then like a chain reaction an avalanche of civility and good will roars over the Earth. When that happens, please everyone remember that SJ Mom and I were the stray neutrinos that started it!!!!
These communists, politically-correct idealogs, sociologists, levelers, and social engineers of various stripes are a form of venomous poison infecting the body politic, society, and interpersonal relations. Their weakness partly lies in their denial of science (particularly) biology and history. They do not realize their views only have held sway for a short time (basically since 1964 or so, the time of the passage of the Civil Rights Act), and that they only manage to become dominant because of a fleeting coalition of social forces namely the following:
1. the ubiquitous lawsuit
2. the desires of corporations and others to expand their markets
3. the cowardice of much of the population
4. the enabled wishes of various inferior groups to gain dominance
5. the fraying hegemony of “western civilization”
and its population
When these ephemeral conditions for the ascendance of their fantastic notions pass — as they will within the span of a few generations —
their ideas will be safely ensconced in the dust bins of history where they belong.
Vlad, you remind me of this notion that food critics really don’t enjoy food, movie critics don’t enjoy movies. You’re a critic of life as it is, so you don’t enjoy being alive. There are just too many things that bug the heck out of you in life: women, men of most kinds, jews, blacks, hispanics, opening doors, etc. etc. etc. Wanna tell us about things that make you happy? Me – I harvested some of our Raspberries around 6am this morning, that made me happy. After I brought some in for the Frau, she made me even more happy 🙂
I bet if you got your white nation in Utah, you’d still find plenty of things to criticize. Or maybe worse, after all Nazis were also killing perfectly white arisch Catholic priests…
Vlad,
You might enjoy reading, “What ever happened to the Vikings? A quizzical look at the Scandinavian experiment to create a gender-neutral society.”
You can find it at enlightennext.org/magazine/J41/what-ever-happened-to-the-vikings.asp
Compensation!!!
LA Times put Bell California [ a mexican city within LA ] on the cover…mayor gets $800,000 a year..you read that right.
police chief gets almost 500,000..has 40 cops and pencil pushers.
bell is mostly non us born. 80% didnt finish hi school.
on a.m. radio it was said ‘ towing cars is a big $ making scam’..tow companies pay to re elect the mayor.
They have much in common, which is why they dislike each other!
by : The US you mean those in power in govt and the rich who own the trans nationals.
lots of peeps id like to help blacks in africa and haiti.
bill gates wife said the turning point in her life was going to africa and seeing the poverty and suffering.
“Let’s go deeper Comrade: everything is false under Capitalism, isn’t it? So just reverse everything and make it right! All the cops are criminals and all the criminals, saints. All men are women and all women are men. High is low and low is high. Black is White and White is Black. Immigrants are the real Americans and Americans are illegal.”
Yes Vlad, immigrants are real Americans,for well over two hundred years now.
But before we go deeper let’s first remove the kitty litter which is covering some of your previous doo-doo. You wrote:
“If you go far enough East you get to the West. Similarly, if you keep going Left you get to the Right.”
Your earlier comment seems to assert the inevitability of the latter comment, which you now sarcastically protest? To be frank, you seem to be the one who wants to put society in reverse and go back to a state of institutionalized racism just now echoed with TBU’s lament of the Civil Rights Act.
But enough of the silliness and delusional projections. Suffice to say, the world you and TBU long for is one of ugliness and separation, brilliantly depicted by the great Jack Levine’s “Birmingham 63“:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/158/335257448_0a4e0af70f.jpg
E said: “Indeed, and alas, history
has featured far, far more Hobbesian
epochs than enlightened ones.”
E, aside from your subjective opinion, do you have any objective evidence this is so?
Hobbes amused himself while a student at Oxford by torturing birds. Hobbes sees the world as a setting for a “war of all against all” which renders the life of its human inhabitants “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Has this “war of all against all” been your experience of the 20th and 21st centuries you have participated in?
Or have their rather been well-defined conflicts (not war of all against all, rather wars of allied nations against axis nations) simultaneous with the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of BILLIONS?
Hobbes said life is ““solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
In just the few hundred years since Hobbes uttered these words, the truth is life expectancy has increased each century, lives are less solitary and more interconnected than ever, and what many call poor in no way resembles the nasty and brutish poverty of, say, the Middle Ages.
Hobbes might have been describing his life experience but as a commentary on life in general, Hobbes is wrong.
I know folks don’t like it when massive quotes are copied and pasted but the following is highly germane to the discussion of the emasculating social engineering espoused by Comrades Nudge, Laura, Wagelaborer, Diogen,etc. Boys and girls are born different with different abilities and interests and it is perverse and counter-productive to try to enforce gender equity. Insisting upon unnatural equality is pernicious and a form of tyranny, and a crime against god and nature.
G
http://www.enlightennext.org/magazine/j41/what-ever-happened-to-the-vikings.asp?page=1
The quote is from page 7.
What Ever Happened to the Vikings?
A quizzical look at the Scandinavian experiment to create a
gender-neutral society
by Elizabeth Debold
In our secure, affluent, and secular cultures, where sexual intimacy is the highest value, our fears focalize on our need for meaningful connection with other human souls.
I was beginning to realize that killing off the patriarch—the father in the home and in the culture—and validating the mother’s intimate sphere will not liberate us and society as we might have hoped. As the historian Henrik Jensen told me, “Culture is made up of two legs: one leg is duty and one is rights.” The culture of duty is associated with the authority of the father, or patriarch. And the culture of rights “only began with the emergence of the individual, which happened fairly recently.” The culture of rights is what we find in Northern Europe—where society tries to fulfill “mothering functions” and meet each individual’s needs. “But duty,” by which he means a sense of obligation and shared purpose, “was actually gluing things together. It created a mutuality of sorts. Once it goes, people get more and more isolated, thinking about their needs and their rights, but no one feels obligated to anyone or anything.”
It’s this point that I believe bears further and deeper consideration. The masculine—which Henrik calls the “father”—is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture. He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority. That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship—which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two. I found it surprising and almost counterintuitive to discover that placing so much priority on nurturing and mothering functions—caring for the special needs of each child, ensuring that each person grows in his or her unique way—does not lead to a close-knit and deeply connected society. Not in our day and age. Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, the result is hyperindividuation, which leaves us self-focused, isolated, and victimized.
These are some key points. The light has shifted to the east, to China, and Japan, which are among the only remaining civilizations with intelligent, well-ordered and organized populations, who preserve their intrinsic integrity. It is they who will be writing the histories that will describe the downfall of the civilization of the west as it sinks and is pushed into a morass of Islamic and Latino ascedence. The Latinos are illiterate and unintelligent and can’t be expected to do much more than drop out of school and pick tomatoes. The islamics are dark age homicidal maniacs. The average IQ of North Africans and South Asians is about 84 and close to that of the Latinos. It is the Chinese and Japanese with their long histories, literate traditions, and well-regulated societies which will lead the world in the future. They will inherit and adapt our technology but will lack the zest, imagination, and sensitivity of the best of the West. The neo-Marxists and corporate rulers are leading the gutless and atomized populace of Europe and America in their march to the dustbins of history. They will be replaced by more virile but less intelligent southerners and more organized, and genotype-defending, but less exuberant Easterners.
http://www.amren.com/ar/1995/08/index.html
The 1924 national origins quota system was dismantled in 1965 during the wave of self-recrimination that accompanied the Civil Rights era. Should Chinese historians of the twenty-second century be writing the final history of Western civilization, no doubt they will cite the 1965 Immigration Act as the blow that broke the back of Western man.
Vlad
Your pseudo intellectualism does little to conceal the redneck lurking beneath.
I’m still waiting for the invitation to your daughter’s impending nuptials with a man of colour. There goes that race purity thing you have been banging on about!!
“But all cultures need religion – we thought we were too good for God so now we have been brought low.”
Puhleeeeeezz!!
Thinking humans need science and humanism.
Cretinous,backward and superstitious little morons like yourself need imaginary deities.
Spend more time in prayer and less time on this forum, we will all be better off, us for not reading your bile and you for communing with your imaginary friend.
Better still kill yourself and bring on that eternity with Jesus, or does the idea of spending eternity praising your deity sound a little more like hell than heaven?
CORRECTION to Hobbes “war of all against all”:
“Or have there rather been well-defined conflicts (not a war of all against all, rather wars of allied nations against axis nations) simultaneous with the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of BILLIONS normal and peaceful human beings?
This is a question of logic.
If alliances are made, then the axis nations are not attacking axis nations, and the allied nations are not attacking allied nations, and by definition there is no “war of all against all” and Hobbes is wrong.
The below quote well explains the modus operandi of the folks now immigrating to America, Australia, and Europe in large numbers. They will use the West’s weakness against it, particularly the ideas of egalitarianism and freedom. The populace of these areas are mostly too cowardly, divided, individualistic, and passive to fight the tide that is swamping them.
http://www.amren.com/ar/1995/08/index.html
Louis Veuillot, the 19th century French writer, captured the dilemma facing the West in confronting peoples who do not conform to Western moral principles. “When I am the weaker, I ask you for my freedom, because that is your principle; but when I am the stronger, I take away your freedom, because that is my principle.” The West must recognize this appeal for compassion by “the wretched refuse of [the non-Western world’s] teeming shore,” for what it is: a form of beguiling parasitism that can, by definition, only seduce those with Western moral principles.
What an absurd name you have chosen since Dostoyevsky was a Christian. He knew more than any that Civilization without God is pure hubris courting nemesis. As he put it, men who set out to be angels will tend to end up as devils. Your pathological hatred is pure confirmation of this. Dude, the joke’s on you. Take a look in the mirror and see the ugly clown.
Wow, great article. It really opens up the real issues. Going to read the rest tomorrow.
In any case, Nature will have the last word. We have the knowledge that we are on Her Side and will triumph in the end. Our’s is the secret joy – to see a gay pride march and know that most of them are out of the breeding pool thus purifying the race. Truly, the beautiful ones are not yet born.
Yes, you have to have a society in which everyone upholds standards of honesty and decency.
This is what we have lost in the US, I think.
When Cheney went duck hunting with Scalia, while his case was pending, and they both sneered at the idea that Scalia should recuse himself, they showed contempt for the idea of integrity, and the concept of keeping up the appearance of such.
When Cheney awarded vast contracts to Halliburton during the Iraq invasion, it was a betrayal of the idea that our representatives shouldn’t have conflicts of interest.
For that matter, Scalia and Thomas should both have recused themselves from voting in George Bush, because both had relatives working for him.
Open corruption, favoritism, and blatant conflicts of interest are now common, while those of us who are aware are dumbfounded that they can get away with it.
It turns out that only integrity and/or the belief that there were consequences for bad behavior kept politicians, if not honest, then at least anxious to appear honest, in the past.
We’ve lost that now, along with corporate leaders who had a sense of responsibility to their company, their workers, and their community.
They’re nasty and they’re brutish. Too bad they live so long.
Raspberries huh? I guess you have a small “gas tank”, but I like em too. But I eat them right off the bush like a bear. Sweet!
Bitter? You have no idea how much you and Cash make me suffer. I find it unbearable when bright people refuse to see. Especially you with your guns and your exposition of the Third Way in German Economics – pure Fascism. Brother, you must overcome the conditioning that makes you a slave. You must become stronger – may you find your strength from your joy. For a man is not complete until he feels proud of his heritage – genetic not excluded. Then your joy will be still greater.
I had a great night: dinner with friends, good music, the experience of trance, a woman falling in love with me, a hazy half moon – I can enjoy many things, God Man. True, I’m less than other men in some ways, but I’m more in other ways, ways they can’t even imagine. I end up appreciating others far more than they appreciate me. Difficult? Oh yes indeed. Bitter? Sometimes, who wouldn’t be?
But even if I was as happy as a pig in shit all the time, I still wouldn’t close my eyes and accept the death of the White Race. Then I would be the pig in shit. It’s one thing if you don’t know, but I do and that entails responsibility. That’s why so many refuse to awaken – they know the burden and will not accept it. It’s unconscous, sure. But as Jung said, much of our process is.
Well,….. I’m not really sure how to reply to that.
Remember, I don’t really think that being “feminized” is necessarily a bad thing.
What do you mean by that?
If you mean “unemployed, so unable to support a family, so lacking a goal in life, so unwilling to try to find a mate that you can’t support”, then, yes, I think that this point in our society is sad. I just don’t think that it’s female.
Remember that I blame society for personal problems caused by social structures.
My dad grew up in a coal mining family. When the mine was hiring, his life was good. When the mines shut down, his family went hungry.
Then the government set up the CCC, and he went and helped support his family.
Then WWll came along, and he went to fight the Japanese, although his best friend in high school was Japanese, and his family was put in concentration camps.
Then, although he had dropped out of high school to help support his family, he got to go to college on the GI bill, and became, (you’re going to love this) an accountant.
Here’s the thing. My Dad is an awesome, intelligent, sweet-tempered man.
But his life was totally determined by forces beyond his control.
If not for the Depression and the war, he’d probably have been a coal miner, like his dad, grandfathers, brothers and cousins.
Pure circumstances made him able to utilize his intelligence and make a better life for his family.
Pure circumstances make so many decent intelligent people today unable to have a decent life.
So, no, I don’t blame people for being swept up in forces beyond their control.
As for punching people for perceived insults, I’m not down with that either.
Remember that I work in the ER, and I see many “macho” men.
Not impressed.
Belligerent assholes who get punched. Rugby players torn up. Motorcyclists with road rash.
The ones I really disdain are hunters. Oh, yeah, macho men, out matching wits with unarmed animals.
And when they fall out of treestands, or shoot themselves, or roll their 4-wheelers, what a bunch of babies! You want to see whining and crying and self pity?
Look at a hunter who shoots himself in the foot! Wah, wah, wha.
I’ll say this about gang-bangers, they don’t whine. If they get shot or stabbed, they are pretty stoic.
But hunters? Geez, what a bunch of weenies.
“He knew more than any that Civilization without God is pure hubris courting nemesis.”
Vlad such drivel!
“Hubris courting nemesis”
Do you even begin to know what that means? Did you read it in Guns and Ammo or Rapture Weekly?
Sometimes you can be so irritatingly
TRITE that it seems like you’re more
interested in getting under people’s
skin than in having intelligent discourse.
Okay, genius, the European Dark Ages is
considered by most to have been a FULL
MILLENIUM in duration from Alaric of
Gaul’s crushing defeat of the Romans
at Adrianople (in what is now Turkey)
in 410 AD to roughly the 1400’s.
The Renaissance brought back the love
of erudition, literature, and art that
died for much of the Dark Ages save for
the few musical codices that have been
dug up in monasteries from Germany
(such as Hildegaard of Bingen’s music)
to Spain (such as the Las Huelgas codex).
The twentieth century may have been a
Light Age as far as technology but from
the standpoint of erudition, few could
pass Willa Cather’s U. of Nebraska
ENTRANCE EXAM of 1900 … even Ph.D.’s
because we’re now a world of PEEVISH
SPECIALISTS. Outside of the 1920-1940
period, most modern ‘classical” music
is sterile, head but no heart, scarcely
“music” at all. Things like hip-hop are
beneath contempt. Bitch-slapping music.
You may have noticed that I seldom, if
ever, reply to your nattering any more
because you bog everything down in
definitional wars and word mincing.
Can you COUNT, whiz kid? The world has
pissed on intelligence and gentility for
about 1100 years out of the last 1600.
And it is doing so again mainly through
“brilliant” ideas like devaluing MERIT
for which Vlad argues eloquently above.
Now, we make every decision from hiring
decisions to deciding on our friends via
“hipness” factors that have nothing to do
with depth of thought, intrinsic merit,
or ethical constructs. This is why our
schools are failing, the administrators
are like Stalinist Apparatchiks, and you
can’t fire driftwood in industry ESPECIALLY
if the firee is one of the “specially
protected” subgroups. Then there is
endless litigation. Sigh.
E.
The real bottom line ? The value of homes, the value of commercial property, the value of real estate: these values have been blowed up way out of proportion starting from the JAPAN of the 1980s, most of the European Union and the USA from the 1970s to present. These values have been way above average salaries, have no correspondence to the reality of what people make and more alarmingly so, what people will possibly make in the future. These values like house above 200,000 dollars in California, 2 bedroom homes in London of 400,000 dollars etc. are completely bogus, imaginary, impossible to be real and in fact are not real. These home values have been inflated way beyond reality for three reasons:
1) To make people “feel rich”, to give them an illusion of how rich they are and how much money they could “cash in” when they “sell” (as if it is so automatic and easy to sell in any possible future ignoring how everything can possibly change in the future);
2) To find some kind of investment for the 80 trillion dollars of profit money hanging around in the world not knowing what to do, to find some kind of magical return, return on investment, profit for money just sitting in a room. Now I feel the entire concept of investment and profit is mostly a farce, bogus, unreal, is a make believe fantasy, magical thinking gimick: investments can be made and profits and money can be made in certain areas (apple with thier ipad), chinese factories turning out products by paying their workers 200 dollars a month, etc: but the bottom line is that most profits are made by giving less money to some actors and skinning off more for the owner’s class. Not much by “innovation”. But they found a great “innovation”: make real estate values and prices blow up forever, and make people believe and pay ever higher prices for these homes, for this basic good everyone needs, and let them pay by borrowing from the “future”.
3) Convince everyone that there is a “population explosion”, that housing is scarce, that you have to get your “own house” before the “resources run out”. In fact most nations are undergoing a flat population growth, some are going backwards, the future is not in resource scarcity, there are and will be any number of homes available to anyone. They are mostly kept off the market, they are mostly fake scarcities due to the fact that the jobs are all in hot areas so everyone wants a home in the hot areas and the prices go sky high.
The prices of homes in the developed world most go WAY DOWN, like not more than 100,000 dollars for a 2 bedroom whether in JAPAN, UK or California. Because the future “work” that people will need to pay these homes will not and cannot pay salaries of more than 500 to 1000 dollars a month: there is no reason to pay white collars workers in Los Angeles or London more than can be paid a guy in Sao Paolo, Brazil or Jakarta, Indonesia. In these places a dude will readily accept 800 dollars a month, is more disciplined and better educated and will be very happy to make such a “high salary as perceived by them”. This is the future reality.
my own mental housecleaning before this week’s JHK article is posted:
1. Someone upthread called these comments, “a giant time suck…” Sadly, I am beginning to agree. I have not yet found a recurrent poster who does not occasionally express a good idea. Unfortunately, the good ideas tend to be lost in clouds of theoretical verbal flatulence.
2. Equating male circumcision with removal of the female clitoris is just wrong. Male circumcision leaves an intact orgasmic sexual response. Female circumcision does not.
This website AND this planet need greater feminine power, not less.
3. I suggest more politeness. Attacking someone’s ideas is reasonable. Attacking their personal race, level of expressed happiness, or AGE is wrong.
Have a great week, CFN!
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But it ranks first among viewers under the age of 50, according to figures provided by the show.
Obama promised viewers he would keep working to help the economy recover from the deepest recession since the 1930s, but he also emphasized issues like student loans and civil liberties that are normally not a central part of his stump speech. He said he still wanted to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison for terrorism suspects, which he has been unable to do so far.
Asked about the administration’s shifting assessment of last month’s deadly attacks on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya, Obama said his administration was still piecing together the evidence.
“The government is a big operation. At any given time, something screws up and you make sure you find out what’s broken and you fix it,” he said.
The edgy humor that Stewart is known for surfaced occasionally.
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The director of UNHCR in Egypt, Mohamed Dayri, said that despite the growing number of refugees in Egypt, only 4,800 Syrians have registered with the agency in Cairo. He called on Egyptian authorities to help UNHCR deal with the “rising emergency” of Syrian refugees here.
A U,Timberland Shoes.N. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media, suggested Syria’s neighbors who have taken in refugees — Turkey, Lebanon,Timberland Shoes, Iraq and Jordan — are “reaching (the) saturation point,” prompting an influx into Egypt,Miu Miu Bags, where the cost of living is cheaper.
Egypt does not share a border with Syria, but the Egyptian government allows Syrians to enter without a visa.
Syria’s uprising, which began in March 2011, has killed more than 33,000 people, according to activists. The violence has displaced more than one million Syrians inside the country, and also triggered an exodus of people from the country.
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While the United States languishes, other nations are actually investing in their young people. That America is a world leader in student debt leaves members of our next generation with a disadvantage over their foreign counterparts that promises to become a long-term liability. Moreover, countries like Sweden and Germany have government-sponsored workforce investment and apprenticeship programs that help their young people transition into full-time work with some confidence of future security.
The Obama campaign’s 2008 promise of hope inspired many,Stella McCartney Handbags, but it also raised the danger of creating false hope amongst our youth,Stella McCartney Bag. We need a next generation that is engaged in renewing our politics and making current beltway deadlock obsolete. But young people who feel ever more disenfranchised are ever less likely to take on that challenge,Stella McCartney Handbags. False hope fosters a lingering sense of anger, cynicism, and distance from civic life,Stella McCartney Bags.
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She also is getting pro bono representation from the Democratic strategy firm SKDKnickerbocker. Her debt is piling up, she said, because most of the nonprofits to which she speaks can’t afford to pay her.
Fluke received the call from the Obama campaign two weeks ago to speak at the convention, while she was in Sacramento marching with domestic workers for a bill of rights, which she had worked on as a lawyer. “And I was marching with a suitcase, because I was going next to the airport” — to talk to Democrats in Manhattan — “and so it was a pretty chaotic phone call,” but she got the gist of the request.
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make recommendations that are likely to exclude a significant number of citizens from the political process — especially those who have traditionally been disadvantaged by restrictions at the polls. but reassured the American people that electronic voting was reliable so long as officials included a “voter-verifiable paper audit trail. The tone was set with the very first question. It also epitomized the tenor of the night. the counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, then and now,Stella McCartney Handbags.67,?Needless to say to new technologies enabling a different kind of consumption—has fundamentally changed the game for Millennials.
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Romney surged to 49%, For information.